Nightmare Man

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  Nightmare Man © 2013 by Alan Ryker

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Always to Christina

  Thanks to the entire DarkFuse staff for their work on this book, especially

  Dave Thomas and Shane Staley.

  Like usual, I feel the nightmare man before I see him, before he pulls himself through. The room is black. I kick at the mattress, the sheets slipping beneath my heels until I’m sitting, my shoulderblades pressed against the cold wall, my pillows bunched behind my lower back. From here, I watch.

  I watch the darkest corner, a recess where an entertainment center is meant to go. I keep nothing there, because the things that go there get destroyed. I’ve covered it before, stapled a sheet over it, but the only thing worse than watching the nightmare man’s birth is knowing he’s making the transition from shadow to substantial shadow unseen. He’s bolder then. He knows he has time to gather his strength. I took the sheet down.

  I watch the darkest corner, the darkness there so dark it becomes a gate. It becomes liquid. I stare harder, straining my eyelids back, my eyes bulging out until I am able to perceive the truth of the shadow, the way it swirls and pulses. It is still true black. But what my mind can see that others can’t is the truth in the blackness. It’s like oil on water on asphalt, black on pure, invisible dimensionality on black. It’s from this matrix of black planes that the nightmare man becomes.

  No, he doesn’t become, except from the perspective of our world. He is, regardless. He always was, I think. But he gains a dimension of substance in the transition. A dimension parallel to ours, and near enough to reach across.

  A hand reaches from out of the shadow. A shadow gripping shadow to pull the rest of the nightmare man through. I push my heels into the bed and press my back flatter against the wall.

  I’m fascinated with hands. Forget faces, hands are the hardest part of the human body to draw. And they can tell as much about a person. Or monster.

  This hand has long, subtle fingers. It’s an artist’s hand. The hand of a creator.

  The nightmare man creates itself from the pooled shadow, pulling itself through and bringing shadow with it like a mold pressing through film, not bursting through it but manifesting in it. The nightmare man’s mind is the mold, the shadow his material.

  The darkest corner becomes a tetrahedron with one insubstantial face (like most artistic kids, I loved high school geometry as math I could understand). A black gateway opens across a corner created by two walls and the floor of that recessed area. The nightmare man continues to drag himself through it. The hand grips and pulls and an arm emerges, then another hand. They brace not on the floor, but on that insubstantial black triangle hovering in the corner like a sheet web woven of the black silk of a nightmare spider. The hands with their long fingers press down, and a head and body emerge, shadow draped in a cloak of shadow. It crawls out then, crouched, and finally looks toward me.

  Inside the perfectly black shadow of that perfectly black cloak, a perfectly black face I’ve never seen swivels toward me. I can feel the eyes like beams of cold. They rake over my naked torso as I drive myself against the wall. I can’t scream yet. We could both remain motionless. That is what we should do, remain motionless until the sun rises, and he can crawl back into his shadow before it disappears, and I can live through another night.

  He springs. One moment his arms are stretched wide across the carpet, one hand still gripping the edge of the solid shadow, the next he is in the air, reaching for me.

  I have never seen his face, but I know his touch consumes. I don’t believe that beneath the hood lies anything as simple as teeth. The nightmare man doesn’t eat in that way. But his entire head is a hungry maw, a hole leading back to his world. He is the consuming appendage of a dark place, pressed through to devour what it can. He’s the cat paw reaching into the mouse hole.

  The slack in the fitted sheet is still cupped around my heels, and I kick wildly, forcing myself back against the wall and then up it as the nightmare man hurtles toward me. The elastic of the fitted sheet finally gives up on holding to the mattress, my feet go out from under me as it slides to the end of the bed and I land on my ass and curl up.

  When nothing happens, I open my eyes. He isn’t in sight, but I’m not safe.

  I jump to my feet just in time, standing up on the puffy naked mattress just as black blades come sliding through where my body had been only moments ago. I move around. His hands, grown long and sharp, slip through the mattress. He stabs at my feet. I manage to evade the slashes, but eventually I can’t take the tension. The floor is dangerous, but I can’t keep up this dance. I can’t keep one step ahead of him. He’ll catch a foot, and I’ll collapse and he’ll run me through, slipping a shadow blade into something vital.

  So I leap, putting distance between myself and the dark space he’s melted into beneath the bed. He’s strongest there, in the shadow. He grows to its size, occupies it, draws from it, becomes it. If I were to step nearer the bed, he’d drag me under and do the same thing to me. Feed me to his dimension.

  I wait for him to make his move.

  “Honey, are you okay? What was that?”

  The doorknob clicks. Someone’s touched it, but hasn’t turned it. I crouch. It could be Shannon. She can’t come in. The nightmare man would get her. But it might be the nightmare man, tricking me. He might be in the hall, hoping that speaking in my wife’s voice will confuse me, give him the split second he needs.

  Either way, that door can’t open.

  “I’m fine.” When my voice hits the hollow door, it buzzes.

