Inferno

by Ellen Datlow

  The only problem was Polly, standing in the doorway, screaming at him to make it stop. He tried to explain what was happening, but it was no good. She ran to the bed, gathered Jack up into her arms, and carried him from the room. Caleb sat there, appalled at what he had done. At what he had failed to do. The terror wasn’t Jack’s alone, he felt. It was his nightmare too.

  Throughout the day Caleb struggled with his fears, barely able to keep his mind focused on his students. Their demands oppressed him, their need for reassurance wore him down. He grew more irritable and short-tempered, so that for the final session of the day, forewarned by the morning’s students, fewer than half the afternoon group turned up. Afterwards, he sat alone for an hour in his office, trying to make sense of what was happening to him. The persistence of Jack’s nightmare scared him and his need to make sense of it had become an obsession. He had come to feel connected to it in some way, to believe that the key to deciphering it lay somewhere in his own past. All day he’d dredged his subterranean memories but had come up empty. As he left the building after six, he wondered if in fact he was afraid to probe too deeply. Maybe there was something there he wasn’t ready to deal with, some secret he didn’t want to discover about himself. He stopped in the Joiner’s Arms on the way home, but found neither relief nor pleasure in the two pints of Three Cliffs Gold he drank, nor in the company of the few regulars who acknowledged his presence but who, faced with his patent desire for isolation, left him to his fretful ponderings.

  Jack was watching TV in the living room when Caleb got home. He glanced in at his son then walked by the door and on through to the kitchen. Polly was reading a book at the kitchen table, sipping a glass of red wine. She looked up as he came in and managed an uneven smile. “You okay?” she said.

  Caleb shrugged, took a glass from the wall unit, and poured himself some wine. “How is he?”

  “Okay, I think. Keeps asking about you.”

  “What’s that?” he asked, meaning the book.

  She showed him the cover. It was called Children’s Minds. “Picked it up in town today. Thought it might help us figure out what’s going on with Jack.”

  “And does it?”

  “It helps me.”

  “I’m going to sit with him tonight,” Caleb said. “Watch him. I’ll try to wake him before it takes hold.”

  Polly frowned. “You really think that will help him?”

  “As much as that book.”

  She got up from the table and took his hand. “Caleb, can you be honest with me?”

  “I thought I was.”

  “About Jack, I mean. About why he’s so afraid for you.”

  “Jack’s not afraid of me,” Caleb said, agitated.

  “That’s not what I said,” Polly said, confused. “Jack’s afraid for you—not of you. Why? Have you told him something? Something you’re not telling me?”

  Her questions shook him, filled him with doubt. “Don’t—don’t be stupid.”

  “I’m not,” Polly said, her voice rising. “I’m scared for our son and I’m worried about you. You’re not yourself, Cale. Something’s eating you up.”

  “Please, Polly,” Caleb said, trying to hold himself together. “Don’t presume you know what’s going on in my head. Can you do that? Is it asking too much?” He didn’t wait for an answer but hurried upstairs where he stripped off his clothes and took a long, almost scalding shower, as if to burn away the stain of some long forgotten sin.

  Later, Caleb apologized to Polly and told her he’d look at the book she’d bought. Maybe it would help him understand what Jack was going through. After dinner, he went to his son’s room. Jack was already tucked up in bed, and despite the broad smile that crossed his face, Caleb could see none of his usual vitality and zest for life.

  “Mum said you’re going to stay.”

  He stood by the edge of the bed, feeling a sudden, intense pang of guilt. “That’s right,” he said. “Keep the bad dreams away.”

  “Are you going to read to me?”

  Caleb saw Wind in the Willows on the night table. He shook his head. “Not tonight.”

  “D’you read it when you were a boy?”

  “Yes, though I’d forgot most of it until I started reading it to you.”

  “D’you forget your dreams too, Dad?”

  Caleb stared at his son, not sure how to respond. He wanted to say the right thing, but he no longer knew what that was. “Most of them.”

  “Did you dream about—”

  “Ssshhh, Jack. Go to sleep.”

  Jack was silent a moment, his face troubled. Then, as if having plucked up the courage, he said, “Will I die if I dream at thirteen o’clock?”

