Because I’d opened the curtain, pale moonlight now poured into the bedroom. I turned back toward the bed, trembling with fear – and nearly shrieked when I saw Faye. She was lying there on her back with her neck craned out toward me, head upside-down and dangling off the side of the bed. Her wide, crazed eyes locked onto me, and her mouth hung open. She issued a gurgling, drawn out groan and flicked her tongue around, prompting me to back into the window frame and nearly climb up the wall. Her movements looked like an epileptic fit in slow motion.
Faye watched me with a malice I’d only seen in movies. Her eyes pierced into mine with hateful desire and never broke from their assault. They seemed to drag me down into them, where I’d be swallowed up forever. My fiancée had opened her eyes while sleepwalking in the past, but never like this. Nothing human remained in her gaze now; I was staring into the eyes of a wolf, and they looked up at me with terrifying glee. Faye seemed to recognize me, but not in the way that two people who live in the same house recognize each other. It was as though I’d been missing a thousand years, and she had finally found me.
The fear that gripped me mutated into an acute rage. I strode toward my fiancée and bellowed her name, shattering the nightmare’s hold on her. She went limp for a moment while her brain rebooted. Then she clawed her way out of the ungodly position she’d bent herself into and pulled herself back onto the pillows. Her eyes blinked repeatedly until the rabid hunger in them subsided.
“Felix?” she asked. Fear anchored her voice so that only whispers escaped her mouth.
“Please tell me you remember whatever you just dreamed,” I said, sitting down next to her. I glanced once more out the window, but couldn’t see the tree line from where I sat.
Faye threw her arms around me and buried her face in my chest.
“I was walking,” she said. “It was dark.”
“What did you see? Do you know where you were?”
She paused for a moment, then turned her head toward the window.
“Out there.”
I felt the hair on my arms stand up again.
“I think it’s time for another doctor’s appointment,” I replied, trying to exhale the wave of dread that rose up in my chest. Faye nodded, seemingly afraid to take her eyes off me. I wrapped my arms around her and held her close, trying to ensure that she didn’t feel alone in this struggle. Faye was engaged in some internal conflict, and the war was being waged across her subconscious. Fear and revulsion rose within me, but I reminded myself that she was my future wife. My devotion required that I be there for her no matter what – even if I didn’t yet know how to help. After some time, the pounding of her heart slowed, and her heavy breathing fell away to a calm rhythm. Her grip on me loosened, and she drifted off into the mysterious world of her dreams, to where I so desperately wanted to follow.
In all the commotion, I had forgotten about my alarm. My phone scared the hell out of me when it vibrated beneath my pillow at 4:15 A.M. By the time I realized what was going on, I had already blurted out a string of curses and nearly woken Faye up. I hobbled to the bathroom.
When I returned, I saw Faye baring her teeth up at the ceiling and gently caressing her face with her hand. As I stared at her through the darkness, a part of me feared she’d suddenly bite off her own fingers as they dragged across her lips. Eventually, her arm flopped back down on the bed.
I sunk down into the old armchair that occupied the corner opposite our bed. It was an ancient thing, discovered by Faye at a garage sale and now essentially a clothes rack, and it was uncomfortable enough that I knew I wouldn’t fall back asleep. I waited quietly in the dark for a half-hour, fixated on my sleeping fiancée and the strange movements she made. Every so often she’d twitch, or reach toward the ceiling, or mumble something unintelligible. But I remained silent, wondering if she’d validate my suspicions that she’d been getting up in the wee hours to skulk around the house.
At around 5:00 A.M., my eyelids hung heavy and my limbs tingled due to the awful chair. I stood up and stretched, ready to abandon my mission and crawl back into bed. Suddenly, Faye drew a sharp breath. She jolted straight up in bed, back stiff, and stared into the darkness before her. A mess of tangled curls cascaded down her face and obscured it, but she appeared to be looking around the room.
