“Okay. Go ahead.”
“Alright so that’s Tee-Way, he’s the father. Guy I’ve known a long time.”
“Uh, can you spell that?” I asked.
“T-i-w-e. One of them little Frenchy flairs on the i and the e.”
William gave me the number and I quickly hung up, just as Faye descended the stairs. She looked at me with a blank expression, almost as if she didn’t recognize me, then smiled and walked past me to the refrigerator.
Chapter 10
For much of the day, Faye appeared to have returned to her cheerful and feisty self. She blared hard rock and danced around doing chores, occasionally winking at me and batting away my attempts to annoy her by pulling on her curls. We were back home in Northern California, unpacking the few things we’d managed to grab during our escape from the cabin. Our shared relief was palpable; we laughed and joked all afternoon.
But as night settled in, I noticed a few odd things in Faye’s mannerisms. We ordered a pizza and she wolfed down most of it, despite her common objection to greasy carbs. I chalked it up to her lack of appetite while she was sick, but I’d never seen her eat like this. She was absolutely ravenous, like a pregnant woman – or a wolf.
Faye also began to grow anxious. The darker it got, the more on-edge she appeared, until she abruptly suggested we not go to bed, but instead watch a funny movie. When I resisted, she grabbed my hand and pulled me close to her, pretending to pout. I could feel that she was trembling, so I agreed. She fell asleep in my arms about fifteen minutes into Wedding Crashers, and twitched and jerked throughout its duration.
The movie ended just before 1 A.M. It was only then in the darkness and silence of the house that I realized I still felt very fearful about our experiences at the cabin. Each little sound outside tripped a wire in my brain, triggering flashes of creepy memories. I tried to remind myself that we were nearly a thousand miles away from Pale Peak, safe at home and surrounded by watchful neighbors, but no amount of rationalizing could calm my nerves. My mind kept returning to the woman on my car and the man standing at the edge of the tree line, facing away from us and gazing up at the trees. Those images will be burned into my retinas forever.
When the movie ended, I quietly snuck away from the couch to get a drink. As I passed the stairwell, a soft noise came from upstairs. It sounded a bit like a man sighing. I dismissed it as the heater, which occasionally whooshed and clanked – but hurried back to Faye and woke her up.
She looked up at me with a puzzled expression, then glanced around the room.
“I had a weird dream,” she said, touching my hand as I caressed her face.
“Oh yeah?” I said.
“There was a man.”
“Better looking than me?”
“He was carrying something,” she said, closing her eyes again. “It was heavy. I offered to help him. But when I spoke, he ran away.”
“Ran away? From you?” I said, tugging on a lock of her fiery hair. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because I only date dumb guys,” she replied with a yawn. We both chuckled.
“Weird dream,” I added.
“After he was gone, I looked at it,” Faye continued. “It was a big bag. Like a body bag. But when I opened it, it was just a bunch of snow and twigs and stuff.”
“…Huh.”
“I stuck my hand inside. Like there was something else in there, something underneath. I just knew.”
At this point, I was intrigued. Faye’s dreams were often complex and metaphorical. Even when neither of us could understand them, I always got the sense that her dreams – even her nightmares – carried a deeper meaning.
“What did you find?” I asked.
“I never saw what it was. You woke me up before I could find out, you jerk.” She laughed and pushed me away.
We headed upstairs to brush our teeth and then climbed into bed. Faye was out before her head even hit the pillow. I tossed and turned for a while, still a tad afraid to fall asleep. I had the irrational fear that I’d wake up back at the cabin, our escape having been only a desperate fantasy.
“What the hell are you doing?” Faye blurted out in the darkness. By the stilted way she spoke, and the unusual tone of her voice, I knew she was sleep-talking.
I rolled over and watched her face in the moonlight that filtered through the curtains above our bed. Her eyes were closed but rolled all around against the lids.
“Do you want some help?” she said.
Perhaps she was reliving the dream from earlier this evening. I held my breath.
“Oh my God,” she panted. “What is this? What is this?!”
