by Ilsa J. Bick
Me, I dropped my foot on the accelerator and sped past, but their eyes followed me all the way, and I got a really, really bad feeling.
Uncle Hank met me at the door as I bounded up the steps. My mind was so focused on planning my next move that I didn’t hear Uncle Hank call my name until he’d said it twice and then stopped me with a hand on my arm. “Sorry,” I said, and then my heart almost died in my chest when I got a good look at his face. Oh no ...was Dr. Rainier... “Uncle Hank, what’s happened?”
“That was Helen . . . Dr. Rainier just now,” he said. “I’m sorry, Christian, but David Witek is dead.”
XXVII
The news was a punch in the gut. I don’t remember what I said to Uncle Hank, but I stumbled up to my room and fell onto my bed, facedown in the pillow, still in my paint-spattered clothes. Paint speckled my arms, drying in tight puckers, and I could smell myself despite the chill of the day, but I couldn’t move, didn’t want to see anyone, couldn’t bear the thought of speaking to another soul.
Dead. I pressed my hot, dry face into the pillow. It was so unfair. How the hell could that have happened? I was so close, things were so clear. . . . I remembered what Dr. Rainier had said: At the end, some of them display astonishing moments of clarity. Now I knew what it was I’d experienced: David’s death. I was some kind of weird death magnet.
Tears came, eventually, big wracking sobs, the kind where your chest is tearing itself apart. Maybe I could cry myself to death or at least to sleep. I kept my face pressed into my pillow so Uncle Hank wouldn’t hear. I couldn’t handle explaining myself to him.
Well, what the hell was there to think about? My parents were dead, and they were waiting. All I had to do was paint that knob, give it a turn . . .
A rap on my door. “Go away,” I said.
“No.”
Flipping onto my back, I propped myself up on my elbows. “Go away. I don’t feel like talking.”
I expected her to say something like, oh okay, if that’s what you want, because she was a shrink and weren’t shrinks supposed to, like—I don’t know—listen to their patients? Just my luck I get the shrink who hasn’t read the manual because the knob turned, my door swung open, and Dr. Rainier came through like something out of a dream.
Anger crowded into my throat. “Are you deaf? I don’t want to talk! I don’t want to see you! Get out!”
She didn’t bat an eyelash. “No,” she said and then closed the door behind her. Pulling out my desk chair, she sat, crossed one knee over the other, and laced her fingers in her lap: what you expect every shrink is going to look like and she never had, up until that moment. “It’s unacceptable for you to hide. You’ve got to talk about this.”
“No, I don’t.” I flopped back onto my bed. I threw an arm over my stinging, watery eyes. They felt like I’d scrubbed them with sandpaper. “I don’t have to do a thing more. Talking hasn’t helped and I’m done—with you and this town and everything.”
“You haven’t struck me as a quitter. If you were, you’d already have walked through that door there.”
That got my attention. “How do you know about that? I haven’t told . . .”
“I didn’t get my degree out of a Cracker Jack box, thanks. I know a door when I see it and you,” she jabbed a finger at me, “are a coward. You come this far, you hint that you’ve got these powers, and you’re too freaked out to use them? People like you give me a headache. Always whining, complaining . . .”
If she was trying to piss me off, she succeeded. A flare of rage fired my chest, and I sat straight up, my fists bunched. “Coward? I’m not a coward. I kill people! I do something that brings out—that draws—death! Everything I touch, everyone I care about . . . they die! Don’t you get it?”
“Really?” she drawled. Her tone was so dismissive, I wanted to break something, throw something across the room just to hear what destruction sounded like. How could I have been so stupid? I thought she cared about me, but she really thought I was just another idiot. “Oh, I get it, Christian. I get that you believe this. But I don’t.”
“Fine.” I fell back onto the bed. “You don’t believe me. Fine. Then get the hell out of my room.”
“Or what? You going to hurt me if I don’t leave? You going to draw me to death?”
Yes, that’s precisely what will happen. But I didn’t answer. An odd ringing filled my ears, the kind of high whine people say you can get from taking too much aspirin, but I knew better. The ringing resolved; it had been some kind of clarion call, and now the muttering started up in earnest: a gibbering crowd pressing against that unfinished door.
