Poe's Children

by Peter Straub

  In fact, despite my attempts at reason, I believed in the man on the ceiling. I always had.

  As a child I was a persistent liar. I lied slyly, I lied innocently, and I lied enthusiastically. I lied out of confusion and I lied out of a profound disappointment. One of my more elaborate lies took shape during the 1960 presidential election. While the rest of the country was debating the relative merits of Kennedy and Nixon, I was explaining to my friends how I had been half of a pair of Siamese twins, and how my brother had tragically died during the separation.

  This was, perhaps, my most heartfelt lie to date, because in telling this tale I found myself grieving over the loss of my brother, my twin. I had created my first believable character, and my character had hurt me.

  Later I came to recognize that about that time (I was ten), the self I had been was dying, and that I was slowly becoming the twin who had died and gone off to some other, better fiction.

  Many of my lies since then, the ones I have been paid for, have been about such secret, tragic twins and their other lives. The lives we dream about, and only half-remember after the first shock of day.

  So how could I, of all people, doubt the existence of the man on the ceiling?

  My first husband did not believe in the man on the ceiling.

  At least, he said he didn’t. He said he never saw him. Never had night terrors. Never saw the molecules moving in the trunks of trees and felt the distances among the pieces of himself.

  I think he did, though, and was too afraid to name what he saw. I think he believed that if he didn’t name it, it wouldn’t be real. And so, I think, the man on the ceiling got him a long time ago.

  Back then, it was usually a snake I’d see, crawling across the ceiling, dropping to loop around my bed. I’d wake up and there would still be a snake—huge, vivid, sinuous, utterly mesmerizing. I’d cry out. I’d call for help. After my first husband had grudgingly come in a few times and hadn’t been able to reassure me that there was no snake on the ceiling, he just quit coming.

  Steve always comes. Usually, he’s already there beside me.

  One night a man really did climb in my bedroom window. Really did sit on the edge of my bed, really did mutter incoherently and fumble in the bedclothes, really did look surprised and confused when I sat up and screamed. I guess he thought I was someone else. He left, stumbling, by the same second-story window. I chased him across the room, had the tail of his denim jacket in my hands. But I let him go because I couldn’t imagine what I’d do next if I caught him.

  By the time I went downstairs and told my first husband, there was no sign of the intruder. By the time the police came, there was no evidence, and I certainly could never have identified him. I couldn’t even describe him in any useful way: dark, featureless. Muttering nonsense. As confused as I was. Clearly not meaning me any harm, or any good, either. Not meaning me anything. He thought I was someone else. I wasn’t afraid of him. He didn’t change my life. He wasn’t the man on the ceiling.

  I don’t think anybody then believed that a man had come in my window in the middle of the night and gone away again. Steve would have believed me.

  Yes, I would have believed her. I’ve come to believe in the reality of all of Melanie’s characters. And I believe in the man on the ceiling with all my heart.

  For one evening this man on the ceiling climbed slowly down out of the darkness and out of the dream of our marriage and took one of our children away. And changed our lives forever.

  Awake.

  Someone in the room.

  Asleep. Dreaming.

  Someone in the room.

  Someone in the room. Someone by the bed. Reaching to touch me but not touching me yet.

  I put out my hand and Steve is beside me, solid, breathing steadily. I press myself to him, not wanting to wake him but needing enough to be close to him that I’m selfishly willing to risk it. I can feel his heartbeat through the blanket and sheet, through both our pajamas and both our flesh, through the waking or the dream. He’s very warm. If he were dead, if he were the ghostly figure standing by the bed trying to touch me but not touching me, his body heat wouldn’t radiate into me like this, wouldn’t comfort me. It comforts me intensely.

  Someone calls me. I hear only the voice, the tone of voice, and not the name it uses.