I instinctively reached over and ran my fingers down the length of her arm. Being touched usually soothed Faye, and helped to weaken the nightmare. Being touched – I liked to think – reminded her on some subconscious level that I was nearby, and that she was safe. She settled back down and mumbled a few more sentences, but there was nothing I could make out. In a few moments she returned to peaceful sleep.
I lay there for a long while, gazing into the softness of my fiancée’s face. The chaos lurking beneath those gentle features astonished me. If only I could know what plagued her thoughts in the murk of sleep. But the fleeting nature of dreams sometimes hindered her ability to recall them, and abruptly waking her guaranteed that they’d vanish like shadows hit with a flashlight. Whatever mysteries lay buried in Faye’s head, they would not be unearthed through interrogation.
At least not by me. Twice now, Faye had answered questions to someone else, or something else, in her sleep. I remembered the woman’s voice outside the cabin, how it lit up with menacing glee when Faye replied to it. Had there really been some dark force on that mountain that took unnatural interest in her? Was it still with us? Or was my fiancée simply talking to a dream of that memory – to a creation of her own mind? Anxiety and despair crept through my muscles, causing them to tense and twitch.
I just need sleep, I assured myself. We both do. Lots of it.
Eventually, I found a bit of rest. Faye giggled a few times and said the names of two of her coworkers, and this actually made me feel better. On a normal night, she babbles about mundane things and people from work, so hearing this sleep-talk indicated that her mind had turned away from dark dreams of the cabin. A new calm settled over me, and all went black.
Much later, I floated up from a dream of grading papers. The first thing that came into focus was the alarm clock across the room. Its glow read 4:01 A.M. I tried to remember what day it was, thinking that the paper stack was due in a few short hours, but my thought was interrupted by a voice.
“Shhh…yes. Yes.”
It was Faye.
She was whispering.
I held perfectly still, feeling every hair on my neck bristle at the quiet words she spoke. Normally, Faye giggled, cursed, argued, and even shouted in her sleep. But in five years of sharing a bed with this woman, never once did I hear her whisper. Faye was lying on her side, facing away from me, and whispering one half of a very strange conversation. I imagined a person crouching in the darkness at the edge of the bed, smiling up at her and whispering back.
It was impossible to make out much of what she said, but I thought I heard “wolves,” “beneath it, down there” and “not allowed.”
“What are you saying, Faye?” I asked, loud enough to wake her. She didn’t respond. I reached over and nudged her. “Who are you talking to?”
She jolted under my touch, and whispered “Don’t.”
Exhausted and annoyed, I yanked the sheets and rolled over, trying to get some rest. As sleep crept its way back over me, I imagined the man from outside the cabin, lying beneath our bed and staring up at the mattress in the dark. In my mind, he had a big grin plastered across his face.
Chapter 11
At about 5:45 A.M., I was awoken by Faye. My eyes cracked open just as she came into the bedroom. She walked stiffly, as if she had muscle cramps in both legs. Faye clambered back i
nto bed and covered herself with blankets, making little effort not to wake me. Her green eyes were big and full, as though she’d been up for hours, and she stared right into mine for just a moment. Then she rolled over and faced away from me. The rhythm of her breathing was soft and shallow, like that of a sleeping person.
This was another disturbing omen that something was wrong. Despite her tendency to babble in the middle of the night, Faye sleeps like a dead horse. A water glass already rested on her nightstand, so I assumed she hadn’t gotten up to get something to drink. Our bathroom is connected to the bedroom, and she certainly hadn’t come from there. The most likely explanation was that she had been sleepwalking. This scared me because I always worried that she’d fall down the stairs. But even then, Faye only sleepwalked a few times a year, and I usually saw it coming. I kicked myself for not having predicted that her current stress levels might precipitate an episode. I should have known.
A fuzzy memory popped into my head. I thought I had seen Faye returning to bed at about the same time on our last night at her parents’ house in Colorado. I couldn’t be sure it was real, but now I wondered how long Faye had been getting up and wandering around in the dark this early in the morning. Did she do it at the cabin? Everything about the past week was a blur.
