In Nightmares We're Alone

by Greg Sisco

  I look around. Maybe a few more boxes have been packed, I guess. The place looks about the same as it did yesterday.

  “Wow,” I say. “I didn’t expect you to… How long have you been here?”

  “A few hours. I was sitting at home not doing anything and it just seemed like… I mean, I thought… Hi, Ellen.”

  “Hello.”

  Something’s wrong here. I can tell when Arthur is keeping something from me. Still, there’s no subtle way of bringing up his lack of progress, even given the fact that there’s no doubt he already knows it’s what I’m thinking.

  “So, what, uh… what room… have you been working on?”

  “A bit of the kitchen,” he stumbles. “I, uh… Yeah, a bit of the kitchen. I was just having a little bit of a rest when you got here, and…”

  “Arthur…”

  I’m about to ask what he’s really doing here when Ellen cuts me off. “Well, there’s three of us here then. We should be able to make some real headway by tonight.”

  “Yes we should,” says Arthur. “Yes we should.”

  I nod my head and abandon my thought process. Oh well. If he’s here, he’s here, and if he’s willing to help then why rile him up?

  I glance at the typewriter. No paper in it. Of course. Why would there be? I don’t even know why I looked.

  We spend a few hours moving things out into the three piles in the living room.

  High school yearbook.

  Storage.

  Mom’s ancient wedding dress.

  Trash.

  Set of screwdrivers.

  Home.

  Dad’s gramophone.

  Yeah, Dad’s gramophone. That ancient thing sitting in the corner of the living room he used to play when I was a little girl and he’d come home drunk. And half the time he’d play his dad’s music. Stuff from almost a century ago. Barney Google, with the goo-goo-googely eyes. And he’d sing along and dance with Mom or me right there in front of the couch. He’d lift me up and kiss my cheek and then ask if I was ticklish before he nibbled my neck to make me laugh and squirm.

  For a second I hear the music playing, the way I felt Mom’s touch in my hair the other day, a fantasy at first that becomes increasingly real until it scares me. Then I can feel Dad’s hands around my waist and smell the liquor on his breath. I feel his teeth on my neck and it’s so real I have to crook my neck to one side and put a hand against it in defense.

  I spin around and everything goes back to normal. I’m standing in the living room with Ellen and Arthur and there’s nothing to see. Just an empty house where my parents used to live.

  Stanislaw Jerzy Lec said it best: “You can close your eyes to reality, but not to memories.”

  One thing they never taught me in college was how to forget.

  Dad’s gramophone goes in storage, with all the other things I can’t trash even though there’s no point in having them anymore.

  * * * * *

  “Are you guys getting hungry?” I ask at the end of three hours. It’s almost seven o’clock now.

  “Not really,” says Arthur. “I say we keep working.”

  “I could eat,” says Ellen after a pause.

  “Yeah, I think it’s about time for dinner,” I say. “We’re making pretty good headway. Let’s all go out to a restaurant. We can sit down somewhere and reward ourselves.”

  Arthur sighs. “There’s still a lot of work to be done. Why don’t we just order out?”

  “I think I’d rather go out somewhere. Ellen?”

  “Let’s go out.”

  “Well, of course you know she’s going to agree with you.” He sounds sour.

  Ellen and I exchange glances.

  “Is something wrong, Arthur?”

  “No. No. I just don’t think it makes sense to stop. We’ve got a few hours left before we need to be home, so why not keep at it? We could just about get this puppy finished tonight if we really put our backs into it.”

  “I’m pretty tired,” I say. “Let’s go get a bite to eat and if we feel like it we can come back after. Otherwise, I mean, a day or two and we should be finished with it. What’s the big rush?”

  Arthur grumbles. “Well, why don’t you two go out then and have your dinner and I’ll stay here and keep working.”

  He goes back to throwing miscellaneous junk into a trash bag, ignoring us. I look over at Ellen, who gives me a confused look and a shrug.

