Chasing the Sandman

by Meyers, Brandon

The older man chewed this statement over in his head before turning his scowl into a slight grin.

  “Well then,” Walt said, in a more composed tone, “I just wanted to be certain. I must have…misplaced it.”

  “I wanted to tell you thanks, though, Walt. I haven’t had no trouble at all from the DeMille kid.”

  “Excellent news, Will. Excellent indeed. And I don’t believe you ever will again,” he said less-than-enthusiastically. “And I think you meant ‘haven’t had any trouble’. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to be going.”

  “Wait, Walt. Where’d he go? You know…Roger. I haven’t seen him at all.”

  “As I said, Will. Don’t worry yourself about it.” With that he strode off quickly. Maybe late to scrub a toilet, Will thought. He fingered the pen in his pocket with a grin and hurried home.

  Will heard from neither Roger nor Walt for the next week. But a few interesting things had happened to him during that time. He had gotten quite good at unlocking the many abilities of his sacred writing tool and discovered that no matter how much he used it, it never ran dry. While becoming more enthralled with his secret creations, Will barely noticed when signs and flyers with Roger DeMille’s picture went up all around the city. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. He would have cared, sure, if he wasn’t so engrossed in his new experiments.

  So far, Will had been able to vastly expand the interior size of his home without any noticeable change to the exterior (the most of which was in his room). He had created beautiful concrete fountains that had sprung up overnight in the middle of the school gym, drawn Dibbles into a Labrador retriever, designed his parents a new car, and even penned himself a few inches taller. He’d even managed to scribble away his mother’s worry fits, by giving his parents constant smiles.

  But following his last encounter with Walt the week before, Will had drawn the one thing whose ingenuity he had been most proud of: an invisible force field that surrounded his immediate person. He didn’t know exactly what Walt was, or what he intended to do with the pen, but Will was determined to keep it for himself.

  Impressively, Will had even tested the unseen barrier by drawing a hundred-pound boulder suspended above him and then releasing it. Will felt nothing as the rock shattered around him.

  At the moment, Will was busy at his bedroom desk renaming his school to King Kong Poo Pie Middle School.

  He couldn’t wait to see the faces and reactions of all his classmates the next day. In fact, he was toying with the idea of changing the name of Ponderosa Pines altogether. “Willville” had a nice ring to it, he supposed.

  It was when he was in the middle of his creative reverie that Will was so rudely interrupted by a tapping at his window.

  “Let me in, boy,” said a hunched-over figure.

  Will was certainly surprised it had taken Walt this long to figure out that he had lied. In fact, he was actually quite keen to try out his force-field, and so let Walt in straightaway.

  “Thought you were clever, did you?”

  “Never said that,” Will replied.

  The old man grumbled. “I must have that pen back this very moment,” he insisted.

  “Why do you want it so bad?” Will asked. “It’s just a stupid old pen.”

  Walt leaned in menacingly. “Yes, as I’m well aware you’ve discovered.” His face twisted and stretched into something with lots of fur, serrated teeth and glowing red eyes. “It is mine, Will. And you will give it to me. After all, we had a contract, did we not?”

  Will stepped back from the looming figure out of surprise and disgust. “You smell awful,” Will said.

  “A contract!” the Walt-creature spat. He pulled from within his coat pocket a sheaf of tattered papers, flipping through them all until he reached Will’s. He held it out for Will to see. “I own you, William James Robeson. You signed away your life, your blood, every drop of it, right here! Do you see this?”

  Will gulped.

  “But that’s just a scrap—”

  “A binding contract, William. I own your blood, and at the cost of removing one Roger DeMille from your life. You agreed to it, you see? Now just hand over the pen and I won’t have to do something you’ll regret.”

  Walt reached out to seize Will and pulled his hand away as if burned. He howled. “You little…If you’ve run it dry, so help me, Will. I’ll devour your parents whole. You’re smarter than I’ve given you credit for, boy, which is why I’ll give you until morning to undo what you’ve done and give the machine back to its rightful owner.” With that, he scrambled out the window.

