I’m so tired.
My head is pounding again. I need to be in the darkness of my room. There, I am at home. There, the black of my innermost being and the black of the room blend with familiarity. When the sun shines on me, I panic and shrivel like a dying grape, leaving a tiny, tasty treat for the monster. It swallows me whole.
A blanket of pain settles over my heart as I lay perfectly still, no energy left in me even to weep.
It’s happening again. The voice. Just one distinct voice. It’s daring me to die.
DIE Die hiss grunt Die DIE die snigger grunt wheeze
DO IT do it Die DIE DIE die hiss Do It DIE.
It’s too strong. I can’t stop It. I can’t fight anymore.
I reach for the stale glass of water beside my bed.
I swallow them all.
The Boogeyman wins.
Safe as Houses
Alex Giannini
It was mice, mostly, that Carrie found, dead and stiff and stinking, in the crawlspace as she searched the house for the source. And then again there was the pair underneath the kitchen sink and the small pack of them huddled together in the attic, bracing against the inevitable.
She found a few more in the front yard, near the white fence, as she sat in a chair on an unseasonably warm Halloween afternoon, a bowl of candy by her side. She scooped them up, those poor little dead things, and threw them in a can and closed the lid. And then Carrie sat down and took note of the trick-or-treaters that evening. It was a comic book year, apparently, with an endless parade of Deadpools and Captain Americas and Spider-Men.
There was one costume that stuck out, though, and stuck with her well into that night. In bed, lying on her side and staring out the window, Carrie couldn’t shake the look of it. It—he, she—was among a pack of other kids, right smack in the middle of them, but it might as well have been from another dimension.
It was dressed in a flowing, wispy black robe, carrying a plastic orange pumpkin in one hand and a flickering LED candle in the other, but it was the mask that really stood out. Off-white with its long rubber nose and sunken eyes, it was the mask that burned into Carrie’s memory. It struck a nerve, for whatever reason, and in the early morning light of the following day, Carrie blamed that mask for the dream she had that night.
She was in a church. In her dream, she and Will were in a church (or what was, in the logic of this particular dream, understood to be a church but more closely resembled a boarding house with wood-paneled walls and dark red carpets).
“It’s happened again,” a man Carrie couldn’t see but could clearly hear announced matter-of-factly and from one corner of the large room.
He might have been a priest, but she wasn’t sure. He hovered more as a specter than any concrete human thing. And then all at once, the dream shifted blurrily forward and Carrie was following Will through a hallway and to a closed door with light peeking out from behind it and Will was talking.
“She’s in there.” He was a couple of steps ahead of her. She couldn’t see his face. She just wanted to see Will’s face and to tell him. Carrie tried to tell her husband not to open it—she started saying we’re not ready—but Will threw the door open anyway.
That’s when it appeared, standing in that backlit door frame, slices of orange trickling out into the dreamscape hallway. It was a woman possessed.
She was chalk white, but not just in skin color. She appeared to have been carved from one large piece of chalk and all of her was white, so white that she was something most unnatural. In her left hand she held a red leash that held back a black dog.
And then suddenly Will was gone—off the screen of her mind—and Carrie was face to face with the chalk woman in the doorway. The black dog on the red leash barked once and threatened to lunge forward. Carrie stepped back, opened her mouth in a silent scream. The dog barked again and shook Carrie from her nightmare.
She woke, in her bed in the dark. And then she was in the sky near the stars, falling.
It was hopeless to fight, to try righting herself. She was surrounded by blackness, the occasional pinprick of starlight flashing by as she fell. Arms and legs and feet flailing and that horrible sense of unbalance. Her stomach lurching with each new turn and the sky and the ground flipping and switching and swirling into the same damn thing.
And then Carrie realized that she was wrong. She wasn’t falling. She was sinking, and just like that, she was under the water. Deep underwater and what she had been doing was burying herself further under. Not breathing.
Panicking. Chest tightening. Looking up through bulging eyes, those pinpricks of light now the glistening of water at the surface, a million miles above her.
“Carrie.”
A voice from somewhere not where she was. She was so far down, too far down for voices.
“Carr!”
Will. It was Will, again, but still so far away.
And then the whole world lurched to the side. The ocean shook, the light of the surface blinked out entirely and Carrie gasped while she rose, straight up now in her bed, in her room, in the soft light of morning.
Will sat next to her, on his side of the bed. She was awake now, truly awake this time but still gasping for air, still trying to catch the breath that was stolen from her in sleep.
“Jesus, Carr. Are you okay?”
When she found her voice, finally, Carrie just smiled. She reached her right hand out, touched Will’s shoulder, and squeezed it just a little. “Thanks. That was a bad one.”
Carrie and Will moved into the house early in the summer, but they continued to pay the rent on their one-bedroom in Brooklyn. They had lots of stuff, both in the apartment and in a storage facility, and their work schedules simply didn’t allow them to take the time needed to move properly. So they moved improperly and over the course of several months.
Finally, by late August they found themselves in their silver Jetta, making the last of countless trips up the parkway, the transition from buildings to trees less jarring each time. The trunk and back seats were packed, but they were done. They crossed the Connecticut line and, just like that, Will and Carrie were former New Yorkers.
