"Whassup?" Mal finally said.
Alyssa froze. So did Blake.
The voice was sleepy. Confused.
And behind them.
They turned. Mal stood farther down the hall, in the door to the bedroom he was using. He rubbed his eyes, blinking his way out of sleep and dreams.
"I dreamed I was dancing," said the little boy.
Alyssa looked at her husband. He was already staring back at her. The light in the hall was on, and so was the one in their room. His eyes caught both sources of illumination and seemed to go transparent. For a moment she could see behind them, directly into the raw terror that was trying to take him over.
Or just take him.
Blake blinked. A mask fell over his countenance. A tough expression that couldn't completely hide that terror.
"Who's –?" she began.
The phone in their bedroom rang. And now she knew it was her eyes that were clear, that showed nothing but unadulterated fear.
There was someone in their home. But that wasn't the scariest thing right now. Because she had heard of people being in others' houses. Home invasion was something understandable, if hardly desirable.
But not this. Not a phone ringing.
Not a single phone.
There were phones in the kitchen, the living room, even one in the entry. And then the one on the second floor: the one in their bedroom.
But the only one that was ringing now was the one in the bedroom.
"Maybe the other ones aren't connected," whispered Blake. So he was thinking the same thing. Afraid of the same thing.
Mal had crept to them. He didn't know what was going on, but he was clearly afraid. Because Mommy and Daddy were afraid.
Blake grabbed Mal's hand and pulled their son into the bedroom.
The phone kept ringing. Ringing, ringing….
They stared at it like it was a viper.
Alyssa wondered if they should go looking for whatever was in the house.
Now it's not whoever, it's whatever.
But she knew she wouldn't. None of them would. If things were normal, they would call 911 – and that was something they needed to do with the phone. If things weren't normal….
Blake picked up the phone. Like everything else in this place, it was old. A rotary-style phone with a tall cradle and forks that splayed out like demon fingers plated in gold.
The phone cut off mid-ring.
Ruthie sighed in her playpen. The sigh of a baby asleep, but for a moment it sounded like a sigh of resignation. Of someone who sees death coming and accepts because it cannot be outrun.
"Hello?" said Blake. "Hello? Hello?" He slammed the receiver down on the cradle.
And another phone rang. Somewhere else in the house.
They crept down together. Into the hall and down the stairs, Mal, Blake, Alyssa, all holding hands….
She froze. Her arm lengthened out as Blake kept walking forward, and Mal bumped into her at the same time. Then Blake jerked to a halt as well.
"What?" he said. The word spat out like steam escaping a ruptured piston.
"Ruthie. I forgot…." Alyssa couldn't even finish. How could she have left her baby behind? Alone. What kind of mother –?
"She's better off," said Blake. He yanked her down another stair. "Come on."
She wanted to protest. But something seemed to bind her tongue. Maybe the fact that Blake was probably right.
But if that was the case then why was Mal with them?
The phone in the living room was still ringing. Another old-fashioned one, rattling its machine gun chimes through its brass casing on an end table by the couch.
Blake picked it up. "Hello? Who is this?" A pause, then, "Answer, dammit!"
His face curled, but before he could slam this phone down as well, another phone rang. He stared at the one in his hand in shock. How could another phone ring if this one was still off the hook?
Blake dropped the receiver. It fell against the wood of the end table with a dry clickety-clack, a painful noise that drew Mal closer to Alyssa.
The phone in the entry was even older. Not a rotary, it was a tall crank phone attached to the wall, an earpiece hanging from its side, a microphone jutting from the middle of the wood case. The mic looked like a mouth, open in a silent scream – a picture helped along by the twin bells, eyelike and staring, that hung directly above it.
She had assumed the phone was ornamental.
The bells chimed again. Fire bells, old sirens. Sounds of warning. Run, run, danger, danger.
This time she picked it up. Her hand felt as on a string, moving slowly through the suddenly thick air.
She put the earpiece to the side of her head.
The music box played. Not behind them. Not in the entry way. On the phone.
She dropped the earpiece, her hand going over her mouth.
"What?" said Mal.
And Ruthie started to cry upstairs.
Alyssa ran.
The stairs tore her. Her crotch felt like she was giving birth again, she felt a trickle on one leg. Blood. Fear.
Ruthie.
Mal and Blake were right behind her. And still she thought she could hear the music box playing, metallic notes rendered even tinnier by their rendition through phone lines that shouldn't –
(couldn't didn't)
– exist.
Mal actually pushed past her in the hall. He was in the bedroom a half step ahead of her. His small voice quavered out, dancing back to her. "Ruthie, Ruthie, you okay?"
She made it into the room, and her son was already peering over the top of the playpen. "Ruthie!"
Alyssa joined him there. One hand on her lower belly, the other on her heart as though ready to keep it from leaping out when she saw the inevitable tragedy of…
… Ruthie asleep. Silent and apparently content in the middle of the playpen.
Mal looked at his mommy with open eyes. "What's going on?" said the eyes.
Her eyes had no answer.
She jumped as something touched her back. Her shoulder.
She spun.
It was only Blake.
