by Noel Hynd
Simultaneously, he was aware that he was in bed and falling through a dream. He felt his arms flap against his sheets. But then he entered the dream world completely and felt himself plunging in a free-fall through time and consciousness. He saw much of his life in flashback.
Nothing could stop the fall. It only accelerated. The next thing he knew, he had hit bottom with a tremendous impact. Now he was dizzy and staring upward, as if in a stupor. His body was paralyzed! He could not move and he was transfixed with pain. But the pain had a center point. He saw himself spread-eagled and naked on a wide black slab in a desolate hellish stretch of some phantasmagoric underground. His arms were spread wide. He tried again to move, but couldn’t.
Oh, no! he thought. Someone, please come and save me!
There was a beast before him. A small, vicious, fanged, winged demon! Like a harpy. Or a griffin. It was straight out of some horrific fifteenth-century woodcut. And the demon was inclined between his legs, its salivating jaws moving toward his abdomen.
The monster leaned forward and tore the flesh of Timothy’s stomach with its fangs. It tore his flesh and chewed on it. Blood spurted from him as the imp ripped out his guts. The demon’s teeth were like a thousand little razors. Its mad eyes were crimson, gleaming and taunting.
In his bedroom, Tim Brooks heard himself scream.
And scream. And scream some more.
The pain in his gut was excruciating. He heard himself scream again, this time as if all hell had broken loose. The beast devoured his insides, braced itself with tiny sharp claws, and was merrily proceeding to eviscerate him and rip out his quivering heart!
Brooks flailed insanely at his sheets. He thrashed wildly against his bed covers. His arms swung wide, as did his legs. It his wild swing of his arms, he sent his bedside radio crashing to the floor.
He bolted upright in his bed in the dark room, his heart thundering, his pulse racing, and sweat pouring from his body. His eyes opened. He knew the dream was over, but his heart still raged.
Then his eyes went wide, the scream still echoing in his throat as well as his ears.
Oh, dear God! Oh, dear God!
There was a flash of terror unlike any that he had ever known before. And he felt his heart kick so hard that he thought it would stop.
In the darkness, he saw a towering black figure before the foot of his bed!
Tall and black and evil and ghostly and…!
Tim lunged desperately for the light switch on the lamp at bedside. He whacked it. It failed. He whacked it again. Blackness that seemed to last for hours. Then the light came on. At the same moment, he picked up a porcelain pitcher that rested beside the lamp on a night table. He raised it above his head to throw at whatever was standing before him—seven feet tall in the darkness.
But the room was deserted.
He looked all around. The room remained empty, quiet and still.
Brooks didn’t move. He heard his heart, which was thundering. He could hear himself breathing. Distantly, he could hear the water drip in his bathroom.
He found his watch, which remained on the night table. He stared at the time on his clock radio. Incredibly, only twenty minutes had passed since he had last checked the time before falling to sleep. Considering the many minutes that he had lain awake, this horrible vision must have been compressed into a tiny sliver of time.
Maybe no more than a few seconds, he guessed.
His pajamas were soaked with sweat, as if he had awakened from a fever. He moved his hand to his guts. The pain had been so horrible, the image of the demon chewing at him had been so lurid, so real that he needed to reassure himself.
Nothing was missing. He sighed in relief. Relief from pain.
Relief from terror.
“Oh, man…” he muttered to himself.
He lay back down and tried to allow the pace of his breathing to subside. He had never had such a terrifying dream in his life. Never one as realistic, either. It was almost as if something had come unhinged in reality and Brooks had poked his head into some horrible new universe—one to which he did not care to ever return.
And that immense black figure at the foot of his bed? Preposterous! There had been nothing there! he kept telling himself. It was a nightmare. Nothing more than a terrible nightmare.
But the intense reality of that black vision had tingled his spine as well. He would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that he had actually seen something, that something had actually been there.
No! Be rational! You don’t believe in such things!
He worked hard to convince himself.
He felt his nerves settle. His heart returned to a normal pace. Never again, he told himself. Never again, beer and an Ambien. He supposed this was how people went to bed and never woke up. He had been foolish, he knew.
“Oh, man,” he again muttered aloud to himself. He ran his hand through his hair. His scalp was damp like his bedclothes. “Oh, man alive,” he said boldly.
The sound of his own voice reassured him.
This type of dementia he did not need. Or want. Was he suddenly coming mentally undone? So many cops ended up as drunks or suicides or drug addicts, or some combination of all three. But never once had he ever thought he would.
He rose from bed. He removed his sweaty bedclothes. He went to the kitchen. He would have liked another beer, but was afraid to consume any more alcohol this evening.
He found a ginger ale, instead.
He sat down at his kitchen table and thought back on the horror of his dream. Involuntarily, he replayed little details of it to a chilling and shuddering effect.
It wasn’t real! I don’t believe in such things!
I don’t want to believe in such things!
Against this, Reverend Osaro’s voice again. “Once you’ve accepted that the paranormal exists, you can accept anything that follows.”
Tim stayed awake. The clock said two forty-five A.M.
