What Goes On In The Walls At Night: Thirteen tales of disgust and delight

by Andrew Schrader

  What Goes On In The Walls At Night

  Thirteen tales of disgust and delight.

  Andrew J. Schrader

  Contents

  Foreword

  Quotes

  Prologue: What Goes On . . .

  The Boy Who Swallowed Rocks

  The Big Feel

  Wings

  Bradbury Walks At Midnight

  The Developer

  The Sewers Are Angry!

  The Night of Running Children

  Every Day

  The Parasite

  2081

  Howlin’ Rain

  Who Goes There

  Epilogue: In The Walls At Night

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Schrader

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN: 978-0-692-84707-7

  Created with Vellum

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  “Finally, I do not pretend to have set down . . . a true, or even a consistent model of the universe. I can only say that here is a bit of my personal universe, the universe traversed in a long and uncompleted journey.

  If my record, like those of the sixteenth-century voyagers, is confused by strange beasts or monstrous thoughts or sights of abortive men, these are no more than my eyes saw or my mind conceived. On the world island we are all castaways, so that what is seen by one may often be dark or obscure to another.”

  — Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey

  “I've seen the future and I've left it behind.”

  — Black Sabbath

  Prologue: What Goes On . . .

  I didn’t sleep during most of seventh and eighth grade. Around two or three in the morning, every night, I’d wake up terrified that someone was waiting for me in the hallway. I’d peek out over the rolling dunes of my covers and watch shadows pace back and forth in the crack between the floor and the bottom of the door.

  Sometimes the shadows whispered things to me, though I don’t remember what they said. Occasionally I’d fall asleep again an hour or two later, after I grew too tired to keep watch. But most nights I stayed on guard until morning.

  Those years I wandered around in sleep-deprived numbness, never really awake. I developed a paranoid personality and acted out at school. I had few real friends. Fortunately, I had books and movies to look forward to during the day and to comfort me at night.

  About this time I discovered the books of Shorty Gray. Vanish Into Midnight was one fiction paperback I found at a thrift store and never saw again: A man and wife are preyed upon by shadow people in the forest. Terrifying for twelve year-old me; I could relate.

  Ironically, reading horror stories gave me courage and helped me stay sane and functioning. In time, the shadows left me alone, although I still rarely sleep for more than four hours a night and am often stalked in the jungle darkness by the two panthers called Panic and Terror.

  For a long time I forgot about Shorty Gray. I read somewhere that he’d published twenty books, maybe more, both fiction and nonfiction of all genres, in addition to essays and short fiction in magazines, yet most of his work is out of print. I still hunt for his books. I rarely find them.

  But what a life. He rode trains cross-country in the sixties, helped occupy Wounded Knee in 1973, spat on President Nixon once in protest. He had never cared much for readership or about making money. I found so little information about his personal life, it was impossible to know if he had a family. He wore no wedding ring, as far as anyone knew. Then again, no one could really know: Shorty Gray always wore a long, black sleeve and glove covering his left arm and hand.

  One night, about two months ago, after a convention on book publishing, I checked into a cheap hotel outside of Philadelphia, in a place so old the wallpaper had taken root in the walls. I set my stuff down on my squeaky mattress, sat around, grew bored, then wandered down to the hotel den. It was dark and damp in there, lit up only by a few solitary yellow-lamp blobs floating in the black.

  A light turned on. In the darkest corner of the room, laid back in a comfy armchair, sipping a glass of whiskey, amazingly, was Shorty Gray.

  I froze, undecided about whether to approach or not. He must have seen me staring, because the next thing I knew he was holding up the bottle and motioning me to sit. Soon I was having a conversation with my lost hero.

  We talked all through the night; or, rather, he talked and I listened.

  He told me about how, when he was eight years old, he’d worked the grounds at a place called Pickering Cemetery with his parents out in Connecticut. How one night there, in the basement, he’d heard shadowy voices in the walls, whispering to each other, telling stories, one after another, all night long.

  “You know what I’m talking about? The . . . shadows? The voices?” he asked, his bushy eyebrows raised, as I leaned forward in full attention.

  I nodded. I knew it too well.

  Sap from the logs in the fire popped loudly. He sighed and said, “This may sound . . . strange, but I have something I’d like to tell you. I’m dying, and don’t have much longer to go. Cancer. Maybe a few weeks, a month. Who can tell? I’ve had a good life, a life of adventure. But there’s one event that I haven’t written about. It was the catalyst for everything, my writing, my wandering . . . In any case, I’d like to tell you about it . . . if you have the time.”

  Of course I said yes, and took out my pen and paper.

  “I was only eight years old when it happened,” he started. “My parents and I had taken jobs as caretakers of Pickering Cemetery, living there. A large place, hilly, rolling, almost fifty acres in size.

