My mother’s phone buzzed, and she stood up from the table, distracted. “Richard, take Christopher would you? This is Doctor Joyce.” She pushed the high chair towards my father before leaving the kitchen.
I watched my father tentatively lift the jar of baby food from the table. He didn’t seem to know what to do with the spoon, looking instead at his own hand hovering in front of Christopher’s mouth with a troubled expression.
I spoke to break the tension. “Dad, can we go to the beach before the end of the summer?”
My father looked up from Christopher in the high chair, relieved at the distraction. “When do you go back to school, Silas?”
“September 8th.”
My father’s face scrunched — as though tasting something bitter, “I’m sorry, buddy. I don’t think that we’ll be able to this week. I need to have a really good month at work. We need a big push going into the Fall. But we can take the trip even when you’ve gone back to school.”
“I think you can take some time,” said Mom, resurfacing from the living room. Christopher had managed to smear most of the potatoes around his face in her absence.
My father’s face was a contradiction. He had said he wanted to, but the question had brought a look of pain to his face despite the fact we both enjoyed the ocean.
“That’s a good point,” said my father, turning back to look at me. “Let me see what I can do. We will go to the beach together soon though, I promise.”
That was all I needed. I knew Dad worked a lot, that it must be difficult to sell enough roofs to take care of three kids — especially when one of those kids needed thirty-five dollars to go to the dance. But Dad would never break a promise.
The rest of dinner passed without excitement. No one noticed my dirty sneakers, so I was able to sneak them upstairs after dinner was over. The rest of the family retreated to the living room to watch television. Monday was the night Mom and Dad watched Too Hot to Handle, a cooking show my sister would join them for occasionally. I didn’t understand why anyone would want to watch other people cook on television when Mom did it for us almost every single night. But they seemed to like watching people yell at food they put in the oven, and it meant that I could retreat to my bedroom without being interrupted for at least an hour.
On my way up the stairs, I speculated about the trip Dad and I were going to take. It was still hot enough to go in the water, one potential silver lining of these dragging summer days. Maybe Dad would come swimming with me and would lift me on his shoulders to toss me in the waves.
As though reacting to the picture of the crashing wave in my mind’s eye, my foot made a splashing sound as it landed on the top step. Used to my overactive imagination, I was certain that this had been another trick of my brain — an illusion created by sleepy days and too many stories. But no, my sock was soggy upon inspection, and I found a small puddle coming right to the edge of the wooden step.
I bent to examine the liquid. It was clear like water, but thicker somehow. The word viscous, a term my science teacher had used on lab day, came to mind, bringing with it the memory of the puddle outside my tree. I looked further down the hallway, lit only by a lonely lamp at the far end. I did not see any more puddles, but there was something about this one that sparked my curiosity. Despite having explored every inch of my world, this was something new, something different. Meaning, anticipation kindling in my chest, that something new and different could potentially, hopefully happen.
Chapter Two
I was oftentimes jealous of Christopher. Not because of the attention he received or the way every conversation seemed to turn into one about him — that was something I was quickly adjusting to. I remained jealous of Christopher because he could fall asleep anytime that he wanted, which was often. His eyes would glaze over, and he would be fast asleep within a minute at any time of the day. I, on the other hand, seemed to have been made without the crucial piece of my brain that could fall asleep like a normal person.
It had been at my first sleepover I realized my difficulty sleeping was abnormal. I’d expected Trevor to toss and turn like I did, but had been quickly proven wrong when he dropped off just after eleven. I had been left to stare at the ceiling, counting away the seconds without even a comic to help me to drift off.
Usually, I would fall asleep after reading when all the lights went out. I would pull a small flashlight and a comic under the sheets to look at the pictures until my eyelids began to take on that heavy sensation. That would be my cue to switch off the light, stash the comic under my bed, and drift off. Tonight, I was reading a comic that had been in my Christmas stocking the year before. The thick paperback, a story about pirates called One Piece, had become one of my most comfortable favorites. Dad said the comic was from a country called Japan where they read in the opposite direction. I asked where Japan was, and Dad had pointed to small island on a globe that could barely fit all the letters of its name. It hadn’t been so amazing then to see how small Japan was, but how large the ocean between America and the tiny island had been in comparison.