  Caleb leaned over the bed and took hold of Jack’s hand. “No,” he said, squeezing. “There’s no such time as thirteen o’clock.”

  Jack nodded but seemed unconvinced. He reached up and kissed his father’s cheek. “I’m okay, Dad, really,” he said, but Caleb saw a wariness in his eyes.

  “I hope so, son,” he said, letting Jack’s hand fall. He moved to the window and sat in the armchair, watching as Jack turned on his side to face him. He’d brought Polly’s book upstairs, but after flicking through the first few pages, he let it fall to the floor and focused his attention on his son.

  He woke that night with the sound of screams still echoing in his head. Violent tremors shook his body as he crouched in the shadows, clenching his teeth to still their relentless chatter. A sickly, cloying dread hung in the air, and his flesh recoiled from its touch. Through the fog of dreams that swirled all round his semiconscious mind, he recognized Polly’s voice, splintered to a thin, fragile whisper. “Caleb,” she was saying, “what happened to you? Where have you been?”

  The stench of foam was in his nostrils, the taste of salt on his lips. “Poh-Polly?” he groaned.

  “Jesus, Cale.” Her arms were around him and he felt the heat from her body seep into his cold, damp flesh. “It’s okay, you had a nightmare.”

  He saw the darkness outside the kitchen window. He was crouched on the opposite side of the room, the slate tiles wet beneath him, and the distant pounding of surf reverberating in his head. Cyril cowered behind Polly, as if wary of him. “How did I get here?” he asked.

  Polly shook her head, her face drained of color in the pale light. “Something woke me and you weren’t there. I was going to Jack’s room when I heard you cry out down here.”

  “This can’t happen, Polly,” he said. “I—I can’t let it happen to him.”

  “What can’t happen, Cale?” Her gray eyes searched his face. He felt cut off from her, drifting beyond her zone of familiarity. “What are you talking about?” she said.

  He wondered at her inability to comprehend the vague shapes and shadows that flowed around him. Nothing he saw reassured him, not even her face. Her lips were moving but the words were drowned by the sound of the blood rushing through his brain. Someone had been outside, watching the house. Was he still there, waiting? For Jack? “Listen to me,” he said, trying to warn her, but there was something else too, something he needed to know. The shadows beyond Polly were melting into the floor.

  “It’s all right, Cale. It’s over.”

  She didn’t get it. The dream was there, but all scrambled in his mind. He’d seen this before. Years ago, he thought, when he was a child. The same nightmare Jack was having. A pitiful cry came from elsewhere else in the house.

  “Oh please no,” Polly whispered, rising to her feet.

  Instinctively, he grabbed her hand and said, “What time is it?”

  “It’s Jack,” she said, pulling away from him, heading toward the stairs.

  He realized what it was she’d heard. Jack was screaming upstairs. He struggled to get up from the floor. Heart pounding ferociously, he forced himself to look at his watch. It was twelve forty-five. Bad memories stirred inside him.

  Caleb looked out through the crack in the curtains, at the three-quarter moon hanging over Three Cl
iffs Bay and the mist rising silently up over the fields toward Penmaen. He leaned back in the armchair. Jack was sleeping. Polly had phoned the doctor again that morning, asked him to refer Jack to a child psychologist. Caleb knew it would do no good but he hadn’t stopped her. He’d wanted to tell her that only he could help their son, but fear, and a sense of his own weakness, had prevented him from articulating this certainty. What mattered was the hour in which Jack’s nightmare came. The same hour in which it had come to him when he was a boy. The thirteenth hour. How many times had it haunted his sleep thirty-odd years ago? That sense of uncertainty. A feeling of being apart from the world, an isolation that had filled him with absolute dread. Lying in bed at night clinging to consciousness, fighting to keep the terror of sleep at bay. At least until the hour was past and even then not letting himself fall all the way, anchoring one strand of thought to the shore of reason.

