13 Tales To Give You Night Terrors (3 page)

My gran used to worry about
the thickness of my glasses and the way I squinted. Said I’d be a
spooky kid. Said I was destined to be a nosey parker forever, amen.
Said I was going to be one of
those
people; the ones who dream and watch, on and on,
ad infinitum. I dream and I watch, sure. I dream and I watch some
very dark things, especially since the new package arrived: the
black book.

I type the words and read
the pages from sun up ’til sundown, the light leaves me and the
room is dark. A cat strolls past under the desk, his patchy fur
tickling my bare legs. A screen, a square of pitch perfect light
interrupted by tiny ramblings, a window. My fingers, illuminated
against the glare of the screen in a silent place, dance across a
keyboard and the words lie across the screen: a series of promises
and observations and suddenly the room is cooler. But then, I’ve
never written about a book like
this
before. Never seen pages like
this or words so savagely scored into the deep pile of age-old
pages.

A breath tickles the inside of my
thigh. I blush. Now I’m warm, it’s stuffy, the breeze is tailored
to me alone. Something could be amiss but the words keep going down
as the cat makes another pass.

Behind me the dark is noisy: black
like velvet, thick like molasses, insincere and not really here.
There’s few reasons to be afraid of the dark but silence is one of
them. The computer screen disappears for an instant, my eyes bulge,
and the vision goes red around the rings, the letters stay but the
page is elsewhere. I can’t remember what I’m writing as the room
goes pitch dark for a second and then the noisy little island of
computer-light flashes back in view—but wait.

The flash gets nostalgia dripping into
places it hasn’t for years. I remember that I’m not even getting
paid much to translate this thing, and my name won’t appear
anywhere for it. I remember I should really change my plaster
because the blood is still flowing from where I cut my wrist on the
book’s ragged brass fringe. I remember the shapes of blood on the
book and the warning that followed. The smell of decay.

I remember I don’t have a cat and
haven’t since I was six.

I carry on typing, not
wanting to stop for a millisecond because I honestly don’t want the
silence. Tears sting my eyes and a wet patch on my neck tickles
cold down the nerves of my spine. I don’t have a cat and haven’t
for
years
. Again
it rubs past my leg, this time harder. I hit the keys as the thing
thumps me lightly and I notice for the first time the deadly cold
and a smell like mould. Something awful is happening. There are few
reasons to be afraid of the dark but silence is one of them because
you never know what you
might
hear.

I locked the door. That much is sure.
The windows are shut tight. The room smells like the cigarette
burning in real-time off to the right. From the pitch blackness a
tiny orange light flickers, its glow trailed off in a thin strand
of smoke. I imagine the smoke up in the dark, circling my head,
dancing around something awful on the ceiling, something with too
many legs and not enough teeth. I panic and write, type viciously
and think inconclusively. I dream and I watch.

The door is
locked—definitely locked—and the room isn’t big at all. Five by
five metres, tops. I heard nothing, so no one entered. Besides,
this doesn’t seem like a no-
one.
My breath catches in my throat as the silence is
barely punctuated by the
tap tap
tap
of the keys
.
This is all nonsense. There is
nothing under the desk. My tongue scrapes across the roof of my
mouth like sandpaper, so I go to grab my glass of water while
repeatedly typing something with my left hand.

The sound is a blessing.
Press your ear to a wall, any wall, then you’ll hear the beating of
your own heart. Every time. In the dark everything is amplified and
the sounds, wishfully, become
you
. The alternative is too
terrifying. The rustle of feet, the beating of a pulse, whispering.
Talking is the hardest to forgive. Two people talking has the
essence of normality. One person talking aloud in the other room,
when there’s no one in, now
that
almost hurts to hear.

The glass is gone. Did I even put it
there?

I type something quick and
short with my right hand and fumble to the left. Under the noise of
the keys
something
sniffs
. It’s nothing.

No, not there either. I
gasp as the hairy bump comes again, only this time it feels solid,
a statement rather than a suggestion. I panic and I whimper, then
bite my lip and swear silently. Whatever it is may just leave me
alone. Maybe it doesn’t know I’m real. Of course, that’s bullshit,
because I’ve spent the past hour yawning, typing, and shuffling in
my seat. I think I even reached a hand down to stroke
it
earlier. Actually,
come to think, my hand feels sticky and it’s too dark to see what
colour the mess on the keyboard is.

Who knows how long this thing has been
waiting? Waiting to be read. Still, for all my attempts at
subtlety, I type mercilessly and will for a long time because I am
dreamed and I am watched. My gran used to say I’d stick my nose
somewhere I shouldn’t have and she was too damn right. The pale
pages on the table beside me—I can just see them in the dull
light—are spattered with black lines. I reach a hand out to flip
the cursed pages.

I just about scream when a grunt comes
from my feet. A heavy muffled din like an angry pig in a sack, the
sort of noise you pray not to hear in the dark, and its right there
in front of me. A slurping noise follows soon, but I block it out
with harder tapping, my fingers crushing the little black keys like
flies. It’s there, as muffled as the grunting but more unsettling.
When you’ve decided you’re petrified, your own brain goes one step
further and tries to rationalise the terror with images and ideas.
Ideas and guesses, condemnations and fuel for the raging fire. But
they never help. Something really reeks and I think it’s the book.
Maybe something came from its pages to be dreamed and watched for
the first time in years.

I clench my teeth and wait for it to
chew on my toes or lick my foot. I’m prepared for a cold sticky
tongue to drag up my hairy leg. I wait, but it never comes, so I
summon the courage to dart a hand over to my lamp, while furiously
hammering the letters within reach.

