The Fear Zone

by K. R. Alexander

  I think it’s his tongue.

  It stretches.

  Not his tongue.

  The head of a snake.

  It drips down from his lips,

  stretching

  twisting

  slinking

  down toward the plate

  where it flops

  and coils

  rearing its head up to stare

  straight

  at

  me

  just

  as

  another snake

  slides

  from Dad’s lips.

  The first snake hisses.

  Tenses.

  Opens its mouth wide, revealing razor-sharp teeth.

  The snake strikes.

  I jerk back to standing, knocking my chair to the ground with a crash.

  “Kyle, what the heck?” Dad roars.

  And just like that, the kitchen is back to normal. Dad sits there with his fork raised to his mouth; Mom stares at me with wide eyes.

  No snakes anywhere.

  No snakes.

  I swallow and pick up my chair.

  “Sorry,” I say, but I don’t know who I’m apologizing to. “I, um, I just …”

  Dad is laughing, though, calling me an idiot and a hundred other names under his breath.

  I don’t bother finishing the rest of the sentence, or my dinner. I mumble that I’m feeling sick and leave.

  When I reach my bedroom, I close the door behind me and curl up on my bed, rocking back and forth and holding myself back from reaching out to Deshaun or Andres or April, the only people in this entire world who might actually understand.

  I can’t risk leaving.

  And I can’t risk them coming here.

  Not with the snakes around. Not with my dad.

  I don’t head back up to my bedroom until it’s time to go to sleep. I spend the night watching TV with my parents. They try to ask me about school and all that, but I can barely focus on what they’re saying. I can barely keep my eyes open. All I can think about is how tired I am, and whether or not my magical protective force field will be enough to keep the poltergeist at bay. Finally, when I can’t stop yawning, Dad gently forces me to go brush my teeth and go to bed.

  I trudge upstairs and head into my room to change into pj’s.

  I unlock the door.

  And freeze.

  Blink.

  Rub my eyes.

  But no, I’m not imagining things.

  Everything I bought today, everything I made, all of it …

  is on

  my

  ceiling.

  A ring of salt circles my ceiling fan.

  Pages of symbols plaster its perimeter.

  My sci-fi book is open in the center, dripping water.

  Even the candles are upside down in the four corners.

  No way.

  There is no.

  Possible.

  Way.

  “Deshaun?” my dad calls from behind me.

  I gasp.

  As one, everything on the ceiling falls to the ground, a great, resounding clatter of breaking glass and crystal.

  Dad runs the rest of the way toward me. He pushes the door open all the way to survey the mess of my room.

  “What did you do?” he asks, shocked.

  I can’t say anything. I just stand there, looking at the ruins of my best attempt at saving myself, and wonder if I’ve just made things a thousand percent worse.

  I don’t sleep.

  When dawn finally breaks Monday morning, my head hurts and my eyes are dry and it feels like my body has been run over by a truck. A couple of times.

  I tried sleeping. Really. I read a book cover to cover in the hopes it would knock me out. I watched five episodes of my favorite anime. I put on quiet music. Anything I could think of to make myself fall asleep.

  And my body tried to sleep.

  The trouble was, every single time I started to drift, I heard it.

  The sound of jingling bells in my closet.

  The telltale giggle of the clown.

  Every time, I’d bolt upright, wide-awake, and check out the closet.

  Nothing was there.

  Nothing was ever there.

  That’s a lie. I fell asleep once. Just for a bit.

  I’d closed my eyes and felt myself drift and this time, rather than hearing the bells, I’d started to dream. I dreamed that I was six years old again. Back at my birthday party. I stood in the backyard in front of all of my friends, and the clown my parents had brought was doing magic tricks. The clown made me nervous, with its big smile and blue eyes and giant shoes. But he made the kids laugh, and I knew I was supposed to be having fun, and that he was safe, so I let him bring me up front to help him with the trick.

  It involved a pie. He said he would make the pie float.

