#truenosleep

We had been friends for thirteen years and in those years I had not once slept at his house.

“So, why the sudden invite?” I asked. I settled the duffel on my shoulder and he held the door.

“My parents are going out,” he said, and the words came out of him in a rush. “Figured it’s about time you saw my humble abode.”

The house was not a humble abode. It was a great white clapboard house that stood on the land as if it had been there forever and the town had grown around it. Old oaks stood guard over the grounds and their shadows fell across the yard. Inside the house there was a smell of old wood and polish and something more besides, a smell like turned earth after a rain.

His mother was a woman built of small bones and she carried a frantic smile that did not touch her eyes. She moved about the dim rooms with a nervous energy, asking of drinks and of snacks. His father sat in a leather chair and he did not speak. He was a large man whose eyes were dark and still and they followed us as we passed.

I heard his mother whisper words to him, urgent and low, but I could not make them out.

At Seven O Clock his parents left.

“So, what’s the plan?” I asked. I dropped my bag on the floor of his room. The room was a small island of the ordinary in that house, with its posters and its rumpled bed and the console set before the television. It was the only place that did not feel as if it belonged to the dead.

“Pizza, video games, the usual,” Leo said. He knelt and woke the machine. He moved with a forced calm, but I saw the cording in his neck.

We ate the pizza and played the games and for a time I did not think of the house or of the silence that lay coiled in its other rooms. For a time it was only the two of us and the sounds from the screen.

Then near to Nine he paused the game.

“Hey, man,” he said. He would not look at me but worked the controller in his hands. “There’s just… one weird rule my parents have.”

“Weird rule?”

“Yeah.” He raised his head and his eyes were serious as a stone. “After 9:00 PM, we have to be in here. In the bedroom. And we can’t leave. Not for anything. Not for the bathroom, not for a drink, nothing. The door stays closed until sunrise.”

I stared at his face and looked for the jest that was not there.

“You’re kidding, right? What if I have to pee?”

“Pee now,” he said. His voice was flat. He gestured with his chin to an empty bottle on his desk. “And after nine, you use that.”

The laugh I had in my throat died there. “Dude, that’s insane. Why?”

He shrugged his shoulders but the motion was counterfeit. “They’re just… super weird about security. Old house, you know? They think it’s… drafty.”

Drafty. I knew he was lying I just didn’t know why. Downstairs a clock began to chime the hour and his head snapped toward the door.

BONG. BONG. BONG.

He was on his feet before the ninth bell had sounded its note. He crossed the room and closed the door. He slid a heavy bolt of steel into its housing and the sound it made was final.

“There,” he said. A sweat had bloomed on his brow and he breathed out the word. “We’re good.”

“Leo, what the hell is going on?” I demanded.

“Nothing, man. Just a weird rule,” he said. He would not look at the door. He turned up the sound of the game until it was a roar in that small room.

But I did not see the game. I saw only the bolted door and I felt a coldness take root in my gut. The house was quiet again. But it was not the same quiet. This was a listening quiet. A waiting quiet. And in the dark heart of that house something waited, and we were locked in that room and waiting with it.

An hour passed and there was no sound from the house. The fear went out of Leo slowly and he played the game with a feigned calm that did not sit right on him. We played on in that silence and a vexation grew in me at the foolishness of it all.

“You really need to tell your parents this is a certifiable way to raise a serial killer,” I said.

He gave back a fake smile. “Tell me about it.”

Then came a sound from the rooms below. It was a soft and measured thumping on the boards of the main hall.

“What's that?” I whispered.

Leo played on. He stared at the screen and his fingers worked the buttons as if he did not hear. “It's nothing. House settling.”

“That's not the house settling, Leo.“

The sound ceased. In the quiet I could hear the blood in my own ears. Then there came a new sound which was a dragging sound, a scraping of some great weight across the wood floor beneath us as of a heavy thing with broken feet.

I muted the television. “Okay, that's definitely not the house,” I said.

Leo set the controller down upon the carpet. His face was pale in the shifting light of the screen. “Just ignore it, Liam. Please. It goes away if you ignore it.”

“What? What is it? What goes away?”

Before he could answer, it spoke. The voice came from the hallway, faint at first, on the other side of our door.

“Leo? Honey?”

I did not move.

The voice was his mother's voice.