No, George. I’m fighting it. I refuse to accept it. Not yet. I do not care to have a seven-foot black ghost standing at the foot of my bed. It’s not really there!
His head continued to hammer. Did someone say, “Migraine?”
Annette’s ghosts were white and shimmery, he reminded himself. They came to warn her. His was black. What was this one here for?
He didn’t turn the light off. But he finally went back to sleep. The next morning he overslept and then was badly tired when he finally arose. He never ran the six miles. He dragged himself through his shift.
During the late afternoon, however, his headache magically lifted. He wasn’t aware of it diminishing. He only knew that suddenly it was gone. He might have been pleased, but a sense of foreboding was upon him—an instinct, developed after many years as a cop.
A sense of impending trouble gripped him.
Deep down, he suspected that though the headache was gone, it would soon be replaced by something far worse.
Chapter Twenty
Annette turned on the television in the living room at 17 Cort Street. It was Friday evening. Jeopardy came on. She played along for several minutes. Then she set a place for herself at an antique table on one side of her living room.
One salad fork, one knife and a blue cloth napkin. A flat straw coaster and a matching place mat. She arranged everything very precisely, even though she would be eating alone. She turned up the sound on the television so that she could hear as she walked back and forth between the living room and the kitchen.
In the kitchen she uncorked a Tuscan white wine. She poured herself a glass. She tasted it. She loved the taste of a dry Italian white on a summer evening. She walked the glass back to the living room and carefully set it down on the coaster, keeping an ear on the quiz show’s final question. The topic: U.S. Presidents in Film.
She walked back into the kitchen. With lettuce, tomatoes and some avocado slices, she prepared for herself a crabmeat salad. She added a few slices of apple and pear. She walked back to the living room. Final J
eopardy question: Who was the first president to appear in a moving newsreel in 1895?
Well, she thought to herself, to answer that, one need to know who was President in 1895 and that was…
Annette set down her plate on the place mat and stopped cold. The wineglass had silently turned over and was on its side.
The wine was running over the woodwork of the table. She cursed to herself. She hurried to the kitchen for paper towels, then froze.
If the glass had fallen over, why had it fallen?
And why hadn’t she heard it?
Annette walked cautiously back to the living room and stared at the wine lying on the table. There was no breeze. The table was level. She had replaced the glass carefully. And unless it had been turned over gently, she wondered again, why wouldn’t the glass have broken?
All three Jeopardy contestants failed to answer Grover Cleveland. But Annette was no longer listening.
She picked up the wineglass and put it down on the coaster again. It didn’t move. Annette stared at it and waited. Still, it wouldn’t turn over. There was something about this episode that didn’t feel right.
In the back of her mind she suppressed the thought: What’s in the room with me?
She checked the rest of her table setting. Everything else was perfectly in place.
Annette put the glass on the edge of the coaster to see whether it would tip. It wouldn’t. She stood, folded her arm and watched it. Still it wouldn’t move.
She leaned forward. She blew at it first from a distance of one foot, then one inch.
It wouldn’t tip.
Annette picked up the glass and walked back to the kitchen. She filled up the glass with the same amount of water as it had held of wine. She walked back to the living room. She set the glass on the coaster again.
She stood near it and watched it. It didn’t budge. Not a millimeter. Annette leaned over so that her eye was level with the glass. The liquid within it was perfectly still.
“All right,” she said aloud. She reached to the glass and placed a finger upon it. “Let’s just see,” she said.
Very gently, she started to tip the glass. She tipped it for several seconds until its center of balance and gravity took over. The glass inclined farther in the direction that Annette had nudged it.
It fell.
It shattered against the wooden tabletop. The water mixed with the wine. It formed a puddle that ran far beyond the shards of broken glass.
Annette stepped back, more frightened than angry. She raised her eyes and looked around the room.
“All right,” she said aloud. “Where are you?”
She waited. She now had that sense, that feeling, that she was not alone.
But the room was still, other than the homogenized electronic voice from the television. Nothing moved. Not even a breeze through the screens of an open window.
“Come on,” Annette said bravely. “Make yourself known.”
No sound replied. No response from a quiet house. Not a creak on a floorboard. Not a footfall. Not a touch. Not a whisper. Annette walked to the sitting room off from the living area. No one was there. No one was in the front foyer or the back hallway. She knew no one had gone upstairs. The old staircase was too noisy. It sang out whenever anyone walked upon it. And no one had gone to the basement. The door was locked and closed from the kitchen.
“Please,” she said next. “Reveal yourself. Who are you?”
Still, nothing. Yet there remained a feeling in the room, something almost palpable.
Annette Carlson stared at the mixture of wine, broken glass and water on the table, seeping into the old pine surface. She looked at the fork, knife, napkin and coaster, otherwise perfectly in place.
Sure, she thought. I’m imagining it, right? The glass turned over by itself. It turned once and didn’t break and I knocked it over a second time and it did. This is nuts. I’m nuts. I’ll be spending another two weeks under a doctor’s care at the Fairfield, Connecticut, funny farm before I know it.