  Awake. Painful tingling of nerve endings, heart pumping so wildly it hurts. Our golden cat Cinnabar—who often sleeps on my chest and eases some of the fear away by her purring, her small weight, her small radiant body heat, by the sheer miraculous contact with some other living creature who remains fundamentally alien while we touch so surely—moves away now. Moves first onto the mound of Steve’s hip, but he doesn’t like her on top of him and in his sleep he makes an irritable stirring motion that tips her off. Cinnabar gives an answering irritable trill and jumps off the bed.

  Someone calling me. The door, always cracked so I can hear the kids if they cough or call, opens wider now, yellow wash from the hall light across the new forest-green carpet of our bedroom, which we’ve remodeled to be like a forest cave just for the two of us, a sanctuary. A figure in the yellow light, small and shadowy, not calling me now.

  Neither asleep nor awake. A middle-of-the-night state of consciousness that isn’t hypnagogic, either. Meta-wakefulness. Meta-sleep. Aware now of things that are always there, but in daylight are obscured by thoughts and plans, judgments and impressions, words and worries and obligations and sensations, and at night by dreams.

  Someone in the room.

  Someone by the bed.

  Someone coming to get me. I’m too afraid to open my eyes, and too aroused to go back to sleep.

  But we’ve made it our job, Melanie and I, to open our eyes and see who’s there. To find who’s there and to name who’s there.

  In our life together, we seem to seek it out. Our children, when they become our children, already know the man on the ceiling. Maybe all children do, at some primal level, but ours know him consciously, have already faced him down, and teach us how to do that, too.

  We go toward the voice by the door, the shape in the room. Not so much to find the vampires and the werewolves who have been seen so many times before—who are safe to find because no one really believes in them anymore anyway—but to find the hidden figures who lurk in our house and other houses like ours: the boy with the head vigorously shaking nonono, the boy who appears and disappears in the midst of a cluttered bedroom, the little dead girl who controls her family with her wishes and lies, the little boy driven by his dad on a hunting trip down into the darkest heart of the city, and the man who hangs suspended from the ceiling waiting for just the right opportunity to climb down like a message from the eternal. To find the demons. To find the angels.

  Sometimes we find these figures right in our own home, infiltrating our life together, standing over the beds of our children.

  “Mom?”

  A child. My child. Calling me, “Mom.” A name so precious I never get used to it, emblematic of the joy and terror of this impossible relationship every time one of them says it. Which is often.

  “Mom? I had a bad dream.”

  It’s Joe. Who came to us a year and a half ago an unruly, intensely imaginative child so terrified of being abandoned again that he’s only very recently been willing to say he loves me. He called me “Mom” right away, but he wouldn’t say he loved me.

  If you love someone, they leave you. But if you don’t love someone, they leave you, too. So your choice isn’t between loving and losing but only between loving and not loving.

  This is the first time Joe has ever come for me in the middle of the night, the first time he’s been willing to test our insistence that that’s what parents are here for, although I think he has nightmares a lot.

  I slide out of bed and pick him up. He’s so small. He holds himself upright, won’t snuggle against me, and his wide blue eyes are staring off somewhere, not at me. But his hand is on my shoulder and he lets me put him in
my lap in the rocking chair, and he tells me about his dream. About a dog that died and came back to life. Joe loves animals. About Dad and me dying. Himself dying. Anthony dying.

  Joe, who never knew Anthony, dreams about Anthony dying. Mourns Anthony. This connection seems wonderful to me, and a little frightening.

  Joe’s man on the ceiling already has a name, for Joe’s dream is also about how his birthparents hurt him. Left him. He doesn’t say it, maybe he’s not old enough to name it, but when I suggest he must have felt then that he was going to die, that they were going to kill him, he nods vigorously, thumb in his mouth. And when I point out that he didn’t die, that he’s still alive and he can play with the cats and dogs and dig in the mud-hole and learn to read chapter books and go to the moon someday, his eyes get very big and he nods vigorously and then he snuggles against my shoulder. I hold my breath for this transcendent moment. Joe falls asleep in my lap.

