James Colton

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Tommy Nier wakes thinking it’s still the middle of the night. If he’d look at the clock above his dresser across the room, he’d know it was 6:59 a.m., but it’s been raining all night and the stormclouds have yet to disperse. The sky outside his window is charcoal and the voice coming under his bedroom door sets his tiny heart pounding. Tommy can’t make out words. It’s just a stream of high-pitched, questioning tones, broken now and then by a listening silence, muffled by doors and carpet and walls until it’s like the house itself is sobbing.

Tommy climbs out of bed at 7:00 and creeps to the door. He pulls it open and steps out into the dark hallway. He sees his mother’s bedroom is open. Her voice, coming from somewhere else in the house, is clearer now, though Tommy still can’t understand what she’s saying. He starts his way down the hall, glancing into his mother’s empty room as he passes.

Her curtains are drawn, blocking even the dim, rainy light from the charcoal clouds, but the green of her alarm clock picks out highlights. The jagged outline of crumpled cloth. The pale crescent of a domed forehead.

Tommy scurries away with a gasp and comes to the stairs. Looking down, he can finally catch hints of language: “…sick joke…who’s she?…I’m not…”

The steps creak under Tommy’s weight, and the voice downstairs cuts off sharply. There’s a moment of breathless silence, then rapid footsteps. Nancy Nier appears on the landing below. Mother and son stare at each other in the dark; Nancy’s eyes sit in red sockets. “Go back to bed, Tommy,” she says.

“Who’s on the phone?” Tommy asks, eyeing the device in his mother’s hand.

“Go back to bed,” Nancy repeats. She vanishes toward the kitchen.

Tommy hovers over the stairwell for a minute, listening as the conversation downstairs resumes. He shivers, then turns back toward his bedroom at the far end of the hall. He’s halfway there when he freezes. His heart thuds to an absolute stop inside his chest. He feels like every drop of fluid in his body has chilled and drained into the soles of his feet.

Something lays across the floor, protruding from the darkness of his mother’s room. A white shape made gray by the darkness. A small arm that tapers quickly to a tiny hand with five baby fingers.

Tommy sways on the carpet for a second, feeling himself meld with the shadows around him. All the while his eyes remain open and glued to that still shape reaching out of his mother’s bedroom. When he finally draws breath, he screams.

By Shannen L. Colton

I’ll never forget the first time I saw him.

I say him, but I don’t really know. He resembles a man, but I’ve never seen his face. The first time I saw him, I thought I must have seen wrong. My son was young, only five months old; taking care of a baby leaves one sleep deprived, and this would not have been my first nighttime hallucination while caring for him. Surely, then, it was just the car seat set against the wall beside the crib, with a shirt or a blanket thrown over it. That had to be it, or so I told myself.

But as I rocked with my son in the nursery chair, barely breathing in that dark room, I knew it wasn’t a tired hallucination this time. I couldn’t stir from it, couldn’t blink it away.

It was a man, or something like a man, hunched over on the floor next to the crib. He stared down toward his knees with his head against the wall, and he didn’t move.

Neither did I, aside from the gentle rocking motion that quickly becomes second nature to any new parent. I tried not to look at him, but inside I swelled with panic. I dared not make a sound; if I did, would he look? Would he turn toward me?

The thought was unbearable. When my son was fed and back to sleep, I left the room. Left him in the room with the other him. You might think me a terrible mother, but if you’d felt it, you would have left too. This man, this thing…to ignore it was the only thing to do.

The next morning he was gone. My son was fine. I didn’t tell my husband. He’d say I was too behind on sleep, too mentally exhausted from my five months of motherhood. He’d tell me to see a doctor.

What new mom has time for that? And I knew it wouldn’t help.

A few days later, I saw him again.

The town I grew up in could boast exactly one remarkable event. The accident of 2004. It resulted in the indefinite closure of Stover Road and a stricter screening process for new bus drivers.