  It had withered inside him, he supposed. Withered but not died. He’d buried it deep down in the darkest recesses of his brain where it had lain in wait all these years till it had sensed the nearness of an innocent mind. The idea of it appalled Caleb. Every fiber of his reason screamed against the possibility. Yet he could no longer deny that his own childhood nightmare had transmigrated into the fertile ground of Jack’s unconscious.

  All day Caleb had thought about the nightmare, trying to collate his own hesitant memories against Jack’s fragmented rememberings of the dream. They had both sensed a presence outside, watching the house. Jack had heard the stranger calling out, but he said it sounded a long way away. Sometimes he was inside the house, in the hall or on the stairs. Jack had never seen the nightmare through to the end, and if Caleb had ever done so, he’d forgotten what he’d seen there.

  In the dim light, Caleb glanced at his watch. Eleven-thirty. Knowing that Jack would soon begin to dream, he prepared to abandon himself to the lure of sleep. Even as it tugged at his mind, he felt the stirring of a residual fear, urging him to resist. His eyes flickered open for a moment but darkness breathed over them, drawing them down. The strands of reason stretched one by one and snapped as he hovered a while on the edge of consciousness, before drifting across the border into the deep of dreams.

  Nothing moved in the room. The chill cloak of darkness made everything one and the same. Caleb held himself still, waiting. His hands hurt from gripping the arms of the chair and every nerve in his body strained for release. He listened, trying to shut out the pounding of his heart and the crackling white noise of nameless fears. Until, above the sound of his own terrible thoughts, he heard again a muffled footstep on the stairs. Silence again for a moment, followed by more footsteps, coming closer. He caught his breath as they stopped right outside the door. Where was Cyril, he wondered. Why wasn’t he barking? His flesh crawled as he waited for the sound of the door handle turning. Instead, the footsteps began to recede. He exhaled slowly, peering into the darkness where he imagined the door should be. He turned on the lamp. Dim light pushed feebly at the shadows, barely strong enough to reveal the open door, the empty bed.

  He choked back a cry and rushed out onto the landing. There was still time, he told himself. His breath misted in the chill, salty air. There were damp footprints on the stairs. Following them down, he felt the fear clawing at his back, wrapping him in its clammy embrace. The wet prints marched along the hall, through the kitchen, to the open back door. A shroud of mist hung over the garden. Caleb hesitated, his arms braced against the doorframe. His son was out there. “Jack,” he whispered, despairingly. “Please Jack, come home.”

  Hearing the dog bark out there, he forced himself to move, out across the crisp grass, which crunched underfoot. He went through the gate at the bottom of the garden, then turned and saw the house rising up out of the moon-yellowed mist. He felt a terrible loneliness and could barely keep himself from rushing back toward it. But he caught the sound of a soft voice calling to him. He hauled himself up over the ditch and ran on through the fields that sloped down into tangled woodland. He could no longer hear Cyril as he beat his way through trees and undergrowth, slipping and sliding on the soft earth, until finally he stumbled out onto the muddy banks of Pennard Pwll. He followed the stream as it meandered out of the valley into the bay. Above the rustling of the water, he could hear his son calling to him.

  Impatient, he stepped into the stream, wading across the gushing, knee-high water. He stumbled over a rock, fell and picked himself up again. “Jack,” he cried, as he struggled up onto a sandbank. Some distance ahead and to his left he saw the three witch-hat peaks that gave the bay its name clawing the night sky through the mist. Having got his bearings, Caleb raced across the sand toward the sea, energized by the blood pumping through his veins. The jaundiced mist billowed around him as he splashed into the wavelets lapping the shore. He waded out deeper, ignoring the current that tugged insistently at his legs. He beat at the mist with his arms, trying to open up a space through which he might spy his son. The sea was perishing, forcing him to snatch shallow, ragged breaths. One moment it was swirling around his waist, the next it was surging up to his chest. The mist seemed to be thinning out and he caught glimpses of the moon up over Cefn Bryn. A wave swamped him, leaving him treading water. The current began to drag him away from the shore. “Jack, please,” he called frantically, as he tried to keep his head above the surface. Another wave washed over him and when he came up he could see clearly out into the bay. The sea sank its bitter teeth into his flesh. He was swimming hard now, just to stay afloat. He was growing weaker but still he searched for his son, chopping through the moon-silvered water, all the time following the sound of a voice, his own voice, but distant and younger, calling to him from out of a long-forgotten nightmare. More water poured into his mouth as he went under again, still fighting. He rose in time to hear a distant church bell strike the hour. At one, there was still hope. At two, it began to fade. He heard the thirteenth strike as a muted sound beneath the surface, a strange echo of the pressure of the sea filling his lungs.

