Darker Terrors

by Neil Gaiman

  The first tremble comes as I return to the hall. I clench my knees, my shoulders, willing myself still. As always, the worst thing about the trembling and the sweating is the confusion that causes them. I can never decide if I’m terrified or elated. Even before I realised what was happening, there was a kind of elation.

  Five steps down the hall, I stop at the door to what was once our workshop, housing my building area and Lizzie’s cut-and-paste table for classroom decorations. It has not been a workshop for almost four years, now. For four years, it has been nothing at all. The knob is just a little wet when I slide my hand around it, the hinges silent as I push open the door.

  ‘Okay,’ I half-think, half-say, trembling, sliding into the room and shutting the door behind me. ‘It’s okay.’ Tears leap out of my lashes as though they’ve been hiding there. It doesn’t feel like I actually cried them. I sit down on the bare floor, breathe, and stare around the walls, also bare. One week more. Two weeks, tops. Then, just maybe, the crib, fully assembled, will burst from the closet, the dog-cat carpet will unroll itself like a Torah scroll over the hardwood, and the mobiles Lizzie and I made together will spring from the ceiling like streamers. Surprise!

  The tears feel cold on my face, uncomfortable, but I don’t wipe them. What would be the point? I try to smile. There’s a part of me, a small, sad part, that feels like smiling. ‘Should I tell you a bedtime story?’

  I could tell about the possum. We’d lost just the one, then, and more than a year had gone by, and Lizzie still had moments, seizures, almost, where she ripped her glasses off her face in the middle of dinner and hurled them across the apartment and jammed herself into the kitchen corner behind the stacked washer-dryer unit. I’d stand over her and say, ‘Lizzie, no,’ and try to fight what I was feeling, because I didn’t like that I was feeling it. But the more often this happened, and it happened a lot, the angrier I got. Which made me feel like such a shit.

  ‘Come on,’ I’d say, extra-gentle, to compensate, but of course I didn’t fool her. That’s the thing about Lizzie. I knew it when I married her, even loved it in her: she recognises the worst in people. She can’t help it. And she’s never wrong about it.

  ‘You don’t even care,’ she’d hiss, her hands snarled in her twisting brown hair as though she were going to rip it out like weeds.

  ‘Fuck you, of course I care.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything to you.’

  ‘It means what it means. It means we tried, and it didn’t work, and it’s awful, and the doctors say it happens all the time, and we need to try again. It’s awful but we have to deal with it, we have no choice if we want—’

  ‘It means we lost a child. It means our child died. You asshole.’

  Once – one time – I handled that moment right. I looked down at my wife, my playmate since junior high, the perpetually sad person I make happy, sometimes, and who makes everyone around her happy even though she’s sad, and I saw her hands twist harder in her hair, and I saw her shoulders cave in toward her knees, and I just blurted it out.

  ‘You look like a lint ball,’ I told her.

  Her face flew off her chest, and she glared at me. Then she threw her arms out, not smiling, not free of anything, but wanting me with her. Down I came. We were lint balls together.

  Every single other time, I blew it. I stalked away. Or I started to cry. Or I fought back.

  ‘Let’s say that’s true,’ I’d say. ‘We lost a child. I’ll admit it, I can see how one could choose to see it that way. But I don’t feel that. By the grace of God, it doesn’t quite feel like that to me.’

  ‘That’s because it wasn’t inside you.’

  ‘That’s such …’ I’d start, then stop, because I didn’t really think it was. And it wasn’t what I was trying to say, anyway. ‘Lizzie. God. I’m just … I’m trying to do this well. I’m trying to get us to the place where we can try again. Where we can have a child. One that lives. Because that’s the point, isn’t it? That’s the ultimate goal?’

  ‘Honey, this one just wasn’t meant to be,’ Lizzie would sneer, imitating her mom, or maybe my mom, or any one of a dozen people we knew. ‘Is that what you want to say next?’

  ‘You know it isn’t.’

  ‘How about, “The body knows. Something just wasn’t right. These things do happen for a reason”.’

  ‘Lizzie, stop.’

  ‘Or, “Years from now, you’ll look at your child, your living, breathing, beautiful child, and you’ll realise that you wouldn’t have had him or her if the first one had survived. There’d be a completely different creature there”. How about that one?’