Alyssa's breath caught at her throat. Half in and half out, like her soul was trying to flee and to hold tight to her body at the same time. Blake was so close he was almost looming over her, leaning in to look at the baby, leaning over her like a malignant shadow.
Click.
Her eyes, which had been glued to Blake's, tore loose and flitted sideways. The wardrobe. Large and dark and beautiful, scrolled sides and gilded edges – it looked like something C.S. Lewis might have stared at while writing about Narnia.
It was open.
Not far. Just a crack. A quarter-inch of darkness between the two heavy slabs of wood that were the thing's doors.
Blake reached for the doors. For the darkness. His fingers fell into the crack, and he pulled. The doors swung open on perfectly oiled hinges that made no sound but still somehow pounded a new beat in Alyssa's heart.
Inside the wardrobe, clothing hung in neat rows. There was something wrong about it, but it took her a moment to figure out exactly what it was. There were no reds or blues, no greens or yellows. All was gray and brown and black. Tweeds and twills that looked soft but firm, clothing built partly for comfort, but mainly for protection – mainly to last.
None of the clothes dropped more than a yard from the closet rod. Another strangeness, another jarring sensation that Alyssa couldn't quite place until she realized that she was looking at a closet full of children's clothing. Clothing that looked like it belonged to another age, another time: a time when gunfighters were on the wane and textile mills on the rise, when cities and factories began blotting out sun and sky in earnest.
A time when children were born, and children died, and when they died their pictures were taken in books of the dead.
Below the clothes, shoes piled atop one another. Wood, cotton, leather, linen. Laces and buckles. All small. Some so small that only toddlers – pe
rhaps only infants – could have worn them. And with that realization came the new comprehension that not all the clothes were dim. Some, tucked away between the others, were light and airy. Gowns made for christenings or baptisms… or funerals. Tiny things that seemed so delicate and ethereal they might blow away on a breath, might disappear into nothing – if they even existed at all.
Do they? Are they really here? Is any of this?
But it was. Blake was reaching for them.
Clothing above. Shoes below. Between them nothing.
And beyond?
She couldn't see. The wardrobe was deep, and past the clothes the light from the room seemed to fade. Far too quickly, in fact, as though it dared not intrude into the holdings of whatever thing had put the clothes there in the first place.
Or perhaps that thing was hiding there itself. In the dark. In the permanent night in the back of a wooden box. The coffin that held the clothing of the dead.
Blake was still reaching. He didn't know. Or didn't care.
"Don't," she said. The word wasn't a whisper, but it had no strength. Blake ignored her. He pushed aside the small clothing.
And still the back of the wardrobe couldn't be seen. Just a thick darkness, a horizontal tumble into nothing. Blake's hand fell into that abyss, and Alyssa felt certain he would be yanked off his feet, torn away from her and Mal and Ruthie and flung into –
(his past, our future)
– some place too horrible to understand.
He reached…
… reached….
… reached…
And the phone rang.
Alyssa gasped in shock and terror, and Mal coughed and fell into her arms. She clutched him to her legs without thinking, fear binding them more perfectly than any glue could have done.
It was the phone in the bedroom, and again it was the only one that rang.
Blake jerked his hand – still attached, still part of his body – out of the wardrobe and turned to the phone. Terror seemed to stretch his face, pinching his skin and making him seem thin and worn. Then the terror turned to something else. Something Alyssa didn't understand. Something terrible.
He moved to the phone. But this time it didn't give him a chance to answer. The ringing cut off and they heard the downstairs phone – the one in the parlor – ring. Two staccato chirps, then the phone in the entry began clanging its old fashioned bells.
Then the bedroom phone again. One ring this time, then downstairs. Upstairs, downstairs, upstairs, downstairs. A circle that went top to bottom, top to bottom like a trail of notes dancing an angry descent to Hell.
The rings came faster, faster. Faster faster fasterfasterfaster.
Mal moaned and clapped his small hands to his ears. Alyssa realized her own hands were in the same position: the ringing wasn't just coming faster, it was getting louder.
How? How is that possible?
Blake grunted. Not in fear or even surprise. Anger. His eyes seemed to flash, and once again Alyssa saw something alien there. Angry.
He grabbed a lamp off a bedside table. Tall and sturdy, green glass that looked almost like jade, it fit in his large hand like a blown glass club. His other hand yanked the cord out of the wall. It came loose with a dull thud that somehow made its way between the pealing tones –
(ringringringringringringupdownupdowntoptobottomtoptobottom)
– of the ringing phones.
"Wait here," he said. His voice was low and husky. The phones clipped the words and made them fade in and out, disappearing and reappearing like they were pushing in from somewhere both terribly close and even more terribly far away.
"Where are you going?" she shouted.
"Daddy –" Mal began.
"Someone's messing with the phone junction."
He headed for the door. As if responding to his action, the phones quieted. Didn't stop, but the volume dropped enough that Alyssa let her hands fall from her ears.
"Don't," she said. Her voice pleading, almost as high as the bells that rang around them.
