Phantom

by Thomas Tessier

  It was a small, narrow room, and Ned had chosen it over the other available bedroom for just that reason. He knew it would be tricky enough for him to keep track of every square inch here; the bigger room would have defeated him. Besides, a large room feels loose and vacant, no matter what you do with it. This shoebox with the angled ceiling was perfect.

  A measure of confinement isn't necessarily a bad thing either, so one window is better than two. The view from the porthole: the backyard, an expanse of grass that Ned's father would have to rehabilitate, future flower beds and a vegetable garden, some lawn chairs and, farther out, a couple of stately sugar maples and a scattering of gray birches. The land rolled away, beyond the limits of the Covington property, to a broad meadow that had, over the years, spoiled with thick brush and undergrowth.

  The only thing that stood out in that unremarkable landscape was the stark remnant of an ancient scarecrow, a mute and forlorn reminder of other, presumably better times, when the meadow had been tilled. Ned had inspected the scarecrow the first day they moved into the house. Only a few strips of rotting cloth remained, but the "body" was still firmly fixed in the ground and the rope binding the "arms" had tightened so much Ned's fingers found no give in the knots.

  When he wasn't outdoors Ned spent most of his free time in his room. Aside from a few favorite programs, he did not watch much television because it made him feel tired. And the room, which was after all a very special place, always offered more to occupy Ned's mind than the flat TV screen.

  For one thing, magic. Not just the Moving Pebble, but the magic that lies beyond such phenomena. The magic of the unseen. Ned believed in it, without knowing what it was. You had to have a special feeling for it, be in a special place, otherwise there was only the ordinary. The twin alarms of fear and excitement were signals Ned had come to know well. When it was finally definite that the Covingtons were going to leave Washington, Ned had worried that the magic in his room would be lost forever. But the first day in Lynnhaven, when he chose this room, he knew that everything would be all right. Perhaps it was nothing more than the aspect of light, or the way the air felt, that almost tangible charge that, even at its weakest, bespoke secret powers. Magic is an imprecise term, but if Ned couldn't say what it was, he did know it was there.

  "Is there such a thing?" he asked Peeler one day.

  The old man considered this for a moment, composing his face in a serious expression. "I believe so," he said at last. "Could be."

  "What is it?'

  "Ain't nobody knows that, no matter what they might tell you to the otherwise." Then he held up one finger to emphasize his next point. "But I do know this. It ain't rabbits outta hats or card tricks or parlor stunts like that."

  "Well, if nobody knows what it is and you can't see it, how do you know for sure that there is such a thing?"

  "Sufferin' hellcats, you sure can fish an unrewardin' mudhole when you've a mind to, boy. You can't see the air neither, but you know it's there. Maybe magic's like that, although I can't say I've had the experience of any since I don't know how long."

  "Are there real magicians, people who can use it and do things with it?'

  "Never seen one," Peeler scoffed. "Nor never heard of one who wasn't just doin' tricks and stunts. Them fellers are a dime a dozen."

  Ned was pleased. It would be great to have a real knowledge of magic but something told him that was not possible, and now Peeler was saying much the same thing. Magic was a property, a state, something you might come across from time to time and take little notice of, like a cold spot or a patch of fog. But the fact that it was so elusive didn't mean a boy couldn't look for it all the time, and perhaps even find it.

  "Are there night things, phantoms, Peeler?" Ned already knew the answer to this, but he wanted to hear what the old man thought about it.

  "Tell me what you mean by that, and I'll tell you my answer."

  "I don't know what they are," Ned said. "I don't think you can see them but sometimes you know they're there, in your room at night in the dark. Strange creatures, like, and you can't move from your bed or they'll get you."

  "Oh, yeah, I think I can remember what they're like," Peeler said. "They're a part of magic, I'd say."

  "Can they hurt you?"

  "I don't guess so."

  "Do they go away when you get older?"

  "Everything goes away when you get older." Then, seeing the look on Ned's face, Peeler smiled and added, "But other things come along, Nedly, better too, if you keep your eyes open for 'em."

  "Does Cloudy know about magic and stuff?"

