Night Things: A Novel of Supernatural Terror (7 page)

Standing in the doorway was something like the figure of a man, only composed solely out of a turbulent and seething darkness. In height the thing towered well over six feet, and occasionally in its murky and vaporous form there appeared the suggestion of massive sinews. But whatever was human ended there, for instead of a face it possessed only an impenetrable darkness. Now that it was no longer shielded by the walls it exuded a staggering raw force and power; it almost seemed to Garrett as if he were in the presence of a hurricane. Only he was not, for there was no sound or movement of air coming from the thing, only a pounding, all-consuming silence.

Despite the figure’s lack of a face, Garrett sensed that the thing was looking at him. Indeed, no sooner had the thought crossed his mind than suddenly the thing started forward once again. For a moment Garrett thought his heart would stop as it moved right up to the very edge of the bed and then circled slowly as if to study him. But for what purpose? Deciding which limb to rend first? Or whether to kill him now or wait until later? He did not know. He was so weak with terror he was afraid he was going to faint.

In the tumult of his thoughts he summoned up the willpower to mutter a silent prayer, for he was certain he was going to die.

But then to his great surprise the thing withdrew, churning like a storm cloud and pulling its awesome power back with it. As gently as if it were his own mother, it pulled the door softly shut and drifted back into the cavernous house.

He was alone in the darkness once again.

The next morning when Garrett felt a hand close upon his shoulder he screamed and somersaulted out of bed. It was only his mother.

“Good Lord, Garrett, what is it?” she asked, her eyes wide with alarm.

He blinked as he looked confusedly around the room. He half expected to see the thing still standing in the doorway, but instead his eyes were met with the brilliance of the early-morning sun streaming through the window. He was so relieved day had finally come it that it took several seconds for him to realize his mother was still waiting for him to explain.

“Last night something came into my room!” The words fairly flew out of his mouth.

She frowned. “What do you mean, something came into your room?”

“Last night in the middle of the night something opened my door and came into my room.”

She looked at him skeptically. “You mean someone came into your room? A person?”

He shook his head as he tried to find the right words to describe his experience. “No, not a person really. I mean, it looked like a person, a man, only instead of being made out of skin and stuff it looked like he was made out of a cloud of black smoke.”

Her expression became slightly annoyed as she started to make his bed. “Are you sure it wasn’t Stephen? Maybe Stephen looked in on you last night.”

This time it was Garrett’s turn to be skeptical. Even ignoring the preposterousness of the notion that Stephen might care enough about his welfare to look in on him during the night, the thing had clearly not been Stephen.

“I told you, it was a man who looked like he was made out of black smoke. He didn’t even seem to have a face. Besides, he was a lot taller than Stephen. And bigger too.” She stopped making the bed. “Then it must have been a dream.”

“No, it wasn’t a dream!” he insisted.

His obstinacy finally got to her, and she swung around angrily. “Then what are you telling me? That you saw a ghost or some kind of creature from outer space?”

The question took Garrett off-guard, and he considered it with some seriousness. It had not occurred to him that the figure might have been a ghost, for in his mind ghosts were white and translucent and gave off light. His nocturnal visitor had been unghostlike in these respects. Could the thing have come from a UFO? But just as he was about to consider this possibility, he saw how upset she was becoming. He wanted desperately to convince her of the reality of his experience—the prospect of spending another night in the house without her knowing about its presence seemed unthinkable. But on the other hand, the fear in her eyes reminded him just a little too much of the way she had reacted to his dinner conversation the night before, and this was something he wanted to avoid at all costs. He mulled over his options and then finally, reluctantly, he acquiesced. “No, it wasn’t a ghost or anything. I guess it was only a bad dream.”

Her relief was visible. “Of course it was,” she said as she resumed making the bed. She even began to hum, and when she finished she said brightly, “Now go wash your face and hands and hurry and get dressed.”

“Why?”

She smiled even more broadly as she tousled his hair. “Because I’m making your favorite breakfast. I’m making pancakes.”

Although Lauren was certain his experience had been a dream, his description of the thing bothered her. An entity made out of a cloud of black smoke just did not seem like something a child would spontaneously come up with, and by the time Stephen came out of his shower and put on a bright-blue velour robe, she felt compelled to tell him about it.

“Garrett just said something a little strange,” she said. “What’s that?” Stephen asked as he looked in the mirror and fluffed his curls so they would dry properly.

“He said something came into his room last night.”

He knitted his brow. “What came into his room?”

“He said it looked like a man made out of black smoke.” Stephen’s curiosity faded. “Oh, you mean he had a bad dream.”

“But that’s just it,” Lauren countered. “Don’t you think that’s an unusual image for a little boy to come up with in a dream?”

“What image?”

“To describe someone as being made out of black smoke?”

“No, I don’t—at least, not for someone as imaginative as Garrett obviously is.”

“You’re right, I guess,” she said. But still something about Garrett’s description of the thing gnawed at her. Finally, after convincing herself she was only being silly, she smiled. “Hey, since it’s our first real day in the house, why don’t the three of us do something together? You know, something like a picnic?”

“A great idea,” he returned.

For Garrett, breakfast started out more pleasantly than he expected. True to her word, his mother made pancakes, and even Stephen seemed in unusually good spirits. Garrett had decided to make a show of tolerating Stephen. This meant being polite, if not exactly warm. After the fiasco of the evening before he did not want to alienate his mother any further. However, he also still did not trust Stephen. He decided the best approach was simply to bide his time and pray that eventually something would happen that would cause his mother to see Stephen’s true colors.

When the meal was over, Stephen and his mother launched into such a gushy display of affection that he was forced to flee to the drawing room. He sat in one of the wing chairs next to the fireplace. Upon reflection he realized he was still too unsettled by his encounter with the thing to even think about going back upstairs alone. Such a venture would be tempting fate, at best. But as he continued to dangle his feet over the faded oriental carpet and mull over his experience, several things occurred to him which caused him to reconsider.

It crossed his mind that since the thing in his room had been composed of darkness, there was perhaps a certain logic in assuming it came out only after dark. After all, it had provided no hint of its presence until well after nightfall. Similarly, given that shadows were dispersed by sunlight, and most ghosts and monsters had a long and well-known history of coming out only at night, it seemed likely that venturing about the house during the daylight hours would be safe.

As the experience of the night before retreated further and further into the misty half-reality of memory, his curiosity about the house and its architectural peculiarities returned. Was there some sort of connection between the thing and the other strange features the house possessed? And if not, what purpose did they serve? His longing to know the answers to such questions outweighed his fears, and he decided to go exploring.

He left the drawing room and went upstairs, but when he reached the second-floor hallway a wave of misgiving passed through him once again. He suppressed it, but did make one concession. Remembering that the thing had come from the right, from the part of the hallway beyond his bedroom, he decided not to proceed in that direction and turned left instead.

As he walked down the hall he noticed it looked very much the same as the hall in which their bedrooms were situated. The wallpaper was the same rose color, and everywhere he looked were still more bedrooms. Uninterested in exploring these, he continued on until he came to a small vestibule at the far end of the hall. On one wall was a large circular window, and on the other walls was a profusion of doors. Choosing one at random, he turned the knob and cautiously crept in.

Inside was an upstairs drawing room. Its walls were paneled with elaborately carved oak squares, and on one wall a row of leaded-glass lancet windows looked out on the forest beyond. Like all of the rooms in the house it was richly furnished, and dotting its perimeter were a number of doors and a few staircases.

Seeing nothing untoward, Garrett padded into the room, but by the time he had walked about halfway through he was overcome with such a feeling of dizziness he had to veer sharply to the left and collapse onto one of the sofas. At first he thought he might be coming down with something, but then he remembered the sitting room on the first floor that had made them all feel dizzy, and he examined the room’s architecture once again.

As he had suspected, careful scrutiny revealed that the floor, walls, and ceiling were all slightly askew. Indeed, its geometry was even more out of kilter than the sitting room’s. But what rendered its pronounced distortion invisible to the human eye was that everything, from the carving in the oak panels to the length of the legs on the furniture, had been carefully designed and reproportioned to conceal this fact.

Giggling with delight at such trickery, he stood and started through the room again. But again the room started to spin around him, and before he realized what was happening he was lurching headlong toward one of the doors. He lunged for the knob and blundered through. Inside he suddenly found himself face to face with a wild boar. Terrified, he screamed and started to run, but in his panic he tripped and fell over his own feet. When he turned around he saw the boar was stuffed.

His heart still pounding, he righted himself and saw the boar graced what appeared to be some sort of trophy room. The walls were covered with panels of birch bark, and everywhere he looked were stuffed animals and mounted animal heads. By a giant stone fireplace at the far end of the room stood a stuffed bear. Over the fireplace was the head of a moose, and gazing dumbly from around the room were deer heads, mountain Hons, pheasants, and ducks. Even the rugs on the floor were fashioned out of various animal pelts, all bearing mute testimony to long-ago hunts. The room possessed a stale preservative smell he recognized from the taxidermy displays of museums.

On another occasion this stuffed display might have captivated him, but given his experiences in the house thus far, the smell and the frozen accusing stares of so many dead animals made him uncomfortable. Seeing a door to the left of the fireplace, he quickly crossed over and turned the knob. It opened onto a narrow set of stairs leading down.

To his surprise the stairs led him once again to the main entrance hall of the house. Miffed at ending up where he had begun, he walked across to the main staircase and went back upstairs. Now he was doubly determined to find out more about the house.

This time when he reached the vestibule at the end of the hall he chose another door. Inside he discovered what appeared to be a large linen room. He passed through a maze of smaller rooms branching off it and was once again forced to go down a flight of stairs that emptied into one of the sun porches. At least he had avoided returning to the entrance hall. Still, he had been unceremoniously discharged into one of the outer first-floor rooms.

Again and again he tried to make his way through the house, but each time he encountered some hindrance or obstacle that foiled his effort. Sometimes the strange and twisting architecture of the house itself obliged him to take certain directions. Sometimes a beguiling maze of halls could not be resisted and led nowhere, into a cul-de-sac of rooms. Sometimes a corridor seemed too dark to venture into.

Whatever the case, after about half a dozen such attempts a remarkable realization slowly dawned on him. Far from being haphazard or merely eccentric, the layout of the house had a curious rhyme and reason. It was almost too fantastic to believe, but it appeared the house had been carefully designed to prevent anyone from venturing too deeply into its inner recesses.

As frustrated as he felt, he was very pleased with himself for having figured this out. But as he sat on the entrance-hall steps and gazed up into the spiderweb of stairways over his head he realized his discovery only brought with it more questions. Why had Sarah Balfram devised such elaborate strategies to control and influence the route a person took through her house? And what might he find if he managed to outwit her various stratagems and travel deeper into its interior? This last question sent a chill through him.