“I retired from trucking after the baby came. We got a little house, and I got a little job. Then Keisha, my daughter, disappeared. My wife started drinking. She started taking painkillers. More and more. She started looking through me instead of at me. Then she started looking through everything.
“On October twenty-ninth, four years ago, I came home from work and she was on the bed with the covers up to her chin, just like she was sleeping, as tucked in and comfy as could be. Except there was vomit all over. And her eyes weren’t shut; they were open. She was the strongest person I ever knew. But not strong enough.”
His words hang in the air, touching everything with their weight.
Nobody says anything or moves for a long time.
Finally, without turning her tear-filled eyes from her plate, Margie says, “Mr. Bent, why did you tell us all that?”
Ron looks around the table. A small, wistful smile hangs on his lips.
“Because all of us, we’re still here.”
Everyone looks at one another. A few heads nod.
“We should get some rest,” says Christine. “We’ll have to wake before dark.”
Chapter Seventeen
SEE THE SLEEPING HOUSE:
The door is locked, the windows shut tight. The afternoon sun that made warm squares of light on the carpet has waned to nothing. It is a silent place. See the master bedroom. Here, two middle-aged women sleep far from one another, each wrapped in her own troubled dreams. See the other bedroom, the room of a teenage girl, with its perfume and posters and books. Here, a young man sleeps. His LA Dodgers cap is tilted down over his eyes. He dreams of a man in chains, whispering “help me,” and the dream makes him frown and mumble in his sleep. Now, look down the hall. See the living room. Here sleeps a man who some would call middle-aged, but who would call himself old. He snores softly. He is supposed to be awake, watching, but even the coffee, even the danger couldn’t hold him. He tried pacing, tried watching TV (but found there was no TV to watch), even tried biting his lip. But in the end, the weight of his eyelids was insurmountable. He swore he would only rest his eyes for a few minutes, only for the time it takes to count to one hundred. But by forty, the numbers bled into silence, and the silence became everything.
Now, hear the creak of the floor. Hear the shuffling tread of slow, tender steps crossing the carpet, crossing the stained linoleum of the kitchen. Hear the breathing. It is deep and slow, but there is the faintest hiss as breath passes teeth. The footsteps stop. Hear the brush of a hand on the counter. Hear a metallic rasping sound, followed by a soft, momentary ringing of steel. Watch, as the figure crosses the kitchen and advances, slow and certain. See her eyelids, closed tight as coffins, the eyes behind them thrashing back and forth as if trying to get out. Watch her cross into the living room. Watch as her footsteps stop at the couch where the old man sleeps. Watch as the girl, the sleepwalking girl, suddenly makes a hideous, rage-warped face and jerks back the long, long carving knife.
Listen very, very closely, and in the bedroom, in the boy’s dream, you might hear the man in chains screaming “wake up!’”
And Caleb does, and rolls over.
And in the living room, Ron Bent opens his eyes just in time to see the mercurial streak as the knife blade speeds toward his face.
He snatches her tiny wrist in his hand.
The killing point of the blade quivers an inch above his left eye.
“Christine!” screams Caleb, just entering the room. “Wake up!”
She only snarls, jerks free of Ron, and raises the knife again.
Ron can hardly believe her strength, can hardly digest the nightmare image hovering over him. Shocked, he doesn’t utter a sound.
When the knife comes down a second time, he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to stop it.
“Christine!” Caleb yells again, as behind the apparition of a girl, Margie and Mrs. Zikry rush into the room and stand in the doorway, still groggy with sleep. Christine snarls again, and the knife blade falls, bringing death on its tip.
Ron knows his reaction is too slow, and waits for the sound of the blade ripping his skin, popping the lining of his stomach, biting into his spine.
Instead, at the last instant Christine is jerked sideways, tackled by Caleb, and Ron deflects the knife.
Now Christine is on the ground, under Caleb, eyes still closed, mouth still folded into a quivering, evil grimace.
