Odds Are Good

by Bruce Coville

  I could have told him what would happen. In fact now that I think of it, I had told him—several times—when we were younger. He just never believed me. So he was actually surprised that when he finally convinced Aunt Marguerite to get down on her knees and raise the edge of the bedspread all she saw was bare floor.

  Harold and my aunt didn’t stay much longer. After they left, Mom yelled at me for “dragging up that stupid fantasy again.”

  And that was the end of things—until later that night, when Fluffy began talking to me.

  She had come and curled up on my pillow when I climbed into bed, the way she often did. This had made me a little nervous. But she had seemed perfectly normal since her reappearance, so I had let her stay.

  It was storming again when the big clock downstairs struck midnight. As the last chime faded, Fluffy opened her eyes.

  They were red.

  Now, sometimes a cat’s eyes will catch the light just the right way to reflect off the back of them or something, and they look red. I’ve seen that. I know what it looks like.

  This was different. Fluffy’s eyes were fire red, blazing with their own light. Before I could move she nuzzled her face close to my ear and whispered, “Weztix wants you, David. He wants you to come to the other side.”

  I screamed and yanked up the covers, sending Fluffy flying off the bed.

  “What’s going on up there?” shouted my father.

  “It’s Fluffy!” I cried. “She’s . . . she’s . . .”

  My voice trailed off as I realized that Dad would never believe me.

  “She’s what?” he yelled.

  “Nothing!” I shouted. “Never mind. Forget it.”

  Why did I give up so easily? Because I had been through this a hundred times before. Because I had barely avoided being sent to a mental institution after I had insisted on clinging to the “delusion” that there was something strange under my bed. And most of all because I didn’t know that being sent to an institution would have been infinitely preferable to what lay in store for me.

  Fluffy clawed her way back onto the bed. Her eyes blazed in the darkness.

  “Go away!” I hissed. “Get out of here!”

  Instead of leaving, she slunk onto my chest. “Go under the bed, David,” she hissed. “Weztix wants you under the bed.”

  I jumped to my feet, scooped up Fluffy, and threw her out the door. Then I took a flying leap back onto my bed, avoiding at least six feet of the floor. I lay there shaking with terror, wishing I could sleep downstairs for the night. But my parents had put a stop to that one angry night years before.

  After I caught my breath, I hung my head over the bed and lifted the edge of the sheet, hoping not to find anything too strange. And what I saw wasn’t that strange, really. Just that familiar shimmering grayness. But it scared me then in a way it never had before.

  I rolled back onto the bed and stared up into the darkness, wondering if I would make it until morning.

  Suddenly I felt something pounce onto the bed. I cut short my scream when I realized it was Fluffy again.

  I glanced sideways. The door was still closed.

  “How did you get in here?” I whispered.

  I know people talk to their pets all the time, but I realized with a kind of terrible fascination that I expected her to answer me.

  “The same way I got back from the other side,” she purred. “Once you’ve been there, doors don’t mean that much. But you’d better go soon, David. They’re waiting for you.”

  “Who?” I asked desperately. “What do they want?”

  Instead of answering, Fluffy jumped to the floor and scooted under the bed. I rolled over and stuck my head down again. Heart pounding, I lifted the bedspread. My cat was gone. But the shimmering gray nothingness that had replaced my floor now had a small blue circle in the middle of it.

  From the circle came a new voice. “We’re waiting for you, David. Come to us. Come to us!”

  I rolled back onto the bed, pulled the covers over my head, and tucked the sheets tightly around me, trying to convince myself I would be safe if I just stayed wrapped up that way. I have no idea why I thought that; desperation, probably. Who knows? Maybe it would even have worked if I hadn’t fallen asleep.

  I tried hard not to sleep. But when everything is dark and silent, and sleep starts tugging at the edges of your mind, even terror can keep you awake only so long. I might have been able to stay awake if I could have gotten off the bed to move around. But I didn’t dare do that. I could only lie there, wrapped in the sheets, still and silent, hoping I would survive until morning. I fought sleep, fought it hard. But finally it claimed me.

  Even then, things might have been all right if only I hadn’t been such a restless sleeper. But I was, a real tosser and turner, and it probably wasn’t long after I fell asleep that I flopped out of my protective cocoon. It probably wasn’t much longer before my arm was dangling over the edge of the bed, my fingertips brushing the floor.

  I was woken by another hand, cold and damp, grabbing mine.

  “Who’s there?” I cried, trying to push myself up from the bed.

  The cold hand linked with mine gripped me tighter, holding me in place. I screamed, loudly, not caring what my parents thought this time, not caring if I got sent away for special treatment, as long as it got me out of this room, away from this house.

  I heard my parents pounding up the stairs, my father cursing as he ran. I continued to scream as loudly as I could. “Let go!” I shrieked. “Let go!”

  The hand began pulling harder.

  “David, what’s going on in there?” cried Dad. He tried to open the door—I could hear him rattling the knob—but it wouldn’t budge, despite the fact that it had no lock. “David? David!”

  “It’s got me!” I screamed. “It won’t let go!”

  “What has you?” cried my mother. “David, what is it? What’s wrong? Harvey, can’t you get that door down?”

  The door shuddered as my father threw himself against it, but it held solid.

  Another hand grabbed my wrist, adding its strength to the first. Thrashing, twisting, fighting every inch of the way, I was drawn over the edge of the bed. I hit the floor with a thump. The hands continued to pull. Soon my arm was under the bed up to my elbow. With nothing on the floor to hold on to, nothing to give me traction, the rest of my body would soon follow.

  “No!” I screamed, pushing my free hand against the side of the bed. “No! No! Let me go!”

  I heard my father throw himself against the door again.

  The cold hands kept pulling and pulling. I swung myself around, jamming my shoulder against the side of the bed, deciding I would rather let them pull my arm out of its socket than let them pull me under the bed.

  A third time my father slammed against the door. It splintered and burst open. Too late. My bed slid across the floor to reveal the swirling gray nothingness that lay waiting beneath it. A horrible crackling filled the air as the nothingness sucked me in.

  Somewhere above me, I heard my parents shouting my name.

  “Now do you believe me?” I cried.

  I was sinking into something like a thick, foul-smelling pudding. It was colder than anything I had ever experienced—a cold that worked its way into the deepest parts of me, penetrating to the center of my bones.

  Then, suddenly, I was through the coldness and falling into dark.

  The fall lasted only an instant. I landed with a dull thump against something that felt like a mattress but turned out to be a huge fungus. Above me swirled a cool gray circle with a spot of blue in the center—the place through which I had fallen.

  I could still hear my parents shouting my name.

  Four torches, mounted on poles, formed a square around me. I heard an evil chuckle to my right. I turned toward it, and the flickering light provided my first sight of the creature who had dragged me here. He was foul looking, with long hair that hung around his shoulders in greasy strings. When he beckoned to
me, I saw that he had long yellowed fingernails; when he smiled, he showed sharp, rotting teeth. His eyes glittered with malice from their deep sockets. Yet for all that, I could tell that he had once been human, which may have been the scariest thing of all.

  That, and the fact that he looked oddly familiar. With a shudder, I realized I had seen him in my dreams—or, to be more accurate, in my nightmares.

  “Got you at lasssst,” he said in a hissing voice that was filled with deep satisfaction. “Got you at lasssst.”

  My terror was so deep that at first I was unable to speak. When I finally realized that he wasn’t going to kill me on the spot, I asked in a trembling voice, “Who are you?”

  “You mean you don’t know?” he replied, sounding genuinely astonished.

  I shook my head.

  He laughed. “Weztix will tell you,” he said, making an odd little leap. “Weztix will tell you!”

  He reached for my hand. When I drew back, his eyes blazed. “Stand up!” he snapped. “We’re going to ssssee Weztix.”

  “I want to go home,” I whimpered.

  “Don’t be sssstupid! Now come along. I don’t want to have to hurt you.”

  He said this last with such feeling that I actually believed him—though if I had understood just why he didn’t want to hurt me, I might have been even more terrified than I already was.

  It was a terrible journey. The place into which I had fallen was a sort of living nightmare, darkened by strange shadows that stretched and twisted around us, though I could see no source of light, nor anything to block it and cause the shadows. It was as if the darkness had a life and a mind of its own.

  I could hear unpleasant noises in the distance: desperate, cackling laughter; sighs so deep they could have been made by a mountain; an odd rumbling; an occasional scream. The dank air smelled so weird I was almost afraid to breathe it.

  Eyes peered out at us from the darkness. I was terrified that they might belong to some new creature that would reach out to snatch me away. (Though what could be worse than the situation I was in already is hard to imagine.) Later, unseen hands did pluck at me, but my captor shouted and drove them away. In several places spiderwebs stretched across our path, and since I was forced to walk in the lead, they continually wrapped themselves across my face. I shuddered each time they did. Other things, less familiar, seemed to brush over my face as well, which was even more frightening.

  “Are we in hell?” I asked at one point.

  The creature behind me hissed and said, “Don’t be ssssilly.”

  We entered a cave and began to follow a series of tunnels through other caves, some small, some enormous. The tunnels were pitch-black in places, lit by torches in others. At one point we walked along a narrow path that had a rock wall on one side, an immeasurable drop on the other. Though I’m used to that path now, I was terrified at the time.

  Sharp stones cut my bare feet, and they began to bleed.

  Eventually I spotted a red glow ahead of us. As we drew closer, I saw that the glow came from a large cave. We walked toward it, splashing through a wide patch of muddy water where slimy things slithered over my feet. When something began nibbling on my bloody toes I cried out in fear, but my captor just pushed me forward.

  We stopped at the mouth of an enormous cavern. A stone path, about three feet wide and lined with torches, led across a stretch of black water to a tall rocky island that looked like a giant skull rising from the water.

  Carved into the island’s side, curving up the jaw and around the back of the head, was a slender stairway.

  On top of the skull stood Weztix.

  Fluffy was sitting on his shoulder.

  Weztix was far taller than a man, and unbelievably beautiful, like some statue of a Greek god come to life. Light seemed to pour from his face when he looked down at me.