  ‘Lizzie, Goddamnit. Just shut up. I’m saying none of those things, and you know it. I’m saying I wish this had never happened. And now that it has happened, I want it to be something that happened in the past. Because I still want to have a baby with you.’

  Usually, most nights, she’d sit up, then. I’d hand her her glasses, and she’d fix them on her face and blink as the world rushed forward. Then she’d look at me, not unkindly. More than once, I’d thought she was going to touch my face or my hand.

  Instead, what she said was, ‘Jake. You have to understand.’ Looking through her lenses at those moments was like peering through a storm window, something I would never again get open, and through it I could see the shadows of everything Lizzie carried with her and could not bury and didn’t seem to want to. ‘Of all the things that have happened to me. All of them. You’re probably the best. And this is the worst.’

  Then she’d get up, step around me, and go to bed. And I’d go out to walk, past the Cliff House, past the Musee, sometimes all the way down to the ruins of the Baths, where I’d stroll along the crumbling concrete walls which once had framed the largest public bathing pool in the United States and now framed nothing but marsh-grass and drain-water and echo. Sometimes, the fog would roll over me, a long, grey ghost-tide, and I’d float off on it, in it, just another trail of living vapour combing the earth in search of a world we’d all gotten the idea was here somewhere. Where, I wonder, had that idea come from, and how did so many of us get it?

  ‘But that isn’t what you want to hear,’ I say suddenly to the not-quite-empty workroom, the cribless floor. ‘Is it?’ For a second, I panic, fight down the urge to leap for my feet and race for Lizzie. If they’ve gone back in there, then I’m too late anyway. And if they haven’t, my leaping about just might scare them in that direction. In my head, I’m casting around for something to say that will hold them while I swing my gaze back and forth, up to the ceiling and down again.

  ‘I was going to tell you about the possum, right? One night, maybe eight months or so after you were …’ The word curls on my tongue like a dead caterpillar. I say it anyway. ‘Born.’ Nothing screams in my face or flies at me, and my voice doesn’t break. And I think something might have fluttered across the room from me, something other than the curtains. I have to believe it did. And the damp is still in here.

  ‘It was pretty amazing,’ I say fast, staring at where the flutter was, as though I could pin it there. ‘Lizzie kicked me and woke me up. ‘You hear that?’ she asked. And of course, I did. Fast, hard scrabbling, click-click-click, from right in here. We came running and saw a tail disappear behind the dresser. There was a dresser, then, I made it myself. The drawers came out sideways and the handles formed kind of a pumpkin-face, just for fun, you know? Anyway, I got down on my hands and knees and found this huge, white possum staring right at me. I didn’t even know there were possums here. This one took a single look at me and keeled over with its feet in the air. Playing dead.’

  I throw myself on the ground with my feet in the air. It’s like a memory, a dream, a memory of a dream, but I half-believe I feel a weight on the soles of my feet, as though something has climbed onto them, for a ride, maybe.

  ‘I got a broom. Your … Lizzie got a trashcan. And for the next, I don’t know, three hours, probably, we chased this thing around and around the roo
m. We had the windows wide open. All it had to do was hop up and out. Instead, it hid behind the dresser, playing dead, until I poked it with the broom, and then it would race along the baseboard or into the middle of the room and flip on its back again, as if to say, okay, now I’m really dead, and we couldn’t get it to go up and out. We couldn’t get it to do anything but die. Over and over and over. And …’

  I stop, lower my legs abruptly, sit up. I don’t say the rest. How, at 3:45 in the morning, Lizzie dropped the trashcan to the floor, looked at me, and burst out crying. Threw her glasses at the wall and broke one of the lenses and wept while I stood there, so tired, with this possum belly-up at my feet and the sea air flooding the room. I’d loved the laughing. I could hardly stand up for exhaustion, and I’d loved laughing with Lizzie so goddamn much.

  ‘Lizzie,’ I’d said. ‘I mean, fuck. Not everything has to relate to that. Does it? Does everything we ever think or do, for the rest of our lives …’ But of course, it does. I think I even knew that then. And that was after only one.