  "Cloudy's same as me. He don't know nothin' about nothin' from nothin', and that's a fact. You ask him, he'll tell you so hisself. "

  "But you know a lot."

  Peeler just laughed.

  Ned knew the phantoms very well; it seemed he'd been aware of them for most of his life. He'd never seen one, of course, and he had to admit he'd never even actually been touched by one, but he knew them all the same. Sometimes, when they weren't around for several nights in a row, perhaps a week or more, he thought he missed them. But then they would be back, surrounding his bed, shivering his nerves and stirring up fears so that he'd give anything to have them go away for good.

  He tried to picture what they looked like. Two-legged, deformed subhumans with huge blind eyes, from the bowels of the earth. Hideous plant-men that moved on stalks. Large mossy valves that could swallow a grown person whole with an oozy slurp. Or the Sandman, who was not a man at all, whose every gesture and movement was accompanied by a horrible, gritty, grinding noise that was like cutting glass, only a thousand times worse. Or a fat, lurching bag of soupy slime you could poke your hand into, but if you did ... They came singly or as an army, in more shapes and forms than anyone could count. Unseen and untouched. But they came, they were there. A while ago Ned tried to pin them down in his mind, to make individuals of them and give them names. Bronk, Lorp, Tsull, Naurgub—but it was like trying to fix a snowflake on a fish hook.

  Another time, years ago, just after his mother had come back from the hospital, Ned had asked his parents about night things and phantoms. It was at the dinner table, and his father herded peas around the plate before answering.

  "It's just your imagination, that's all. People imagine all kinds of things, but that doesn't make them real."

  "Like bad dreams, nightmares," Ned's mother had said. "You've had them. You know they're very frightening at the time, but you also know they're not really happening and you can't be hurt by them. They're only in your head."

  "That's all," Ned's father confirmed.

  Ned decided there were some things it wasn't very helpful to talk about with his parents. It was not like something wrong, a secret that had to be kept from them in nervous desperation, but rather he had just come to the conclusion that it was pointless to raise such matters with them. Magic and phantoms didn't exist for them. It seemed to Ned that his parents had won, in a way. They were free of the fear and menace that darkness brought. But if it was a victory for them, Ned sensed that they had simply landed on the shore of neutrality and the diminished nature of that achievement held no appeal for him.

  It still frightened him to recall what had happened to his mother that night five years ago. In spite of his worst fears, she had returned and life went on much as it had before. But even if the doctors had words for it, even if his parents thought they knew what it was, Ned was convinced that he alone understood what had truly happened that night. A phantom. The dark magic of the night world. It didn't help to know this, in the same way that it didn't seem to hurt his mother and father not to know. Either way, it was all beyond the realm of human influence or control. If it was going to happen again, Ned knew that all the medicine and machines in the world could not prevent it. You lived with it, or—or who knows what? But there was no avoiding it. Nobody could do that.

  One night, not long after the day he and Peeler had pulled crayfish from Old Woods Creek, Ned fell aslee
p early. In Washington he would have been awake in his room much later, reading by flashlight or creating mental pictures to go with the sounds of the city outside. But in Lynnhaven, more and more it seemed, the combination of sea air and the extra outdoor activity he got up to hit Ned as soon as darkness fell.

  "Work hard, play hard and sleep hard," Ned's father had declared shortly after their arrival in the fishing village. "That's what you want to do out here, and that's the way it should be."

  But some things didn't change. Night things.

  Ned's eyes opened, and the room seemed to be bathed in a pale, lunar light.

  Here there was nothing to use, no rumbling truck or beeping car horn for the suddenly awake mind to fix on, if only for a second or two. Here there was nothing but the silence of the Lynnhaven night. The house was just a little too far away to catch the sound of the breakers on the shore, or the random clatter of the bell buoy in the bay.

  That light.

  Ned had never seen it before. He had never seen anything before, however many times he had tripped into consciousness in the middle of the night. Now there was light, a thin, washed out illumination that gave the room the eerie look of an aquarium.

