Night Terror

by Chandler McGrew

  “I’m sorry.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about. I wish I could have done something.”

  “You did something by being there.”

  He slid a plate of bacon and eggs in front of her and she picked at it.

  “Maybe you should call Tara,” he said.

  “No.” She didn’t need Tara just because of one bad dream. Even though she knew Tara would probably be able to help, she couldn’t call her. Being around Tara or speaking to her reminded Audrey of just how much she’d lost. Reminded her of why she was afraid of forgetting things. Tara had helped, once. But she couldn’t help after Zach was taken. Audrey couldn’t let her help the way she’d wanted to. She just couldn’t.

  “Then maybe we should call Doctor Burton.”

  “I don’t need a doctor. It was just a bad dream.”

  “It was a heck of a lot more than just a dream.”

  “Can we talk about something else?”

  “Like what? I’m on your side, Audrey. I just want to get you some help, that’s all.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m okay.” He carried the griddle to the sink and stood with his back to her, head bowed.

  “I’m getting better,” she whispered. She hadn’t been weeping every day, standing in the front window staring out across the lawn. She hadn’t awakened in the middle of the night to go tuck Zach into bed in what, six months?

  She could see Richard taking a deep breath, working his way up to saying something, and she knew what it would be. She just didn’t know how he would phrase it this time.

  “I don’t want another baby,” she said.

  His neck reddened.

  “You can’t replace my son,” she said softly.

  Richard turned slowly to face her. “Audrey, having another child doesn’t mean we’re replacing Zach.”

  “Then what the hell does it mean?”

  “We can’t keep on like this, Aud. It’s killing us. It’s killing me. He’s gone. We both have to face that.”

  Audrey shoveled bits of egg around on her plate, staring at the swirling pattern in the yolk. The fork felt strange in her hand. Soft. Her entire body felt weird. What was happening, a panic attack? She willed her breathing to slow, concentrating on her pulse. Controlling it. Forcing herself to relax.

  Richard sat down in the chair next to her. His dark eyes and high cheekbones reminded her of Zach. There were times now when she hated looking at him because of the resemblance. Hated herself for it.

  “I loved Zach just as much as you did,” he whispered.

  She could tell by the startled look on his face that he realized his mistake immediately. Her voice was a heavy stone, poised to crush both of them. “I still love him.”

  “So do I, Audrey.”

  “Then why didn’t you say so?”

  “I only meant that we have to go on living.”

  “I’m living. You’re living.”

  “No, we’re not. We’re just frozen in time. Waiting. Audrey, we’ve done all we could do.”

  “He’s out there somewhere,” she whispered, barely able to breathe. “He needs me and I can’t find him. Someone took my son.”

  “Our son.”

  “I want him back.”

  “I want him back, too, but we have to face the fact that we may never get Zach back. There hasn’t been one call. No one saw him taken. He could be anywhere.”

  She dropped the fork onto her plate. The handle was bent. “Why didn’t they call? Why didn’t we get a ransom note?”

  “You know why, Aud. The police told you why. Zach wasn’t kidnapped for ransom.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “Honey, calm down.”

  She stared out through the open back door. “The bastard stole my son right here. From our home.”

  That burned. The fact that Zach had been taken from a place where he should have been safer than anywhere else in the world. When both she and Richard were home. That inflamed her guilt and her rage, but it also angered her that Richard was right. They had done everything there was to be done.

  They had contacted the Ouachita County Sheriff’s Department immediately. The Warden’s Service coordinated the search. Rangers, deputies, even volunteer firemen searched the area with dogs for days. The woods surrounding the house were deep Maine forest, and farm-to-market roads spiderwebbed the mountains. She and Richard had run through the woods with the searchers, shouting Zach’s name, searching for him beneath every deadfall pine, in every dry gully. But there was no hope, really. The dogs never got a scent.

