by James Comins
She had to get these two stubborn teeth out.
But the more she worked at it, the more her gums seemed to cling to them. Instead of the pink jelly she was used to, her gums had gotten bony and covered in yellow and brown spikes. The roots of each tooth were captured under the surface of the gums.
Hannah found a nail file and set to work.
Five days before her dentist appointment, she pulled one huge tooth from the top and one from the bottom. Her gums were a crusted filthy black mess now.
That night she lay in bed with a low-fat protein shake and probed the rotting flesh of her mouth.
What would the dentist say when he saw her?
The thought hadn’t occurred to her before. He’d think she was a disgusting freak. Such a kindly old man, too. He’d take one look and tell her parents she was crazy. He’d tell them that she needed to go to a psychiatric institution.
Hurriedly she poured out the collected teeth, sifting out the pronged ones and the smaller baby ones. She arranged the adult teeth in order, found superglue in the junk drawer downstairs and brought the adult teeth collection to the bathroom. Locked the door. Got to gluing. Held them in place.
Four hours later, she looked at her reflection. It looked like a catastrophe happened to her gums, but all her teeth were in the right place. She hoped she’d got them in the right order, anyways, because that superglue was strong.
Her mother drove her to the dentist. The whole ride, her mother was playing with her cellphone, and more than once Hannah was certain they were going to get driven into a telephone pole and killed.
Instead, Hannah hopped out of the passenger door just before the car came to a stop and went inside. She looked at Miss Angie the secretary, who knew her pretty well and made a note in the computer saying Hannah had showed up. Hannah sat and looked at Magic Eye pictures.
Miss Angie called her name. Pursing her lips, Hannah stood and went into the orthodontist’s cubicle and sat.
The orthodontist took one look inside her mouth and called the dentist in hurriedly.
"Good grief," the dentist breathed as he poked at her mouth. "You--you ripped all your teeth out. You ripped all your teeth out and superglued them back in." The kindly old man took a step back and looked at her. "I think I need to talk to your parents, young lady. Is your mother in the waiting room?"
"No," Hannah whispered, feeling tears well up. "She just drove away."
"Well, I’ll call her."
Hannah sat and waited for everything to be over. Her mother finally came, took a look inside Hannah’s mouth and began to scream at her about what a horrible daughter she was, and how she’d ruined her life forever. The dentist talked to her mother, and a new appointment was made, plus one for a psychiatrist. Exactly what Hannah had been afraid of.
Hannah rode home in silence, keeping her mouth firmly closed.
She dove into bed and willed herself to fall asleep.
Despite the superglue, the teeth had all come out by morning. She had a mouthful of detached teeth. Collecting them, she counted thirty-one. She had swallowed one in the night. Oh well.
Tonguing the ruined remains of her gums, she discovered that the next row of teeth was coming in. Very sharp, she decided. Sighing, she waited for more awful things to happen to her.
The pointed teeth came in quickly. They were like needles, and curved inward like the teeth of a carnivorous fish from the midnight zone. The dental repair appointment was in two weeks.
Every day the needle teeth kept growing longer and longer until she could feel them stabbing into her hard palate every time she closed her mouth.
After three days she had to prop her mouth open all the time.
Then the teeth began to stab up through her mouth.
She could have gotten these needle-teeth out, using her tricks. She could have. She could have rubbed benzocaine gel all over them.
Instead she let them grow.
* * *
Scowling, Hannah’s mother pushed through the door to Hannah’s bedroom and found white needles coming out through Hannah’s forehead. In the girl’s hands were a bag of ninety-seven teeth.
Sam
Your shadow has a mind of its own. Normally, when you’re awake and walking around, your shadow sticks by your side. Timid and obedient.
At night, your shadow’s job is to scare you. Are you scared of the dark? That’s your shadow, doing its job well.
Once you fall sleep, your shadow goes exploring.
