Night Terror (5 page)

9

AUDREY STOOD ON THE BACK PORCH
staring out across the garden. Richard was taking an afternoon nap. She had halfheartedly tried to talk him into going to work, but he didn’t want to leave her alone yet, and, to tell the truth, she wasn’t ready to be.

Doctor Burton seemed certain the pain that had assaulted Audrey hadn’t been caused by anything physical, but the memory of the unbearable agony frightened her, and in her mind the pain was tied to her garden. The memory of it was as powerful a deterrent as the grief it had replaced. But she had to face her fear somehow. She wasn’t going to live the rest of her life afraid to cross her own backyard.

Steeling herself, she took two cautious steps onto the lawn. Her tools still lay beside her overturned bucket. If nothing else, she needed to put them away. That thought gave her a purpose, and she strode over and gathered up her claw and trowel. Turning full circle in the bright sunlight, she inhaled deeply. The smell of lilac relaxed her a little. No pain struck like a knife and slowly the tightness in her chest began to ease.

The day was as clear as sunlight could make it. A beetle crawled slowly across the leaves of a small rhododendron and high overhead a couple of ravens twirled in a springtime mating dance. There was nothing here for her to fear.

The ring-wraiths were gone. No demons in the alders. There was only the age-old horror she carried with her like a second skin.

A splash caught her attention.

A frog must have gotten into the small concrete fountain that was the centerpiece of the back garden. Richard had constructed the little pool for her two years before. He’d run underground power to it and they could flip a switch in the kitchen to turn on lights and pumps. Eventually it was intended to feed a false stone-lined stream running the length of the garden, but events had curtailed construction.

She set her bucket down and knelt beside the fountain that was barely wider than a bathtub. A circular pattern of ripples flattened back into its murky surface. If the splash was caused by a frog, the creature had chosen a poor place to live. The pool was scummy with algae and surely nothing edible lived in its water. Audrey watched the greasy reflections of the maple trees. The foliage danced in seductive diamonds across the vanishing ripples.

The water seemed to deepen until Audrey stared, not into the shallow pool, but into a bottomless darkness. She felt as though she were sinking slowly into its dismal depths, growing colder. The darkness was deathly silent and a terrible sense of loneliness and abandonment pervaded the space she had entered. Suddenly Zach’s face appeared in front of her and she thought she screamed his name, but if she did, she didn’t hear it. The darkness around her seemed to absorb sound as well as light, and Zach’s doe eyes implored her to come to him, to find him.

To bring him home.

She reached out for him but her hands passed into the water and through him, as though
she
were the apparition. Just as with the vision in the window, it was maddening to be able to see him so clearly, to be so close to him, and yet not to be able to touch him, to hold him, to carry him in her loving arms to safety.

As she watched, two large male hands dropped over Zach’s shoulders and dragged him away, fading into the inky darkness. She began to sense the suffocating closeness of the black water all around her. She felt herself struggling to rise back out of the depths of the vision, but she was
locked inside it, unable to quite break the surface. She wanted desperately to get out of that terrible darkness, but at the same time she longed to be close to Zach once more, if only in a vision
.

“Where are you!” she moaned.

Finally, still half-caught in the imagined depths, she struggled to her feet, stumbling blindly into the house.

10

RICHARD AWAKENED
to a barely audible whimpering sound. Climbing groggily from bed, he glanced at his watch. Five in the afternoon. He stumbled down the hallway toward the kitchen, following the plaintive mewling noises. It sounded like Audrey, gasping for breath and crying, trying to be as quiet as possible, and it appeared to be coming from the hall closet.

With a quivering hand, he opened the door. She had burrowed her way into the farthest corner of the closet, her hands clasped tightly over her breasts. Her legs were scrunched up beneath her and she had lost one sneaker. She was shaking like a leaf. Richard dropped onto his knees in the pile of scattered clothes and touched her gently on the shoulder.

She quivered as though he had struck her. A squeal replaced her whimper.

“Audrey,” he croaked. “Audrey, honey, what is it? What’s wrong?”

