Insomnia: Paranormal Tales, Science Fiction, & Horror

by Saul Tanpepper

  “Where are your friends Jessica and Stacy?” he asked his sister.

  Sarah shrugged inside her overstuffed jacket; her shoulder gave the faintest of twitches. “They left.”

  “Come on, don’t be such a baby. One more run down the hill.” He looked up and around, but his two friends were nowhere to be seen, and several of the kids who’d been sledding were starting to look like they were packing up to leave. He watched one young boy picking up his backpack, brushing it off.

  The snow and increasing gloom of the late afternoon were severely reducing visibility. Over in the parking lot, the lights were beginning to blink on, their pale blue bulbs looking like floating orbs.

  The car was still there, and he wondered briefly if Creepy Dave had left it there. Maybe the battery was dead or the car was otherwise undrivable. He hadn’t seen him leave, but he might’ve walked off when Andrew wasn’t looking.

  “Your friends aren’t going to show up,” Sarah said.

  He turned back to her. “You don’t know.”

  “It’s getting dark. And I’m cold. Where’s my stuff?”

  He walked over to his piece of cardboard, already an inch under new snow and brushed it off. It was pretty thrashed and wouldn’t last more than another couple runs down the hill. “One more run,” he repeated.

  “Andy!”

  He gritted his teeth as he turned his back on her. He trudged back up the hill making sure not to look back. He knew she wouldn’t leave without him, not unless she knew he’d follow. So he didn’t look.

  When he got to the top of the hill five minutes later, he couldn’t see her. The snow was coming down heavier, but he could still barely make out the lamp posts at the bottom of the hill. He didn’t her pink jacket anywhere.

  “Sarah!”

  His shout died in the air, soaked up by the falling snow, sinking away into the ground.

  “Dammit!”

  He settled the cardboard on the ground and sat on it. It scrunched into the soft snow and didn’t move.

  “Sarah, wait! I’m coming! Just…wait!”

  He hadn’t noticed it before, but now it seemed so much darker. The lights over by the walkway and in the parking lot seemed much brighter, though they did little to illuminate anything other than what was directly beneath them. All around him, the world had gone white. But it was a dark white, a white that seemed to resist light and color.. The only color he could see was the car way down in the parking lot. Even the dark green of the pines lining the hill looked black.

  He scooted himself toward the slope. At first the cardboard hesitated and had to be urged forward, but then friction gave way to gravity and he was shooting down the hill. This time he reached the bottom without falling off, but the run had lost its excitement, and his mood darkened when he saw that his sister really had left after all.

  He was going to get into trouble unless he caught up to her before she got home. She’d tattle on him to their parents, say he wasn’t watching over her like he’d promised. He’d argue that it wasn’t his job to watch her, complaining that he’d already made plans to meet up with his friends. Besides, it was unfair to make him go back to his old school (now Sarah’s), which was a good half mile out of the way. If they were going to make him do that, then he should be allowed to have a little fun, right?

  But the truth behind his reluctance to return there had nothing to do with the extra distance. He and his friends had planned on coming to Suicide Run anyway to test JB’s new sled. No, it had to do with people thinking he actually belonged there with the younger kids.

  He tossed the cardboard off into the trees and recovered his backpack from the base of the largest pine, the ground beneath it covered with only a thin powdering of snow, the mat of pine needles and dirt frozen into a cement as hard as epoxy.

  Sarah’s footsteps were still visible in the snow, though they were filling up fast. He slung the pack over his shoulder and hurried down the walkway, now covered four inches deep. He kept his head down and out of the wind that whipped across the soccer field, trying to keep the snow out of his eyes and nose.

  At the end of the walkway he stumbled over the curb and fell sprawling onto the parking lot. A hand reached down and pulled him up by his backpack.

  “Jesus, kid, you’re half frozen.”

  Andrew looked up and into the familiar face of the crossing guard.

  “Did you see a girl pass by here a few minutes ago?”