  ‘Would you like to go for a walk?’ I say carefully, clearly. Because this is it. The only thing I can think of, and therefore the only chance we have. How does one get a child to listen, really? I wouldn’t know. ‘We’ll go for a stroll, okay? Get nice and sleepy?’ I still can’t see anything. Most of the other times, I’ve caught half a glimpse, at some point, a trail of shadow. Turning, leaving the door cracked open behind me, I head for the living room. I slide my trench coat over my boxers and Green Apple T-shirt, slip my tennis shoes onto my bare feet. My ankles will be freezing. In the pocket of my coat, I feel the matchbook I left there, the single, tiny, silver key. It has been two months, at least, since the last time they came, or at least since they let me know it. But I have stayed ready.

  As I step onto our stoop, wait a few seconds, and pull the door closed, I am flooded with sensory memory – it’s like being dunked – of the day I first became aware. Over two years ago, now. Over a year after the first one. Halfway to dreaming, all but asleep, I was overcome by an overwhelming urge to put my ear to Lizzie’s womb and sing to the new tenant in there. Almost six weeks old, at that point. I imagined seeing through my wife’s skin, watching toe and finger-shapes forming in the red, waving wetness like lines on an Etch-A-Sketch.

  ‘You are my sun—’ I started, and knew, just like that, that something else was with me. There was the damp, for one thing, and an extra soundlessness in the room, right beside me. I can’t explain it. The sound of someone else listening.

  I reacted on instinct, shot upright and accidentally yanked all the blankets off Lizzie and shoved out my arms at where the presence seemed to be, and Lizzie blinked awake and narrowed her spectacle-less eyes at the shape of me, the covers twisted on the bed.

  ‘There’s something here,’ I babbled, pushing with both hands at the empty air.

  Lizzie just squinted, coolly. Finally, after a few seconds, she snatched one of my waving hands out of the air and dropped it against her belly. Her skin felt smooth, warm. My forefinger slipped into her bellybutton, felt the familiar knot of it, and I found myself aroused. Terrified, confused, ridiculous, and aroused.

  ‘It’s just Sam,’ she said, stunning me. It seemed impossible that she was going to let me win that fight. Then she smiled, pressing my hand to the second creature we had created together. ‘You and me and Sam.’ She pushed harder on my hand, slid it down her belly toward the centre of her.

  We made love, held each other, sang to her stomach. Not until long after Lizzie had fallen asleep, just as I was dropping off at last, did it occur to me that she could have been more right than she knew. Maybe it was just us, and Sam. The first Sam – the one we’d lost – returning to greet his successor with us.

  Of course, he hadn’t come just to listen, or to watch. But how could I have known that, then? And how did I know that that was what the presence was, anyway? I didn’t. And when it came back late the next night, with Lizzie this time sound asleep and me less startled, I slid aside to make room for it so we could both hear. Both whisper.

  Are both of you with me now, I wonder? I’m standing on my stoop and listening, feeling, as hard as I can. Please, God, let them be with me. Not with Lizzie. Not with the new one. That’s the only name we have allowed ourselves this time. The new one.

  ‘Come on,’ I say to my own front door, to the filigrees of fog that float forever on the air of Sutro Heights, as though the atmosphere itself has developed bas-relief and gone art-deco. ‘Please. I’ll tell you a story about the day you were born.’

  I start down the warped, wooden steps toward our garage. Inside my pocket, the little silver key darts between my fingers, slippery and cool as a minnow.

  In my mouth, I taste the fog and the perpetual garlic smell from the latest building to perch at the jut of the cliffs and call itself the Cliff House – the preceding three all collapsed or burned to the ground – and something else, too. I realise, finally, what it is, and the tears come flooding back.

  What I’m remembering, this time, is Washington DC, the grass brown and dying in the blazing August sun as we raced down the Mall from museum to museum in a desperate, headlong hunt for cheese. We were in the ninth day of the ten-day tetracyclene programme Dr Seger had prescribed, and Lizzie just seemed tired, but I swear I could feel the walls of my intestines, raw and sharp and scraped clean, the way teeth feel after a particularly vicious visit to the dentist. I craved milk, and got nauseous just thinking about it. Drained of its germs, its soft, comforting skin of use, my body felt skeletal, a shell without me in it.