  The sheriff sent out a File 6 Missing Persons Report by teletype to all law enforcement agencies including the NCIC, the National Crime Information Center. Audrey and Richard had placed ads in local newspapers, paid for spots on radio stations, put professionally printed posters in stores and gas stations. And they would have spent most of their savings hiring a private investigator out of Lewiston, but the man had refused to accept any pay after informing them that there were no clues to be had. Zach had wandered into the front yard to play while Audrey worked in her back garden, and five minutes later he was gone.

  One year ago today. How dare Richard think of another child.

  “He’s alive,” she said. Richard didn’t respond. “He’s alive,” she repeated.

  4

  AUDREY STOOD STARING OUT THE BACK door into her garden. She hadn’t set foot in the backyard since the day of Zach’s disappearance. Her perennials had survived but they were coming back wild, and the areas that would normally be planted with young annuals were filling with spring weeds. Everything about her life seemed to be going to seed, falling apart.

  Since Zach’s disappearance she and Richard had worn their love for one another like an old coat that had been slashed and ripped in some violent accident. The fabric could be repaired, but Audrey wasn’t certain if it would ever fit the way it had before. After their argument, Richard had packed his briefcase and gone into Arcos to work on some client files—a CPA always had something to do. Whenever they fought about Zach, Richard went to work and Audrey brooded. Now it was time to stop brooding and get on with her life. That meant her garden.

  Her aunt Tara had explained the rudiments of gardening to Audrey when Audrey was barely in her teens, bought horticulture books for her to study, worked with her until both their hands were callused, until finally Audrey outgrew her teacher and began to instruct Tara. In gardening, Audrey had found more than just a hobby to take her mind off her troubles; she had discovered solace and rebirth. She became so accomplished at it that three years after she and Richard were married, she published a book on home flower gardening. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden became a hit. It was in its seventh printing now and Audrey had always been proud of the fact that she wasn’t just a housewife, that she supplied more than her share of the family income.

  The garden called to her now. She longed to smell the rich soil, to feel her fingers working through the damp earth, to hear the sound of crickets and birds. But when she rested her hand on the doorknob, it felt frigid to the touch, hostile, as though the house dreaded her departure. But what else could she do, spend the rest of her life inside, pacing from room to room in an old housecoat like some hag out of a Dickens novel?

  Still, the door would not seem to open. An odd tingling tickled the very back of her mind, the first tiny signal of fear. But why should she be afraid of her own garden?

  Then she realized that it wasn’t her garden she feared. It was the door itself. It wasn’t the place, but the passing into the place. It was that irretrievable step from the past year with Zach into this new one without him. Opening one door. Closing another.

  She glanced around the kitchen. Sunlight glinted on the blue countertops and white vinyl floor. The dishes were washed and stacked. The laundry was dried and put away. The house was spotless. She could return to the manuscript for her new book and pretend to write, but she knew that was a game. She had to write the manuscr
ipt out there where it was lived. There was nothing more to be done indoors. No further living to be accomplished. If she remained in the house, it wouldn’t be to live, but to die.

  She clamped down hard on the knob and jerked the door open. Without hesitating on the stoop, she strode out into the backyard. The day was warm and golden, the air redolent with balsam fir and lilacs just beginning to flower. A pair of robins performed a mating dance on the lawn near her storage shed. One year ago she had been right over there, down on her knees in the dirt. A sudden, inexplicable sense of doom had overcome her, and she had risen to her feet and raced to the front of the house, calling Zach’s name. On the grass at the edge of the lawn, where the ground dipped into the roadside drainage ditch, lay his bat. His baseball was never recovered.

  She faked a confident stride over to her shed and found her tool bucket just inside the door. Toting it to the center of her garden, she slipped on her kneepads and knelt. The familiar position and the smell of damp earth slowly revitalized her. Removing her garden claw from the bucket, she scratched at the weeds that were making inroads into her carefully planted perennials. She stared at the tines of the tool as they traced finger patterns in the dark soil, as though the implement were guided by someone else’s hand.

  What am I doing here? How could I possibly come back to this place?