  Mister Dave nodded and tilted his head toward the car. “She’s inside keeping warm.”

  “Sarah?”

  Mister David’s smile widened. “Yes. She said she didn’t want to leave without you.”

  “She gets scared,” Andrew said, eying the man warily.

  “I gave her some hot chocolate. Would you like some? How about if I drive you two home? It’s already dark and the snow’s coming down pretty thick.”

  The man looked at the snow and sneered, almost as if he resented it.

  Andrew hesitated. His parents had always warned him about talking to strangers, about accepting rides, about getting in people’s cars. But this wasn’t a stranger, this was Mister Dave, the crossing guard at his sister’s school. He’d been a crossing guard even when Andrew himself went there.

  Creepy Dave, his mind whispered.

  “I think we’ll walk.”

  “Suit yourself.” The man shrugged and brushed the snow off his shoulders. “But it’s time for me to be leaving.”

  He turned and rested his hand on the handle of the driver’s side door and peered through the glass inside.

  “Your sister looks like she’s about to fall asleep.” He chuckled. “I don’t know how you kids play so hard. You better go wake her up.”

  He started to pull on the handle.

  “Wait. I’ll—”

  The man turned and looked at him, his head tilted in expectation.

  “I guess it’ll be okay, right? I mean, you work for the school, right?”

  Mister Dave smiled again and nodded. He let go of his door and stepped over to the back and pulled it open.

  Andrew circled the door and tried to look in, but it was dark, and not just because the windows were tinted, but now because they were all covered in snow. It was like a cave inside the car.

  “Sarah?”

  The man rested his hand on Andrew’s shoulder and guided him closer.

  “Sarah? Hey, she’s not—”

  Something heavy landed on his back and pushed him into the car. He landed on the floor and couldn’t move, his arms trapped beneath him and the weight of his wet clothing, his backpack, and another person on top.

  He heard the car door close behind him, and he strained to look, but he couldn’t turn his head far enough.

  “Let me go!” he shouted.

  A white cloth was pushed down into the opening of his parka hood. He smelled something that reminded him of hospitals. It made his eyes water. A warm sensation passed through his body and he felt lighter, like he was floating.

  “…sarah…”

  Then, whiteness took over his vision and thoughts. He was warm.

  † † †

  David carried the boy into the house, kicking the back door open and then shutting with the heel of his boot. The snow he’d tracked in from the car began immediately to melt, despite the chilliness inside. He made his way through the kitchen to a locked door.

  Down in the basement, a single bulb inside a metal cage gave off a pale yellow glow. The switch for it was over by the door, but he’d taped over it years before so that it stayed lit, and in all that time he’d only had to change the bulb once.

  The boy moaned.

  David went over to the bed and laid the boy on it, then began to strip off his outer clothes. The boots were the first, followed by the boy’s socks. They were soaked and stained by the insides of the boots. The boy’s feet were white and wrinkled. David stood up and turned on a space heater, rubbing the dampness from his hands and blowing on them.

>   He picked up a towel and began to dry the boy’s feet. The stimulation roused the boy and he stirred and moaned again, but he didn’t wake.

  Next, David removed the boy’s gloves and scarf. Then the jacket. He dropped everything into an old laundry basket. Later, he would incinerate it all.

  He looked down at the boy’s face and frowned. The boy looked older than his size suggested. The first whiskers of adolescence sprung from his chin and cheeks, a few dozen twisted hairs, dark but fine. And there, beneath the chin, the telltale lump of an Adam’s apple.

  “Dammit!”

  He kicked viciously at the basket, sending it rolling across the cement floor and spilling its contents out in a wide arc.

  The gods would not be happy. The last time he’d offered them a child as old as he suspected this one might be, they had shown their disappointment by nearly allowing him to be caught. He’d had to move from that town, had to change his appearance, his name.

