In Creeps The Night

by Natalie Gibson

  Carol sat down at her desk and fired up her computer. She craned her neck back and forth, leaning back in her office chair. A wet nose brushed against her knee, and she looked down at Beau. “Come on, bud. You know the routine. I’ve got work to do. Go play.” She motioned, and Beau trotted off through the open doorway of her office.

  Carol opened the file to her work-in-progress. She took a sip of her coffee as she tried to recall the nightmare she had used to develop her story plot. When the inspiration came to her she began to tap away at the keys mechanically. The sound, like a boiling pot on a stove top, became a mantra and soon she was lost in the action like the pull of a vortex.

  An hour passed as Carol infused her dreams of running helpless and terrified, pursued by someone so deadly he could only live in the dark recesses of her mind, onto the innocent white of the document on the screen. She stopped when the twitching of her nose forced her hand to rub at the itchy sensation there. Vaguely she acknowledged silence in the house, Beau likely sleeping somewhere downstairs, and the soft thrum of the furnace blowing heat through the ductwork. The only sensation that caught her attention was a mottled scent of something foreign—woodsy and almost cinnamon. She attributed it to the lingering sensation from the crowded movie theater and scratched her arm at the remembrance of the cootie-like feelings it evoked. Her nose twitched again, however, when she still detected the scent and she let out a powerful sneeze.

  Through watery eyes, Carol’s breath caught at the sight of a reflection on her computer screen of a man in the doorway behind her. No Beau. No big, protective dog—a man. Much like the transformation of man to werewolf in the film she’d just seen, her spine felt as if it were twisting inside of her before going completely rigid. Her mind tried to reason if the foreign feeling was from the force of the sneeze or if it was truly what sheer terror felt like for the first time. The tiny hairs on her arms stood up. Like an undiscovered superpower, the feigned, foreign scent manifested and she knew it must belong to the deep, raspy voice that called out from behind her.

  “Bless you.”

  Her eyes fixed on the reflection, the blurry image of a chain link lowered from his grasp. The clank of it, mere feet behind her, caused every inch of her skin to harden and her ears to tingle as though her body was taunting her for acknowledging she wasn’t dreaming. As if she needed further proof she was for the first time in her life both very awake and very afraid, the deep voice called out tauntingly.

  “Honey, I’m home.”

  I NEVER KNOW what it is that wakes me up. She doesn’t sing or whisper to me. I have no voice for her. She doesn’t touch me; she’s never nearer to me than the top of the cathedral ceiling of my bedroom. Wraith or angel floating above me, I’m not sure. She watches, and sometimes I catch her watching.

  She is my secret, because Granny is the only one I know who believes in ghosts, and I can’t tell her that her daughter, my mother, haunts me. What would it do to her? Would she try to catch my guardian? Would she try to talk to her? I am terrified that Granny might claim and distort this last echo of my mother, so I don’t ask, “What do you think she is doing there?” Granny already owns all the memories, all the words, all the images and ideas and actions that my mother ever was or had. I can learn nothing about my mother when she was alive that isn’t filtered through Granny’s anger-tinged sorrow and guilt.

  I have only echoes of my infant feelings: not the singing, but the feeling of being sung to; not the holding, but the feeling of having been held; not the planning, but the feeling that someone had once dreamed for me. I don’t want my grandmother’s words shaping these nightly visits. They are the only thing I have with my mother that is completely mine. I gaze at her while she floats. She gazes at me while I ward off dreaming. As I grow, this is what she and I share as parent and child.

  My grandmother says she has to protect me because she failed to protect her daughter. Throughout my childhood, I have a vague worry that means protecting me from her daughter as well. Once when she was singing me to sleep, Granny forgot herself and said, “Your mother had you too young. She didn’t know how to take care of you.” Then she stopped, smoothed my hair, and said in a shaky whisper, “Even so, I shouldn’t have fought with her about some things. Maybe then she would have come to me when she needed my help.”