She drew a breath to steady herself.
“This is nuts. The world is nuts. I’m nuts,” she repeated aloud.
She walked back to the kitchen, her thoughts askew. She picked up a cloth dish towel, came back to the living room and began to mop the table.
Then her hand froze. When it registered upon her what she was seeing, she recoiled and dropped the towel and gasped.
The knife and fork were now inverted. They were facing the wrong way, points downward instead of upward toward the open table.
They had been perfectly in place seconds earlier when she walked back into the kitchen. She knew it! Twice she had looked directly at them. But they had moved within a matter of seconds. She knew that either she was right or she was losing her mind.
Annette stepped backward all the way to the door to the room. Then she unleashed another scream that had been bottled within her for the last several seconds. It was long and shrill and piercing. It could be heard all the way to the street, had anyone been happening by.
And with her scream, she felt the tone of the room change.
Annette had temporarily driven something from the chamber. She leaned back against the wall and screamed again. Then, with the cry of fear out of her system, she bolted to the kitchen, grabbed her purse and fled the house.
Chapter Twenty-one
Less than thirty minutes later, Timothy Brooks pulled his Jeep to a halt in front of 17 Cort Street. Annette, in what remained of the daylight, sat on a lawn chair to the side of the house.
As Tim Brooks stepped out of the car, he could see how shaken she was. He was wearing sweatpants and a wet T-shirt. He walked toward her, carrying a copy of the local weekly newspaper folded under his arm. The edition had just been published an hour earlier. Brooks didn’t want his copy blowing out of his open car.
Annette’s face was ashen. Her hands were folded across her lap.
“Sorry to take so long,” he said. “I had to be paged.”
She looked at him and his unlikely attire. “You’re a real piece of work for a cop, aren’t you?” she said.
He smiled. “How’s that?”
“Where were you? At a gym?”
He smiled again. “No such luck.” He’d been on his own time when his beeper rang, he said, in a pickup basketball game. “I called in,” he said. “When I recognized your address, I came over.”
“Oh,” she said. There was something dismal about her tone. “Well, thanks.” She looked at him critically. “Do you even own a uniform?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Look, I only appear to be casual. I’m ready for any occasion.”
He indicated the spot around his ankle where he wore the ankle hems of his sweat togs all the way down at his sneaker top. Beneath the gray cloth was the bulge of his service revolver.
And from a pocket, he pulled his badge.
“I believe you,” she said. “I just came back, myself.”
“Oh?” he asked. He glanced at the house. It looked warm and inviting in the twilight. “Another problem, huh?” She looked at him for several seconds. “Yeah,” she said finally. “Another problem. I’m not willing to spend another night in my own home.”
She opened her mouth to explain and suddenly found herself choking back tears.
“Won’t somebody help me?” she pleaded. “Won’t somebody do something?”
For several seconds, she buried her face in her hand. He knelt down next to her, surprised at her emotion, and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. He might have done more right there. He might have placed an arm around her as he had done with other distraught individuals in various moments of emotion or disaster, but he was struck by the awkwardness of it. Here he was a town cop. She was a nationally prominent film star. And she was at the brink of emotional collapse, reduced to pleading for his help.
“Okay, look,” he said as she quickly gathered herself, “I’m here to listen. Want to tell me what happened?”
She g
radually recovered. He sat patiently for several minutes and listened to what she had seen and what she had felt. That latter aspect—what she felt, what she sometimes sensed in the house—was gaining in significance. It was as if she knew when something invisible was present. She had a growing sense of something she couldn’t see, and that was almost as upsetting as the things that were visible.
He let her talk. And as he listened, his own nightmare came back to him.
When she was finished, he offered her a hand. She accepted it. He stood and helped her up to her feet. They would walk through the house together, he suggested. Whatever was there, they would face it down, together.
“I’m sure you screamed pretty well,” he said, attempting to cheer her. “Whatever it was is probably safely in Maine by now.”
“I wish,” she answered without a smile. And he wished that inside, he was as confident as he appeared outside.
She led him first into the living room. The television was still on. Annette flicked off the TV with a remote.
The kitchen towel remained where she had dropped it. The puddle and the shards of glass were still on the dining table, making a strangely-shaped white stain on the antique wood. Tim couldn’t help but notice: the stain was emerging almost in the shape of a man’s head.
Brooks set down his newspaper on a dry end of the table. He put his hand to the puddle, then raised his fingers to his nose. “Wine,” he said slowly, “mixed with water. Exactly as you said. “
“Did you doubt me?”
“In my line of work,” he answered, “I confirm for myself as much as I can.”
He looked at the merging shape again and felt a shudder. He ran his fingers through it to break up the image. Distantly, he thought he heard a laugh. He shuddered again and tried to convince himself that the laugh was out on the street.
Annette stood with arms folded, watching him. He raised his eyebrows as if to indicate that first, he had believed her all along and second, there was nothing to fear. The gesture even elicited a small smile from her.
He picked up the towel. “May I?” he asked.
