A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

by Krystal Sutherland

  “Get it together, Esther,” she muttered.

  The bright lights of the 7-Eleven faded and then she was riding on gloomy back streets, and then no streets at all, making her way toward the industrial part of town where no one but serial killers and drunk teenagers went anymore.

  “Fuck you, Eugene,” she chanted as she bowed her head and rode as fast as she could, her heart hammering in her chest. “Fuck you, Eugene. Seriously, Eugene, fuck you.”

  When she finally made it to the refinery, the light inside was dead. No more coal-bright flames, no more whooping teens, no more long shadows dancing in the windows. Esther ditched her bike and climbed through the chain link fence, the lights around her chest barely puncturing the heavy dark. Two figures huddled close to what was left of the bonfire, now no more than a pit of slow-burning embers. Hephzibah had her arm around Eugene’s shoulders and was whispering in his ear, singing maybe, to keep him calm as the firelight died. Around them, Eugene had set up a safety circle of flashlights all pointing in their direction, an island of bright light in the shadows. A stranger stumbling upon them might have mistaken them for spirits: the ashen girl with the ashen hair in the ashen dress, softly singing tunes about love and death, and the boy, dressed like a faded memory, shaking in the ghost light.

  Eugene had tried therapy a few times when he was younger, when the family had money for that kind of thing, before Rosemary had started feeding all their spare cash into the slots. But the vehemence with which he believed his delusions—the consistency of them, the depth of the detail he used to describe the monsters he saw in the dark—well, it crept under the skin of each therapist he saw. The things he spoke of filled their heads with half-remembered horrors they’d seen or heard or felt as young children, things they’d spent a lifetime convincing themselves weren’t real, things most people successfully stopped noticing after they reached a certain age. And here was a boy of no more than eleven, twelve, thirteen, who had them half convinced that these impossible memories were true.

  No one slept in the dark after sessions with Eugene Solar.

  Hephzibah spotted Esther hovering at the entrance to the warehouse and smiled brightly and waved, but she wouldn’t speak or sing again, not with Esther so close. She used to get upset that Heph could whisper to Eugene but not to her. That he knew what her voice sounded like, really knew, and she didn’t. It took Esther a couple of years to work out that Hephzibah was in love with him. That whatever magic had once burned brightly in their mother had lived on in Eugene, and his enchantment over her had done what no therapist could: get her to talk.

  “Thanks for coming back for him, kid,” Esther said to Heph.

  “Anytime,” she signed.

  Esther sat on the other side of Eugene and put her arm around him too, so that he was wedged safely between them, so that—as always—the demons would eat them first. They stayed there pressed tight against each other until dawn, Heph and Esther holding hands behind Eugene’s back, Eugene’s fingers curled around a sprig of yarrow plucked from Rosemary’s garden, trying and failing to find courage in the strong, sweet scent of the devil’s nettle. When the sky finally lightened, he rose and went out into the gray sunlight and breathed it in and in and in, angry at himself and exhausted and above all shocked, as always, to have survived another long night in the dark.

  “Come on you beautiful weirdo,” Esther said, standing on her tiptoes to rest her chin on his shoulder. Even though they looked different and felt different and disagreed on most things, she’d never be able to think of Eugene as anything less than the second half of her soul. “Let’s get you home.”

  5

  DEATH AND HORSE-SIZED LOBSTERS

  WHEN THE twins finally arrived back at the house, Rosemary didn’t ask them where they’d been all night, because Rosemary wasn’t there. Their father, Peter, heard their footfalls and called up the stairs, but they didn’t answer him. Esther sent him a note down the dumbwaiter. Most kids would get in trouble for ignoring their parents, but it wasn’t like Peter was going to come out of the basement anytime soon to discipline them.

  A few years ago, Eugene had devised a series of trials to try and draw Peter out of his burrow and proceeded to spend the next week:

  - Setting the fire alarms off and pretending to choke on smoke at the top of the basement stairs.

  - Cooking several dozen slices of bacon and leaving the plate at the top of the basement stairs.

