The uniformed men stared at me with a mixture of confusion and pity.
“Shadow people?” one of the officers repeated.
“Yes, they’re from the house. The ones that burnt in the fire. And the boys were there, too. The ones that were murdered. I saw them. They were all there, and there were more. How many have died in that house?”
“Sir, you must be mistaken.”
“No! Please, you have to believe me. You have to help them.”
“There’s nothing we can do for them, Mr. Cabot. They’re gone.”
“Gone?” I said as I cried out in grief. “No! It can’t be. Not my wife and child. They can’t be gone. They’re the loves of my life.”
“No, Mr. Cabot, you’re confused. Your parents were the ones killed in that car, not your wife and child.”
*
I awoke shaking and sobbing. Linda was standing over me.
“You had a bad dream,” she said, gazing into my wet eyes. “And it was a noisy one. Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I said, even as relief washed over me like a warm tide. “I think so.”
Linda was still looking at me, her face clouded with concern. “You sure?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Sam, you’re all sweaty. And there’s blood on your feet.” Linda took one of my bare feet in her hands and inspected the sole. “Jesus, Sam, they’re all scraped and scratched. What the hell have you been doing?”
Panic nearly overwhelmed me in that moment as Linda rushed to the kitchen sink to retrieve a wet washcloth.
“Nothing,” I called after her. “I fell asleep.”
She came back and sponged off the bottoms of my feet. “They don’t look too bad. You’ve been walking in your sleep again, haven’t you? You’ve been outside.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Damn it, Sam, you’re scaring the hell out of me.”
“I’m okay. Listen, where’s Sean?”
“In the kitchen. We’re lugging in groceries.”
“Let me help.”
“No, you stay right where you are until we’re done and I’ll put some bandages on those cuts.”
I nodded. It took me a few long moments to get my panic under control. I realized that Linda was probably right. I’d been sleep walking. There could be no other explanation for my injured feet.
We want you to see.
We want you to understand.
The problem was, I didn’t see, nor did I understand. In truth I was more confused now than ever before.
The dream would not go away. It haunted me for months.
Chapter 12
By Labor Day, the Hulk was finally up and running. I was in awe of it, of course, as I knew I would be, marveling at its size and complexity, fawning over it like a car-nut with a newly restored ‘55 Chevy. Carlisle stood back watching my reaction, assuring me of its efficiency and necessity. He needn’t have bothered, I was hooked beyond articulation.
When it was time for the test burn, my face went waxy with a fine sheen of cold sweat and my hands shook like a man with palsy. As fuel entered the burner, misted in the firebox and ignited, the roar sounded as strange and as wonderful to me as the breathing of some newly-awakened beast.
*
Linda enrolled Sean in first grade at Davenport Elementary School. The days continued to stay warm right into September. I promised Sean we’d take him to the beach carnival on the following Saturday. It was going to be our first weekend off in more than three months. But we didn’t go to the carnival on that day. A cold rain fell instead. The first blustery feel of fall was in the air. What a strange turn of events. Or perhaps not so strange at all, now that I can look at everything clearly and put it into perspective. Things were starting to come apart in and around our dream house by that time. Change had come to Farnham House. I wasn’t exactly sure what, but something felt different. I knew it in my bones. My moods continued to darken as Linda and I drifted further and further apart. And it was somehow all related to two things: that strange dream I’d had the month before, and the attraction I felt when I came within range of the Hulk, which began to worsen, morphing into something like obsession.
I wandered a lot in those days, awake and asleep, and without realizing it I would find myself in the basement, standing trancelike in front of that huge shiny life-force, staring at the fire behind the louvered maw of a door and wondering what it would feel like to burn.
Chapter 13
The saying goes that omens come in threes. The Hulk, the well, and now the mask. I should have known then—and probably did on some subterranean level—that the mask was somehow connected to it all. It was odd how we came upon the mask in the first place. I suppose it was inevitable. It had been there all along, in that old trunk in the attic waiting for a rainy day so that it could be discovered.
Up until that time we hadn’t had a chance to explore the attic. Carlisle had discouraged us on that first day and we’d been just too damned busy during the summer. Sure, I got up there a few times in the process of doing my restorations, but it was never for exploration purposes. It was to run wiring and install roof vents and such. Carlisle had been right. The place was cluttered with old junk and Linda was just itching to pick through it.
But before I get to that, let me tell you about the events leading up to the discovery of the mask.
*
The night before the discovery, I had another wrenching dream. The shadow people were there again, this time in my bedroom, looming above me. They were just featureless silhouettes, as black as holes that had been ripped in the night; only their glittering eyes gave them life.
We want you to see.
We want you to understand.
They were trying to communicate something to me. I know that now. I wish I had known what then.
Welcome home, Sam, We’ve been waiting for you.
I felt claustrophobic, like I was suffocating. I heard a voice, a shrill, rising scream that took me a few minutes to recognize as my own. I was still screaming when my eyes snapped open. The room was dark. I realized I was sitting up in bed and my fists were swinging, every muscle in my body tensed. I swung out blindly with both fists the instant I sensed someone come up close beside me. I connected with something, but I could tell there wasn’t nearly enough power in it to do damage. My feet thrashed wildly, but I couldn’t kick free of the tangle of sheets.
