Nightmare Magazine Issue 22

by Nightmare Magazine

  Maddy wrinkled her nose. “Like where?”

  “It’s got to be a trick of architecture,” I said, trying for rationality. “No wind outside, but maybe beneath the eaves?”

  Aiden didn’t even look at me. “Just someplace else.”

  “What’s that?” Maddy asked. She pounced on Aiden’s bed, dragged a book out of the tangle of sheets. I recognized it when she brought it up, and forgot about the window for a moment.

  “Oh, the book?” I held out my hand, but Aiden snatched it from Maddy.

  “It’s about the house,” he said. “About that window.”

  The window loured behind us, black and cold. I thought about that bluster of wind, about the sounds that traveled thinly through the glass. “The book’s about the window?”

  “I just started reading,” Aiden said.

  I licked my lips. I itched to have the journal in my own hands, but Aiden cradled it close. Maddy shifted to stand at his shoulder. A united force.

  “You tell me what you find out,” I said. “And don’t mess with the window.”

  • • • •

  Aiden delved into the journal with all the fervor of a born-again into the Bible. At first, I was glad to see it—I wanted to know about the window just as much as he did. Was it paint or some special glass that made it so dark? What made the winds—an accident of architecture, or design? I imagined the three of us talking about it, bonding. But though Aiden spent all his time with the journal, he shared nothing with me. When I asked him direct questions, his answers were unsatisfying, and full of covert glances at Maddy. He was talking to her, but not me.

  After six meals spent in attempted interrogation, while Aiden ignored me and Maddy rolled her eyes and bitched about the food, I gave up. At least, I gave up asking Aiden. All he’d coughed up was that the window had been in the stables and was moved to the main house after the stable came down.

  I decided I’d have to read the journal myself. Easier said than done. Aiden guarded the book zealously. I was determined. I couldn’t let it go. Now that I’d heard the winds behind the black window, I couldn’t stop hearing them.

  At night, in my room, the sound crept through my walls, moaning like the spirits of the forsaken. When I wasn’t listening to the window, I was listening to Aiden cry out in his sleep, to Maddy sobbing in the dark.

  I was equipped to solve old mysteries. To be a parent? I was ill-equipped, digging without a plan.

  When Aiden was out of the attic, I was in it, poking at the window. The glass stayed cold, but when I breathed on it, the glass refused to let my breath touch it. The sounds outside were louder, it seemed, or maybe I was just . . .

  Scared.

  The window scared me.

  The black window felt like a threat, a looming storm over our heads.

  The next time Aiden headed for a shower, I braved the black window’s judgmental eye and tossed his room ruthlessly. I found the journal with my fingertips first—the cracked leather binding, the thick paper, crumbling at the edges—and pulled it out from his pillowcase. I locked myself into my bedroom, journal in hand.

  Aiden shouted through the door, but I ignored him. Did him good to get upset about something other than our parents for once. Besides, he’d lied to me when he said he hadn’t read far into the journal. Aiden had bookmarked dozens of pages—the journal bristled with curling scraps of paper. He’d read it through more than once.

  Maddy joined Aiden, drawn up the stairs by his unexpected fury, and she added her protests to his. “It’s not funny, Holly!” she shouted. “Give it back. It’s not for you!”

  “When I’m done!”

  As I read, my outrage at Aiden’s lies turned to a brittle anxiety. Aiden had bookmarked it like a textbook, studied it. And the material was . . . disturbing. Each scrap of paper marked another horrifying entry about the window.

  The window had been in the stable. But no one knew who had put it in. The stable hand said it just appeared one night. It had been a mystery, but a benign one.

  Until the stable hand disappeared.

  The horses shrieked and Annabel fled the supper table, gathering the boys as she went. I followed, quick as my bad leg would allow. I feared fire, but what we found was something peculiar. The horses frothed with terror, and Annabel and the boys hastened to get them to the paddock. I lingered, and when I saw . . . when I understood, I fell back against the doors, numb and bewildered.

