by Peter Straub
Her night terrors now most often take the form of a faceless lady in white who stands by her bed with a knife and intends to kill her, tries to steal her breath the way they used to say cats would do if you let them near the crib. The lady doesn’t disappear even when our daughter wakes herself up, sits up in bed, and turns on the light.
Our daughter wanted something alive to sleep with. The cats betrayed her, wouldn’t be confined to her room. So we got her a dog. Ezra was abandoned, too, or lost and never found, and he’s far more worried than she is, which I don’t think she thought possible. He sleeps with her. He sleeps under her covers. He would sleep on her pillow, covering her face, if she’d let him, and she would let him if she could breathe. She says the lady hasn’t come once since Ezra has been here.
I don’t know if Ezra will keep the night terrors away forever. But, if she trusts him, he’ll let her know whether the lady is real. That’s no small gift.
Our daughter is afraid of many things, and saddened by many things. She accepts pain better than most people, takes in pain. I think that now her challenge, her adventure, is to learn to accept happiness. That’s scary.
So maybe the lady at the end of her bed doesn’t intend to kill her after all. Maybe she intends to teach her how to take in happiness.
Which is, I guess, a kind of death.
I know that the lady beside my daughter’s bed is real, but this is not something I have yet chosen to share with my daughter. I have seen this lady in my own night terrors when I was a teenager, just as I saw the devil in my bedroom one night in the form of a giant goat, six feet tall at the shoulder. I sat up in my bed and watched as the goat’s body disappeared slowly, one layer of hair and skin at a time, leaving giant, bloodshot, humanoid eyes, the eyes of the devil, suspended in midair where they remained for several minutes while I gasped for a scream that would not come.
I had night terrors for years until I began experimenting with dream control and learned to extend myself directly into a dream where I could rearrange its pieces and have things happen the way I wanted them to happen. Sometimes when I write now it’s as if I’m in the midst of this extended night terror and I’m frantically using powers of the imagination I’m not even sure belong to me to arrange the pieces and make everything turn out the way it should, or at least the way I think it was meant to be.
If the man on the ceiling were just another night terror, I should have the necessary tools to stop him in his tracks, or at least to divert him. But I’ve followed the man on the ceiling night after night. I’ve seen what he does to my wife and children. And he’s already carried one of our children away.
Remember what I said in the beginning. Everything we’re telling you here is true.
I follow the man on the ceiling around the attic of our house, my flashlight burning off pieces of his body which grow back as soon as he moves beyond the beam. I chase him down three flights of stairs into our basement where he hides in the laundry. My hands turn into frantic paddles which scatter the clothes and I’m already thinking about how I’m going to explain the mess to Melanie in the morning when he slips like a pool of oil under my feet and out to other corners of the basement where my children keep their toys. I imagine the edge of his cheek in an oversized doll, his amazingly sharp fingers under the hoods of my son’s Matchbox cars.
But the man on the ceiling is a story and I know something about stories. One day I will figure out just what this man on the ceiling is “about.” He’s a character in the dream of our lives and he can be changed or killed.
It always makes me cranky to be asked what a story is “about,” or who my characters “are.” If I could tell you, I wouldn’t have to write them.
Often I write about people I don’t understand, ways of being in the world that baffle me. I want to know how people make sense of things, what they say to themselves, how they live. How they name themselves to themselves.
Because life is hard. Even when it’s wonderful, even when it’s beautiful—which it is a lot of the time—it’s hard. Sometimes I don’t know how any of us makes it through the day. Or the night.
The world has in it: Children hurt or killed by their parents, who would say they do it out of love. Children whose beloved fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins, mothers love them, too, fall in love with them, say anything we do to each other’s bodies is okay because we love each other, but don’t tell anybody because then I’ll go to jail and then I won’t love you anymore.
Perverted love.
The world also has in it: Children whose only chance to grow up is in prison, because they’re afraid to trust love on the outside. Children who die, no matter how much you love them.
Impotent love.
And the world also has in it: Werewolves, whose unclaimed rage transforms them into something not human but also not inhuman (modern psychiatry sometimes finds the bestial “alter” in the multiple personality). Vampires, whose unbridled need to experience leads them to suck other people dry and are still not satisfied. Zombies, the chronically insulated, people who will not feel anything because they will not feel pain. Ghosts.
I write in order to understand these things. I write dark fantasy because it helps me see how to live in a world with monsters.
But one day last week, transferring at a crowded and cold downtown bus stop, late as usual, I was searching irritably in my purse for my bus pass, which was not there, and then for no reason and certainly without conscious intent my gaze abruptly lifted and followed the upswept lines of the pearly glass building across the street, up, up, into the Colorado-blue sky, and it was beautiful.
It was transcendently beautiful. An epiphany. A momentary breakthrough into the dimension of the divine.
That’s why I write, too. To stay available for breakthroughs into the dimension of the divine. Which happen in this world all the time.
I think I always write about love.
I married Melanie because she uses words like “divine” and “transcendent” in everyday conversation. I love that about her. It scares me, and it embarrasses me sometimes, but still I love that about her. I was a secretive and frightened male, perhaps like most males, when I met her. And now sometimes even I will use a word like “transcendent.” I’m still working on “divine.”
