by J. W. Ocker
And then she noticed the flatness had a shape. A head shape. A flat head like on a paper doll, but the size of a real head.
Noe thought of the gray paper doll she had ripped to shreds, the pieces of which probably still littered the base of the driveway.
She was hit with a wave of vertigo, like the dank basement air had thickened around her and was being stirred. Noe continued to stare at the shape extruding slowly out of that crack. It was about a foot or so out of the wall, sticking out into the air like a giant tongue.
She realized there was no sound. No slither or scrape of the thing as it slipped out of the wall, just a thick silence like there was no such thing as sound.
The flat form oozing from the crack in the wall bent up to reveal a face. A horrible, grayish face. A face that looked abused. Wounded. Smashed. Like a truck had run over it. Bruised and ripped with raw muscle and skull showing through, but all of it no more than a fraction of an inch thick. It had oily black hair and unearthly violet irises that shimmered in the gloominess of the basement like it had LEDs for eyeballs.
And it smiled. As it continued to slowly flow through the crack, it smiled at her.
That’s when Noe felt trapped.
It felt like she wasn’t watching of her own will anymore. Like the basement had constricted to an inch around her, not letting her leave. She knew this feeling, she realized. Just like she knew the feeling of slipping from sleepwalking into real life. She hadn’t woken up. This was a night terror. You weren’t supposed to remember your night terrors. But she always did. Every detail. And the worst thing about them was that she couldn’t escape them. She endured them, and then she woke up when they let her wake up. A type of scared that she was well familiar with settled at the bottom of her stomach. A helpless scared. She hated that type of scared.
It felt like another ten minutes for the flattened creature to free its shoulders and elbows. Its arms were held at its sides, its hands still in the crack, as it wavered like a lazily rearing cobra. The upper body was strewn with grayish rags that were embedded into its flatness, and the whole thing floated parallel to the ground like a ribbon tied to the grille of a fan. Except for its face, which continued to bend up and gaze at her with those purple eyes and smile at her with that ripped mouth full of teeth. Any moment now its hands would be free. And then after that, its legs. And then it would be out of the crack. And who knows what would happen after that.
The staring, grinning creature slowly reached its newly freed arms toward her.
Five
She screamed. Like a three-year-old. Like Len would have screamed. The scream seemed to shake her loose. Noe turned around and sped across the hard dirt without throwing another look back. She dashed up the stairs and burst into the kitchen.
“Mommy! Daddy! Mommy! Daddy!” She didn’t see either one of them around, and the rooms were all dark, so she ran upstairs, ricocheting here and there against the boxes on the floor. The boxes felt real. She reached the stairs and ran up, her feet falling heavily on the carpeted steps. The steps felt real. They sounded real. It was completely quiet in the bedrooms, and the baby gate at the end of the hall was open. But she turned to the other side of the hall, to the open door of her parents’ room.
“Mommy! Daddy!” Noe dived into the bed and felt her body hit the firmness of unexpecting limbs and the softness of unprepared bellies. The bed felt real. Her parents felt real. They lurched awake, Dad knocking the bedside lamp over with a crash of broken glass as he clumsily tried to find the switch on it.
“What’s wrong?” asked Mom. “Night terrors?” The concern was immediately evident. Not just because of the violence of her entrance. Noe realized she had been calling them “Mommy” and “Daddy.” She hadn’t done that since first grade. The bright beam of a flashlight blinded her. Dad had pulled it from the bedside table. He didn’t even try to hide the fact that he was only wearing boxers.
“There’s something in the basement. A thing,” said Noe breathlessly.
“Noe, are you awake?” asked Dad, shining the light into her eyes
“I’m awake,” she said, squinting in the beam. “I think I’m awake. I’m not sleepwalking now, right? I’m not having night terrors?” She slowly made eye contact in the dimness with first Dad and then Mom. Measured actions. Purposeful movements. Controlled responses. The evidence of someone not asleep.
“You seem okay,” said Dad.
“Why were you in the basement?” asked Mom.