My eyes trailed the familiar pages, revisiting the adventures of Luffy the pirate. Setting course in charted waters, I jumped from panel to panel — a young Luffy, kidnapped, taken on a boat out to sea. His mentor, Red Haired Shanks, saving him from the deadly sea monster. It is not until after being rescued by Shanks that Luffy realizes his savior’s arm has been bitten off. It was my first time seeing blood in a comic book, and even in black and white the dramatic panel had ingrained itself into my imagination. Shanks hadn’t winced or panicked, but only been grateful that Luffy was safe.
My eyes began to take on that warm, weighty feeling, and I tucked the copy of Luffy’s adventure beneath my mattress. It’s not as though there was a lot for me to feel concerned about. There was only a week until school started.
Seven days, six when you wake up tomorrow. That’s nothing.
I had bought all of my school supplies, read all of the books I was supposed to, even the boring ones, like Shiloh, I was sure not even the teachers enjoyed. I should have been able to fall right off to sleep. I thought about Red Haired Shanks staring down the sea monster that fled for the safety of deeper waters. I thought about the chimera fish, also known as the zombie shark, who hid in the dark. I thought about my father not looking directly at me when he promised to take me to the ocean.
My brain, just drifting into a dream about boats and fish stitched together with red twine, snapped awake with a start as a burst of heat threw me into a sweat. My heart rate sped up in panic and dread. This was not a new feeling, but one I absolutely loathed. My chance to fall asleep had slipped away — like watching the school bus take off without me. I had one chance to drift off before it was gone, abandoned in horrible wakefulness. This was something that I had tried to explain to Mom and Dad on many occasions, but they couldn’t understand. They insisted that if I just became tired enough, I would fall asleep. But it never worked that way. It didn’t work that way any more than holding my eyes closed for long enough would bring happy dreams. Instead, I would lie there, clock in the hallway ticking away, the gloom of that dark stretch after midnight settling behind my eyelids. I would fall asleep eventually, but sometimes not until three or four in the morning.
I lay there, wondering what I was supposed to do now that I’d missed my bus. My heart beat through the too thick comforters of my bed. I pulled the blankets off, stretching under the cool air, contemplating one possible solution. Oftentimes when I had trouble sleeping, a bowl of cereal would help me to drift off. Just getting out of bed was sometimes enough to reset the clock and try again. I put on a t-shirt and cotton pants, resolved that I was not going to be a victim of three-thirty in the morning. I was going to eat a bowl of shredded wheat, relax, and wake up not feeling like a zombie shark.
I was careful not to disturb the stillness of the house as I tip-toed into the dark of the kitchen. Here was a different kind of quiet than when I just happened to be alone in th
e middle of the day. The quiet in the middle of the night was the kind that did not want to be disturbed.
Shredded wheat pinged into the ceramic bowl, the refrigerator slurping open like a ziplock bag. The single bulb of the refrigerator threw a pillar of light across the kitchen, cutting the darkness in two across the dinner table. I grabbed the gallon of milk and closed the door as quietly as possible, afraid to disturb the stillness. The darkness made me uneasy, but that cautiousness interested me in the same way. My imagination could play with the darkness, imagining what unfound things could be hiding out of sight. I knew there was nothing creeping just out of my view though. This was my home. Creatures that did not want to be seen lived at the bottom of the ocean — not in houses with people.
The shredded wheat tasted sweet. Even without being able to see, I could pour the right amount of milk into the bowl, and sat crunching at the kitchen countertop. I wondered if any other members of my family were bad sleepers too, and we kept missing each other when we came down to get snacks in the middle of the night.
