Night Terror

by Chandler McGrew

  The pattern in the laminated tabletop writhed like a mass of black-and-white snakes, weaving in and out of itself. She listened to the scratchy sound of her own breathing and tried to focus on the hallucination in front of her rather than the picture that wanted to burn itself into the front of her brain. She couldn’t do it. The picture of Richard’s shrine in the basement kept torturing her.

  Richard had hardly ever shown his pain. He’d never broken down in front of her. Even the shrine had been a way of hiding his hurt from her. He’d only taken things she hadn’t remembered: old clothes, old toys. Zach’s room upstairs was untouched. Richard’s self-control and secrecy had led her to the reluctant conclusion that he didn’t miss Zach the way she did. Didn’t love him as much. She thought it was a guy thing.

  But the memorial he’d constructed didn’t fit her conception of Richard’s grief. Every item of clothing, every toy, was clean, perfectly organized. Orderliness had always been the one point of contention between Richard and Zach. While Richard was neat to the point of obsession, Zach chose to leave things where they fell. And no matter how much Richard preached, no matter how much he tried to instill his own pattern of living on Zach, it didn’t take. Zach was going to grow up a free spirit.

  Only now, Zach wasn’t going to grow up.

  As it always did, that thought stilled her breathing.

  He’s dead. My baby’s dead. All the visions of Zach… they’re all just dreams. Insanity. Hallucinations.

  She rested her head in her arms. Richard was right. They weren’t living. They were just existing in some kind of tortured limbo. She thought of him, alone in the cellar for hours, dusting the bike, oiling the gears, polishing the lens of the telescope. What was going on in his head all that time?

  She lifted the bottle of Halcion and stared at it, so light in her hand. She shook it like a child’s rattle. More like a pacifier. Finally she took it to the counter and placed it in the cupboard and closed the door. She stared at the kitchen window, but it was just glass. Her neglected garden drew her attention and she thought once again how it mirrored her and Richard’s relationship. She was killing that too. She had to break out of this terrible trap somehow, and she knew that Doctor Cates was only part of the answer. If she and Richard were going to have any chance at a life, then she had to start helping herself.

  She knew instinctively that she’d made a mistake burying her past. No matter what she said, Tara was wrong. Audrey knew that Tara had done what she had out of love. But her treatment had been a mistake. And the drug was only making things worse, distancing her from the things she needed to remember. She knew the cure she envisioned was going to be terrible. Her gut clenched with fear of the unknown. What if she had done something that needed to be forgotten? That was her worst concern. What if Tara had done what she had, to bury not only horror but also guilt?

  Whatever it was, she was determined now to face it. She was not only ready to see Doctor Cates again, she was anxious. Anxious to get on with her life. With the decision made, a great weight lifted off her shoulders.

  She picked up the phone and autodialed Richard, leaving a message.

  “Take me out to dinner,” she said. She smiled, knowing how surprised he’d be when he got back to his office and realized the call was from her. “I mean it. I’ll be dressed when you get here. I love you.” As she said it, she realized just how deeply she meant it, how much different her life would be without him. She wasn’t going to lose him now. She was going to do everything in her power to restore the life they’d shared before. Everything.

  When she hung up the phone, she felt freer than she had in months. Even though she still felt lethargic from the Halcion, she felt strong, almost lighthearted. She even took a couple of hours to sit at the desk in the living room and work on her long-ignored manuscript, compiling a list of plants that she needed to research so that she could begin a list of growing periods and fertilization requirements. The one thing she wasn’t ready to do was enter her garden. But she did stand in the back doorway and give it fair warning.

  “I’m coming back. Not today. Today, I’m taking off. Richard and I are going out to dinner tonight. We’re going to come home, make love, and go to sleep. Tomorrow, I’m coming out there.” She didn’t feel in the least funny talking to the air outside. It gave her a sense of control over the inanimate world around her. The plants couldn’t talk back. They couldn’t mock her. They couldn’t tell her she was going crazy.

