Phantom

by Thomas Tessier

  He wanted to mention it to someone, anyone—his mother or father, or Peeler and Cloudy—but how could he explain it without sounding like a silly kid? They'd probably think he was losing his marbles. That was a worry, too. Maybe there was something wrong with his head. Something real, something bad. People did go crazy; that's what they have asylums for, right? It could happen to him—as far as he knew, kids weren't exempt. This idea renewed itself whenever Ned realized he was talking out loud to the sound, out of sheer frustration and mounting anxiety. "Who is it? Who are you? What are you? Get away .... Leave me alone .... " But the only sound that came back to him was the same whispered buzzing. Perhaps he had jarred his head more than he thought in the fall at the spa. And yet he hadn't been hurt when he hit the ground, merely had the breath whumped out of him for a minute.

  He had heard the sound, or something like it, once or twice before in recent weeks, and thought nothing of it. But then it was almost as if the noise had decided to get serious about Ned, and it started to come regularly, persistently. He tried to ignore it but that simply proved to be impossible. Talking back to it, whatever else that might signify, did have a certain usefulness, as the sound of his own voice provided some distraction. But it was not enough, and Ned knew that if the occurrences became much more frequent and uncomfortable he would have no choice but to tell his parents about it ... and go along with whatever they decided to do. And that might be unpleasant—doctors, tests.

  The strange light that woke Ned once had not appeared again, but the nights were not empty. There were ... other sounds that reached his ears in the dark. Getting rid of the scarecrow had been a wise move, Ned thought, and for a few nights after he had done so he felt relieved and slept easily. But then the sounds began. The noise that would bother him for a minute or two during the day was one thing, but what he heard at night was something else altogether.

  They never seemed to come from within his room, but rather from behind the walls and ceiling, beneath the floorboards or just outside the window screen. Ned's mind would filter out the familiar—his parents moving around elsewhere in the house, the chirp of crickets, the wings of birds and bats, a breeze riffling the trees—and create a zone of silence that would, soon enough, pick up the unfamiliar.

  Ned detected several sounds in the night. Once, after his mother and father had gone to bed and he knew it couldn't be either of them, he heard someone or something moving around in the backyard. Ned crept from his bed to the window, but he saw nothing. Still the sound continued: feet walking heavily across the grass, stepping on the flagstone path, and then the protesting squeak of plastic and tubular metal as if somebody were sitting down on one of the lawn chairs. But even as he heard these sounds Ned could see that there was no one walking around out there and that all the lawn chairs were empty. He was sure the sounds were too distinct to be just the product of his imagination, but on the other hand it obviously made no sense for a prowler to stroll about or sit down on a lawn chair in the middle of the night, as casually as someone taking the afternoon sun. Perhaps he was hearing simple, routine sounds, and his mind was magnifying them into something more. But …

  There were other sounds of movement outside. Some were so sharp they seemed to come from only inches below Ned's window, and some were as far away as the meadow, feet tramping through the brush, back and forth, stopping and going, like a soldier on night watch. But even on the brightest of nights Ned could see nothing that might have made the sounds he heard. It was almost enough to make him wish the scarecrow was still there, because the sound of unseen activity was proving even harder to deal with. But the scarecrow was gone, and the funny thing was that Ned couldn't remember ever hearing an unusual sound when it had been there, moving or not.

  The most disturbing sounds were those that were closest to Ned's room. One night he had made a tent of the bed sheet and was curled up inside it reading a Hardy Boys adventure, The Ghost at Skeleton Rock, when he abruptly turned off the flashlight. Something had pinged on the window screen. It might just be an errant moth, but then again it could be something else. Another sound soon followed. It was as if someone were pressing hands along the clapboarding on the side of the house near his window. Pressing, pushing, sliding, rubbing .... And then the sound was all over, coming from beneath the floorboards, behind the walls and on the beams above the ceiling, as if these hands held Ned's whole room and were caressing it. Ned pictured his room as a little matchbox in the grip of some enormous, invisible giant who would any minute now detach it from the house and hold it hundreds of feet up in the air, inspect it, shake it perhaps, and watch Ned rattle around inside. Maybe it would crush the room like a useless toy and throw it away. Maybe ...