I felt the words “Faye? Are you okay?” well up inside
my mouth. Before I could blurt them out, she tossed the sheets from her lower body and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She planted wobbly feet on the carpet one at a time and stood, teetering back and forth, then rose up onto the balls of her feet. She tilted her head back and forth a few times as if to empty water from her ears, then tiptoed across the bedroom and pulled the door open with a gnarled hand. Her movements were not cute and clumsy, like those of a sneaky child on Christmas eve. They were robotic. Inhuman. She moved down the hall like a meth-addicted zombie ballerina and stopped at the stairwell. Her breathing remained delicate and hypnotic.
I paused at the doorway, watching my fiancée’s alien movements. Faye stood at the top of the stairs, peering down into the abyss, whispering something I couldn’t make out. She remained high up on the balls of her feet, every muscle in her body pulled taut until her form was stiff as a corpse. The moon peeked through a nearby window, illuminating her from behind. It cast her figure in a ghostly glow, adding to the illusion of an old corpse stalking around my house.
Faye slid her fingers over her face for two or three minutes. It almost looked like she was learning about her own appearance for the first time. She ran a hand over the banister, then the wall, and flicked the light switch on and off in patterns of five. All the while, she maintained her perfectly mechanical breathing.
In my mind, I saw her collapse and fall down the stairs. I wanted to hurry to her side and wake her up before my vision became a reality, but a cocktail of fright and morbid curiosity rooted me to the floor. I looked on as Faye moved through her disturbing performance.
My fiancée reached an arm out, stretching and wiggling her fingers. Then she closed her hand and pulled it back up to her face in roughly the motion of a bicep curl. She repeated this behavior for about a minute, and I had the idea that she was testing the limb – as though she’d never used it before. However, after seeing her lips move again, I realized that she was communicating with someone at the bottom of the stairs. Someone in the dark. Faye was making a “come hither” motion, enticing whoever it was to come up here with us.
Remembering the man I’d seen wandering around outside, I strode out of the bedroom and leaned over the half-wall that overlooks the first floor. It was so dark down there that I couldn’t see anything but the glow of the clock on the cable box. Beside me, Faye stood there waving, smiling, and touching her face and hair. I gently wrapped an arm around her waist and flipped the light on, blinding myself in the process. She went limp at my touch as if released from a magic spell, and nearly sent us both tumbling down the stairs onto the tile floor at the bottom. I ushered her back down the hall and spoke as softly as I could, trying not to fully wake her. As with every other time I’d discovered her sleepwalking around the house, Faye offered no resistance, and climbed back into bed without so much as a mumble. A part of me felt silly for doing it, but I searched the entire bottom floor of the house – and found no one.
I now had to admit what I could not before. Whatever it was that had found us at the cabin had followed us home.
Chapter 13
That morning, Faye woke up looking terrible. Dark rings circled her eyes, and a deathly pallor had fallen over her skin. She was clammy to the touch, and if not for her ravenous appetite, I’d have thought she’d come down with the flu.
After about ten phone calls, we landed a same-day doctor’s appointment. When I notified Faye of it, she hardly looked up from the giant omelet she’d made for herself.
“Doctor in Arvada’s gonna fax your blood work over to this one,” I said, squeezing her shoulder as I passed by. “Maybe somethin
g’s changed. You okay with some more tests?” I circled the table and sat across from her.
“Mh,” she grunted.
“You never eat eggs,” I said. It was more a question than a statement. She paused for a moment, then continued shoveling forkfuls into her mouth. Pieces of onion fell from her lips as she did. I looked closer. It was just eggs with onion. Too much onion.
Faye barely spoke during our drive to the appointment. She answered a few of my questions with one-word responses, but remained disconnected and listless. She watched the world rush by as the car moved, but I couldn’t be sure she was even seeing anything. I made a few comments that would normally prompt her to reply with a smartass joke – things like “man, I’m so sore” and “I couldn’t sleep at all last night” – but Faye never took the bait.
