Escaping Midnight (What Goes On in the Walls at Night Book 3)

by Andrew Schrader

  Which leaves me to hang out with myself. I’ve made a few friends, but what I really enjoy in Los Angeles is the library. Being a history nut, I decided a couple weeks ago to research the history of this neighborhood. There’s a lot of information about its development, but almost none about my particular street. After digging through half a dozen books and browsing the Internet, I did find one source that actually mentioned my house. It was quite interesting.

  It said that one of the original animators for The Company lived at my address. (Sorry, I can’t give that to you. You might be creepy and strange, and even though I might not be here soon, and most of you wouldn’t want to come anyway, some of you would, and only the complete psychos would really do it.) He had the house built specifically for him and his family, and it’s as eccentric as he apparently was. First of all, it’s two stories, but the top, where the attic is, is built like a citadel or something, so it ends in a point, like it’s reaching straight up to the sky. Looks like a wizard’s hat. And the shingles are all misshapen, on purpose, resembling a fantastical home. Same with the sides of the house. Even the door is slanted, purposefully. The whole place has a whimsical quality to it.

  But it’s also dark and strange, like an old movie you love because it’s magical but also a bit creepy. Like it has the potential to be both good and bad, if such a thing exists.

  There’s all these nooks and crannies, too, that I didn’t discover until recently. Like when I was rearranging my bedroom, sliding my dresser to the other side of the room, when I stumbled and knocked into the wall opposite my small walk-in closet. I wasn’t sure I’d fit in the hole. Then my face got all hot, even though I was alone. I pulled my jacket tighter over my stomach. It was easier to hide from myself that way. Voices, in my brain. Calling me out for potentially being wider than the hole.

  I shook my head. The voices left. That was good. They usually do if I just breathe and envision them cascading out of my mouth on each exhale.

  ::buries head in fat arms in total shame::

  I went feet-first into the tunnel, shimmied my way until it turned downward, and lowered myself in, half-sitting, half-sliding until I hit bottom. Ahead of me, the tunnel looked like it opened up. I shifted my legs behind me and crawled a few feet until I entered a tiny room.

  I shined my light to the left.

  Sitting atop a ledge was a small child, eyes like dinner plates, with a strange grin, staring at me.

  Chapter Two

  Okay, it wasn’t a child. But I thought it was, which is why I grabbed its arm and dragged it out of there.

  After I’d climbed out of the tunnel and closed the secret door in my bedroom, I sat the wooden thing across from me on my dresser. Its head was smooth and shiny, with painted face and hair and clothes and hands. It had no movable joints, kind of like a marionette. Its eyes were wide, the lashes long, the smile tight-lipped. It was eerie and strange.

  Yes, of course it was a man.

  And it looked a little . . . off. Not like a doll you’d buy in the store. It felt more like a prototype or something, like a proof of concept that animators or designers might create to show that a character “works.” If you’re confused, don’t worry about it, it’s just an industry thing.

  And what was this tunnel that went nowhere inside my house? I checked the floor plans, the building history—every document we had—but I couldn’t find any answers.

  So I decided to sleuth some more.

  In the bottom drawer of my parents’ hideously massive file cabinet, I found one historical record that mattered: information about the first owners. In the 1920s, Bill B. was a character designer for The Company. Like many employees at these places, he’s not mentioned in company documents, and the general public wouldn’t have a clue who he was. Most entertainment jobs are like that. People are faceless, nameless, and the most talented ones, Dad says, never see anything close to fame.

  Bill B. had a wife and two daughters. They lived here until 1946. After that, the house was sold to a few other families, which made us the fifth to live here.

  I was still absorbed in the material when I heard the door open. I rubbed my eyes and looked at the time. 9:03 p.m. Quickly, I replaced the files and met Dad at the doorway.

  Huge bags hung under his red eyes. He looked ridiculous, honestly, more like a cartoon character than a person. He sat and drank a beer. I took the opportunity to show him the doll. He set it on his lap, stared at it for a minute.

  Then, his face brightened and his frown broke. “It’s perfect,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “One of the characters in the movie isn’t going to work. But this little guy could be great.”

  I didn’t think much of it at the time; I just shrugged and brought Dad his dinner, pleased that he seemed happier. And when I turned back from the hallway on my way to bed, he was holding the doll in his lap and was petting its shiny head, with an odd smile on his face.

  Chapter Three

  Thump.

  I opened my eyes. The neon numbers on the alarm clock read 3:16 a.m.

  Thump.

  Sitting up, I looked at my bedroom door. Listened closely. There it was—another thump. But not like something hitting against a wall. Something else.

  I crawled out of bed, careful not to make the old floorboards creak, crouched on my hands and knees, and peeked under the door, where I could see a little glow from the night light shining down the hallway.

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  A shadow passed under the door.

  I froze. Why didn’t I open it? Later I would yell at myself for that. I was too scared.

  I was probably dreaming, I decided later.

  There’s no way that doll could have been walking down the hall.

  The next morning, I emerged from my bedroom in time to see Dad off for work. He carried the doll under his arm and left. I felt better knowing it was out of the house.

