The Night Listener and Others (34 page)

You see that you have a very weak little body.

Thank you for all your many kindnesses, Mrs. Mortimer. Her eventual point was that the child should pray to God to keep its little body safe from harm. I suppose it’s merely a more explicit version of the old bedtime prayer, “If I should die before I wake,” but I wondered about the effect such a list of horrors would have on an impressionable child of “five or six,” Mrs. Mortimer’s target audience, as revealed in her preface.

I couldn’t help but share Mrs. Mortimer’s deathless prose with Linda, though she’s never been as fond as I of such literary cruelty. Being an elementary school principal makes her even more sensitive toward the feelings of children, and she was properly horrified and disgusted to the point where she gave a theatrical shudder, closed her own book, and turned off the light on her side, a cue that I should do the same, and one to which I responded as desired.

Nothing alarms me at night. When I close my eyes in the darkness I’m able to close them on the concerns of the day, even my current inability to create a solid outline for a new novel, which drove me mad whenever my eyes were open. Nor am I affected by any filmic or literary horror I might have ingested before bedtime. In short, I sleep well and heavily, and am awakened only by the twin orbs of the morning sun and my bladder when full. That bladder alarm usually wakes me around four in the morning, as it did on this particular night, so I got up quietly, traversed the darkened bedroom with the assurance of one who knows every toe-stubbing bedpost and nightstand by heart, and made my way to the bathroom.

When I stepped into the hall on my return, however, I felt suddenly ill at ease, as though if I turned and looked through the doorway into the living room, I might see a dark shape sitting in one of the chairs. It was surprising. Usually I’m as at home in the dark as a cat.

So I confronted my fear, and turned and looked directly into the room, lit only by the pale glow the street lights cast through the thick curtains. There was nothing there, of course, but I thought that I heard just the wisp of a sigh, high and feminine. I took a few steps to the doorway, reached in and turned on the light.

Th room was empty. Th sigh had probably been my own sinusitisinduced nose-whistle. I snorted at my own imagination, and went back to bed. Sleep, however, didn’t come as readily as it usually did.

The next day I was too busy to think about Mrs. Mortimer and her less than salubrious effect on children. My writer’s block, spongy at first, had thickened to the consistency of cement, and I struggled unsuccessfully through another eight-hour day, trying to extricate myself from a muddle of forced motivations and blatant coincidences. When I’d finished, I had another paragraph of my outline done, and knew that I would delete most of it the next day. My anxiety deepened daily, despite Linda’s assurances that I would work my way out of my problems. Hives frequently appeared, and the small X-shaped birthmark on my shoulder itched madly, as it always did when I grew upset.

That evening, lying next to Linda, I tried to distract myself by once again paging through
The Peep of Day
. Nothing equaled the awfulness of the first chapter, though that on “The Wicked Angels” came close, with the deathless verses:

Satan is glad

When I am bad,

And hopes that I

With him shall lie

In fire and chains,

And dreadful pains.

All liars dwell

With him in hell,

And many more

Who cursed and swore,

And all who did

What God forbid.

I wondered if the Anna B. Huber who owned the book had been as enthralled by her bedtime tales as I’d been by mine, and in curiosity I turned to the endpapers to see her name again, then flipped to the back. There was a note handwritten in pencil. Though faded, it read:
The owner to this book is A. B. Huber. My Father gave it to me for a Present. This is a nice reading book for us if we only try and do as it says in this book and read it through and through. 1862
I was unexpectedly moved by this touch of humanity in such a harshly written volume, and could nearly see the events of a century and a half before, the father giving the book with pride and affection to his daughter, and, two years later, Anna trying out her new penmanship skills on the endpapers. I looked through the other pages at the rear and front of the book, and found on a fore-title page a main course to which the other inscription had been a mere appetizer:
This evening I write my name here and that is Anna B. Huber. In the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty three and here youns can see my name when I am dead and gone.

The rose is red the vines are green

The days are

Past which I have seen

Remember me by the dawn of day

Remember me when far away

Remember me and so will I

Remember you till I die.