  Will shuddered. He had sold his life. His blood! And to that demon, or monster, or whatever he was. Now what was he to do? He sat down on the edge of his bed and began to cry.

  Chapter Two

  It was a little after midnight when Will again began to draw. He worked feverishly for hours, though not doing precisely what Walt had instructed. For starters, he had drawn his parents sitting on a Hawaiian island, relaxing at the beach and having fun. The further they were away from this mess, the better, Will thought. Perhaps Walt would still be able to locate them, but at least now he couldn’t threaten their lives immediately.

  With a flash of what he knew was brilliance, Will decided to draw the scrap of paper he had signed his life away upon, hoping that he would be able to somehow summon it to him. He recreated the exact size and shape of the scrap from memory, all the while imagining it there, in his hands, as he was about to light it on fire with a match. The matchbox appeared on his desktop, but Will’s heart sank when he realized that the same would not be true for the contract with his name upon it.

  At about three in the morning, Will stepped over to a blank spot on his wall and reached out with the pen to draw a life-sized window. While etching the details, he thought only of Roger DeMille and his desire to find the missing bully.

  What he viewed through the completed window was a hanging cage, an oversized version of a canary’s, and Roger DeMille folded inside of it. He must not have seen Will, because he made no sign of it. Roger’s cage was one of many, so many that Will could not see all of them. He guessed he was looking into the horrific secret home of Walt the supposed janitor. The school board would probably have had something to say about this.

  Will snuck downstairs to his father’s tool chest and removed a hammer and screwdriver. He returned to the window in his wall and lifted it open. Even to his own surprise, the wall slid upward to reveal the actual cage room. He slid through the opening. Having been returned to his original shape, Dibbles had crawled into Will’s shirt collar for a ride-along.

  “Roger,” Will said, scrunching his nose at the smell of grime and general filth.

  The blank-eyed boy looked down at him. “Oh, hello. Is it time?”

  “What…Roger it’s me, Will. Time for what?”

  “Time to sign,” the dazed Roger said.

  “Roger, hold still. I’m gonna get you outta this mess.” Will looked around the room and saw that all of the cages but Roger’s were empty, though well-used. Eyeing the lock on the cage, he jammed the end of the screwdriver into the hole and twisted, to no result. He took the hammer and gave it a good pounding.

  It popped free. Roger tumbled from the cage as the door swung open.

  “Come on, will you. We don’t have a lot of time,” Will said urgently, shoving Roger toward the window.

  “Where is he?” Roger said, frightened.

  “He’s not gonna bother you anymore,” Will reassured him. “I’m sorry, Roger. I just wanted you to leave me alone. I didn’t mean for—up you go.” He helped heave Roger through.

  When they had re-emerged into Will’s bedroom, he closed the window and re-traced it into nothingness with the pen.

  “Where…where am I?” Roger said with returning clarity.

  “My room.”

  “You,” Roger said, in dawning recognition. “Robie-sun.” His face contorted into a scowl. “Just what the hell do you think you’re trying to pull here
, Robie-sun?”

  Will watched him sternly. “Roger, shut your mouth. If you wake my parents, I’ll tell them you broke in and tried to hurt me.” Will knew his parents were not even remotely close to home at the moment, but Roger did not need to know that.

  A snap decision clicked inside Roger DeMille’s brain, because he immediately shot out a punch aimed for Will’s stomach. Out of instinct, Will flinched, but it was Roger who absorbed all the pain.

  “Let that be your lesson, DeMille,” Will said. Roger had slumped to the floor clutching his hand and moaning.

  With a look at the clock, Will saw he only had a couple of hours until the sun came up, at which time he supposed Walt would come looking for him.

  “How’d you get there?” Will asked.

  “Where, man?”

  Will shook his head. “To the cage. You’ve been missing for like a week.”