  The next night, the sound was back in a slightly different form. Again it started around the window, and there was the softest scratching on the screen. Then a long, deeper noise, like one heavy surface being dragged across another. On and on it went, up one side of the window frame, across the top, down the other side, and then into the house itself, trailing around Ned's room, zigzagging up the back of the plaster and finally fading away somewhere overhead. It went on like that for several nights, each time assuming a new variation—and always it seemed to grow tighter, closer.

  Early one morning in August Ned woke to find that he couldn't move. His body seemed to be tied to the bed with a thousand wires holding him in place, and his face felt like it was covered with stitching. It was difficult even to breathe through his nose, and he couldn't open his mouth. As he became more awake and conscious of his situation, the sense of alarm grew in him. His breathing came shorter and faster, and his heart raced like a straining motor. Was that sweat trickling down his neck—or blood oozing from his ears? Then something was on his face, wispy fine as hair-ends tip-touching his skin, walking across his cheek, his laced up mouth, crawling over his nose so lightly but so deliberately—a spider!—and now it was settling atop his nose, preparing to spin a death cap for Ned's last access to air. His eyes had already been sewn shut. Ned was sure it was a spider and he tried desperately to squirm free, to wriggle loose and shake the monstrous thing from his face. But he was in an iron cocoon, one that shrank more tightly around him the more he struggled to move. It became harder to inhale as his chest was slowly being crushed beneath bands of steel. Help me, I can't breathe, his mind screamed. At that moment Ned heard a new sound, so near it might have come from the spider—or whatever it was—sitting on his face. It was a tiny, distorted, whir rushing of noise that somehow managed to sound plaintive and doleful, even as it labored on relentlessly. It could have been a microscopic emanation of the spider echoing its way along the network to the very center of Ned's brain. It was the sound of a dying thing, perhaps Ned's own blood, or the ghost of his breath. It was the music of sadness, broken, mangled and forced to a level of cacophony that marked nightmare's end.

  Ned felt himself exploding into a shower of brilliant lights and clear air, so pure it hurt at first. Did he still exist? There was no focus, just a dizzy, spinning sensation. His brain was a hailstorm of meaningless pieces tumbling down an endless shaft of light, gradually clumping one to another. Ned dimly wondered if it could ever be put back together again, with all the pieces in the right place. Scarecrow.

  Now he was crying with relief, gulping in air as sweet and clean as mountain spring water. His parents were lifting him up off the floor and hugging him. They sat on the bed and sheltered Ned between their bodies. The feeling of love and comfort was so overwhelming that Ned started to cry more, wanting this moment to last forever.

  "My God, he's drenched, his pajamas are soaking wet."

  "Bad dream, Ned?"

  "Is he running a temperature?"

  "No, he's all right."

  "Do you think he hurt himself?"

  "Kids fall out of bed all the time. He's just a little shook up, right, Ned?"

  Ned nodded his head vaguely, but his mind was elsewhere. Thoughts were beginning to form again. He knew he had been
through something far more serious than an ordinary nightmare.

  They had come.

  They had compromised the safety of his room.

  And they almost got me.

  "What'll it be like the next time they come?"

  "What did you say, Ned?"

  "He's still dreaming, poor fella.”

  "There's a bump on his head."

  "It's just a bump, honey. It'll go away in a while."

  Michael and Linda stayed, rocking Ned gently between them until his eyes finally closed and he found sleep again.

  A couple of days later, when Ned visited the baithouse, he just had to tell Peeler about the sounds he had been hearing. But only the external sounds, not the buzzing around his ears, nor what happened in his bedroom. The old man listened patiently, sharpening jig hooks while Ned skated around the subject, trying to appear curious but not overly concerned.

