For that, I hated him.
For that, I feared sleep.
Even still, I break into a sweat and start to fidget when I know that bedtime is approaching. Many nights, I’ll pry my eyes open and engorge myself with coffee grounds, not quite ready to enter that miserable world again, to be at the Beak Man’s side, watching him do terrible things that proper human beings (though he was no such thing) would never do to others. My morals would cry out against him, always without effect.
The Beak Man grew old, like myself. My twenties flew by and I blame much of that on a lack of proper sleep. I had grown tired of him, and of sleep in general. If somebody would have proposed to me a pill that would allow me to never sleep again, I would have taken it no matter what the price. My thirties came and went. I never had a family, not even a wife. The Beak Man was the only relationship I could handle. In his very existence, all other connections were destroyed. He had ruined my life, and I often wonder if that was his basic intention, from that first time I saw him bouncing on my mother’s bed. I often wondered if other people had their own Beak Men, and if I was just too weak to handle him.
My mother has been dead for several years. She never believed in my Beak Boy or Beak Man. I miss her often. She was the only family I ever had, besides the Beak Man. For that simple notion, I am in a sort of hell that I dread on a daily basis. I hate to be awake, knowing that I will eventually have to sleep, that every joy ends with misery. And I hate sleeping for the Beak Man.
I write this, now in my mid-forties.
I am tired, so very tired.
I dreamed of the Beak Man last night, as I do every night, and he was particularly monstrous. He clubbed me over the head with a plank of rotting wood. When I had awoken (as much as one can awaken in a dream), I found myself bound to a chair, my mouth gagged. He danced around me with his standard set of squawks and dead black stares. He loomed in close to my face, nibbling at my nose with his rigid beak. I cried out in pain, but of course pain is not real while in dreams. I begged him to stop, but he does not understand my language, or so I am to believe.
He tortured me for what seemed like an eternity, burning my chest with a red-hot Bowie knife. Clutching my tongue with a vice grip, hammering nails into it slowly and sloppily, or simply screaming in my ear, his alien sound making my brain itch. This is the hell that I live through in my dreams, and for that I often ponder suicide. Tearing my clothes away and pecking at my body, poking me in the eyes with needles, inserting them deep into the fleshy membrane of my eyeball. If you have ever been told that you cannot be hurt in dreams, then you are not thinking of the insurmountable mental anguish that can be wrought upon somebody. Chinese water torture, but without a physiological connection to the body. The human brain can scream just as easily as the human throat.
After my grueling moments tied in a chair in the house I grew up in, I was dragged on to the front lawn, across the street, and thrown into the trunk of my neighbor’s vehicle. The Beak Man revved the engine, celebrating his thievery of the car with a cacophonous squawk, and we took off. I am not sure where he took me, but we stopped often. In my dream, in the dark, in a trunk — I could only hear his clicking and clacking noises that he made with his beak. That, and those vile squawking noises. The black maws of his eyes studying the road as we joy-rode through my childhood neighborhood.
I awoke with a sweat ring about the neck of my shirt and decided that I wanted to die.
I write this and I look out my window. Snow is falling in the yard and it is quite beautiful. If I end my own life, will that same termination affect the Beak Man? Will he die as well? Are our destinies intermingled with each other? Something in me hopes that he too will perish, that he too will dangle from a noose in his alternative reality, that he will not see it coming, the rotten piece of hot garbage.
○
I place my pen on the table and I step on to the chair, tugging at the thick brown rope that dangles from the beams above. This is the house that my mother brought me to as a child. The place I grew up and the place I dreamed of. This is the place that I may always exist, and I am at peace with that.
As my body hangs limp above the floor, I stare through the window. The Beak Man stands there, squawking at me and flapping his arms as he did on my mother’s bed as a child. He is quite agitated with me, and for that I am grateful. He bashes his gray hands against the window panes and I am smiling inside.
The world is fuzzy again, as it was when I first drifted into consciousness.
