Ravenous Ghosts (5 page)

In here, in this room, he had been permitted to believe the misery wasn
't endless, that someday his father would arrive home wearing a smile in place of his ever-present scowl and smelling of wood and sawdust instead of whiskey. In here, solitude had provided the perfect movie screen for the illusions his hope projected and as long as he stayed here, nothing could break the spell imagination wove around him. Here was peace, love and happiness. Out there, over the moat and a million miles away, were misery, hate and pain.

Tom lifts his head and looks out at an encroaching darkness unique to the season. He pictures the dying leaves caught in a maelstrom, spinning round in a mindless vortex like lost souls and he realizes nothing has changed.

As he gets to his feet, he sees himself again, youthful body hunched over the desk, hiding the bruises on his face, weeping as he mourns the death of another fantasy at the vicious hands of reality.

He decides then that he will not stay here tonight. Even though he has long since dismissed the idea that adolescent fantasies can soften the edges of life, he doesn
't want to sleep in a place where that very belief died.

This room is haunted, but not by ghosts. He can sense his childhood self here, the child that has stayed in this room, poring over the marks on the table, still hating the Mickey Mouse wallpaper, still trying to figure out why his daddy beats him while his mother watches with tears in her eyes. He is still angry and probably still dreaming of a better life he will never get.

"But my life did get better," Tom tells the silent room, surprised by the lack of conviction in his voice. The taste of stale coffee clings to the back of his throat as he swallows and turns to leave.

Stop lying to yourself. This was the only safe place.

The voice in his head is devoid of malice but filled with determination. He ignores it for it is just another unwanted memory and one he has the luxury of dismissing.

With a rattling sigh he slowly makes his way back downstairs and wonders if it might be better to put the house up for sale, to let someone oblivious to the horrid memories make it their home, someone immune to the tapestries of pain fashioned from the dust itself and the sting of sharp tongues still lingering in the air.

He thought it would be different coming back here, that his mother had been the only remaining anchor to a past too dreadful to contemplate. A foolish assumption.

If anything, her presence had allowed him to think only of her part in the shadow play that had been his childhood. With her gone, the curtains were thrust open, every room a set upon which the dramas of a miserable youth waited for an audience.

But the fact remains that he has no place else to go.

He supposes a few weeks here won
't hurt, just until he comes up with something better. Perhaps an extended vacation, to clear his head and relax for the first time in as long as he can remember.

He stops at the bottom of the stairs; sure he hasn
't heard what his brain is telling him he has. A few moments of listening yield nothing to confirm there has been any noise and the tension begins to ebb from his muscles. Then it comes, softly, seeping under the door like floodwater:
Shhhnick! Shhhnick! Shhhnick!
He doesn't move; waits instead for what he is now certain will follow.

A brief scratching like nails on a garage door.

Or an old mailbox being opened.

This is crazy.

It takes a great deal of effort for him to swallow the knot of inexplicable fear that has lodged in his throat but he is suddenly tired of being afraid, can't remember the last time he hasn't been, and a surge of uncharacteristic resolve brings him to the door, makes him wrench it open, propels him down the garden path and delivers him to the mailbox and the old lady standing before it.

She is peering once again into the bulbous darkness inside.

"Excuse me," he says, his voice brittle in the cool air.

She ignores him, apparently too intent on her felonious task, but this close he can see that she is a lot older than he first thought, the myriad lines in her sallow face retaining the shadows as if they are an intrinsic part of her. The black pools of her eyes are curved at the behest of a toothless smile as she retrieves her second prize of the night from his mailbox.

It occurs to him that he has seen her somewhere before but is not altogether surprised. Marrow Lane is a small neighborhood.

"
Excuse me but what do you think you're doing?" He wants to tap her on the shoulder, to grab her elbow or anything that might bring her focus round to him, but for some reason he senses that touching her would be a dreadful mistake.

She is holding the small white envelope up to the streetlight and he has almost conceded, is in fact formulating a parting caveat when she suddenly turns and says:
"You always had a great imagination, Tommy" before once again shuffling off into the shadows, leaving him helpless to do anything but watch.

"
Wait, who are you?" he cries after her and she looks back over her shoulder at him, her face a creamy blur in the darkness but then even the shuffling ceases and the sounds of night rush back in.

Only the soughing of the wind answers him.

Frowning, he goes back inside.

How did she know my name?

* *
*

In the hallway, Rufus sits against the wall.

Tom stands paralyzed, the door clicking shut behind him, muting the wind.

"Hello?" he asks the hallway and thinks that if the teddy bear turns his head in response he will most certainly drop dead of a heart attack. While the old lady was bizarre, she certainly wasn't beyond rational explanation. This however, is dancing on the boundaries of sanity.

He clearly remembers seeing the toy seated on the bed in his old room. He hadn
't moved it, would recall if he had. How then, has it ended up down here?

Horrible images of the teddy bear carefully navigating the stairs while he was outside flash behind his eyes and he scoffs, a little too casually and feels his hackles rise.

"To hell with it." He rushes forward and scoops up the stuffed toy, then marches up the stairs, the loud clumping of his boots deliberate and reassuring. If someone else is here, they will know he is coming and that he isn't happy.