  “Arthur, can I talk to you in the other room?” I ask.

  He drops the bag, frustrated and follows me into the dining room.

  “What’s the problem?” I ask him. “Yesterday you told me you weren’t even coming back here. Today I can’t get you to stop. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. I want to be done with it. Is that so hard to understand?”

  “A little bit. I told you I’d take care of it. It’s not—”

  “But you would have been upset about it.”

  I fold my arms and tap my index finger against my upper arm, an old nervous tic. “Not that upset. You’re acting strange.”

  “No I’m not. I’m acting like I want to get done with all this and be out of this house. I told you I don’t like being here. I’m going to finish.”

  “So if you don’t like being here then come with us and get out of the place for a while. You don’t even have to come back if you don’t want. Ellen and I can handle the rest.”

  He thinks. “I…” He pauses and looks toward the window, searching for words, I guess. He sighs. “No. I need to work.”

  I shake my head. “Okay. I guess if that’s what you want to do.” I start to head back into the living room.

  “I wish you wouldn’t go,” he says.

  I have to stop and turn back to him. There’s a sick feeling in my stomach all of a sudden and I’m not sure exactly why. Or maybe I just won’t let myself acknowledge it.

  “I’m going,” I say. “You can stay or you can come, but Ellen and I are going to dinner.”

  He stands there looking like a sad child as I head back into the living room and get my coat.

  * * * * *

  Ellen drops me off after dinner and we say our goodbyes. I’m heading up the steps to the porch and looking in through the window and I see Arthur sitting there on the couch in the living room, same as he was when I arrived with Ellen hours ago, staring at the floor between his feet. I shudder.

  “Ready to go?” I ask as I open the door.

  It doesn’t look like he got much organizing done after I left the house. There’s still a day or two of work left to be had. I don’t want to think that he spent all of the last two hours sitting alone in the silent living room staring at the floor, but, well, it’s the first thought that occurs.

  “I’m not going,” says Arthur, refusing to look up at me.

  That sick feeling in my stomach again. And suddenly I can’t blind myself to why it’s there.

  “What do you mean you’re not going?”

  “I can’t. I have to… stay here. I can’t go.”

  “Until when?” I ask, trying as hard as I can not to sound terrified.

  “Until I don’t know when. When we’re done, maybe. It’s… I shouldn’t have come back. My medium today told me he was a fraud and that there isn’t a spirit world, so I thought I could come confront this and get past it but… I wish I hadn’t come. I think… I think it has me.”

  “Arthur, what are you saying?” My voice breaks as I ask him.

  “I don’t know. It’s that feeling I had yesterday. Something has a hold of me. It won’t let me go.”

  I’m overwhelmed by a combination of terror, grief, and anger I don’t know if I can take. I start pacing and breathing hard. “Oh, Jesus. Don’t do this, Arthur. Don’t. I can’t take this from you right now. Not from you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No. I just lost a mother and a father. You don’t get to do this to me now. Not after that. We’re going right now. You said it felt worse when you got he
re. So it’ll feel better back at the apartment. Get your jacket. We’re going.”

  “Edna,” he finally looks up at me. There are tears running down his face. It’s a little boy’s face. He looks younger than he did when I met him at twenty-two. “I can’t go. I’ll die if I go. You have to believe that.”

  Seeing him crying like that, my eyes well up and my lip starts shaking, but I refuse to let myself break.

  “Goddamn you, Arthur,” I say, and then I have to scream. “Goddamn you! How can you sit there and talk to me like this? How can you?”

  “I don’t know what to do,” says Arthur, his voice shaking. “It has me. I’m so scared.”

  I almost start crying, but I tell myself I won’t. I put a hand over my eyes for a moment and then wave it up over my shoulder. “I’m not doing this,” I say, heading for the door.

  “Oh God, please, Edna. Please don’t leave me.”