  Instead, he tossed the pie in my face.

  As I wiped off the cream, everyone in the backyard started to laugh. Started to call me names. Even the clown.

  Even though it was my birthday, they made fun of me.

  I ran into the house and closed myself in my room and didn’t come out. Not until everyone went home and my mom came up and apologized and said the mean clown was gone.

  But I could still hear his giggling. Still hear the sound of the bells jingling on his shoes.

  The same jingling I heard from my closet.

  The same giggling from the graveyard.

  When I woke from the dream, only five minutes had passed, but I heard the clown’s distant laughter all the same.

  By the time the sun rises and I smell the coffee coming from downstairs, I really wonder if I’m losing my mind.

  I check my phone while I’m eating breakfast. Andres has been trying to get in touch, saying we need to meet up before school. Tacked on to the very end of the message are six words:

  I’m so, so sorry. I understand.

  I respond immediately and head out the door to meet at the park a block from the school. We have forty minutes before school starts—it’s not a lot of time, but it’s enough.

  Surprisingly, Andres is already at the park when I arrive.

  Even more surprisingly, he’s not alone.

  “What are you guys doing here?” I ask.

  Kyle and Deshaun stand with guarded expressions on their faces. Both of them have their hands in their pockets and shoulders by their ears, like they’re freezing cold. But it’s a nice, cool autumn day. It’s then that I realize their eyes are red. All of them.

  “Andres said you had a nightmare,” Deshaun says tentatively. “The night we went to the graveyard.”

  I glare at Andres, but he only shrugs. He doesn’t know that the nightmare was just the beginning.

  “I did too,” Andres adds quickly. He gulps. “Only it didn’t seem like a nightmare. Saturday night. I fell asleep in the tub and I … I …” He cuts off. “You’ll laugh.”

  No one says anything. The air between us is heavy and powerful and expectant. It’s clear none of us are going to laugh.

  “There was a shark. In my tub.” He says it quickly and quietly, like he doesn’t want to admit it aloud. “I thought it was going to eat me.” He looks down at his feet, then up at me. His face goes pale. “It sounds stupid, but … I felt it. It was real. I know it was. Last night I had another nightmare. This one was much worse.”

  “I had it happen too,” Deshaun says. “My computer turned on Friday night. And it … it showed all of us in the graveyard. Digging something out of the grave. And whatever it was took over the whole screen. Like some sort of ghost. Or demon. And last night I tried to protect myself—and whatever is haunting me put every single protection charm I made on the ceiling, before letting them drop and destroy my room.”

  “What about you?” I ask Kyle. “Did you see anything?”

  “Not the first night,” Kyle says. “But Saturday night. There were snakes in my bed. Real snakes. They tried to choke me.” His voice lowers. “Then yest
erday … there were snakes in my pocket. And when I yanked out my hand, there was this.”

  He hands over a note—

  Written in the same handwriting as the notes that started all of this for me.

  I shiver when I read the words.

  I hand the note back to him. He doesn’t look like he wants to take it.

  A dozen different emotions war within me.

  They’ve all had something scary happen to them. They believe me. I’m not alone. But also …

  “So this is real,” I whisper. “Really real.”

  Deshaun nods. “When Kyle texted me this morning, I honestly thought I was going insane. I didn’t sleep at all last night. I thought I was the only one.”

  “You’re not,” I say. “I couldn’t sleep either.”

  Kyle keeps looking down at his shoes. Andres looks over at him; I know that look. Andres wants to comfort Kyle, but he doesn’t know how. I don’t really either. All I know is, we’re all in this together.

  “So we all saw something,” I say. “I mean, everyone who was in the graveyard is having nightmares.”

  “Not everyone,” Andres says.

  I glance at him. I know who he’s talking about, but it still makes me angry that he’d reach out to her.

  “I, uh, messaged Caroline,” he continues. “Asked her how she was doing. How she was sleeping. She told me not to talk to her.”

