Childhood Fears Read online

  Billy scooted back against the wall, trying to feel the slight rise of the floral prints, to pretend it was his mother rubbing his back, telling him everything was going to be all right. Shush now, there you go.

  Slowly, his lids fell like a curtain over the smiling clown face. Billy slept peacefully the rest of the night, in that half-crouch between the wall and headboard.

  Chapter Three

  Past

  Billy Pallasso’s father used to be called Billy himself when he was a child. No more. These days he preferred Will. Will’s father had been named Jacob.

  Jacob Pallasso had been a tall, ugly man. Thin to a fault.

  Whenever someone would comment on how much Will looked like his mother—Thank goodness he takes after your side of the family, they would say to her—his father would wince but say nothing. His dad was a quiet man who kept things to himself, but Will recognized the winces because his eyes instantly went to his father’s face every time they said things like that, catching the fleeting grimace that lingered there sometimes.

  His dad’s was one of those faces where you knew something was wrong, a little off, but you couldn’t be sure why. Not at first. His nose was a little too big, his eyes a little too buggy, lips a little too thick for his mouth. Each of these things would have been subtle on their own, but together they added up to a face that wasn’t very pleasant to look at.

  Jacob didn’t interact much with his son, never got very close. Will remembered a lot of things about his father, but never the man kissing him on the cheek or hugging him. Over time he stopped caring about that shit, but it sometimes tugged at him. He knew that his father didn’t love him. Not like Mom did. And if he did have any strong feelings, the man never let them show.

  Lucy Pallasso, however, was warm and affectionate throughout Will’s childhood. Years after Jacob’s death, his mother would fall into an occasional, dreamy remembrance of a man Will could not associate with his father, a funny, laughing man full of the spit of life, as she put it. That might have been so, and Will could almost remember such a person, but that changed when Jacob’s father, Will’s grandfather, passed away. His belongings were shipped up to Hillcrest from the old trailer home in Florida, where the man had drunk himself slowly into oblivion.

  Will had friends whose fathers drank, and more often than not they’d got mean, but his father was never much of a drinker. Maybe a glass of wine over a holiday, the occasional beer on a hot summer’s day. Jacob Pallasso prided himself on being in control of himself at all times.

  Over time, however, he developed a cruel streak.

  Once, Jacob set fire to their dog. He swore it was an accident, but Will had watched from his hiding place behind the living room couch and saw though the front window how his father poured kerosene from the yellow bottle, the one used to refill his lighter, across Alfie’s back then light it aflame with his Zippo. The ancient dog ran around the yard yelping. Jacob just stood there, a strange smile on his face. By the time his father put out the flames, Alfie’s fur was burned away. His flesh, especially along his back, was molten and bubbled. The stink of cooking hair and meat filled the air. They had neighbors, but no one saw, or maybe they simply did not speak up. It wasn’t their dog. Alfie died the next day at the vet’s. Will never asked if he’d been put down. The burns were bad, but not enough to kill him.

  That was the only time Will ever shouted at his father. The one time he’d had the nerve to accuse him, scream at him with tears streaming down his face while Jacob calmly claimed the boy didn’t know what he was talking about. That night, when his mother was asleep, Will acquired some burns of his own from the tip of his father’s cigar (circular scars that he still carried and which stung with phantom pain even now), and was told to keep his mouth shut unless he wanted something much worse.

  At least in those days Jacob hadn’t been around much. Either he was at work, on one of his frequent walks, or down in the basement where he took apart old household appliances and radios and put them back together again, whiling his life away. There were entire days when he wouldn’t see his father at all. He liked it that way.

  Jacob worked at “the plant.” Will imagined it was some kind of vast nuclear facility, that his father was one of the men in charge, but he never made much effort to find out. Eventually it didn’t matter. His father was out of work more often than not, and spent more and more time in the basement. Always so far away, his mother would complain.

  So far away. There were times when his father would be sitting in his chair and his eyes would glaze over, like he was somewhere else. Not in his body at all. He could have been on the moon for all Will knew. He’d begun wearing that weird necklace too. The one with the sphere encircled with rings. Something about it scared his mother—hell, scared Will too. It was old, older than his father. The necklace had been in Jacob’s family for generations, a hundred years, maybe more. Passed on from his own father via that crate from Florida.

  Things changed when Will joined the Scouts. His father suddenly took an interest in him. He didn’t go so far as to become a troop leader, but he would actually have conversations with his son, asking about his friends and what kinds of things they did. Will was eager to connect with his dad and was glad for the interest. It was around this time, too, that his father started dressing as a clown. He’d perform at children’s parties on the weekends. Will thought it was weird, and the other guys teased him mercilessly about it, but it was one of the few things that ever seemed to make the man happy, hiding behind that greasepaint, pretending to be someone else. He didn’t seem as ugly behind the makeup. The stoic man who always seemed so out of place in his own skin would finally become animated, almost human. And always, the necklace would dangle across his chest and shine like some New Age crucifix.

  Maybe one day Dad would have passed it on to him, had he lived. By then Will knew better.