Off into the night your shadow flits, looking for scares or excitement or adventure. If you’ve been good to it, it will always come home before you wake up.
Have you ever had a dream of falling very fast? That was your shadow, coming home from its nighttime mischief, realizing it had stayed out too late.
Shadows are usually reliable. They’re usually tame. Usually.
But sometimes, when mistreated or taken for granted, a shadow goes wrong.
Today, or more precisely tonight, Sam’s shadow went wrong.
It began with a pair of eyes in the dark.
* * *
Sam walked home from the park. The light from the streetlights made his shadow long and sharp. It stretched from his feet to the other side of the street and up across the grass. By running to the base of a streetlight he could make his shadow disappear under his sneakers. It stretched out again as he ran toward home.
Over and over Sam squashed his shadow under his shoes, then stretched it all the way out, laughing at the way it squashed and stretched.
His shadow hated it.
Too tame to try to scare him, his shadow stewed and steamed with anger. It wanted revenge, but not yet. Not while there was light out.
Sam finally stopped messing with his shadow and got home. Bedtime. Sam’s mother tucked him in and switched out the light.
Boiling angry, Sam’s shadow faded into the darkness. Time to get revenge. It pressed itself into the dark, spread itself out and made the room just a tiny bit . . . off.
The night was full of things, Sam thought, bad things, and he hid under the covers in the safety of his bed. Whistling noises came in through the place the window didn’t close completely, as if the night were sneaking into his room when he wasn’t looking.
Somehow, after a certain amount of being afraid under the covers, Sam fell asleep.
A wavy shape detached from the darkness of the room and stretched like a cat. His shadow sniffed at the darkness, which felt familiar, like a brother, and sat on the edge of the bed. It tried to decide what to do. Should it fold itself very small and stow away in a stranger’s pocket? Should it fly up into the night and follow the crows in their carrion circlings? Should it find a bug in the wall and try to frighten it to death?
Still angry, the shadow couldn’t decide.
As it sat, pondering, something happened. Through the place the window didn’t close completely, a something else slithered into the room.
A pair of eyes opened in the dark. They were not Sam’s eyes, nor were they his shadow’s eyes.
They were not human eyes. They were eyes made of sparks. Sparks made of fear.
Sam’s shadow felt a sudden chill--not the good and spooky kind, either. It felt for all the world like it was being watched. And it was.
"Why be frightened of your owner?" hissed in Sam’s shadow’s ear. "Why stay attached? Why not free yourself and live forever, flying free in the night sky?"
Sam’s shadow felt a tug, and it thought about how badly it had been treated by its owner. Obediently it followed the something else out through the place where the window didn’t shut all the way.
Soaring up, the shadow and the something else fled the house, fled the city, fled the planet, and traveled--quicker than an eye can turn--through outer space to a planet made of light. Frightened things crawled over the bright surface of this world. Wherever Sam’s shadow landed, the frightened things skittered away, as if a mere shadow were the most powerful thing in the world.
"See?" said the something else, blinking its pair of eyes. "You could live here forever, scaring these creatures, or you could travel to a thousand thousand places as different and interesting as this place. But you know that you’ll be captive again as soon as Sam wakes up. You’ll be too scared to be alone. For you to be free, Sam must die."
And without thinking, Sam’s shadow flicked back to Earth, back to the city, back to the house, and in through the window.
Quietly, as quiet as a shadow across a gravel road, Sam’s shadow wrapped itself around Sam’s face, stretching farther and farther around until it thought it might snap like a rubber band. It clung to Sam’s nose and mouth until he stopped breathing.
And when they buried Sam in the churchyard, his was the only corpse to have no shadow.
So take care with your shadow. Treat it well. And remind it often that the best scare is the one closest to home.
Lorrie
Lorrie was covered with flies.
They just adored her. Any open doorway would attract them, and going outside was the worst. All summer vacation the sound of buzzing drove her nuts. It seemed like there was always a fly right beside her ear. Over time, she found her arms getting itchy, so she started wearing long-sleeved t-shirts to keep the mosquitos off her arms.
