Nightmares, p.28
Nightmares, page 28
“What are you doing?”
“Go back to bed, Sheilah. I’m fixing something.”
“I’m thirsty.”
“Go back to bed. I’ll bring you a glass of water as soon as I’m finished.”
She looks at the open window. “Mommy’s going to be mad.”
“Yes, she is. If she calls and finds out that you are still awake she’s going to be very angry at you.”
Sheilah’s face contorts. I have confused her, taken advantage of her logic skills, rooted, as they are, in her six-year-old mind. “Go on now.”
Her eyes narrow as she glances from me to the window and back again.
“Go on.”
She shuffles out of the room, like a little old lady, weary with the wrongs of the world.
I hit the screen three more times, wincing with pain until, at last, it loosens, only to dangle by the bottom left corner. The hornet nest is silent, two hornets, the night guards, cling to its side.
“Daddy? I’m ready for my water now.”
It takes both hands to wrench the thing free. My knuckles are bleeding.
“Daddy!”
Finally it comes undone. I shove it away, approximating a throw; it crashes to the ground, followed by a sound of brush scattered, twigs broken. I have frightened some creature down there, a deer, or perhaps something more dangerous.
“Daddy!”
When I walk into Sheilah’s room her eyes widen. I hand her the glass of water. “Drink it,” I say, and then I say it again, in a gentle tone. “Drink it, honey.”
She shakes her head vigorously. “Don’t wanna,” she says.
I snatch the glass from her. Water slops out. “Go to sleep, now.” I lay my hand on her head, bend down to kiss her. As I leave the room I prop open the door with the big book of Grimm, the one with the fake gold edging on all the pages.
Downstairs, the rich scented summer air flows through the rooms. I sit in the flowered chair, sipping last year’s clover wine. It was on just such a night as this that we were ruined. I fall asleep remembering the screams, the terror, the open windows. Screams. I wake to her screams, my heart pounding like a trapped creature. She screams, and I run through the rooms brightened by morning sun. “I’m coming,” I shout, “Daddy’s here.” I race up the stairs and do not hesitate as I approach her room, abuzz with dark noise and screams. She is sitting up, covered by them as if she were made of honey, their golden wings trembling. I can see her halo of hair, though some alight there as well, her mouth, open but blackened by their writhing. I grab a blanket and swing it but this only heightens their attack; she screams and they sting me without mercy. “Daddy’s here, Daddy’s here,” I say even as I run out of the room, down the sunlit hall (but wait, what was that scurrying to hide in the corner) to the bathroom where I draw the water, which comes out languidly. I run back to the room, “Daddy’s here,” I say over and over again, wrapping her in the blanket. She screams at their new assault. Through the blanket I feel their squirming, their soft bodies, their stings. I rush down the hall to the bathroom, set her in the bath; she screams. I tear the blanket off; it is alive with wings; I press it, and her, under the water, releasing her just long enough for screams and breath before I hold her under again. They fly at me, as if they understand what I am doing. The water is black with them. She struggles against my grasp, her mouth wide with screams; I dunk her one more time, then I carry her, heavy and wet and screaming, down the hall, slipping but not falling, down the stairs (and there, what was that behind the potted plant, and what just flew overhead). I hold her close even as they continue to sting. I grab my car keys from the kitchen counter, I run down the crooked path. They follow us, stinging again and again; she screams and I scream too as I set her in the car. A few of them follow, but only a few. I kill them with a rolled up atlas. At least now she understands, I think, now she knows not to harm a creature with wings.
Although it is late fall we are making up for lost time and spend much of our evenings outdoors. Anne is sitting in the garden, painting a small portrait of a fairy. She has never accused me of doing anything more than opening all the windows on a hot summer night. Why has she stayed, knowing even this? Well, why did I stay three years ago? I like to think it is love, this tendency to believe in each other’s innocence, but maybe it’s something else. I sit here, on the porch, writing in this notebook, sipping dandelion wine we bought from an old German fellow at the Farmer’s Market. Sheilah sits on the blanket beneath the oak. She is almost entirely recovered though she moves strangely at times, with an odd, careful slowness that you would expect from someone wounded, or very old. They had to shave her head. Her hair has grown in strange, bristly and sharp. The doctors say that it will likely fall out, this sort of thing happens sometimes as a result of trauma, and already there are a few patches of soft hair coming in behind her ears, no longer blonde, but pure white. She sits on her quilt, dressed in jeans and a cotton sweater, playing some sort of game with fallen leaves; they are scolding each other, their leafy voices brittle.