  Even now the thought of it sent a shudder of revulsion through him. Ten days before Jacob’s death, Will tried the necklace on in front of the bathroom mirror while his mother cooked dinner and his father napped. As he stared at himself, something happened to his eyes, an image superimposed over his own face. When he took it off, the illusion vanished. The sensation had been so sudden, so alien that, regardless of the fear which had begun crawling along his skin, he watched as his arms lifted the chain again, as if he was not in control, only an observer, and laid it over his shoulders. When the ringed amulet rested against his chest that second time, the visions came. Sharp, painful pictures in his head, of his father, then others beyond him, standing farther down along some piss-yellow hallway. First Will’s dead grandfather, then farther along to countless other men Will did not know but who were lost in the past, who were him in many ways. Some stared back with dead eyes, others were bent over and twisted, doing horrible, confusing things to indistinct shapes around them, an indefinable terribleness which Will could not identify but which sent him rigid with a contradicting mix of fear and excitement.

  He’d found himself unceremoniously pulled from the vision as the metal sphere was lifted from around his neck and his mother stared in horror at him. The fillings in his teeth had ached, he remembered that even now. She had stared without speaking for a few long minutes, holding the necklace as far from herself as possible like a snake.

  What is it, Momma? He’d asked.

  Promise me you’ll never put this on again, she’d said in a breathy reply. It will corrupt you.

  More than the words, which he did not completely understand, her tone had terrified him enough to nod his head and say, Yes, Momma. I promise.

  Ten days later his father was dead. The same night he saw his father in the woods, as the clown, with the boy in pajama bottoms.

  That didn’t happen. That couldn’t have been real. Just a kid’s dream.

  Some parts had been a dream, maybe, him floating down from the bedroom window. The fact that the woods seem
ed to go on forever. But Will knew most of it had been real. Because of what happened afterwards, after the clown finished its killing and flopped/skipped across the clearing to where Will stood frozen by the tree. After the smiling monster reached out and lifted the necklace from around his neck, Will found himself suddenly back in his own yard with his mother waiting for him inside the house.

  Now Will lay in bed thinking about his own son, thanking God that Jacob hadn’t lived to see the next sunrise, or witness Billy come into the world over a decade later. Sometimes he wondered if he seemed as cold and distant to Billy as his own father had in those days. Before they came here, Will didn’t think so, but if this place had become a wall separating him from his family, it wouldn’t be an obstacle for much longer.

  He had to come here, but he should have done this alone, not brought his family with him. The closure he needed did not involve them.

  But they were here and he had work to do. Unfinished business that needed to be attended to.

  Chapter Four

  Present

  The basement was chilly, filled with the lingering odor of dust and mold Will remembered on a level more instinctive than sensory. Here was the world within the foundation of his childhood home. A place of mystery to him as a child. Dark corners, forgotten secrets. A place he feared more than any other, where the nightmare ended almost twenty years earlier, but had been replaced with other, less tangible fears. A place he swore, when he’d left for the chaos of the University of Massachusetts dormitories as an incoming freshman, he would never, ever stand in again. It was a prison his mother had never been able to leave. She’d simply replaced one cage for another. Of course, Will had helped. The sin was both of theirs to share.

  Standing in this place had become a ritual he’d fallen into every morning since they arrived. Or at night, when Billy had settled in and Lisa was brushing her teeth, preparing for a few quiet moments together before bed. This morning he stared down the length of the basement, the space illuminated every ten feet by the exposed, dust-caked bulbs overhead. Will knew he was running out of time, had to begin the two tasks he’d been avoiding all week.

  The house wasn’t large, a simple one-story ranch, hardly forty feet from the western concrete wall behind him, where the stairs descended from the kitchen, to the eastern wall currently lost in shadow where a final bulb had burned out. A dozen boxes were pushed under the stairs on his left, long-stored memories and knick-knacks collected and shunned by his mother over the decades, mostly crap she’d picked up from her constant yard sale excursions. He would need to go through those soon. The boxes were so saggy and damp, once he opened them they’d likely fall apart. Lining the full length of the wall to his right were newer, sturdier boxes they’d picked up at the U-Haul store on the way up here. Far more would be thrown away than re-boxed, he hoped. So far, this had proven true, what little he’d done. Will stared at the boxes, then up at the webs of dust hanging like old party decorations between the floor studs above him.

  He looked everywhere, except at the shrine. The candles had long burned out in their red votive glasses, casting the monstrosity they once illuminated into the shadows where it belonged, easy enough to ignore.

  Who was he kidding? Impossible to ignore. Will breathed in the dusty air, let it out, turned to his left and looked at the last vestige of the nightmare. It took up most of the space against the left wall before it narrowed with the final descent of the staircase above. The space surrounding the altar was cleaned and swept, though it had slowly gathered its own drifts of dust from the floor above. It was a sanctuary, constructed by his late mother’s hands so many years ago, where the penitent—specifically Lucy Pallasso—once knelt. The altar was nothing but a folding card table, its simple details hidden under a moth-eaten red spread of velvet. The votive candles formed a semi-circle atop this, dried leaves scattered between them. What these leaves (or perhaps the plant they’d once belonged to, which had probably been tossed in the trash long ago) symbolized, what purpose they served, Will would never know. But this altar, as dramatic as it was even in shadow, more so when the candles were lit, paled in significance compared to the three-foot tall white woman standing on top of it. She faced Will but looked serenely down at the table, or at what lay below the concrete.