The house is new again, cartoon-ish and colorful. There is beautiful music playing, jubilant tunes that remind me that the world isn’t such a bad place after all — not with music like this. I scamper through the house, again a boy in my footed pajamas, sliding on the glossy wood floors. My mother hums in the kitchen as she prepares my lunch.
I run in. I hug her around the waist, for I am still so very short.
I smile and all is right. We’ve left the Beak Boy and the Beak Man behind, back in that world where I dangle like bait on a hook, my feet kicking as the last of electricity escapes my corporeal body.
The Beak Boy squawks from behind me. He is at our kitchen table, slamming a knife and fork on the surface, craning his head from side to side as he studies my mother. He is hungry, and she is not moving fast enough.
I sit with my horrific brother. We await our meal.
Eric Dimbleby lives (with his wife and three children) and works in Maine. To learn more about his works, visit his website at www.ericdimbleby.com. His newest collection of humorous short stories, called The Fetus Cloud, is now available exclusively on Kindle.
Reminiscence
by A.D. Spencer
In truth, the dream woke her, not the mouse.
Sayra couldn’t remember what the nightmare had entailed. A single image remained in her mind, an aerial view of a bedroom floor. Sayra’s dream self had flown above, looking down, like a giant, at her own feet on orange and pale brown linoleum strewn with upturned shards of glass, clear in color and nearly invisible in the dull light. The glass had not come from a broken window, the room was not the kitchen; the mess itself seemed out of place on this floor. Awake, she recognized the pieces as the remains of bottles, some long necked, most squat and square. Liquor bottles. Empty, for the most part. Each one of them shattered around her toes.
She could feel nothing when she stepped on their biting edges. This made sense. It was a dream. But, paralyzed as she was, she woke, the sweat on her brow cooler than it should have been, her body trembling. She blamed it on the sound, though, the first she heard past her heaving breath.
The sound was so muted, so lost in the steady spin of the rusted electric fan’s aluminum petal blades, that Sayra had almost convinced herself that it was wasn’t real. Listening with such intensity, eyes wide open to the night, she looked like she’d seen a figure in the shadows above the bed. But she had no fear of the darkness, only what was hiding in it.
A slow thud followed by the rattling of papers. Hurried, frantic scratches against wood grain. Not her imagination. The noise was real. It was coming from beyond the stained shag rug, past her still-full duffel bag. They were in the stack of dresser drawers, in one of them, scurrying about. Building.
It’s making a nest, her mind confirmed. For every one you saw in daylight, there were dozens more; she hadn’t seen one yet, only heard it. And it had come late in the evening. So there was less, in theory. She could handle less, could set traps, could surround her bed with poison and baited glue pads. A nod against the pillows was stilled. She didn’t want the mattress to call out to it; movement would scare away the noise and then it would be more careful, a cautious enemy. It would hide more expertly. She’d lose track of it.
A nagging voice in her head told her that its current location was unimportant. What was important was that she’d spilled milk and cornbread down her nightshirt only a few hours before. It would smell the food. It would climb up to the bed in the ea
rly morning, after exhaustion had left her too tired to stay on guard.
Without hesitation, she sat up, slipping her fingers under the hem of her long t-shirt and pulling it off. The cloth was damp with sweat. She paused; she listened. Chiding herself for the move, she stood from the bed and flipped the light switch. The noise would stop, she told herself, if the light stayed on.
She crouched down, an arm instinctively holding her breasts against her ribs as she unzipped the bag at her feet, pulling free a tank top. The shirt was cool against flushed skin. It would be wet within the hour, just like the last one. The open window, the circa 1955 fan, it was useless when the air was greenhouse-heavy and Alabama-in-August hot. Mrs. Laude didn’t do air conditioning — in fact, the old woman was adamant that nature didn’t intend for folks to catch a chill during the summer — and this shack was too far past its time to offer the luxury of vents. This didn’t bode well for Sayra, a firm believer in keeping the thermostat below seventy at her parents’ house.
There—
Eeel.