  Nothing weird happened after that, for the next couple nights at least. No strange thumps during the night. I even forgot about the door in the wall.

  I went to school, tried to get to know other kids. They’re nice enough, but I’ve always felt different from . . . well, everyone. Besides, I don’t know about these L.A. girls. They’re all so skinny. Also, by the time you’re seventeen it seems harder to make new friends. I was always a bit of an introvert, and being the new girl doesn’t help. I tried not to let it bother me and shoved the terrible voice in my head down, down, down somewhere dark and deep.

  Alright, I admit it, I was lonely.

  I got the courage to ask a girl in biology class, Melinda, to hang out after school. She was cool. She liked to climb in those indoor rock-climbing gyms, and she wore ripped jeans, which made me feel like she didn’t care about fashion the way the others did. When the other girls wore ripped jeans, it was a fashion statement. But Melinda genuinely had no interest. I liked that.

  We went to the mall in Burbank. It’s kind of a consumerist hellhole, but there’s a bookstore. Plus, it’s air conditioned. We had fun trying on clothes and spying on boys in the food court. We played a game called “Who would you rather?” which is pretty self-explanatory. You just compare two boys and ask each other who’d you rather do bad things with. You have to explain why, of course, you can’t just say this guy or that guy and not give a reason. It’s fun to argue with each other.

  Anyway, we were sitting there and something caught my attention. I hid, reflexively.

  “What is it?” Melinda asked, sucking down a soda.

  “My dad!”

  “Huh?” She turned and watched him walk into a nearby hair salon. “Why are you hiding?”

  Good question. I didn’t know. It was instinctual, I guess. I wasn’t sure what to tell her. For some reason it just felt right to hide.

  He was walking funny, like he couldn’t bend his legs at his knees too well. Also, there was something strange about his—

  “Does his hair look weird to you?” I asked as I wat
ched him through the storefront window.

  Melinda squinted. “It looks like he buzzed one side or something.”

  “He didn’t buzz it. He’d never do that. Wait, what’s he buying?”

  “Not sure.” She smiled at me. That devious girl. “I’ll check.”

  She hustled out of the food court, entered the salon, and pretended to study a shampoo bottle as the cashier rang up my dad. After he’d gotten his receipt, he left the mall. I turned away so he wouldn’t see me.

  Melinda puttered back, a confused look on her face. “He was buying spray-on hair.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. Like, uh, hair you spray on. He doesn’t normally use that, right? That stuff’s gross.”

  “No. I don’t think so. Mom likes to play with his hair. Or, she did.”

  “She’s not gonna do that anymore.” Melinda munched on a french fry.

  I frowned. She was right about Mom. Even before this hair thing, my parents hadn’t seemed to be getting along so well. Not since we’d moved. She was in Vegas for a real estate convention for the next week or so, so I couldn’t joke with her about Dad’s . . . spray-on hair? So bizarre.

  Melinda burped, finishing her soda.

  We had some more fun playing “F, Marry, Kill” while watching a new crop of boys stroll in, but the whole time I felt super uneasy, like I had seen my father doing something really bad, something he wouldn’t want me or Mom to know about.

  As it turns out, I was right.

  Chapter Four

  The ticking clock read 10:30 p.m. I’d finished my homework and taken a bath, and was carrying my plate of cheese and crackers into the living room so I could watch some horrible television alone.

  Why are there so many shows about people who are famous for no reason? I’ve never understood it. We might as well be watching the life of a grocery store clerk. I’d watch that. Think of the nonsense they have to put up with. Customers demanding the chocolate-covered Twinkies that were discontinued years ago, for example. Getting really angry about it, too. Screaming, spit flying from their red faces . . . Maybe that doesn’t sound interesting to you. I guess rich people are fun to watch in their own way. I just prefer real people.

  Still, I couldn’t deny it would have been nice to be rich and famous. Life seems so easy for them. It doesn’t matter if they “fit in” because everyone else is trying to fit in with them. They make the rules. That sounds fantastic.

  The credits for some “Real Housewives” show had begun rolling when Dad walked in. It was dark in the entryway—just one dim bulb lit the door—but I could see he had what appeared to be a full head of hair.

  It just looked a little shiny. Greasy.

  ::shudders in utter disgust::

  He tossed his keys onto the small table next to the door. His movements looked stilted, jerky.

  “Hey, Bunny,” he said awkwardly.

  He turned his entire upper half—from his waist—and stared at me straight on. I tried not to gasp when he stood in the light. Besides the spray-on hair on the right side of his head, there was—

  “Dad, what’s wrong with your eye?”

  “Nothing. What’s wrong with yours?” That was a dad joke.

  “It looks like you got beat up.” I stood. “Here, let me see—”

  He yawned, waved me off, and hustled on stiff legs down the hall to the bedroom. “I’m beat, Lydia. Long day. Didn’t even have lunch. We’ll catch up tomorrow.”

  Boom. The door shut. And locked.

  ::stares dumbfoundedly at the wall for three-and-a-half minutes while contemplating Dad’s flat, wooden-ass head::

  I called my mom.

  “Sorry, honey, I know I’ve been out of touch. I’ll be back on Saturday. How’s school?”

