The Smashed Man of Dread End

by J. W. Ocker

  She didn’t like it down here.

  But not enough to warn somebody not to come down here. Had those kids been in this basement? Had they known the people who lived here before? Her parents had bought this place because it was a bigger house than what they had and very affordable. They weren’t even looking for a new house. It had come onto the market suddenly. Noe had been the one to find it. Not that she was into real estate. She was just trying to figure out how big a yard you would need for an average-sized dog. She had come across it online and liked the red color and the flat metal man on the roof and the old look of the whole thing. Dad was standing nearby, so she showed it to him. When he saw it, his face almost dropped off his skull. She’d never seen him so surprised. Apparently it was a really good deal.

  A little more than a month later, they were living in it. It was a sudden and strange move. But the house was definitely worth sudden and strange. Even if it did have a creepy basement and creepy neighbors.

  She looked up at the night-colored rectangles at the top of the walls. Her imagination painted in a pair of shoes in one of the windows, like a stranger was standing beside the house in the dark. Between that image and the image of the buried dead beneath her, she realized it was time to leave the basement. Her imagination was lashing out at her for not going to sleep.

  Noe walked back to the stairs and looked up into the bright rectangle that was the kitchen . . . and almost jumped out of her fuzzy green slippers.

  A small form was silhouetted in the door.

  “Werewolves,” the small shape said softly.

  “You jerk, Len. You scared me to death. What are you doing up?” Noe squinted at her sister. Len was wearing a bright green onesie, her bottom swollen by a diaper and her arms strangling her lemur.

  “Werewolves down there,” Len mumbled.

  “You think there are werewolves everywhere,” said Noe. Len was afraid of the dark. She made Noe turn on the overhead light in the SUV when they were driving at night, and she wouldn’t even step outside onto a porch if it was dusk. They’d had to cut trick-or-treating short last year because Len couldn’t handle it. Not even a plastic pumpkin full of candy could tempt her to stay out. She said it was because there were werewolves in the dark. That was Noe’s fault. She had let Len watch a werewolf movie with her one night. It was an old one, all black-and-white with fake fog and even faker trees. And now werewolves were Len’s bogeymen.

  Len muttered something else that wasn’t “werewolves,” but that Noe didn’t understand. And that was when she realized that her little sister wasn’t really talking to her. Wasn’t really looking at her. That she was wobbling a little.

  Len was sleepwalking.

  Noe’s heart dropped as she imagined her sister falling down the stairs. She dashed up them two at a time and grabbed Len in her arms before her sister tumbled down those hard steps to that hard dirt floor.

  Len opened her eyes abruptly, rubbed at them with the back of her wrist, and murdered her lemur a little more.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  “You’re in the kitchen. In the new house. I think you’re very sleepy. Let’s go to bed.”

  “Sleep in your bed?” asked Len.

  Noe looked out the blackness of the kitchen window. “Yeah. I guess so.”

  Len stared into the basement until Noe closed the door, “Werewolves down there,” she said, as serious as an adult.

  Noe took Len to her bedroom, pushed the mattress against the wall, and laid her sister down on it. She then dragged one of the metal pieces of the bedframe over until it lay on the floor beside the mattress. She made sure Len was cozy between her and the wall, which, judging by the fact that Len had already fallen asleep, she was, and then Noe tied her own wrist to the bedframe piece with one of her socks.

  Warm, slow tears dripped down Noe’s cheeks as she lay beside her sister. She stifled the sobs that threatened to push up through her throat and out her mouth. She didn’t want to believe it. She had hoped it wouldn’t happen to Len. But it had. Len was a sleepwalker. Just like Noe. And that was scarier than any basement.

  Three

  “I don’t like it when you tie yourself to your bed,” said Mom. She aimed a flathead screwdriver at a strip of bacon in a bubbly frying pan and harpooned it. She flipped the bacon onto a paper towel on the counter. She then hissed a duet with the frying pan as drops of scalding grease hit the back of her hand. “I also don’t like that we can’t find my tongs.”