As the amber evening closes in around us, and the night fairies come out, carrying their tiny lanterns, whispering their dark thoughts, Sheilah continues playing; even when a parade of them crosses the patches of her blanket, even when several fly right past her, she pays them no mind at all. Anne and I have begun to suspect she no longer sees them, which is sad in a way, but given the choices we had, and what life made of us, we think we have done well by Sheilah. Now that we have a normal child, she will be safe in her normal world, and we will be safe in ours. We can hope, we can dream, we believe.
John Langan is the author of three collections, Sefira and Other Betrayals (Hippocampus 2016), The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters.
He’s one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Award and served as a juror during its first three years.
He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with his wife, younger son, and a growing collection of swords.
The Shallows
John Langan
“Il faut cultiver notre jardin.”—Voltaire, Candide
“I could call you Gus,” Ransom said.
The crab’s legs, blue and cream, clattered against one another. It did not hoist itself from its place in the sink, though, which meant it was listening to him. Maybe. Staring out the dining room window, his daily mug of instant coffee steaming on the table in front of him, he said, “That was supposed to be my son’s name. Augustus. It was his great-grandfather’s name, his mother’s father’s father. The old man was dying while Heather was pregnant. We… I, really, was struck by the symmetry: one life ending, another beginning. It seemed a duty, our duty, to make sure the name wasn’t lost, to carry it forward into a new generation. I didn’t know old Gus, not really; as far as I can remember, I met him exactly once, at a party at Heather’s parents’ a couple of years before we were married.”
The great curtain of pale light that rippled thirty yards from his house stilled. Although he had long since given up trying to work out the pattern of its changes, Ransom glanced at his watch. 2:02 p.m., he was reasonably sure. The vast rectangle that occupied the space where his neighbor’s green-sided house had stood, as well as everything to either side of it, dimmed, then filled with the rich blue of the tropical ocean, the paler blue of the tropical sky. Waves chased one another toward Ransom, their long swells broken by the backs of fish, sharks, whales, all rushing in the same direction as the waves, away from a spot where the surface of the ocean heaved in a way that reminded Ransom of a pot of water approaching the boil.
(Tilting his head back, Matt had said, How far up do you think it goes? I don’t know, Ransom had answered. Twenty feet in front of them, the sheet of light that had descended an hour before, draping their view of the Pattersons’ house and everything beyond it, belled, as if swept by a breeze. This is connected to what’s been happening at the poles, isn’t it? Matt had squinted to see through the dull glare. I don’t know, Ransom had said, maybe. Do you think the Pattersons are okay? Matt had asked. I hope so, Ransom had said. He’d doubted it.)
He looked at the clumps of creamer speckling the surface of the coffee, miniature icebergs. “Gus couldn’t have been that old. He’d married young, and Heather’s father, Rudy, had married young, and Heather was twenty-four or -five…call him sixty-five, sixty-six, tops. To look at him, though, you would have placed him a good ten, fifteen years closer to the grave. Old… granted, I was younger, then, and from a distance of four decades, mid-sixty seemed a lot older than it does twenty years on. But even factoring in the callowness of youth, Gus was not in good shape. I doubt he’d ever been what you’d consider tall, but he was stooped, as if his head were being drawn down into his chest. Thin, frail: although the day was hot, he wore a long-sleeved checked shirt buttoned to the throat and a pair of navy chinos. His head… his hair was thinning, but what there was of it was long, and it floated around his head like the crest of some ancient bird. His nose supported a pair of horn-rimmed glasses whose lenses were white with scratches; I couldn’t understand how he could see through them, or maybe that was the point. Whether he was eating from the paper plate Heather’s uncle brought him or just sitting there, old Gus’s lips kept moving, his tongue edging out and retreating.”