  We talked for ten minutes. I felt sad. I wanted to tell her about Dad, but what was I supposed to say? Hey Mom, Dad is using spray-on hair and he’s looking weird and won’t talk to me and I have one friend and isn’t that cool and oh there’s this doll and you have to come home right now because I’m freaked out but don’t know why—

  I hung up and got ready for bed.

  Maybe I’d feel better in the morning, I thought.

  That’s a laugh.

  Little did I know, I’d feel much, much worse.

  Chapter Five

  That night. 2:47 a.m. A scratching sound ripped me from my sleep.

  ::rolls over, half-awake, nearly loses her shit::

  My father was crawling, belly-down, toward the secret door.

  I watched his dim outline tap on the wall. The door opened. He half-crawled, half-wriggled into the hole, head-first.

  The door gently shut behind him.

  I must be dreaming.

  But I wasn’t.

  My father had just slithered across my floor in the middle of the night and through a secret door in the wall.

  I froze. Was it my father, or was it someone else?

  It had to be him. Who else would come into my house?

  Who else even knew about the door?

  Come to think about it, no one knew. Only I did.

  And . . .

  No.

  The dummy knew about it.

  But that’s impossible, I told myself. The dummy wasn’t alive. It couldn’t see or think or hear, or even know that it had been taken out of its compartment.

  Besides, what was I even saying? This was my father, not the doll. He must have known about the door in the wall and, and . . .

  Nothing made any sense.

  I set my feet down and tiptoed out of my room. I needed to check Dad’s room and make sure he wasn’t in there. If he wasn’t, that meant he was in the tunnel. If he was in his room, then we for sure had some problems: namely, that someone else was in my house.

  I pushed open his bedroom door.

  His bed was empty.

  So he really was down there.

  What are you going to do now? Go back to bed, pretend to sleep, waiting and chattering your teeth, hoping to God or whatever might be out there that your dad hasn’t lost his goddamn mind?

  I decided to march into my bedroom, fling open that door, and yell: What are you doing, Daaaaad? I could even be annoying about it. Yeah, that’s it. Be like a kid. The kid you are.

  I stomped into my bedroom, strode to the back wall, flung open the secret door—

  “Don’t go down there.”

  I whipped around. Dad was sitting in my rocking chair, the one I’d had since I was four. Under any other circumstance his sitting in it might have been comical. But right now, I didn’t see the humor.

  Because the yellow night-light plugged into the outlet next to the rocking chair lit his face from underneath.

  It looked like someone had taken a rough eraser to the right side of his dome. Little strands of hair clung to his skull like climbers on a cliff, but most of his head was just red, splotchy skin. He seemed to have no right cheekbone.

  Like that side of his face was painted on.

  “You don’t want to go down there,” he repeated. “It’s not safe. I’m gonna seal it up.” He motioned to the door in the wall. “I couldn’t sleep. Figured it was a good time to check it out.” He rubbed his temples. His voice was low, gravelly.

  “Dad, your face—”

  “Oh, that. I’ll go to the doctor’s. Maybe next week, we’ll see.”

  “Can’t you go tomorrow?”

  He stood. “I’ll get it done, don’t worry.”

  He hugged me and then went to bed.

  I froze.

  If I hadn’t felt what I felt, I’d have just thought I’d been making too big a deal about this whole thing. Dad is having some weird health problem, I’d have thought. He was only going into that tunnel to check it out for himself. He couldn’t sleep and thought that it might be a good time to do it. Fine.

  But here’s the thing. He was wearing a ski jacket. Which was odd, but with everything else going on I hadn’t given it much thought. Then we hugged, and I felt something
beneath the layers of clothing.

  And when he turned to leave, I caught a glimpse of the thing underneath it.

  The little arm.

  The little wooden arm.

  That was growing out of his side.

  Chapter Six

  You don’t need me to tell you it is not normal for daughters to try and sneak a peek at their dads in the shower. There are just some things you don’t want to know.

  But how could I ignore what I’d felt and seen?

  I felt the doll there. It was right against his skin. But how the hell could it be growing out of his side?

  I know that my imagination can get a wee bit away from me. Like when I was four and thought I could fly. Didn’t work out so well. My arm was in a cast for weeks.

  Being alone most of the time doesn’t help either. You get really weird when your only companions are YouTube or Snapchat personalities. It warps your mind. It has to. Like, you start seeing the real world through the filter of whatever you’re feeding yourself.

  And given that I listen to a lot of conspiracy and horror podcasts, I’m the first to admit it when my thinking gets wonky.

  But I don’t think that’s what was happening.

  I wanted to tell Melinda, but I didn’t know her well enough just yet. Even if I had, I probably wouldn’t want to admit something like this.

  Something this strange.

  Dad’s behavior didn’t help dissuade me, either. He started leaving the house really early from then on. Like four or five in the morning. I didn’t see him at all the next few days.

  All of this added up to me wondering if I’d lost my freaking mind a little.

  No. I knew something was definitely wrong. Even if Dad wasn’t “merging” or whatever with the doll, what was he really doing in my room? His explanation just didn’t make any sense.