  “They’re here somewhere. We just need to get to the bottom of more boxes,” said Dad. He was sitting at the kitchen table with Noe. Len was still asleep upstairs on Noe’s mattress. Around them, boxes were stacked like a messy game of Minecraft.

  “I don’t like doing it either,” said Noe.

  “Noe, you haven’t sleptwalked in weeks. I think you’ve grown out of it. The doctor said you would,” said Mom.

  “Isn’t the past tense ‘sleepwalked’?” Dad jumped at the opportunity to pick his phone off the kitchen table and start jabbing at it.

  “The doctor also said it peaks at my age.” Noe had told her parents the awful news. That Len was a sleepwalker. Like she was. And Noe didn’t like their reaction at all.

  “But you’ve been doing so well. And I don’t even remember the last time you had night terrors.”

  “Parasomnia” was the doctor word for what Noe had. “Para” meant weird, like in paranormal. “Somnia” meant sleep. And that was it: weird sleep. Although it was worse than that. Much worse. Noe thought of it as dangerous sleep. Parasomnia wasn’t a single condition. There were a dozen types of parasomnia. Noe was the lucky sufferer of two: sleepwalking and night terrors. She walked in her sleep. And sometimes she had vivid nightmares. It had all started about a year before, and it had been awful. And now her kid sister was about to go through it all too. And her parents were worried about tongs and past tenses.

  “It is sleepwalked,” said Dad softly, using the opportunity to check some other apps on his phone that had nothing to do with grammar.

  “It doesn’t matter about me, anyway,” said Noe. “What about Len? Why aren’t you worried about her? She’s sleepwalking. You know how dangerous it is for me, and she’s only three years old.”

  Mom laid a plate full of bacon on the table and sat down. “We’ve gone through this with you, and we’ll go through it with Len. We’re pros at it now. And it’s a new place. Len might just be confused. That’s all. Doesn’t mean it’s a long-term situation.”

  “Right,” said Dad, grabbing a piece of bacon without looking up from his phone, and ripping off an end with his teeth. “I’m pretty sure I almost sleep-unpacked last night. Besides, the layout of this house is better for dealing with sleepwalking than our old house. Every outside door has a dead bolt, and both your and Nore’s bedrooms are at one end of the hall. . . .”

  “Stop it,” said Mom.

  “What?” asked Dad, looking up and widening his eyes in fake confusion, the strip of bacon dangling from his mouth.

  “Her nickname isn’t Nore. It’s Len. We’re not calling our kids Noe and Nore.”

  “Why not? It’s clever and endearing.”

  “It’s confusing and embarrassing. You’re with me on this, right, Noe?” Mom pushed the plate of bacon closer to Noe.

  “It’s confusing and embarrassing,” said Noe, picking at a piece of bacon but not lifting it from the plate. “We’re not twins.”

  “Well, what I was saying,” said Dad, “is that I can put up Len’s old baby gate at that end of the hall. That’ll keep her from wandering. You’ll just have to remember not to crash into it when you go to the bathroom at night.”

  “That doesn’t protect her from me,” Noe said.

  Mom slapped the table hard enough that the bacon jumped. So did Noe. So did Dad. The boxes surrounding them seemed like the only objects unaffected by Mom’s sudden anger. “Don’t say that,” said Mom. “That thing with Abby was . . . just something that happened.”


  Abby had been Noe’s best friend. One night, she’d had a sleepover at Abby’s house. It was before Noe knew about the parasomnia. She had woken up surrounded by her parents and Abby’s. Abby wasn’t there. Noe’s parents took her home and told her she’d attacked Abby in the night. They didn’t go into details. They still wouldn’t. But Abby had never talked to her again.