  But that had been many years ago, so long ago that he couldn’t even remember what he’d called himself back then. Maybe the gods would be more forgiving this time. After all, he had always done what they asked, even after they’d suddenly started demanding more: more offerings, larger portions. They were leaving him with less and less. It was almost like they were testing him.

  He eyed the boy, still out cold, lying on the bed with his legs and arms flung haphazardly about him. His breathing was shallow but wheezy and sounded asthmatic. David wondered what might be wrong with him, why he was so much smaller than other kids his age.

  How many fingers would it take to satisfy the gods’ hunger this time? How many toes?

  He grunted with frustration and finished getting the boy’s outer clothes off. He was beginning to mumble now. His eyelids fluttered, then opened. David waited as those blue eyes wandered about the boy’s skull before finding him. He waited until the recognition returned to the boy’s mind. He watched as realization twisted into fear, and fear became anger.

  “You’re awake.”

  “Wh-where am I?”

  “In my house. You were practically frozen to death.”

  The boy sat up, gripping his head.

  David gently urged him back down again. “Not so fast. You’ll make yourself sick, and the last thing you can afford is to be sick right now.” He smiled.

  The boy stared. “What do you want?”

  “What’s your name?”

  The boy didn’t answer at first, but David waited patiently. “Andrew. Where’s my sister? Where’s Sarah? What have you done with her? I’ll kill you if you’ve hurt her!”

  David sighed. “I didn’t touch your sister.” He shrugged. “As far as I know, she went home. Or maybe she’s still waiting for you at the park. No, I’m pretty sure she left. I saw her leave. She left you there all by yourself.”

  “Shut up!”

  David stood up. Before the boy could move or even react, David’s hand whipped out snake-like and struck the boy across his face. The boy rocked back on the bed, then tumbled off of it. He held the back of his hand up to his mouth and glared at him. David circled around the bed and stopped right in front of the boy, who winced as if expecting another hit. “We’ll talk again when you’ve learned your manners.”

  “I want to go home.”

  David’s kick connected with the boy’s thigh and he howled in pain. He bent down and grabbed the front of the boy’s shirt and lifted him to his face.

  “This is your home now, Andy.”

  Fear flooded the boy’s eyes. He raised his hands and gripped David’s, but he didn’t struggle.

  “That’s better. Now, you will be quiet.”

  “Why are you doing this to me? What are you going to do?”

  David smiled and the boy’s eyes widened. “Getting you ready to meet someone very special.” He laughed and threw Andrew back on the bed.

  He left him then, striding across the cold, hard concrete floor of the basement and gathering up the strewn clothes and basket, then snapping the cord of the space heater from the outlet. His arms full, he headed up the steps. When he reached the top, he turned and said, “I’ll be watching you.” Then he went through the door, closed it and locked it.

  He thought he heard the boy crying down below, but it was just his imagination. The basement had been soundproofed long ago. The boy could cry all he wanted and nobody would hear him. He could scream until his voice gave out and it would be all for naught. In fact, it was better when the children did cry and scream. The scent of their horror on their skin was stronger then, staining their clothes and hair. The god’s fed off of it.

  He washed his hands with surgical care, then made himself some dinner of potatoes and meat and ate in the silence of his kitchen while standing at the stove. The meat was stringy and the potatoes bland.

  “Needs gravy,” he said. He said it every night, and yet he never made it.

  After dinner, he washed the dishes, dried them, put them away. After that, he carved.

  In the beginning—twenty, thirty years ago?—the bowls he whittled from the ash blocks he bought at the mill had been crude, rough and crooked and poorly formed. The injury to his right hand was fresh then but it eventually healed. And though he’d never gotten all that good at using his left hand, especially for tasks that required both strength and precision, the bowls did become less grotesque and more recognizable, not that such considerations were even relevant. They served one purpose and it didn’t matter how they looked. What mattered was what they held, whether they floated, and how well they burned.