  “Something unusual about this cemetery: it had a columbarium, an ornate structure the size of a small church. Housed inside were hundreds of urns containing ashes, and some bodies. Its front loomed thirty feet tall, with protective gargoyles perched at the tops on both sides. My mother told me that long, cavernous tunnels ran underneath, in mazes carved in the dirt. When I had to pass by the columbarium to get home—home was only a few hundred feet past—I would run and never linger lest the massive door fly open and let the spirits out . . .

  “Our own little home was made of brick and had only three rooms above ground—a kitchen, a bedroom, and a small living space. There was, however, a basement. I never did like the cold much, and was much more sensitive than my parents, so I spent nights below, listening to the furnace gurgle and belch, its metals expanding and contracting and heating me while I slept.

  “One night after work I went downstairs, dog tired, dirt rolling off my hair and onto my pillow, and fell into a deep sleep. But at some point I was awoken by the sound of scratching.

  “At first I thought the furnace was making noises, but all I heard was the tick-tick-tick of it cooling. No, this was behind me, behind the brick walls, somewhere deep in the earth. I put my ear up to the wall; I heard rustling followed by scattered sounds of dirt or rock falling, or being pushed, through a hole. What it was I could
n’t guess—what moves in solid dirt? A mole?

  “In any case, it was coming from the direction of the columbarium. The tunnels under the earth, I realized! My mother was telling the truth!

  “I leaned in closer and put a hand against the wall for support. I heard more scraping. An animal, perhaps? Maybe. I put an old funnel up to the wall, and in my ear I inserted the smaller end, magnifying the sound. Only then was I able to hear what sounded like muffled speaking . . . The muffled speaking of the voices in the walls.”

  Shorty sipped his drink, one eye shrouded in black, the other large and wild and fixed on me. “Would you like to know what the voices told me? What stories I heard?”

  What follows are all the tales he told me that night, which I’ve translated from my scribbled shorthand notes as best as I could.

  The Boy Who Swallowed Rocks

  I remember him. Shallow eyes and a pudgy face, with hands scabby from sifting through sediment all day and night. He had the hands not of a twelve-year-old boy but of a cement worker. Thick, sweat-creased lines, tinted with the red-orange of an afternoon sun that hits at a surface angle but over prolonged periods creates the weathered look of tired baseball mitts, started at his hands and fanned themselves out into webs flung across his arms, wrists, and face.

  The boy who swallowed rocks used to sit on the sidewalk and shovel pebbles in his mouth.

  Sometimes dirt, mixed with his saliva, dribbled down his chin like lemonade after a hot summer day’s play. He would grin and stare at the professional men and women passing by on the busy streets, meaning no harm, but—due to the rock-eating—offensive, nonetheless. He would sit and chomp his earthly delights in the corporate bushes and company streets, just outside the cathedrals of finance in the center of downtown.

  The boy who swallowed rocks drew in the local homeless, who thought him a riot—though after a few minutes of the poor watching their freak show they’d be shooed away by police. Always sly and distrusting of authority, he would halt his sediment-chewing when the cops came and resume only when they were out of view again. But he’d quickly remove the next rock form (maybe a basanite, which were his favorite, and which he could only get from his home, two miles away) from his pocket and chip away at it with his two front teeth. Those teeth, somehow both dulled and fanged now, molded and carved, chomped and gnashed and shredded away at the hundreds, thousands, of ancient pieces of stone and mortar and sand—which would crumble like feta or burst apart, bomblike.

  Thirty or forty of us had been protesting for weeks, standing impotently around Grand National Bank (one of the big five in the world at that time) and waving signs, or sometimes marching. Bank and government policies, combined with lower wages, inflation, and a number of systemic inequalities, had made evictions and repossessions of cars and homes ubiquitous. Grand National had made over 11 percent of the loans for home mortgages and were ruthlessly dispossessing residents in the Bay Area.

  That day, the kid arrived sometime before nine. The sun was far along already in its godly ascent, casting down heat-soaked rays of yellow and morning gold that conjured sweat on the brows of elite corporate wage earners.

  Today, though, he sat quietly, staring blankly into the gutter as the sun’s heat threw a sheen across the street, reflecting the silvery glow of passing hubcaps. I watched him from the opposite sidewalk. The day had come: he had no rocks! Had he grown out of his habit? Had he eaten all the city’s best stones?

  He sat awhile, turned around and peered up at the high-rise building under whose shadow he’d sat, and then he stood and stutter-stepped his way to the edge of the building, regarding the corner wall—studying it, stroking it—like a mother does her child’s face.

  He tilted his head sideways, opened his mouth, and set his creaky jaw against the building. Scraping and wiggling his teeth against the granite, he eventually made enough of a dent in the building to take a bite. The side of the building shrieked, awakened out of nonexistence, panicking, calling suddenly for help. As for the boy, he simply chewed, his tongue pushing the marble and granite to the back of his throat before it made its way to his iron stomach.