  I am wide awake now, holding my sleeping little boy in my lap and rocking, rocking. Shadows move on the ceiling. The man on the ceiling is there. He’s always there. And I understand, in a way I don’t fully understand and will have lost most of by morning, that he gave me this moment, too.

  I was never afraid of dying, before. But that changed after the man on the ceiling came down. Now I see his shadow imprinted in my skin, like a brand, and I think about dying.

  That doesn’t mean I’m unhappy, or that the shadow cast by the man on the ceiling is a shadow of depression. I can’t stand people without a sense of humor, nor can I tolerate this sort of morbid fascination with the ways and colorings of death that shows itself even among people who say they enjoy my work. I never believed horror fiction was simply about morbid fascinations. I find that attitude stupid and dull.

  The man on the ceiling gives my life an edge. He makes me uneasy; he makes me grieve. And yet he also fills me with awe for what is possible. He shames me with his glimpses into the darkness of human cruelty, and he shocks me when I see bits of my own face in his. He encourages a reverence when I contemplate the inevitability of my own death. And he shakes me with anger, pity, and fear.

  The man on the ceiling makes it mean that much more when my daughter’s fever breaks, when my son smiles sleepily up at me in the morning and sticks out his tongue.

  So I wasn’t surprised when one night, late, 2 A.M. or so, after I’d stayed up reading, I began to feel a change in the air of the house, as if something were being added, or something taken away.

  Cinnabar uncurled and lifted her head, her snout wrinkling as if to test the air. Then her head turned slowly atop her body, and her yellow eyes became silver as she made a long, motionless stare into the darkness beyond our bedroom door. Poised. Transfixed.

  I glanced down at Melanie sleeping beside me. I could see Cinnabar’s claws piercing the sheet and yet Melanie did not wake up. I leaned over her then to see if I could convince myself she was breathing. Melanie breathes so shallowly during sleep that half the time I can’t tell she’s breathing at all. So it isn’t unusual to find me poised over her like this during the middle of the night, like some anxious and aging gargoyle, waiting to see the rise and fall of the covers to let me know she is still alive. I don’t know if this is normal behavior or not—I’ve never really discussed it with anyone before. But no matter how often I watch my wife like this, and wait, no matter how often I see that yes, she is breathing, I still find myself considering what I would do, how I would feel, if that miraculous breathing did stop. Every time I worry myself with an imagined routine of failed attempts to revive her, to put the breathing back in, of frantic late night calls to anyone who might listen, begging them to tell me what I should do to put the breathing back in. It would be my fault, of course, because I had been watching. I should have watched her more carefully. I should have known exactly what to do.

  During these ruminations I become intensely aware of how ephemeral we are. Sometimes I think we’re all little more than a ghost of a memory, our flesh a poor joke.

  I also become painfully aware of how, even for me when I’m acting the part of the writer, the right words to express just how much I love Melanie are so hard to come by.

  At that point, the man on the ceiling stuck his head through our bedroom door and looked right at me. He turned, looking at Melanie’s near-motionless form—and I saw how thin he was, like a silhouette cut from black construction paper. Then he pulled his head back into the darkness and disappeared.

  I eased out of bed, trying not to awaken Melanie. Cinnabar raised her back and took a swipe at me. I moved toward the doorway, taking one last look back at the bed. Cinnabar stared at me as if she couldn’t believe I was actually doing this, as though I were crazy.

  For I intended to follow the man on the ceiling and find out where he was going. I couldn’t take him lightly. I already knew some of what he was capable of. So I followed him that night, as I have followed him every night since, in and out of shadow, through dreams and memories of dreams, down the back steps and up into the attic, past the fitful or peaceful sleep of my children, through daily encounters with death, forgiveness, and love.

  Usually he is this shadow I’ve described, a silhouette clipped out of the dark, a shadow of a shadow. But these are merely the aspects I’m normally willing to face. Sometimes as he glides from darkness into light and into darkness again, as he steps and drifts through the night rooms and corridors of our house, I glimpse his figure from other angles: a mouth suddenly fleshed out and full of teeth, eyes like the devil’s eyes like my own father’s eyes, a hairy fist with coarse fingers, a jawbone with my own beard attached.

