The Night Library

by T L Barrett

  Feeling frightened now, she mounted the stairs. She turned the corner at the top and saw his figure thrashing on the bed in the dim light.

  “Andy sweetie, wake up. Momma’s here.” It had been a mantra she had used, night after night, to her little colicky baby as she struggled nearly penniless and without a husband. Of course, then she had her father. Now he was gone, and it made her feel very alone. She wanted her son to wake up very badly.

  Andy babbled nonsense, but nonsense colored with the high syllables of terror, and beyond terror to something fanatical and awful to hear. Gale shook her son awake.

  His eyes opened wide, and he gasped as if coming up from being submerged. Then he saw her and he rammed his head into her breast as if to try to find shelter from the storm there. He sobbed openly as she rocked him and held him fast.

  As the storm abated, so did his sobs. Finally, she laid him back against his pillows.

  “Sweetie, it was just a night mare,” she said and brushed his hair from his forehead with her hand.

  “No, it wasn’t, Mom,” he said.

  “It was. You’re home in bed safe with your momma.” She took his hand in hers and he flinched in pain.

  “What happened to your finger?” she asked, holding the hand up to the meager light.

  “Clint. He cut my finger.”

  “Clint Heywood? That little bastard! I’m calling his parents right now; and I’m not afraid of that crazy witch of a mother he has either. I’ll sick the police on them if I have to.”

  “Mom, I let him do it. It was just a stupid thing.”

  “What? Why? You didn’t exchange blood with him or anything did you. He probably has all kinds of diseases the way he alley-cats himself around town without a shirt on!”

  “No, mom, I didn’t. It was… just a bet.”

  Try as she might, she could not get her son to give her very much detail of the day’s events. What he did tell her seemed sketched together, a vague set of lies to try to satisfy her. She did get him to promise him that he would not ever go near Clint Heywood or his house again. He did this over and over, crying with relief. In the end she cleaned his finger, wrapped it and fell asleep with her work clothes on holding him in her bed.

  The next day, she called in sick to work and spent the day watching DVD’s with her son and taking him out for ice cream. He would not speak of the events of the day before. Late in the afternoon, the two of them were playing cards at the kitchen table when Todd Gingue, her son’s nerdy friend, came by.

  She was getting herself some coffee when she heard Todd asking Andy if he was going with him over to the Heywood’s. Andy told him he wouldn’t, just as Gale moved closer to the kitchen door. Todd had a very white complexion and a confused look upon his face. Finally, he shrugged, nodded and stepped back onto the porch. He raised a hand in farewell. Gale noticed that his finger was wrapped in a Band-Aid, as well.

  Gale went to the door and locked it. Then she led the boy back to the card game. Throughout the rest of the game, the boy kept looking over his shoulder toward the door.

  ***

  Whenever Andy called Todd, he was always out at a friend’s, or he wasn’t feeling well and he had gone to bed early. Andy went to the Kiwanis pool almost every day. Unlike the summer before, Lydia Belle never made an appearance.

  ***

  In early July, Gale came home to find Andy home alone, playing video games.

  “Honey, I have some bad news.”

  She had seen Todd Gingue’s mother at the grocery store. The woman had looked like a truck had hit her. Todd had come down with a mysterious illness. He had only worsened and been rushed down to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital for tests and monitoring. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with him. It didn’t appear to be contagious. Their best bet was on some virulent form of Leukemia. Whatever it was, it was acting fast.

  Andy listened quietly to this, his video game on pause, his eyes still fastened to the screen.

  “Would you like to see if they would let us go and visit him, sweetie?” Gale asked.

  “Yeah, mom, that would be good. Let’s go tomorrow.”

  “You bet, little man,” she said and kissed him on the head.

  ***

  Andy never thought that Todd could look anymore tiny, frail and vulnerable than he already did. But, as Andy walked into the intensive care ward, his old friend looked nearly suffocated by the smells of flowers, the taped bunches of IV and monitor cords, and the large hospital bed.

  “Hey, Todd,” Andy said. Todd tried to focus his eyes without his glasses. His face looked naked and pale without them.

  “Hey, Andy,” Todd sighed.

  “I brought you my DS. I know you’ve always been jealous of it.” Andy said, holding the scratched game system out.” Todd’s eyes crept over to a nearby table where a new PSP system sat beside its box.

  “Thanks, buddy. That is really cool of you.”

  “Yeah, sure. How are you feeling?”

  “I’m going to die,” Todd said in a hissing voice. The hair on Andy’s arms stood up.

  “Don’t talk like that!” Andy sounded angrier than he meant to. “You’re going to get better.”

  “Ok,” Todd said in placation.

  Andy sat down on a chair near Todd’s bed. His eyes wandered over the bouquets of flowers and the silly get-well cards from Todd’s family. It really did look more like an arrangement for a funeral.

  “How’s Clint doing? Have you seen him?” Todd asked.

  “No, I haven’t really seen anybody.”

  “I wonder what he can do now,” Todd said wistfully. “You should see the stuff he was doing before I got too sick and they stuck me down here.”