  - Dropping stink bombs down the basement stairs.

  Alas, Gollum remained in his cave, and the Solar children no longer feared parental retribution from either side.

  What they lost in Peter Solar: a man who loved hiking and poetry and taking his children to the zoo, where he explained to them, in detail, each conservation project being undertaken. A man who took them to yard sales and bought them binoculars and went on weeklong birdwatching expeditions. A man who taught them how to play chess and read to them at bedtime and sat beside their beds and stroked their hair when they were sick.

  Peter Solar. Their father. That’s who they lost.

  Eugene took a blanket into the backyard and rested in what little sunlight filtered through the oak trees, his sleep fitful. The creatures that came for him in his dreams hated sunlight, he said, so whenever he did sleep—which wasn’t often—it was usually in the sun. Esther napped in her bed, slipping in and out of that heavy, sluggish haze that comes with sleeping during the day, the kind that made you think that Jonah Smallwood (red love heart) had sent you a message asking what navarrofobia was.

  JONAH SMALLWOOD :

  What’s navarrofobia?

  Esther sat bolt upright. Jonah Smallwood had, and was reading, her semi-definitive list of worst nightmares.

  Before she replied, she went into her contacts and deleted the stupid heart from next to his name.

  ESTHER:

  Fear of cornfields. Bring me that list back *immediately*. Do not even glance at it again.

  JONAH:

  You really afraid of all these things? Some of these are pretty stupid. Who the hell is scared of moths?

  ESTHER:

  DO. NOT. EVEN. GLANCE.

  JONAH:

  Fine, fine. I’ll drop it by tonight.

  ESTHER:

  Put it in the mailbox and then delete my phone number and then get abducted by aliens and never return to this planet.

  JONAH:

  I glanced. Couldn’t help it.

  To which Esther sent five rows of angry emojis before going back to sleep.

  • • •

  ROSEMARY WOKE THEM UP in the afternoon and took them to visit their grandfather, Reginald Solar, at Lilac Hill, a building that looked like it may have once been a prison, but now smelled faintly of cheese and strongly of death. If Tim Burton and Wes Anderson had a love child, and that love child grew up to be an architect/interior designer that focused solely on constructing/decorating sad nursing homes, then Lilac Hill Nursing and Rehabilitation Center would be that kid’s magnum opus. Glossy, olive green floors, orange pleather chairs, and wallpaper with tiny pink lobsters all over it, despite the fact that a) the town was an hour’s drive from the seaside, and b) most of the residents couldn’t take a lobster in a one-on-one fight to the death.

  Reginald Solar, in his prime, could’ve kicked the crap out of a horse-sized lobster, but that was before the dementia snuck up on him in his sleep. (He maintained that it never would’ve been able to sink its claws into him if he’d been awake.)

  They walked through the too-bright halls toward Reg’s room, Eugene quietly sliding from window to window in case there was a sudden power outage. In his hand, as there always was in untrustworthy buildings (i.e., buildings that didn’t have the light switches taped in the on position, and a generator, and a backup generator), was a flashlight, the same industrial black and yellow flashlight Peter used to take with him
on house calls when he still left the house.

  The hall was lined with shucked shells in the shape of people, all of them hunched over in wheelchairs and looking fuzzy somehow, like spiders had already started spinning webs in their hair.

  “I could rule this place with a small lobster army,” Esther muttered to herself. “Thirty, forty lobsters, tops, and I could be queen.” The more she thought about them—their beady eyes, their abundant legs, the way they moved, how much their claws would hurt—the more uncomfortable she started to feel. If Jonah hadn’t stolen her semi-definitive list of worst nightmares, she might have added lobsters to the roster, just in case.

  Then there he was, Reginald Solar, once a hardened homicide detective, now the owner of a nonoperational brain inside a paper-skinned body. Esther was always shocked by how much worse her grandfather looked every time she saw him. Like he was a clay statue left outside, and every time it rained, more and more of him washed away, leaving deep grooves all over his body and a puddle of everything he used to be at his feet. He wore a red cap—the last one her grandma had knitted for him before she died—and was sitting in his wheelchair in front of a chessboard, playing (and losing) a game with no one.