  The Virgin Mary was not meant to be here, hidden from the world in some madwoman’s cellar, standing guard over a dead monster. Her displeasure seemed to emanate from her otherwise kind, alabaster face. I do not wish to be here, she once told him in a hangover-induced nightmare while he was in college. I have other needs in the world than to protect one family from its own terrible sins.

  He remembered waking from that dream and screaming, sending his sleeping and equally hung-over roommate crashing to the floor beside him. In that dream, he’d been staring in the darkened dormitory room to the white Mary standing beside his bed, looking down as she always did, only at him instead of the altar. Perfect, white face, red-painted lips, glistening and full in the dream, not like here in the basement where they had long faded and chipped.

  I do not wish to be here, those lips told him in the dream. I have other needs in the world than to protect…and as these words came her voice sharpened, grew louder and filled with loathing…one family from its own terrible sins. She’d said nothing else, only stared while Will had lay in his narrow bed, heart pounding, waiting, wondering what he was supposed to do about it. Mary’s face lost its loving softness, hardened like the plaster she truly was and twisted into a grimace of fury. There was the rustle of cloth as her robes spread out, long white arms reaching toward him. She’d snarled and closed her cold fingers across Will’s face.

  That was, naturally, when he’d woken both himself and his roommate, Benny Dziekiewicz, with his screams.

  Now, in the dim, dust-covered light of the overhead bulb, she only looked sad. Maybe she was asleep. The statue was about half the height of an actual human. Even so, she seemed real enough. A beautiful, chipped woman waiting to be freed from sentry duty.

  On Saturday, he’d had no choice but to come down here. Will remained only long enough to leave the empty boxes and scurry back up the bulkhead steps with his back to this hellish makeshift chapel. Each day since, he’d managed to stay a little longer, stare a little longer, always with the fear deep in his chest that she would look up suddenly, grab his face and push it down through the card table. Into the basement floor. See what you have done, boy!

  He gasped, whispered, “Stop it, you idiot. Grow up.”

  There was work to do, loose ends to tie off and throw into the river. But first, this macabre staging had to come down and go away forever.

  Will looked at his watch. No time to start today. He and Lisa had decided this morning to take Billy to Lexington and Concord for an all day field trip. They needed some better family time on this trip. Maybe tonight he’d begin, or tomorrow. Billy was doing better, the glowing image of the happy clown—in Will’s mind, the reminder of his father (though he would never tell his son this) —was helping. But Will doubted he or Lisa could keep the kid from coming down here. One look at his grandmother’s little altar and Billy’s restful nights would be over for a long time.

  Chapter Five

  Past

  Will was thirteen the night his father died.

  His mother had practically ran into the kitchen when he’d stumbled in from outside through the back door, returning from the dream which was not a dream. Will’s face and feet were scratched and dirty, stained from a return trip out of the impossible woods behind the house, a trip he could not remember because the time between losing the necklace and suddenly looking up from a crouch in his back yard was instantaneous, no different than coming out of a dream. There had to have been a return to the house, no other explanation, but in his mind there had been none between the moment he’d been certain his fate would be like that of the other boy, and seeing his house looming in front of him, eve
ry light blazing.

  In the kitchen, after an initial flood of relief, Lucy Pallasso’s face had tightened and locked in an expressionless mask. Except her eyes, still wide-eyed with relief and a rage Will hadn’t recognized until much later, so alien was it on his mother’s face until that moment. They faced each other for a full minute, neither speaking, not that he had any idea what he could say, still fighting to remember how he’d gotten home. She finally reached out and ran her soft fingers across his streaked tears and nodded, very slightly. In that moment, Will guessed that she knew what he’d seen, maybe had known this secret for some time. Like the rest of her face, her eyes hardened, cold blue even in the murk of the night. They told him she’d had enough.

  “Go to bed, William,” she’d said softly. “Everything will be all right.”

  He was in his bedroom a long time with the door closed, something his mother did not ordinarily permit, trying to shake the image of what he’d seen in the woods. The boy tied to the tree with Will’s father dancing around him, yellow-white clown suit glowing in the moonlight. Shafts of light breaking through the trees into the clearing, highlighting the man toying with his prey before the kill.

  The knife, the blood.

  The clown dancing toward him and lifting the ringed necklace from around his neck.

  Will kept shaking, curled under the covers. He just wanted to disappear, to get sucked into the mattress and the sheets and the pillows, pulled into oblivion. Sleep was a lost hope, unable as he was to shut off the movie reels that played over and over in his mind.

  He had no idea how many hours went by. As he replayed every moment, every image in his head from beneath the sheets, a hand touched him, gently pulled the sheets away to expose his head. His mother, breathing in the dark with ragged breaths like she might be crying. She leaned in, whispered into his ear, “It’s time.”