by Mike Ramon
Chapter Eight
Tom spent the evening catching up on the past few episodes of his favorite TV shows. It felt good to get his mind off of living shadows, psychic memory dreams and things that go bump in the night. He ate a frozen chicken dinner as he watched his shows--the chicken was soggy, the vegetables were dry and the brownie came out undercooked. The potatoes weren’t too bad, though he did have to add some butter to make them palatable.
At midnight Tom shut off the TV, tossed the tray of chicken bones and a few leftover kernels of corn into the trash, and took a leak before brushing his teeth. He stripped down to his boxers and got into bed. It was a warm night, and there was no need to use the covers, which he left bunched up at the foot of the bed.
As he lay awake he worried about work; since this business with the Home had started he hadn’t written anything, not a single piece, for the Review. He had already passed on two stories that Charlie--his editor--had given to him, giving the excuse that he was working on something big that was going to take up most of his time. When Charlie had asked him what the big story was, Tom had played coy, telling Charlie that he wanted to keep his cards close to the vest for the time being, and Charlie had let it go at that. The man had no reason to doubt Tom, who had proven himself exceptionally reliable over his years at the paper. There was no way that any of what was really going on could ever be printed in the Review, and Tom wondered just how in the hell he was going to explain the failure of his “big story” to ever materialize. He figured that he would just have to cross that bridge when he came to it.
He just hoped that Patricia’s friend Harry wasn’t a crook or a weirdo, and that he actually had some sound input to offer. Tom had no choice but to trust Patricia’s judgment of the man. She was oddly defensive when it came to Harry, which Tom put down to what she had said about him: that he had believed her. It must have been terrible to walk around for so long holding a secret belief about the true nature of her husband’s disappearance, while knowing full well that 99% of people would have scoffed at her if she had dared to share it with them.
This realization brought his thoughts back to Frankie, and how he must be feeling. Frankie had had to lie to his parents about what had really happened the night his sister had disappeared. The truth must have been eating the boy up. Tom pictured Frankie lying awake in his own bed, afraid to let sleep take him, terrified of the things he might see in his dreams. Tom felt sorry for him, and hoped that maybe--somehow, some way--they would find Jessica. Deep down, however, he didn’t think this was the type of story that ended with ‘…and they lived happily ever after’.
When Tom finally fell asleep, the digital clock next to his bed read 12:48 AM. Through the next couple of hours he slept a fitful sleep, strange half-formed dreams breaking up and dissolving almost before they had begun and morphing into one another, different places, different times. In some of the dreams he experienced everything in the first person, and in others he watched everything from a detached perspective; at times he felt like he was in a movie theater, watching a flickering set of moving images as they formed together to tell disjointed stories about him, about people he knew and places he had been. Tom tossed and turned, and sometimes mumbled things in his sleep. The sheets at the foot of the bed were knocked to the ground.
Then for a period there were no dreams, and Tom’s nocturnal aerobics ceased. This was utter blankness, supreme calmness. Tom lay afloat in the black, gentle sea of dreamlessness, and the sweat that had broken out over his body, leaving a slick sheen on his skin, dried up.
Slowly, a still image formed within the darkness. At first Tom didn’t know what it was that he was looking at, but then the image widened out (again that eerie feeling of watching a movie, of a camera slowly zooming out to give a wider view), so he could see more of the image, and he realized that he was staring at a chain-link fence. In the gaps between the wires he could see the street beyond the fence, dissected into neat little squares. Then a pair of headlights swept by, cutting through the night, and Tom realized that he was not looking a still image after all. In some deep, buried part of his sleep-mind he knew that this was the start of a new dream, and he was wary.
As this dream began, there was silence, as if in the dream Tom were a deaf man, but then the sounds of the night came to him as if they were being played on a radio whose volume was slowly being turn up. There was the sound of crickets, the soft susurration of the wind, and the scraping sound of feet dragging on cement. When he heard this scraping noise Tom tried to locate the source of the noise, but he couldn’t move at all; his gaze was fixed on the fence. When he attempted to raise his arms up, there was no response from his body. It felt like he was in a catatonic state, unable to do anything but stare straight ahead. The wind picked up for a moment before dying down, and Tom could see some littered paper blowing across the street.
The sound of shoes scraping on cement came closer, approaching at a slow, deliberate pace. Still unable to move, Tom waited for the source of the noise to come into view. Moments later an old man walked through his field of vision, shuffling forward one dragging step at a time. Tom’s body moved then, but it moved independently of him, as if someone else were in control of his motor movements. The old man was disheveled, wearing a torn shirt and shoes; the sole of the right shoe flopped free of the rest of the shoe with each rise of that foot. He had a snowy-white beard and a head of hair to match. Tom turned to follow the man’s progress. A few steps on the man lost his balance, but was saved from falling to the ground by the fence, which he fell against before struggling to right himself.
“God damn it!” the man hissed.
The man looked around, then looked at the fence and lashed out with one hand to strike the wire mesh.
“Whatcha go an’ do that for?” he asked the fence.
His voice had a slur to it, and Tom realized that the man was drunk. Satisfied at having his anger at the fence be known, the drunk old man started walking again, his feet scrape-scrape-scraping with each staggered step. Tom followed after on his side of the fence, again moving by someone else’s volition. The man seemed to be completely unaware of his presence.