  At five o’clock sharp she decided to get ready. She felt like a young girl preparing for a first date, choosing an outfit she hadn’t worn in ages—tight-fitting skirt, light spring sweater, and a pair of high boots. She thought the combination made her look like a tart, but she knew Richard would like it. She laid the clothes out on the bed and took a shower. When she returned, she put on the ensemble and sat on the edge of the bed, brushing her hair.

  Glancing at the bedroom window, she recalled the face she had seen there.

  I didn’t see it. Richard said no one was there. It was all in my head. Just like the image in the kitchen window.

  The face wouldn’t leave her mind. She brushed harder, bearing down, scraping her scalp, but it wouldn’t go away. She felt as though the face in the night had been more than just a frightful image. It had been meant as a reminder. Her mind was trying to tell her something.

  She closed her eyes, and—steeling herself—for the first time ever, she tried to get a glimpse behind the doors that she and Tara had so laboriously constructed. She tried to relax, taking long slow breaths, picturing her thrumming heart easing to a stop. Slowly at first, images came to mind and, instead of recoiling from them, she let them come. Suddenly a picture of a hideous metal mask shimmered in front of her eyes and she shuddered, but she gritted her teeth and tried to see beyond the mask, to rip the rest of the weird memory out of its box in her mind. To open it and face it. Each subsequent flash seemed to reveal just a little more. But she couldn’t quite get it. Couldn’t meld the flood of images into a coherent whole.

  Instead of memories from her early childhood, she caught weird glimpses of her years with Tara, as though she were standing outside herself, watching their therapy sessions. She had the odd sensation of hearing Tara’s droning voice without being able to make out the words. Her own voice was unintelligible as well.

  The trouble was that Audrey didn’t have any clear memories of her childhood at all. Not the time spent with her mother or most of the early years with Tara. She seemed to have emerged at around seventeen like a butterfly from a chrysalis, unable to recall anything of her caterpillar youth.

  She remembered Richard asking her about her childhood when she was eighteen, before Tara had warned him not to. It had shocked Audrey to learn that he remembered so much of his. By that time, it had become normal for Audrey to assume that childhood was a fog for everyone. Her therapy had progressed to the point at which she no longer wanted to know about her past. Her curiosity had been erased along with her memories and she had been left with an ingrained fear of disturbing them.

  She had tried to help herself after Zach was taken, using the tools that Tara had given her, closing more doors, hiding away the hurt. Had she somehow buried feelings for Zach that she should have allowed their rightful time, their rightful place in her grief? Had she taken the easy way out and in doing so, stuck herself in Neverland? She lay back on the bed and spread her hands and feet, relaxing, taking longer, deeper breaths. First she imagined her feet going to sleep, growing so heavy they wanted to sink through the mattress, then her legs, her torso, finally her head. She couldn’t move now if she’d wanted to. She began to count backward from one hundred, telling herself over and over that she was falling into a deep restful sleep. She blanked out her thoughts and pictured blackness.

  With practiced slowness, she began to place herself into a trance.

  29

  A SMALL FLOWER ARRANGEMENT nestled on the seat beside Richard, filling the car with the smell of roses. The
call from Audrey had been unexpected. She sounded happy and alert, almost like the old Audrey, the one he hadn’t spoken to in over a year. Obviously the pill had relieved her headache as well as her depression, at least for the moment. Maybe they’d do a movie. They hadn’t been out for a night together since he couldn’t remember when.

  He wondered why the drugs had worked, and Audrey’s self-hypnosis seemed to be losing its power. Could it be that there was something wrong with her brain? Something chemical? Neither of the doctors had said so. But the thought nagged at him.

  He pulled into the drive and turned off the car, forcing the worry from his mind. Stepping up to the door, he glanced across the lawn, and remembered the footprints. His eyes traced what would have been the path of the tracks. He could still picture them clearly in his mind, surrounded by glistening dew, and a heavy hand seemed to settle on his shoulder. He hadn’t wanted to acknowledge their presence then and he certainly didn’t want them intruding on his thoughts now. But as he stared across the empty lawn, he knew that he had been wrong to erase them with his foot, wrong not to at least mention them to Audrey.