  Granny and my guardian mother remain invisible to each other as year after year passes. Granny feeds me the same rhubarb pie she fed my mother, always commenting that my mother never learned to cook it even though it was her favorite dish. She sews me beautiful dresses and reminds me that my mother never liked ruffles and ribbons as much as I did. She makes me dolls and tells me that my mother didn’t like dolls because she preferred playing with live babies. When I tell lies, my grandmother laughs softly and says, “I once knew another little girl who liked to tell stories.” I refuse to cry when I’m hurt, and Granny says, “Don’t keep the pain too close, sugar. It will ruin you if you pretend it isn’t real.” This is the way I grow until my twenty-first birthday, with the ghost I can see mutely accepting the ghost Granny uses her memory to build for me.

  When I turn twenty-one, Granny says, “And now you have outlived her. Please be wiser. I can’t survive losing another one.” So I’m careful. I don’t get pregnant. I stay away from reckless men. I go to college. My mother fades away. She has no experience with the world Granny’s guidance has created for me. She no longer hovers around me watching me live the life she had as a little girl. I assume she is at peace because I’m grown and I can take care of myself. I imagine her free to start a new existence.

  Granny comes for a visit. She jokingly praises me by saying I am the daughter she always wanted. She listens eagerly to my work stories, occasionally swatting my arm and saying, “I think you may have embellished that one.” She tells me that I got the thin sugar crust at the bottom of my rhubarb pie just right. She’s relieved and pleased that my apartment décor indicates I’ve lost my fierce affinity for ruffles and bows on every surface such ornaments can be attached to. She goes to bed laughing, “You and me, we did all right by each other.” I have the odd realization that I have been her salvation as much as she has been mine. She sees my life and feels redeemed as a parent.

  In my mind, my mother’s strife with Granny ended when she died and she and Granny were pushed into cooperation by their mutual love for me. This is why I didn’t expect it. I bent my dreams around the belief that Granny and my never absent, never present mother were both determined to keep me safe and keep the past from repeating itself. I thought my angel mother was making sure that Granny fulfilled a promise because my mother couldn’t hold me or feed me or tell me I was loved. When she drifted over my bed that last time and slowly descended, I thought she was coming to kiss me good-bye. I had been waiting decades to feel my mother’s loving touch. Her serene luminous face did not even change expression as she settled down into my body and pushed the breath out of me.

  If I have to believe that she meant to suck the air out of my lungs and leave me gasping for life, my entire childhood shatters. Granny rushed into the room and shook me until my angel departed, but I don’t really know what Louisa meant to do to me. Granny did not acknowledge that she saw her daughter’s spirit flee. She blamed it on the wine we were drinking, heartburn, or maybe an adult version of sudden infant death syndrome. I pretend it never happened, but before I go to sleep every night, I say to the dark, “Granny is stronger than both of us. Don’t make her choose.” So far, that has been enough.

  Every night you shed a tear,

  You just might have something to fear.

  He feeds upon your inner sadness,

  And drives your mind to utter madness.

  JASON BLOOM CRIED that morning, for the first time in twenty years. Tears streamed freely down his cheeks, as Mary Lyle explained, over the phone, why they could no longer be in a relationship.

  He listened and wept as the only woman he had ever loved told him, “It’s not you, it’s me.” Reading
between the lines, Jason knew that no, it wasn’t him, but his best friend Dave. Of course.

  After the call ended, after she had said all that she felt she needed to say, after rounding it all off with several groveling apologies that meant nothing, Jason hung up the receiver and stared out of the kitchen window, into the garden beyond. The sun shone proudly, optimistically, in the sky, oblivious to the pain he was feeling, while the beautiful flowers he and Mary had planted together some months ago swooned lazily in the warm breeze. What a day to have your heart ripped out, he thought to himself, numb, shocked.

  Jason rubbed a sleeve across his face to wipe away the tears, and an old memory flashed across his mind…

  He was seven years old again, a stroppy young boy whose reaction to not getting his own way was screaming and crying until he did. On a particular night back then, he had been crying for a good few minutes at being told he had to go to bed early. He’d been old enough to no longer fear the “Ten o’clock Horses,” who apparently came for children who stayed up late. But that night, his parents told him about a new boogeyman, someone he had never heard about before.