Her voice boiled up through the hubbub. “I don’t believe you can do it. I don’t think you’ve got the talent. You’re nothing but a sponge, a conduit maybe, but you’ve got no power on your own. No way you can draw a scenario out of your own head and make it what you want. You’re dependent on everyone else to feed you the emotion because you’re too scared to use your own—”
“Screw YOU!” I shot to my feet so fast I knocked over my nightstand. My lamp smashed against the floor in a bright, gaudy explosion, like what you see in movies. I snatched Mordecai Witek’s brushes from my back pocket and shook the pouch in her face. “You think I can’t use these? Let’s see how you like it when I do you!”
Her expression was utterly calm. Her dark eyes were bright as a crow’s. “Yes, do that, Christian. Draw something out of your head. Draw me into something, and then make me experience it. Show me what you can do. Or are you really all talk and no action?”
I almost hit her. My fist, bunched around those brushes, was inches from her face, and it would’ve been easy, so easy. Then I thought: Fine. Fine. You think you’ve crawled around private hells? You don’t know the half of it, lady. I’m your worst fears realized. So you want this? You got it.
I don’t remember much. I do know that I unrolled Mordecai Witek’s brushes and grabbed a fine; pawed through my desk and fumbled out paints; and then I started, not so much painting as filleting, slashing, cutting in a vicious fury on my walls. I could feel Dr. Rainier behind me, but I didn’t need to see her face; I’d memorized those contours, and so I closed my eyes, and I reached down deep, and then I pulled, I drew as hard as I could. I reeled out the darkness from her gut, and I let myself go. That subtle click and then my mind detached; and I was filled with the same floaty, helium-balloon feeling I’d experienced before with Miss Stefancyzk and Aunt Jean. And with Lucy—not the time I’d pulled the image of her as a happy girl in a white dress on a summer’s day, but as I’d drawn her at the moment of her death, her gnarled fingers cramping around a chunk of charcoal, black streaks like tear-drenched mascara sliding across the page as she collapsed. From somewhere deep down, I drew up a foul, putrid blackness that not even Dr. Rainier suspected lived inside. Oh, I was floating all right, but I was a balloon caught up in a black funnel cloud, a tornado, and the roaring wind was my fury—all the hurts and losses, all the slights and whispers and evil thoughts of the people of Winter and all their secrets—
I worked fast, urgently, in broad strokes; my mind completely elsewhere; my muscles obeying some hidden reservoirs of thought of which I was unaware: my body as the vehicle for an unseen, ghastly puppeteer. I worked until my arm hurt and my shoulder throbbed; I worked until my fingers screamed. I don’t know how long I painted, but the hours swept by in a blur, the way they do in dreams, and then finally, the energy vanished the way a storm cloud sweeps over the land and out to the lake.
Spent, panting, my chest going like bellows, I opened my eyes.
Behind me, Dr. Rainier made a harsh, guttural broken sound, the caw of a dying crow.
But I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t. Instead, I stared, riveted at the ugliness of what I had painted.
Dr. Rainier’s deepest dread and worst fears, realized.
How to describe a nightmare?
Each is ultimately unique. Yes, there are universals. That’s what Sarah said once—another nugget from h
er psychology class about the collective unconscious. But every dream requires a unique dreamer, every fear a person who feels the sharp sting of terror.
Think of the foul stink of an unused basement: dank and earthen, churning with slithery worms thick around as your wrist and fecund with the smell of decay. You know that if you take a single step into that muck, you’re lost because the things that live there—not just the greedy worms but macerated corpses with ropes of bloated intestines and skeletal fingers and maggots boiling in eyeless sockets, and fat, mucus creatures with pinpoint eyes and jostling teeth—they’ll reach up and grab your ankles and draw you down, screaming and thrashing until the muck flows down your throat and you drown.
But you’re just a child; you’re only six, and there’s no power because of the storm raging beyond the house. You’re miles from nowhere, and the monster’s coming, and you have to do something because the animal’s up there, shouting your name, axe in hand. It’s already killed your mother, and now it’s coming for you. So, whimpering, you slap the slimy moist wall, looking for the light switch, but there is none. You don’t have a flashlight. But you have to go, and you have to get down there now and hide because the monster’s coming; you can hear it moving through the house and smell its fetid drunk’s breath and know without having to see that there are strings of fresh meat dangling from its teeth and your mother’s blood on the blade of that axe. You know it is worse to stay aboveground than to go below.