  Just her name makes me angry, and hearing that she’s sleeping fine while the rest of us are having nightmares, when all of this really is her fault, makes me even angrier. If anyone deserves to be losing sleep, it’s her.

  “Then it’s just us four,” Deshaun says. He pauses. “What do we do?”

  I shrug uncomfortably. It’s the question I’ve been asking myself all weekend.

  “What is there to do?” Kyle asks. He looks to his friend. “I mean, they’re just stupid nightmares, right? Bad dreams can’t hurt us.”

  “But sleep deprivation can,” Andres pipes in. “They’ve done studies. You can only last, like, eleven days.”

  “Before?” I ask.

  He doesn’t answer. At least, not that part of the question.

  “After a few days, you start to hallucinate,” he says, as if he didn’t hear me.

  “I’d say we’re already hallucinating,” Kyle says. His voice is bitter.

  “It’s not hallucinations,” Andres says. “Hallucinations can’t make notes show up in your pocket, or levitate half your room.”

  “So what is it?” Kyle asks. He almost sounds angry.

  “I think we’re being haunted,” Deshaun says quietly.

  “This is ridiculous,” Kyle says. “We fell prey to some stupid prank in the graveyard and let our imaginations get away from us. That’s it.”

  “If you believe that, why did you come here?” I ask. “How do you explain that note?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Look,” I continue. “I get it; I don’t want to believe it either. But I know I’m not hallucinating or making things up. Something is following us. And if I’m right, I think I know what it’s doing.”

  When Andres looks at me, he actually seems excited for the first time in our entire conversation.

  “What?”

  “Well,” I tell him. “I hate clowns. More than anything. And that’s what I saw in my closet. Andres, you’re scared of sharks. So you dreamed you saw that in your bathtub.” Andres blushes, but he doesn’t argue. “Deshaun, I’m guessing you’re scared of—”

  “Ghosts,” he replies. “Poltergeists, mainly. You know, ghosts that move or haunt objects. Remember that story about the kid who got lost in the graveyard?”

  I nod.

  “Yeah, that was me.”

  Kyle gapes.

  “Really? You never told me.”

  “I was embarrassed,” Deshaun says. “Besides, there never seemed like a good time to mention it. And even if I had, you wouldn’t have believed me.”

  “Believed that you got lost?”

  Deshaun shakes his head. “No,” he says quietly. “Not lost. I was trapped. And I … I saw things that night. Ghosts. Demons. I don’t know. They whispered terrible things and wailed all night long. As I got older, I thought maybe I’d made it up. Now I’m not so sure.”

  I swallow. I want to reach out and take his hand but I don’t know him well enough. Kyle pats him on the shoulder comfortingly. I’m about to ask Kyle what he’s scared of, but after Deshaun’s admission, I don’t think we need to talk about fears anymore.

  I go on. “Don’t you get it? Whatever this is, it’s showing us our deepest, darkest fears! That’s why we all see something different.”

  “So how do we stop it?” Andres asks. “Whatever this thing is.”

  Kyle keeps shaking his head.

  “This is ridiculous,” he says. “There isn’t some sort of ghost haunting us! Face reality, guys. There are much scarier things than whatever we’re making up in our heads.”

  “Dude—” Deshaun begins, but Kyle cuts him off.

  “No, I’m not standing around here freezing my butt off any longer. You guys want to fight ghosts, fine. But I’m going to stay rooted in reality. This is just stupid. Someone is messing with us, giving us bad dreams. Bad dreams can’t hurt us. Period.”

  He turns to begin walking away.

  He takes a few steps.

  And then, I hear it.

  The jingle of bells.

  The high-pitched laughter.

  Kyle freezes. We all do.

  Because there, standing beside the swing set, is the clown from my nightmare. He waves at the four of us, his mouth so wide it seems to be splitting his face, his teeth sharp as needles and eyes blue ice.

  Then he points at us, one at a time, and his smile stretches impossibly wider.