Anna B. Huber’s Book 1863

God, I thought with a smile, how these simple words define a life long past. A little girl wants to be remembered after death, so she puts her name in a book, perhaps the only object of permanence she owns, creating her own time capsule to be opened years later by a middle-aged man who hears her voice and does as she wishes—he remembers her, long after she is dust.

Remarkable, I thought at first, that she should be so fixated on death. But when I considered what mortality rates were like in 1863, not even taking the Civil War into account, I thought it likely that Anna B. Huber had experienced the deaths of family and friends. It was even possible that her father had died at Gettysburg or Shiloh or Antietam or in some other less famous but no less lethal battle.

And there was always Anna’s prized volume, in which Mrs.
Mort
imer constantly reminded her of
mort
ality and of the many and varied ways in which life might end. No wonder the poor wee thing had death on her mind. Don’t worry, little girl, I thought. I’ll remember you.

I read a chapter from another book, having had quite enough of the ill-tempered Mrs. Mortimer, and went to sleep with one arm around Linda, but thinking of Anna Huber, wondering what she had looked like, how long she had lived, and whether she had had children of her own to abuse with Mrs. M’s writings.

It wasn’t the bladder alarm that roused me that night. It was Anna B. Huber, or, I thought at first, my simulacrum of her. And before I realized what I was seeing, I was grateful for the awakening.

I’d been having a dreadful nightmare, quite a novelty for me. I had been closely watching a little girl in a long dark-colored dress, and, as so often occurs in dreams, was also experiencing what was happening to her. In literary terms, I was both first and third person at once. This collective
We
were moving through a series of incidents that would have made Lemony Snicket quail.

At first I was drowning. Not knowing which way was up, I thrashed about in thick, swampy water, and saw long brown hair twist like snakes on either side of my head, drifting in front of my eyes and blocking my vision. Every time I breathed, I took in a noseful of lumpy viscosity that choked me so that dark flames surged before my eyes.

Then those flames heated the water until I seemed a piece of meat boiling in a pot. My hands reddened and great blisters started to form, bubbles rising beneath the young flesh as though live things were pressing to get out. The blisters burst, and tattered shreds of skin roiled in the bubbling water like strands of seaweed. The pain increased as something pierced my stomach, and when I looked down a silver beam of light a foot wide had impaled me, and a great stream of blood was pouring from my body as though from a fireman’s hose, and I remember thinking that it looked like the scene at the end of Kurosawa’s
Sanjuro
, when the blood gushes like a fountain from the dying samurai.

As the blood roared out of me, I felt myself growing even weaker than before. The heat receded, and the blood slowed its river and stopped altogether, though the sense of being in thick water remained, and I began to fall. Twisting I fell through that thick miasma of dream until I saw a stony plain far below coming up to meet me. I tried to turn away, to slow or even cease my fall, but I could not, and the ground grew closer and I saw myself as a diver, head first, arms at my side, until the stones filled all my view and I struck them. My neck twisted and snapped like a dry branch broken for kindling, and I entered blackness.

The darkness turned to white, and I was lying on a flat hard plane, but I could see myself, and my face, the little girl’s thin face, was growing thinner. The eyes protruded, the cheeks fell in as if made of pastry dough, and the bones pressed against the wasted skin. I—she—was dying. My breath came slow and shallow, and my body grew colder until the world was full of stillness.

Suddenly a pinpoint of motion entered that world, and my dead eyes became fixed on a speck high above my reclining form, a speck that was slowly getting larger. At last its shape took on the definition of a square, and as it drew nearer it seemed as though I lay at the bottom of an elevator shaft, with the car above rushing down at me. Though I struggled to move, I could not. My dead eyes could only watch helplessly, as further doom approached.

In one final instant the dark square drove all the white world away, and pain crushed me, shattering skull, smashing brain, hurling my dream entity into an abyss from which there would be no rebirth.

So naturally there was no choice but to wake up.