  That was the point, as Dr Seger explained it to us. We’d done our Tay-Sachs, tested for lead, endured endless blood screenings to check on things like prolactin, lupus anticoagulant, TSH. We would have done more tests, but the doctors didn’t recommend them, and our insurance wouldn’t pay. ‘A couple of miscarriages, it’s really not worth intensive investigation.’ Three different doctors told us that. ‘If it happens a couple more times, we’ll know something’s really wrong.’

  Dr Seger had a theory, at least, involving old bacteria lingering in the body for years, decades, tucked up in the fallopian tubes or hidden in the testicles or just adrift in the blood, riding the heart-current in an endless, mindless, circle. ‘The mechanism of creation is so delicate,’ she told us. ‘So efficiently, masterfully created. If anything gets in there that shouldn’t be, well, it’s like a bird in a jet-engine. Everything just explodes.’

  How comforting, I thought but didn’t say at that first consultation, because when I glanced at Lizzie, she looked more than comforted. She looked hungry, perched on the edge of her chair with her head half over Dr Seger’s desk, so pale, thin, and hard, like a starved pigeon being teased with crumbs. I wanted to grab her hand. I wanted to weep.

  As it turns out, Dr Seger may have been right. Or maybe we got lucky this time. Because that’s the thing about miscarriage: three thousand years of human medical science, and no one knows any fucking thing at all. It just happens, people say, like a bruise, or a cold. And it does, I suppose. Just happen, I mean. But not like a cold. Like dying. Because that’s what it is.

  So for ten days, Dr Seger had us drop tetracyclene tablets down our throats like depth charges, blasting everything living inside us out. And on that day in DC – we were visiting my cousin, the first time I’d managed to coax Lizzie anywhere near extended family since all this started – we’d gone to the Holocaust Museum, searching for anything strong enough to take our minds off our hunger, our desperate hope that we were scoured, healthy, clean. But it didn’t work. So we went to the Smithsonian. And three people from the front of the ticket-line, Lizzie suddenly grabbed my hand, and I looked at her, and it was the old Lizzie, or the ghost of her, eyes flashing under their black rims, smile instantaneous, shockingly bright.

  ‘Dairy,’ she said. ‘Right this second.’

  It took me a breath to adjust. I hadn’t seen my wife this way in a long, long while, and as I stared,
the smile slipped on her face. With a visible effort, she pinned it back in place. ‘Jake. Come on.’

  None of the museum cafés had what we wanted. We went racing past sculptures and animal dioramas and parchment documents to the cafes, where we stared at yoghurt in plastic containers – but we didn’t dare eat yoghurt – and cups of tapioca that winked, in our fevered state, like the iced-over surfaces of Canadian lakes. But none of it would have served. We needed a cheddar wheel, a lasagne we could scrape free of pasta and tomatoes so we could drape our tongues in strings of crusted mozzarella. What we settled for, finally, was four giant bags of generic cheese puffs from a 7-11. We sat together on the edge of a fountain and stuffed each other’s mouths like babies, like lovers.

  It wasn’t enough. The hunger didn’t abate in either of us. Sometimes I think it hasn’t since.

  God, it was glorious, though. Lizzie’s lips around my orange-stained fingers, that soft, gorgeous crunch as each individual puff popped apart in our mouths, dusting our teeth and throats while spray from the fountain brushed our faces and we dreamed separate, still-hopeful dreams of children.

  And that, in the end, is why I have to, you see. My two Sams. My lost, loved ones. Because maybe it’s true. It doesn’t seem like it could be, but maybe it is. Maybe, mostly, it just happens. And then, for most couples, it just stops happening one day. And afterwards – if only because there isn’t time – you start to forget. Not what happened. Not what was lost. But what the loss meant, or at least what it felt like. I’ve come to believe that time alone won’t swallow grief or heal a marriage. But perhaps filled time …

  In my pocket, my fingers close over the silver key, and I take a deep breath of the damp in the air, which is mostly just Sutro Heights damp now that we’re outside. We have always loved it here, Lizzie and I. In spite of everything, we can’t bring ourselves to flee. ‘Let me show you,’ I say, trying not to plead. I’ve taken too long, I think. They’ve gotten bored. They’ll go back in the house. I lift the ancient, rusted padlock on our garage door, tilt it so I can see the slot in the moonlight, and slide the key home.