Bedtime Story

by Robert J. Wiersema

  Jacqui shook her head. “It’s just the way he’s manifesting the symptom.”

  “I think it’s more than that,” I repeated, trying not to get frustrated. “Look at how his eyes are moving. Doesn’t it look like he’s reading?”

  “Chris.”

  I stopped.

  “I’m going to get a coffee and stop by the ER to check in with Marla,” Jacqui said slowly. “Do you want anything?”

  I felt a rush of anger at the thought of her leaving, walking out when I was trying to explain, but then I recognized it for what it was: de-escalation. Cooling off.

  “Just a coffee’ll be fine,” I answered, not looking at her. “Thanks.”

  The curtain rattled as she left.

  I turned back to David, smiling down at him, hoping he could at least sense my presence.

  “Looks like it’s just the two of us again, sport,” I said. “So what should we do now?” I held the book up to him before I sat down. “A bit of a story?”

  I imagined him smiling the way he always did when it came time for stories at home. Teeth brushed, face washed, jammies on, tucked warmly into bed.

  I flipped through the pages. “It’s kind of tough,” I said, “not knowing where you left off. I don’t want to read you anything that you’ve already read—” Then louder, as I leaned back in the chair, “Well, how about this?” I settled on a page. “I think this is about where you finished. Looks like a good part, too.”

  Their arms tightened around him. If he didn’t do something soon, Dafyd feared they would drag him to the ground, swallow him.

  Summoning all his strength, he pushed himself forward, shaking from side to side to break loose. The apparitions held for a moment longer, then shredded apart, leaving Dafyd free and stumbling forward, falling at the foot of the wall.

  I looked up from the book. “Does that seem about right to you?”

  He didn’t answer, save with the twitching of his eyes, and the clenching of his hands. I continued.

  Turning, he saw the mist re-gathering itself into vaguely human shapes, arms reaching out for him once more, mouths crying out, “Stop, stop.”

  In seconds they would be on him again. He didn’t know if the Stone’s powers would protect him, but what other hope did he have?

  Pulling himself to his knees, Dafyd reached out for the Sunstone.

  David’s body jerked on the bed. His back snapped upward, his hands flying uncontrollably. A gasp escaped his mouth and I stood up, dropping the book to the floor.

  “What the hell?” David muttered, opening his eyes.

  It was dark and cold. And it felt like he was lying on the ground. Not in his bed. When he tried to roll over, his whole body protested, and there wasn’t even a hint of give to the cold surface beneath him.

  I thought it might be the beginning of another seizure, and I glanced at the curtain, wondering if I should call out for help, wishing that Jacqui was there. She always knew what to do.

  I was reaching for the call button, and just as quickly as it had come on, David’s body relaxed back onto the bed.

  I waited a moment. “Davy?” I whispered, touching his face, his arms, his hair, trying to soothe him. “David?” My mouth was dry, and I could hear the beating of my heart.

  It was a long time before I could sit back down. I pulled away slowly, tentatively, reluctant to break the contact between us. “You gave me a scare there.”

  I thought about calling a nurse, but he seemed back to normal. I’d let Jacqui know when she got back.

  I picked the book up off the floor. “Should I continue?”

  I would pause in my reading every so often to look at him. Something was different. It took me a couple of glances to determine what it was.

  His hands were now absolutely still on the hospital blankets, no clutching, no grasping. And his eyes had stopped flickering: he seemed to be staring directly upwards, focused unwaveringly on a spot somewhere in the middle distance.

  Like he was listening.

  The last thing David could remember was dropping the book on his bedroom floor, watching it fall away from his shaking hands in slow motion, trailing streaks of light. The blinding pain in his head. The taste of blood in his mouth, in his throat, choking him.

  But he also remembered stumbling, falling, almost burning himself with his torch, turning toward the stone wall, reaching out for the Sunstone, then a burst, almost like an electrical shock, his whole body shuddering, the smell of burning flesh.