So you take a step and then another, and then the darkness rushes forward and swallows you up, and you’re in the basement, with no way out.
The basement is dark-dark-dark and smells bad: dust and dried-up rat poop and mildew. No muck at the bottom the way you thought, but that doesn’t matter because this is just as bad. There are spiderwebs, big sticky ones that drag across little Helen’s face as she pushes deeper into the basement, looking for a place to hide.
In the third room, she runs into a brick wall, and now there is nowhere else to go, only the furnace to hide behind, and she does just that, huddling down, the grit digging into her knees. Her heart is going puh-boom-puh-boom-puh-boom, and she’s trying not to cry. But she’s so scared, she lets out little eepy sounds, just like Cookie. (Whenever Cookie slept, she had nice hamster dreams, only sometimes she went eep-eep-eep. But that was okay because even if Cookie was scared, she could wake up. Then the bad dreams would be gone and the monsters too, and everything would be all right.)
But nothing will ever be all right again, not ever-ever. Because Helen knows that the bad thing living in her daddy is awake; it always wakes up when he drinks, but now the drinking’s gone too far. IT just took over: all the way, exploding behind her daddy’s eyes like a volcano.
That’s when Helen’s momma ran up the stairs. Run! Momma shouted. Run, Helen, run!
But it was already way, way, way too late.
The thing in Helen’s daddy hit Momma real hard, and Momma crashed against the wall like Raggedy Ann. All Helen’s books went bang, and then there was blood trickling down Momma’s chin, and Momma’s teeth were orange, but she was still shouting: Run, Helen, run, baby, run, run!
Only Helen couldn’t. Helen was so, so scared: for Momma and Cookie and especially for Daddy, lost somewhere in the monster. Her daddy’s teeth were all spiky, and his eyes were yellow and green with black slits up and down, snake eyes, lizard eyes. IT scooped Cookie out of her cage. Helen started screaming, but the thing in her daddy just laughed: not a funny laugh or one when you’re happy because there are butterflies or dandelion fluff or because Cookie’s stuffed her cheeks with so many seeds they look like furry balloons. It was the kind of laugh only a monster with a daddy mask makes.
IT threw Cookie to the floor. Poor little Cookie bounced and went eep-eep-eep and tried to get away. Helen screamed, No, Daddy, No, Daddy, NONO! But IT didn’t care; IT didn’t listen. IT just stomped real hard—again and again and again until Cookie was nothing but blood-jelly hair and squiggly pink guts.
That’s when Helen ran as fast as she could to the basement and where she hides, waiting to die....
And now, there’s a sudden flare of yellow light as the thing with the daddy mask pushes open the basement door. “Helen?” ITS voice is bloody. “I know you’re there. Come out, Helen. Don’t make this worse than it has to be.”
Nononono . . . There’s a dull bang, the scraping sound of metal, and she knows that the monster’s in the first room, heaving the washer to one side, to see if she’s hiding there.
Oh please. Please. She isn’t praying. God has a bunch of better things to do than help her, especially since she’s made such a mess. But Momma always said Helen should call on God to help if things got bad, and Helen thinks things probably can’t get much worse.
Another light, brighter now: the second room. The thing keeps calling, saying he won’t hurt her, he just wants her to come out, and he needs to explain. Meanwhile, jars go bang-crash and boxes go bump-thump. She doesn’t move because she knows: he is IT.
And then a crisp SNAP! Two bare bulbs burn hot yellow-orange because IT is in the third room, the furnace room. There’s the stink of sweat like her daddy’s been mowing the lawn on a hot day but also a sharper stink like gasoline. She smells ITS fury, too: the odor of a bloated raccoon by the side of the road. ITS boots scrape concrete. She can just see the tip of ITS shadow inking the near wall to her left. More bangs on top of the furnace ductwork and something heavy makes the metal go boom-boom-boom and she thinks: Axe.