  It was nearly midnight when he put the unfinished bowl away and cleaned up the shavings. Afterward, he crept down into the basement to check on the boy, and his heart skipped a beat when he saw that the bed was empty. He found the tiny figure huddled in a darkened corner beneath the large aluminum laundry sink in the corner, his arms wrapped around himself and his tear-streaked face twitching in his sleep.

  Seeing it, David felt the stirrings of some ancient memory, buried deep inside of his brain, some ancestral vision of another boy similarly terrorized. He pushed it away. There had been so many boys, an almost equal number of girls. There had been other such memories, trying to escape from the cage of his mind. But none had been as strong as this one and it troubled him momentarily.

  He shuddered, then went back upstairs and prepared for bed.

  † † †

  Andrew heard the door at the top of the steps open. He heard the soft creak of the steps as his captor descended. The smells of food preceded him down the stairs and into the basement where they turned Andrew’s stomach.

  After the man had left him alone earlier, he’d searched the basement for any possible way out, but there were no windows and no other doors besides the one at the top of the stairs. He was in a room roughly fifteen feet on each edge. The steps ascended along one wall and were partitioned from the rest of the room and his view by plywood. The walls and ceiling were unadorned, covered in a heavy foam, and when he knocked on them, the sounds were muffled and faint, even to his own ears. They felt quite solid underneath, as if lined with stone or some other heavy material.

  Other than the bed, which looked old and broken and smelled musty and slightly sweet, there was little other furniture: a beanbag chair with a dark stain covering it, an overturned milk crate, a pail, a filthy bathmat. A large sink stood in one corner, but no water came from the faucet when he turned the handles. Next to it, a toilet. There was water in the bowl, but it was gray and smelled bad. A thin, oily crust covered its surface. He tried to flush it, but the handle clattered loosely in his fingers and did nothing.

  Pipes and wiring spanned the ceiling and one wall. A mop leaned into another corner, but the handle was made of cheap plastic and wouldn’t make much of a weapon.

  He crept over to the bottom of the steps, listening, fearing that the man would suddenly open the door and find him there. But after several minutes listening in vain, he crept up to the landing and placed his ear a
gainst the door. It too felt solid and impenetrable, and though he sat there for what seemed like hours, he heard nothing on the other side of it.

  Terrified but growing ever angrier, he went back down into the basement and over to the bed where he sat and tried to think.

  What did the man want with him?

  He hoped he wasn’t some kind of pervert, but the alternative that presented itself to him seemed even more frightening. In the end, he knew whatever the man planned to do to him, it was going to be bad; there was no way he’d ever be able to see his family again. His only hope was to escape. But how?

  Back at the base of the steps, he found a loose nail holding the plywood to the frame of the staircase and he pulled. At first the wood wouldn’t budge. Then, by planting his foot again the wall, he was able to pull the plywood away enough to get a better grip. He pulled again, harder this time, and froze when the nails squealed loudly. But there was no sound from above and the door remained closed and locked. He worked on the board for another half hour, slowly pulling it away from the frame until it finally came fully free.

  The single light bulb in the center of the room did a poor job of illuminating the space underneath the steps, but it was enough for Andrew to see that there was nothing but dust and stone and the coarse-cut wooden framing. He poked the handle of the mop into the darkness, probing the space behind the second plywood panel and determined that there was no door or vent there either. The basement was underground and lined with rock, and this one room was all there was to it.

  Even so, a plan was beginning to form in his mind.

  Using only his fingers, he removed the nails from the plywood and placed them in his pocket. He knew the man had already searched him, as the few coins he’d had that day, as well as his student ID and a rubber eraser, were missing. He hoped the man wouldn’t think to search him again.

  When he was finished, he wedged the plywood back into place. It fit snugly and looked as if it had never been moved.

  Suddenly overcome with fatigue, he staggered back to the bed, but the thought of sleeping on it made him nauseous, and neither the beanbag chair nor the bathmat on the floor looked any more appealing.