A noise. Sayra felt her heart leap against her sternum. A moment later, she knew the sound to be a squeak cut short. Instinct told her to crawl onto her bed; instead, fingers wrapped around the baseball bat leaning, hidden, behind her door. Mrs. Laude had insisted on the protection: “Young thing like you, old thing like me, we need our protection — the bad men usually bring their own.” Sayra turned the bat around, its narrow neck out, ready to jab with its knob.
Violence built. It was a primal need, a want for the kill. Guilt followed.
“Stupid mouse,” she muttered, part of her hoping to scare the rodent away.
She couldn’t admit to it, wouldn’t, but they were what made living outside of her parents’ house so hard. Her dorm room had been fine — clean, modern, if tiny. No rodents. A slight ladybug problem. The apartment had been dreadful though. She’d moved back in with her family within a month. Her mom and dad understood her fear better than most. They knew she had a damned good reason for it, and they’d gone to extreme links to ensure that mice didn’t infest their home.
Still.
Her mother, for all her carefulness, probably hadn’t considered that her daughter would have to face rodents again if she became Mrs. Laude’s live-in. An allowance, day time off to work a second job, a place to stay: being Mrs. Laude’s night and weekend care-giver seemed simple enough. And it was. Floy Laude was eighty-two, but her feet were as nimble as a sixty-year-old’s. She took morning and evening walks, kept her wild garden in bloom, even if her back didn’t let her stay at a constant stoop these days, and had a firm grasp on reality. Watching over her at night was easy money.
But, the old woman was also a friend of nature; too good a friend, if Sayra had any say. Sayra didn’t think it wise to take in strays or provide shelter for bats, and she certainly didn’t think there was a single thing wrong with killing scurrying, chewing, scratching…
Thud.
Mice. Sayra screwed her face up, ready. And she pulled the drawer out. Stuffing spilled over the lip, white and yellow, bits of blue string wadded in the seedy clumps of fluff. Droppings, black beads, all were strewn about, and a feather, gray and brown, sat in the mist of it. Sayra shot the bat down at the stuffing, her body tense as she waited for movement. Nothing.
“Where are you?” she voiced.
“Sayra?”
The young woman froze, pushing the drawer into place. Listening.
“Sayra?”
The call was weak, from somewhere further than her door. Sayra dropped the bat and stepped through her doorway. A yellow light guided her down the hall, bleeding out from the kitchen’s opening.
“Just a moment, Mrs. Laude!” Sayra called.
Something slick touched her toes and she paused three steps out, her hand reaching out to steady her body. Her fingernails scraped the thick door to her side, the door to Mrs. Laude’s apparently empty room. It was so close to Sayra’s that the sound of the door opening should have roused her — she hadn’t realized how dead asleep she had been early, before the mouse.
Shaking off her own incompetence, she raised her foot, squinting at the liquid she had tracked. Even in the faint light, its rosy tint was apparent.
Sayra’s step quickened, and she forced herself not to squint at the kitchen light when it assaulted her. Her hand was already outreached, about to snatch the cordless phone from the wall.
“No need for that, Say,” Mrs. Laude assured.
The elderly woman perched on one cushioned seat, pulled far from her table, the sunflower yellow of her kitchen making her skin look paler, translucent, her hair a faint blue hue at its roots. Her nightgown was wadded above her knees, the snap-button robe hanging open.
“It’s just a little cut,” she said.
“What happened?” Sayra managed.
Mrs. Laude lifted her right leg, groaning at the effort, but managed to cross it, propping her ankle above the opposite knee. Though the movement played her aching limbs, her face lit, as if she was proud of her dexterity. A drop of blood rolled down her heel.
“One too many glasses of sweet tea tonight,” she managed, the ghost of a smile crinkling her cheeks. Her choppers were still floating in the bathroom dish, and her voice sounded odd bouncing off her gums alone. “Broke a knick-knack on my way to the toilet. Like a fool, I stepped right into the mess. Guess this old bat needs to be taken care of after all.”