“Damn it, Sam! Stop it! For God sakes, it’s me!”
The voice was loud enough and close enough to hurt my ears, but through my blinding panic, I didn’t recognize it. Terror filled me as I felt someone grab hold of my arms to try and steady me. “Come on, stop it. It’s just a dream. You’re having another nightmare.”
At last Linda’s voice registered. I let my body relax and in that instant all strength drained out of me. Sighing, I slumped back onto the bed, my body slick with sweat. When I drew a deep breath my chest hurt as if ribs were broken.
“You’re okay. You’re okay,” Linda said soothingly. I was aware that she was holding onto me tightly.
“Jesus, Sam, this is getting out of hand,” she said.
I licked my lips and looked around, but the bedroom was too dark to see very well. Linda was just an indistinct form. For all I knew this might not be Linda at all but one of the shadow people who had assumed her shape and voice to trick me.
“Are you okay now?”
“Shit,” I whispered, letting myself fall back on the damp sheets and closing my eyes. As my pulse gradually slowed and my breathing returned to normal I tried to push the nightmare images out of my mind, but the cold, stark terror of the shadow people would not go away.
“Shit,” I whispered again.
After another few seconds, I felt Linda move from the bed and go to the window where she drew the curtain aside. I cautiously opened my eyes. The light was dim, nevertheless it hurt my eyes. I was relieved to see that it really was Linda standing there.
“Just like
old times, huh?” Linda said.
“I don’t know what you mean?”
“Your PTSD, Sam. Don’t try to deny it.”
I shook my head. No, I wasn’t going to deny it, much as I knew these dreams weren’t about Afghanistan. They were about something much closer and scarier.
“You used to scare the crap out of me with your PTSD nightmares. Then things were good for a long time. But since we came to this house. . .” Linda let the thought trail off as she hugged her arms to her body.
I looked at her for another few seconds without speaking, then she sighed and shook her head.
“What’s going on, Sam?” she asked looking scared.
I knew I should have been honest with her but what would I have said? This is about something much closer to our lives than a distant war on terror. I keep having this dream where all the people who died in our house—the ones I never told you about—keep trying to warn me about something bad. Oh yeah, and the furnace talks to me all the time too, you know, like it’s not a furnace at all but some sort of living creature. I think it wants me to burn and I don’t seem to have the courage to resist it. And truth is I can’t talk to you about any of this because I’ve been warned against it. And if none of this is real, well, I’m afraid it would just reinforce my increasing belief—and yours, by the way— that I need a nice little vacation on the padded cell side of the loony bin. Now do you understand?
In the end I gave her the simplest answer I could and still maintain some semblance of dignity. “Nothing’s going on.”
Biting her lower lip, Linda shook her head, turned away and left the room.
Chapter 14
When I came downstairs she was standing, her back to me at the stove in her housecoat, cracking eggs into a stainless-steel bowl. Beyond her, through the kitchen window, rain fell in sheets. Sean was zipping around the table holding a balsa-wood airplane above his head making a noise similar to that of a chain-saw on the verge of cuffing a piston rod.
“Grrrrrrrrrr, rrrrrr, rrrr,” he went as he cruised around the room. “Grrrrrrrrrrr, rrrr, rrr, Grrrrrrrrrrr, rrrr, rrr, Grrrrrrrrrrr, rrrr, rrr.”
“Are you sure you’re all right, Cabot?” Linda asked without turning to speak directly to me.
“Yeah, I think so,” I said, having to shout in order to get above Sean’s racket.
“I heard you get up in the night,” she said, “sometime before you had that awful nightmare. It seemed a long time before you came back to bed.”
I knew where I’d been, of course. It seemed in recent weeks I would automatically get up in the night and go down into the basement without the benefit of free will. Not exactly sleep-walking, but something similar, I suppose—perhaps it had been something more trance-induced—that left me without much of a memory of the incident when morning came. It didn’t matter. The memory part anyway. How I ended up there was secondary. What I was doing there was the important part. But now I was beginning to wonder if Linda knew more than I gave her credit for.
“Grrrrrrrrr, rrr, rr,” Sean went, cruising back and forth in front of my face.
“Sean,” I said calmly. “Please go into the living room and watch TV until breakfast is ready. You’re getting on my nerves.”
“Oh, Daddy.”
“You heard your father,” Linda said. She turned from the stove and Sean stopped dead in his tracks. She was edgy and I could see it on her face and read it in her posture, that harried look one gets when they’ve reached the end of their proverbial rope.
Sean saw it too. “Sesame Street, Sesame Street,” he blurted as he and his airplane flew toward the living room at speeds approaching the sound barrier.
“Now, what were you saying?”
Linda looked at me. “Goddammit!” she said. “He never sits still. He’s like a hyperactive little monkey. He’s driving me crazy. Sometimes I feel like running away.” She held the spatula in her hand and I could see a swell of tears in her eyes. “You need to be firmer with him.”