  I turn. He looks so pathetic there, sitting on the couch in the living room. His cheeks are curled down into a boyish frowning mask and there’s snot running out of his nose and I start to smell urine but I can’t bear to let my eyes confirm what I already know.

  This isn’t fair. It isn’t fair to me. Months of looking after two senile parents and guiding them to the other side and when we’re this close to packing up the house and being done with it, my psychotic, ghost-befriending husband is going to sit in the living room blubbering and pissing his pants as he echoes their symptoms. It’s wrong. He’s too young for dementia and it’s cruel of him to get weak enough to put me through this. I’ve buried my father and mother and I’ve watched them suffer and spiral into death ungracefully. I can’t watch a husband do the same thing. Not now.

  I force myself to look away from him and my eye catches the typewriter with a new sheet of paper in it. I rush to it and rip it out of the carriage.

  “When did you write this? Why?” I ask Arthur.

  “W-what?”

  “This quote. It wasn’t here when we left. I looked. Why did you write it?”

  “I didn’t. I… What does it say?”

  “Nothing. Gibberish.”

  “Let me see.”

  “It’s just a quote by Yeats.” I wish I hadn’t mentioned it to him now. I wish I’d ignored it. I don’t want to show him these words.

  “Edna, let me see it.”

  I hesitate. When I can’t think of anything better to do, I hand it to him.

  It reads: “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

  “But they’re not patient,” says Arthur, crying. “It’s a lie! They’re anything but patient! They’re merciless!”

  I look him in the eye. “I’m leaving. You should come with me.”

  “I can’t,” he says. “Edna, I’m begging you. Stay with me. I’m so sorry. I need you to understand.”

  “Arthur,” I say, and for the first time I feel one of those tears break free and run down the side of my face. “Arthur, please. I’m begging you.”

  He just sits there in that puddle of his filth, looking at me with those infant-like eyes, and I stare back trying to control the flow of tears as best I can. And after a while, when he doesn’t answer, I walk outside. As soon as I do, the wind blows the door shut behind me. I take one last look at him through the window before I get in my car and go back to the apartment.

  It’s the first night in a quarter of a century that I sleep without Arthur in the house with me. It won’t be the last.

  Wednesday, September 29th

  I wish Arthur had his cell phone with him. I wish I’d woken up early and stopped by the house to check on him before I went to class. Brought him his cell so I could call him at recess and ask how he’s feeling.

  A part of me held out hope he’d come home last night. At two o’clock in the morning I thought maybe he’d muster up the courage to face his demons and walk out the front door and get a cab. A couple of times I even woke up in the night thinking I heard him coming to crawl into bed with me. But it didn’t happen.

  We disconnected the landline at Mom’s place a few days ago and threw the phone into a stack of trash. I don’t know why we had to do that so soon. Couldn’t have kept it hooked up until the last day at the house like a normal person would. We had to throw it out early. When I try calling in the morning Arthur hasn’t hooked it up. Every few minutes I have to look at my cell phone and see if I’ve missed any calls. But of course I haven’t. He’s probably sitting perfectly still on the couch, still staring at the floor between his feet like he has been since I left, still blubbering and thinking something is coming to get him.

  I come into the classroom with such a fear for Arthur burning in me that I forget to brace myself when I turn the light on and see the chalkboard.

  There it is. Like I would have known it would be if I gave it a thought.

  “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

  No. No!

  Bullshit!

  Someone is coming into my house and my classroom. Someone is doing this to frighten me. Nothing is hiding in the shadows waiting for me to discover its secret. There is no great supernatural mystery here, waiting for me to spot it. There is only my own fear and longing and sorrow.

  The world is not full of magic things. I will not go down this road. No matter if Dad and Mom and Arthur all want to sense wonder hiding just beyond reach, I will not accept this.

  I have no sense of whether I’m walking or running or floating as I go from my classroom to Mr. Van Berkum’s office.

  I shove the door open and shout, “Have you found them? Have you found who’s writing on my board?”