We woke up late the next morning.
“Yo Monkeytoes,” I said, leaning out from the kitchen. Faye was reading something on her phone while I made us some eggs. “You remember anything from last night?”
“Ughh,” she replied, wiping her face with her hands. “I think his name was Brett or Brad or something…I don’t know. I was pretty wasted.”
“Smartass,” I said. Faye burst into laughter, apparently satisfied with herself.
“What are you asking, Poptart?” she said.
I told her everything I remembered from last night, knowing that it could trigger a chain reaction. Once Faye was aware that she was sleepwalking and experiencing other nocturnal disturbances, she tended to overthink it and cause more of them. To me, it was worth the risk. She was acting stranger than ever before, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it. Her constant disruptions to my sleep were beginning to drive me insane.
“I don’t remember any of that,” she said, looking into my eyes with a joyless expression. I knew she wasn’t lying. I didn’t press her any further.
Faye’s work shift didn’t start until the afternoon, so when she left, I had the place to myself all evening. In that time, I decided to call Tíwé. I felt hesitant to reach out to him, even after William had assured me that it was alright. It was probably a reluctance to hear anything that would further terrorize my brain while lying in bed at night. It took some consideration, but eventually I picked up the phone.
Tíwé picked up on the first ring.
“Felix,” he answered in a dreary voice, “I foresaw this conversation in a dream.”
“Uh…hey,” I replied, not knowing what to say to that.
Tíwé let out a disarming laugh. I instantly got the sense that he was a nice guy. A friend.
“Bad joke,” he said. “Sometimes it’s fun to play the part. For the tourists, you know.”
“That was good,” I admitted, letting out an awkward chuckle. “All those magazines and gift shops they have out there…I can see why visitors get the wrong impression.”
“The industry isn’t really fair to us,” Tíwé said. “We’re not all shamans and wise men. In fact, we cuss and dick around and use Facebook – almost like you humans.”
“I’m sorry,” I replied. “I felt a little weird calling you, and that’s one of the reasons. Is it wrong of me to ask you for help with…uh…whatever this is? Isn’t it a bit like asking a random Chinese guy to teach me kung fu?”
Tíwé laughed again. His voice was rich and textured, the kind you’d hear narrating a nature documentary.
“Well,” he said, “I guess if he’s the one who offered it first.”
“Okay. In that case, it’s nice to meet you. Can you make my fiancée stop doing Satanic shit in her sleep?”
We both cracked up. For the first time in days, I felt hopeful.
“How’s things?” he asked. “I’ve been meaning to call you. Got your number from William a few days ago. But I figured I’d give you both some time to unwind.”
I filled Tíwé in on what had happened at the cabin, and about Faye’s unusual behavior since we’d left the place. The conversation became more and more grim as I proceeded down the list of disturbing things we’d experienced. Tíwé listened carefully, and occasionally said “Hmm,” or “Tell me more,” but did not share any of his thoughts with me. He waited patiently and considered my every word.
After ten minutes of recounting the story, Tíwé finally spoke.
“Felix, this sounds like a really strange situation. I understand why you’re upset, and I’m sure what you guys went through would’ve given me a heart attack. Based on what William told me, I had some idea about what’s going on. But now that I’ve heard it from the horse’s mouth, I want to talk to a few buddies of mine – wise men, you know. Can you give me a few days? Just to be sure.”
My heart sank at the request. I was hoping for a simple explanation for everything, but I appreciated that someone was willing to help at all.
“Sure thing,” I said, trying to hide the disappointment in my voice.
“I just don’t want to be wrong about this,” he added. “It sounds like you love your fiancée very much. Hold onto that. It will keep you both strong, should she get worse.”
“What do you mean ‘worse’?” I asked.
“I’ve got to go now,” Tíwé said. “But I’ll call you soon. Get some rest.”