Ron glances at the knife, now jutting from the arm of the couch only a few inches from his head. Then he rises, takes a deep breath to clear his head, and stoops to help Caleb restrain Christine.
“WAKE UP!” Caleb shouts, his face close to hers, his hands clamped on her wrists. “WAKE UP!”
And she does.
“What’s going on?” Mrs. Zikry says.
Caleb doesn’t say anything. He’s staring at Christine and struggling to regain his breath.
Ron watches, utterly still.
Margie, stepping into the room, pipes up: “She tried to kill him, that’s what’s happening.”
“She’s a bad girl . . . ” says the witch next to Margie.
“No,” says Christine, “I didn’t mean to.”
“Don’t just stand there,” Margie says, nudging Ron. “We have to do something with her, or she’s going to kill us all!”
“No!” says Christine, still pinned to the ground, tears filling her eyes. “I’m so sorry, Billy. I swear I wasn’t trying to hurt him. I would never hurt him, I swear! You believe me, right?”
Caleb looks around, at a loss for words.
“Right? Ron? I’m sorry, I would never . . . ”
“You had a knife, Christine,” Caleb says finally. “We all saw what you tried to do.”
“I wasn’t me!” says Christine. “You have to believe me! It’s whatever he put in my head! It makes them come.”
“Makes who come, sweetie?” says Ron.
“Them!” she says. “The ghosts.”
Caleb rolls off Christine, and they sit up, both shaking.
“Why do the ghosts want you to kill me?” Ron presses.
“They want to kill all of us,” she says. “Because they think we’ll stop them from waking the devil from where he sleeps in the dark.
And the director wants the end of the world. But Anna says . . . ”
Christine leans against the couch now and her head drops into her shaking hands.
“What does Anna say?” Caleb asks.
“She says it’s already too late.”
And from just outside the window comes a low voice filled with poisonous mirth: “Five little blackbirds, baked in a pie. . . .”
Caleb spins around and slaps the curtains back from the window.
No one is there—only the black outlines of trees against the deep blue of twilight.
“It is too late,” says Christine. “We should have run away. We should have left town during the daylight, when we had the chance.
Now they’re all around us.”
A pounding begins at the front door. Then there’s a pounding at the wall of the room behind Christine, then on the wall next to Margie.
“Sweet Jesus Christ,” she says.
Now there is pounding on every wall. The entire trailer is shaking.
The witch leans against the door frame, covering her ears and moaning. Finally, she steps over to the nearest wall and starts pounding back.
“Stop!” she screams. “Stop, stop, stop!”
“Do we have any weapons?” Ron asks.
“Only the knives in the kitchen,” says Christine. “But they won’t do us any good.”
“Let’s get one for each of us,” Ron says. “I have a gun in the car,” he adds. “But I doubt if they’ll let me run out and get it.”
And suddenly the pounding stops.
The five look at each other.
“Let’s get those knives,” says Ron.
“We ain’t giving that girl a knife,” says Margie. “I’ll tell you that much. She
’s one of them, I don’t know how much clearer it can be.”
“I’m not one of them,” says Christine, and she turns to Caleb. “Tell her, Billy!”
He looks at her for a moment, eyes veiled with conflicting emotion.
“Maybe we shouldn’t give you one,” he says finally, “just in case whatever they did to you comes back.”
“It’s only when I sleep,” she says. Then, appealing to her mother: “Mom?”
The witch is scuttling back and forth, eyeing the walls warily. For a second, her mouth almost twitches into a smile.
“Christine is a bad girl,” she says. “My Anna was always the sweet one.”
Christine tries one more look at Caleb, but he won’t meet her gaze.
She storms down the hall toward her room. A door slams shut.
Ron hands out the knives, one for each of them. “God be with us all,” he says.
From Christine’s room, a great hissing sound erupts.
Margie gives Caleb a look.
“I’ll check on her,” he says.