When my eyes opened in the darkness, I hitched in a breath of relief. I was lying on my left side, facing Linda, and I put my arm around her, careful not to wake her. I closed my eyes again, but opened them immediately, fearful that I would fall back into the nightmare. Better to remain awake and get my thoughts off Anna Huber and Mrs. Mortimer, for I had no doubt that they were the source of my dire dreams.

I turned slowly, still not wanting to rouse Linda, onto my back and then my right side, closing my eyes with the superstitious conceit that my movement was thus more stealthy, and opening them again when I was in the proper position.

Before me I saw the face of a little girl. Her eyes were open wide, staring at me fearfully. Or maybe her fear was a reflection of my own.

What made the apparition more frightening was that she wasn’t standing next to my bed, but rather parallel to my own recumbent body, as if floating sideways in the air. Her hair was covered by a white kerchief tied under her chin, but the strands of hair which had escaped it were hanging down on either side of her face, rather than dangling toward the floor. That detail was the most uncanny of all, and made me think that I was still dreaming, because even ghosts had to obey the laws of gravity, didn’t they?

It was simply another dream, a dream inside a dream, as I’d occasionally had before. So I commanded myself to wake up.

The strategy didn’t work. As those eyes continued to look into mine, I felt my breath lock in my throat, and the hair on the back of my neck tingle. I thought if I could only speak or make some kind of noise, the vision might disappear.

Then I squeezed my eyes shut hard, frowning with the effort, and made a throaty croak that I hoped the thing would hear as a command of banishment. I moaned again, now wanting Linda to wake up, and she did. “Michael?” she said sleepily, “Michael, are you all right…wake up.”

She shook me and I opened my eyes. The girl was gone. “I’m okay,” I said. “Just a bad dream….I’m gonna get some water. You want some?”

“I’m fine,” she said, and I knew that what she wanted most was to get back to sleep.

I shuffled my way to the bathroom, where I turned on the blessed light and looked at my frightened face in the mirror. The cold water felt good on my skin, and, as I blinked the drops away, I saw that I was perfectly alone. I sat on the closed toilet seat and tried to rationalize away what I thought I’d seen.

Though I hadn’t realized it during the dream, I could now see that all the events consisted of Mrs. Mortimer’s catalogue of violent mishaps, not missing a trick. There had been injury and death by fire, by scalding, by a “great knife,” by falling, by sickness, and finally by the “great box” falling on my head. I had lived through all the terrors that
The Peep of Day
might have inspired in little Anna Huber, and then awoke—or
thought
I had—only to be confronted by my further dream of the young victim herself, her face still showing the fear of what she’d read about and what I’d imagined in my dream. That was all. Perfectly explainable and rational.

I stood up and smiled at myself in the mirror, then used the toilet, rinsed the sleep mud from my mouth, and went back to bed, where I passed the night, as far as I could recall, dreamlessly.

The next morning I kissed Linda goodbye. She was attending an education conference in Pittsburgh, and would be spending the night. Left alone in the house, I went into my office, turned on the computer, and opened my outline for the new novel. Nothing came easily. I had characters, but getting those characters to act in a way that would produce a coherent narrative seemed to be beyond my abilities. It was always, I reminded myself, hard work, but it seemed harder than ever.

By the end of the day, I had saved a few more ideas, another couple paragraphs of tenuously linked incidents that I might conceivably be able to turn into a novel. I ate a light dinner, watched an old John Ford Western, and crawled into bed with a crime novel written by one of my friends. It was good, but I kept thinking about the dream I’d had the night before, and the other, far more realistic one that followed it.

Anna B. Huber’s little book was still on my nightstand. I set down the novel and picked up
The Peep of Day
, turning to the introductory section of horrors and ascertaining that my dream had mirrored them perfectly. Whatever my other literary weaknesses might be, poor memory was not among them.

The unproductive struggles of the day had worn me out, and I set the book back down and turned off the light. Despite my tiredness, I knew I would have trouble sleeping, as I always did when Linda was away. I decided to try and replace the comfort of her warm body with the novelty of having the spacious bed all to myself, so I positioned myself in the middle on my back, with my arms flung out to either side. Being King of the Bed ran a poor second to having Linda there, but it wasn’t long before I drifted to sleep.