  Our stables are small, as befit our small family. Eight stalls, eight horses. Yet, the eighth stall had vanished as if it had never been.

  Four stalls along one side; three along the other, a smooth expanse of sanded wood where there should be another space, and Edward and Pretty, the spotted mare, vanished along with that eighth stall.

  My breath failed as I saw the unaccountable window had not disappeared with Pretty, but moved, closer to the house, settled into the first stall.

  I read on; apparently the horses never recovered their nerves and Annabel had the stables torn down, the land given over to a much needed vegetable patch. I checked the date—1942—the midst of World War II, and the homeowner’s bad leg probably a result of World War I.

  The pounding on my door stopped.

  I flipped to the next bookmark, though my fingers were numb from clutching the book so tightly. The paper fluttered free and I lost the spot.

  I browsed roughly, the pages tearing beneath my fingers, scanning the tiny text. The page that I stopped on was a faded sketch of a house plan. I recognized the tower at the end—where we lived now—but most of the page was taken up by the main house. The western wall of the house was marked with a black X. The note alongside it was laconic, a simple—the window is returned here.

  I flipped the page, read more crabbed text.

  The boys are fascinated by the black window, though Annabel tries to keep them from it, mindful of Edward’s incomprehensible fate. We have sealed off the parlor, much to the relief of the daily girl whose job it was to clean beneath that window’s gaze.

  Though we have barred the door, the boys prove most enterprising at finding the key. How many mornings must I drag them out of there? They wait to see how daylight fails to seep through the darkness, and wonder at the shadows untouched by the sun’s rays. Annabel is distressed, nearly to hysterics. She has locked the room once more, and thrown the key away. Perhaps that will be the end of it, and we will, like one of Poe’s tales, have this room bricked in.

  The next page dropped a photograph into my lap, showed me the family. Mother, father, two boys about Aiden’s age.

  They looked nice, I thought and cringed. There was disaster looming on every page of the journal—the main house gone, the black window moved to the attic.

  I opened to the next marked page, close to the end. The handwriting, tidy through all previous pages, was pen scratchings and damaged paper here.

  The boys went through the window. I woke this morning certain that something was wrong. Houses become a part of you. Our breath lingers in the halls, our hearts beat in the empty spaces, our nerves search out the measure of our walls like they are our skins. I knew, even as I woke, that the house had changed. It was too empty, too small, too . . . terrible. A silence had crept inside where there should have been boyish voices.

  The dining room was vanished. Only a smooth expanse of faded wallpaper remained. The boys . . . I knew they were gone. That they had managed to coax the window open. Annabel came upon me there and screamed. She tore through the house haranguing the servants to “look for the window! The black window!” By the cook’s shrieks, we found it, a black gloss in the pantry, shelves missing where the window had come to rest.

  Annabel is determined to retrieve them, and may the good Lord forgive me, but I can not encourage her. The boys are lost to us; I know that. Nothing lives behind that false glass. I have heard the eerie cries, seen the darkness massed behind the window. It is the land of the dead waiting there, and nothing living can abide in it. But she will not be
swayed.

  I will use the servants’ exodus as cover for our own. I will plunder the house of our possessions; I will send Annabel to the church to pray and prepare for her rescue attempt. While she is out, I will fire the house and see if fire will do what tearing down could not.

  The next pages proved that he had followed through, that he had burned down their home, and that Annabel had not forgiven him. She left him in the ashy rubble and returned to her family.

  He moved into the ramshackle tower—the only remnant of his home.

  I had cause to store all my goods in the attics while the rebuilding occurred—a rebuilding I had no desire for, but the community pitied me and in a paroxysm of civic duty subjected me to a welter of dust and noise, the chatter of strangers who commiserated with me over the loss of my family, and would not see that I had become that most useless of citizens: An old man who wants to be left alone. An old man with a secret.

  The black window, you see, returns; it always returns. I have barricaded it behind furniture and hope that left alone, it will sleep. That it will remain unopened.