  “Really, like what?”

  “I can’t tell you, because you decided to stop coming.”

  “I couldn’t come. My mom said so. Maybe you shouldn’t have-”

  “Don’t should on me, and I won’t should on you.” It was an old joke between them. Suddenly everything seemed old between them. At that moment Andy understood that Todd really was going to die. From this angle, he could see his bone-thin hand resting on the thin hospital coverlet. It was an old hand, a skeletal hand.

  Finally, after a long silence, Andy reached over and touched the top of that skeletal hand. The body attached to that hand shifted and let out a quiet snore.

  Andy’s mom came to the doorway. Andy wiped his face and went to her.

  ***

  A few days later, Andy had followed the Baraw twins, boys with freckles and crew cuts, from general swim to the old center playground. Many groups of kids of all ages were huddled in groups playing hop scotch, kick ball, swinging or just gossiping. A few parents with strollers sat on distant park benches and talked, shading their eyes with their hands. Andy almost followed the Baraw twins to join the game of kick ball when he saw that Clint Heywood was there, rolling the ball from the pitcher mound.

  Unbelievably, Clint looked bigger and more magnanimous than ever. A gaggle of girls stood against the chain link fence and watched Clint’s every shirtless move. Suddenly, with the preternatural focus of a hawk, Clint turned his head and stared into Andy’s eye, while still delivering a wicked spinning bowl of a pitch. A corner of Clint’s mouth rose up in a devilish smirk. Under his inspection Andy felt like he was wearing a pinafore dress with silk ribbons in his hair. He looked away, turned red, and went to the swings.

  A few minutes later, Andy saw movement that did not jive with the sporadic energy of children on the playground. An adult moved across the paved kick ball area with solemn purpose. It was Mr. Gingue, Todd’s father. The man was wearing his work clothes still, a white shirt, dress slacks and a tie. His eyes looked sunken and old under the thick glasses he wore. His fists were curled at his sides. Andy had never noticed how gray Todd’s father was at the temples. He had also never noticed how big and formidable the man could look. He might have been one of the scientist heroes in the goofy fifties sci-fi movies that Todd and Andy had
laughed about with the crew of the Satellite of Love on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

  Mr. Gingue turned abruptly and approached the chain link fence where Clint stood waiting for his turn.

  “What the hell did you do to my son?” Mr. Gingue nearly screamed. All movement on the playground stopped. “Answer me, you little shit! How did you make my boy so sick?”

  Clint, with unbelievable audacity, turned his head at his fellow kick-ballers and smirk. Leisurely, he turned his eyes to Mr. Gingue. Andy thought he could see Mr. Gingue’s pulse in his temples.

  “I didn’t do nothing to your son, man.”

  “Don’t you man me!” Mr. Gingue took two quick strides toward Clint. Clint backed against the fence.

  “I’m going to call the cops!” Tanya Meadows, a buck-toothed girl screeched from nearby. The cops had often paid visits to her trailer in the Green Lantern Trailer Park during her parents’ frequent fights. She had been anxious to spread the love for some time.

  Mr. Gingue looked around slowly at the herds of frightened children and the parents that were trying to decide if they should rise up from their distant benches. Then he stepped in very close and jabbed his finger inches from Clint‘s face. He quietly said something very descriptive to Clint. Andy could see by Mr. Gingue’s posture and Clint’s complexion that it was a threat. Then Mr. Gingue turned and stalked off across the playground, dozens of eyes watching him.

  Clint shook himself and called out some colorful words to Mr. Gingue’s back. Mr. Gingue stopped. He spun around on one heel and just stood and pointed at Clint. Nothing moved, for perhaps ten seconds; then Mr. Gingue stalked back to his car on School Street.

  Andy slipped away home before Clint’s eyes could light upon him again.

  ***

  A week later, Todd Gingue died at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Hanover, NH. The doctors tried their utmost to keep the frail boy alive, but his internal organs would have nothing to do with it. They kept shutting down until the doctors were forced to wash their hands and prepare the confused parents for the terrible news.

  ***

  Mr. Gingue, as expected, did not take the news very well. A day after his son died, he began driving around Bearfield with a loaded .357. The day after that he caught up to Clint and a couple of high school kids walking back from drinking beer and fishing down by the river in Pearson Park.

  The other boys said that Mr. Gingue never said a word. He drove up beside them, leaned over and shot Clint on the sidewalk through the open passenger window of his Prius. The blast put some of Clint’s heart and ribs on the sidewalk and the Brown family’s front yard. The boy was dead before he hit the ground.

  Mr. Gingue drove just under the speed limit to the winding dirt roads of the nearby Pawanic Township. There he went on foot into the woods to the foot of Devil Mountain. By a little waterfall where, unbeknownst to anyone but a middle aged woman of Akron Ohio, he had received his first kiss and trip to second base, Mr. Anthony Gingue blew his own brains out with the same .357.