  But that was the book. That was Dafyd, in the cave in the canyon.

  He had been in his room. Mom was downstairs. He could hear the tinny voices on the television. He had been in bed, holding the book, and his hands had started to shake, a headache coming on so fast he thought his brain might explode.

  But he had just come down the stone stairway into the chamber of the Sunstone. He had been attacked. The only thing that could save him was the Sunstone.

  No, that was the book again.

  Why was he remembering scenes from the book as vividly as he was remembering scenes from his own life? Was he sick? Sick in the head?

  Where was he?

  “Mom?” he croaked out, his mouth dry and tasting of metal. “Dad?”

  “Shh …” came a voice in the darkness, a cool, comforting hand on his forehead. “It’s going to be all right.”

  The voice sounded like it belonged to a child.

  Turning, looking up again, David saw that he was surrounded by the mist creatures who had attacked him.

  No, that was Dafyd they had attacked.

  Vaguely human in form, glowing faintly in the darkness, reaching out to him with long, misshapen hands.

  David screamed.

  When Jacqui got back to the room, Chris was sitting in the chair on the far side of the bed, reading aloud.

  He glanced up at her, and she shook her head slightly: he shouldn’t stop on her account.

  She listened to Chris read as she pulled the cups from the tray, not really paying attention to the words, but letting the rise and fall of his voice comfort her. It reminded her of home, of the old days, when she used to stand in the doorway of David’s room and listen to his storytime.

  When she glanced over at Chris, he gestured with his hand as he read that she should look at David. She looked at their son, then back at Chris, wrinkling her brow. What did he want her to look at?

  Chris lifted one hand from the book and pointed at his eyes; Jacqui leaned over, looked more closely at David’s face.

  His eyes were perfectly still, staring straight ahead.

  Chris’s voice rose slightly, his words coming a little more urgently. Things were building up in the story. And at the perfect moment, he stopped—Jacqui knew the sound of a cliffhanger when she heard one.

  He stood up as he finished reading. “He’s not moving his hands, either,” he said excitedly.

  “No, he’s—”

  “His eyes and his hands stopped moving when I was reading.” Chris was breathless.

  “That’s a good sign,” she said. “He’s probably responding to the sound of voices around him. It means—”

  “We’ve been standing here for two days, talking, and it’s never made any difference before.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Jacqui said. “Maybe he’s coming out of it. That he’s developing more awareness of …”

  She stopped.

  David’s eyes were moving. And the fingers on his right hand had started to twitch. She looked at Chris. He had noticed it too.

  Within a few seconds, the twitch had spread to his left hand. Then both hands jumped slightly off the bed, bending and grasping.

  David screamed and pulled himself across the stone floor, trying to get away from the long, grasping fingers of the mist creatures. They followed him, floating effortlessly through the dark room as he scraped and banged his hands and elbows on the rocks.

  “It’s all right,” one of the creatures said, the shape of a face emerging ou
t of the mist: a nose, the curve of a mouth, dark shadows where the eyes should have been. “We don’t want to hurt you.”

  It was the same childlike voice that had spoken to him before.

  David wasn’t falling for it. That was one of Darren Keneally’s favourite tricks, to pretend to be all friendly, and then just when David started to trust him, bam! And Darren would walk away laughing not only at what he had done, but at how stupid David had been for trusting him in the first place.

  David kept pulling himself away, trying to put as much distance as he could between himself and the mist creatures. But they kept coming, shifting like mercury as they floated through the air toward him.

  “Stop it,” he cried out.

  A moment later he backed hard into the wall of the cave, banging his head. He was trapped in the dark, pinned against the wall.

  I was running a little late: Jacqui had sent me home mid-afternoon, ordering me to take a nap. I had said I’d be back by eight, but it was almost nine by the time I got the van parked and took the elevator up to the ward.

  I pushed through the curtain and stopped. A nurse was leaning over David, gently withdrawing a needle from his left arm. He was restrained with wide leather straps at his arms and feet, blood on his face and on the sheet under him.

