PANIC (10 page)

They did meet at Warped Tour, after all.

He sat down on the bed, trying not to wake her and she turned over, moaning. She seemed placid, totally at ease, like it was just another weekday night. Eric lay down next to her but didn’t take comfort in her peace.

He couldn’t.

He lay there with the covers up to his chin just like a kid, watching the dark hall for a shadow of movement.

He faded, then drifted off.

F
OUR

IT WATCHES OUTSIDE the room.

The bed is like an operating table from that angle, a wide cot where the victims of the diseased day take recuperation every night.

The woman looks cold and grey, a background detail, bundled up in comfort.

Next to her lays a rough sack, zippered, size of a man, shifting every now and again. This is a sleeping bag thing, a cloth bindle that cruel children sew up live cats in to dunk in the cold creek.

In bad times when there’s no allowance for a coffin to be made, this is a thing that makes a good substitute.

In good times it might be a rug or a barrel to aid in helping the thing inside go away.

The sack moves on the bed next to her, coming alive without consciousness, feeling around blind in its dry cocoon like a desiccated caterpillar.

Soon it thumps down to the floor and slugs away, down the hall.

The thing watching does not follow.

F
IVE

THE BREATH THAT woke him was snatching as though he’d awoken on an operating table. It caught in his throat and gagged him to the point of tears; straining, not weeping.

In his dream, all the people of the town all went up to the hill as the judge and the sheriff's men lead him by rope to fasten him to a stone pedestal as big as his whole body. In the dream he lay there, as now, eyes rimmed with resigned tears and bulging with cracked blood vessels.

He turned his head to the side to watch two laborers lift either end of a birch pole in unison, carefully resting it on their shoulders to carry over and lay it on the pedestal as if there were no one there. They didn’t even look at him; they were haulers, not executioners.

In the dream he didn’t plead. There was no way to guess how much the stone wheel weighed - enough to squeeze the breath from his lungs. Enough to pin his limbs until they itched, then lost feeling. Enough to still him until he felt his body turning cold.

It would take three full weights to make sure it was done, to ensure the slow suffocation of an adult male.

Eric gasped in panic, a sound of pained surprise that woke him back in the bedroom, leg dangling over the edge of the bed. Opening his eyes to fight the tears was nearly as difficult as groping for air and he wished he hadn’t.

It was straddling his chest, its bare heels resting on his shoulder, impossibly heavy.

The gasps turned to sips, drinking the air as if it were his last.

Those eyes looked down at him as it crouched atop him, dumb and unfeeling, animated without life. He shut his eyes and could still see them, hanging in the room above him like twin moons.

“Wake up, Shannon,” he said, turning his face to her. He couldn’t move his limbs to shake her; he couldn’t feel them at all.

If he could clutch his chest or his throat, he could fight for air, but the loss of reflex was even worse than the shortness of breath.

“Shannon-”

His voice broke, cracking with hurt and betrayal as he watched her sleep undisturbed. She was slumped in total repose, ignorant of his circumstance. The loud wheezing ought to have woke her and made her scream when she saw the fat little man sitting on her husbands’ chest, but she lay there, dozing.

He saw it through teary eyes, its head as big as its torso, the long proboscis nose hovering over him like a knife. Behind its beady eyes was nothing at all, so empty he would’ve welcomed the twinkle of hellfire. He was grateful he couldn’t feel anything but the pressure of its body on him but his brain could sense the slimy flesh touching his, seeping grease that would never wash off.

He didn’t want her to wake up. He didn’t even want to know what it wanted. He wanted himself to wake up from this double recursion, dream within dream.

“Leave us alone,” he pleaded, his voice strained and broken. “Leave me alone.”

It moved, then climbed off, then stood by the side of the bed like a loyal dog.

His breath slowly swelled in him and he lay there, letting feeling return to his body. Shannon pulled the covers over herself.

When sensation returned to him, he swung his legs over the edge of the bed where he knew the creature was waiting. The sounds she made next to him on the safe side were chilling now, rubbing and shifting in the sheets could’ve come from its fingers tugging at the covers but he couldn’t know. He refused to look.