  Climbing slowly down off the side stoop, he strode over to the bedroom window. Audrey was napping on the bed. The footprints were gone, of course, the grass risen back into place, but he remembered the location and direction close enough. He strode out across the lawn and, when he reached the edge of the garden, he picked his way through the mulch, careful not to disturb any of Audrey’s perennials. Fifty yards above him lay a saddle in the hills, a dip like a rifle sight. He stared at the thick bracken and alders and then down at his suit and dress shoes. This was silly. He probably had imagined the footprints.

  Only he was increasingly certain that he hadn’t. Someone had been spying in their bedroom window.

  If you believe that, then why don’t you call the sheriff? Why don’t you tell Audrey?

  Tell them what? That there were footprints on the lawn, but now they were gone?

  The saddle in the slope was in a direct line with their bedroom window and the lay of the footprints he had seen in the night, but it looked like easier going off to the right, making a wide sweep around the worst of the undergrowth. By the time he had clawed halfway up to the top of the hill, his face was scratched by branches and his hands were chafed and raw. Burrs clung to his pants and jacket, he was breathing heavily, and he considered turning back.

  He glanced up at the notch in the ridge and then back toward the house. Equally far either way now. But the house was downhill. And what did he think he was looking for up here anyway? What did he hope to prove? Even if there had been a trespasser, no one was going to be up here now. He glanced back up the slope. What the hell, he was already halfway there and covered with debris. He grabbed a branch and dragged himself up another couple of steps.

  The ground was loose beneath his feet. Twice he stumbled to his knees, catching himself on the thorny brush. By the time he forced his way through the last of the bracken and stumbled to the top of the ridge, his hands were bloody and his lungs stung. He stood there for a moment, hands fisted on his hips, chest heaving, staring across a grassy clearing at the backside of the Coonts farm.

  He glanced at the old farm, then back down the slope behind him, to his and Audrey’s bedroom, and a chill ran up his spine. He recalled Audrey’s terror attack when they’d passed the farm. Like she knew something. Or felt something. But that was crazy.

  It surprised him how close they actually lived to Merle Coonts. In the car it was a five-minute trip around the looping road to their drive. Yet he had traversed half the distance between them on foot in that time, by simply climbing the hill.

  Could someone really be hiking over from the farm in the middle of the night to peek in their windows? But why in the hell would anyone in their right mind do that?

  Maybe they weren’t in their right mind. That thought chilled him almost as much as the one that followed tight on its heels.

  Maybe it wasn’t the neighbor’s tracks he’d seen. Maybe they were Audrey’s. He couldn’t really tell, after all, which way the prints were coming from. They were just impressions in the damp grass.

  Maybe she had climbed up the hill to see what was there. She’d seen the old house and it got into her subconscious. That and Zach’s disappearance, coupled with God only knew what kind of leftovers from her past, had sizzled around in her head and pretty soon she’d invented some woman kidnapping Zach and keeping him in the basement next door. What better place to have it happen than an old beat-up farmhouse?

  But Audrey would never have been so intrepid. Audrey was a home gardener, not a wilderness explorer. He glanced to his right and his heart caught in his throat.

  There was a path.

  Rather than straight down the slope, back the way he had come, it wound its way to the bottom. It hadn’t been visible from below. From that vantage point, all he had seen was an impenetrable thicket. But looking down on the alders, he could make out the winding pattern of a trail. A trail that looked man-made.

  No. He couldn’t believe that. It had to be an animal path, or the natural growth pattern of the underbrush.

  But following its sweep, he spotted the entrance to it a few yards to his right, and he hurried over, anxious to check it out, still more anxious to be back on familiar ground. He tried to lock the trail into his mind, lest he lose it halfway down.

