There was nothing else in the room. Of course there wasn’t. Just my wonderful, challenging son.
Sleep deprivation is a classic form of torture—did you know that? You stop a guy from sleeping for a few days, blasting loud music or screaming at him whenever he closes his eyes, and he enters this weird la-la-land where nothing’s quite real. His brain unkinks or something, smoothing out until he loses all sense of balance and reason. You can ask him anything; he’ll tell you whatever you want. The moon’s made of green cheese. The Bolsheviks are poisoning the groundwater. Whatever! What-the-fuck EVER! Just let me sleep, you merciless pricks!
* * *
Two days ago, Rosa and I got into a fight. A doozy, as the old salts say. Busted crockery, angry curses. It got a little physical. That’s on me. She pushed me, though. Pushed my buttons. She knows better. She threatened to take Benny and leave. I said it would be over her dead body. I’m not monstrous but any man, pushed to it, can do monstrous things I guess. Like I said, buttons. We both said things we didn’t mean. But I knew what it was. We were tired. The household situation was tearing us apart. Lack of sleep, plain and simple.
I told her to give me two nights. Like detox. We were going to put this whole nightmare to bed once and for all. I wasn’t going to hurt the kid—I swear, Rosa, I won’t harm a hair on his head—but it would be best if she wasn’t around for it. I was worried about Benny, too, I told her. He was smaller than kids his age. His growth factors were screwy because he never slept. More than good food or vitamins or any other shit, sleep was the biggest determiner for his health. A child who slept well was a shipshape child. So we needed to help him be healthy, right?
She packed a bag. Reluctantly. I told her to stay two doors down, with our neighbors. She’s close with the woman. I wasn’t shipping her off to a Siberian gulag, for fuck’s sake.
The first night—just last night—I put him down before the sun went down. I wanted him to feel it going dark around him. Night closing in. I was going to break him, you see. That’s what it had come to. The world can be a scary place, sure. But we all have to cope with it. And once you walk through the fire, whatever that may be—well, you come out purified.
Around seven o’clock, he began to scream. I let him. Game on. I stood outside his room and in a calm and steady voice repeated: “Go to bed, Benjamin. Daddy is here. You are safe. Go to bed.” He kept screaming. For hours, it seemed, I stood outside the fucking door. He never stopped. At some point, I guess I got frustrated and began to mock his croaky shrieks: “Waaaaah! Waaaaaaaah!”
Round about midnight, he began to let out these shrill doglike yelps, the purest fear-struck sounds I’d ever heard.
I imagined him standing straight up in his crib, spine stiff as a board, his eyes bugged out in terror.
I didn’t open the door.
This was the heat of it, I figured. He was in the crucible. The fever was going to break and we’d be shut of this nonsense forevermore. Twenty months old is a little young to have to walk through that fire, I grant you, but every one of us has to be tested. I was, and my dad, and his dad before him. And look how we turned out.
It’s strange, but after hearing a person scream for that long—being that close to it, separated only by a door—you start to hear other noises behind the screams. It’s just that you’re starved for different sounds, nothing more, but your ears can play funny tricks. Like you might hear something that sounds a bit splintery, like ice cubes fracturing in a glass. Or squishy and kind of sluglike. Or what may sound like the hiss of a snake, or whispers in a tongue you’ve never heard before. All this stuff you might hear but it’s nothing. Just… like I said, tricks.
It was one o’clock when his shrieks quit out. All at once, too, like a radio snapped off. Stone silence for a full minute. Hallelujah! Then… talking. My son talking. He hardly had two words to rub together. Mamma and Dadda and truck and owie and Do you want a smack? and Are you sorry? which he picked up Lord knows where.
But I swear I heard him talking to someone. His voice warbly and raw but flat, too, like something had been pounded out of it.
I went to bed. I didn’t hear a damn thing from him the rest of the night.
This morning, I go in and he’s still asleep. He was shivering. He woke up screaming, but then he saw me or maybe the sunlight and simmered down. There was this crusty white foam at the edges of his mouth. Like a rabid dog! And his diapers were just sopping with piss. Like he’d pissed himself in fear a few times. His skin was clammy and a touch cold. I felt a little bad for putting him through it. But kids are tough and we don’t remember shit from our first few years on earth, anyway. I mean, do we?
I took him out today. To the park, and for ice cream. He usually loves that stuff. We’ve got this petting zoo at the park and he likes feeding the llamas and sitting with a chicken in his lap, petting it gently. He’s a softie, my boy. Probably grow up to be a florist or something. But today he was zoned out and distant. I don’t know that he spoke two words. Usually he’s a chatterbug, even if it’s the same five words in a different order. He shivered a lot and threw up his ice cream, which he didn’t eat much of anyway. It’s like some part of his brain has burnt out, was the stupid thought that ran through my head—so stupid that I dismissed it, naturally.