  The worst part was that she didn’t remember hurting Abby. She just remembered the night terror. A large purple snake was floating in the dark, coming right for her like it wanted to bite her head off. It moved stiffly, like it was half frozen, but when it got closer it start twisting and contorting faster and faster until she woke up. She’d had that exact same night terror a few times since. Even thinking about it in the daytime made her uncomfortable. But because of it, she had hurt Abby. Although it wasn’t her fault.

  “Even if Len has the same issues you did, it’s different this time,” said Mom. “And I mean more than the house. When you were dealing with it, it was only me and your father helping you. And we knew very little about parasomnia at the time.”

  “We only just now learned the past tense of sleepwalk,” said Dad, grabbing another piece of bacon.

  “Len has three people watching over her. Three people who are now experienced with the condition. So let’s eat this screwdriver-flavored bacon before your father finishes it all, and get back to unpacking boxes. This house is a maze of cardboard.”

  The entire day was dedicated to boxes. Mom and Dad had taken the week off work for the move, and since it was summer, Noe had plenty of time to help out. Too much time. Even Len, once she woke up, tried to help. Her job was to stack the empty boxes by the back door to be flattened and shoved into the big green recycling bin, but mostly she drew windows and doors on the boxes and crawled inside them.

  The entire week was like that. A slow limbo of brown cardboard and moving familiar items into unfamiliar places. Getting her room right. Not really caring about getting the rest of the house right until Dad or Mom raised their voices a few decibels. Every night she went to bed exhausted, and maybe because of that she didn’t sleepwalk, although like Mom had said, it had been weeks since the last time it had happened. Len didn’t sleepwalk again, either. All that work plus worrying over her little sister had pushed the warning from the girl with the stone around her neck right out of Noe’s mind.

  Until she saw the thing in the mailbox.

  Noe had opted for staring out the front window instead of pulling one more thing out of one more box. The air from the plastic desk fan cooled the sweat on her arms and forehead. She realized she hadn’t seen any activity outside the house all week, other than a car pulling out of a driveway here or there. Instead of an R in the DEAD END sign, the vandal should have crossed out the END. That’s what this street was. Dead Street. The kids she had seen on that first day acted more like zombies than kids. Why weren’t they out riding bikes or playing basketball or lying in the middle of the road, like Dad had said?

  Her eyes roved the street, looking for any activity. She’d even take a squirrel at this point. That was when she noticed something wedged into the flag of the mailbox.

  That was enough of an excuse to take a break from unpacking.

  Noe walked out the front door and marched down the slight slope of the front yard, past the two tall oak trees that she’d already decided would sport a giant spiderweb between them next Halloween. At the old house, three steps out her front door and she was in a busy street, and ten more steps and she was on the neighbor’s front porch across the street. Here, twenty steps away from the front door and she was still in her own front yard, standing on grass spotted by yellow dandelions. She looked up, the oak trees towering above her and framing the sky in their branches. She’d heard once that a person’s property extended up all the way to space, so maybe they owned that patch of sky just like they owned the trees and the dandelions and the grass.

  The mailbox was big and black and metal with a rusty red flag. She was sure it wouldn’t last a week. This was their first chance at a real mailbox, so Dad would probably replace it with something quirky and embarrassing like a barn with an open door or a fish with a giant mouth. Their old house had had a small, boring metal bin nailed to the house.

  The thing stuck in the mailbox flag was an envelope. White and long like the kind her parents kept in the junk drawer but never used. She opened the box first, but it was empty. She pulled the envelope away from the flag. The paper was bendy, like there wasn’t much inside, and there was no postage or address on it. On the side where the address should have been, written in large, shaky letters, was her name. Sort of. It was misspelled N-O-E-L. She opened the envelope.

  Inside was a paper doll cut from gray construction paper. It had a round head and a rectangle body and long arms and legs. The edges were unevenly cut, like it had been done by a child with dull scissors. The body of the doll was blank, but its face had been drawn with crayon . . . and it was terrifying. Purple eyes that seemed too big and staring. Large red splotches on the face like it was bleeding. A red slash of smile that made her uncomfortable. A child’s version of a monster. Horrifying. When she flipped it over, it had two letters in black crayon on the back, punctuated with oversized periods: S.M.