  “Why aren’t you in bed?”

  She knows exactly why I’m not in bed, so what’s the game? That door can’t open. But when whatever’s on the other side jostles the knob a bit more, I slide back a step, still crouched.

  Then I realize if it is my wife on the other side of the door, it means the nightmare man might still be under the bed, and I spin around. A tentacle of darkness halts its progress toward me, caught in the beam of my eyes, which can be something like light to the shadow, if not destructive, at least uncomfortable.

  The shadow retracts.

  “I’m fine!” I bellow, because I’m not at all fine, and whatever is opening the door is making me less fine with every passing moment. It’s paralyzing me, dividing my attention, and I can’t help but suspect that’s its intention. I can’t stay out in the open like this. I have to get my back into a corner. I slide again toward the bed, watching it now, watching that entrance into a dark dimension between the mattress and the floor. “I’m fine.”

  The knob spins hard and quick, hitting the limit with a metallic click. The door opens, and I spring, hands out. It only takes me one step to reach the door, but the hand slipping through the gap has time to snake back out before I slam into the thin wood and smash it closed with a hollow, wall-shaking boom.

  I spin and drop down to my haunches, relief floods me at having my back against something solid.

  “Goddamn it, Jessie!”

  I hear more curses, but also footsteps heading away from the door, and I relax a bit.

  There’s no way the nightmare man can sneak up on me from here.

  * * *
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  Shannon makes a little noise as I get out of bed, a cross between a grunt and a whine, then rolls over and flops her arm across my spot. It’s 5:20 AM by the time I get out of the shower. The room is dark, but I feel no sense of danger as I reach into the closet to pull out my Polo shirt, khaki slacks and brown dress shoes. As I get dressed, my body aches out of proportion to its thirty-three years. This is part of life, and I push it out of my mind.

  The programmable coffee machine rarely lets me down, and hot coffee is waiting for me. I pour a cup in the dark, add some milk. I used to feel an aesthetic obligation to drink my coffee black, but now I make a concession to the ferocious heartburn that creeps up my throat at just the thought.

  With the refrigerator door shut, I sink into the darkness again. The light is too much right now. I mentally prepare myself for the day ahead, swallowing a panic attack that would love to wrap electric adrenaline fingers around my heart and send me slinking back to bed to bury myself in blankets, cover my head and refuse to respond to Shannon’s questions.

  The idea is too appealing. I have to avoid thoughts like that. Instead, I force my breathing to slow, force my lungs to stop their fluttering and inhale deeply, hold, exhale deeply, so deeply it hurts. Before the first breath, I lift my head from the table, where I didn’t even realize I’d settled it, to open my chest. I got the technique from my anxiety book, and it does help.

  When you force your body to breathe like you aren’t scared, your body assumes you must not be and halts the downward spiral, the adrenal feedback loop. I could never stick with the meditation and its promises of peace at some point in the future, but the breathing always helps.

  I gulp some more coffee. The caffeine doesn’t help with my anxiety, but it’s so damn early, and I must not have slept well last night, because I’m exhausted, which takes a work day already stretched to misperception’s limits by my horrible job and twists it into some sort of endless Escherian nightmare, so that there is no forward or back, no progression or even regression, and it seems like the only escape is to jump sideways into nothingness.

  There’s always a way out.

  I hear a shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, and I prepare myself. She wouldn’t, though.

  She does, flip the kitchen light on.

  “Gah, honey,” I say, squinting at her. She’s squinting back, looking as tired as I feel. But she gets to sleep for another hour, and then can go back to bed if she wants after she drops the kids at school.

  The kitchen’s sunny yellow color scheme seems like a ghoulish joke at this hour and in my current state of mind.

  “We have to talk,” Shannon says. “You tried to break my arm last night.”

  “Oh yeah?” It’s not the sort of thing I can get worked up about anymore. I don’t say it, but she knows the rules.

  She waits for me to say more, and when I don’t, says, “Yeah. I heard you going crazy in there, so I tried to reach in and flip the light on, and you slammed into the door so hard that if I hadn’t heard you coming, my arm would be in a cast.”

  I look at her, and the look says she knows she can’t come into the room when I’m having a night terror. If I’d said it, she’d lay into me, but for some reason, transmitting it in this nonverbal fashion puts her on the defensive. We’ve been married a long goddamn time.

  She says, “I could tell from your voice that you were moving away from the door, or I wouldn’t have tried.”

  “So your voice scared me off and you thought it was okay to come in?” I’m too tired even to scoff. The night comes back to me in pieces. The nightmare man was there. I almost remember Shannon opening the door, but so much of the memory is imagined already, because the nightmare man appears with the same solidity as she does.

  “I figured my voice woke you up and you were going back to bed.”

  “Then why would you turn on the light? Either saying my name had broken the night terror and I was going back to bed, or you freaked me out and I was going to try to break your arm.”

  The expression on her face tells me I pushed my slight advantage way too far. Right off a cliff. I want to will myself unconscious. I want to slam my head into the table, but she’d freak out and I can’t handle a raised voice.