  It seems like dawn, or maybe dusk. He has difficulty now, telling the time of day. It seems to be always twilight. But still he waits for them, anticipating the moment, imagining a different outcome this time. But when they appear in the garden, the desperate longing he feels is as overwhelming as it always was. Jack looks bigger, more filled out. He must be ten, at least. Color reddens Polly’s cheeks again, and the small lines around her eyes signify acceptance more than sorrow. He wonders what that means. He places a hand on the garden wall and as he does so, the house recedes a little, as if wary of him. He calls out their names and for one second, Jack looks up and stares directly at him. “Jack,” Caleb cries out again, waving to him. “I’m here.” For another moment, Jack continues to look his way, shielding his eyes from the sun. But then he turns and as Caleb looks down in despair, he sees no shadow on the garden wall, only sunlight falling right through the place where he stands.

  Lives

  JOHN GRANT

  John Grant (real name Paul Barnett) is the author of more than sixty books, of which about one-third are novels. His The Encyclopedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters is regarded as the standard work in its field. As coeditor, with John Clute, of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, he received the Hugo Award, the World Fantasy Award, and several other international awards. He received his second Hugo in 2004 for The Chesley Awards: A Retrospective (with Elizabeth Humphrey and Pamela D. Scoville). As managing editor of the Clute/Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, he shared a rare British Science Fiction Association Special Award.

  Recently published books, all written as John Grant, include the “book-length fiction” The Stardragons (illustrated by Bob Eggleton), the novel The Dragons of Manhattan, the children’s book Life-Size Dragons, and the nonfiction Discarded Science. His story collection, Take No Prisoners, was published in 2004. The editor of the recent anthology New Writings in the Fantastic, he is currently at work on an encyclopedia of film noir and a “story-cycle,” Leavi
ng Fortusa, while awaiting the imminent publication of the nonfiction book, Corrupted Science.

  1

  We are waiting for Christopher to get home. Sipping wine around the kitchen table, Alice and I are just at the stage of starting to get worried. He’s all right, we say to each other occasionally, betraying our concern that there might be something wrong. He’s all right: Dick Charters will have picked Chris and Harry up okay from after-school drama practice, it being neighbor Dick’s turn this week to fetch the two nine-year-olds. Maybe the traffic’s hellish. Maybe Dick’s run out of gas—wouldn’t be the first time he’s done that—and even now they’re waiting for the rescue vehicles. Something like that.

  Still, it’s after nine o’clock, and we’d expected Christopher home by seven … .

  The phone rings and it’s Marian Charters, Dick’s wife, Harry’s mom. Do we know where they are?

  Alice, who was the one to pick up the phone, tells Marian to come over to our place—help us with the wine while we’re waiting for the truants, why doesn’t she?

  Marian says yes, and she’s with us within ten minutes. Before she gets here we’ve opened another bottle of wine and swiftly knocked back a glass apiece to pretend we haven’t.

  As usual I pretend not to notice that Marian’s very pretty. Alice is watching me to make sure I’m not noticing.

  Twenty minutes later, a ring at the doorbell.

  That’s them, announces Marian, a slight drawl in her voice. Anxiousness has shoehorned her swiftly into a state of minor inebriation.

  But it’s not them; it’s a man and a woman in blue, with faces as long as empty roadways.

  A drunk started driving his SUV on the wrong side of the freeway. Took out four cars, another SUV, and a plumber’s van before swerving right off and hitting a tree. Seven dead including the drunk driver. Three of the dead—an adult and two children—in the burned-out wreck of a blue Neon registered to Richard G. Charters, Jr. The cops called first at Dick’s and Marian’s home, and were sent here by a neighbor … .