  Noe looked around the neighborhood to see if the sender was spying on her, watching her open the strange delivery and hoping for a reaction. But the neighborhood was as still as it had been for days . . . until she saw the house at the tip of the dead end. The white one on the slope of the ravine. Something moved in an upper window, a slight shifting of a curtain.

  Noe got angry.

  She lifted the doll into the air and made a big motion of ripping it up while looking directly at that window. She was angry because she had gone down into that basement. By herself. After dark. Because there was supposed to be something to be afraid of there. But there were worse things to be afraid of than pranks for the new kid on the block. Like falling down the stairs or wandering out in the streets or hurting somebody you care for without being able to help yourself and your little sister about to go through the same dangers and torments that you had to put up with and lose friends over and can’t hide from because it could happen any night while you were asleep and helpless.

  Noe dropped the pieces of the paper doll to the ground. She tried to run inside before the tears started. If it had been the front lawn of her old house, she would have made it.

  Four

  The dirt didn’t feel like dirt. The air didn’t feel like air. Noe couldn’t tell if she was inside or outside, if it was day or night. Nothing around her felt familiar or right.

  She was easing out of a sleepwalking episode. Time seemed to flow strangely, and she couldn’t be sure if anything she heard or saw or felt was real. The dream world and the awake world didn’t have hard lines. Elements of one blended into elements of the other. She just had to wait it out.

  Noe didn’t usually wake up in the middle of a sleepwalking episode. She often only knew she had sleepwalked if her parents told her the next morning. Sometimes they found her standing in front of an open fridge without moving. Or a turned-off television set. Or on the porch. Or screaming from a night terror in a corner. They would lead her back to her bed and tuck her in, where she would finish her sleep the way she was supposed to. The way most people slept.

  But every once in a while she woke up in the middle of one of her sleepy ambles. It was confusing, and she had to spend minutes separating dream from real life, stacking up the evidence for or against in neat piles in her head like she was folding laundry, figuring out why she was standing in her pajamas in the garage in the dark or why she was sitting in Len’s closet. It never got easier.

  Noe stomped the floor with her bare feet to assure herself she wasn’t dreaming. But it wasn’t a floor. It was dirt. But it wasn’t like dirt. It was hard. Like a floor. She touched a wall. But it felt rough and uneven and cracked like a cliff face. Not like a wall. She had touched the water heater, bu
t that hadn’t helped. It looked like metal, felt like metal, but the metal was warm.

  Finally all the puzzle pieces floated slowly together like they were on the surface of a pool of water. She was in the basement of her new house. And she had sleepwalked. For the first time in her new house. For the first time in many weeks.

  She hated this so much.

  Noe found herself on the far side of the furnace and water heater, staring at the wall with the giant crack that traveled from ceiling to floor. She looked over at the windows, but they were solid black. She had no clue what time it was. Just that it was night. She stared in a daze at the wall, like she was sick with a stuffy head and couldn’t focus. She stared harder at the wall. At the crack among the cracks. Focusing on the long jagged line that stretched the length of the wall in a diagonal path like it was a lifeline that would keep her firmly in reality.

  And then, out of that crack, she saw movement.

  At first Noe though it was water, not for any reason other than that her mind couldn’t come up with anything else that would be seeping out of a crack in a stone wall.

  “Seeping” was a good word. “Oozing” was better. It looked like toothpaste being slowly pushed out of a tube. Or like when Len was pushing Play-Doh through the holes in her cupcake factory play set.

  She watched the movement for a few minutes, but for some reason couldn’t bring herself to get closer to the wall to see what it was. She stuck near the water heater, her left hand trailing behind and touching its warm surface like it was home base in a game of tag.

  Whatever was coming out of that crack was flat, more like one of those wide noodles from her mom’s pasta maker than like toothpaste, although it was much wider than those noodles.