The conversation left me with mixed feelings. On one hand, I felt better knowing that I wasn’t alone in my quest for answers, but on the other, I feared that Tíwé was going to come back and tell me that Faye was possessed or some other crazy nonsense. I couldn’t understand why she was the one who ended up with all the weird psychological problems from the trip; I was the idiot who almost touched the dreamcatcher, and who almost got dragged away into the forest. I went outside into the snow multiple times, exposing myself to God knows what. Maybe the difference was that Faye believed in the supernatural – the world behind the world – and I did not. Maybe her belief that the cabin is haunted was having a psychosomatic effect on her, causing her to feel sick. Intruded upon. Tainted. Maybe it was all in her head.
Then who the hell was talking to her in her sleep? I heard voices up on that mountain. I didn’t dream it. Someone was out there, walking around in the freezing dark, calling out to my future wife.
Chapter 12
That night, I came up with a plan. I wanted to test my hypothesis that Faye had been getting up early and sneaking around for the past several days. I set my phone to buzz at 4:15 A.M. and placed it under my pillow. Then, I went to bed before nine, hoping to get in a good few hours of sleep before the alarm went off.
At least my insomnia’s gone, I mused, just at the brink of consciousness.
An unfamiliar voice woke me up. I glanced around the room, trying to get my bearings, and saw that it was just after midnight. A dry, raspy voice croaked a few things from nearby. At first I thought there was someone on the floor or under the bed, so I jumped up and used my phone as a light. It only took me a moment to realize that the voice was Faye’s, and that she was mimicking another person in her sleep. Just as she had done the night before, she was lying on her side (usually she sleeps on her tummy), facing away from me.
She repeated the sounds “Laaaa… Laaaa… Lalaaa…” as if she were trying to sing, but the words were robotic and monotonous. I could hear her tongue wagging around and flicking against her teeth between utterances, like she was testing a new mouth for the first time. Then, Faye spoke a few phrases:
“Down in the hole.”
“He’s still up there.”
“Where were you? I looked for you…”
Faye’s v
oice had changed, but she wasn’t channeling some otherworldly spirit. It was as if she were trying to imitate the person she was speaking to. It frustrated me that this person was in her head, in her dreams, and I could only ever hear one side of the conversation. I found myself beginning to hate this phantom of her mind.
As I stood there clutching my phone, contemplating whether to wake her, there was a noise outside the bedroom window. It sounded like an old man grumbling to himself about something. The night was quiet and hardly any crickets sang, so I knew I hadn’t imagined the noise. Whoever he was, he was moving away from my house, muttering his frustrations under his breath as he went.
Because I’m in a Ph.D. program, Faye and I are able to live in a faculty housing complex at the base of campus. It’s a quaint little set of neighborhoods surrounded on three sides by a belt of redwoods, and there are small groves of trees separating each neighborhood from the next. Our bedroom window overlooks the street in front of the house. Just across it rests one of these groves, and at night, the faint yellow lights of houses in the adjacent neighborhood twinkle through it. They look a bit like fairies floating in the dark.
I left Faye and quietly pulled the curtain open, hoping to catch someone wandering around in front of the house. Instead I saw the silhouette of a man far off in the distance, meandering between the trees across the street. He’d never have been visible if the houses behind him weren’t lit up; each time he passed in front of one, his huge form eclipsed the yellow lights, providing me with momentary glimpses of his body. He must have been nearly seven feet tall, and shuffled awkwardly like a drunken person.
A thousand hairs pricked up on my arms as I stared out the window. The longer I watched, the more bizarre the man seemed. Suddenly, he stopped in his tracks and turned around. His body was a featureless black mass, so I couldn’t tell if he was facing toward or away from me. Then, he lurched a step past the tree line. The moon lit him up just enough to reveal that he was wearing a ragged jacket. His back was turned to me, and his head was tilted straight up at the sky. He paused there for only a moment, then retreated into the darkness of the woods and disappeared. I scanned the tree line, trying to spot any disruptions in the lights beyond it, but there was nothing. The man had vanished.
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