  “Be careful Jay,” his father had said, sitting by the boy’s bed and dabbing a tissue at his son’s cheeks. “You know if you go to bed crying, Mr. Morbid will come and get you. He feeds on the tears of children, and makes you sad forever. You don’t want to be like that, do you?”

  Jason, young Jason, shook his head, and his father had left him in peace. But a few hours later, in the dark, haunted shadows of a child’s bedroom at nighttime, something lurked. Unseen, but heard. Shuffling about, breathing. Seven-year-old Jason had screamed his head off, and for weeks after he had recurring nightmares about “Mr. Morbid,” who was desperate for the young boy’s tears. Eventually, Jason escaped those old night terrors, but he still tried his best to never cry again.

  And he didn’t. Not until today, his dry spell broken by Mary. And when he cried again, the sunshine and optimism that Jason had kept in his heart for so long evaporated in an instant. He had finally, truly grown up, it seemed. Moved away from the joy and color that others struggle to hold on to as they get older, and plunged head-first into the “real world.” Not bad work for a morning phone call, really, he thought bitterly.

  The day passed Jason by with excruciating sluggishness, and he only managed to survive it by remaining in a daze. The phone rang, the doorbell screamed, but he ignored it all. Shutting himself off from the rest of the world seemed like the best solution.

  The sun eventually shrank away, as if coming to terms with the fact that there was no longer any place for it in Jason’s heart, and he, Jason, went to bed. Alone.

  He tried not to think about where she might have been last night, tried not to think about where she was tonight, but he couldn’t help it. Moonlight glinted off the framed photograph of him and Mary, which sat on his bedside table, as they hugged and grinned like two stupidly happy people madly in love.

  Jason cried, for the second time that day. Tears exploded from the corners of his eyes, poured onto his pillow, drenching it with sadness.

  It was the breathing he heard first. It simmered beneath his rasping sobs like a prolonged death rattle and, head buried in his pillow, he suppressed his cries and listened. It sounded threatening, and eerily familiar. Holding his own breath, he lifted his head slightly, and turned it toward the photograph, to his and Mary’s frozen happiness. Afraid to look the other way.

  Ancient fear took over Jason then, seizing his heart like it hadn’t since his days as a seven-year-old. It was as if something had unlocked a box, and released an old, old feeling that had long been subdued.

  He was seven again, in his own mind. Alone in a dark room, in a bed without Mary lying next to him, or the reassuring presence of his parents down the hall. He didn’t know, couldn’t explain, why he suddenly felt so vulnerable, so terrified. But this terror was somehow worse than his one true love leaving him forever. This was primal.

  Trying to swallow, his throat hurting from dryness, Jason rolled over slowly, his eyes stinging with tears as he faced the thing in his room.

  “Jason,” whispered Mr. Morbid, a hunched figure with a crooked nose and spiteful eyes, leering down at him from the side of the bed.

  Jason was shaking. Cold. Paralyzed.

  “I’ve been waiting for you a long, long time,” continued the monster who shouldn’t have been real but was.

  Jason tried to speak, tried to protest, but his words were strangled in his throat before they could reach his lips. His eyes were wide, unblinking, at this thing that made him more afraid than a future without Mary.

  “Mr. Morbid feeds on tears,” Jason remembered his dad saying, all those years ago, “And when he does, you’ll be sad for the rest of your life….”

  Mr. Morbid, a childhood boogeyman brought back from the past by Jason’s adult heartbreak, leaned down toward the bed, maggot-ridden teeth shining yellow in the moonlight.

  Jason cried, Jason screamed. He didn’t call for Mary. He yelled, begged, for his father….

  Jason Bloom had been a man of a million smiles. People said there was once sunshine in his heart, and joy in his soul, before his relationship ended. They thought that his sullen eyes and greasy hair, his down-turned mouth and slouched walk, were the result of his split with Mary Lyle, the love of his life.