“I was sleepwalking, and I woke up down there. But that doesn’t matter. Not this time. There’s something in the basement.”
“A mouse?” asked Dad.
“No, it’s a . . .” She couldn’t bring herself to say “a monster.” She already felt like Len overreacting to bedtime. “No, not a mouse. Please come. Follow me.”
Again feeling like a little child, she grabbed Dad’s hand and towed him to the top of the stairs, Mom following close behind.
By the time she got to the basement door, she had stopped holding Dad’s hand. Noe must have slammed the basement door shut in her flight. It loomed there like a guardian, not wanting her to pass. She didn’t want to pass, either. The next moment was going to be a bad one. No matter what happened.
If that monster was there, she didn’t know what she’d do. If he wasn’t there, she still didn’t know what she’d do. She wanted it to be there so that her parents could see it. She wanted it not to be there so she could convince herself that it hadn’t been real. That she had imagined it. That it was a night terror. Or that this strange house in this strange neighborhood with its strange kids had conspired to trick her imagination into seeing it.
“You first,” she told Dad, who hadn’t had a chance to throw on a pair of pants or a robe. He looked extremely vulnerable, all soft and pale and round and hairy.
He went steadily down the stairs like he was going to switch over the clothes from the washer to the dryer. Noe followed, and then Mom.
At the bottom of the stairs, Dad looked around casually, the same way he would check under Len’s bed and in her closet for werewolves. Noe did the same, but more like when Len herself would look under the bed or in her closet, scared and knowing with childlike certainty that something was there. The basement looked empty. Except for the washer and dryer. Except for the boxes. Except for the metal box of the furnace and the tall cylinder of the water heater.
“So where is it?” asked Dad.
“And what is it?” asked Mom, who had stopped at the halfway point of the stairs. She was in socks and didn’t want them to get dirty. What kind of house was this that you had to wear shoes to go to the basement?
Noe didn’t know how to answer. The flat monster didn’t seem to be there. She peeked quickly around the water heater. Nothing. The crack was just a crack. She looked at the other cracks on the other walls. Nothing. The she felt her chest grow cold at a sudden realization.
A flat monster could hide anywhere.
Even in an open room like this. It could hide on the other side of the water heater or slip under the washer and dryer . . . or slide behind the boxes.
“Was it a snake? Did it go behind the boxes?” Dad persisted when he saw her looking at them.
Noe approached the boxes like she was mesmerized by the brown cubes. There were six stacks of four boxes, each stack about five feet high and pushed together into a wall of cardboard. Yes, it could easily have slipped behind those boxes. Was probably watching her between the cracks in the stacks, its breath moistening the cardboard as it waited for her to get closer.
“Are you okay?” Dad asked again.
Noe leaned forward to peer between the boxes. “I think it’s behind . . .”
Movement elsewhere caught her eye.
It was the same crack in the same wall. The large crack that traveled from the floor to the ceiling on the wall on the far side of the water heater. A movement somewhere in the middle of the crack, at a point where it ran parallel to the ground—the same movement she had previously
misinterpreted as water gathering to drip down the wall, the same movement that she now recognized as a flattened head oozing its way through the crack, slowly, slowly, slowly . . .
“It’s right there!” she screamed, covering her mouth with one hand and pointing a finger at the monster. Mom ran down the steps, socks and all, to stand behind her, putting her hands on Noe’s shoulders, and Dad spun quickly around to look where Noe’s finger was pointing.
They all stared at the wall. At the giant crack.
The monster’s head was only halfway out. Like it had rewound itself in the time she had run upstairs. It had started its exit from the crack all over again. Any second now, its head would bend up. She would see its purple eyes, its bruises, its bone, the wide grin on its grayish face as it looked directly at her. She whimpered.
“What are you pointing at, Noe?” Dad asked, his voice soft.
“That thing! In the crack!”
“Oh, in the crack?” Dad started walking toward the crack.
“Dad, stop.” Noe grabbed at Dad’s bare arm.