The coffee was cool enough to drink. Over the rim of the mug, he watched the entire ocean churning with such force that whatever of its inhabitants had not reached safety were flung against one another. Mixed among their flailing forms were parts of creatures Ransom could not identify, a forest of black needles, a mass of rubbery pink tubes, the crested dome of what might have been a head the size of a bus.
He lowered the mug. “By the time I parked my car, Gus was seated near the garage. Heather took me by the hand and led me over to him. Those white lenses raised in my direction as she crouched beside his chair and introduced me as her boyfriend. Gus extended his right hand, which I took in mine. Hard…his palm, the undersides of his fingers, were rough with calluses, the yield of a lifetime as a mechanic. I tried to hold his hand gently…politely, I guess, but although his arm trembled, there was plenty of strength left in his fingers, which closed on mine like a trap springing shut. He said something, Pleased to meet you, you’ve got a special girl, here, words to that effect. I wasn’t paying attention; I was busy with the vise tightening around my fingers, with my bones grinding against one another. Once he’d delivered his pleasantries, Gus held onto my hand a moment longer, then the lenses dropped, the fingers relaxed, and my hand was my own again. Heather kissed him on the cheek, and we went to have a look at the food. My fingers ached on and off for the rest of the day.”
At the center of the heaving ocean, something forced its way up through the waves. The peak of an undersea mountain, rising to the sun: that was still Ransom’s first impression. Niagaras poured off black rock. His mind struggled to catch up with what stood revealed, to find suitable comparisons for it, even as more of it pushed the water aside. Some kind of structure—structures: domes, columns, walls—a city, an Atlantis finding the sun, again. No—the shapes were off: the domes bulged, the columns bent, the walls curved, in ways that conformed to no architectural style—that made no sense. A natural formation, then, a quirk of geology. No—already, the hypothesis was untenable: there was too much evidence of intentionality in the shapes draped with seaweed, heaped with fish brought suffocating into the air. As the rest of the island left the ocean, filling the view before Ransom to the point it threatened to burst out of the curtain, the appearance of an enormous monolith in the foreground, its surface incised with pictographs, settled the matter. This huge jumble of forms, some of which appeared to contradict one another, to intersect in ways the eye could not untangle, to occupy almost the same space at the same time, was deliberate.
Ransom slid his chair back from the table and stood. The crab’s legs dinged on the stainless steel sink. Picking up his mug, he turned away from the window. “That was the extent of my interactions with Gus. To be honest, what I knew of him, what Heather had told me, I didn’t much care for. He was what I guess you’d call a functioning alcoholic, although the way he functioned…he was a whiskey-drinker, Jack Daniel’s, Jim Beam, Maker’s Mark, that end of the shelf. I can’t claim a lot of experience, but from what I’ve seen, sour mash shortcuts to your mean, your nasty side. That was the case with Gus, at least. It wasn’t so much that he used his hands—he did, and I gather the hearing in Rudy’s left ear was the worse for it—no, the whiskey unlocked the cage that held all of Gus’s resentment, his bitterness, his jealousy. Apparently, when he was younger, Rudy’s little brother, Jan, had liked helping their mother in the kitchen. He’d been something of a baker, Jan; Rudy claimed he made the best chocolate cake you ever tasted, frosted it with buttercream. His mother used to let him out of working with his father in the garage or around the yard so he could assist her with the meals. None of the other kids—there were six of them—was too thrilled at there being one less of them to dilute their father’s attention, especially when they saw Gus’s lips tighten as he realized Jan had stayed inside again.