Shit. I knock the lamp and
it falls noisily to the floorboards, its wire knocking loudly
against the leg table like this:
tick,
tick, tick
. A wire must come loose because
it flickers on and off erratically. Within seconds I have a beating
head and throbbing eyes. Moments of utter blindness are followed by
dazzling light. I’m on a bungee cord between Heaven and Hell and it
hurts so bad I’d like to stay in Purgatory. From above I must be a
pitiful sight, naked and pale shuddering in front of a lamp in a
tiny room, a big and blood-drenched volume on the nightstand beside
me.

I chance a look at the book and
there’s a sketch of me, vague and doodled.

A stop-motion shadow scurries over the
wall, gargling and grunting as it scampers. There’s scratching on
the boards behind me, and then something darts between my legs,
back under the desk where it makes me sick to think. I decide to
sit back in my seat and take a peak under.

Too dark to tell. Too dark to be sure.
The table smells like old book and the walls look printed. My
clothes reek of mulch and there’s writing on my arms. The book has
disappeared now, and something rustles its gorged pages somewhere.
In the next room a man’s voice mutters as the walls ooze venom.
Everything is futile now. Yet, with the next pulse of fractured
light, I throw the chair back and make for the door, ignoring the
signs that I am dreamed and I am watched, ad infinitum.

3. BLACK
HOLES

Erin Callahan, United
States

“
MARISOL?
Marisol, can you hear me?”

Marisol didn’t realize right away that her
eyes were open. Her eyelids fluttered as she inhaled the sterile
scent of the hospital. Her pupils shrank and expanded in quick
succession, sucking up the room’s fluorescent light, struggling to
focus on the face in front of her.

Mid-forties. White. Female.
Underfed. Overtired.

The face frowned and Marisol heard the stuffy
click of a pen.

“
Reflexes intact,” the face
intoned. The
scritch-scritch-scritch
of note taking grated on
Marisol’s ears.

Another woman swept toward Marisol and the
doctor.
Approaching retirement. Also
white. Overfed and over-caffeinated.
“She’s
okay?”

“
We’ll have to monitor her for
signs of a concussion,” the doctor said. “And I’ll send a resident
to stitch up that laceration by her eyebrow.”

The woman breathed an exaggerated sigh of
relief. “Oh, thank god.” She leaned toward Marisol with a
freshly-bleached smile on her face. “Hello, sweetie. Do you have a
wittle headache?”

The hospital’s antiseptic tang was replaced by
the stench of coffee breath. Marisol’s empty stomach turned. “Who
the fuck are you? And why are you talking to me like I’m a
toddler?”

The woman bristled, her face puckering with
shock. At this moment, Marisol realized she knew only three simple
facts about herself.
My name is Marisol.
I’m fifteen years old. I was in a car accident.
She
blinked away fresh memories of glass shattering into the
night.

The woman turned to the doctor. “Are you sure
she’s okay? She doesn’t recognize me and she’s
acting…odd.”

The doctor pursed her lips. “A degree of
memory loss is common with mild head trauma. It’s rarely permanent,
though it can be very disorienting.”

The woman leaned toward the gurney again,
plastering that toothy smile back on her face and filing Marisol’s
nose with her godawful breath. “You really don’t remember me? Do
you remember the accident?”

More glass shattering into jagged pebbles. The
squeal of tires. A man’s shrill, unearthly scream. “I’m not
answering any questions until you tell me who you are.”

The woman retained her smile, but the
worry-lines deepened on her face. “I’m Lorna. Your social
worker.”

“
Social worker? What am I, some
kind of charity case? Where are my parents?”

Lorna’s lips, shellacked in cheap drugstore
pink, twisted into the corner of her mouth.

No parents. At least, not any that
matter.

Marisol’s chest tightened and her heart pumped
jittery adrenaline through her limbs. The pain dulled by the shock
of waking up in a strange place with a mind like Swiss cheese
finally blossomed in her skull. Her left temple throbbed, sending a
wave of nausea into her parched throat. The gurney felt like a
starched coffin, demanding she lie still.

Her vision blurred as she forced her head
upward. Pain streaked across the left side of her face, down into
her neck, almost knocking the wind out of her lungs. Both Lorna and
the sleep-deprived doctor tried to stop her, but she fought them
off. She couldn’t remember standing up, but suddenly found herself
bolting down the hall, shielding her eyes from the florescent
lights.

Someone screamed her name, but it wasn’t Lorna
or the doctor. The sound filled Marisol’s throbbing left ear with
dread, dredging up more snippets of the accident. The same man
whose unearthly shriek had pierced the quiet hum of tires a
nanosecond before the car swerved left and tumbled over the
guardrail… He was trying to get her attention. She stumbled toward
his voice, vaguely aware he’d been driving the car.

“
Are you okay? Please tell me
you’re okay.” The man’s bloodshot eyes brimmed with desperation.
Marisol gazed at the IV pumping clear fluid into his arm and
another wave of nausea rolled through her.

The man grabbed her arm, his hands smooth
against her dark skin.
A
pencil-pusher
.
Late-twenties.
High-strung. Allergic to everything.

“
Mari,” he breathed. “You saw him,
right? You must have. I’m not crazy, am I?”

Marisol shook her head in a futile attempt to
clear the fog. The high-strung young professional took her gesture
as a no and his neatly trimmed nails dug into her skin. She took
two steps back, trying to pull away, but he held fast and followed
her, groaning and turning ashen as he pushed himself up off the
gurney.

“
I’m not crazy,” he repeated. His
pupils dilated, but Marisol couldn’t tell if it was from fear,
anger, or painkillers. “Tell me you saw him.” His voice cracked and
he wobbled on his feet, leaning into Marisol for
support.

“
Saw who?”

“
The boy,” he croaked. “He came out
of nowhere, like he teleported into the middle of the goddamn road.
I thought for sure we were going to hit him. But he just…grinned.
Then he was gone. Poof.”