  To wake with your eyes open and your head out from under the covers—that was the chanciest circumstance of all. You might yank the bedclothes up over you in an instantaneous move, but the slightest twinge of hesitation would bring immediate paralysis, and then you could only hope to endure.

  Ned lay there like a rag doll, body limp and eyes wide open. What was this light? He could almost make out certain features, specific objects in the room. They were fuzzy suggestions at the edge of his sleepy vision. But his mind was awake enough to recognize the ghostly light as unique. He managed to shake his head briefly, but the glow remained, imprecise and persistent as the afterimage of a camera's flash.

  "What is it?'

  Ned realized it was his own voice, although it sounded small and distorted, as if it were echoing up from the bottom of a very deep well. A moment later he began to doubt that he had spoken at all.

  "What is it?"

  Now his voice startled him, it was so close and loud. He blinked his eyes rapidly, hoping the movement would plunge him back into familiar darkness. But no, the light was still there. It was real, neither a dream nor an optical side effect of waking fast. He had pictured a hundred, a thousand different creatures, but he had never conceived of such a chilly, diffuse phosphorescence.

  This does not happen.

  Rooms don't behave like this. Rooms don't behave at all. Rooms are just—rooms.

  This does not happen, but—

  It suddenly occurred to Ned that he wasn't frightened. He felt no fear, in spite of the fact that he was lying there exposed and defenseless. It was because now he could see something, whatever it might be. He was surrounded, enveloped in a room full of the stuff, but he felt no apprehension, only puzzlement.

  "What is it?"

  Nothing.

  "Who is it?'

  Nothing.

  "What do you want?"

  Nothing, nothing, nothing. Ned wondered if, when you came right down to it, his parents might not be right after all. This was nothing.

  Nothing.

  Was he just a silly little boy with a vivid imagination, peopling his mind with ridiculous creations that had no basis in reality? Were the phantoms just that—phantoms of his mind? Ned screwed his eyes shut and mentally counted off the seconds of a long minute. Then he let his eyes open again.

  Still the light.

  Now the fear. He could be wrong, wildly wrong. He could be underestimating what was going on, assuming it was nothing when in fact it was more, so much more that he couldn't even begin to grasp it. Ned's body was shaking now.

  "Hello?"

  It was the voice of surrender, and he hated it as soon as he heard it come from within him.

  Then the light was suddenly gone. Not a slow fade or a smooth disappearance. The light was there, and then it was gone. This was even more upsetting to Ned, because it seemed a kind of awful proof of what he had feared. It was not nothing that he had seen. He had been let off this time, but that hardly made any difference. He felt invaded. There had been a light, unlike any other light on earth. It had held him in its grip, but still it hadn't taken him.

  Yet.

  * * *

  5. Old Woods Tales

  "Cloudy."

  "Yowsir?"

  "Is Progger a name?"

  "It surely is."

  "It is? What's it mean?"

  Cloudy was perched on his crate by the pile of old tires. He was trying to fix an electric clock he had found. It was plugged into an extension cord that ran to the baithouse nearby. The second hand swung around the dial as it should, but the minute and hour hands wouldn't budge from ten past two. Cloudy set the stubborn device down on his lap and looked at Ned.

  "How come you wanna know that?'

  "I never heard it before."

  "You never heard it before, then how you know it to ask me what it means?"

  "Well, I did hear Peeler say it once."

  "Peeler said it, huh." Cloudy resumed his efforts with the junked clock. The faulty hands moved smoothly enough when you pushed them with your fingers, but if you let the clock run on its own they stayed where they were. "Peeler should say it, he bein' a progger hisself."

  "He 1s?'

  "'Course he is."

  "But what is a progger?"

  "What's a progger? Mr. Tadpole, you don't know nothin' at all, do you?"

  "Nope."

  Cloudy put down the clock again and assumed the look of someone who has been called on to explain two plus two. Actually, he was glad to have a diversion, since he was getting nowhere with the infernal timepiece.

  "A progger, he’s a person spends his time proggin' around, you see. Now, proggin' is just pokin' around the swamps and marsh creeks and potholes to catch somethin' you can use. Could be crawdads—"

  "I did that with Peeler."

