by T. L. Bodine
He arrived at the office, half-expecting there to be a monster lurking there, but none appeared. He settled down for his day’s work in relative peace aside from the lingering feeling of unease. The fluorescent lights cast no shadows for monsters to skulk in. He emptied his pockets onto his desk, putting everything in its proper place for the day — wallet and keys in the locked drawer, cell phone on the table. His fingertips brushed a paper in his pocket — the sketch of The Nightmare Man — and he hesitantly laid it out on his desk, tucking it under his day planner.
Adrian glanced up, once he had gotten settled, and his gaze traveled without his permission to a desk across the room, landing upon the lines and curves of the woman he had spent seven years with. He knew those curves by touch, could still feel them under his fingertips. He watched her, and crossed his hands on his desk and fiddled with his stapler so he would forget how her skin felt on his.
Jessica didn’t notice his eyes burning into her back and carried on working, apparently unbothered by his proximity. He lowered his eyes and set down the stapler — it was smeared with sweat and tumbled from his hands with an audible thud — and he stared down at the papers on his desk with the steady intensity of someone trying to fight off a wave of nausea.
She’d asked him, once, to come to therapy with her, and she’d taken his staunch refusal as the final sign that he had given up trying on their relationship. He wished he could have found the words to explain how far from the truth that was; the fact was that he simply despised therapists. He hadn’t seen a therapist since the grief counselor he had met with for a few sessions as a kid, and he had every intention of never seeing one again. They had the tendency to pry places, to try and open doors in his mind that he kept shut for a reason.
He looked back up at Jessica, boring his eyes into the back of her skull, before reaching for his telephone. Still focusing on her back, the gentle curve of her shoulders, the tumbling waves of auburn hair, he dialed Angela’s number.
“Hello?”
“Hey Angela, it’s Adrian. I just got your message.” Out of habit, he picked up a ballpoint pen and fidgeted with it, as though intending to take notes. He watched as Jessica stood, tossing her hair, and, carrying a stack of papers, made her way toward the hall to the fax machine. He looked down, hurriedly, at the notes he wasn’t taking.
“Oh, hi. I wasn’t expecting you to call me back so fast. It’s been crazy here, between the cops and the search teams and all the people trying to give me casseroles.” He could hear her smiling on the line, and was astounded, as he always was, at how cheerful she could manage to be in the face of total life crisis. He’d never had that skill. He was lucky to be cheerful on a good day. “But…yeah. This psychic guy called, just out of the blue. Said he saw the Amber Alert and the picture matched a vision he’d had…really freaky stuff.”
“I wouldn’t get my hopes up, too much,” Adrian said, as gently as he could. “From what I hear, these types are all quacks just trying to get some attention or make a buck off of some person’s tragedy.”
“You’re probably right. Still, I just…I want to give it a shot. Just in case. I won’t pay him anything,” she added, quickly, as if this was the key point — as if Adrian’s opinion on the matter of her finances counted for anything. “He just…he knew things, Adrian. Knew things about you. He knew you worked with…with us. He knew what you looked like and everything. I mean…the whole thing was just very strange. If it’s too much to ask, I get that, I don’t want to get you into trouble or anything, but…” He heard a hint of heartbreaking desperation in her voice. “Not as a social worker. But as a friend…can you come, tonight, and talk to him?”
He couldn’t really say no; now that he had heard the desperation and fear in her voice, he didn’t want to deny her what may have been her only hope. “Of course,” he said, after just a moment of hesitation. “Here,” he pushed the papers on his desk away and opened his appointment book. “My last appointment of the day is on that side of town, anyway. It won’t even be out of my way.”
“Thank you…I really appreciate this…it means a lot to me…thank you.” He could hear the smile again, through the phone, and he couldn’t help responding in kind. “I don’t know what I would have done if all this had happened and I didn’t have you to help me get through it. Nathaniel will be so happy to hear about how much you’ve helped us. He really looks up to you.”
“I’m just doing my job, Angela,” he said, and knew perfectly well he wasn’t.
She laughed, maybe a little nervously. “Yeah. Well, okay. I’ll see you tonight, then.”
“Sure thing. Take care.” He hung up, and then glanced back down at his appointment book to check and see if his last appointment of the day really was on the same side of town. He was relieved to note that it was.
“You’re looking quite pleased with yourself.” Jessica was standing behind him. He could feel her looming over his shoulder, and the tone in her voice had an undercurrent of steel that, in their married years, would have caused him to cower. “Did I overhear that right? You’re doing some extracurriculars with Angela Weaver?”
He wondered just how long Jessica had been standing there, listening in — and why she would bother. Was that jealousy in her voice?
“She needs some help dealing with one of those quack psychic detectives. I’m just stepping in to make sure she doesn’t get taken advantage of, that’s all. You know how those guys are.”
“Right. Playing the white knight, like always.” Her brows raised, and she shifted her weight from one hip to the other, crossing her arms neatly beneath the swell of her breasts. “No leads, I take it?”
He shook his head.
“Well. It’s only, what, day two of the search? There might still be a happy ending.” They both knew perfectly well that, when kids are concerned especially, being found safe and sound became less and less likely with each passing hour. “They’re sure it’s not the dad?”
“His dad’s on house arrest fifty miles away.” It had been sixteen hours, in fact. It would be twenty-six by the time he got to Angela’s house tonight. And, he remembered, Detective Roark had still not called him back.
Jessica’s eyes landed on the folded piece of paper on his desk. She reached out a hand to touch it, but Adrian snatched it away hurriedly and tucked the drawing away in the back of his appointment book. He noticed the pale line of untanned skin where her wedding band had been.
She shrugged. “Well, hopefully he’ll turn up. It’s a duplex, right? Did anybody check the other apartment?”
“Why do you care?” He said, more sharply than he’d intended. He knew perfectly well that Nathaniel wasn’t in the next door apartment, because he’d searched it himself. Angela, panicking, had called him first, and together they’d searched the whole house, the woods nearby, knocked on neighbor’s doors, asked the gas station attendant. Then the police had arrived and done all the same things. “You’ve got other things to do, I’m sure.”
Her lip curled. “Fine.” And then, because Jessica had never been able to back away from a fight in seven years of marriage, “Just…keep your nose out of places it doesn’t belong, all right? Do your job, and let the cops do their job. You’re going to get yourself in a world of trouble with your damn hero complex.”
“I do not have —“
“I know how you are. And I know how you feel about her.”
How he felt about her? There it was, again, that undercurrent of jealousy, and Adrian was steamrolled; how was it, in the eight months he had been working with Angela Weaver, that Jessica had never shown any signs of jealousy or concern, and now that they were all but divorced…
“You like taking on projects, Adrian. It’s not my place to tell you what to do, but…”
“So don’t tell me what to do,” he cut in. Confusion, surprise, and hurt mixed uncomfortably in his mind and his already-pounding head started to pound harder. Hey Jessica, he thought, crazily, Mom wants you to come over for Thanksgiv
ing. I forgot to tell her we’re separated. You’re cool with coming, right?
She sighed, and her expression softened. “You just want to help. I know you do.” She drew her lower lip between her teeth, biting it thoughtfully like she always did when nervous about something. She’d looked at him that way just before she’d mentioned the divorce the first time; she’d looked at him with genuine fear in her eyes, like she was expecting him to hit her. But — no. That wasn’t right. She was afraid that he would hurt himself. The only thing that had kept her around, that look said, was the fear that he might find some pills or a gun or car exhaust and off himself after she walked out the door. “Just be careful. Please.”
She turned and left, without further word, and Adrian watched her go, feeling the confusion and the hurt battle for their position at the top of his emotional totem pole.
Baffled, and more than a little aggravated by this sudden intrusion of unwelcome uncertainties in a day that had already reached its intrusion quota, he pulled away from his desk, carefully packed his briefcase, and set out for his morning appointments, purposely putting thoughts about Jessica back in her filing cabinet. He’d have to dream up a stronger lock.
ALONE IN A ROOM
Nathaniel Weaver was certain of two things: First, that he wasn’t playing make-believe anymore; second, that he wanted to go home now. At first, things hadn’t been so bad. The Nightmare Man looked scary, but he hadn’t hurt him. Instead he had taken him here, to this little room, and fed him cake. The cake had tasted good, but the frosting was too sweet; after a few bites Nathaniel’s mouth was dry and sticky, and whenever he burped it tasted like sugar and butter. He asked for a glass of water.
The Nightmare Man left, then, and hadn’t come back.
Nathaniel hadn’t been scared at first. He sat patiently at the small table, humming a little song to himself, and waited for the dream to be over with. But he knew, deep inside, that he wasn’t dreaming, and as time wore on and no one came with his glass of water, that realization became more and more real and more and more frightening. So he had started to cry. He cried for at least ten minutes, big loud temper-tantrum sobs like he hadn’t done since he was in training pants. No one came. His sobs died away and his chest heaved with big, miserable gasps as tears trickled from his eyes and snot dripped from his nose and he wiped away the snot with the back of his hand and slept for a little while.
He woke up on the floor, curled in a little ball. His shoulder hurt from being hunched up.
He was still in the room, and there was still no glass of water.
Nathaniel almost started crying again, but he didn’t. It wouldn’t help anything. That was the thought he had: It won’t help anything. This struck him as a frighteningly grown-up thought, and that more than anything cemented the severity of this situation into his mind. Crying won’t help. Mommy’s not here. Nobody will help you.
His heart jumped up into his throat and he climbed up to his feet and ran around the room like a mouse caught in a shoebox. There has to be a door, he thought. The Nightmare Man left through a door. I can, too. But after he’d run around the room twice, he knew that wasn’t true. The Nightmare Man was fully capable of appearing and disappearing wherever he liked, with or without a door.
Nathaniel Weaver sat down heavily and hugged his knees to his chest.
There were no doors in the room. What was in the room: a small, Nathaniel-sized table and matching chair; a plate of half-eaten cake with blue too-sweet frosting; a half-deflated beach ball; and a pair of rollerblades with their laces tied into a knot. These last items were in the corner of the room — which, now that he had stopped running around, seemed to have grown smaller — and Nathaniel stared at them moodily. They made him angry. He wasn’t sure why they should, but they did. He wished that they weren’t here. He stared at them hard and pretended that they disappeared.
They didn’t budge.
Sighing, he curled up on the floor again and tried to sleep.
Nathaniel had first seen The Nightmare Man eight months ago, a little bit after Daddy Did The Bad Thing And Went Away For Awhile. He was living in a motel room with his mommy, but he didn’t like it there. They only had one bed and she cried at night and it woke him up a lot. Also, the blanket was scratchy and smelled like cigarette smoke. One day Nathaniel had been taken aside by his teacher at school and she had asked him some things, and then the next day someone had come to his motel room — Mr. Montgomery, but he didn’t know his name at the time. He looked a little bit like Daddy, because he had red hair — hair just like Nathaniel’s — but nothing else about him was like Daddy at all. Eventually Nathaniel realized that he really liked Mr. Montgomery, but at the time he had started crying and gone to hide in the bathroom when he came inside. Everything was really scary at first. Nathaniel was afraid that maybe Mommy was going to Go Away For Awhile, too.
That’s when the Nightmare Man had first started visiting.
At first he came at night. Whenever a bad dream woke him, he would be there — just standing at the bedside, staring down at him with those big white eyes. At first Nathaniel would scream and his mother would jolt awake and grab him and they would hold each other in the dark until they both fell back asleep. But after a few visits, when Nathaniel realized that the person in his bedroom didn’t seem to want to hurt him, he had stopped screaming, and then he started seeing him more and more often. He showed up at school. He walked Nathaniel home, stayed with him when he was alone. He was almost like a friend.
