Childhood Fears Page 6

  “Will,” she said, staring at the flashing screen. “I don’t know what the hell is going through your head, but I don’t think we should stay here.”

  “We can’t leave yet. I’m not done doing what I have to do. It won’t be much longer.”

  Lisa turned sideways on the couch and pulled one leg under her to face him. Her expression was a dance between anger and surprise. “And just what in hell are you doing down there?” Now that the silent bubble had burst, Lisa was released from her self-imposed paralysis and could not stop moving. She turned a little more, pulling her other leg up until she was kneeling on the cushions. Will knew her well enough to know he needed to remain quiet, for the moment at least. She wasn’t done talking.

  “Ever since we got here, hell, since we began planning to come here, you’ve been this, this, mental wreck!” Her arm moved up and down, as if conducting her side of the conversation. “We’ve had this discussion before, I know that. You promised to tell me some day what happened when you were a kid and I promised to give you time, but…shit, Will! You’re digging up the cellar floor.” Her words tumbled and rolled over each other like storm waves. “You tell Billy there were big cracks but I don’t remember that, or ever talking about doing anything like this, not to mention you might as well have thrown me up the stairs when I asked about it. What the hell is going on?” She looked into her lap for a few heartbeats, then softened her voice, only a little but enough so Will would take it as a good sign. “Yes, I’m a little pissed. I admit it. We don’t keep secrets from each other, but I’m starting to think you’ve got some whoppers. I’m also scared. Not just for you. Billy’s nightmares are coming back, and I’ll admit…”

  Her posture slumped, caught for the right word, but the silence stretched. What?” he finally said.

  She shook her head, the index finger of her right hand unconsciously touching her mouth. She bit down lightly. “Nothing. Never mind. It’s stupid.”

  Will didn’t push her. This was an opportunity to end the conversation, or at least turn it around. Lisa’s next words escaped like a breath. “I hate that damned clown.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  And it hates me, Lisa wanted to add, but knew she could not say that. She didn’t want this conversation to suddenly be about her. It was about Will acting like a lunatic, chopping up the floor and keeping secrets. Will was lying about something. He needed to remain in the center of this conversation. Not her, not the clown. Just dreams. Stupid, bad dreams.

  Then why the hell was she so afraid to continue this line of discussion? Because to admit anything strange, more than the behavior of the two most important men in her life, would be to feed whatever delusions they’d fallen under. Billy’s problems were to be expected. He was just a kid. But Will was an adult, older than her by two years. She shouldn’t have to worry about his sanity.

  She folded her arms under her breasts and forced herself to stare directly at him. “What the hell are you doing down there, Will?”

  She expected him to avoid the question by jumping on her remark about the clown, but he didn’t. Instead, Will turned on the couch to face her, as if this was a prerequisite tonight for speaking. His expression was set, hard but not angry, only serious. They faced each other like two people hunkered over a long-running chess game. He reached up, freed one of her hands and held it between both of his own with a gentleness that belied his current expression.

  “Lisa, I’m going to ask you for one thing, one promise you have no reason to give me, considering how I’ve been acting. But I’m going to ask you to promise it to me anyway. In return, I’ll make a promise too. An oath, if that’ll help. I’ll even swear to God if we can find Mom’s old family Bible.”

  He smiled. It helped. This gave her enough assurance to nod once and say, “What?”

  He scooted sideways a little more. “There’s something I need to do, something so important that I’m going to tell you right now, with no disrespect intended, that I’m going to do it no matter what you say. Tomorrow. And I’d like the two of you to go out and do more fun things while I do. Give me one day alone to finish.”

  She stiffened, felt her hand reflexively begin to pull away. His grip, though still soft, tightened enough in a silent plea: Wait, let me finish.

  “Then, tomorrow night, once everything is done without either you or Billy taking any part, I’ll tell you everything.” The intensity of his gaze softened, nearly went out as he looked away, stared at the floor. “You may decide it’s too much when you hear what I…what I have to say. You may ask me to leave and never come back. I’ll accept that.” He gazed into her eyes. His own had flecks of brown in otherwise blue pools. “I won’t like it, don’t want that at all, I swear. But I’ll accept it.”

  She almost said, Unless there’s a body in the basement, Will, I can’t imagine what would make me leave you… Those exact words had come to her and just as quickly she bit down on her lip before they could escape. She shivered and mentally tossed the words away because they were absurd. Impossible.

  All of a sudden she did not want to know the truth. All of a sudden Lisa wanted nothing except for time to stop in this moment, or maybe two seconds earlier, before the errant words had flitted into her brain, before she had to bite them back for reasons she did not understand.

  She was being stupid.

  Will was silent, searching her face for a reaction. She hadn’t moved, probably hadn’t blinked in these past few seconds. She closed her eyes, let a new thought creep its way through the blanket of cold dread which covered her head and shoulders. Whatever he is up to, it can’t be as bad as that. So you can wait one more day, and realize your imagination is far worse than reality. Life will be good again. Life will be good forever…

  The thought brought comfort, enough to allow her to move at last, nod her head.