The man stopped when he came to a tear in the fence. Something about the fence, and the opening in it, seemed familiar to Tom, like some barely recallable memory that may be important, or may mean nothing at all. The man parted the cut ends of the fence, learned down and began the intricate process of squeezing himself through. Tom stood still, watching the old man struggle through the fence. The man finally made it through with one last push, and the effort sent him stumbling forward, his arms flailing in a vain attempt to regain his balance. He lost the battle with gravity and went sprawling to the ground, hitting the pavement with a loud crack as his chin made contact with the ground.
“Uhh…muffucker…”
Tom tried to ask the man if he was okay, but he couldn’t speak; his mouth refused to open. The man pushed himself up to his knees. A thin sheen of blood dribbled down his chin, coming from his mouth. He held his hand under his mouth and used his tongue to push two loose teeth out onto his palm. He stared at the teeth for a minute like he was fascinated by seeing them there in his palm when they were supposed to be in his mouth.
“Goddamn shit,” he said.
The man slipped the two teeth into his pants pocket, for what reason Tom didn’t care to hazard a guess. The man, still on his knees turned his head and spit some blood onto the asphalt. He then struggled to his feet, still a bit unsteady. Once standing he stood still for a second and took a few deep breaths of the crisp night air.
“What a night,” the man spoke aloud,
He wiped his bloody palm on his dirty pants and started shuffling along again. Tom was pulled along after him. The man was headed for the fence at the other end of the lot. His path there was not a straight one, but rather a swerving, wavering one, and twice Tom thought the guy was going to fall again; maybe this time he would crack his head open. But the man managed to stay on his feet. Tom wa
s behind him now, and he could see a prominent bald spot amid a sea of white, matted hair.
The old man stopped in his tracks, and Tom stopped as well, though he had no say in the matter. His body was still under some foreign control. The man titled his head slightly, as if he were listening for some faint or distant sound. Tom could only hear the wind and the crickets. The man turned his head to the right, so that he was looking off at something that Tom could not see. Again Tom had that feeling of familiarity, as if he were seeing a reenactment of a story told to him once, but something was off about it. It wasn’t supposed to be an old man taking a short cut through a parking lot, but a little girl. A little girl and her brother.
Terrible realization came down on Tom’s head then like a grand piano dropped from a fifth story window. He felt like kicking himself for not seeing it sooner. He knew where he was now, and more than anything he wanted to shout at the man, to tell him to go, to run away and to never return to this lot. But he could not speak, and he could not move except when whatever external force that was using him as a puppet decided to move him.
The man turned his body fully toward that unseen thing on Tom’s right, so that Tom was looking at him in profile. Tom’s head turned on its own and he saw it, and any shred of hope or doubt was removed. There stood the Home. The man took two steps toward the silent, hulking building. The darkened windows looked to Tom like empty, dead eyes, the eyes of a corpse left open and staring long after all life has fled from the body. If he couldn’t warn the old man, or stop him, Tom just wanted to get away from there. He felt that he had been brought there to bear witness to this, but he didn’t want to see it. He wanted to wake up, he wanted to find himself in his bed, where he could laugh at that strange dream he had had, and to take comfort in the knowledge that that’s what it was--just a dream.
The man took three more steps, and Tom wondered if he was hearing the same phantom voice calling out to him that Jessica Gardener had heard. The man stopped again, and he looked confused, like he was trying to puzzle something out but the pieces just wouldn’t fit.
That’s it, Tom thought. Something is very wrong here. Leave now, while you still can.
And then Tom was moving toward the man, and he was powerless to stop himself. The man’s attention was still focused on the Home; he had no idea that Tom was so near to him. Two hands rose up into Tom’s field of vision, and he realized that they were his arms. Only they couldn’t be his arms, because his arms had substance, and these arms were wispy, shadowy things that looked like they could be torn asunder by a stiff wind. But even as the thought occurred to him, Tom knew that looks were deceiving, and that no wind could tear these arms apart. He knew that these were not his arms, and that this was not his body. He had simply been allowed to hitch a ride with some terrible thing, and to see through its eyes. Again he wished that he could warn the man, that he could save him.
Then the arms had a grip on the man, and they started to drag him kicking and screaming. The man struggled to break free of the shadow that had a hold of him, but he could not. Tom watched through the thing’s eyes as they rushed toward a broken out window (perhaps the same broken window a little girl had climbed through not so long ago), and just as they were crossing the threshold, leaving the outside world behind in exchange for the dark interior of the building, Tom woke up.
He lay in bed, his body covered in sweat. The fitted bed sheet had come loose sometime during the night, leaving one corner of the mattress bare. He sat up and looked at the window; it was still dark outside. He glanced at the clock. It was 4:46 AM.
Tom swung his legs out of bed and sat on the edge of it for a few minutes, waiting for his heart to slow down. When he felt that he was as calm as he was ever going to get, he stood and walked to the bathroom, where he flipped on the light and turned on the tap, scooping a few handfuls of cold water into his mouth. It was just regular old bathroom sink water, but it tasted good. He turned off the tap, moved over to the toilet, put the lid down and sat on it.
He sat there in the bathroom for nearly an hour before getting up and going to the living room. He sat on the couch and turned on the TV, knowing that he would get no more sleep that night. The first movie he landed on while surfing through the channels was a horror movie from the 80’s. A couple of clueless teens were trying to get away from the faceless, axe-wielding villain by running into an old, spooky-looking house. Tom changed the channel, looking for lighter fare.