  "Ain't nothin' to it," Peeler said. "The metal frames in the lawn chairs expand as they bake in the sun all day, and then they contract when they cool down at night. Same thing with the wire mesh in your window screen. That's what you hear, take it from Mr. Wizard."

  It was just what Ned had been afraid he might be told, the kind of explanation—so simple, so down-to-earth—he might have got from his father. That old moon won't hurt you, son. The only difference was that Ned's father would say it as if he meant it, while Peeler didn't convey such certainty. He had given Ned a perfunctory answer and the boy sensed it.

  "What about the other sounds, behind the walls and ceiling?"

  "Every house has its own bag of noises it makes," Peeler remarked. "A place as old as yours is bound to have more'n most. Goes on day and night, a house breathin' by itself, but you only notice it at night 'cause it's quieter then and you ain't got no other distractions."

  Again the easy answer. Did Peeler really think that Ned wasn't aware of such things, that he had to be told about them? There had to be other, better answers, even if Peeler didn't want to go into them today. Ned felt disappointed and weak, torn between his own reluctance to talk much about what was bothering him and his yearning for a measure of real understanding.

  "Why? What d'you think them noises is?"

  "I don't know." Ned hadn't anticipated the question, but now that Peeler had surprised him by opening another door he couldn't let it pass. "Maybe they're phantoms, ghosts, things like that. Do you think maybe they are?"

  "Ah-ha."

  Ned couldn't tell if that was a response to what he had just said or merely a remark addressed to the rusty jig hook Peeler was studying at that moment.

  "When I asked you once before you said you did believe in things like that," Ned continued.

  "I did, did I?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well, maybe I do and maybe I don't."

  "Do you think that's what I've been hearing?"

  "Could be."

  "Peeler, why won't you say?" Ned's feeling of exasperation was too much for him now. "Tell me," he demanded.

  Peeler put down the hook and the carbide stone.

  "I truly would, if I knew," he said. "But the fact is, I don't know, one way nor the other. Look here, Nedly, you ask me on a beautiful sunny morning like this and I'll say, Hell no, there ain't no such things like what you're talkin' about. But you ask me late on a cloudy afternoon when I've progged too far into Old Woods and I won't be so sure, And if you ask me again on a bad bad night, when it's hot but I got me a bone-shakin' chill, when I can't tell if that's a nosy skunk lookin' for my garbage outside—or something else—well, then maybe I'll say, Yeah, I think you got somethin' there. But the heck of it is. it don't make so-what neither way. Now you call 'em phantoms or what-all, but to my mind that just makes it all the more confusin' for you. I told you before a name won't get a pea out of a pod."

  "What should I do then?"

  "Ain't a Christ-thing you can do. Don't matter if it's magic you hear or just mice in the attic, you leave it be."

  Ned didn't believe that. Later, when he thought about it, he would be startled by the fact that he had actively rejected something Peeler told him, but he couldn't stop for that now.

  "Peeler, it scares me."

  "Why?"

  "Because I don't know what it is."

  "That's what most folks'd say but they'd be wrong, and you're wrong."

  "What do you mean?"

  "It ain't the unknown that scares a person, even though they may think it is. You catch sight of a movement outta the corner of your eye or hear an odd sound in the night, and you feel somethin' stirrin' inside of you, somethin' buried so deep in the back of your head you can't put a finger on it nor give it no name, but it's there, it's known—and that's what'll make you brown your britches,"

  Peeler held up a long stretch of blue monofilament with leaders and snelled hooks branching off on either side.

  "This here is a kind of double crappie rig I fixed up," he said, smoothly changing subjects. "But I put the split shot above it, not below, and it works just fine in shallow water for bluegills. I've pulled 'em outta Baxley Mill Pond two, three and even four at a time with this contraption. Kinda looks like a TV antenna for midgets, don't it."

  "It's not just my imagination," Ned asserted, pursuing the original point. "It's something more than that, I'm—" He ran out of words momentarily.