“Noe.” He shook off her hand and walked to the crack. He stood close to the head of the monster, scrutinizing the wall as if he were planning out a mural for it. Meanwhile, the head kept creeping slowly out, like a letter in slow motion through a slot. Dad bent over to take a closer look at the crack itself, and the head started bending up. Their faces were about to be inches from each other. Noe closed her eyes tight. She didn’t want to see what was about to happen.
“I don’t see anything in the crack. Was it a centipede?” Dad asked. Noe opened her eyes again. Dad was staring directly into the purple eyes of the monster. “We’ve left the doors open a lot, moving stuff into the house. Who knows what kind of critters slipped in from the forest?” He stuck the tip of his index finger into the crack, right beside the head of the creature, right where its flat shoulder was about to emerge any second as it continued to seep from the wall.
“You don’t see that . . . that thing? It’s right beside you,” said Noe.
Dad turned back to her. “Noe, there’s nothing here but a crack in the wall. They’re all over this basement. It’s an old foundation. Nothing to worry about.”
His eyes.
Dad’s eyes.
They’d changed.
The irises weren’t brown anymore. They were a pale violet. And shimmering. Like the monster’s eyes. Noe sucked in her breath.
“I don’t see anything either. Can you describe it?” asked Mom behind her, removing her hands from Noe’s shoulders. Noe turned around. Mom’s eyes, normally dark green, were the same terrifying hue as Dad’s.
Noe stepped away from Mom, backing her way to the staircase. She spun, running up the stairs and out of the basement, and she didn’t stop until she was in her own room, the door shut, her entire body buried in the blankets and pillows of her newly assembled bed.
Eventually she heard a door closing downstairs. Noises in the kitchen. Footfalls on the stairs. Down the hall. The click of the child gate. Her door opened, and her parents entered. Her purple-eyed parents.
“Noe, look at me,” said Dad.
“I don’t want to,” said Noe in a voice muffled by blankets. She thought maybe the monster was with them, standing behind them, all three with matching eyes glowing in the darkness.
“Come on, Noe,” said Mom. “We’ve been through this before. It’ll feel better any minute now. You just need to calm down and fall asleep. Morning always fixes everything.”
Finally they coaxed Noe out of the blankets. Dad had put on a white T-shirt and blue sweatpants. Mom had thrown on a maroon robe. Noe didn’t see a flat monster with them. They had brought her some water and a peanut butter sandwich, the same stuff they always brought her during a bad sleep episode. Noe looked at their eyes. It was difficult to see in the dark. “Can you turn the lights on?” she asked.
Dad stood up and flicked the switch. Noe looked straight at Mom. And then at Dad.
Their eyes were normal. A normal green and a normal brown.
Her parents eventually returned to their own bed. She could hear the plastic snap of the baby gate closing after they passed through it.
Noe pulled the covers up to her chin and stared at the ceiling. What was that thing in the basement? How did the neighborhood kids know about it? Why had it gone back into its crack the first time she had run away? Was it still in the crack? Had it followed her? That was an awful thought. She looked around her room. At the space under the door. The slats in her closet. The inch that her window was cracked open to relieve the heat. A flat monster could get through any of those spaces. It couldn’t be kept out. It could be in the room right now, hiding behind her dresser or behind her headboard or under her bed.
Noe hid under the covers again and did math problems in her head. Her doctor had told her to do that when she was scared. If you do math problems, you’ll eventually get more bored than scared, and then you’ll fall sleep.
Noe did finally fall asleep, but on the side of the bed away from the thin space between her mattress and the wall.
Six
Noe awoke to soft fur pushing against her face. She smiled and reached out to pull the fur closer, awaiting the cold, twitching nose of the dog on her cheek. But then she smelled the awful aroma of banana and remembered that they didn’t have a dog.
She snapped her eyes open and threw herself away from the edge of the bed, which should have landed her against the hard wall on the other side, but instead landed her against a soft mound of fur, like she was in bed with a giant beast.