At the hospital, we were greeted by a man named Dr. Farmer. He was older, with salt-and-pepper hair that looked uncombed for a century. His cheerful demeanor and sincere interest in Faye’s health seemed to coax her out of her shell, and after a few minutes, he actually got her to crack a smile.
As I recounted my fiancée’s unusual sleepwalking incidents, the doctor made exaggerated reactions of pretend shock and horror. This elicited a few giggles from Faye, and she eventually began speaking in full sentences again. Dr. Farmer’s playfulness, combined with his rather small stature, made him appear more like a cartoon character or a hobbit than a medical professional. But as soon as I mentioned the creepy sleep-talking, his conduct changed, and the gaiety fell away.
“Tell me about your dreams,” he said, yanking the stethoscope from his ears and dropping onto the stool in front of her.
She stared into his little blue eyes for a long moment, hesitant to share, then said, “Someone’s trying to talk to me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you see this person? Or just hear a voice?”
“It’s foggy. Hard to remember. I always forget what he looks like. But I saw him a few times. He never looks right at me.”
The two spoke a few more minutes, drawn into a conversation about the significance of dreams and whether they reveal anything about the state of our minds. They carried on as if I were not even in the room. Suddenly, Dr. Farmer looked to me and said, “Mr. Blackwell, do you mind if I speak to Faye alone?”
I felt stunned and a little put off, but I understood the importance of his request. If somehow I were the cause of Faye’s recent psychological issues, she might be unwilling to speak openly with the doctor. I glanced over at Faye as I left the room. She returned a little smile to me.
When Dr. Farmer opened the door a few minutes later, he was smiling again. I felt a warm hand on my back as I passed by him into the room.
“Well, my boy,” he said, ushering me to an empty chair beside my fiancée. “I was just telling this young lady that I’d like for her to see a psychologist if these dreams persist for more than a few days.”
“You mean like for a psychiatric evaluation?” I asked. Faye and I exchanged worried looks.
“Oh yes,” he said, eyes widening in terror. “This one’s out of her mind.”
Faye laughed. My face went a bit warm. She hadn’t laughed at anything I’d said all morning.
“Nothing official,” he replied, then looked at Faye. “I just think you could benefit from talking to someone more extensively about these dreams. Get down to the root, you know. That’s the thing about strange dreams, and sleepwalking and so forth. They’re like smoke. The fire’s even deeper. And as fascinating as I find yours, Miss Spencer, I’m no expert on nightmares.”
The doctor prescribed Faye a mild sedative to ensure she got a full night’s sleep, and started her on a short course of anti-anxiety medication to see if it helped to calm her nerves. He surmised that Faye was dealing with some kind of trauma and suggested that we spend some time outside to clear her head. We accepted the suggestion and a referral to a psychologist if the medications failed, then went home.
As we left the office, Dr. Farmer poked his cherubic head into the receptionist’s area and called out to Faye, “Write them down! Spend some time on it!”
For the remainder of the day, Faye was in better spirits. She went right back to teasing me and joking around as usual, and even agreed to go on a little nature walk on the trails near our house. We grabbed her meds from the pharmacy on the way home, then suited up for the walk. It was about 3 P.M., so we planned to be outside for only an hour. In the redwoods, it gets dark as soon as the sun dips behind the tree tops, and this time of year that’s just after three.
Faye came trotting down the stairs in a curve-hugging gym outfit. I pulled her in for a kiss, but she nipped at me playfully and shoved me away. It was relieving to see the fire in her eyes again. It was that fire that I’d fallen in love with. The one that occasionally burned me. She grabbed her water bottle and flung the door open, signaling for me to follow.
Outside, we crossed through the neighborhood toward the trails. The walk required us to cut through the line of trees where I had seen the dark figure the night before. As we moved into the grove, I glanced around, looking for any sign of his presence. I tried not to alert Faye to what I was doing, but she noticed me periodically gazing up into the trees and scanning the ground around us.