  They were wrong. They didn’t know about Mr. Morbid.

  TO SOME PEOPLE, Hallowe’en was about the mysteries of the netherworld, about the “veil” between the living and the dead. To me, it was just about the candy, and the kids. So many folks nowadays handed out tiny candy bars that were barely a bite for a nine-year-old, much less a mom or dad grabbing a midnight snack after the kids’ sugar rushes wore off, but I couldn’t bear to be so stingy. We didn’t have all that many kids in the neighborhood anymore, anyway. I’d spend the year looking for sales in gas stations and mini-marts on the King Size ones—I was on a fixed income, after all, and couldn’t spend like I wanted—and watch their eyes light up like glowsticks when they reached into the bowl and encountered a real by-gum treat. They’d come to the door, some excitedly, some reluctantly, dressed in cheap homemade costumes and cheaper store-bought ones and things that looked like they were off a Hollywood set, and they’d each get their candy.

  Yes, even the teenagers who were too cool for costumes and showed up in hoodies and dirty faces. The rest of the world was a pain in the butt to those kids; the least I could do was give ‘em a little sugar and chocolate.

  I don’t think my neighbors liked me very much in general, but their dislike was especially palpable on Hallowe’en. Most of the year I was just that strange old man who mowed his own lawn and never had visitors, not even his kids, but on Hallowe’en I was the only one on the block who decorated or handed out candy. The kids would tromp over the edges of their professionally-manicured lawns, sometimes onto a flower bed or two (and yes, I did warn them, but you try to walk in a straight line when you’ve got slits for eyeholes and you’re still not all that great at walking), and the next day there’d be lollipop sticks and candy wrappers in the street. Didn’t matter that I picked up everything I could get to, from Elm on the north down to Oak on the south, I didn’t belong.

  Not that any of them had come by when Marcie and the kids went away, more than two decades ago. No cards, no lasagnas to throw in the freezer, no just-checking-to-see-how-you-were-doing. I didn’t exactly advertise what had happened, of course, and most of the people who’d lived here then were long gone, off to Florida or Arizona or wherever Marcie and the kids were these days, if they were anywhere anymore.

  This year was better than most, and I’d had a steady stream of kids coming by since the official trick-or-treat hours had started at four o’clock. Word gets around, I guess, and I had the good stuff. Pirates were big again this year. And princesses. And the bear from that movie. Superman twins. A dad with a fake bald head and three kids in yellow pillowcases and goggles. I broke my rule and gave the litt
lest one two candy bars—trick-or-treating was almost over, and she was too cute for words. And then finally the kids were gone, and I was left alone with a not-quite-empty bowl and a jack o’ lantern and its guttering candle.

  As the last kids left the block, a drizzle started to fall. I put the bowl down outside the door and went to go start fixing dinner. Anyone who came late could grab themselves a candy bar if they wanted, but I was getting hungry.

  And thirsty.

  The whiskey burned, and my eyes started watering from pain both present and past. I only opened the bottle once a year, but I managed to put a pretty good dent in its contents nonetheless. Closing my eyes, I saw them again, hanging in the front hall. Peter Pan and Tinkerbell, the cutest little costumes you ever did see. But I wasn’t home that night to see the kids put them on, or in the neighborhood to take them from house to house, even though I’d promised. A morning meeting had gone through lunch, and then all day, and then to drinks, and then to her house. By the time I’d gotten home, Marcie and the kids were gone. No note, just a number for a lawyer. She’d known it was coming, even if I hadn’t wanted to admit it. I didn’t fight, just set the court date and started the paperwork.

  And then they were really gone. An accident on the way to the custody hearing, and Peter Pan and Tinkerbell were never to be part of my life again.

  I took another drink, and breathed deep so I could feel the burn. I’d pay for this tomorrow, but I’d do my penance with the lollipop sticks and start another year. It was fully dark outside, the time for real trick-or-treating, if people still did that kind of thing, but the kids were all home long ago.