As he leaves, he hears Margie whispering to Ron: “I don’t trust that witch none either. You shouldn’ta given her no weapon . . . ”
Caleb tucks the knife into his belt and steps into Christine’s room. She sits Indian-style on the floor in front of a bookshelf stereo.
“Anna,” she says, “talk to me, please. What’s going on? Anna?”
And the static forms a reply, deep as thunder.
The voice is loud enough to make the picture on the walls rattle.
“Who are you?” says Christine.
“What did you do with Anna?” she says.
At first, there’s only the hiss of nothing, then:
The sound shakes everything in the room, knocks two pictures off the wall, and blows out the speakers. Only a soft, electric buzz remains.
From the living room, they hear Margie:
“There’s somebody out there!”
Christine and Caleb look at one another, then she gets up and starts to go down the hall. He grabs her arm and turns her toward him.
“I know you didn’t mean to hurt Ron,” he says. “Alright?”
“Billy,” she says, “you’ve always been my favorite person of all, and if Ron helped you like you said, I would never hurt him. I would never hurt anyone. I thought you of all people would know that.”
He can see the hurt in her eyes as she pulls away and disappears down the hall. He sighs, then follows.
In the living room, Ron is peering out the curtains. Margie and the witch seem to have taken up a defensive position behind the kitchen counter.
“The sheriff ’s out there,” Ron says. “And . . . what the hell?”
Caleb and Christine look out. In the half-light they can see the sheriff with his brown hat and uniform, and next to him . . . Next to him stands an inhuman-looking, white-faced figure with large, strange eyes, wearing a black suit. In his hand: what appears to be a length of rope.
“Who’s the other guy?” asks Ron.
“It’s the director,” says Caleb, but he doesn’t know how he knows it.
The sheriff pulls out a megaphone.
“THERE’S TWO WAYS TO DO THIS,” he says. “THE EASY WAY, OR THE FUN WAY.”
And in the director’s hands, a torch flares to life.
“WE WANT TO SEE ALL OF YOU OUT ON THE LAWN, NOW. YOU DON’T WANT TO COME OUT, THAT’S FINE. WE’LL BURN YOU OUT.”
The director leans over and appears to say something to him.
The megaphone belches to life again. “UH . . . THIS IS JUST A TÊTE-À-TÊTE, THERE’S NO NEED TO BE AFRAID. THE FIGHT COMES LATER.”
And the man with the torch, the director, starts walking toward them.
“What should we do?” Caleb asks. “Jump through the back window and make a break for the woods?”
“Uh, Billy,” Christine says, staring out the back window, “look at this.”
Out the back window, Caleb sees only an empty forest, at first. Then in the deep shadow he glimpses one white-gowned figure. Then another. Then another.
“We’re surrounded.”
“IF NOBODY COMES OUT BY THE TIME HE REACHES THE HOUSE, HE’S GONNA LIGHT IT UP.”
“I’ll go out,” Christine says. “They already had me once. I’m not scared.”
But her lips tremble as if with cold as she says the words.
“No,” Caleb says. “I’ll go.”
“I’ll go too,” says Ron.
“Don’t leave me in here!” says Margie, gesturing to the two Zikry women with her eyes.
“Believe me,” says the witch, smiling, “you got bigger things to worry about than us.”
For some reason, that makes everybody laugh, and the humor gives them all the courage they need.
Caleb steps over to Christine.
“I just wanted to let you know that I’ve missed you,” he says softly, “and that you were always one of my favorite people too. It’s just—”
“It’s okay,” she says, putting one shushing finger gently on his lips.
“He’s getting close,” says Ron.
“Lock the door behind us,” Caleb says. He kisses Christine on the cheek, turns, and steps out the screeching screen door behind Ron.
They both stop short at the top of the cement steps. The director stands only ten feet away—but he never should have been able to cover that distance in so little time. And beside him are two sleepwalkers that weren’t there before. Each of them holds a pistol aimed at the sky, like a couple of duelers.