Nathaniel started to fall asleep. He had always been very good at falling asleep, no matter what. When he was a baby, his parents hadn’t needed to do any of the usual tricks like driving around the neighborhood or rocking him for hours. He had always been able to switch off immediately. His Daddy used to joke that he felt more at-home in dreamland than in the real world, and it was partially true. Nathaniel had always had particularly vivid dreams.
The dream he had now wasn’t like the usual kind, however. It was a memory. In it, he was sitting on his Daddy’s shoulders at the beach. He had a beach ball in his arms. His arms almost didn’t fit around it and he hugged it as tight as he could because the wind was blowing. That was it — the whole memory. Beach ball. Beach. Shoulders. Wind. This repeated as though it was a movie being played in every room of a house and Nathaniel was walking from room to room, watching it start and play at different spots.
Then the dream began to change, but it was all wrong. The memory didn’t make sense anymore. They were still on the beach — the gulls cried overhead, the waves lapped at the shore — but it was raining. No, snowing? No. Leaves were falling. That was it. Red and gold and brown leaves fell around him like confetti and faraway he heard someone crying. It wasn’t him. It was a grown-up. He knew the way that grown-ups cried, because Mommy did it so much.
The realization that this was no longer Nathaniel’s memory made him realize this was no longer his dream, either, and he woke up in a slow, hazy confusion. In the small, blank room he sat in there was no way of knowing how long he had slept.
But there was a glass of water beside him when he awoke.
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
The drive out to the Weaver’s house was a familiar one, considering how many times Adrian had been there on welfare visits, but it felt strange now that he was making it after hours. He thought he should call Angela, but then stopped himself. What would he say to her? Double-check that she had, in fact, invited him? That was ridiculous — of course she had asked him to come, or he wouldn’t have considered it, whatever Jessica might think to the contrary.
It seemed like the only thing to do, now that he had agreed, and it was too late to turn back, so he kept his eyes ahead of him on the quiet, empty old country highway, and drove. Shadows flickered in his peripheral vision. He ignored them.
The townhouse itself was beautiful and tired. It had chipped white paneling and large, four-pane glass windows with green shutters that had been nailed to the outer walls to keep the
m from clapping in the wind. The upstairs, from where the home had been converted into a duplex and currently stood vacant, was dark and empty, but Angela’s downstairs apartment was clearly lived in. A bright red child’s bicycle leaned against the porch; a deflated soccer ball sat in a puddle in the yard, which had faded from overgrown summer weeds to wet, muddy autumn dirt.
Adrian parked on the street at the end of the long driveway and started up the walkway with a blanket of white noise in his head. It sounded like the crackle of rice cereal and it ebbed and flowed in time with the pounding in his skull. Angela’s car was parked in the driveway; behind it, an unfamiliar, flashy black sports car of the kind generally purchased by insecure balding men on the precipice of their middle age.
He lingered at the base of the driveway a moment longer before making his way up the white gravel walkway to the house and up the wooden porch. It creaked a little under his weight, and the house seemed to groan as he crossed the deck to the front door, opened the screen door, and knocked.
“Coming.”
He heard her voice from the depths of the house, and he looked around, feeling exceedingly nervous, as though he weren’t supposed to be here — as though, if the neighbors were watching, they would be making snide remarks against his character. Which was ridiculous. There would have been people coming and going all day, between cops and media and search party volunteers. He wondered how long the psychic had been here.
Angela Weaver looked like someone who hadn’t slept or looked in a mirror for a couple of days. Her hair, a strawberry blonde with coppery highlights, fell loosely around her shoulders, damply curled and, although she was only in her late twenties, graying around the roots. Her eyes were the same size and color as Nathaniel’s, with worry-lines around the edges. A half-smoked cigarette smoldered between her forefingers.