Tonight I put him back in his room to sleep. He started wailing before I’d gotten his pajamas on, but there was something defeated to it, like he’d given up trying to fight back. Which was good. Finally! I win. But then when I hugged him roughly before setting him in his crib, he grabbed my hair, twin handfuls, and held on like grim death. I had to pull him off my scalp like tenacious Velcro. He took a few strands in each of his little, white-clenched fists. He stared at me with the most pleading, wretched look. There is something about the way a child expresses themselves—there’s a nakedness to it, just one-hundred percent bald emotion—that is unlike anything else. I almost decided against it, based on that look. Give him the night off and let him sleep with me. But the pity was short-lived. The world doesn’t have much use for pity. The world eats up the pitied.
He started with those doglike shrieks when I set him down. I actually watched his pajama bottoms bulge out as he peed himself in what I can only imagine was fright. I put him down as he squealed and reached desperately for me. Nope. Sorry, sport. We’re close. We’re almost through.
I shut the door and went to my room and ran the fan. I slept for a few hours then woke at midnight to him screaming.
That was three hours ago. Right now, my anger could be charitably termed as fucking epic.
The clock reads 3:12 AM. A loud crack from Benny’s room—a shuddery, fibrous sound. I’m thinking he’s fallen out of bed again but no, he’d get tangled up in the netting and anyway, that didn’t sound like the crack of a broken bone.
I’ll check on him. Damn it! I’m breaking the first rule.
The hallway is dark in a way that is different than usual. Like the walls have dissolved and I’m walking through deep space. Benny’s door is open. Just a hair. How the hell did that happen?
I walk into his room. Benny’s not in his crib—I can tell without really seeing, because it’s dark in the room and my eyes haven’t adjusted. A dad just knows, okay?
That’s the first thing I notice. The second is the crack.
It’s enormous. It starts at the ceiling and forks down six feet, ending two feet above the baseboards. An inconceivable crack, really. It’s two feet wide at the top, winnowing down to a quarter inch at its base.
“Benny?”
My voice is strangled and tinny. A wedge of ice splits up my spine. It’s so damn cold in the nursery.
I can hear something. It’s coming from the crack.
These weird guttural noises. Sucking, slurping sounds.
“Ben, buddy?”
A powerful numbness blows through me—it’s like a Novocain wind has blown through the room, numbing the surface of my skin. My heart is hammering against my breastbone so heavily t
hat I can feel the pounding of blood in my ears.
That smell again, heavier now. The smell of a new baby ripped open and stuffed full of dust. The smell of an ancient, cavernous room filled with taxidermied infants.
“Benny—oh, Benny, oh, buddy…”
I’m at the crack. My whole skull can fit through—but I don’t want to put it through. Terror seeps into me slowly, an IV drip pumping in slow poison. That smell, the terrible darkness that sears my eyeballs… those horrible sucking sounds.
My boy. Oh my God. My only son, my most precious possession—
“Are you sorry?”
I turn and see him in his bed. Jesus. Oh God oh thank Christ. I can’t see him well—only his shape squatting in the crib. My boy my boy my sweet sweet baby—
I cross to the crib. One big step gets me there. My heart floods with love and joy. He will sleep with me the rest of the night. He will sleep with me until he’s ten if he fucking wants to. I was stupid. A man must admit when he’s stupid or he’s not a man at all. Benny buddy oh thank Christ we’re going to patch that crack I’m going to rip the whole fucking wall down and level it to the ground and build it up safe and strong and you’ll never ever—
He’s in my arms. My boy! As I pull him up his scalp slides under my nose and I inhale that wondrous new baby smell—
…no, not exactly. There’s something off about that smell.
I’m raising him up now, in a crisp and fluid movement fueled by fear and concern—I just want to look into my son’s eyes and show him how much I love him and how sorry I am for… for…
It’s difficult to see. The room is so dark it’s almost funereal.
But I do see the wrinkles. Oh Christ yes. Deep as the bark on an ancient tree, each line trenched with darkness. And the eyes. Old and piss-colored, with a perfect coin of darkness in the center of each.
I’m holding him out at the ends of my arms. My boy. My precious Benny.
Something gurgles at the pit of the crack. Clotted and sludgy, the laughter of something terribly and incomprehensibly old.
My son… it reaches for me. Its arms are very long indeed.
“Daddy,” it says.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
NATHAN BALLINGRUD is the author of the novella The Visible Filth and the acclaimed short story collection North American Lake Monsters. Several of the stories have been chosen for Year’s Best anthologies, including the Shirley Jackson Award-winning tale “The Monsters of Heaven.” The collection itself has also won the Shirley Jackson Award, and has been nominated for this year’s World Fantasy Award.
AMBER BENSON is a writer, director, actor, and maker of things. She wrote the five-book Calliope Reaper-Jones urban fantasy series and the middle grade book, Among the Ghosts. She co-directed the Slamdance feature Drones and co-wrote and directed the BBC animated series, Ghosts of Albion. She also spent three years as Tara Maclay on the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Her latest book is The Last Dream Keeper.