The new place was nice. It had a little yard with a firepit dug out in the back. Carrie liked the white picket fence. Will liked the finished basement. They both liked how big it was, comparatively, of course, in relation to their Brooklyn apartment. They talked often in those days about getting a dog.
Autumn arrived and the house became drafty at night. The doors creaked and the floorboards moaned. The house contracted and expanded and breathed when it had to. Routines formed and life changed. New things became comfortable things. Slowly, the house became home. Slowly, it all began again.
Late in September, Carrie’s parents got into an argument with Will. Normally tepid, especially around the in-laws, this time, Will exploded. He even threw his phone, cracking its screen down the middle as the glass rectangle skipped across the kitchen tiles. Carrie, more shocked than angry, tried to make things better. She gave up after a week of being in the middle of an unwinnable war.
Later, on a random October Wednesday, Carrie was called into her boss’ office and he laid into her about her slipping job performance. He spoke in generalities, frustrating Carrie into an uncomfortably obedient silence. She’d been “put on notice,” whatever the hell that meant, and all of a sudden, her steady, high-paying job with its nice big Christmas bonus became less steady.
Life was, slowly, becoming less steady for Will and for Carrie, but the drip drip drip of bad news didn’t seem overwhelming. It seemed like life.
Will’s freelance work had dried up at the end of the summer—right after they’d left Brooklyn, actually, and he was feeling less and less connected to the world he’d known so intimately. A decade’s worth of contacts and clients seemed to lose interest once he’d left their city.
Then, on a mid-October Friday morning, Carrie clicked the button and opened the garage door and turned the key in the Jetta
and nothing happened. Frantically, she called the office and apologized before she even said hello, and then she and Will and their neighbor Harold had jumper cables attached to his little green Honda, and Will was pushing down on the pedal but nothing was happening. “Dead,” Harold was saying from behind the wheel of his Honda. The engine was dead.
Carrie made another call, and a tow truck was on the way. She was late to work that day, and then again the following Monday and Tuesday when her Uber drivers each passed by the white picket fence and the stalled Jetta in the driveway.
“Bad luck, Carr,” Will said as they sat on their new blue couch in their new white living room and he flicked through the little pictures on the screen hanging from the wall. “It’s just a shitty stretch, that’s all. Happens to everyone. We’ll be okay.”
Will wasn’t an overly positive person, so his attempt at reassurance had done little to calm Carrie’s nerves. If anything, his illogical conclusion had worried her. Instead of talking about it, though, she got up from the couch and stomped up the stairs and slammed the door to the bedroom, leaving Will on the couch with a sea of bad options on the screen in front of him.
In that moment, Will could feel the space between him and his wife. A kitchen, some stairs, and two unlocked doors separated them, sure, but the distance seemed so much greater. Like an ocean or like space or like the end of a novel. Behind him, Will heard the sound of the heat clicking on and felt the wooden pop of the floor under his feet. Above, Carrie’s footsteps paced softly.
The late October winds kicked up and the whole world slowed down when Will’s father had a heart attack. A big one, the surgeon had told him in the waiting room late in the night. The halogen above Will flicked blue and white as he sat on a cruddy green couch, listening but not listening as the doctor described how his father was resting and alive but not yet out of those dark woods.
He was okay, Will’s father. Eventually, he was okay. It was a process and an ordeal and real life seemed less real for a while but things settled back down into normalcy. Still, death lingered. The thought of it, anyway. It was just enough to raise the hackles.
If you were paying attention.
If you were looking in the right places.
The morning after Halloween, Will got up first, left Carrie to lie there a bit, blinking away the dream of the chalk-white lady. She closed her eyes, shook it from her brain. Finally, Carrie walked downstairs, the smell of coffee drifting along with her.
The holidays drifted in, as they tend to do, slowly at first and then barreling through like a storm. Carrie and Will spent Thanksgiving at Will’s parents’; Carrie did cartwheels to sell that decision to her own parents, saying Will needed to be close to his dad that year.
Christmas was more difficult. The truth was, Will hadn’t spoken to Carrie’s parents since their phone call fight months earlier. The feud lingered well into the new year.
Death lingered, too.
First it was Chris Cornell, the singer, and that one landed hard for Will. Either before or maybe after it was Bowie and Prince and then a former president. Somewhere in the middle, Will lost a great aunt and Carrie lost a couple of older cousins. They all kind of blended together, though, and Carrie kept finding dead mice in the house and an election went the wrong way and still, after all those months, Will couldn’t land steady work.
And still, after all those months, Carrie wasn’t back in the good graces of her increasingly mercurial boss.
One Friday night, deep in the wintertime, Carrie was (grudgingly) in San Francisco on a business trip with her boss, and Will was alone in the house. Carrie’d left that Thursday and wasn’t to be back until late Sunday night. Will’s phone would buzz every now and then, next to him there on the couch, with a text message from her.
San Fran tacos are good
San Fran tacos are also 9 dollars more than CT tacos
Miss you
Love you
Kill you
Will looked at his phone again, squinting as the white harsh light of the still-cracked thing illuminated his otherwise dark living room.