Finally all her senses started working together and she realized she was surrounded by stuffed animals. More like buried in them—a menagerie of hellbenders and capybaras and okapis and bush babies and meerkats and all the other obscure and exotic animals that Len loved. Her little sister stood at the side of the bed, a half-peeled, half-rotten banana in one hand and a plush wallaby that was supposed to be the next animal in the plush cocoon she was making for Noe in the other.
“What in the world are you doing, Len?”
“Protecting you from werewolves,” Len said around a disgusting mouthful of soft banana.
And then Noe remembered. The sleepwalking. The basement. The flat monster. Her parents’ eyes. She jumped out of bed in an explosion of fuzzy chinchillas and echidnas and blob fish and kakapos and started throwing on clothes.
“Where are you going?” asked Len.
“Don’t worry about it. Just keep playing with your animals.” Noe grabbed her phone, noted that it was almost ten a.m., and dashed downstairs. Her parents were elbow-deep in boxes. She tossed out an “I’m going outside. Be right back!” at them and then darted behind a stack of boxes and out the front door before they could reply.
The temperatures were shifting from morning cool to afternoon muggy. The grass was dry, and the blue sky was so blank, it was like a giant reflector for the heat of the sun. She tried to remember which directions those creepy kids had gone on that first day. Any of them. But she had only a vague memory of them moving away from the house.
Then she remembered the movement in the window of the white house at the tip of the dead end when she had found the paper doll.
She walked around the arc of asphalt toward it. The house was relatively isolated at the end of the street, as if nobody wanted to build on either side of it. On one side of the house, a thin dirt path wended up the gentle slope and disappeared over the top of the hill.
From afar, the white house seemed like every other house on the block, old-fashioned and very New England. But the closer she got, the more she realized how really old it looked, in the negative sense. It looked uncared for. Abandoned, even. The white siding was dingy and cracked. The red paint on the door and window shutters was speckled and peeling. The grass on the small front lawn looked as wild as the forest surrounding the property. She didn’t see a mailbox.
Strangest of all, somebody had painted a large black X on the dirty white siding beside the red
front door. It looked freshly painted and seemed to sparkle like the R on the Dead End sign at the opposite end of the neighborhood.
The X reminded her of something Mom had told her when they went hiking once. Noe had pointed out a group of trees with orange X’s on them, and Mom had told her they were marked to be removed. When Noe asked her why anybody would want to remove trees, Mom guessed that the trees were diseased or infested with bugs and needed to be taken down before they fell on a hiker or infected the trees around them. Whatever the reason, it was so the tree removers would know exactly which trees to remove and which trees to leave alone.
Noe stared at the shimmering black X and the dilapidated house it was painted on. The house did seem diseased, and she couldn’t imagine who would be living here. She was about to find out, though.
She crossed the lawn and ascended the cracked concrete steps to the front door. There was a doorbell to the side, but after pressing it a few times, she decided it didn’t work and banged hard on the wood with her knuckles.
Nobody answered. She knocked again. Maybe this place was abandoned. But then who had been looking at her out that window? She looked up at the window and saw curtains covering it.
Eventually, Noe walked away from the house. She was relieved that nobody had answered. That she had been saved an awkward confrontation. But then she thought of Len sleepwalking down into the basement and that thing in the crack. She had to try another house.
There were about a dozen houses on the block, and there were three kids standing at the edge of her lawn on the day she moved in. If she had to knock on the door of every house in the neighborhood to find one of those kids, she would.
She continued around the curve of the dead end to the next house, which was blue and shaped like a barn. It was the house almost directly across the street from her house. It had a white door with no X beside it. This house was staying. She rang the doorbell.
A woman opened the door almost before Noe had pulled her finger back. The woman was wearing black yoga pants and a loose green T-shirt and had beads in her hair like the girl with the stone around her neck. Noe suddenly realized that this was not like her at all, walking up to strangers’ houses and talking to adults she’d never met so that she could talk to kids she’d never met. Her face flushed as the woman waited for her to speak.