“Leo, sweetheart, your father and I came home early. I brought you boys some warm cookies. Open the door.”

I looked to Leo and saw a boy cast in tallow. He stared at the door as if it were the gate of hell itself, and he raised a trembling finger to his lips and shook his head.

“Leo, that's your mom,” I whispered.

“Don't be silly, sweetie, we're inside," the voice said. It was just outside the door now. "I just baked your favorites. Chocolate chip. They're getting cold.”

The scraping from below had stopped. There was only the sweet persuasion of that voice in the silent house. But the voice was wrong. There was a terrible perfection in its sound, like a memory of a voice and not the voice itself.

Then came the knocking. It was a soft and wet sound on the far side of the door, as if a piece of meat were striking the wood.

“Leo? Liam? Are you boys alright in there? You're being awfully quiet.”

“Leo,” I mouthed, but no sound came.

He sat upon the floor like a man made of stone, his eyes wide with a plea that had no words. He looked like something trapped. The knob of the door turned, once to the left and once to the right. Then it began to rattle in its fitting with a growing violence.

“Boys, this isn't funny," the voice said. The sweetness broke in it then and it was replaced with a hard and ragged edge. "Open. The. Door."

A great blow struck the door and the frame of it groaned in the wall. I scrambled away from it on my hands and feet until my back was against the far wall of the room.

The voice changed. It spoke again and the voice was a ruin, a low and guttural thing that gurgled in its throat.

“I k n o w y o u ' r e i n t h e r e.”

The wet tapping began again, faster now and frantic. With it came a thin and keening whine, a sound like wind through a crack in the world. And from the dark gap beneath the door a black and viscous fluid began to seep into the room. It was thick as oil and it carried the smell of the grave, of wet soil and of things that rot in the earth.

Leo moved. He crawled to the bed and pulled the blankets over him and became a small and shuddering shape in the dim room. He had gone into his own darkness.

On the other side of the door the thing fell silent. I knew it was not gone. I knew that in my bones. It was there in the darkness beyond the door, and it was waiting.

I kept my back to the far wall and I watched the door. My breath was a small and panicked thing in my throat. On the bed Leo was a trembling knot of blankets and fear. For me this was a night's journey into that darkness. For him it was the place he lived.

A fool's curiosity which has been my ruin more than once warred with the terror. A need to see the shape of the thing that hunted us. A dreadful truth was better than not knowing. I went forward on my stockinged feet and the old boards did not whisper.

“Liam, no.” came a voice from the bed, muffled by the cloth. “Don’t. Don’t look.”

But I would look. I knelt upon the floor and the reek of the grave was stronger. I lowered my head to the cold brass of the keyhole.

At first there was only the dim hall and the moonlight that fell in a pale blade from the window at its end. Then it stepped into the narrow view.

It was not a man nor was it a beast. It was a thing that was built of sticks and of shadow, impossibly tall and thin. Its limbs were the limbs of a winter tree and its body was a gyre of dust and night that had no true form.

It wore his mother's floral apron, the cloth stretched over a hollow space where a chest should be. It wore his father's hunting cap set upon a head that was only a clot of moving dark. It had no face, only a void.

In one of its twiglike hands it held a picture I had seen on the wall, a portrait of the family. It held this picture before the void where its face should be and it wore the smile of Leo's mother for its own.

From its body it put forth a long and blackened twig of an arm and it tapped upon the door. Thump. Thump. Thump.

I threw myself back from the door and clapped a hand to my mouth to keep the gorge from rising. My mind could not hold the shape of what I had seen. This was no creature that had entered the house. This was the house itself, a parasite that wore the stolen keepsakes of the dead or the soon to be dead for its raiment.

From the door a new voice whispered, and the blood in me went to ice.

“Liam? Why are you hiding in there? Your mother is so worried about you.”

It was my own mother's voice. Perfect. The voice she used when I was a child and sick with fever, the call to supper from a life I would not see again. A wave of homesickness and of horror washed over me for I wanted to be home and I was not.

And the thing in the hall gave a low chuckle that was the sound of dry leaves scuttling on a stone walk. It knew it had found the part of me that was soft.

“Let me in, Liam,” my mother’s voice whispered, a sound of love and of poison. “I've come to take you home.”