  I closed the journal. I didn’t want to read more; I didn’t need to. So much of Aiden’s obsessiveness made terrible sense. The land of the dead? Aiden was still young enough to believe what was written. And Maddy—she hated me, sided with Aiden no matter what.

  Panic broke through me, a lazy roll deep in my guts.

  The house was silent. Aiden had stopped yelling at me. Maddy had stopped trying the door handle. When?

  Aiden hadn’t wanted me to read the journal. Why?

  Because I would stop him.

  Would stop them.

  But now they knew I knew.

  I was on my feet, fumbling with the door latch, the slippery key, the old knob fighting me. I clung to hope. Aiden might be grief-stricken, guilt-mad, despairing, but Maddy . . . she was so angry. She wouldn’t let him go; she’d already lost so much, our parents, her friends, her school, her home . . .

  I had climbed rock-strewn hills alongside goats, navigated tight underground caverns with ease, but I made a series of pratfalls as I raced out of the room, toward the attic. Toward the faint sounds that told me I wasn’t too late, wasn’t too late—

  Glass cracked like a gunshot. Like a broken window.

  • • • •

  When I burst into the attic, Aiden was just dropping my wood ax to the floor. Beside him, Maddy held a lumpy woven coil that I recognized—the rope ladder from my field gear.

  A silvery crack raced across the pristine blackness of the window, like a zipper pulling apart.

  The space beyond moaned, hungry.

  “Don’t,” I whispered, breathless. “Please, don’t.”

  The window tore. Darkness spilled into the attic, icy and thick as fog banks. Maddy spun and hurled the rope ladder into the darkness. Aiden slipped over the side, vanishing like he’d been swallowed whole.

  “We just want Mom,” Maddy said, her voice as broken as the glass. “We want Dad. It’s okay, Holly. You tried.” She slung a leg over the sill.

  I forded the room, blackness spreading like ink over my legs, sneakers, ankles, jeans, coiling hungrily around my hips. I caught Maddy’s arm, but she slid from my grasp, sucked out into the eclipsing darkness. My nails left rake marks on her flesh, and her blood spotted the floor between us.

  Then they were both gone.

  • • • •

  I went after them though my legs shook and tears slicked my face. I crossed the sill, and slung myself down the first rungs.

  Maddy and Aiden were so young. They believed blindly. If some delusional writer said it, it must be true. It could be built on. The land of the dead? A fact; therefore, our parents would be waiting for them.

  The ladder’s rope steps curved and swayed beneath me as I climbed down into . . .

  I wanted to think ‘void’ but void suggested emptiness and this place was anything but empty. It was black and cold and so full of dark, broken things that the air vibrated with their passings and collisions. So crowded that I felt my lungs constrict. My bird’s eye view was dark, dark, dark, but there were shapes moving around me, above me, below. And threaded beneath all of that movement, other dark lines. Buildings? Roads? Nothing I understood.

  Something bellowed in the darkness, a foghorn burst of loss and hunger, a cry that weakened my bones.

  Maddy’s pale hair was an unmoving beacon. My hands and feet were slow to move me down one rung to the next. Maddy clung, shaking, to the ladder. When I reached her, she launched herself at me, holding hard enough to bruise.

  “Go up!” I told her. Tried to tell her. The words were torn from my lips and shredded. Nothing human was welcome here. I shoved Maddy upward.

  We both looked up, and there was nothing to see, no sign of the window to our world. Her face contorted, terror and fury and betrayal—this wasn’t what she’d wanted.

  I had to believe we could escape; I shoved harder. “Go!”

  Her lips moved, Aiden, and I nodded.

  She climbed slowly, so terribly slowly, and I felt all of that black within the black swooping around us, noticing us . . .

  I forced myself downward. Aiden had been just a moment before us on the ladder. He couldn’t be too far . . . Unless he’d fallen.

  My throat and eyes burned.

  This place felt like it was eating away at my bones from the inside. Some sizzle in the air made my lungs ache. I leaned into the ladder, coughing. I rubbed my face on my wrist and left it smudged black.

  I went down.