She tunneled like a rabbit with a fox on its heels. He dragged her out of the corner and pulled her against him, until she melted into his chest. Her heart pounded beneath his palm as though it filled her entire torso, a huge pump, running wildly out of control. He wrestled her gently out of the closet and held her while he phoned the hospital.

It took forever for Doctor Burton’s secretary to return
his call, but at least by that time he had managed to get Audrey into bed. She stared at him over the top of the covers, her eyes wide and strange, as though she didn’t really see him at all. She was having another night terror, but he couldn’t understand how, unless she had fallen asleep in the closet.

“Call the police,” she said.

“You need a doctor, honey,” said Richard, moving back to the bed and sitting down beside her. He stroked her hair back into place and tried to kiss her cheek, but she jerked away.

“Call the police!” she screamed, her voice echoing down the hall.

“Honey…”

“The police!” she wailed. “Call the fucking police!”

He rushed back to the phone. Her voice calmed a little when she saw him lifting the receiver, but she didn’t seem to be looking at him. “He’s got Zach,” she said, again in that awful, melancholy tone.

“Who, honey?”

“I don’t know,” she said, staring through him. She kept running her fingers across her face, reminding him of the night in the hospital, and he watched her closely lest he have to drop the phone and rush back to her side. “He’s in a little room in the ground. It’s so dark.”

“That’s crazy, Aud.”

She made a face, as though she was trying to see through a wall of fog. “He’s scared. He’s just a little boy and he’s so scared and lonesome. He needs his mother!”

“Maybe you were just dreaming. One of your night terrors. That’s all it was.”

“I know what I saw, Richard!”

“Aud,” he said, ever so gently. “What did you see?”

She shook her head, closing her eyes. “My baby,” she whimpered. “They’ve got my baby.”

She slumped down in the bed and curled into a fetal position, drawing the covers up over her head.

Richard eased the phone back onto the hook.

11

RICHARD LEANED AGAINST THE REFRIGERATOR
, staring at

Doctor Burton’s back. When she fumbled with something on the table, trying to fit it into her bag, he leaned around and flipped on the kitchen lights.

“I’ve given her a shot to help her sleep,” said Doctor Burton, zipping the medical case and hefting it by the handle. “She’ll be out like a light in three minutes and shouldn’t wake up all night.”

“Thank you for coming,” said Richard. “I can’t figure out what happened. I was napping and then I heard Audrey crying…. She must have fallen asleep. I mean, she had to be asleep to have a night terror, right?”

Burton shrugged. “If it’s only night terrors, Richard. But we don’t know that. I spoke to Doctor Cates at home. He’ll fit Audrey in tomorrow morning at ten. Here, take this.”

Richard stared at the business card as though it were a death certificate.

“She needs to see him, Richard,” said Burton. “You have to make her go, for both your sakes.”

He slipped the card into his shirt pocket. “What if he can’t help her?”

“I
can’t help her, that’s for sure. But Doctor Cates is the best. You and Audrey can get through this, but Audrey needs to see a specialist.”

“I’ll make her go.”

“Good.”

He opened the door for her and she turned to face him, a bare remnant of twilight haloed around her.

“I’ve never told you how sorry I was about Zach,” she said.

Richard stared at the floor.

“I’m not a therapist, Richard,” she said. “But I know that grief is an important part of living. We can’t bury it or forget it or it will bubble up and hurt us even worse. Audrey needs to learn how to deal with the loss of her child. You need to learn to deal with it. Doctor Cates can help.”

“I’ll take her.”

Burton nodded and left.

Richard was getting a glass of water from the sink when light outside the kitchen window caught his eye. He hadn’t noticed before, but Audrey must have tripped the switches for the fountain. Water danced and eerie green and yellow light illuminated the trees from below. They looked like giant trolls, hovering over Audrey’s garden with outstretched, grasping hands. He stood for a moment, transfixed by the vision, wondering how his mind could transform such mundane surroundings into something so macabre. The trees grew more and more threatening, not trolls anymore, but weird creatures with thin, wasted limbs and gnarly fingers sprouting innumerable ice-pick talons.