She knows IT will look behind the gas furnace next and then ...
Save her.
The thought is like a jag of lightning across a starless sky. Behind me, Dr. Rainier is making that broken sound, and I know that this is what’s killing her, this nightmare come to life that I made happen: that she somehow survived once but will not live through again—without my help.
Save her.
For once, I don’t hesitate. I step forward, into the painting, or maybe her world rushes to meet me, I don’t know. But suddenly I am there, in that basement, at the entrance to the furnace room. I smell her father’s insanity and the iron stink of her mother’s blood. Her father is a muscled giant, with a lizard’s eyes, rounding the far corner of a furnace. IT grips an axe, smeary with red blood, and the thing that had been her father stares down at a frightened little girl, and then IT reaches down—
“NO!” In two strides, I’ve crossed the basement. Her father half turns, but I spring, arms outstretched. I crash into him; off-balance, he reels, the axe clattering to the cement, and we go down in a heap. I have the advantage of surprise, but he is older, bigger, and much stronger. Bellowing, he slams a fist into my head. It’s like a bomb going off; my vision sheets white and then red, and then his fist slashes the air again and catches me in the stomach. Gagging, I topple back as vomit spews from my mouth, and then I’m rolling onto the cement, unable to breathe.
Get up. I’m trying to pull in air; I hear her father drunk-staggering, lurching for the axe, which is actually closer to me, and my brain is screaming: Get up get up or you’re dead, get up or you’re going to die here in her nightmare get up get up get up . . .
I lunge for the axe a split second ahead of him. My desperate fingers close around the handle, which is slick with blood, and then his fist hammers between my shoulder blades. My face smashes against the hard concrete; I actually bounce and my head snaps back. Blood spurts from my nose, and there is blood in my eyes because my scalp has split, but I still have the axe; the axe is in my hands, and I roll to one side, and then I’m swinging—the axe hurtling, whickering the air—and I am screaming in a voice I no longer recognize as I heave the axe in its murderous arc with all my might—
“Christian!”
Screaming, I thrashed awake in a tangle of bedding. I’d thudded to the floor at some point in my nightmare, and now I lay in a halo of splintery glass. My nightstand was on its side; the base of my lamp was cracked in two at the same time the bulb burst. My face was still we
t and hot from tears and snot, and drool smeared my chin.
“Christian?” Dr. Rainier’s voice rose in alarm. I heard her say something, and then Uncle Hank was banging on my door, bawling: “Christian, what’s going on in there? Christian, open the door!”
A dream. I was shuddering. A nightmare, but it had been my own. I’d fallen onto my bed and cried myself to sleep and dreamt that Dr. Rainier found me, goaded and taunted me into action, and the rest was . . .
“Coming.” My throat was raw, the act of talking like swallowing a razor blade. I coughed; smeared snot from my face with a sheet; and then half-crawled, half-staggered to the door.
Uncle Hank’s eyes went wide when he saw my room. “Christian, what in God’s name . . . ?”
Dr. Rainier took one look—at me, the room, and the ruin of bedclothes on the floor—and her skin went paper white. “My God.” She took me by the shoulders and peered up into my face. “Christian, what is it? What did you see?”
“What?” asked Uncle Hank. “Helen, what are you—?”
“The answer,” I croaked. I was limp as a rag doll, wobbly-weak as a baby. I tottered, and my head, so light in my nightmare, swam with vertigo. “I...I saw...I...”
My knees buckled, but then Dr. Rainier had me by one arm and Uncle Hank moved in to take me by the other.
“Easy,” he said. “We got you, Christian, we got you.”
“Oh . . .” Then my throat clogged and I couldn’t speak. We three stood in the wreckage of my room, as the sideways place pressed in and my head whirled, but they wouldn’t let me go, they would not let me fall.
“Christian?” Dr. Rainier. “Tell us. What did you see?”
My tongue flicked over my parched lips. I was desperately thirsty.
“The answer,” I said finally. “I saw how to paint the answer.”
XXVIII
“That’s insane.” Uncle Hank thrust his jaw out at a stubborn angle. “Paint yourself into another man’s past? It would all be in your head, your imagination. Just like what happened upstairs. You had a bad dream was all.”