  And sometimes his changes are more elaborate: he sprouts needle teeth, razor fingers, or a mouth like a swirling metal funnel.

  The man on the ceiling casts shadows of flesh, and sometimes the shadows take on a life of their own.

  Many years later, the snake returned. I was very awake.

  I’d been offered painkillers and tranquilizers to produce the undead state which often passes for grieving but is not. I refused them. I wanted to be awake. The coils of the snake dropped from the ceiling and rose from the floor—oozing, slithering, until I was entirely encased. The skin molted and molted again into my own skin. The flesh was supple around my own flesh. The color of the world from inside the coils of the snake was a growing, soothing green.

  “Safe,” hissed the snake all around me. “You are safe.”

  Everything we’re telling you here is true.

  Each night as I follow the man on the ceiling into the various rooms of my children and watch him as he stands over them, touches them, kisses their cheeks with his black ribbon tongue, I imagine what he must be doing to them, what transformations he might be orchestrating in their dreams.

  I imagine him creeping up to my youngest daughter’s bed, reaching out his narrow black fingers and like a razor they enter her skull so he can change things there, move things around, plant ideas that might sprout—deadly or healing—in years to come. She is seven years old, and an artist. Already her pictures are thoughtful and detailed and she’s not afraid of taking risks: cats shaped like hearts, people with feathers for hair, roses made entirely of concentric arcs. Does the man on the ceiling have anything to do with this?

  I imagine him crawling into bed with my youngest son, whispering things into my son’s ear, and suddenly my son’s sweet character has changed forever.

  I imagine him climbing the attic stairs and passing through the door to my teenage daughter’s bedroom without making a sound, slipping over her sleeping form so gradually it’s as if a car’s headlights had passed and the shadows in the room had shifted and now the man from the ceiling is kissing my daughter and infecting her with a yearning she’ll never be rid of.

  I imagine him flying out of the house altogether, leaving behind a shadow of his shadow who is no less dangerous than he is, flying away from our house to find our troubled oldest son, filling his head with thoughts he won’t be able to control, fillin
g his brain with hallucinations he won’t have to induce, imprisoning him forever where he is now imprisoned.

  I imagine the young man who is not quite our son and is far more than our friend, who lives much of the time in some other reality, who wants so desperately to believe himself alien, chosen, destined to change the world by sheer virtue of the fact that he is so lonely. He hears voices—I wonder if the voices in his head help him ignore his man on the ceiling, or if they are the voices of the man on the ceiling.

  Every night since that first night the man on the ceiling climbed down, I have followed him all evening like this: in my dreams, or sitting up in bed, or resting in a chair, or poised in front of a computer screen typing obsessively, waiting for him to reveal himself through my words.

  Our teenage daughter has night terrors. I suspect she always has. When she came to us a tiny and terrified seven-year-old, I think the terrors were everywhere, day and night.

  Now she’s sixteen, and she’s still afraid of many things. Her strength, her wisdom beyond her years, is in going toward what frightens her. I watch her do that, and I am amazed. She worries, for instance, about serial killers, and so she’s read and re-read everything she could find about Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Daumer, John Wayne Gacy. She’s afraid of death, partly because it’s seductive, and so she wants to be a mortician or a forensic photographer—get inside death, see what makes a dead body dead, record the evidence. Go as close to the fear as you can. Go as close to the monster. Know it. Claim it. Name it. Take it in.

  She’s afraid of love, and so she falls in love often and deeply.

  Her night terrors now most often take the form of a faceless lady in white who stands by her bed with a knife and intends to kill her, tries to steal her breath the way they used to say cats would do if you let them near the crib. The lady doesn’t disappear even when our daughter wakes herself up, sits up in bed, and turns on the light.