Sayra bit her cheek to stop her smile from growing too large. “That’s what I’m paid for.”
“Don’t believe in charity — giving or receiving,” Mrs. Laude agreed. She tapped the table with a boney finger. “Done half the work for ya.”
Sayra agreed. The first-aid kit was sitting beside the woman.
“So you managed to make it to the bathroom?”
“You smell piss?” Mrs. Laude asked.
“Guess not. Just old folk funk.”
The toothless grin was its own reward. “Touché.”
Sayra raised a brow.
Mrs. Laude leaned back, a little shrug in her narrow shoulders.
“Learned that one from my stories,” she explained, giving the small, outdated television on her kitchen counter a longing glance, as if she wished her favorite shows were airing ten hours in advance.
Sayra pulled a seat close to Mrs. Laude and gently maneuvered herself closer to the woman’s foot. She wouldn’t need tweezers for the glass. It was sticking out, a curved, dull edge to it. Mrs. Laude’s ankle felt like wet paper, and Sayre wished that she didn’t have to touch it with her messy fingers.
“So, what was it?” Sayra asked. Part of her was curious, most of her just wanted something to keep her awake. “What did you break?”
Mrs. Laude’s face hardened. “Damn him,” she bit. She smacked her gums, thirsty. “Damn that man. He bought it for me, that silly jar. See? See, he tries to hurt me even now.”
“Who?”
The old woman’s eyes were crystal blue on a good day, but cataracts made them look pink. Sayra didn’t like the way they followed her when she was looking down at the wound.
“You know,” Mrs. Laude accused.
Sayra did. Her mother gossiped enough about the old woman’s past life: Mrs. Floy Laude and her four dead husbands. The first marriage, of course, was the most notorious.
“That mean old Indian,” Mrs. Laude confirmed. “Dead sixty years this month.”
Native American, Sayra almost corrected. She followed it with a mental slap to the face. Mrs. Laude was married to the jerk, let her call him what she liked.
“Ah,” Sayra agreed, stripping a bandage off its covering. “You’ve mentioned him.”
“Did I?”
“I can’t believe you put up with him,” Sayra said. Her mother hadn’t been graphic, but Sayra was no child. She knew what cruelty could be found in a drunk human being.
Mrs. Laude’s tissue-paper fingers touched the young woman’s wrist. Sayra lo
oked up, into those pink-rimmed eyes. They were dry and flat, as if they’d been painted on to her face.
“I didn’t,” Mrs. Laude said. Her lips sunk in, curling under her gums. “I didn’t put up with it. I killed that old Indian in his sleep.”
Sayra had been in the seventh grade and interested in Cody Simmons. He’d written her a letter at lunchtime, asking her to the Valentine’s Day dance. She’d checked “maybe” and given it back to Marcus, the go-between, for redelivery. It was a Wednesday, pizza day at school, but she’d left the greasy, pepperoni square on the tray, too stressed to touch it after she’d answered the note.
What if he changed his mind? She brushed that thought away. Play hard to get: that’s what the movie she’d rented the week before said. Maybe was safer than yes.
Cody, of the ocean blue eyes; Cody, who played the guitar with his grandpa; Cody, who had made fun of her freckles for the past two years. The last recollection was the one that made her uncertain, made her stomach queasy, made her pizza unappealing. But, if he’d meant what he said…
She smiled at the thought, knowing the dog walker passing her thought the expression strange.
Wednesday was also the day the bus left her at her Aunt Julie’s apartment complex so that Mom and Dad could get caught up at work — catering, they’d said, was not a forty-hour-a-week job. Sayra understood, and her Aunt Julie was younger than Mom, fun, and liked to buy things. Sometimes Aunt Julie would just call infomercial numbers for sport, give Sayra a wink, and start chatting up the person on the other end of the phone. If he sounded cute, she’d buy something; that was her rule, and she stuck by it. Aunt Julie was still paying payments on a lawn tiller that she’d never used.
Fear of the Dark: An Anthology of Dark Fiction Page 19