Eric went to the closet and took down some paint-stained jeans and a hoodie to match, bleached white and orange where he’d spilled a mixture of thinner and ammonia on it and dressed himself quickly.

He didn’t even put socks on, instead slipping into beat up jogging shoes.

He could feel it standing there, facing his back as he pulled the hoodie over his head. He had to get away from it.

S
IX

INSIDE THE SACK it squirmed,
in utero
. It was the blissful stretching of something unborn, the happy wriggling of a maggot. It wouldn’t know what a bed was, or comprehend the meaning of the soft flesh next to it. It knew sleep and could see her sleeping and squirmed its way close until they almost touched.

It got carried away and its outer hood touched her, just brushing against her shoulder. The rough twined bristles of burlap scratching her skin like an allergic reaction. It just wanted to be close to her.

Inside its bag it was made of pulp and skin, too.

Shannon turned over with the back of her hand on the pillow. She could feel coolness on the back of her arm on the pillow where his head hadn’t touched and warm where she touched his face, stroking it unconsciously. She really did love him, even in her sleep she comforted him and touched him, made him feel like he belonged to her.

This wasn’t his face, though the rough sack on skin felt like stubble, thorny, dry burrs that scratched slightly when she brushed her hand over it.

She’s too tired to open her eyes and see what he’d seen before he left her alone in the room.

“Honey,” she sighed, feeling how gentle it breathed. “Go back to sleep.”

S
EVEN

NIGHT OUTDOORS SEEMS lonely.

Sometimes, when it’s this late at night the sky is so dark its purple, a deep, subtle color that makes it seem the world has tipped over to peek over the horizon. Of course there are no stars; even out in the suburbs every street is flooded with fluorescent lamplight.

The hoodie keeps Eric’s eyes from straining in these lights as he walks down the hill toward the main road into town. Their street is a popular one for joggers and dog-walkers, a nice, challenging incline for one to prove one’s fitness. In fact, he can hear the huff of breath and the hit of running shoes a couple hundred yards away, the rustle of a windbreaker to ward off the late night chill. He doesn’t dare turn around because he can hear closer footsteps, bare, waddling footsteps that might leave a glistening slug-trail.

At the foot of the hill is the Blass’ place, an older couple, the man a county clerk, his wife a librarian, of all things. Mister Blass barbecues as a hobby and made his own hot smoker out of a surplus steel drum. Eric doesn’t really know how to be company to older people but Shannon likes them, and they love the kid.

None of the lights are on in the house and the car is in the garage, or at least it must be, yet there’s someone standing on the lawn, doing something with his hands. He’s just going to walk by and not say anything, pass him like a ship in the night.

Blass makes a hell of a pulled pork sandwich, he thinks, approaching the house and its deep, rich smell. That hickory applewood smoked wood thing never quite goes away.

“That you, Eric?”

The voice of the person on the lawn was calling to him, standing outside the light and close to the house, which was dark and still.

“Hey, Mr. Blass,” he said, taking one hand out of his sweatshirt pocket to wave. In one hand, the older man was clutching a green bottle. In the other, he held the nozzle of a hose, spraying water back and forth over the lawn methodically.

“What are you doing out this time of night? ‘s late.”

“I could ask you the same.”

“Well, I’m watering the lawn,” he said with a tinge of friendly condescension.

“I can see that. Why are you watering the lawn?”

He shrugged.

“Lawn needs watering. Why are you out for a walk?”

Eric smiled, wearily.

“Needed to stretch my legs.”

“Uh huh. Want a beer?”

“No, I’m alright. I’ve got to get going here,” he said.

“Have a beer,” said Blass, pushing a warm green bottle into his hand. He wouldn’t take a drink as long as Blass didn’t insist. “Hardly the time of night to be in a rush.”

He could feel it right by him but the words were too absurd to form into a sentence. He could see in the older man’s eyes that he had no idea about the thing standing just behind him, pestering boggard with a name too stupid to say.

“Do you know my wife’s gone?”