I fell back to the wall and slid to the floor and I felt the heat of shame in my thighs where my body had betrayed me. I looked at the trembling shape on the bed. The bottle he had offered. It had not been a joke. It had not been a rule but a kindness. A tool for survival, for he knew. He knew all of it.

The scraping began upon the door itself. A slow and patient sound, as of a claw being sharpened upon the wood. All the while it whispered my name in the voice of my mother, and it promised me an end to all this if I would but unlatch the door.

The hours passed in that room and the thing outside did not cease its siege. It spoke in the voices of the living and of those I could not know, a gallery of ghosts at the door. It offered warmth and food. It promised an end to the long night. And all the while it scraped at the wood with a patience that was a madness to hear.

The fear had burned away in me and left a hard and bitter anger. I was angry at the thing in the hall and at the people who had built for it a cage and called it a home, and I was angry at the boy who hid in his blankets and would not speak.

Hours passed.

“Leo,” I said. My voice was a dry croak in my throat. “Leo, wake up.”

A shape stirred in the bed. He looked out from the pale fortress of his sheets and his eyes were raw with fear.

“Is it gone?” he whispered.

“No, it's not gone,” I said. “I need to know what this is. Now. No more lies. What is that thing?”

He flinched from the sound of my voice. He sat up in the bed and hugged his knees to his chest and would not look at me. “I don't know what it is,” he mumbled to the door. “We just call it… the Nightman. It's always been here. As long as my family has.”

The story came out of him then, a broken telling in the dark. His great-great-grandfather had built this house upon unhallowed ground. And from the first night there was a wrongness in the wood and in the walls. A bargain had been struck in that time, an unspoken covenant with the darkness. The family would have the house by the light of day. But from nine until the dawn the house was given over to that other.

“It gets lonely,” Leo whispered. A tear cut a clean path through his face. “It likes to… play. It mimics people. It uses things it finds to try and make a body for itself.”

The apron. The hat. The picture.

“But it's getting bolder,” he said, and his voice trembled in the small room. “It used to just make noise. Now… it tries to get in. The rules were enough before. Stay in your room. Don't look. Don't listen. But now it wants more.” He finally met my eyes and I saw in them a guilt as deep and as cold as a well. “It wants someone new.”

A cold truth settled in my soul, and it wound me.

The sudden invite.

The fear in his parents’ eyes.

The heavy bolt on the door.

“You… you brought me here for it?”

“No! I didn't want to!” The boy's voice broke. “My parents… they said it was getting too strong. That it wouldn't be satisfied with just them anymore. They said if it had someone new… someone not from the family… maybe it would be satisfied. Maybe it would leave us alone for a while.”

He had led me here as a lamb to the altar. His parents had not gone out. They were in this house, in their own locked room, and they were listening. They were praying that the beast in the hall would choose me.

And then the scraping stopped. The whispers died. The house fell into a quiet so profound it was like the earth had stopped its turning.

“What's happening?” I breathed.

Leo's eyes grew wide.

From the floor below a new sound came. The sound of feet on the stairs. Heavy. A footfall. And the dragging of a dead weight. Thump. Drag. Thump. Drag. It was not trying to trick us. The game was done.

The footsteps ceased outside our door. The silence held for a count of three. Then a crack like thunder sounded as a great force struck the door. The wood splintered and the deadbolt shrieked in its housing.

CRACK!

A web of breaks spidered from the lock. A fine dust of ruined wood fell to the floor.

“It's never done this before,” Leo whimpered. He crawled away toward the dark corner of the room. “It's never tried to break the door down!”

CRACK! BANG!

The deadbolt was torn from the frame like a tooth from a jaw. The door swung inward on its hinges with a sad and final groan.

And in the blackness of the hall, I saw it. There was no void. It had filled itself. Its body was a terrible congress of things stolen from the house. Floorboards for shins and rusted pipes for arms. Its torso a twisted cage of stair bannisters, and within that cage I saw my own duffel bag, and it pulsed like some dark and foreign heart.

Its head was the grandfather clock from the hall. It leaned upon its neck of twisted wood and the pendulum swung behind the glass face like a wild and frantic eye. From the clock a voice came, not one voice but all of them, a discordant chorus speaking as one.

“T I M E . I S . U P.”