  Hand under hand, foot below foot, I went, swaying through the caustic air, buffeted by cold, fume-laden winds.

  I nearly stepped on Aiden’s head, his pale hair coated with black streaks. He clung to the end of the ladder, a flutter of cauterized nylon dangling below us, into an abyss.

  He stared down, hypnotized, one foot free. Ready to step off.

  Wanting to believe.

  His wrist felt like it was in rigor, ice cold and stiff. I recoiled, then seized hold again. He turned his head, slowly registering my presence. His eyes were black holes in a black-smeared face. His lips moved. I thought I saw the word why, the word find.

  Below, the darkness shifted, revealing a landscape so inhospitable, the last of my breath went.

  Aiden leaned forward, the ladder swaying, shifting with his weight, leaning over the darkness like a lure above black waters. I had one hand locked on his wrist, the other on the ladder. I tried to pull us up even one rung, but he resisted.

  It was the final shock, piled on all the others. I couldn’t save him. No matter how desperately I wanted to. I couldn’t drag him up the ladder if he wouldn’t go.

  I rested my face against his cold cheek and sobbed, the cries scoured out of my throat. “Please, please, please. They aren’t here. They’re gone. All we’ve got is each other.”

  He couldn’t hear me. But he could feel my tears on his skin.

  A cold touch on my hair, not a creature passing too closely by, not a gust of that foul, cold wind, but Aiden’s tentative fingers. An awkward pat. Offering comfort.

  Aiden’s eyes glittered with tears, damp black streaks on his skin. The first connection I’d made with him since the funeral, and it was over the grief I’d been refusing to let him see.

  I had been an idiot.

  I pulled at the rung above, staring at his tear-stained face, and after a long, painful moment, Aiden did likewise.

  We scaled the ladder, the fabric of it thinning, wearing beneath the constant winds.

  We climbed and we climbed, stiff, cold marionettes. We climbed, sobbing and scared. We climbed. Just when I decided the window had vanished and left us stranded, clinging to the ladder, Maddy reached out her hand.

  I pushed Aiden through the window, followed after. The attic was creaking and dead around us, the boards gone silver and cracking beneath the dark fogs.

  “Hurry, hurry!” Maddy croaked.

  We staggered from the attic, down the s
tairs, and out into the afternoon light. The kids looked like hell, skin grayish, lips and eyes stained black. Twin streaks of blackish blood ran from their noses, their lips. I didn’t feel much better. My nail beds were black and my breathing bubbled.

  We huddled against each other, watching the house, watching the attic disappear.

  • • • •

  We ended up in the hospital for three nights, coughing up blood and bile and something that tasted like machine oil. The doctors were horrified as well as bewildered, though they assured us we were recovering.

  Maddy and Aiden refused to leave my side so they found us a room to share. Aiden whispered on our second night, “Do you think Mom and Dad were there?”

  “No,” I said.

  “But it was dead there. It was the land of the dead,” Maddy said. She sounded like a two-pack-a-day smoker. “The book said so.”

  “The book was wrong,” I managed. “I’ve seen humanity in every stage of ruin. There was nothing human over there.” I took a needed breath. “If it was the land of the dead, it wasn’t our dead.” I had been dreaming of what I’d seen, waking shuddering and anxious.

  Maddy shivered, fell silent. She should have been the healthiest of the three of us, but the long minutes alone in the attic had done their own sort of damage.

  We’d all come out with damage, but I reminded myself of the key part. We’d all come out.

  • • • •

  Three months later, Maddy and Aiden came home from a field trip and said they’d driven past our old house. They said it was being sold as a one story cottage, and that the front window was black.

  © 2014 by Lane Robins.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lane Robins was born in Miami, Florida, the daughter of two scientists, and grew up as the first human member of their menagerie. She attended the Odyssey workshop, the Center for the Study of Science Fiction novel and short story workshops, and has a BA in Creative Writing from Beloit College. She writes urban fantasy novels under the name Lyn Benedict, and fantasy novels under her own name. She currently lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

  To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.