“She-”

Eric paused, thinking of the most tactful thing to say.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“She hasn’t left me or passed on, if that’s what you’re thinking. She’s been at the hospital since-”

He put the bottle to his lips, pondering it.

“Well, let’s see. Since January. Few months now, for observation.”

‘Is she-”

“I’ve never heard this in my life, but she just stopped speaking. Just outright stopped talking and it didn’t seem to bother her one bit. At first I thought it was something I’d done, like maybe I didn’t clear my plate before I put it in the sink; you know how the missus can be.”

As he sprayed, the leaky drip from the nozzle steadily wet the ends of his pants, making him look he took a wade and forgot to roll them up.

“I just didn’t catch on for a while because she seemed so normal otherwise. After about two days I took her to the doctor and they looked her over and said there was nothing wrong with her. Two days after that, I took her to the shrink, guy I shoot deer with from time to time. He couldn’t get a thing out of her.”

He shook his head.

“Is she committed?”

“Friend, I don’t know what she is.”

There was a dog barking somewhere in the neighboorhood, who knew what it saw or smelled out there in the dark.

“What hospital are they keeping her at? Shannon and I could visit her if that helps.”

“Sure, maybe. It would mean a lot to me. She’s at Tenafly Psychiatric. Couldn’t tell you the room, they keep moving her around.”

“Tenafly?”

“That’s right, Tenafly Psychiatric Center.”

“Are you sure? That place is long gone; it closed down when I was a kid.”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, the other one, then.”

He took a swig of his beer and continued his robotic swaying with the hose and Eric was seeing him differently. There were no other ones, the state had no more dedicated mental hospitals and hadn’t for a long time.

“I’m just - well, I’m afraid to go and visit her. I don’t know what they’re doing to her and I don’t know what kind of state she’s in. I’m afraid I’ll go there and see this frizzy haired thing in a bathrobe like a bag lady and it won’t be my wife anymore.”

The genial smile was gone from his face, gradually withered away by a misery abiding. The warm, flat beer made Eric think he hadn’t gone much further than his own lawn in days, weeks maybe.

The dog barked louder and louder, off in the distance, until it sounded like it was barking in his ear, until it seemed he could hear the flat, floppy tongue licking over its palate and teeth, gums bare and quivering, rumbling in its throat until Eric felt it in his heart.

Blass sat down on the concrete shelf that passed for a stoop in front of his house and put the hose down, letting it spray into the topsoil, drowning the linked roots of lawn grass. He held onto the beer and put his other hand to his head, exasperated.

The barking was so loud; Eric could hear its jaws snap. It could keep it up forever.

E
IGHT

DAWN FINALLY BREAKS over the horizon and the world is tugged into color. The highway is laid down over the valley in the flattest, shallowest scoop of land that makes the horizon look vast. Eric staggers blindly at the shoulder of the road, aside the barrier, knowing the road goes somewhere. If he follows it, he won’t get lost.

He’s been walking all night, so long that he’s forgotten all about Blass and his wife and Shannon and his job, knowing that when it’s finally over, he can return home to sleep all day and all night if he wants.

The sun is so low that the haze of the road smears its round shape, making a mirage-sun at the point where the road disappears over the horizon. Between the sun and the road is the curve of the Earth and the ocean.

The Earth is turning and it gives his footsteps momentum, a compelling force that pulls him forward - east, into the safety of the blasting heat that weird things in the night can’t tolerate.

He will walk to the beach, cross the whole state if he has to to rid himself of it.

It hasn’t left him alone.

It won’t let him alone.

It won’t answer him why.

Shannon should be there with him, right at his side like she is every time the boy starts wailing about this or that. Every once in a while, a car passes from either direction but never seems to take notice of the little man following him, waddling after him energetically as he shuffles like the undead.

He would never say it but he was frightened, utterly. If he touched it, tried to struggle with it, there was no telling what might happen and so he tried to get ahead of it and leave it behind.

Shannon thought Eric was in an unusually good mood that morning and it made her feel strange because she’d never really thought about it, but he was actually smiling. He could be in a good mood, surely, but never showed it that way. He thought it seemed phony to wear a smile like that, as if he were embarrassed about his happiness.