He shook himself away from the vision, realizing that that was exactly what was happening to Audrey. That was what her night terrors were like. He staggered back into the bedroom, more determined than ever to find a way to help her.

12

EIGHTY MILES AWAY
, Tara Beals replaced the phone on her desk, staring at the bumps that called themselves hills outside of Augusta, Maine. The rolling horizon was slashed neatly by the mullions in her office windows, and the sun turned the clouds into cotton candy. Adler, her Doberman, sat obediently beside her, pretending to enjoy the scenery while Tara patted him distractedly.

“Richard says she needs me and she won’t admit it,” she muttered, mulling that morning’s phone call in her mind. It seemed that Richard trusted her more than Audrey these days. He was a good man, good for Audrey, and Tara had been happy to see them married. But he was siding with Audrey against her now, and Tara feared that all of her and Audrey’s work would be undone. A mind was a terribly delicate mechanism, and Tara knew that better than anyone.

With high cheekbones and deep brown eyes surrounded by short hair, Tara had been stunningly beautiful twenty years before. Now she was only disconcertingly so. At five foot six, barely over one hundred twenty pounds, she had that perfect balance of features and form that men found irresistible. Coupled with a mind that had sent university professors into apoplexy, she was a formidable woman.

“She’ll change her mind, Adler,” she said, scratching absentmindedly behind the dog’s ears.

She stared out across the grounds that had once been
manicured to perfection, but now grew ragged and wild. Sometimes she felt as though the same thing was happening to her. She opened a large manila file, studying each sheet of paper in the voluminous pile. When the sun slipped behind a cloud, she flipped on the desk light and began glancing through the records. Finally, reaching the last page, she closed the binder and sat for a moment staring down the darkened hallway outside her office.

She knew that Audrey had always hated the sessions, even though Tara had done everything in her power to assure that Audrey remembered only
good
things. She also knew that calling Audrey would do no good—their last parting had been heated. If she was going to help Audrey, she desperately needed Richard on her side. Audrey had to come to
her.
She had to decide for herself that it was time.

Call me, Audrey.

For God’s sake, call me.

Virgil crossed the old concrete bridge over No Name Creek and drove slowly past the spot where he had almost run over Cooder. The morning sun cast long shadows, turning the asphalt into a black river as dark as Virgil’s thoughts.

I seen bad things, Virg.

What the hell was that supposed to mean? Virgil figured he was crazy to even be worrying about it. Cooder was so burnt out there was nothing left in his head to get lit again. But even so, Virgil couldn’t help but wonder if maybe there
was
something to Cooder’s utterances. What if Cooder
had
seen something, only he was so fried he didn’t know how to explain it? He was all over the place, in more ways than one.

Cooder seemed a more likely candidate for a séance than Doris.

Recalling the upcoming séance, Virgil cringed. A sudden picture of Babs St. Clair, decked out like the Tarot Woman on the TV, flashed into his head and it tickled his funny bone. Now that would be worth seeing. And it wasn’t out of the question. Babs’s sense of fashion was famous around Arcos.

I wish to hell I could believe there
was
something after this life. Doris, I honest to God wish I could.

But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get the idea past a wall in the back of his head. He’d sat there on the church pew with Doris all those years like a good Christian. Hell, he tried to
act
like a good Christian anyway.
That much
he could believe in. But he’d seen too much death in his job. He didn’t believe souls rose out of the dozens of bodies he’d witnessed during his career. He wasn’t expecting to meet Doris or his little sister or any of the rest of his family after he had his appointment with his service pistol either.

His baby sister’s death had been on his mind since Doris got sick. He never knew
why
her death had been so hard on him. But it had. Maybe it was because she was the first child he ever knew that died. But she was gone forever just like the rest.

He swallowed a large lump and stared directly into the sun, trying to burn some faith into himself. The idea that he could somehow be suddenly reformed reminded him of the story of Saul of Tarsus, going blind on the highway. But no revelation came to him. No angel was standing in the middle of the highway.