Kiss you
He chuckled. The basketball game blared from the TV on the wall in front of him. Leaning back on the blue cushion, Will felt the world start to slip away, the announcers’ voices swirling into the nonsensical ether of encroaching sleep. The knocking from the basement stirred him back to life.
He sat up, instinctively checked his phone.
Kiss you
He waited for a moment, listening for the sound again. Hoping it wouldn’t come. Of course, it came. Three knocks, echoing from down somewhere in the basement. Will felt his stomach suck upwards as tiny icicles of fear ran down his head to his groin.
He got up from the couch, padded slowly to the kitchen. The door to the basement loomed in front of him, its gold-plated knob shining in the moonlight. Or maybe that was just the way it seemed to Will, standing there and hoping against all the world that the knocking sound would stop.
It didn’t. It came, louder now and more distinct. Four knocks this time. Echoing, real. Then again. And again. Each time exponentially louder than the last. Each time exponentially more real.
The buzzing in his right hand made Will jump. Carrie, texting.
You fell asleep on the couch didn’t you
Will didn’t answer. He quietly put the phone in his pocket, felt it buzz once more. Standing directly in front of the basement door, he grabbed the round gold knob and twisted.
Another knock, just then, but this time much different. Just one, but this one seemed to shake the whole house at its foundation. Will let go of the doorknob, felt the tile under him move. He held his hands out to his sides to steady himself. To keep the world from drifting. An overreaction, Will thought, but still.
The unreason of the situation gripped him then, thoroughly and completely and he could feel it in all the nooks and crannies of his insides. In that place where terror and curiosity meet, Will found the strength to reach out and to turn the knob, flick on the light switch to his right and walk down the wooden stairs. They moaned under the weight of his feet, each wooden squeak as loud as a car wreck in the otherwise still house.
The basement was exactly as it had been just after Christmas, when Will had made trips, one after the other, to return decoration boxes to their offseason resting places. Looking around the room those months later, he felt buoyed by the fact that there was no snarling beast or knife-wielding intruder lurking through the bowels of his home. Finally, satisfied with his search, Will turned back towards the stairs.
The knocking began again.
Sharp and loud, and coming from the back corner of the room where the Bilco doors opened out into their small backyard. The knocking was coming from those doors, from the outside, Will realized for the first time. Whatever it was, it was in his backyard, in the night.
Will hesitated, his mind cycling between pushing open the doors from the inside from the basement, or rushing back up the stairs to the kitchen and peeking out at the yard from the window above the sink. His pocket buzzed, jostling the thoughts from his mind.
Wake up Will
“What?” He said to no one. And then another brief moment of thought. Before. Will unlocked his phone, flicked through his previous messages from Carrie.
You fell asleep on the couch didn’t you
Will?
Lol
Wake up Will
A wash of comfort, of familiar real-world talk. Of Carrie. Then three more knocks from the Bilco doors. Will bolted up the stairs, flew through the doorway to the kitchen and leaned hard against the sink. He flicked on the light switch next to him and the backyard was awash with an orange halogen haze.
Peering out the window over the sink, Will scanned the yard. There was nothing there. Just orange. Just haze. Just the night and everything it held. But there was no one there, that was for certain.
Except.
On the concrete landing just in front of the Bilco doors. A s
hape. On the ground. Something.
Calmly—or, as calmly as he could manage—Will opened the door to the yard and walked out, throwing a long black shadow across the orange field. There, on the landing by the doors to the basement was a mask. Chalky white. Rubber nose.
He bent down and took a closer look at the thing. A child’s Halloween mask. Chills up his spine. Rain from above. Soft droplets of water dinging the top of his head. A buzz, from his pocket.
You know what happens if you don’t get up
Will swallowed. Pinched his bare forearm. Actually pinched himself to make sure he was awake. It hurt. He was awake. He felt a cold rush of panic but he left the mask where it was and went back into the house. He closed—and locked—the door to the backyard, closed—and locked—the door to the basement.
“Fucking kids.” Another buzz in his pocket.
Go to bed...you’re gonna be up all night if you don’t get up
So he did.
In the morning Will went back outside, picked up the chalky rubber mask and examined it in the stark light of day. In the stark light of reason.
“Fucking kids,” he said again, and this time he meant it. Will tossed the thing into a neighbor’s garbage can on his way to the coffeeshop down the street. He never told Carrie about it.
Will spent as much of the day out of the house as he could, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling through jobs online, looking for the right fit. Applying to some. Hearing back from none.
Carrie came home that Sunday evening and everything went back to normal. Or, as normal as things had become. They still hadn’t seen Carrie’s parents. Will even avoided Facebook in an attempt to block them completely from his sight, if not from his mind.
By springtime, Will officially went on unemployment. He was getting, per week, what he used to make in a couple of days. Payment due dates became increasingly panic-inducing scenarios. Sleep was lost. Fights were had. The “unimportant” bills went unpaid. Trips to the grocery store became mini-battlegrounds of attrition.
The Half That You See Page 11