Something creaked upstairs, but I chose to ignore it. The house I grew up in was older than I was. It was older than anyone else in the family, as old as my grandfather who had died when I was only six. At the funeral, they had said he was born in 1932. I remember learning in history class that World War II, the largest war we ever fought, happened in the first part of the 1940’s. That meant that my grandfather, and this house, were older than the biggest war of all time. Only the house was still here.
Once I finished my bowl of cereal, slurping the delicious milk at the end because Mom was not here to tell me not to, I placed the bowl in the sink and began the careful crawl back upstairs. Walking off the balls of my feet, I leaned on the banister and lined my feet along the corner of the steps to avoid waking anyone. Not that I would have been in trouble, but I did not want to have Maggie use me as an excuse to be cranky the next morning.
Moonlight lit the face of the clock in the hallway, saying that it was five past one in the morning. If I could fall asleep within the next thirty minutes, then I would get seven hours of sleep, and I’d survived decent days on far less.
It was just before I reached the doorknob to my room that I heard the noise I was not supposed to.
I knew the sounds this house made. I knew the creaks and squeaks, even the occasional snaps as wood settled in the walls. One noise, however, that this house did not make was the sound of slurping. The gulping, an almost perfect copy of the noise I made while sipping the last drops of cereal-flavored milk came from down the hallway, behind the door to my parents’ room. The door was ajar, its difference in darkness peeking from the crooked frame. I didn’t think I should be creeping into my parents’ bedroom, but my curiosity was getting the better of me. It may have been the late hour, making even the most implausible scenarios seem likely, but my mind was jumping to sea serpents, to the oarfish that slowly digested its prey whole. Besides, my parents’ door was always shut at night, and they had said to never come in without knocking when the door was shut. If the door was not closed, then that rule did not apply.
I crept towards the door, the drinking growing faster, as though pushing to find an end to the milk in the bowl. A floorboard creaked under my foot, and the slurping abruptly stopped. Whatever was causing the noise in the night had heard me and was frozen just as I was, waiting for something else to happen. Knowing I was about to lose my chance, I pushed the door open and peered into the depths.
Two lumps rose beneath the blankets of my parents’ bedroom. By the light of the hallway I could follow the tangle of sheets to where my Mom and Dad’s heads poked from beneath the plaid pattern. Jewelry from the bedside table glinted back, a silver heart necklace reflecting the wane light. Scanning the uneven line, I passed the mess of hair that marked my mother to the smaller mass of my father. His head, less tangled, seemed to be buried beneath a shadow the light of the hallways could not illuminate. The shadow twitched.
As I took a step into the room, a cold sweat ran down my back to catch in the folds of my shirt. I didn’t want to be here anymore — I wanted to be back in my bed pretending to sleep. But the shadow twitched again. The slurping picked up, taking one last draw before the long shape detached from my father.
“Who’s there?” I asked. It was a foolish question, but my brain had just pieced together that the shadow connected to my father did not belong to him. The question had leapt from my mouth before I had could think about whether or not shadows could respond.
The shadow twitched again. The sounds of gushing milk stopped abruptly as the shape responded to the sound of my voice. The shadow and I looked at each other. I couldn’t make out its face, if it could be called a face. Something looked back at me in the darkness — the thing that had been attached to my father did not move, did not answer. My breathing was speeding up uncontrollably. Everything was hot and cold all at the same time. I wanted to be dreaming — I wanted to be asleep. The rush of temperatures and emotions built until I couldn’t take them anymore. I slammed the door as hard as I could and ran for my bedroom.
“What? What’s happening?” I couldn’t tell if it was my mother or father who called out from the room. I only knew I had to get away, that I had no choice in the matter. In a few short steps, I had retraced the path to my bedroom and thrown myself beneath the covers. Sweat clung to my sheets, the heat intensifying beneath my mountain of blankets. I heard footsteps outside, quiet murmurs, and feet come to a stop outside my bedroom door. I couldn’t make a sound for fear that the door would be opened, my parents to unknowingly exposing me to the shadow outside.