Now it was certainly true that Lorrie was of a size. Not an extraordinary size, at least it didn’t feel that way to her, but she was, perhaps, a little pronounced. But there were plenty of other chubby kids in her class, and they didn’t attract flies. She couldn’t figure out what it was. She didn’t smell funny, did she? Did she give off, like, fly pheromones? Why *swat* were they always chasing her?
All year she tried to figure it out.
It had to be the flub. That had to be it. She would lose the weight, she decided. That was her summer project. She went online and learned all about the gym, all about nutrition, and started trying out what she learned. She got a gym membership, she convinced her mom and dad to buy kale and carrots for snacks, and she started working out for two hours every day.
The flies started swarming through the propped-open gym door. They swirled around her, a thick buzzing cloud, as she ran on the treadmill. It was like they were following her.
She ignored them. It was just the sweat, she told herself. Just the pounds coming off.
And the pounds did come off, a little at a time.
Six weeks later she was looking at herself in the bathroom mirror in her bra and pajama bottoms. The door was locked. She squeezed her flub, which was definitely and reassuringly firmer and tighter. A fly buzzed. More were collecting outside the bathroom window.
She felt her firmer skin, smiling at her progress.
Wait. What was--
There was a hard place on her left side, under the flub.
What was it? It felt a bit like a lump and a bit like a bone.
Was it cancer? Did she have fat cancer? Could you get a breast cancer lump inside your fat rolls?
Her first instinct was to run and tell her parents. But she was so embarrassed! All of that awful stuff, the flies and now the lump, just because she had resisted going to the gym until now!
Lorrie didn’t tell anyone.
All night, mosquitos seemed to squirm around the corners of her bedroom window and into the room, buzzing. Over and over she rose, swatted them, and went back to bed.
Haggard, she went to the gym the next day, convinced she could burn the lump away.
But as the fat came off, the lump got bigger, as if something were pressing against the inside of her body, trying to get out.
Still she told no one. She just wore baggier shirts--it was easy, she just wore her old size--and swatted the flies into piles. They were growing bolder and landing on her body all the time. They seemed especially interested in the lump.
The gym. The flies. The pounds, burning away. That was summer.
It was when the second, smaller lump appeared that she really started freaking out. Out of morbidness she’d started collecting the flies she’d smooshed, and they already filled the bottom of a tupperware container. As she piled more flies into the plastic tub (to show to no one, she told herself), she unconsciously touched the lump and found the second one.
She ran to the mirror. Yes, you could just see it, a narrow, pointed knob just beside the big lump. She broke down crying, because she was definitely going to die of cancer. Kidney cancer, probably. Your kidneys are right there, right? That’s where kidneys are.
The skin over the big lump seemed to be getting thinner, as if the lump were ready to break through, like a big pimple.
Lorrie never told her mother or father any of this. They wouldn’t understand.
The gym guys got into the habit of shutting the door and windows as soon as she came in. The flies were so thick that some nights she woke up with a grid of mosquitos, dozens of them, feeding on her bare skin. People avoided her, even though she was becoming slim and fit. The flies created a buzzing wheel around her. The end of summer was hot and the gym became a sauna.
But she would defeat the fat and the flies. Lorrie wasn’t the sort to give up, or to give in and tell her parents.
The skin over the lumps grew thinner and thinner. They were emerging.
School was only a week away when it happened.
She was lying in bed, aiming a fan at her face and swatting flies, scratching surreptitiously at the lumps when they finally broke through the skin.
It felt sickening and a little painful as the broken-through-skin expanded and the lumps pushed through.
A big lump with the second lump attached. Clinging to them, a long spiky strand, followed by . . .
Ribs.
A series of long bendy ribs, like a xylophone hanging out of her flank.