  “Hey Pop,” said Eugene, sliding into the empty chair across from Reg.

  Reg didn’t say anything, didn’t acknowledge their presence, just stared and stared at the chessboard until he made the only move he could make: the one that would lead him straight into checkmate. “You always win, you old bastard,” he mumbled to Eugene. Reginald was, technically, still alive, though his soul had died several years earlier, leaving behind a thin cadaver to be dragged slowly and messily toward the grave.

  “Tell us about the curse,” Eugene said as he reset the chessboard. Despite everything else that had roared out of his head like a landslide, Reg could still describe the handful of times he’d personally met Death with perfect clarity, so that was the only question Eugene ever asked.

  “The first time I met the Man Who Would Be Death . . .” he began, his speech slurred, his voice rasped, his eyes far away. The story was a mechanical thing now, no longer recalled with flair and passion as it once was, though the nurses said it was a miracle he could remember anything at all. “The first time I met him,” he said again, trying to form his lips and tongue around words his brain no longer recognized, “was in Vietnam.”

  Reg spent the afternoon slowly recounting the story with as much detail as he always had—the humidity of the jungles, the bright colors of wartime Saigon, the sweetness of the Vietnamese hot chocolate, and the Man Who Would Be Death, a younger man with a pockmarked face, as war weary as the rest of them. Eugene rested in a chair by the window, his thin eyelids closed against the sun. Esther was on the floor, her head on a pillow, her body wrapped in a cloak of falcon feathers because today she was the Valkyrie Freyja, Norse goddess of death.

  These are the things she remembered about her grandfather as he spoke:

  - The way the rest of the world had seen him as a hard-assed homicide detective, but she’d only ever known him as Poppy, the man who grew gardens of orchids and let her pick the flowers even when no one else was allowed to.

  - The way the only animals he’d ever liked were birds, until Florence Solar rescued a puppy (that Reg very much didn’t want to keep). The way the puppy would follow him around the greenhouse as he tended to his orchids, and the way he pretended to hate that the dog was obsessed with him. The way the dog remained nameless, and the way he only referred to it as “Go Away,” yet let it nap on his knees when he watched TV and sleep at the foot of his bed every night.

  - The way he laughed. The way he’d tip his head back when he found something particularly funny. The way he’d wipe his right eye with his index finger as the laugh subsided, whether he’d been crying happy tears or not.

  The memory of the laugh was perhaps what made Esther most sad. She had no recordings of the sound, and once Reg was gone, it would survive only as a snippet in her imperfect memory, where it could be distorted or forgotten altogether. As a tear slipped from her right eye, she used her index finger to wipe it away, and replayed the fragment of her grandfather’s laugh again, already unsure how true it was.

  When the story was done she stood and stretched and pressed her lips to Reg’s waxen forehead, and he asked her if she was an angel or a demon come to reap his soul, and that was when they left him.

  6

  THE CURSE AND THE REAPER

  IN THE evening the sun began its ominous sink into the mountains, a ball of red-hot nickel drowning in the sky, and the Solar household prepared for another night in the trenches. Another battle against the ever-encroaching dark. A procedure that had been going on every night for six years.

  Eugene was lighting candles like a maniac, slipping through the halls of the house armed with matches and his favorite novelty lighter, a dragon that shot flames out of its ass. It was a long process. Every now and then he looked out a window and said “Fuck. Fuck me. Fucking sunset” or something to that effect and went back to madly clicking the smiling dragon’s tongue until it shat blue fire from its bowels. Occasionally he asked Esther what time it was and she checked her phone and said “five thirty-two” or “quarter to six.” And each time she gave him a number, no matter what number it was, Eugene swore and started moving faster, lighting candles without even touching them, all the illumination he’d saved up in his skin jumping from his fingertips to the wicks. Not many people could light a candle with sheer willpower alone, but Eugene Solar could. Eventually the whole house was humming with electricity and glowing with firelight and the air smelled of burnt wick and melting wax.