  The cold remained, however, even as Will slid forward and swallowed her in a long, silent hug. One more day, Lisa thought. Then it’ll all be over.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The room was dark, except for small shafts of moonlight shining through the flapping shade hanging an inch lower than the open sash of the bedroom window. A cold breeze blew across Billy’s face, the only part of him exposed to the air. He stared at the glowing face across the room, having to blink now and then as his eyes dried in the constant breeze. Outside, freshly fallen leaves danced and played among themselves on the lawn. He and Dad would probably rake the yard before they left. Billy loved that. Dad always let him make one big pile back home so Billy could run and dive into it. Feet first, though, Dad’s number one rule. Never hands- or head-first, in case an errant stick might be waiting to poke an eye out or something. Gram Lucy’s yard had more trees than at their house, with woods out back. Plenty of leaves. He could hear them…not just outside. There were sounds of their rustling from the hallway, just outside his closed bedroom door. Wait. That was stupid. The sound had to be coming from outside, bouncing off the door like dolphin clicks, or bats echoing.

  The night light clown’s face flickered, faded, brightened a moment before fading again. The wind, messing with the power lines, maybe. Last year a squirrel had climbed the pole on their old street, fried itself on the transformer. Billy hadn’t seen it, no charred squirrel corpse on the road the next day, but that’s what his father had said. Maybe the same thing was happening now. Here.

  Light rustling and taps against the bedroom door. It sure sounded like leaves. Billy, watching the dying, fading face, blinked when it glowed bright only to flicker again. The effect was strangely lulling in this late hour. He didn’t want to check the time, afraid it might be midnight. He’d fallen asleep, hearing his parents’ indistinct voices in the living room, and the sound of the television. Now the house was quiet, except wind and leaves outside. Just outside, though, not in the house.

  The clown’s face went completely dark. For a few seconds Billy saw its after-image
lingering then that, too, faded. He was alone and awake in the middle of the night in total darkness. The power must be out. The thought didn’t frighten him until he noticed the dim line of light under the bedroom door. The light in the hall was still on. The black wall where the clown light used to shine suddenly seemed a lot darker than he liked.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The thing in the basement moved a little more, dragging itself on elbows thin like fallen branches, clothes all but faded away, skin limp and dead over stringy muscles. Pieces of the tattered throw rug which had been its funeral shroud slid away. All of which, the carpet and the body itself, should never be, should have long decayed and blended with the earth. Still, the body moved, stumps of its thighs dragging behind. The severed legs themselves remained in the hole, abandoned, forgotten like discarded chicken bones. The clown was free, however, and this freedom was an overwhelming sensation. That, and the presence of two things which drove the body forward.

  First and foremost, the necklace, powerful and having rested for so long mere inches above the clown’s head, never within reach. No longer confined, the creature inched forward, hands once soft and pliable that could do so much to so many children, were now draped with skin hanging like oversized gloves on a little boy’s hands. It reached out, not close enough to touch the chain. It dragged itself farther on elbows of exposed bone. The body hissed in its rags across the floor, sounding like a broom. It reached out again, and dead fingers closed around the rings orbiting the silver ball, felt new life pouring in. The fingers were as thin and dead in their equally dead skin-gloves, but there was an energy in them now, power as it fumbled its fingers to the chain and dragged it along like a toy toward the stairs.

  The second thing urging it forward, less so than the necklace but as important, was the presence of his son in the house. Once-beloved, but turned traitorous, a murderer. Billy—Jacob’s Billy—was an adult now. The creature slid a few more inches closer to the bottom step. The boy still called himself Will, never wanted to use the name his old man had for him. There was another presence, too, the child whom the clown touched for the first time only a few days ago with its sleeping, half-dead mind. Jacob had a grandson. Rather, the thing which used to be Jacob had a grandson.

  A second chance.

  Lips, once traced with paint but now with the barest remnants of flakes along gray skin, parted. They opened and closed, opened and closed, and in that time one word, like a first, tentative breath, escaped as sound into the darkness. “Billy…” It pulled itself and the necklace along. The hiss of its skin and clothes across the dusty, rubble-strewn floor, an occasional hitch when shriveled lungs attempted to take in air, and the whisper again of one name, “Billy,” were the chorus it moved to, stronger every second. The necklace glowed ever so faintly, offering the slow warmth of its power growing inside the otherwise cold, dead basement, and inside the clown. Strong, it thought. I am strong. I have life.

  No, the necklace whispered into its shriveled pit of mind, we have life.

  The clown worked its voice, turning it over like a long used engine, parts inside a body unused for so long. Diaphragm weak and quivering, vocal chords the thinnest of membranes like discarded spider webs, tightening, stretching, coming to terms with the world again. The eyes of the clown were always open, since most of the lids had disintegrated below the dried remnants of the black tape, disintegrated like the rest of the body should have done if not for the preserving power of the amulet so close above it—stupid, stupid woman, it thought with growing humor, you should have thrown it away, destroyed it. Then your children, our children, would have been safe.