  It wasn’t the sight of the blood that stopped me, or of the straps.

  It was the sight of Jacqui pushed back into the corner. Her face was white as paper, but streaked with tears. Her eyes were wide, and when they met mine, she started crying again.

  I crossed the room and held her as she rose to her feet. She shuddered in my arms. I willed my heart rate to slow. I had never seen Jacqui like this, completely helpless, completely out of control. She was usually so level, so calm—it made me dread asking her what had happened.

  “I went out to talk to Judy. I talked to her, maybe a couple of minutes, and when I got back to the room …” She lowered her head, trying not to lose her composure again.

  “He was having another seizure?”

  She shook her head. “No. Not right then. I came back to the room and he—Just as I came through the curtain, he screamed.”

  “He screamed?”

  “I’ve never heard anything like it, Chris. It sounded—it sounded like he was in pain. And scared. Terrified.” Tears left silver streaks as they ran down her cheeks. “And then, he was out of control.” She shook her head. “His arms and legs … He tore out his IV.”

  She threw her head back and sniffed, trying to shake it off. “I rang for the nurse, but they were already coming. They’d heard him.”

  “Jesus.”

  “It took three people to restrain him so the nurse could give him a sedative.”

  “If he’s sedated …” Looking at the broad leather straps.

  “They’ve ordered him restrained, at least until they can run some more tests. They’re worried that he’s going to injure himself.”

  The blood on David’s arm, where the IV had pulled free, was drying on him like rust.

  “What can we do?”

  Jacqui shook her head.

  It wasn’t until hours later, flipping through the pages of David’s book, holding a solitary vigil while Jacqui tried to get some sleep at home, that the thought struck me: the seizure had come shortly after eight in the evening.

  Storytime.

  The twisted, misty fingers hung in the air in front of David’s face.

  “It’s just a dream,” he whispered, trying to convince himself. “It’s just a dream, it’s just a dream.”

  He pressed himself against the wall as hard as he could, turning his face away when he could go no farther. He flinched as he felt the cold tendrils touch his cheek.

  “It’s not a dream,” the voice said, and David choked back a sob.

  But the fingers weren’t reaching for his throat to choke him, or his eyes to gouge. They were stroking his cheeks, as if trying to comfort him.

  “Shh,” the voice said, as its fingers continued to brush against David’s face. “It’s all right.”

  “But, but …” David couldn’t even form full thoughts, let alone full sentences.

  “We’re not going to hurt you,” the voice said, with such sincerity that David almost believed it. Except …

  “You tried to kill me,” he said, his voice bouncing off the rock wall, surprisingly deep.

  “No,” the creature said simply.

  “When I was trying to get the Sunstone. When I—” David stopped himself.

  That wasn’t me.

  So why could he remember it so clearly?

  “No,” the voice said again.

  David half turned his head in time to see the face emerge from the mist again.

  “You tried to keep me from the Sunstone.”

  Him. To keep Dafyd from the Sunstone.

  The face was moving, as if the creature were lowering its head. “We tried to stop you from touching the Sunstone.” The misty lips moved to form the words. “We tried to save you.”

  IV

  DALE PARKED HIS VAN at the curb and stepped down, carefully balancing the cardboard tray of coffee. It was too early to be visiting anyone normal, but Chris made such a fuss about getting up at four every morning to write. He’d be awake.

  Or he would be, soon enough.

  He knocked heavily on the back door of the garage and waited in the silence, surveying the barbecue, the picnic table, the Adirondack chairs, the lawn in need of a mowing, then knocked again, a little more forcefully. The smell of the coffee made his stomach growl. He was about to knock again when he heard Chris on the stairs.

  He put on a smile when Chris opened the door, but the expression quickly receded. “Hey,” he said cautiously.

  Chris didn’t say anything, and held on to the doorknob with one hand.

  “I brought coffee.” Dale gestured with the tray. “It looks like you could use some.”