Eventually, the footsteps moved on, back down the hallway before returning to silence. I experienced a small amount of shame at leaving my parents to face the monster alone. I was nine after all, about to turn ten years old in just over a month. I should be able to take care of grown-up things like monsters by myself.
Stirring the dark flavors of my imagination, assumptions of what the shadow above the bed had been trying to do to my father wove in and out of plausibility. Images of bloodsucking vampires and flesh-eating ghouls flickered across the scene behind my eyelids, not quite lining up with the sight in the bedroom. Why hadn’t my father woken up from the pain of having his blood sucked out through his head?
Maybe he didn’t know he was having his blood sucked out, I thought, stress saturating my overworked brain. When vampires suck people’s blood, they turn into vampires too, everyone knows that.
If that was the case, maybe I had saved my own life by not opening the door to his footsteps.
That’s really dumb, responded the older, more mature voice in my head. I tossed beneath the heavy covers, doing my best to find some comfortable position despite the damp sweat clinging to the sheets. Everyone knows vampires don’t exist. They’re made up.
Vampire bats are real. They drink blood.
I didn’t have an answer for that thought. Whatever had been above my parents’ bed hadn’t been a bat. While I couldn’t have put my finger on what made the shadow so distinctly inhuman, at the very least it had not been flapping about on fleshy wings. And besides, vampire bats did not live in New Jersey. These thoughts turned over in my imagination, slowly working in and out of tight knots. The only relieving thought I had as I slowly gave myself over to sleep was that one way or another, I would find out exactly who my father had become in the morning.
I struggled to keep my eyes shut, knowing the moment I opened them I would be unable to drift back. The light had come too quickly, spilling through the window into my eyelids. I tried my best to hide from the day, feeling like a vampire myself, but the shuffling of footsteps and Maggie’s high-pitched voice made that impossible. Sometimes I could bury my head beneath the covers, creating a few more precious moments of nighttime. The air beneath the covers was too warm though, the stuffiness becoming more than I could bear after a minute or so. Each time I woke up from a bad night’s sleep, it took me the better part of a morning to
come back to feeling anything like “normal Silas.”
“Did you have trouble falling asleep last night?” my father asked as I came stumbling from my bedroom.
It was as his words parted the clutter in my brain that the events of the night before came tumbling back in disjointed pieces. I studied his face, looking for any sign that the monster in the night had changed him in some visible way. There were no bite marks on his neck, no gashes, no deflated skull. He only looked a little pale, but Dad always looked disheveled before shaving and putting his tie on.
“I think so,” I said, still studying his face.
Had it been a dream after all? Had I imagined the entire thing?
No, I hadn’t. I was still wearing the shirt and sweatpants from my trip downstairs. My sheets had been wet in the night, sweaty from burying myself beneath too many knotted layers. The easiest way to tell if I had been dreaming would be to ask if he had been woken by me slamming the door, but that would mean admitting I’d crept into his room. Then I would have to tell him about what I’d seen, a mystery I was still struggling to untangle myself.
Could it possibly have been real?
My father continued, “I’m sorry, I know that’s never fun. I can’t say I had the best night either. Why don’t you get undressed and I’ll give you a bath before work?”
I nodded, passing him into the bathroom.
Bath time was one of our oldest traditions, a ritual the two of us had kept since before I could remember. I would fill the tub to just above my belly button with soapy water, playing with the knobs to find the right temperature. The soap would build into mountains of foam I would clap into wispy clouds that floated around the bathroom. When the water began to lose its scalding, pleasant heat, I would call Dad in. He would pour water from a large cup over my head, washing out all the soap and shampoo, occasionally using the cup to splash me in the face instead. It was also our time to talk about important things before going our separate ways for the day.
Deep, Deep Ocean Page 2