  ***

  Three days after that, the widow Mrs. Gingue called Andy’s mother and asked in a trembling voice if Andy wanted to come over to their house and go through Todd’s things. She thought someone Todd loved should get some use out of them. Gale told the woman that she would ask Andy if he was up for it, then offered to bring a bit to eat. Sandy Gingue said she didn’t have to. She had her mother and a sister from Akron, Ohio staying with her for the time being.

  Andy agreed that they should go, and the next day they went to Todd’s house at the foot of Deacon Drive. Todd’s grandmother greeted them at the door and led them to the Gingue’s pristine parlor room where Todd’s mother sat staring off into space listening to a little metronome click away over the piano. The grandmother told Andy to go on up to Todd’s room. He sheepishly looked up the stairs which he had dashed up countless times in his childhood. Finally, taking measured steps, he rose up and disappeared. Todd’s grandmother went into the kitchen to attend to lunch, leaving Gale alone with the grieving widow and the cookies she had brought.

  “Thank you for coming, Gale.” Mrs. Gingue said, without turning her head.

  “It’s quite all right, Sandy. It really is the least I can do. Would you try one of the cookies that Andy and I made?”

  “I really haven’t felt like eating, but perhaps I will, after all.” She lifted a cookie with a trembling hand. “I got some good news just last night.” She turned and settled her grief-crazed eyes upon Gale. Gale wondered if she had slept at all, either, or what kind of medication the woman’s mother and sister had been forced to give her.

  “What good news is that?” Gale asked. Sandy Gingue glanced over at the door to the kitchen and then leaned over and told Gale the news in a girlish whisper.

  “My boy Todd isn’t really dead,” she stated. Gale lowered her eyelashes. “I saw him last night. He came to my bed room.”

  “That’s wonderful, Sandy. So many people have been blessed by seeing their loved ones after they passed. I was talking to my cousin, Brenda just the other week about how she-”

  “No, Gale, not like that!” Sandy Gingue almost hissed. “I touched my boy. I held him. He was so beautiful in the moonlight coming through the window. He was so happy. Something very wonderful has happened. I always knew my boy was special, he was just so sick when he was little. I know it made him awkward and frightened, but not now, Gale, not now. Now, he is a beautiful boy. My little Peter Pan, coming to his momma through the bedroom window…” She stared off at the ticking metronome, silent, the cookie held in her hand. They sat like that for some time, until Andy came back down the stairs carrying three items, two of which had originally belonged to him, in his hands.

  “Uh…I’m all set, Mom.”

  “Okay, sweetie, I guess we’ll go and let Mrs. Gingue rest up,” Gale went to get up. Sandy’s hand shot out and grasped Gale by the wrist.

  “It’s not too late, Gale,” Sandy Gingue hissed. “We can be beautiful like my boy, too. We can be free. My boy told me so. We just have to wait. It’s not too late for your boy, either.”

  Gale put her hand on Sandy’s arm and pulled her own wrist free.

  “Well, we’re got to be going, Sandy, and let you rest. Thank you for inviting us over. I’m sure it meant a lot to Andy.” She took Andy by the shoulder and steered him to the door and led him away from the ticking of the metronome.

  ***

  That night, Gale was awoken by the voice of her father.

  “Wake up, little girl, honey child, wakey, wakey.” Gale’s eyes flew open to the moon shadows of branches on her bedroom ceiling. The scent of Winston cigarettes was born on the night breeze.

  “Daddy?” she said. She fumbled for the switch to her bedside lamp. Her father’s crucifix lay on the pillow next to hers. She put her hand around it and found it strangely warm. She could hear whispered voices coming from her son’s room. She got up with the crucifix in her hand, left her bedroom and crossed the landing. She peered into her son’s room.

  Andy stood, shirtless and in pajama bottoms in the middle of his room. His back was to her as he faced the open window. Outside his second story window two spectral faces leered inside. Their eyes were lit by a strange fire; their skin was sheen and pale in the moonlight. It took a moment for her to recognize the beautiful faces as Todd Gingue and Clint Heywood.

  “Come on, buddy. Come on out and play!” Todd called in a lilting voice. Andy took a step forward.

  “Andy!” Somehow Gale found her voice. Andy turned his head and looked back at his mother. She could see his cheeks were wet with tears in the moonlight.

  “Mom?” And Gale was hurrying to her son’s side. She hugged him to her.

  The creatures at the window leered at her when she looked up at them. She remembered her father’s crucifix in her hand. She lifted it toward them. The creatures’ features contorted into masks of fury. They hissed at her from between razor sharp teeth.

  “Get away from m
y house. You leave my boy alone!” she commanded. The creatures curled clawed fingers in the air and continued to hiss. She clutched her son to her side and took a step forward, holding out the crucifix. Its gilded sides caught the moonlight and shone bright.

  And then they were gone.

  Gale went to the window and shut it. When she took hold of her boy again, he trembled. She guided him down to the carpet. He buried himself against her bosom and wept.

  “Mommy, I was so scared! I didn’t know what to do,” he sobbed.