“Anyway, this one night, Gus wandered into the house after spending the better part of the evening in the garage. He passed most of the hours after he returned from work fixing his friends’ and acquaintances’ cars, Hank Williams on the transistor radio, Jack Daniel’s in one of the kids’ juice glasses. In he comes, wiping the grease off his hands with a dish towel, and what should greet his eyes when he peers into the refrigerator in search of a little supper but the golden top of the cherry pie Jan made for the church bake sale the next day. Gus loves cherry pie. Without a second thought, he lifts the pie from the top shelf of the fridge and deposits it on the kitchen table. He digs his clasp-knife out of his pants pocket, opens it, and cuts himself a generous slice. He doesn’t bother with a fork; instead, he shoves his fingers under the crust and lifts the piece straight to his mouth. It’s so tasty, he helps himself to a second, larger serving before he’s finished the first. In his eagerness, he slices through the pie tin to the table. He doesn’t care; he leaves the knife stuck where it is and uses his other hand to free the piece.
“That’s how Jan finds him when he walks into the kitchen for a glass of milk, a wedge of cherry pie in one hand, red syrup and yellow crumbs smeared on his other hand, his mouth and chin. By this age—Jan’s around twelve, thirteen—the boy has long since learned that the safest way, the only way, to meet the outrages that accompany his father’s drinking is calmly, impassively. Give him the excuse to garnish his injury with insult, and he’ll take it.
“And yet, this is exactly what Jan does. He can’t help himself, maybe. He lets his response to the sight of Gus standing with his mouth stuffed with half-chewed pie flash across his face. It’s all the provocation his father requires. What? he says, crumbs spraying from his mouth.
“Nothing, Jan says, but he’s too late. Gus drops the slice he’s holding to the floor, scoops the rest of the pie from the tin with his free hand, and slaps that to the floor as well. He raises one foot and stamps on the mess he’s made, spreading it across the linoleum. Jan knows enough to remain where he is. Gus brings his shoe down on the ruin of Jan’s efforts twice more, then wipes his hands on his pants, frees his knife from the table, and folds it closed. As he returns it to his pocket, he tells Jan that if he wants to be a little faggot and wear an apron in the kitchen, that’s his concern, but he’d best keep his little faggot mouth shut when there’s a man around, particularly when that man’s his father. Does Jan understand him?
“Yes, Pa, Jan says.
“Then take your little faggot ass off to bed, Gus says.
“What happened next,” Ransom said, “wasn’t a surprise; in fact, it was depressingly predictable.” He walked into the kitchen, deposited his mug on the counter. “That was the end of Jan’s time in the kitchen. He wasn’t the first one outside to help his father, but he wasn’t the last, either, and he worked hard. The morning of his eighteenth birthday, he enlisted in the Marines; within a couple of months he was on patrol in Vietnam. He was cited for bravery on several occasions; I think he may have been awarded a medal. One afternoon, when his squad stopped for a rest, he was shot through the head by a sniper. He’d removed his helmet…to tell the truth, I’m not sure why he had his helmet off. He survived, but it goes without saying, he was never the same. His problems…he had trouble moving, coordinating his arms and legs. His speech was slurred; he couldn’t remember the names of familiar objects, activities; he forgot something the second after you said it to him. There was no way he could live on his own. His mother wanted Jan to move back home, but Gus refused, said there was no way he was going to be saddled with an idiot who hadn’t known enough to keep his damn helmet on. Which didn’t stop him from accepting the drinks he was bought when Jan visited and Gus paraded him at the V.F.W.”
Behind him, a pair of doors would be opening on the front of a squat stone box near the island’s peak. The structure, whose rough exterior suggested a child’s drawing of a Greek temple, must be the size of a cathedral, yet it was dwarfed by what squeezed out of its open doors. While Ransom continued to have trouble with the sheer size of the thing, which seemed as if it must break a textbook’s worth of physical laws, he was more bothered by its speed. There should have been no way, he was certain, for something of that mass to move that quickly. Given the thing’s appearance, the tumult of coils wreathing its head, the scales shimmering on its arms, its legs, the wings that unfolded into great translucent fans whose edges were not quite in focus, its speed was hardly the most obvious detail on which to focus, but for Ransom, the dearth of time between the first hint of the thing’s shadow on the doors and its heaving off the ground on a hurricane-blast of its wings confirmed the extent to which the world had changed.