  She bore down on the tool, burying it deeply, yanking it along. The rasping sound grated on her ears. She was here because she had to be, because if she didn’t come out here and do this, then Zach’s kidnapper would have won. He would have taken her son and her life. Wasn’t Richard trying to beat Zach’s kidnapper too? Beat him by burying himself in his work every day? Beat him by having another child?

  Audrey couldn’t bear that thought.

  Even if another baby wasn’t a betrayal of Zach, how could she possibly consider having another child? How would she ever keep him safe? She and Zach had been impossibly close, even for a mother and son. She always sensed when he needed her, when he awakened in the night. He never had to call—she was always there when he needed her.

  Only that one time had she arrived too late.

  She could picture it as though it was yesterday, Zach cavorting around her, more full of life than any nine-year-old should be, shouting and tumbling, grass stains on his T-shirt, sunlight glinting in his eyes. The yard barely contained his exuberance. One year ago today. The thought plunged into her, a knife to the heart. Zach would be ten now.

  She tried to envision another life growing inside her. Tried to recall the feel of a tiny heart, beating in rhythm with her own. Suddenly the memory of another child flashed through her mind and she blinked in astonishment.

  The image was gone as quickly as it appeared, but its shadow hung just behind her eyes, a picture of herself at the age of nine or ten. Bright blue eyes and a cockeyed smile. She was holding a small doll in her hands as though in offering. Only she didn’t remember the doll.

  Just as suddenly, another unfamiliar vision rolled across the screen of her mind, whirling past on fast forward. People and places she didn’t remember, but people who stirred violent emotions nonetheless. The images aroused sadness, fear, and anger, and with these emotions came agony.

  Jagged pain slashed through her abdomen, blazing outward in fingers of golden fire. Her teeth chattered as she clutched her belly. Her hands shook where they grasped her light cotton blouse. She struggled to get to her feet, but her kneepads merely dug deeper into the soft loam. The agony electrified every nerve ending in her body, sparked her synapses like strands of flickering lights on a Christmas tree. Minutes later, when the pain finally drained away, she knelt limply in the garden, clutching her arms tightly about her. Never in her life had she experienced such pain, not even during childbirth. And it had struck so suddenly, out of the blue. As she began to take note of her surroundings again, she noticed that her vision was still off. The day seemed dimmer, out of focus.

  Just as her muscles began to relax, another wave of flame crashed down upon her. The agony was a chemical explosion that erupted inside her body, burning its way out through her skin. She glanced frantically at the unplanted earth, wondering if she should lie down and hope for the terrible seizures to pass.

  But maybe something was horribly wrong inside. Maybe she was bleeding internally or some terrible tumor had just asserted itself. She needed help. Remembering the birthing techniques she had learned years before, she took short, shallow breaths, trying to relax. After what seemed an eternity, the second attack passed. She struggled to her feet and stumbled across the lawn toward the door, praying to get inside before another blast of pain struck.

  She was halfway up the back stoop when the agony lashed her again. Worse than the first two. Much worse. She buried her fingernails in the wood bannister. The muscles in her arms tightened into steel bands as she doubled over, her cheek resting on the splintery stair rail. She had one foot on the landing, one on the top step. She eyed the door only two paces away.

  Her body shook so violently she was afraid she might collapse into a boneless mass, but as the pain started to ease once more, she staggered into the house. She dragged a kitchen chair over to the wall phone, not wanting to be caught standing when the next attack struck. She knew more were coming. She imagined them, lined up in the distance, black horsemen, Tolkien ring-wraiths. She grabbed the phone and pressed the autodial button for Richard’s office. He answered on the third ring.

  “Help me. Oh, Jesus! It hurts so bad” was all she managed to say before the next wave of pain thundered over her and left her moaning into the receiver. She heard Richard, as though from a great distance, telling her he was on his way, he was calling the hospital.

  The phone crashed to the floor.