No one ever lived on Stover Road, but it was a key stretch of pavement, linking our small town with the even smaller village of Buckhill. After the 2004 tragedy, I learned that the road’s construction had caused a bit of a fuss with some of the older folks in the region. The few who were still alive in 2004 wasted no time in shouting “we told you so” loudly enough to convince the authorities. The resulting closure meant kids from Buckhill had to suffer a doubled commute time to and from school.

I never had to ride the bus. My mom was a bus driver, so I’d just go to school with her in the dark hours of the morning and wait at the bus garage until the main building opened up. My mom didn’t drive the Buckhill route, fortunately, but the accident still rattled her. It rattled a lot of people. I can only imagine what it was like in Buckhill. All those kids, just gone like that.

Because my mom was a bus driver, I knew a few things about school buses. Things that came up frequently in the aftermath of the accident. For instance, federal law requires the body of a bus be strong enough to support one and a half times the bus’ weight, the idea being that it’ll hold up in the case of a rollover or collision, preventing the kids inside from getting crushed.

Investigators determined that the bus hadn’t been properly inspected. The closure of Stover Road spoke to how much faith our town put in the investigators’ opinions. Afterall, the bus hadn’t rolled over, and there were no other vehicles it could have collided with. And no lack of inspection could explain what had happened to the missing rear half.

They set up orange and white barricades on either end of Stover Road. The pavement crumbled, and slowly succumbed to weeds. The forest through which the road ran closed in on either side and covered everything in fallen leaves. Years later, after the shock and mourning had passed, kids would dare each other to approach the barricade, to shout across it and listen for an answer. But not even the toughest kids would set foot onto that cracked and faded blacktop, nor dare their friends to try. It was an unspoken law that not even the most irreverent among us cared to violate.

There was some argument about what to do with the bus—what was left of it, at least. Some parents wanted it destroyed, others wanted it preserved as a memorial. It sat behind the bus garage, at the very edge of school property, waiting to learn its fate. The debate went on for weeks, then gradually simmered away without any decision. And so the bus stayed there. The grass grew tall front of it, and the woods, which formed the back edge of the school grounds, reached out to claim it. Between the road and the bus, it was like nature was slowly erasing the tragedy from our history.

But you can’t erase something like that. Not completely.

It was some time past eleven, as far as he could guess, and Jacob was regretting the decision to ride through the night. Beside him, Phillip rode with his head bent against the wind, his dark riding cloak plastered with snow.

They’d both agreed to this plan, hoping to reunite with their families all the sooner. Jacob and Phillip were business partners, and the engagement from which they were returning had been a miserable one; all parties had left feeling either disappointed or cheated. Jacob and Phillip were encouraged only by the thought of their own comfortable beds, and any measure that returned them swifter to that reward seemed a good one.

But that had been in the early moments of dusk, before the sky had grown black with storm clouds. Now, as ice pelted his face and his horse staggered through snowdrifts, Jacob wished they’d rented a room in the last town. It would have been worth delaying their homecoming by a few hours to avoid this blizzard.

The men’s spirits were low enough thanks to their stinging faces and numb fingers, but what really had them depressed was that, some time ago, it had become apparent that they were lost. Their road had been buried beneath the rising snow, and the horses must have veered off at some point. It was Phillip who first noted the unfamiliar surroundings. They had sought to regain their way, but only succeeded in becoming more lost. They passed through strange woods and vast fields, none of which they recognized. But what alternative had they? They couldn’t very well stop and camp for the night; they and their horses would be frozen by morning. So they rode. Jacob could barely see his horse’s head in front of him, but still they rode.

Jacob firmly believed that things couldn’t be worse. The thought had barely escaped his mind when he heard a CRACK. His horse lurched and Jacob leapt from the saddle as the animal toppled over. Phillip was doing the same, scrambling away from his steed as it kicked and screamed amidst a churning chaos of broken ice and black water. The men watched helplessly as their horses vanished beneath the surface of a hidden pond.

When the last echoes of the animals’ cries had been swallowed by the water, Jacob asked, “What now?” His question was nearly lost beneath the roar of the snowstorm.

I braked at the stoplight and rested my forehead against the steering wheel. What could I do? The three appointments I’d scheduled had been fruitless. My two impromptu tours likewise. This city was just too expensive, even for the—I’d thought at the time—generous salary from my new job.