  “Oh. Oh… I… No, it’s… I’ve asked the other teachers and no one has been—”

  “Well somebody has! Every morning when I come in, somebody has been in there, and they’re leaving notes to me, for me specifically. This is a hostile workplace. You better find them. Whoever they are, you better…” I stop myself. Them and they. I hear Mom in my voice.

  I start breathing slowly, deliberately.

  “Edna,” says Mr. V, very slowly. “Why don’t you go home? We’ll find a substitute. And you just take all the time you need, and you give me a call when you’re feeling a little better. My mother passed last year. I know… What do you think? Why don’t you just take a break?”

  If it weren’t for them and they, I’d nod my head and go. But I can’t play into their hands. This is my own sanity I’m fighting for. I am a logical, rational woman who does not believe in spook stories and fairy tales and I will not give in to this pressure.

  “No,” I say. “I’m fine. I have to teach a class. Just find out who’s writing on my board.”

  I walk back to the classroom trying not to shake.

  * * * * *

  They ask us to do Show and Tell once a week but I’ve been doing it every day since this mess with my parents started. It’s an easy way to kill half an hour sitting behind my desk, sitting back and staring at my cell phone and hoping for a call. Every time I take my eye off the phone, it goes straight to the faded, erased letters on the board.

  “…magic things, patiently waiting…”

  “Does anybody have anything for Show and Tell?” I ask the class.

  Macie Giddings puts her hand up instantly and eagerly. I might have known. Of course it would be Macie. More about evil dolls and witches and people burning other people alive. It couldn’t have been another day like yesterday when she was absent. No. The universe can’t give me a break.

  “Macie,” I say. “Maybe you want to tell us why you weren’t at school yesterday?”

  “No,” she says. “I brought something I want to show.”

  She comes up to the front of the room with a little child’s doll in a homemade dress, turning this made-up twenty-first century woman into a 1950s housewife. It’s an odd look.

  “This is my doll Kaylie,” she says.

  I can feel the whole clas
s shifting in mood as soon as she says it. Most of them look uncomfortable and a handful have that morbid excitement some people get when they’re driving up to a car accident. I look down at my cell phone.

  Call me, Arthur. Resolve this building sense of doom I’m feeling.

  “She’s not the witch doll,” says Macie. “The witch doll is my mom’s. My mom’s only had the witch doll for a week or so but I’ve had Kaylie for two years. Even though I threw her in the garbage she came back. And every night I bury her under clothes in my closet but when I wake up at night she’s on a shelf in my room and pointing to my mom’s doll room.”

  “Macie…” I say.

  I have to make her stop. This silly superstitious nonsense, it’s damaging. Kids this age are impressionable. Fill their heads with these tales of ghosts and bogeymen and they grow up to be adults with ridiculous superstitions who visit mediums and spend all the money they need for retirement.

  “The world is full of magic things…”

  Macie keeps going with building hysteria. “I don’t want to get rid of Kaylie, because I love her. But I want to get rid of her because I think she’s friends with the witch doll and that’s why when I throw her in the garbage or bury her she just comes back, because the witch doll won’t let me get rid of her.”

  “Okay Macie,” I say curtly. “That’s enough. Back to your seat.”

  She ignores me. “The witch doll has one blue eye and one green one and when I wake up at night that’s always how Kaylie looks. Her eyes change when I’m the only one around so she can look like the witch doll.”

  I look around the room at the other children. Little Stephanie, covering her ears and shutting her eyes and shaking her head. Martin with a trace of a smile on his face and a glare of fascination in his eyes. Bobby swallowing dryly and hoping somebody will give him an excuse to laugh and let it be a joke.

  And I know one of those students out there is Arthur. Maybe Macie herself. Get bombarded with enough of these damaging lies and one day something in you snaps and you believe a house is trying to kill you. You sit there pissing yourself on your mother-in-law’s couch and refusing to leave the house because there are ghosts inside that will kill you. It starts off small, but it destroys lives.