And sometimes I write about love. Certainly I love all my characters, miserable lot though they may be. (Another writer once asked me why I wrote about “nebbishes.” I told him I wanted to write about “the common man.”) Sometimes I even love the man on the ceiling, as much as I hate him, because of all the things he enables me to see. Each evening, carrying my flashlight, I follow him through all the dark rooms of my life. He doesn’t need a light because he has learned these rooms so well and because he carries his own light; if you’ll look at him carefully you’ll notice that his grin glows in the night. I follow him because I need to understand him. I follow him because he always has something new to show me.
One night I followed him into a far corner of our attic. Apparently this was where he slept when he wasn’t clinging to our ceiling or prowling our children’s rooms. He had made himself a nest out of old photos chewed up and their emulsions spat out into a paste to hold together bits of outgrown clothing and the gutted stuffings of our children’s discarded dolls and teddy bears. He lay curled up, his great dark sides heaving.
I flashed the light on him. And then I saw his wings.
They were patchwork affairs, the separate sections molded out of burnt newspaper, ancient lingerie, metal road signs, and fish nets, stitched together with shoelaces and Bubble Yum, glued and veined with tears, soot, and ash. The man on the ceiling turned his obsidian head and blew me a kiss of smoke.
I stood perfectly still with the light in my hand growing dimmer as he drained away its brightness. So the man on the ceiling was in fact an angel, a messenger between our worldly selves and—yes, I’ll say it—the divine. And it bothered me that I hadn’t recognized his angelic nature before. I should have kno
wn, because aren’t ghosts nothing more than angels with wings of memory, and vampires angels with wings of blood?
Everything we’re trying to tell you here is true.
And there are all kinds of truths to tell. There’s the true story about how the man, the angel, on the ceiling killed my mother, and what I did with her body. There’s the story about how my teenage daughter fell in love with the man on the ceiling and ran away with him and we didn’t see her for weeks. There’s the story about how I tried to become the man on the ceiling in order to understand him and ended up terrorizing my own children.
There are so many true stories to tell. So many possibilities.
There are so many stories to tell. I could tell this story:
Melanie smiled at the toddler standing up backwards in the seat in front of her. He wasn’t holding on to anything, and his mouth rested dangerously on the metal bar across the back of the seat. His mother couldn’t have been much more than seventeen, from what Melanie could see of her pug-nosed, rouged and sparkly-eye-shadowed, elaborately poufed profile; Melanie was hoping it was his big sister until she heard him call her “Mama.”
“Mama,” he kept saying. “Mama. Mama.” The girl ignored him. His prattle became increasingly louder and more shrill until everyone on the bus was looking at him, except his mother, who had her head turned as far away from him as she could. She was cracking her gum.
The sunset was lovely, peach and purple and gray, made more lovely by the streaks of dirt on the bus windows and by the contrasting bright white dots of headlights and bright red dots of taillights moving everywhere under it. When they passed slowly over the Valley Highway, Melanie saw that the lights were exquisite, and hardly moving at all.
“Mama! Mama! Mama!” The child swiveled clumsily toward his mother and reached out both hands for her just as the driver hit the brakes. The little boy toppled sideways and hit his mouth on the metal bar. A small spot of blood appeared on his lower lip. There was a moment of stunned silence from the child; his mother—still staring off away from him, earphones over her ears, still popping her gum rhythmically—obviously hadn’t noticed what had happened.
Then he shrieked. At last disturbed, she whirled on him furiously, an epithet halfway out of her child-vamp mouth, but when she saw the blood on her son’s face she collapsed into near-hysteria. Although she did hold him and wipe at his face with her long-nailed fingertips, it was clear she didn’t know what to do.
Melanie considered handing her a tissue, lecturing her about child safety, even—ridiculously—calling social services. But here was her stop. Fuming, she followed the lady with the shoulder-length white hair down the steps and out into the evening, which was tinted peach and purple and gray from the sunset of however dubious origin and, no less prettily, red and white from the Safeway sign.
The man on the ceiling laughs at me as he remains always just out of the reach of my understanding, floating above me on his layered wings, telling me about how, someday, everyone I love is going to die and how, after I die, no one is going to remember me no matter how much I write, how much I shamelessly reveal, brushing his sharp fingers against the wallpaper and leaving deep gouges in the walls. He rakes back the curtains and shows me the sky: peach and purple and gray like the colors of his eyes when he opens them, like the colors of his mouth, the colors of his tongue when he laughs even more loudly and heads for the open door of one of my children’s rooms.
The white-haired woman was always on this bus. Always wore the same ankle-length red coat when it was cold enough to wear any coat at all. Grim-faced and always frowning, but with that crystalline hair falling softly over her shoulders.
They always got off at the same stop, waited at the intersection for the light to change, walked together a block and a half until the lady turned into the Spanish-style stucco apartment building that had once been a church—it still had “Jesus Is the Light of the World” inscribed in an arc over one doorway and a pretty enclosed courtyard overlooked by tall windows shaped as if to hold stained glass. At that point, Melanie’s house was still two blocks away, and she always just kept walking. She and the white-haired lady had never exchanged a word. Maybe someday she’d think how to start a conversation. Not tonight.