KEALAN PATRICK BURKE is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Turtle Boy, Kin, and Sour Candy. Visit him on the web at www.kealanpatrickburke.com and find him on Twitter @kealanburke
RAMSEY CAMPBELL is described in The Oxford Companion to English Literature as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer.” He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature. Among his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, Ghosts Know, The Kind Folk, Think Yourself Lucky and Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach. He is presently working on a trilogy, The Three Births of Daoloth – the first volume, The Searching Dead, was published in 2016, and Born to the Dark is forthcoming. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, Just Behind You and Holes for Faces, and his non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably. Limericks of the Alarming and Phantasmal are what they sound like. His novels The Nameless and Pact of the Fathers have been filmed in Spain. He is the President of the Society of Fantastic Films.
Ramsey Campbell lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever’s in that pipe. His website is at www.ramseycampbell.com.
M.R. CAREY is a writer who is equally at home in a wide range of media. His latest novel, Fellside, is a ghost story set in a women’s prison. Its predecessor The Girl with all the Gifts was a word-of-mouth bestseller and a movie based on his own screenplay has just had its UK release. He has written for both DC and Marvel, including critically acclaimed runs on X-Men and Fantastic Four, Marvel’s flagship superhero titles. His creator-owned books regularly appear in the New York Times graphic fiction bestseller list. He also has several previous novels, two radio plays and a number of TV and movie screenplays to his credit.
NICK CUTTER is a pseudonym for a Canadian author of novels and short stories. He has written The Troop, The Deep, The Acolyte, and Little Heaven. He lives in Toronto, Canada.
TANANARIVE DUE is the author of The Living Blood, The Black Rose, and My Soul to Keep, among others. Her short fiction was included in the groundbreaking Dark Matter, an anthology of African-American science fiction and fantasy. A two-time finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, the former Miami Herald columnist is the Cosby Chair in the Humanities at Spelman College, where she teaches screenwriting and journalism. The American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient is the author of twelve novels and a civil rights memoir, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights, which she co-authored with her mother, the late civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due.
CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN is the New York Times bestselling author of Snowblind, Ararat, Of Saints and Shadows, and many other novels. A winner of the Bram Stoker Award, he has also been a finalist for the Stoker on multiple occasions, a three-time finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, and a finalist for the British Fantasy Award and the Eisner Award, among others. With Mike Mignola, Golden co-created two cult favorite comics series, Baltimore and Joe Golem: Occult Detective. As editor, his anthologies include Seize the Night, Dark Duets, and The New Dead. He is one third of the popular Three Guys with Beards podcast and is a frequent speaker at conferences, libraries, and schools. He is also a screenwriter, video game writer, workshop instructor, and chocolate enthusiast. Please visit him at www.christophergolden.com
SIMON R. GREEN has written fifty-eight novels, two collections of short stories and one film, and he’s going to have a little lie down any time now. His best known series are the Deathstalker books (space opera), the Nightside books (a private eye who operates in the Twilight Zone solving cases of the weird and uncanny), the Secret Histories (Shaman Bond, the very secret agent), and the Ishmael Jones mysteries (Agatha Christie style mysteries with very weird elements). He rides motorcycles, appears in open air Shakespeare productions, and once punched a swan.
SHERRILYN KENYON is a regular at the #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list. Since 2003, she has placed more than seventy-five novels on the list in all formats including manga and graphic novels. Current series are: Dark-Hunter®, Chronicles of Nick®, Deadman’s Cross™, Lords of Avalon® and The League®. Her books are available in over one hundred countries where eager fans impatiently wait for the next release. The Chronicles of Nick® and Dark-Hunter® series are soon to be major motion pictures while Dark-Hunter®, Lords of Avalon® and The League® are being developed for television. Join her and her Menyons online at SherrilynKenyon.com and www.facebook.com/AuthorSherrilynKenyon
&n
bsp; JOE R. LANSDALE is the author of forty-five novels and numerous short stories, articles, essays and reviews. He has received numerous recognitions for his work, including the Edgar, the Spur, and ten Bram Stoker Awards, eleven including Lifetime Achievement. He has written for comics, film, and television. A number of his works have been filmed, including Bubba Ho-Tep, Cold in July, and the Hap and Leonard television series for Sundance Channel. He lives with his wife in Nacogdoches, Texas.
KASEY LANSDALE was first published at the tender age of eight by Random House and is the author of several short stories and a novella, as well as the editor of several anthologies collections including Subterranean Press’ Impossible Monsters. She is best known as a singer/songwriter whose music has appeared on Animal Planet, the Sundance Channel, and in the film Cold in July.
TIM LEBBON is a New York Times-bestselling writer from South Wales. He’s had over thirty novels published to date, as well as hundreds of novellas and short stories. His latest novel is the dark supernatural thriller Relics, and other recent releases include The Silence, The Hunt, and the Rage War trilogy. He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award, and has been a finalist for World Fantasy, International Horror Guild and Shirley Jackson Awards. The movie of his story Pay the Ghost, starring Nicolas Cage, was released on Halloween 2015, and several other novels and screenplays are in development. Find out more about Tim at his website www.timlebbon.net
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