Dark Screams: Volume Two

by Robert R. McCammon

  He twisted the key in the wardrobe door and flung it open, stepping back two paces after he had done so, both hands raised defensively in front of him. On one side of the wardrobe rail there were six or seven empty wire coat hangers, which jangled for a moment and then stopped jingling.

  All of Dawn’s coats and dresses and skirts were hanging in the wardrobe, and all of her shoes and boots were neatly arranged underneath them. On one side, there were six shelves on which she kept her sweaters and her underwear and her socks.

  But there was no man standing or sitting in the wardrobe, and the only smell was the light flowery fragrance of Allure, Dawn’s favorite perfume, on her clothes.

  Dawn looked up at Jerry and shook her head. “He’s gone. I don’t understand it. Where did he go? He must have hidden in the wardrobe. There’s absolutely nowhere else.”

  Jerry reached into the wardrobe and rapped his knuckles on the back of it. “Solid. No false back to it. And in any case, it’s right up against the wall.”

  “Oh, Jerry,” said Dawn, and she suddenly burst into tears. “I must be going mad! I swear I saw him! I swear it! His face was all black and horrible like he’d been burned or something and he grunted at me and he was coming to get me but the lightbulb popped and it all went dark again and I was so scared, Jerry! I thought he was going to kill me!”

  Jerry held her close and shushed her. “You had a nightmare, that’s all. Plenty of people have nightmares when they think they’ve woken up but they haven’t really.”

  “I’m going mad! I know I’m going mad!”

  “You’re not going mad, silly. You’ve just been overworking, that’s all. Too many split shifts at that crappy restaurant. You haven’t been very well, either, have you?”

  “No,” she said, miserably.

  “Listen, come back to my place and spend the rest of the night with me. I’ll call up the restaurant tomorrow for you and tell them that you have to go to the dentist or something. I’ll take a day off and we can go for a walk around Kew Gardens or down by the river or something. It’s about time you had a break.”

  Dawn nodded and said, “All right. I’d like that. Thanks, darling.”

  She dressed and brushed her hair and collected a few clothes together in case she wanted to change later, including her favorite pink jumper. When she was ready she closed the wardrobe door. Jerry was waiting for her in the hallway, and he smiled when he saw her locking it, too.

  “There’s no horrible black-faced man inside there, sweetheart, I promise you.”

  Dawn said nothing. She still found it hard to believe that the man had been nothing more than a nightmare. She locked the bedroom door, too, and set the burglar alarm before they left.

  Jerry put his arm around her and gave her a comforting squeeze. “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen somebody setting an alarm to stop an intruder from breaking out.”

  —

  The following evening Jerry drove her home and came in to check the wardrobe and reassure her that there was nobody in there, or anywhere else in her flat. He even lifted up the cushions on the sofa bed in her living room, in case there was a black-faced man hiding inside it.

  “There’s nobody here, sweetheart. You can see for yourself.” He walked through to the kitchen and opened up the oven door and said, “See? Empty. You’re completely on your own.”

  “You don’t have to make fun of me.”

  “I’m not. I’m just trying to convince you you’re perfectly safe. I wouldn’t leave you alone here if I thought that there was a prowler around. But—listen—if you do hear anything, or get frightened about anything—just give me a call. I’ll come over straightaway.”

  “Thanks, Jerry,” she said, and put her arms around him and gave him a kiss. “It’s just me being stupid, you know that.”

  “That’s why I love you, stupid.”

  —

  That night she dreamed that she was sitting on a veranda overlooking a weedy, unkempt garden. The grass was almost knee-high and all the laurel bushes surrounding the lawn were overgrown. Above her the sky was heavy and gray, and the garden smelled as if it had just stopped raining.

  At the far end of the veranda a wind chime was jingling. Jing-a-ling-jing-ching. She found the sound of it irritating rather than soothing, and she wondered why it was jingling at all, since there wasn’t any wind.

  Then she thought: The wind chimes sound just like the sleigh bells in my other dream. But how can I remember another dream, when I’m dreaming this one?

  She opened her eyes. Her bedroom wasn’t completely dark, because she had deliberately left the curtains three inches apart. She could see her teddy bear’s eyes glistening in the gloom, and on the wall behind his chair, a shadow was flickering, a shadow that looked like a witch nodding. Dawn knew that it was only the shadow from the plane tree that stood in the garden at the front of her block of flats, but all the same she couldn’t keep her eyes off it, in case it moved, and the witch suddenly came tapping at her window.

  Jingle-jingle-ching went the wind chimes. Only they weren’t wind chimes, out of her dream, nor sleigh bells, from the black-painted sleigh. They were coat hangers, jingling inside her wardrobe.

  Oh, God, oh, God, please don’t let it be him. Please don’t let it be the black-faced man inside my wardrobe. Please, God, don’t let him get out.

  Dawn stretched across the bed for her mobile phone, but as she did so the whole wardrobe creaked, and she could hear something heavy shifting inside it.

  Oh, God, please don’t let it be him.

  She groped around for her phone; where was it? But the wardrobe creaked again, much louder this time, almost a groan, and the groan was followed by a shuffling sound. She was so startled that when she found her phone she accidentally tipped it over the edge of her nightstand. She heard it drop onto the carpet, but when she looked over the edge of the bed she couldn’t see where it had gone.

  The door’s locked. He can’t get out. Please don’t let him get out.

  She threw back the covers and climbed out of bed and went down on her hands and knees. Her phone wasn’t anywhere in sight, so she guessed that it must have bounced underneath the bed. She reached into the narrow gap between the bed and the carpet, pushing her arm in as far as she could, and after sweeping her hand from side to side three or four times, she touched it with her fingertips.

  She tried to flick her phone back toward her, but it was a fraction of an inch too far away, and she succeeded only in pushing it even farther out of reach. The bed was much too heavy for her to lift, so all she could do was force her arm in deeper, even though the rough hessian lining scraped against her skin.

  She was still straining to reach her phone when she heard the key slowly turning in the wardrobe door. Click, click, click—pause—kerchick.

  She turned her head around and looked back up at the wardrobe. It was impossible. You couldn’t unlock the door from inside. Yet, as she lay there, on her side, with her left arm pinned underneath the bed, she saw that the wardrobe door was slowly opening.

  “Go away!” she screamed. “Don’t come out of there! Leave me alone! Don’t come out of there! Don’t! Don’t come out of there!”

  She dragged her arm out from underneath the bed, grazing her forearm all the way from her elbow to her wrist. Then she threw herself onto the bed, rolled over it, and went for the bedroom door. She tried to turn the key, but it jammed, like it often did, because it was old and worn and always needed coaxing. What had she been thinking about when she locked it? She should have realized that she might need to escape.

  She glanced frantically over her shoulder, and as she did so the black-faced man stepped out of the wardrobe and turned toward her. He not only looked burned, he was actually wreathed in acrid-smelling smoke, which lazily curled its way across her bedroom. His white eyes were staring at her and his black teeth were bared in a snarl. He started to make his way around the end of the bed, with both hands raised in front of him like blacke
ned claws.

  Dawn jiggled the key in the lock and at last managed to turn it. As soon as she pulled open the door, though, the black-faced man came up behind her and slammed it shut again.

  “Bitch!” he said. His voice was so harsh he sounded as if he had grit between his teeth. He stank so strongly of charred wool that Dawn could hardly breathe. “Why’d you tell ’em it was me, you bitch? You see what they done to me? You see what they done?”

  Dawn was unable to speak. She sank down onto her knees, her hands crossed over her breasts like a religious supplicant, and all she could do was whimper.

  The black-faced man stood over her. She was too frightened to lift her head and look up at him, and all she could see was his black, ragged trousers and his burned lace-up boots, with smoke leaking out of them.

  He seized her upper arms. His fingers were blistered and rough, and he gripped her so tightly that she felt that he was trying to twist her arms out of their sockets. With a deep grunting noise he hoisted her up off the floor and flung her backward across the bed. Immediately he climbed on top of her, straddling her hips. He glared down at her, with his black flaking nose only an inch away from hers.

  “Please,” she said. “I don’t even know who you are.”

  “Oh, you really are a bitch, aren’t you?” He growled at her, and she feel his spit prickling on her face. “You don’t even know who I am? You knew who was I right enough when they came asking questions about your baby. You knew who was I then, all right.”

  Dawn dug her heels into the mattress and tried to kick herself out from under him, but he clenched his thighs together even tighter, and then he slapped her across the face, twice. Her eyes burst out with tears and her cheeks felt as if he had set them on fire.

  “Bitch!” he said, each time he slapped her. “Bitch!”

  With his left hand he kept her shoulder pinned against the bed, while he reached down with his right hand and started to tug at his belt buckle.

  “Might as well do it, if I’m to be blamed for it!” he spat at her. “Might as well relish what I was punished for! What do you say, bitch? What do you say to that?”

  He wrestled his trousers halfway down to his knees. The hair on his thighs was thick and crisp and scratchy. She felt his hardened penis press against her leg, and that felt rough and dry, too, as if he were jabbing at her with a wooden rolling pin. He grabbed the hem of her cotton nightshirt and tore it upward and sideways, so that the buttons were pulled off.

  Dawn struggled furiously, but the black-faced man was far too strong for her. She screamed, again and again, or at least she thought she did. All she could see was his white eyes, staring down at her, and all she could smell was his burned body hair and his charred woolen clothes, and all she could feel was his weight bearing down on her, crushing all the breath out of her, crushing her rib cage.

  He forced her thighs apart, and pushed one knee in between them. As he did so, however, somebody rapped against the window, very sharply. The black-faced man hesitated, and looked around, although he still kept Dawn pressed down on the bed.

  The rapping was repeated, and then Dawn heard a muffled voice outside the window say, “Dawn? Dawn? It’s Jerry! Are you awake?”

  “Jerry!” she called out, but the black-faced man immediately covered her mouth with his horny, clawlike hand. “Mmmffff! Jerry! Jerry!”

  Jerry rapped again. “Dawn? It’s me, Jerry! Are you awake?”

  The black-faced man hesitated for a few seconds, and then he heaved himself off her, and stood up, pulling up his trousers and buckling his belt.

  “I’ll get my revenge on you one day, you bitch!” he told her. “You just wait and see!”

  With that, he stalked back round to the wardrobe, opened the door, and climbed inside. He closed the door behind him and Dawn heard the key turn.

  Shaking, she slid off the bed. She knelt beside it for a moment, breathing deeply, and then she managed to stand up.

  “Dawn? Are you there, Dawn?”

  Unsteadily, barely able to keep her balance, she went to the window. Jerry was standing outside, precariously perched on the edge of a wooden planter so that he could reach up and rap on her window.

  “What is it?” he shouted, through the glass. “What’s happened?”

  Dawn pointed toward the bedroom door to indicate that she would let him in. He jumped awkwardly down from the planter and she went to the front door and opened it for him. She put her arms around him and clung to him and sobbed so hard that it hurt.

  Gently, he walked her through to the living room and sat her down on the couch.

  “What’s happened? Look at you, your nightie’s all torn! And look at your face! You look like somebody’s been hitting you!”

  “He came out again. That black-faced man. There’s no way he could have unlocked that wardrobe door—not from the inside. But he did, and he came out again. And I dropped my phone and I tried to get away but the key got stuck. He pushed me onto the bed and he was going to rape me.”

  Jerry stood up. “Right,” he said. “I’m going to settle this, once and for all.”

  “Jerry, no! He’s really, really strong. He’ll hurt you.”

  “We’ll see about that. Where did he go? Back into your wardrobe? I bet it has a false back, or some secret compartment, and he’s been hiding in it.”

  “Please, Jerry, no! Let’s just go back to your place and come back tomorrow. Then we can see if he really is hiding in the wardrobe, and if he is, we can call the police.”

  But Jerry said, “Sorry, Dawn. I’m not letting anybody get away with hurting you and trying to rape you. I don’t care how bloody strong he is! I don’t care if he’s King bloody Kong!”

  With that, he went through to the bedroom, marched up to the wardrobe, and hammered on it, hard. “Right! You in there! I’m warning you! You’ve got a count of three to come out and show yourself! If you don’t I’m coming in after you, and I’m going to find you, mate, even if I have to chop this wardrobe up into firewood!”

  Dawn stood in the bedroom doorway, watching him as he turned the key in the wardrobe door and opened it. The wire coat hangers softly jingled for a while, and then stopped jingling.

  “Right, then! You’ve got one—two—three!”

  He waited, but no black-faced man stepped out of the wardrobe. Almost half a minute went by, but all they could hear was the traffic outside in the street. Dawn said, “Perhaps this was a dream, too. Oh, God. Perhaps I need to see a psychiatrist.”

  “You can’t slap your own face, Dawn, especially in a dream. Look at you. In the morning you’ll have two black eyes.”

  He reached into the wardrobe and parted Dawn’s dresses and coats. He banged on the back of it, much harder than he had the night before. Then took out all of Dawn’s shoes and boots and thumped with his fist on the floor.

  “If you’re hiding under there, you’d better show yourself, quick!”

  He thumped on the floor again, and then turned to Dawn and said, “Bring me a knife, would you? Any old knife.”

  Dawn went to the kitchen and came back with a carving knife with a broken tip that she always used for cutting up vegetables. She handed it to Jerry and said, “He’s not actually in there, is he, under the floor? There’s not enough room, surely.”

  Jerry dug the broken knife blade into the side of the wardrobe’s plinth. Carefully, he pried a board upward, but underneath there was only a dark, empty space, containing nothing at all, not even spiderwebs. He peered inside and then shook his head. “Not in here,” he said, his voice sounding hollow. “Wouldn’t really be room enough, anyway. You’d have to be a bloody midget to hide in here.”

  “You see?” said Dawn. She felt as if her brain were bursting apart into a thousand glittering fragments, like a mirror being smashed in slow motion, and she had to sit down on the side of the bed. “I was dreaming it. Or else I am going mad. I think I’m going mad.”

  Jerry sat down next to her and put his arm around her. “No
, sweetheart, you didn’t dream it, and no, you’re not going mad. To be honest, I wasn’t too sure if I believed you yesterday about this black-faced man, but I was lying in bed tonight and I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking to myself, Dawn’s not the hysterical type, not at all. In fact you’re the most levelheaded girl I ever went out with. Why do you think I came round here at two o’clock in the morning? I just wanted to be sure.”

  Dawn gave him a kiss and snuggled in closer to him. “But if I’m not dreaming him, and I’m not going mad, then what is he? He felt real and he really hurt me, but how can he be real if he can disappear like that? Perhaps he’s a ghost or an evil spirit or something. He kept saying that I was a bitch. He said he’d got the blame for something I’d done, but I couldn’t really understand what he meant. Something to do with a baby.”

  Jerry said, “I’m sure that it’s something to do with the wardrobe. How long have you been living here now?”

  “It’ll be a year at the end of September.”

  “And when was the wardrobe delivered?”

  “A month ago. Less than a month.”

  “And you didn’t see this black-faced man before then?”

  Dawn shook her head.

  “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” said Jerry. “Tomorrow we’re both going to throw a sickie and we’re going to drive up to Oxford and see your aunt what’s-her-name.”

  “Selina. But what for?”

  “Let’s find out where she got this wardrobe. Maybe it used to belong to a coven of witches. Or a stage magician. I’ll bet that’s it. I’ll bet you it belonged to the Great Lumbago or somebody like that, only he got trapped inside it.”

  “So why is he all burned like that? I could feel the hair on his legs was burned. It was all crunchy and horrible.”

  “Maybe he was waiting for somebody to let him out of the wardrobe and he lit up a cigarette to pass the time, and he accidentally dropped it.”