The door swung open on its ruined hinges and the thing assembled from the house's bones stepped into the room. Its coming was a grinding of parts, a clicking of old wood and metal, and the air filled with the smell of sawdust and the deep earth of the grave. Leo cried out, a sound of pure terror that was lost in the noise of the thing's advance.

A hot and primal fear seized me, not of a predator but of a thing that was wrong in the world. I took up a glass trophy from the desk and I threw it with all the strength that I had. It struck the face of the grandfather clock and the glass shattered in a spray of bright shards. The thing reeled back. It made a sound like all the clocks in the world striking some final and calamitous hour at once.

It gave us a moment.

"The window!" I screamed. I grabbed Leo by his arm and dragged him, for he was a thing of stone.

My fingers were slick with sweat and they slipped upon the window latch. It would not give. It had been painted into its frame.

The thing righted itself. The broken glass of its face caught the moonlight in a thousand crazed points of light. It came for us, its arm of rusted pipe raised up to strike.

"The bed! Help me with the bed!" I yelled.

Adrenaline found him at last and he moved. We set our shoulders to the heavy oak bedstead and turned it onto its side and made of it a poor and flimsy barricade. The creature stumbled into the mattress and its feet, made of chair legs and other things, became tangled in the sheets. It roared, and it began to tear the bed apart with its hands, ripping the guts of it out onto the floor.

We were trapped in the corner of the room with the unyielding window at our backs.

"The sun," Leo gasped, and his eyes were wild. "It's the only thing. It has to be inside before the sun comes up."

I looked out into the night and the sky was a deep and starless black. We did not have hours.

The creature tore itself free of the ruined bed. It came on, slow now, for it knew that we were its own. It raised a hand made of silverware from the kitchen, the forks and the spoons bound together to make a shining and terrible claw.

And then I saw a thing tucked behind his television. It was a high-powered flashlight.

A last and desperate thought came to me.

I lunged and took up the cold metal of the flashlight. The thing was upon me. I smelled the dust of its body and I saw the brass pendulum swinging in its broken face. I found the switch and a great pillar of white struck it full in its head.

It shrieked a sound of pure agony. The light did not burn it but seemed to unmake it from itself. The spoons of its hand clattered to the floor. A floorboard on its leg split and fell away. The light was a poison to the thing's very being. It shielded the ruin of its face with its pipe-arm and it stumbled into the shadows by the door.

And in that room began the longest watch of my life.

I held the light like a sword and the beam of it was the only thing that held the creature at bay. Leo huddled behind me and cried out when it scuttled at the edges of the room. We were keepers of a light against a great and pressing dark, and the strength in my arm burned away and the batteries that fueled our light would not last. The creature would lunge and I would drive it back with the beam and we would wait and listen to it breathing in the shadows. The hours passed this way, in a stalemate between the light and the dark. The beam of the light began to fail. It flickered.

"It's dying," I gasped.

"Just a little longer," Leo urged, his eyes fixed upon the window. "Just a little longer."

The creature knew. It gathered itself in the dark as the beam dimmed to a sad yellow glow, and with a final and triumphant roar, it charged.

In that same moment, a pale grey line was drawn upon the black horizon. It was the first sign of dawn.

The thing struck me and the flashlight was knocked from my hand. I was on the floor and the monster stood over me, its clock face bent low, and I saw my own face reflected in the arc of the swinging pendulum. Then a single and pure ray of the morning sun pierced the window and touched the creature's back.

It froze. A profound stillness came over it. Then it began to come apart. The clock head crumbled to a fine dust. The pipe arms fell from its shoulders and clattered on the floorboards. The bannisters of its chest unwound. The stolen silver and the splintered wood and my own duffel bag all collapsed into a heap of simple things. In moments, all that was left was this pile of refuse and a thin layer of grey dust that smelled of the grave.

The sun streamed through the window and filled the ruined room with light. I lay upon the floor and gasped for breath. Leo wept against the wall, a sound of relief and of terror.

We had lived.

There were footsteps in the hall. Not of a monster, but of a man. The door to his parents’ room opened. A moment later they stood in our doorway. They did not look at the ruin of the room, nor at the pile of debris on the floor where the creature had been.

They looked at me. And I saw on their faces not relief nor any gladness, but only a deep and bottomless disappointment.

The horror was not ended. I knew then that the plan had failed. The sacrifice had not been made. The thing that was the house would be hungry when the sun fell again.

I was the one who got away.