  "See? You been proggin' and you didn't even know it."

  "What else?"

  "Any thin' you can get, that's what else. Crawdads, catfish, muskrat, mink, any old critter you can trap or hook or bonk on the head. Dippin' for peeler crabs or jiggin' for eels, and such like that. Clappin' and hollerin' for a snappin' turkle, a progger do that too sometimes."

  "Turkle?”

  Cloudy nodded enthusiastically. "Lotta them around, but you must do a regular song and dance to make 'em pop up so's you can grab 'em, and then you better make sure he can't get you. Big snappin' turkle, he can chomp your little finger clean off."

  "You mean a snapping turtle."

  "That's right, snappin' turkle."

  Cloudy prodded the clock tentatively with one finger as if he half expected the machine to lunge suddenly and bite him.

  "Are you a progger too, Cloudy?"

  "I'm what you call your weekend progger, like Grandma Moses. I'm a part-time progger, you see, I do it when I ain't got nothin' else to do. Now you take Peeler, he got proggin' in his blood, he's the real progger."

  "Peeler sure drinks a lot of beer." Ned didn't know why he had just changed the subject; maybe Peeler's style was rubbing off on him.

  "He likes the beer," Cloudy agreed.

  "But you don't drink it, do you, Cloudy?"

  The black man looked somewhat indignant. "Oh, Lord, no, no, I don't drink at all, not no more I don't." Now he held up the clock and studied it as if it were some remarkable object from a strange civilization in the far reaches of outer space.

  "How come?"

  "How come what?"

  "You don't like beer, is that it?"

  Cloudy turned his attention to the boy again. "Don't you never start, Mr. Tadpole. What happened to me, I used to drink all the time. Like beer? I loved it. Every chance I got, I took a drink, 'cause when you're younger you think you can do whatever you want and it won't bother you none. But the thing of it is, I had a friend, name of Mr.
Eustace Boggs." Ned laughed at that. "You think that's funny?" Cloudy continued. "Well, everybody called him Useless. That's the truth. Useless Boggs. Anyway, he was in an accident one day, I don't remember exactly what it was, but old Useless, he lost his legs or he couldn't walk no more, somethin' like that, and then he really was useless. Stuck in the house, in bed most of the time, and oh, he had a plague of a wife. Marylou Boggs. Talk? That woman'd make the wallpaper curl up and block its ears, the way she'd go on. It was Useless this and Useless that, and poor old Useless couldn't do nothin' 'cept sit there and listen. Well, I don't know why, but I kinda liked that poor sucker. I guess I'd knowed him a long time. So I used to take the newspaper up to him at his house every day and tell him what's goin' on, jokes and gossip and stuff like that. Nobody else bothered with him, so I was his only contact with the outside world, you see. Now, we had a little system goin' between us and it was a nice one. I'd wrap up a bottle of rye whiskey for him, smuggle it in past Marylou, and Useless'd pay me for it. Sometimes he give me a ten, sometimes a twenty, and I got to keep the change, so we both done well out of the deal. He had a lotta money, see, on account of the accident. He got a big payoff for losin' his legs, so money was no problem.

  "At first I didn't like the idea, you know. I said to him, 'Useless, did your doctor tell you not to take no drink?' He says, 'No, the doctor never say nothin' like that to me. My wife did, but she's no doctor.' So you see, Marylou was the one who didn't want him to have a drink, but what else has the poor man got? He can't go nowhere, nor do nothin' without his legs, so I had to help him out. I don't know what he did with it all, maybe he watered the plants with it too, but he had to have a new bottle every single day. Imagine that. Boy, we sure had some kinda system goin' there for a while. Then it stopped."

  "How come?"

  "He died, for cryin' out loud. Fell right outta his bed onto the floor. Useless Boggs, dead with a pint of rye whiskey in his hand. Didn't spill a drop, neither, I heard. I don't know, the doctor must've talked to somebody .... I never did notice it myself but they say his liver was the size of a basketball. And that's when I stopped drinkin' myself, right then and there. "