But that salary was contingent on my relocation, and it was looking more and more like I wouldn’t be able to relocate.

The light turned green. Just before I pulled away from the intersection, I saw the flyer. It was taped to the stoplight pole and caught my eye because of four words: APARTMENTS FOR RENT CHEAP.

I slowed down to note the address, earning an impatient honk from the car behind me. I had time for one more tour. One more chance. Hopefully, “cheap” meant the same thing to the flyer’s owner as it did to my overstretched budget. If not…I shuddered at the thought of returning to my parents’ basement.

My hopes both rose and fell as I neared the address. Rose because even in this overpriced city, a bed in this part of town had to come cheap. Fell because it was, well, that part of town. Shining glass gave way to dark, jagged holes. Traffic disappeared. Stoplights swayed from their wires, lifeless. There were no trees showing off autumn colors, but there were enough discarded newspapers whispering through the streets like leaves that it felt like I was driving down a country road in a black and white photo.

By the time I parked in front of the address, my conflicted hopes had died. This building was abandoned. Dimming sunlight—what little made it this deep into the urban labyrinth—showed me a door fused to its casing by a smear of graffiti. Windows caked with dirt and soot. Rusted fire escapes that ended several stories too soon.

That was it, then. My last hope, a dead end. I shifted into reverse.

A gray form moved behind the spray paint and grime of one of the windows. A moment later, the graffitied door cracked open, and a slight, hunched form slipped out. It stopped when it saw my car, stared directly at me, and I almost didn’t hit the brakes. No, I didn’t want to share a building with that thing!

I have a lot of fond memories from my teenage years. This is not one of them.

I’d just finished my sophomore year of high school. To celebrate the start of our summer freedom, my younger brother and I spent the evening around a bonfire in the backyard, burning old homework assignments and roasting marshmallows over their ashes. I don’t recall which of us suggested abandoning the fire and hiking through the woods behind our property. It was a stupid idea, and if it was mine then I’d like to apologize to my brother now. If you can read this, Dan, I’m sorry.

We’d been back there plenty of times during the day. The forest floor stretched more or less level for several yards before suddenly plunging into a broad gully. A stony brook trickled along the bottom. As far as we knew, that brook had no name, and we couldn’t identify its source or its destination. It was simply The Brook. On warm summer nights we could hear frogs singing along its banks, and after a heavy rain we could hear its swollen current rushing through the gully.

But tonight it was quiet. There’d been no rain for a couple weeks, so any remaining water was stagnant. Even the frogs were still, although now and then we heard a lonely thunk or peep. We were cautious. Our post-school, s’more-fueled euphoria hadn’t completely clouded our judgment; we knew not to stray too deeply into the woods, to walk parallel to the tree line so as not to risk tumbling into the gully. But if you’ve never been in a forest at night, you have no idea how dark it is, how easy it is to get disoriented. It’s nothing like the movies; there’s no luminous blue fog to light your way. It can be pitch black even with a full moon overhead, and we didn’t have even that small luxury. After maybe fifteen minutes of laughing at our own daring, then laughing at the way our laughter echoed back at us off the trees, we found ourselves sliding down the steep bank toward the brook.

If that had been the worst of our misfortunes, this would’ve been one of those fond memories I mentioned earlier. Neither of us were hurt, and we weren’t afraid of getting lost. The gully was a constant landmark; all we had to do was march back up the hill and we’d be home in a matter of minutes. And now that we were at the bottom, the greatest danger was already past. So rather than take our tumble as a warning, we laughed it off and took it as an excuse to keep exploring.

As I mentioned before, this wasn’t our first time exploring the gully, just our first time after dark. We knew that gully and that little brook. We knew all the notable trees and oddities in the landscape. We’d practically grown up in those woods. So when we saw the light glowing out of the hillside ahead of us, we were surprised to say the least.

Dan and I both stopped. The light was dim, an orange shimmer in the darkness, like firelight cast from an unseen source.

“What do you think it is?” asked Dan.