  “Welcome, David,” he said in a voice that was as beautiful as he was. “Welcome. We have been waiting for you for such a long time.”

  Though I had felt a surge of relief at seeing this beautiful creature, his words made me nervous again.

  “Waiting for me?” I asked.

  He chuckled. “Surely you knew something was waiting for you under your bed.”

  “I just know it scared me,” I replied.

  He smiled, which made his face even more beautiful. “Good. That’s what this place is all about.”

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “The land of nightmares, of course,” he said, spreading his arms in welcome. “And I am the Lord of Nightmares. My name is Weztix, and I am the source of all your worst dreams.”

  My blood felt cold in my veins. “Why . . . why have you brought me here?”

  “Because we need you,” he said. “And because we could.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He spread his arms, then rose into the air and began to float in my direction. I cringed as he came down, fearing that he would land on top of me and crush me. But he touched down about three feet away.

  My head came up to about his kneecap.

  Looking down at me, Weztix said, “There aren’t many places where the border between nightmare and reality is frail enough for someone to pass through it to our side. We can go through, of course; we have to, in order to do our job.”

  As he spoke, I began to have flashbacks of old nightmares, terrifying dreams that had vanished from my conscious memory but turned out to have been lurking at the back of my mind, waiting to spring out again. Nightmares, I now understand, that had been meant to prepare me for this moment.

  “The thing is,” continued Weztix, “bringing new people to this side is a bit of a problem. Sometimes I actually run short on help. After all, the way the world is these days there are often more nightmares than I can deliver! Anyway, we’ve known for some time that there was a weakness under your bed—which meant that you were a candidate for a job here.”

  More old nightmare images came surging to the surface. I felt hot tears running down my face.

  “Why?” I asked. “Is this punishment for something bad I did?”

  Weztix threw back his head and laughed. “Don’t give yourself airs, David! It is completely and utterly random. There’s not a thing you could have done to make it happen, not a thing you could have done to avoid it. It has nothing to do with you as a person. You just happened to have the wrong bedroom.”

  He smiled again. “I think it’s scarier that way, don’t you?”

  I nodded solemnly.

  “Anyway, weak as the boundary was beneath your bed, we still couldn’t bring you through until some other living thing from your side had made the final break. When your cat came through the floor today, Timothy knew that his long wait had been rewarded.”

  “Timothy?”

  Weztix nodded toward the evil-looking creature who had pulled me into the nightmare world. With a sick feeling, I realized that my captor was—or at least had been—a kid.

  “Timothy is one of my delivery boys,” said Weztix. “Same as you will be. After all, someone has to pass out the nightmares.”

  “I don’t want to!” I cried.

  Weztix shook his head. “Look at it this way, David. Most people your age don’t have any idea what they want to be when they grow up. They muddle their way through school then thrash around, trying this, trying that, wondering what to do with themselves. You don’t have to worry about any of that. Your life’s work has been chosen for you!”

  He began to laugh again. This time the sound was not so beautiful. Pushing my hands against my ears, I threw myself to the ground and began to sob.

  It did no good. Nothing did any good. I was a prisoner in the land of nightmares.

  I don’t know how much longer it was before my training began. Back then I found it hard to measure time in this place where reality shifts so easily that not only can one day slide into the next, but one place can slide into another as well. Here in the land of nightmares, boundaries merge and break the way they do in
dreams. You might walk into a small house and go through dozens or hundreds of rooms before you find your way out. Or you might walk through a door and find yourself in a forest—or sit down under a tree and find yourself having dinner with an army of the dead.

  After a while you begin to learn to look past those things. You can move fast down here once you know the shortcuts. And you do have to move fast to do your job.

  I hate my job. It works like this: Weztix calls me and I go to sit with him inside the stone skull, in a dark chamber that smells of loss and suffering, and sometimes of death. He closes, one huge hand over my head and fills my brain with images.

  Sometimes when he takes his hand away I realize that I’ve been screaming. So I won’t talk about those images right now. But maybe you’ve seen them anyway; maybe you’ve dreamed them. Because what I do when Weztix is finished with me is carry the things he’s poured in my head back to the real world.

  Which is to say, I climb the ladders of nightmare and come up underneath your bed. Now that I’m one of Weztix’s messengers, I can cross the barrier easily. And once I’ve risen up beneath your bed, I lie there in the darkness beneath you and whisper to you while you sleep, spinning back the images that Weztix has planted in my brain.

  Why don’t I try to run away one of those nights?

  If I told you, you might never sleep again.

  And I need you to sleep.

  After all, if you don’t sleep, how can I do my job?

  The only good thing about all this is the nightmares I got to take to Harold. Heh. The truth is, I took him a lot that weren’t meant for him, which is sort of against the rules. But I don’t do it anymore. I pretty much stopped after they took him away for special treatment.

  I used to be a good boy. I want to be good again, but I don’t know if that’s possible anymore. Because the only way out is for me to do what Timothy did, what all the others do eventually, and find someone to take my place.

  Of course, Timothy didn’t get to leave right away. As Weztix said, there’s a labor shortage down here. But his reward for recruiting me was to be allowed to go back to the land of the living about ten years after I got here.