  Roger shivered. “He promised he would let me go, ya know. Said all I needed to do was sign a little piece of paper and I’d be free.”

  “But ya couldn’t do it, could you?” Will asked, fingering the pen.

  “H-how’d you know? Were you in on it? Were you a part of it, man?”

  Of course he had been, but only inadvertently. He had had no idea what the mysterious old man had intended to do to Will’s bully. Hadn’t he?

  “No,” Will said. “But I’m trying to put an end to him, whoever he is. The papers. Did he show you the stack?”

  “Yeh, I seen ‘em,” Roger admitted. “Kept ‘em in a book. You know, one of them hollowed out ones like the spies are always using in movies.”

  “A book,” Will said, processing this new information. “Was there anything else?”

  Perhaps having exhausted his complete vocabulary in a single sentence, Roger simply shook his head.

  “I’ve got to get my hands on that book, Roger. And I didn’t see it on him before, so that means it’s gotta be in his house.” Multiple tries to recreate the window on his wall showed Will that without Roger as a point of focus, it was impossible to find the caged room again.

  “I need you to show me the way. Think you can do that?”

  Will’s former bully shivered again visibly before nodding that he could. Before they left, Roger asked, “Whydja do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Ya know…save me. Ya coulda let me just rot there. ‘Least that I coulda understood.”

  Will replied, “’Cause I couldn’t be responsible for letting someone else get hurt. Not when I could help.”

  Roger nodded, obviously unfamiliar with the idea of mutual respect for life.

  Will took a flashlight from his father’s toolbox and they left, swallowed by the darkness of night.

  Roger led them to a house that had indeed been on Vine Street, where Walt had left Will in possession of the pen the week before. It looked like every other house on the block at that early hour: a dark and shadowed two-level brick ranch.

  “You sure this is it?” Will asked. But when he turned around, Roger had disappeared. Will heard his footsteps and could just make out his fleeing shape in the growing distance. “Guess so.”

  He considered the house again, before pulling out the fountain pen and approaching the door on tiptoe. Will traced a rectangle around the locks, which acted as a sort of silent saw, severing them completely from the rest of the door. After pulling them gently free he pushed the door inward.

  Please let this be the right house, Will thought.

  Whether or not it was just his hopes, Will believed the house to be empty. It had the musty smell and disused feeling that accompanied places long unlived in. However, Will reminded himself, Walt might not be categorized as being among the living.

  A sheen of nervous sweat now covered his face and arms, and had forced Dibbles to take up refuge atop Will’s head, which was relatively dry. He gripped the pen all the tighter in his slippery palms, creeping from room to empty room, not entirely sure of what it was he would do if and when he found Walt. As Will had suspected upon entering, the entire house was filled with cobwebs and dust so thick it could actually be called dirt. What little furniture there was had all been covered by plastic. Finally, the only place left to look was the basement.

  Will shook his head, thinking of every scary movie he’d ever seen as he pulled the door open.

  Dust cut into the beam of his flashlight as he descended the stone stairs. At the bottom, Will found the room full of cages from which he had rescued Roger. Pointing his light, he discovered another door at the far end of the room.

  Finding it unlocked, Will pushed the door in, suddenly awash in pale light. At first glance, the room looked to him to be a library. When his eyes had adjusted to the light of the wall-mounted candles, though, Will saw that the wall opposite all of the books was filled with clear wine bottles. Most of them were empty, but a few were filled with thick, black fluid. Upon closer inspection, held up to the light of a candle, Will found that their contents were actually a deep crimson as dark as the richest of wines. But Will knew that it wasn’t wine.

  He replaced the bottle and moved to the book shelf, wanting to slap himself upside the head. Why had he not asked Roger what color the book was that he was looking for? Deciding to try and find it the hard way, Will reached for a leather-bound volume. Written on the front were the words, or names rather, Sheldon-Shaughnessy. When opened, the hollow book spilled its contents onto the floor. Will nearly shouted with joy. He dropped to his knees and began sifting through the pile when a thought occurred to him. He reached for a second volume, opening this one a little more carefully. It too was full of little discolored sheets of paper with names writ upon them.