“This place,” she said abruptly. “I had a dream about it last night.” Her remark pulled me out of a memory of the figure. Faye stopped in her tracks and turned around, facing back to our neighborhood.
“What do you remember?” I asked.
“I was just standing here,” she said. “Just watching.”
She pointed a finger into the distance. A few hundred feet away, our little bedroom window was visible.
“Do you know why? What were you doing all the way out here?”
“I don’t know. But someone was watching me back, from our window.”
“Was it me?” I asked. I needed to dance around the subject; I didn’t want to divulge to Faye that I’d seen a man slinking around out here in the middle of the night. “I uh…that night, I got up and looked outside. Heard a noise.”
Faye studied the window, deep in thought.
“Not you,” she said, voice lowering to near a whisper. Her brow furrowed in contemplation. “Someone else. He was all dark. He watched me for a while…”
“Was it the man from your dream at the cabin? The one digging the hole?”
“It felt like him.”
“Did he talk to you?” I took a step toward her and put my hands on her arms. The symphony of songbirds died away, leaving us alone in the murky shadows of the redwoods.
“No,” Faye said, closing her eyes. “He turned around, and looked down at you. He stood over you while you slept.”
It was only in this moment that I realized how cold the air felt. But it wasn’t just the breeze that chilled me. It was the similitude of her dream to what I had seen through that window while she slept.
“What did you do?” I pressed, squeezing her arms a bit tighter.
Faye tilted her head back and drew in a long breath.
“I turned away. I was so scared. And then I looked up.”
She opened her eyes toward the tree tops. They darted around for a moment, and then locked onto something. Faye gasped, and her knees buckled. We stumbled together, but I managed to catch her before we fell over.
“What is it?!” I asked, clutching onto her and frantically searching the canopy.
“I feel like I’m gonna pass out,” she panted. Her face went pale again. “Let’s go home. I need to go home.”
Faye held onto my arm with both hands as we headed back toward the house. Right as we exited the little grove, she stopped and looked over her shoulder.
“You hear that?” she asked, voice still weak.
“Hear what?”
“Thought I heard a little boy,” she replied. “He was singing.”
Chapter 14
Back at home, Faye napped a while on the couch.
She seemed more comfortable sleeping downstairs than in our room, probably because she had come to associate our bed with all of the awful things plaguing her mind. While she was asleep, a strange thought occurred to me. The child she thought she heard today – was it a memory of the little boy that sang and babbled in the darkness outside the cabin? I tried to recall some of his phrases:
“Burn up the hags!”
“Rooock-a-bye-baaaaby…iiiin the tree top…”
“When do we go insiiiiide? When do we go insiiiide?”
The terrible way he spoke, the simultaneity of joy and emptiness in his voice, painted a gruesome picture in my head. I imagined a little boy in an archaic school uniform, standing in the snow outside the cabin on Pale Peak. His eyes had been gouged out, leaving behind a darkness that yawned from their sockets. Despite his blindness, he stared out at the cabin with a knowing gaze, cheerfully practicing songs and phrases he most likely didn’t understand. He was a hollowed-out thing, a desperate mockery of a person. The child’s voice reminded me of what Faye had said about the man digging holes in her dreams. They both felt singularly inhuman.
I shook the image from my mind, but could not shake the darker thought that replaced it. What if the phrase “When do we go insiiiiiiide?” didn’t refer to the cabin at all? Perhaps instead, it referred to Faye herself. I glanced over at her from my chair, watching her chest rise and fall. I wondered when her mysterious visitor would reveal himself again – and what he would ask of her this time.
Faye was hungry when she woke up. She insisted we get away from the house and go out to eat. I obliged, hopeful that being around other people might help to snap her out of the peculiar moods she’d been suffering. She chose our favorite steak joint, Bucky’s Smokehouse. There, Faye always orders the same thing, and calls it her “death row meal”: a barbecue chicken sandwich with macaroni and cheese, and a glass bottle of Coca-Cola. It’s the only soda she’ll drink; in fact, her blood is mostly Coke.
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