Tonight, like most nights, she just wanted to be home. Safe and patently loved in the hubbub of her family. Often, disbelieving, she would count to herself the number of discrete living creatures whose lives she shared, and she loved the changing totals: tonight it was Steve, and five kids, four cats, three dogs, even twenty-three plants. Exhausted from work, she could almost always count on being revitalized when she went home.
The man on the ceiling turns and screams at me until I feel my flesh beginning to shred. The man on the ceiling puts his razor-sharp fingers into my joints and twists, and I clench my fists and bite the insides of my lips trying not to scream. The man on the ceiling grins and grins and grins. He sticks both hands into my belly and pulls out my organs and offers to tell me how long I have to live.
I tell him I don’t want to know, and then he offers to tell me how long Melanie is going to live, how long each of my children is going to live.
The man on the ceiling crawls into my belly through the hole he has made and curls up inside himself to become a cancer resting against my spinal column. I can no longer walk and I fall to the ground.
The man on the ceiling rises into my throat and I can no longer speak. The man on the ceiling floats into my skull and I can no longer dream.
The man on the ceiling crawls out of my head, his sharp black heels piercing my tongue as he steps out of my mouth.
The man on the ceiling starts devouring our furniture a piece at a time, beating his great conglomerate wings in orgasmic frenzy, releasing tiny gifts of decay into the air.
How might I explain why supposedly good people could imagine such things? How might I explain how I could feel such passion for my wife and children, or for the simplest acts of living, when such creatures travel in packs through my dreams?
It is because the man on the ceiling is a true story that I find life infinitely interesting. It is because of such dark, transcendent angels in each of our houses that we are able to love. Because we must. Because it is all there is.
Daffodils were blooming around the porch of the little yellow house set down away from the sidewalk. Melanie stopped, amazed. They had not been there yesterday. Their scent lasted all the way to the corner.
One year Steve had given her a five-foot-long, three-foot-high Valentine showing a huge flock of penguins, all of them alike, and out of the crowd two of them with pink hearts above their heads, and the caption: “I’m so glad we found each other.” It was, of course, a miracle.
She crossed the street and entered her own block. The sunset was paling now, and the light was silvery down the street. A trick of the light made it look as though the hill on which her house sat was flattened. Melanie smiled and wondered what Matilda McCollum, who’d had the house built in 1898 and had the hill constructed so it would be grander than her sister’s otherwise identical house across the way, would say to that. A huge, solid, sprawling, red-brick Victorian rooted in Engelmann ivy so expansive as to be just this side of overgrown, the house was majestic on its hill. Grand. Unshakable. Matilda had been right.
The man on the ceiling opens his mouth and begins eating the wall by the staircase. First he has to taste it. He rests the dark holes that have been drilled into his face for nostrils against the brittle flocked wallpaper and sniffs out decades’ worth of noise, conversation, and prayers. Then he slips his teeth over the edges and pulls it away from the wall, shoveling the crackling paper into his dark maw with fingers curved into claws. Tiny trains of silverfish drift down the exposed wall before the man on the ceiling devours them as well, then his abrasive tongue scoops out the crumbling plaster from the wooden lath and minutes later he has started on the framing itself.
Powerless to stop him, I watch as he sups on the dream of my life. Sud
denly I am sixteen again and this life I have written for myself is all ahead of me, and impossibly out of reach.
Melanie was looking left at the catalpa tree between the sidewalk and the street, worrying as she did every spring that this time it really would never leaf out and she would discover it was dead, had died over the winter and she hadn’t known, had in fact always been secretly dead, when she turned right to go up the steps to her house. Stumbled. Almost fell. There were no steps. There was no hill.
She looked up. There was no house.
And she knew there never had been.
There never had been a family. She had never had children.
She had somehow made up: sweet troubled Christopher, Mark who heard voices and saw the molecules dancing in tree trunks and most of the time was glad, Veronica of the magnificent chestnut hair and heart bursting painfully with love, Anthony whose laughter had been like seashells, Joe for whom the world was an endless adventure, Gabriella who knew how to go inside herself and knew to tell you what she was doing there: “I be calm.”
She’d made up the golden cat Cinnabar, who would come to purr on her chest and ease the pain away. She’d made up the hoya plant that sent out improbable white flowers off a leafless woody stem too far into the dining room. She’d made up the rainbows on the kitchen walls from the prisms she hung in the south window.
She’d made up Steve.
There had never been love.
There had never been a miracle.
Angels. Our lives are filled with angels.
The man on the ceiling smiles in the midst of the emptiness, his wings beating heavily against the clouds, his teeth the color of the cold I am feeling now. Melanie used to worry so much when I went out late at night for milk, or ice cream for the both of us, that I’d need to call her from a phone booth if I thought I’d be longer than the forty-five minutes it took for her anxiety and her fantasies about all that can happen to people to kick in. Sometimes she fantasized about the police showing up at the door to let her know about the terrible accident I’d had, or sometimes I just didn’t come back—I got the milk or the ice cream and I just kept on going.