He reaches the landing and takes a deep breath, steels himself for whatever he might find in his old bedroom. With his heart chiseling its way through his ribcage, he stalks into the room. And comes to a dead halt.

A little boy, sallow-faced and sheet-white, has replaced Rufus on the bed; an ugly bruise purpling his left eye and most of his cheek. He is dressed in Mickey Mouse pajamas,
Tom's
old pajamas and as Tom watches, the boy raises his hands to receive the bear. Despite the surrealistic feel reality has draped over its shoulders, Tom tosses the bear to the child and tells himself to remain calm.

"
Who are you?"

The boy looks at the bear as if he
's addressing not Tom, but the toy. "You know who I am. Who do I remind you of?"

In truth, this is a question Tom has been hoping the boy doesn
't ask, because the answer is something he is not prepared to face so he says: "I don't know."

The child looks amused and Tom feels his nerves fraying at the edges, unraveling.
"How did you get in here?" he asks.

"
I'm the one who makes stuff up, not you. So stop pretending you don't already know these things you're asking me."

To accept what is presenting itself as the truth, as reality, as normality is to Tom, opening the door wide to insanity. So for now, he will keep on pretending that the child sitting on the bed is not a younger version of himself. He carefully makes his way over to the desk and sits down, his finger absently tracing the striations in the surface of the table that form the word: HAVEN.

"I couldn't do it you know," the boy says, fingering Rufus's eye. "I couldn't bring her back."

"
Who?"

"
Mom. I guess I thought I'd be able to. After all, I was able to make Gramma come back."

Tom feels his skin grow cold and the old lady at the mailbox flashes before his eyes. She had seemed familiar. Now he knows why and it brings to mind the sepia-toned pictures of smiling strangers down in the living room.

Without thinking, he blurts: "But she isn't dead. She's in a home in Harperville."

The boy nods.
"She found her own safe place. I brought her back here where she belongs though, just like I thought I could bring Mommy home. Just like I brought
you
home."

Tom rubs a hand over his face and leans forward.
"And who do you think
I
am?"

"
Still pretending you don't know? You're me, the part of me that went on and left me behind, the part of me forced to leave the safe place. You're what escaped."

Tom chuckles at that but it is a sound so far from mirth it frightens him and his face draws tight with worry.
"This is madness, you do see that don't you? This is like a literal translation of what shrinks mean when they talk about people talking to them
selves
. I'm expecting to wake any moment in an asylum."

The boy looks at him, his coral blue eyes glistening.
"You've often thought there was something missing in your life, haven't you?"

Tom says nothing.

"So have I." For the moment, the stuffed toy is forgotten. "I thought in here nothing could touch me and for a while it worked. I got to stay where it was safe while you carried on living in the real world, forgetting the make-believe and acting like everyone else. I tried to bring Mommy back when she died but it didn't work. Gramma came back and you came back, even though you still won't believe."

"
What do you want from me?" Tom asks in a voice little more than a whisper.

The child looks back to the toy.
"My safe place is crumbling. I can't be here on my own any more."

"
Why? If you've been here this long…"
What the hell am I saying? Am I actually buying this?

But what the child says next dismisses all doubts because in the instant the words reach him, he is once more afraid, a fear that transcends all others.

"Daddy came back."

It is irrational, but by now Tom is coming to expect nothing less. He gets to his feet and looks down at the boy, at the fear etched on his face, a terror so suddenly familiar and personal that he believes everything without question, simple as that. Denying this reality any longer will drive him mad.

"He hurt you?"

The child nods.
"He slipped through once, when I fell asleep and forgot to close the door all the way. I woke up and saw him standing over me, just a large shadow with gleaming white teeth. Now, I keep the door closed." He looks toward the door and Tom follows his gaze.

"
Will you stay with me?"

"
I don't know." His eyes are fixed on the door. It's open just a crack, but that crack is now as deadly as a yawning abyss.

"
There is nothing out there for you. You know that. You've felt it ever since you left."

Tom mutters agreement but can
't look away from the door or the shadows crawling up the walls of the stairs beyond.

"
Please."

He thinks of the word scratched into the desk, the word he carved there all those years ago when he believed it to be true. Now he realizes it still can be.

Three paces and he is across the room and slamming the door closed.

The boy looks at him and smiles.
"We might not be able to keep him out forever."

Tom walks to the bed and sits just below the boy
's slippered feet. "We'll see."

His eyes are on the door.

"I missed you," says the boy.

Tom tries to ignore the creaking of the stairs.

THE
BINDING

This story marked the end of my first serious case of Writer's Block. For three months, the mere thought of writing made me feel sick to my stomach and I produced little more than a paragraph over the course of an entire summer. Until that dreaded block struck me, I had always thought it fiction, but here I was lying awake at night, my fingers itching to type, with nothing but snarled and tangled thoughts cluttering up my head and refusing to come out. It very nearly drove me insane. Then, one morning over coffee, the first line of the following story popped into my head and I rushed, nay,
raced
to the keyboard and wrote it down.

An hour later, I finished the first draft of the story you
're about to read.