  Chris was pale and haggard, his shirt hanging loose, his hair messy and dirty. Dark circles around his eyes against the white of his face made him look like he was wearing a mask. He stepped to one side to let Dale enter.

  The apartment looked as rough as Chris did. Clothes were strewn across the floor, books and papers on every available surface, the air thick with the smell of cigarette smoke.

  He passed Chris a cup. “I thought you might be at the hospital.”

  “I came home a couple of hours ago. Nothing I could do there.” His voice was ragged.

  “So,” he said, looking pointedly around the room before letting his gaze settle on Chris. “I guess I don’t have to ask how you’re doing.”

  “Surviving,” Chris said as he sat down in the desk chair and gestured for Dale to take the Stickley-style reading chair.

  “Barely,” Dale said as he sat down. “You look like hell, actually.”

  “Thanks.” Chris tipped his cup toward Dale in a mock toast.

  “Have you slept? At all?”

  “A little bit,” Chris said, with a guarded tone that Dale knew meant he was lying.

  “Right,” he said. “How’s David?”

  Chris didn’t say anything for a moment. “He had another seizure. Last night, at about eight.”

  “Was it a bad one?”

  Chris nodded.

  “Is he okay?”

  Chris exhaled a sharp, sad laugh. “That’s the question, isn’t it. I’ve been going through my books—” He gestured at the table beside Dale, at the stack of home medical encyclopedias. The Merck Manual was on top of the pile. Since when did Chris have a Merck Manual? “And trying to find something online, but I can’t figure it out.”

  “You don’t need to figure it out, Chris,” Dale said, rattled by the pure desperation in his friend’s voice. “That’s what the doctors are there for. They’ll figure it out.”

  Chris sighed heavily.

  “What?”

  “I don’t …” He leaned back in his chair. “I’m not sure they will.”

  “Yo
u’re just tired,” he said. “You need to take care of yourself, and of Jacqui, and let the doctors take care of David.”

  Chris shook his head, fiercely and decisively, a look of frustration flashing across his face. “I don’t think they’re looking in the right place.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He reached past the laptop and picked up a book from the desk. “Ever since I gave him this for his birthday, David’s changed.”

  Dale took a sip from his coffee, avoiding looking at Chris.

  “I don’t know what happened. I liked it when he started reading, all on his own. You know how hard that is for him. But then he, I don’t know, he seemed to get obsessed with the book.”

  “And you think it had something to do with the seizure?”

  Chris ran his fingers through his dirty hair. “I know how stupid that sounds. I’ve been doing all this research … Reading doesn’t cause seizures. The brain doesn’t work like that.”

  Dale was about to speak, but Chris cut him off. “But I can’t help it,” he said, arguing against words that Dale hadn’t had a chance to speak. “I saw how the book was affecting him. I mean, come on, threatening a teacher? And now, when I read to him, he calms right down. He stops fidgeting, his eyes stop moving.”

  “His eyes?”

  Chris leaned forward excitedly. “His eyes. Even though he’s … unconscious … his eyes are moving. Back and forth, back and forth. It looks like he’s still reading.”

  He slumped back into the chair.

  “It’s not the book,” Dale said, quietly and carefully. “You need to get some sleep. You’re not going to do anybody any good if you’re too tired to even think straight.”

  “I know,” he said, nodding slowly.

  “Listen,” Dale said, standing up. “I’m gonna hang around here for a bit. Why don’t you crash for a while?”

  Chris looked at him for a long moment.

  “Seriously.”

  He smiled a grateful smile as he rose unsteadily to his feet and went to his room.

  Dale started to straighten up the apartment. He didn’t try to be quiet—it was probably better for Chris to have a reminder that he wasn’t alone. He avoided Chris’s desk, knowing better than to interfere with the organization of his work. He put mugs and glasses into the sink to soak, emptied the ashtrays and dumped the take-out containers that littered the counter. He threw the loose clothes into the laundry hamper and put out the overflowing garbage.