  Billy-Now-Will had trashed the altar, shattered any weak powers it might have had over the thing which had once been Jacob Pallasso, over the necklace and all that lived within it. Had that been Will’s own doing, or could the spirits within the necklace control his son as Jacob himself had been so willingly controlled when he was alive, when he was human? Probably.

  Likely.

  No matter. Eventually the altar would have been removed by another, and the necklace would have reclaimed its own. Certainly those within wouldn’t have let Jacob rot away, or would have found someone else to carry on their purpose. Now, it thought, as one unfeeling hand reached out and touched fingertips to the dusty wood of the first step, there was an opportunity to mend the severed line. Return the necklace to the path it had been traveling through so many generations of Pallassos, before Will broke the cycle.

  The clown used the step to pull itself up to the bottom landing as the necklace banged against the wood, then the creature rolled sideways along the landing and stared up, toward the basement door. Eyes bulged in their sockets as if something within the skull was inflating them. Nothing else changed, no miraculous healing. Only the eyes, and the strength stored for generations inside the necklace, filled with so much innocent blood. The forces within, coiled like a hundred thousand snakes, had preserved him for this moment. One purpose. Protect the line.

  Now it was the clown’s turn for redemption.

  Billy, the younger, the grandson, was waiting to be a true Pallasso.

  It pulled the necklace to its chest, having to roll farther on its side to do so. The thing that had been Jacob could not put it on, for its life had ended, its time had passed. But the hundred thousand snakes had waited too long and they were hungry. More strength flowed from the talisman, more anger and hatred recycled and used as blood and air in its dead heart and lungs. It—for he was an it now, neither male nor female nor even human—sucked in a deep, dusty breath, felt a sudden sharp pain through every inch of its body. Wonderful pain. It meant life, to touch and feel and now shout, “Billy!” toward the basement door and beyond.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Will opened his eyes. The bedroom was dark, but shapes took form in the corner of the room where the two walls converged over the door, dimly outlined by the light in the hallway. Across everything, like water, pale shapes were cast by the street light outside, remnant shadows of leaves which had stubbornly refused to fall this early in autumn. Like Billy, Lisa had left the window open a crack, cool autumn air blowing in as justification for the comforter draped over them. This early in the season, the nights were cool enough to justify it, providing the window was open.

  He did not move.

  Something had woken him. Billy, crying out? Will waited, heard nothing more than the rustle of leaves in the hall beyond the door.

  Wait, no. That wasn’t right. Leaves outside the window…but as he listened, the rationale wouldn’t stick. There was a soft tapping against the door, not from the nervous fingers of his son but by something hardly there, conjuring an image of leaves rustling against the door. It had to be something else. Unless they’d left the front door open, but that made no sense. Even if it had been open, the screen door beyond would have kept anything out.

  There was gentle breathing beside him, Lisa as deep and lost in sleep as always. He envied that in his wife. She could sleep through the most violent storms, never waking until the morning when Will hit the snooze button and gave her a gentle nudge. Unlike him. Will woke two, three times a night. In most cases he could fall back to sleep, temporary as it may be. Sometimes not. In those latter moments he would simply prop himself up with pillows against the headboard, turn on the bedside lamp and read for a half hour. Lisa never woke, not without that nudge she trusted he’d give her in the morning, every morning.

  Silence, save whatever was making the leaf-rustling noise beyond the door. Billy, then. Maybe his pajamas brushing against it as he waited, afraid to come in and admit another nightmare. Will lay unmoving beneath the weight of the comforter, waiting for Billy to go back to bed on his own, to realize the folly of his terror, see the nightmare he’d probably just woken from for what it was: insubstantial, unimportant.

  The gentle, whispering sound stopped. Outside, the wind which he hadn’t realized had been blowing
until it stopped, died away. In those final moments Will felt the slow pull of sleep, hoping Billy had returned to his room on tiptoe, leaving his father to stay in the warmth of his own bed.

  The moment ended when Will heard the sound of his own father’s voice, broken and wailing and unmistakably that of Jacob Pallasso, so loud it echoed throughout the house. The voice did not come from the hallway, or outside the window, but literally through the house, inside the walls and up through the floor.

  “Billy!”

  One word, sounding both like cry and a scream directly in Will’s ear.

  Something inside his head tightened, as if his brain had physically cringed at the sound of a voice it never expected to hear again. A voice it could never hear again.

  Lisa kept sleeping.

  He was dreaming. Had to be dreaming.

  To prove it, he pulled aside the sheet and comforter and swung his legs over the side of the bed, sitting up. He wore only thin pajama bottoms, the habit of wearing anything the result of so many nights awake with Billy. The cold washed over him like water.

  He wasn’t asleep.

  But he hadn’t heard that voice, either. He couldn’t have. It must have been Billy.

  The leaves outside the bedroom came to life again, the sound unmistakable now that he was so aware of any noise around him. Then a new sound. Footsteps, followed by his son’s voice, his real voice shouting through the bedroom door.