  “Jessie, I’d been asleep on that lumpy couch when you woke me up, throwing yourself around the room. I didn’t want you to hurt yourself. I didn’t stop outside the room and think through everything, because as far as I knew, you were about to injure yourself again. The point is, we can’t keep going like this. We need to sleep. I should be sleeping with you.”

  She got me. Now I feel guilty, on top of everything else. “You want some coffee?”

  “Hell no. I’m going back to bed after this.”

  I shrug and take a sip. “We do sleep in the same bed.”

  “I spend half the night on the couch.”

  “You only need to spend a couple of hours on the couch. You could set an alarm.”

  “I’m not going to set an alarm for midnight. I’d never get back to sleep. You know this.”

  I do know this. I know all of this so well that I can see all the possible branches of the conversation exploding out like a schematic drawing. It’s like one of the choose-your-own-adventure books I read over and over again as a kid. I could take whatever path I wanted, make the story do whatever I wanted, as long as what I wanted was one of the options provided. The one thing I couldn’t do was create a new path. This argument has no new paths. We’ve discovered them all, then traversed them multiple times. Like those choose-your-own-adventure books, they share elements. Different lines converge at the same arguments, but then diverge again depending upon our responses.

  I truly don’t understand why she made an effort to get up at 5:30 in the morning to have the same conversation we’ve had a hundred fucking times. I tend to only freak out for the first hour of sleep. Two at most. So I go to bed at around 10:00. Shannon only needs to stay awake until 11:00, and then if I’m sleeping okay, she can come to bed, too. But she never manages to stay awake that long. She always falls asleep watching the news, and then ends up spending half the night on the couch. Hell, sometimes she doesn’t make it to bed until 5:00, when I get her from the living room after waking up well-rested because she hasn’t spent the night crowding me and shoving the point of her elbow into my head.

  I don’t mention that I prefer it when she sleeps on the couch. Instead I say, “So what do you suggest?” even though I know exactly what the next line in the script is.

  “You need to talk to your doctor about your medication. We can’t go on like this.”

  She’s been saying that for years, and yet we’d managed to go on.

  “Clonazepam is the standard medication. There is no cure for night terrors, no treatment other than tranquilizers. Increasing the dose will just turn me into a benzo addict. My body will adjust and then one milligram will only manage to do what half a milligram was doing before, so then I’d take two, then three, then five, and the only difference would be that if I missed a dose, I’d have a seizure.”

  “Then why are you taking anything? Because it’s not working.”

  The paths diverge. I don’t know why I choose to take the worst, the rockiest, the most dangerous, the one ending with You die. Try again. I guess because I’m tired and angry, and I’m stuck in another feedback loop.

  “We both know why it’s not working.”

  “So change jobs! No one is stopping you.” The anger comes from guilt. I don’t care. She should feel guilty.

  “I have a fucking fine arts—”

  “Don’t curse at me.”

  Deep breath.

  “Shannon, I have a fine arts degree. I am qualified to illustrate. Or I was ten years ago. Nothing in that degree translates into any job that both pays well and isn’t horrible. I can have one or the other. I manage to get decent money because I work a job no one else wants to do, and we both know it. I didn’t flip out every night when I worked at ScanTech, but there’s only one w
ay for me to get a lower-stress job, and that’s for money to come in from somewhere else.”

  We both know she’s the potential “somewhere else.” The kids are finally both in school all day, and because we live in Colorado but I go into work at 6:00 in time to collect on the East Coast, I could pick up the kids after school and she could get a normal eight-to-five.

  Her eyes, already red from sleep, get more red, then moist. In a moment, her shoulders will slump. Then the tears will overflow. Then I will get up and hug her and rub her back through her oversized Bugs Bunny T-shirt and feel terrible, and if she gets snot on my shirt, I’ll have to change it.

  “I’m hungry!” Logan slides past her and sits at the table, facing me. I glance at the microwave clock. Who’s hungry at 5:45 in the morning?

  Oh shit, 5:45.

  “I gotta go, hun.” Her face is no longer twisting up like a wet rag set on dripping. I give her a kiss on the forehead to avoid the morning breath, then hand her my cup of coffee. It’s still half-full. “I guess you’re not going back to bed.”

  I manage to get my back turned to her before a smile splits my face.

  I’m putting on my jacket when she says, “I’m making an appointment for you.”

  “Okay, sure.” If it makes her happy, and a doctor’s appointment means paid time away from work.

  I step out into the brisk morning feeling vulnerable. It’s hard to explain, but I need my quiet time in the morning to put on my armor. I yawn. It’s going to be a very long day.

  * * *

  “Mr. Jones, do you like having someone else take care of your family? Don’t you want to man up and do the right thing? You need to pay your bills. Otherwise, those might as well be my kids. If this goes to court, it’ll ruin your credit. You won’t be able to send your kids to college. You won’t be able to buy them cars—”