The light that had flashed in his eyes now sparked even brighter. "They're messing with us, Lyss! Someone's doing this. Whoever owns this place has some perverted sense of humor – that's probably why this place was so cheap. Maybe we're on a reality show for sadists." His fingers grew so tight around the lamp that his knuckles glowed and she thought she could hear the glass crack. "I'm going to find out who's doing this. I'm going to stop it."
Alyssa didn't understand what was going on. Not just with the phones, but with her husband. What had him acting frightened one moment, loving the next, then with a look in his eyes, an expression she had never seen there and that –
(was alien different unbelonging other someone ELSE)
– almost scared her.
Blake left.
This time Alyssa didn't forget her daughter. She picked up Ruthie –
(Still asleep? Through all this how is she still asleep?)
– from the playpen, grabbed Mal's hand, and followed Blake out of the room. She stopped in the doorway, looking after where he had gone.
He must have been running, though. Because by the time she got into the hall he was out of sight.
She heard the front door slam. A chill writhed its way up her spine, a centipede with its hundred legs climbing the bones.
Had Blake left?
Or had something come in?
FLIGHT INTO DARKNESS
The dream had been happy. Dancing to a tune he knew, a happy sound. Mal was alone, alone in a small place. A place just big enough for him to turn around, to spin like a helicopter. Fast and fast and fast until he was so dizzy he had to laugh because if he didn't laugh he might barf.
Then things turned dark. He didn't know where he was. Not exactly. But it had been happy. Good. Now his spin got faster and faster and then too fast and then scary-fast. He wasn't dizzy, he was afraid. His feet kept slipping on a smooth floor that was impossible to see.
And he realized he couldn't even see himself. He could feel himself, but when he looked down in the middle of the spins, there was nothing there.
Darkness, blackness, fell all over him. Like when he hid under blankets. But this wasn't safe. No help from the monster. The dark was the monster.
Something whispered. Something he couldn't hear.
And then… his name. Not coming from the thing in the dark (the thing that was the dark). It was from somewhere beyond.
Mommy. Daddy.
He ran on legless legs. Clawed with hands that were nowhere. Pulled through black that fell into a mouth he could feel but that could not scream.
And then sat up in his bed. Well, not his. The bed in this new place. The cross on the wall. Froo-froo bedding wadded up all around him like bizarro quicksand.
Mommy and Daddy calling him.
He went to them.
They were afraid. He didn't know why. But soon he got it. The music box was playing, and he recognized it from his dream. His dancing where he was there, but also wasn't.
Then they went into the room, and Daddy looked into a closet full of old clothes, and the phones rang, and now Daddy was gone.
Daddy was gone.
Mommy had Mal under her arm, held against her legs. Ruthie was sleeping in her other arm, and Mal could hear his sister's gentle breathing behind him.
The phones were still ringing. It scared him. Scared him even worse than the dance. He wanted to run, and wanted to scream, and wanted to go to the bathroom right there in his PJ's right in front of Mommy.
He did none of those things. Daddy had run away and Mal was the man of the house. But he was a man of the house who didn't know what to do.
They went into the hall, and then something made a noise behind them. Mommy turned a little, and Mal also pushed his way around her, just enough to see.
Ruthie's mobile was spinning. Dancing just like he had done, round and round and he wondered if it would all fall down like the ashes to ashes.
Then it stopped. So
did the ringing phones.
And a voice screamed. "LEAVE!"
The voice was like his dream-self. It was real, but it was nowhere. Louder than loud, louder than the phones had been. Coming from right next to the mobile. And also right in his ears.
Mommy's body went hard behind him, all her muscles getting stiff like his hardest plastic toy. He wanted to pull her far away from the mobile, far away from the room. But he was stuck to the floor, too. His muscles were so tight he felt like they might just ping apart: rubber bands pulled too far.
The mirror on the desk-thing – what Mommy called the vanity – cracked. A long line in its center that made Mommy look like two different people when he looked at it.
Then it fell. The glass exploded in a trillion tiny pieces. But the explosion happened before the mirror touched the floor.
In the next second something hit the big bed with a whud sound. So hard the bed slid a good foot.
Mommy moved. Grabbed him and ran.
The bedroom door slammed shut behind them. It hit so hard that Mal's teeth slammed shut, too, and the shockwave of the door bounced his feet an inch off the floor.
Mommy held him tighter and they ran.
Inside the closed-up room, it sounded like a fight was happening. An angry thing – a thing he knew must be a ghost, like that Poltergeist movie Daddy showed him and Mommy got angry about – smashed into all the walls.
They ran.
The door slammed open.
Paint flew off the walls around them. The little table in the hall turned over as they ran past. It almost hit him in the leg, but he dodged. It hit Mommy and she shouted.
"Mommy!"
"Run! Don't stop!"
The music box started playing below them. Ahead of them. The big clock ticked, faster and faster. His heart beat faster with it, and he wondered if the clock could make it beat so fast that it exploded.
He thought maybe it could. And that maybe it would.
Paint and wood were like a snowstorm. He had to close his eyes to tiny lines, barely could see. The storm danced to the music box, like he had danced in the dream. He knew it wasn't the box making the storm, it was something in the hall. Something following them. Something that wanted to hurt them.
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