  The pain rose inside her, swelling like a molten rush of lava, burning its way through her. As the wave crested, she drifted away, deep down inside herself. Reality dissolved into thin echoes of sound and sunlight and the surflike pounding of her heart. She thought she heard, for just an instant, a child’s frightened voice, and the sound of a child’s feet, running.

  She opened her eyes, but of course she was alone. She didn’t know if she had been delirious for minutes or hours, but the sun hadn’t moved and neither Richard nor the paramedics had arrived. And the pain didn’t seem to have lessened all that much. She closed her eyes and clasped both hands again across her belly. She drew her knees up to her chest, her feet resting on the edge of the chair.

  When she closed her eyes again, she heard pattering feet and then silence.

  Audrey glanced groggily around the kitchen as Richard and the big paramedic lifted her onto the gurney. The pain had eased, but in its place a great sadness had settled. Something indefinable had cooled inside her along with the pain.

  She felt empty.

  As the gurney crunched across the gravel in their drive, Audrey lay back on the thin white pillow while Richard walked alongside, holding her hand. She needed to hear the child’s voice again. Needed to remember it. She knew she had heard it before.

  But it was gone.

  The pain came again, but it was distant and dull. The spasms were farther apart, more controllable. Richard climbed into the back of the ambulance, never letting go of her hand, but she couldn’t look at him. He wiped her cheek but the spot still burned, as though it were not a tear he had erased but acid. He whispered in her ear, consoling her, but all she heard was the dull drone of the engine.

  And over it all, the frantic patter of a child’s feet.

  5

  TWO HOURS BEFORE MONDAY’S dreary dawn, a lone delivery truck passed in front of Cartland Memorial Hospital in downtown Arcos. Tires hissed on pavement still wet from a late-night rain. A freight train moaned in the distance, heading for Montreal. A cigarette sizzled to its death in a glittering puddle, as a tall orderly with buckteeth turned to pass back through the sliding glass doors into the emergency room.

  Two hallways over Audrey lay on her bed, sound asleep yet covered in
a sheen of cool perspiration. The only sound in the room was Richard’s light snore as he dozed in his chair. Then the curtain stirred against the window frame when a light breeze slipped down across the mountains. The open page of a book on the bedside table fluttered in reply. In the corridor outside, the soft padding of a nurse’s shoes reached a low crescendo and died away.

  Audrey’s sudden shriek pierced the hospital quiet like a gunshot in church. Clutching at the sweat-soaked sheets that snared her, she bolted into a sitting position.

  “The smell!” she gasped, gagging for breath. “The smell!”

  She ripped at her head and face with frantic fingers, trying to strip the skin away from her skull.

  Richard jerked upright in his chair, fighting his way out of the well of sleep. He wiped his eyes and squinted, then rushed to Audrey’s side, grabbing her hands. The nurse’s rubber soles sounded again.

  The light from the lamp struggled to frighten away the demons of darkness, but they hung in the room like smoke. Weird shadows flittered—angular and harsh—as Audrey twisted on the bed. She shivered and Richard pulled her toward him, but she pushed him away.

  “No!” she shrieked. “Let me go!”

  He released her and she recoiled against the metal headboard. The nurse poked her head through the door.

  “Get Doctor Burton!” shouted Richard, and the nurse disappeared.

  Audrey reached toward her face again and he slid onto the bed, holding her tightly, binding her arms in his own. “It’s all right, honey,” he said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “No!” she screamed again. She rocked back and forth so hard the metal headboard rattled against the wall.

  “Audrey!” said Richard, shaking her shoulders. “Audrey! Wake up! It’s a bad dream.”

  He couldn’t stand to see her so frightened. She seemed as terrified of his embrace as she was of the demons in her head. When she shoved him away again, he let her lurch out of bed. Then he raced in front of her, blocking her path. The door opened and Doctor Burton pushed in past the nurse. Burton wasn’t much bigger than Audrey, but she was twenty years older, with gray hair and deep-set green eyes. She peered at Audrey over the top of thicklensed bifocals, holding out her hand to Richard to freeze him in place.