  "If it is, Ned, you'll know before I do. But you can't get no answers from the likes of me, nobody else, at least not none that'll be worth a damn to you." Peeler tested the knots on the rig, to keep himself busy. "You're the one who hears them sounds and sooner or later you'll be the one who decides what they are."

  Ned didn't understand. How could he decide anything about the sounds? He was just the person who happened to hear them. Or did he? Perhaps he really was so wrong about his senses, so inclined to pick up strange sights and sounds, that the whole thing was, after all, nothing more than the product of his own imagination. That's what his father had been telling him, and now he was hearing the same thing, or something very like it, from Peeler. Maybe the old man was right and the best idea was not to build up the sounds into something other than what they were—mere sounds. They were real, but how real? Peeler seemed to be saying that it wasn't all that important.

  But Ned remembered something else Peeler and Cloudy had told him. You don't go wading barefoot in what looks like snapping turtle water. You might not see the beast and he might not even be down there but you'd better assume he is, otherwise you could be one toe lighter before you found out for sure. Okay, maybe the lawn chairs and the house do make those noises. Maybe the buzzing is a symptom of a minor ear ailment. But assume they're not. Assume they're something else entirely.

  Assume the worst.

  * * *

  16. The Noekk

  "It ain't nothin' but a big overgrowed mud hole," Peeler said, wiping sweat from his face. "But there's a stream in and a stream out, so it stays alive."

  "Just about," Cloudy said.

  Ned took in the scene. The pond covered only a few acres.

  It looked shallow, muddy and stagnant. The surface of the water was studded with the remains of dead trees; brittle, bone-gray trunks and jagged, rotting stumps. It was not a promising sight, it was simply desolate. They had hiked a long way to reach this place. They were deeper into Old Woods than Ned had ever been before.

  "There's catfish in here," Peeler went on as he prepared his rod and line. "A few big ones, too. Now's a good time to fish for 'em. August is when the bass're settin' back out in deep water, where it's cooler, but the old catfish still moseys around in close to shore."

  "A catfish is an awful low critter," Cloudy declared. "All he does is eat the crud on the bottom."

  "Yeah, but he tastes might good hisself," Peeler argued amiably. "And they put up one helluva fight."

  "That's true," Cloudy admitted. "We used to eat 'em just about every day when I was a youngster." He turned to Ned. "Say, that's a smart-lookin' outfit you got there, Mr. Tadpole."

>   The boy smiled proudly and held up his lightweight Zebco spin caster rod and reel. "My father gave it to me."

  "Well that was pretty darn nice of him, I'd say."

  "You make sure you hold onto it real tight," Peeler warned. "You don't want no grandaddy catfish pullin' it right outta your hands and swimmin' away with it."

  "They're not that big," Ned said, although he wondered about it. "Aren't you going to fish, Cloudy?"

  "Oh, no, not me. No, I'm gonna wait till you and Peeler start haulin' in the monsters and then I'll be here, ready to bash their heads in. I got to find me a good stick." Cloudy wandered off, searching through the brush. A few minutes later he returned, carrying a hefty piece of broken branch. "This'll do the job," he told himself, taking some practice swings.

  "You really hit them with that?" Ned asked.

  "Sure. You got to. Catfish'll live forever, unless you kill 'em. Peeler threw one in the garden a few years back and it stayed alive out there most of the summer, huffin' and puffin' like an engine. Ain't that right?"

  Peeler nodded. "Kept the raccoons away."

  Ned smiled. It was one of those stories he couldn't believe but didn't want to disbelieve either.

  Peeler had cast his line out and was sitting on a rock with a can of beer in his free hand. He checked to see how the boy was doing. "Hey, put another worm or two on that line," he said. "A catfish likes a big mouthful, he ain't gonna waste his time on one dinky worm. And put some more lead on too; it'll give you better castin' range and make sure your bait stays on the bottom where the cats are."