  Will’s mouth formed an ‘o’ as he looked up at the wall of books. How many could there be? A hundred? Maybe more than that. But what did it mean, he wondered.

  He scanned the books surrounding the first one he’d pulled, until he came to the one he was looking for: Rissler-Rockport. This was the volume in which his name would be stored. He placed the book on the rug covering the concrete floor, and carefully began sorting through the names. Will smiled as he searched, knowing that he was very close to the end of this whole ordeal.

  An icy hand gripped his stomach when he realized that his piece of paper was not where it should have been.

  “Where is it?” he whispered hysterically. He tore through the book’s contents twice more, losing hope as he did so. Now what? If Walt had the contract on his person, how in the hell was Will going to get it from him?

  “Now what, Dibbles?” Will said.

  He shoved the papers back into whatever books they would fit in, crammed them back into the shelves, and set to drawing himself a window on the nearest blank wall, next to the shelves of bottles.

  Movement out of the corner of his eye made Will shriek in surprise. When he turned though, nothing was there. He returned to scribbling, faster now, and again saw something move. He tore his eyes away from the wall while allowing his hand to continue writing on its own. What he saw shocked him. While the pen moved along the concrete as if it were the softest of paper, one of the bottles on the shelf drained visibly.

  Will might not have been one of the quickest minds of his age, but he realized what was happening as soon as he witnessed it. The pen was running on the disturbing inky contents of the shelved bottles. And it apparently used a lot. Will counted only five full bottles remaining. Just drawing the quick window had used almost an entire one.

  In a moment’s decision, he pulled all of the bottles from the shelf and threw them one at a time at the opposite wall. They shattered, sending sickening splashes of blood everywhere. Will caught himself before he threw the last bottle, deciding that he might need it, and tucked it into his pants.

  Back in his room, Will again sealed the window behind him. He weighed his options, considering what to do next. What would Walt do when he discovered that not only had Will released Roger, but smashed his stores of ink, as well?

  “What do I d
o, Dibbles?” Will asked. “What do I do?”

  The sun had just begun to peek over the horizon, casting the first glow of daylight. All Will wanted to do was go to sleep and forget about everything. And then an idea sparked in his brain. As if with a mind of its own, Will’s hand started to sketch on a blank piece of paper. After a minute, the figure began to take clear shape. Will watched the sharp edges of the weapon form, coming together to a sleek metallic point. With the last bottle drained, this final rendered object appeared there atop his desk. And having also used the last of his physical abilities, Will nodded out into dreams.

  Chapter Three

  Will had awful nightmares.

  He dreamed that he was sitting in one of the cages from Walt’s basement, watching helplessly as the conniving monster preyed upon person after person. Scenes played in such a rapid succession that Will witnessed Walt collecting signatures from hundreds and thousands of people, grinning happily all the while. Will struggled to reach out to the deaf ears of the men, women and children who signed away their lives without hesitation, and without any clue. He screamed for them not to do it, but none of them could hear his warnings.

  And then his cage began to tumble, coming to a halt inside of a gigantic hollowed book, which slammed shut and filed him away in the darkness.

  Will yelled to be released, and found that he had screamed himself back into the waking world.

  “Troubled mind?” said a raspy voice from behind Will.

  Even in his post-sleep blurriness, Will’s senses sharpened. His pulse jumped and adrenaline flooded his system. He turned in his chair to look into Walt’s grinning face. He was sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “Good morning, sleepy head. It seems that someone must have had an eventful night. Busy righting wrongs, I suspect?”

  Will thought of the bottles smashed in the basement and returned the grin. “You could say that.” Dibbles poked his head out of his box to look around, and seeing nothing of interest, went back to sleep.

  “I trust you’ve set things back to the way they’re supposed to be and are now ready to relinquish the pen?” Walt said.