  A gust of wind billows leaves and dust around us, making me blink.

  The clown is gone.

  The moment I see the clown, I know this is no hallucination.

  I still desperately want that to be the case. Want to believe someone just left the note in my pocket, and the snake just, I don’t know, crawled in or something. But that clown … that clown sends a chill so deep in my heart that I know none of us are making any of this up.

  It stares at me, and its smile seems meant for me alone.

  I swear it does know my deepest, darkest fears. And that smile tells me that it will do everything it can to bring them about.

  I swear it has my father’s eyes.

  “Did you see that?” Deshaun yelps the moment the clown vanishes. “Did everyone see that?”

  I can only nod, and I hear the others behind me mumble their terrified agreement. We’ve all seen the clown.

  “Where did it go?” Andres whispers.

  “It knows,” April replies. Her voice quivers with fear. “It knows that we’ve been talking about it. It knows we’ve caught on.”

  “So?” I say. I try to push down my own fear, try to melt the ice that seems to freeze my bones in place. I turn and face them. “Even if it knows that we’ve been talking—so what? I mean, it hasn’t actually hurt any of us, right? It’s just scaring us. I mean, has anyone been physically hurt?”

  We all shake our heads.

  “So far,” April mutters.

  “I say we all have a sleepover,” Andres says. “That way none of us are alone. We’ve all watched scary movies before, right? Our powers combined, I’m sure we can try to figure out how to stop it.”

  Everyone seems on board for this monster-hunting party. They don’t seem to understand that for some of us, the monster already lives in our house.

  “Where can we stay?” Deshaun asks. “I could ask my parents, but I don’t think they’d ever let me have a girl stay over.” He blushes and looks at April. I know that look. Deshaun is crushing on her. “Sorry. They’re old-fashioned.”

  She shrugs. “We could stay at mine.”

  “On a school night?” Deshaun pushes.

  “Sure, we ha
ve big enough sofas that you two could sleep on. Andres stays over all the time.”

  “I can’t,” I say immediately.

  “Why not?” April asks. “I can have my mom call your parents and—”

  “I just can’t, okay? My parents would never allow it. I’m grounded.”

  “This seems bigger than being grounded,” Andres begins, but it’s Deshaun who cuts him off.

  “Nah. You don’t want to push this one. Kyle’s parents never budge on punishment.”

  I look at him. There’s a part of me that wants to thank him for stepping in so I don’t have to explain myself. The rest hates that it’s even necessary.

  “I’ll be fine,” I say. “Promise. It’s just bad dreams and visions, right? I can handle another night of snakes.”

  The three of them nod. They seem uncertain.

  Trouble is, so am I.

  I’m worried. Not just because we’ve all seen some sort of phantom clown, and not just because we’re all apparently being haunted and given nightmares of our deepest fears.

  I’m worried because Kyle looks terrible—his skin is even more pallid than usual and his eyes are so tired they look bruised. There’s only one thing in the world that makes Kyle look like that. And it’s not ghosts or snakes or nightmares.

  It’s his dad.

  He thinks I don’t know that his dad is terrible. He thinks I don’t worry. But I do.

  I wish I could figure out what was most important—figuring out how to save all of us from a phantom, or trying to figure out how to get Kyle’s dad out of his life for good.

  “Maybe there’s a clue in the graveyard,” I say, even though just thinking about the graveyard makes me sick. Every time we mention it, I’m reminded of being lost in there. Reminded of the phantoms that stalked me, that imprisoned me until sunrise.

  I thought I had escaped. Now I’m starting to think differently.

  April shakes her head. “I was there yesterday. There wasn’t anything.”

  “Come on,” I say. I have to feel like we’re doing something. I can’t imagine just waiting around all day for night to fall. We have to find an answer to end this. Soon. “Let’s go check again. We have a little time before school starts. Maybe we’ll find something with the four of us.”

  “I don’t know …” April says.