  By the time he reached the back side of Audrey’s garden again, he felt as though he had completed a marathon. His suit was in shambles. His shoes were scratched beyond repair and his pants were torn. He climbed the back stoop and stood for a moment, glancing back up the hill, a terrible muddle of possibilities swirling in his brain.

  30

  AUDREY, DEEP IN HER SELF-INDUCED TRANCE, had lost all

  sense of body and time.

  She wandered down a dark hallway that she knew was not a part of her past or her present. It was simply a construct that existed in her mind. She dimly recalled helping Tara build it, piece by piece. Remembered the audible click of each of the doors closing, sealing off a part of herself, protecting Audrey from the past. But now she wondered if that was really what they had accomplished.

  The walls of the corridor seemed solid as stone. And the doors were thick and strong. She remembered Tara’s singsong voice in the dim distance. “These doors are thicker than they are wide, Audrey. The locks are made of a special steel that cannot be cut or melted. There is no key. When we close these doors, no power on earth will be able to open them again. No one must ever open these doors.”

  Audrey stared at the door in front of her and she shuddered. She glanced down the rest of the long hallway and hurried on past that door. She didn’t want to be near it, much less touch it. She was after answers and something told her that behind that door lay answers. But they were answers that might destroy her. And there was something different about that door in other ways. She seemed to recall building it by herself. But it didn’t have anything to do with Zach. She knew that.

  It had to do with her alone.

  The farther down the corridor she traveled, the darker it became, until she could hardly see her hand in front of her face. She was approaching the final door, the door to her earliest memories. And it was open. She floated inexorably toward it, like a leaf adrift on a river current. She reached for the walls, but they receded from her grasp and she was swept forward into the waiting darkness.

  She heard laughter first. A sweet remembered sound. The laughter of a little girl. Exactly like her own laughter. Only Audrey knew immediately that it wasn’t her. It was Paula.

  Paula?

  Why was that name so familiar? She didn’t recall ever knowing anyone named Paula, and yet she knew her intuition was correct.

  As the laughter swelled, the darkness diminished, and Audrey opened her eyes in another world. She was a small child again and she danced with childish abandon. A mirror image of herself held her by the hands, and the pair spun round and round until they coll
apsed into a dizzy huddle on the summer grass.

  Audrey was stunned, staring at the little girl as though she were a ghost.

  Paula. My twin. The girl in the mirror. How could I have forgotten her? Why was her memory so terrible that Tara had to lock it away behind this door? What happened to Paula?

  But she knew. Or at least she sensed some of what was to come, and the horror dimmed the daylight around her. Paula was the faceless little girl in her visions. The girl behind the mask.

  The girls—no more than five or six and clad in tan romper suits—laughed and rolled in the grass. This was the recorded memory of a brief, wonderful moment in her past and she tried to hold onto the joy of it, but the young Audrey—through whose eyes the older Audrey was now looking—was not concerned with remembering. Had no idea of the terrible events about to unfold. She glanced at Paula offhandedly, then slowly around the white-fenced backyard.

  Tall oak trees shaded the lawn. A swing set with an attached slide sat near the fence. A brightly painted doghouse guarded the center of the yard and a half-grown German shepherd tugged playfully at the end of a leash attached to it, wanting to join in the fun.

  Gidown.

  Audrey had named the dog because he was always on the furniture. Her mother was constantly shouting at him, “Gidown!” and the dog would slink away with a canine grin, chastised but unrepentant. A small boy hid behind the doghouse, whistling through his teeth and teasing the dog. Her brother, Craig.

  Forgotten. Just like Paula.

  He was ten years old. Dark-haired, with dark eyes. Like Zach. A heavy weight suddenly settled on Audrey’s heart. How could I have allowed myself to forget Craig and Paula? Why did I have to?

  Audrey’s vision followed the high white fence back to the house. The old building appeared giant from her child’s perspective. The wide eaves two stories over her head hung from the cloudless sky. The house was as well cared for as the fence, freshly painted siding, double-hung windows gleaming in the sun. The back door opened and a small, dark-haired woman stepped out into the shade of the porch, searching the backyard.