The director smiles and brings the torch up a little. In the flickering illumination, Caleb sees why his face looked so strange before.
He’s wearing clown makeup. His skin is smooth and white, with black stars around his eyes and livid red paint emblazoned on his lips.
“Hello,” says the director, “hello, hello. This is a festive day. Do you know why?”
Ron and Caleb shake their heads.
“Today,” says the director, “the world ends. Or begins to end, anyway. And both of you have a wonderful part to play. That’s exciting, isn’t it?”
“We aren’t helping you,” says Caleb. He tries to sound defiant, but his voice wavers.
The director leans forward and whispers in a mock-confiding tone, “You’re helping me right now.”
Caleb can’t tell whether he’s really laughing, or whether the makeup just makes him look that way.
“Would you like me to explain, or should it be a surprise?”
“Explain,” says Ron.
“Well,” the director says, “I only need a few more souls in my little soul soup, and then my work here is done. So, I’m taking two of you. But not this one.”
He points to Caleb.
“Why not me?” says Caleb.
“Because,” says the director, “you have to be the hero. That’s how you will help me. He,” he points to Ron, “will help me by dying.”
“What if I don’t cooperate?” says Ron.
“Ron, have you ever watched a bullfight? The funny thing about a bullfight is the bull only thinks it’s fighting. Really, it’s just taking part in an elaborate, entertaining ritual culminating in its death. This is kind of like a bullfight.”
Ron remains still, silent.
“Now, Ron. Thinking of going for your knife?” the director gestures to the gowned figures on either side of him. “Just because their eyes aren’t open, do you think they can’t see?”
The sleepwalkers jerk their arms toward the dark sky and twin shots crack. An instant later, two bats fall at the foot of the stoop, shot out of the sky.
The director smiles. “That was well done. Even I’m impressed. But precious time is ticking past us. I’ll need the others to come out now.”
“What if they don’t?” says Caleb.
The director sighs. “Please, little Billy. You already know the answer. T
hey will shoot each of you, then I will light the trailer on fire. Your friends will either run out and be caught, or they will sizzle inside. Now quit stalling. COME OUT!” he roars.
Caleb and Ron exchange helpless looks.
“Don’t come out!” Caleb yells over his shoulder.
“Oh, Billy,” sighs the director, “always the fighter. Tell me, have you read the paper these last few days? Do you know about the big earthquake in China? The tsunami in Indonesia? That probably breaks your big ol’ heart, doesn’t it? Over five hundred thousand people are already corpses. And the dead are still washing up on the beaches.
I bet you wish you could go help those people, don’t you? Just like you wanted to help those millions of poor colored folks dying by the truckload in Africa?”
“How did you know I was going to do that?”
“I know everything,” says the director. “From beginning to end, I know it all. Here’s a lesson: when you die, things are revealed. The dead tell me many things because I help them. And in turn, they help me. As you can see.” He gestures to the sleepwalkers.
“But my initial question regarding the mass carnage in South Asia is this: if you believe there is a heaven, then aren’t these people actually better off? Their suffering is relieved, their poverty and disease have been cleansed from them. It’s hypocritical to believe that good people who die go to heaven and yet still mourn death. Death is divine release. In the words of Shakespeare, ’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.’”
“Every human life is precious,” says Ron. “We can rejoice when a spirit rejoins God, but when people are taken before their time, it is a tragedy.”
“Ah, words from the preacher who lost his faith. Bravo. But you have it wrong. It is life which is the tragedy. And it is the transcendence of life which should be celebrated. Therefore, you should rejoice in the opportunity to help two of your friends reunite with God in heaven. Now, SEND THEM OUT so the celebration can begin!”
The director is fidgeting with the loop of rope in his hand. His eyes, behind all that black makeup, appear dazzling, almost hypnotic, almost familiar.
“Your words wear a mask that looks like the truth. As the devil’s words often do,” says Ron. “And I didn’t lost my faith. I just misplaced it.”
The Sleepwalkers Page 23