  Esther’s role to play in this psychotic ritual was security; she closed all the windows, drew the curtains, sprinkled salt lines across doorways, and ensured the front door was securely locked. She was about to complete this last task, her hand hovering inches from the dead bolt, when there came a series of bangs from the other side of the door, which was alarming. Everyone in the neighborhood knew not to come to their house (no one ever answered), which meant that the person banging was almost certainly a violent home invader. Esther was midway through weighing her options—call the police, grab a knife from the kitchen, barricade herself in the basement with her father—when the violent home invader called out.

  “Esther! Esther, open up!” said a familiar voice.

  Jonah Smallwood was on her front doorstep, sobbing. She knelt by the mail slot.

  “I’m not falling for that again,” she said. “Steal my Fruit Roll-Up once, shame on you. Steal my Fruit Roll-Up twice—”

  “Open the damn door!” Jonah said.

  “Put the list in the mail slot and—”

  Jonah banged the door again. “Come on, it’s an emergency!”

  What a person with anxiety hears: I am here to murder you and your family. Esther looked behind her, but Rosemary and Eugene had disappeared, swallowed by the house after the first knock. They wouldn’t reemerge from their hiding places until the coast was clear.

  So—knowing the risk was only to herself, and feeling fairly certain Jonah wasn’t the murdering type—she took a breath and opened the door.

  “I hit it with my moped!” Jonah said, rushing inside. Cupped in his hands, he held what she first mistook for a wet ushanka, one of those furry Russian hats, but was, in actual fact, a very limp kitten. Out in the front yard, Jonah’s cream-colored moped was toppled in some tree roots, its tires still spinning.

  The kitten was clearly not breathing.

  “I think it’s dead,” she said, closing her hands gently over Jonah’s.

  “It’s not dead!” He pulled the kitten away from her and pressed it to his chest.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Your dad’s a vet, isn’t he?”

  “Jonah, he hasn’t . . . He hasn’t left the basement for six years. I don’t think he’s se
en a stranger in all that time.”

  Jonah Smallwood, to his credit, didn’t seem to find this half as weird as most people who knew about Peter Solar’s condition. “Where’s the basement at?” he asked, so she led him to the orange door her father walked through on a cold Tuesday morning six years ago and never walked out of again. They descended the stairs together, the feathers of her cloak lifting eddies of dust from the wood. Even down there, the lights were taped on with electrical tape for when Eugene had still visited their father.

  The basement that was now Peter Solar’s whole life looked like what you’d expect if someone hadn’t left it for six years. The walls had been hung with yards and yards of red fabric so that the space kind of had an opium den vibe. The only furniture consisted of what had already been down there the day he decided he couldn’t ever leave. A ping-pong table, a couch that had been fashionable in the ’80s, four mismatched bar stools, and a black-and-white TV, all surrounded by the usual basement clutter—a ladder, three lamps, a stack of board games, bags of old clothes earmarked for Goodwill years ago, golf clubs, a guitar, two fake Christmas trees (both decorated and lit up, all year round—Peter loved Christmas), Reginald’s record player, and dozens of precariously balanced towers of books and newspapers.

  Six years ago, Esther thought this was cool. She looked at his basement and saw the Room of Requirement from Harry Potter and believed her dad was an eccentric wizard worthy of a position at Hogwarts. Now she could smell the anemic scent of human skin that hadn’t seen sunlight for half a dozen years, see the layer of fine grease settled over the tomb that had become his life.

  Peter Solar had come down here one afternoon when Esther was eleven to hook up the second generator that Eugene had requested. Perhaps he was deep in mourning for his brother, Uncle Harold, who had recently succumbed to his fear of germs, or perhaps the horror of suffering a stroke had driven him into the comfort of the dark, or perhaps it was simply his time to fall victim to the curse. Whatever the case, what happened was this: