Darkness Creeping (33 page)

Whatever happened, happened sometime during the night. All I know is that the next day the papers said something about a man disappearing. They didn’t have a picture yet, but I knew who it was. Even before I read the papers, I knew.

You see, that morning I awoke with a spot of sunlight reflecting in my eyes from a piece of sculptured glass sitting on my dresser. It was my own grinning glass beast.

Again, I had left my window open and was half frozen. My teeth were practically chattering out of my head. I wanted to scream in terror when I saw that my creation was back . . . but at the same time I was glad to see it.

As I stared at the glass beast, I could swear that it was closer to me than it originally was. Was it creating some optical illusion the way it did back when it was just weird sand in the Sand Trap?

No, I finally decided, it wasn’t closer—it was . . .
larger
. At least six inches larger than before. And it wasn’t just taller, either. It was broader as well, and its muscles were thicker than those I had given it. In fact, now I could even see fine glass ridges, like tiny veins, in its huge, bulging muscles.

“Come down for breakfast, Philip!” Grandma called from downstairs.

I looked at the thing, wanting to hate it, wanting to tell it to go away. But I couldn’t. The truth was that I didn’t want it to go away.

“I can’t let her see you,” I told my beast, “so I’m going to lock you in here, okay?” Not waiting for an answer—afraid I might actually get one—I quickly left and locked my door.

After school, I went straight to the shop. I didn’t want to think about the glass beast in my room. I just wanted to sit there at the register and smile mindlessly for what few tourists and passersby came into the shop on that cold September day.

As I walked in, Grandma gave me a big smile. “You little sneak,” she said, wagging her finger at me. “To think you kept it from me all this time!”

I didn’t know what she was talking about, and I’ve learned the best thing to do when you’re clueless is to keep your mouth shut until you have a clue.

“I needed to get in to your room to collect your dirty laundry, and I was wondering why you locked your door,” she went on with a grin. “Anyway, I used my old passkey, and do you know what I found in there?”

I gulped a gallon of air. “What?”

“This,” she said, and pointed to the showcase that used to hold her now-headless creations. In their place was a large, crystalline punch bowl carved with such care and sharp precision, it looked like it had been cut out of diamond. It must have cost thousands of dollars.

“When’d you buy this?” I asked her, staring at the rim of the bowl, which had fine beveled edges . . . like teeth.

She laughed. “Stop trying to be funny, Philip. I know that you made it. I just didn’t realize how talented you were!” she exclaimed, giving me a hug. “Tell me, how long have you been hiding this masterpiece in your room?”

All I could do was keep silent, trying to figure out what was going on.

I looked at the bowl’s perfect surfaces, each cut like a gem-stone; its shape perfectly round. I could never make anything like this. Still, there was something familiar about it. I touched it, running my finger down a deep ridge in its surface design.

Cold as ice
, I thought.
Smooth as whalebone
.

Then I shuddered so hard I shook nearly every piece of glass in the room.

But Grandma didn’t even notice. She was busy putting a five-hundred-dollar price tag on the punch bowl.

It sold that same day to a couple driving south, whose names I made a point to forget.

With my bedroom window open, I waited for it that night. The temperature had dropped, and I could feel myself almost disappearing into the cold.

I heard it before I saw it—a hissing, slithering sound through the window, down the cold, coiled radiator, across the wall, and onto my dresser.

So perfect
, I thought.
So beautiful
. And then I let myself relax, like a father who had been waiting for his child to return home.

Fascinated, I watched it take shape once more—its old shape—the beast I had created. I fell asleep staring at it across the room, mesmerized at how the moon, its blue light twisting through the flapping blinds of my open window, painted my beast in fine neon lines.

In the morning when I awoke, it was something new. A chandelier, with glass arms, and dangling from those arms were a hundred beautifully shaped, sharp crystalline spears. It was too heavy for me to carry down the stairs all by myself, but somehow I managed it—probably because the chandelier’s many arms actually helped itself through the hall, like the arms of an octopus.

Grandma looked at it with a sense of apprehension and a vague sense of dread—the kind of dread you feel before you know enough to feel fear.

“You . . .
you
made this?” she asked.

“Of course I did, Grandma.”

She looked into my eyes, trying to catch me in a lie, but she couldn’t, because in a way, I wasn’t lying.

“You must have worked all night,” she said to me coolly.

“No,” I told her. “Actually this is something I’ve been working on for a while. I’ve been, uh, hiding it . . . like the punch bowl.”

“You’ve been hiding a lot of things from me in that room,” she said.

When I just shrugged, she let it go. I knew she was fishing for a lie, but she found only half-truths. Lucky for Grandma she was a firm believer in old sayings like “What you don’t know can’t hurt you” and “Let sleeping dogs lie.”

I strung the chandelier up from a beam in the corner of the shop, and all day long its dangling crystals sang in the breeze like a wind chime whenever someone walked in. It was as if the thing were trying to draw attention to itself. But it didn’t have to do that. Even in the darkest corner of the room, it stood out over everything else in the shop.

It was Mr. Dalton who took an interest in it later that day. He owned an antiques shop a few miles down the road, and usually kept his nose too high in the air to step into a tourist shop like ours. But that nose must have gotten wind of some unusual glass sculptures we’d had in the shop lately, because he’d been here twice, earlier in the day, and here he was sniffing around again.

He’d come in first at around ten, pretending not to look at the chandelier, then again after lunch, with a magnifying glass. Finally he returned a third time as we were getting ready to close for the evening, clearly ready to talk business.

“How much do you want for it?” he asked as he ran his finger along its six glass arms, marveling at the fine-cut design of its dangling shards, each sharp as a razor.

“It’s not for sale, Mr. Dalton,” said Grandma without even looking at it. “It’s—”

“Seven hundred dollars,” I blurted out. It was mine, and I could sell it if I wanted to. Or at least I could “rent” it.

Mr. Dalton laughed a practiced laugh—the kind he gave whenever he was bargaining with someone.

“Come, now,” he said. “Don’t be ridiculous, son. After all, it may be unique, but it’s full of imperfections. There are flaws in the design, and—”

“No, there aren’t,” I countered, staring him straight in the eye. “It’s perfect . . . absolutely perfect. Seven hundred dollars, or no deal.”

He gritted his teeth through his congenial smile, furious to be outbargained by a fourteen-year-old. “Very well,” he said. Then he paid me in cash, probably figuring he would sell it in his own shop for over a thousand.

As I helped Mr. Dalton carry the chandelier out of the shop, Grandma looked at me, trying to read something in my face. But lately it seemed my face was unreadable, even to me as I stared at myself in the mirror each morning.

“Would you mind riding with me to my store?” Mr. Dalton asked after we’d put the chandelier into the back of his van.

“I could sure use your help carrying it in.”

Figuring he’d sort of paid for my help already, I hopped into the front seat, and we took off.

It was as I was carrying the chandelier from Mr. Dalton’s van to his shop that I thought I heard it breathe through the tinkling of its many dangling crystals. It sounded like the rush of the ocean when you put your ear to a shell.

Once inside Dalton’s shop, we hoisted the chandelier up with a rope over a beam, right in the center of the room. It took a while, and by the time we were done, it was already dark outside. The antiques shop was lit with dim yellow incandescent lights that glimmered off the hanging chandelier, casting tiny spots of light around the room like fireflies.

I hung around, waiting for something to happen.

“It’s not that far,” Mr. Dalton said to me after a few moments. “I suspect you can walk home from here.”

I shrugged, glanced at the chandelier again, and waited.

“I hope you don’t think you’re getting a tip for bringing it over,” he said coldly. “I’ve already paid through the nose as it is.”

And that’s when it happened. The crystalline monstrosity jerked itself off the rope and fell.

Spinning out of the way just in time, Mr. Dalton looked with wonder, which quickly built into horror, at the chandelier. It had landed on the ground like a cat, barely making a sound. Then, two crystalline spheres hanging in its center turned toward the terrified man. And both he and I knew at that moment that those spheres were the thing’s eyes.

Amazed, I watched it skitter on the wooden floor like a giant glass spider and then spring across the room, landing right on top of Mr. Dalton. He sputtered something I couldn’t hear, but he didn’t have a chance to scream as the chandelier’s glass arms swung inward, and its hundred dangling crystals became teeth as sharp as the shards of a broken bottle.

It was feeding.

I couldn’t watch a moment longer, and I ran to the next room, stumbling over furniture, smashing my shins. Quickly I slammed the door behind me, then collapsing in an old high-backed chair, I turned the chair around so I didn’t even have to see the door.

That’s when I spotted an old-time radio, large and wooden, across the room. I raced over and turned it on, found a station, and cranked up the music full blast, drowning out the sounds coming from the other room. For five minutes I sat there . . . then ten . . . then twenty. Finally I dared to turn off the radio.

There was silence in the other room, and soon my curiosity began to match my fear. Slowly I made my way back in, opening the creaking door, terrified of what I might see.

But when I finally looked in, I saw no sign of Mr. Dalton—not a button, not a shoelace . . . and the creature—my creature—sat there in the very center of the room. It had resumed its old form now—the gargoyle beast that I had first created. I could hear it breathing a heavy satisfied breath, and I could see its chest rising and falling.

Slowly the beast moved toward me, but I didn’t run. My feet were frozen, and I couldn’t move. It came up close and brushed against me, purring like a cat. I reached out and stroked its icy mane. The second I touched it, my fear began to drain away, replaced by numbness. In fact, I could feel the creature draining away everything I had ever felt. Everything good, everything bad—all of it was slipping away into a cold emptiness. It was like sinking into quicksand.