  He continued, eyes like a contented cat’s, the demeanor of a well-satisfied hog. He’d had enough of small pebbles and gravel; this was the real show. He continued to bite, chew, swallow, and repeat. The building’s outer shell broke, bite by bite, and slowly the rebar and encasing concrete became exposed. I looked for signs of the boy’s stomach growing full and expanding. There were none. Sweating freely from the hard work in the tremendous heat, the kid showed absolutely no signs of fatigue or stomach ache.

  Gradually a crowd gathered around the edge of the building. Businessmen on their way to work in one of the nearby skyscrapers and stay-at-home moms out shopping crowded around the boy. Aghast, amused, frightened, curious. They’d been used to seeing the boy who swallowed rocks, but a boy who swallowed buildings . . .

  He’d carved his way into the skyscraper—starting from where two walls met (about four feet off the ground)—two feet in on either side, two feet up and down, and nearly one foot deep. Presently his head was buried in deep darkness, looking as if he’d run very fast and hurled himself into the thing and gotten stuck there like some foolish cartoon character.

  By the time he’d gone two feet deep, the police officer had circled back. The well-meaning and all-around nice man approached the boy and gently tried to pull him away. He set a hand on his shoulder, just to the right of his face—and without hesitation, the kid simply ate across the building as if it were corn on the cob, and coolly bit into the officer’s wrist.

  Shock. Pain. Blood. As the officer’s vision went black, red streams shot into the air, striking the building and running down its exposed orifices. The crowd, torn between the emotion of seeing a good man go down in battle and the fascination of boy-versus-building, simultaneously wanted the kid to stop and continue.

  More cops came, quickly. Decisions had to be made. The boy now was three feet deep and four feet across on both sides of the corner of the building. Sensing his time was limited, the boy sped up, shredding and swallowing faster, thrashing his neck like a serpent with its head lopped off. His tongue, powerful as a jackhammer, flicked in and out, punching the concrete into cheap, soft fluff. His stomach, large as a pregnant woman’s, sweating and distended, roared for more.

  The crowd, meanwhile, had crowded around the boy in an airtight semicircle. Police at first tried to reason with the people but were met with swift objections. They didn’t want the officers hurt; they just wanted the boy to continue.

  At five feet deep, the manager of the building was called. At six, the governor. The boy would soon be eating one of the eight foundation pillars that were holding up the twenty-one thousand cubic feet of concrete.

  His belly resembled an elephant’s; still, he showed no signs of slowing down—only speeding up. The stomach gurgled, the earthen rocks inside conspiring with one another, celebrating their newfound freedom. Hurriedly, the rocks inside made space for new debris to come join them, compacting themselves more and more.

  Then came the tear gas and flash grenades. The crowd dispersed. The boy’s focus deepened. Faster and faster he ate, while all around him mothers and fathers were beaten and cast aside. It had been decreed that there would be no more property damage today, not in San Francisco. The decision from the governor went to the mayor and then to the police chief, then down to the officers who were stripping off their gas masks as the smoke cleared.

  The order was given to an expert shooter, an Irishman named Sergeant MacReady. Removing his gun from his holster and aiming it carefully, MacReady paused for just a moment to give the kid one more warning. The boy turned and looked askance at the sergeant, crazy-eyed, mouth full of blood and sand. He grinned, then raised his middle finger into the air.

  The officer fired.

  Two days later, I sat across the street and watched city workers patch up the side of the building. Business was back to normal. The day aft
er that, for some reason, I returned. Others sat with me. Together, we’ve watched and waited, hoping that someone else would come to finish the job of tearing down that useless bank and all the other buildings like it.

  I sigh. I’m an old man now. Twenty-four years have passed.

  And no one has ever come.

  The Big Feel

  Each day Everett Thompson went to work was the next greatest day of his life. Somehow today was always brighter, livelier, and just simply better than yesterday. And yesterday had been more glorious than the day before that, and so on. He loved his job—that was the reason—and you’d never find an airport security man more full of skipping and smiles and good cheer.

  Three days ago, Everett strolled into work with freshly polished shoes and his breast badge over his truck-chested build—as was his custom on Mondays. It had taken him hours to get his clothes ironed and primped and acceptable for work at the airport in Oklahoma. His hair was gelled and pulled to the right side, and this day he bounced in so hard, so fast, that the dandruff was already caked around his uniform collar like snow after a blizzard.

  For Everett, his job was all business. As he rounded the corner to the Continental Airlines terminal checkpoint, his delicious, egg-sucking smile faded, and his face grew hard and emotionless. Everybody knows that smiling, good-natured people appear less intimidating to the passengers coming through security, and Everett’s job was all about intimidation. You can’t be afraid of a happy person, now can you? Besides, the Transportation Security Corporation discouraged its employees from smiling.