Screaming, Laurie switched on the light and screamed louder at the rotting skull filled with maggots poking out of her abdomen. With a tug she pulled the skeleton out whole and ripped away everything connected to it.
And died.
* * *
Doctors told her parents that they found her two working kidneys inside the pelvis of her dead twin.
John
John could always hear something in the walls.
Every night he would run into his parents’ room and shout for them to come quick, this time they’d really be able to hear it. He promised this time it was real. It was a scratching, or no, maybe more like a tapping, or a crunching . . . and every time, they would dutifully file out of bed and check every corner of the room.
"No, it’s in the walls," he’d say, and they’d sigh sleepily and say they’d see what they could do.
After a week or two of that, John’s dad brought home a machine to locate beams through the wall. "Sonar," his dad said. John sat on the bed with his legs crossed, watching as the green LCD screen revealed "studs, studs, pipes from the bathroom, studs, oop, that looked like it might have been a rat," his dad said, leaning over the baseboards. "Welllp, looks like you were right. I’ll call the exterminator tomorrow."
Rats.
So at least it wasn’t anything too awful, like cockroaches or something. He could sleep soundly knowing all the rats would be dead by the end of the week.
That night he brushed his teeth and slid into the covers. All his problems would be over soon.
A shape appeared in the dark room, silhouetted on the wall against the faint green glow of the multicolored LED lights shining from the guts of his computer.
The shape was the shape of a rat. But as it spread across the ceiling, it grew. It grew hairier, and darker, with terrible whiskers and dark red eyes blazing and a tail that couldn’t stay still. On its head was a crown.
"John," an inhuman voice hissed--or squeaked? "I am the king of rats. They’re coming to kill us, John. We’ll all die in a cloud of poison gas. Do you want that to happen?"
"Y-yes," John stuttered, his back pressing against his headboard’s cubbyholes.
"You want to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of g
ood, law-abiding rats?" the rat king squeaked.
"Just--just leave, before they come to kill you," whimpered John, who wasn’t good with confrontations.
"We cannot get out," the rat king hissed. "We came in through the roof, and now we cannot climb out. We live on the bones of pigeons and crows. There is a kingdom inside your walls, John. We can make you a knight of the Order of the Rat, if you convince the men with gas to spare us. We’ll grant your wishes, too."
"How are you going to grant wishes when you’re trapped in the walls?" John said.
"The same way you can see my shadow on the ceiling," said the Rat King. "We rats can cast our spirits abroad, out of our bodies, if we choose. A promise to you: spare our lives and we’ll grant your wishes. Now go, and speak to the men with the killing gas."
The spirit of the rat king faded from the ceiling, although the glowing eyes remained for a moment. John slept fitfully.
"Dad," he said at the breakfast table the next morning, "don’t worry about killing the rats. I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided I like rats."
"Now John, rats spread diseases," his mother said. "And they bite."
"I think they’ll just . . . go away on their own," John said. "So you don’t need to poison them after all."
"No pest ever went away on its own," his dad said. "That’s not how pests work. Let’s just get this taken care of and wrapped up."
"But don’t you think that pouring poisonous fumes into my room is a bad idea? What if I get sick?" John said.
"I’m sure the exterminators know what they’re doing," his mom said.
No matter what John said, he couldn’t convince his parents not to call the exterminators.
"Now, you’ve been complaining about the noises in your room for weeks," his mother said. "So we’re taking care of it." And that turned out to be the final word.
That night the rat king appeared to him.
"I couldn’t convince them," John whispered to the crowned silhouette.
"Then let us out, quickly," the rat king squeaked. "The men with poison gas will come and make the air go wrong for us."
John scrabbled out of bed in his pajamas and crept to his dad’s workshop, looking for something scrapy to dig through the wall with. He hoped he wouldn’t get into trouble. He got a chisel and a putty knife, and he also grabbed the beam finder. Switching it on, he found an open spot in the wall and began digging.