“Don’t start in on me again, Linda. I’m doing the best I can.”
“Okay, smart ass, have it your way.” She aimed the spatula at me, and her eyes drew down, narrow and accusing. “But don’t come crying to me when he’s beyond our control. Now is when he needs the guiding hand of a father, not ten years from now.”
“He’s just hyperactive, that’s all!”
“Yes, I know. The doctor says he has ADHD. Well you know something? Sometimes I think people like Carlisle are smarter than we give them credit for. I think the medical establishment makes up these disorders because people are gullible and believe them and it makes doctors rich. There. That’s what I really think. What Sean needs is a father.”
“Wait a minute. That’s not fair—”
“Isn’t it, Sam? Think about it. You hardly ever give him any special time. You’re either working on the house or you’re writing in those loose leaf notebooks of yours.”
“This house is what we wanted, isn’t it? You begged me to buy it.”
“I know, I did. And I’m starting to regret it.”
“And I’m trying to write a novel.”
“But you also have a family.”
Linda was right, of course. It wasn’t the first time in recent weeks that we’d had this discussion. I knew that my responsibility as a father and a husband was somehow slipping away from me. I knew that I was on some sort of descent, and powerless in the face of it. Linda knew it too, but she was just as powerless as I was.
“All right,” I said, and I could feel my face flushing with anger. “From now on I’ll make sure and beat him once a day whether he needs it or not.”
And the moment the words were out of my mouth I knew that it had been the wrong thing to say. Linda stood with her back to me, rigid, seething. Then she turned, stood with hands on hips, and said, “What’s going on, Cabot?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t lie to me! You think I imagine you getting out of our bed every night and not coming back for hours? I want to know what’s going on. What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with me?”
My eyes dropped to the floor. “I don’t know.” I said, in a small, defeated voice, and it was the truth, sort of. What else could I say? I was not allowed to talk about the Hulk or what I had been learning from it. This was clear. It would have killed my family if I had. And besides, I didn’t actually know what I was learning. Not yet anyway. It was sort of like the first stages of some weird foreign language. Clarity would come eventually, I was sure of that. The part I wasn’t sure about was whether I would like the lesson once it had finally been grasped.
“And when you are in bed,” Linda went on, “you have nightmares. You talk in your sleep. You walk in your sleep. I try to wake you, but you won’t wake up. This morning you almost punched me out, for cripes sake.”
“Tell me something, Linda, what do I talk about in these nightmares?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes I really do.”
“Okay, here goes, but if you try to punch me out again I’m leaving you, Cabot.”
“Linda, tell me.”
Linda stared at me for a long moment before answering. Finally she said, “Okay, shadow people. What the hell are shadow people? And the Hulk. You mean like the comic strip guy they made a TV show about? Why are you dreaming about a comic strip character? A lot of it is gibberish. Ghosts chasing you and lining up across the road. What’s that supposed to mean? You sound like a mad man. You used to have some pretty creepy nightmares after you got back from Afghanistan. Back then you needed a shrink. I understand. War sucks and it screws people up. Nothing to be ashamed of. If you want the truth, I think the bad stuff has started up again and it’s scaring the crap out of me. I think you need to go back to the VA and make an appointment with a shrink. I think you’ve got some serious issues, and lord knows, you never come to me for help. I don’t know, maybe you’re beyond my help.”
I knew what the nightmares were ab
out, of course, and Afghanistan wasn’t it; it was the dream of the accident, the day Linda and Sean had given Carlisle a ride to town. Somehow I kept coming back to that in my thoughts and in my nightmares. In the dream I was confused about whether it was my parents who’d died or whether it had been Linda and Sean. But of course it wasn’t Linda and Sean. They were here, alive and well. My parents were long gone and their deaths had dropped me into a chasm of despair that had taken me all the way into adulthood to climb out of.
“There’s nothing you can do for them, Mr. Cabot. They’re gone.”
“Sam, are you listening to me?”
I started. Linda had been talking and again I was reliving that horrible time. Why was it haunting me so? Would I ever be able to put it behind me?
Linda walked over to the table with a steaming pan of scrambled eggs. Oscar the Grouch grumbled in the living room. She leaned in toward me and said in a whisper, “Sam, I’m scared. There’s something wrong here. I feel it and I think Sean feels it too. Sean,” she called. “Come eat your breakfast.”
“I think you’re worrying for nothing,” I said. “This is all so new to us. The house, this life. We’ve been working our asses off. We haven’t had time for anything else but this house. But we’re almost done. Things will get better, I promise.”
“I don’t feel like things are getting better.”
“You just need to buck up, that’s all.”
“Don’t you dare make light of this, Sam. I’m starting to freak out. I’m worried about you. I’m worried about us.”
“Please don’t,” I said in a consoling voice. “I’m okay, honest.” I gave her a small and playful pat on the bottom.
“No, you’re not!” she said, pulling away from me almost violently. “You’re freaking me out.”
“And you’re taking drugs,” I shot back. “I saw the Valium on your bedside stand.”
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