Phantom (16 page)

Chop!

When Ned finished he was pleased to notice
that he was sweating. Good sweat, this time, for a chore well done.
The scarecrow was nothing more than bits of kindling on the ground.
Ned gathered up the pieces and, one at a time, hurled them as far
away as he could—zing, zing, zing—scattering them widely across the
field.

All the king's horses and all the king's
men, won't put you back together again. Good-bye, Mr.
Scarecrow.

Ned went back to the house, put the hatchet
away and flopped down on his bed. Once he rolled off to take a look
out the window. There was nothing to see, and that made him happy.
Just an ordinary lawn, an ordinary field and the dew steaming up as
the sun began to make itself known.

Ned fell back onto the bed and tried to get
to sleep once more. But his eyes wouldn't stay shut. He watched the
mist, swirling and burning, writhing in the force of heat and
light. Phantoms formed, one after another, but they were atomized
instantly. It was a gratifying spectacle. If only those words would
stop—YOU WILL BE MINE AGAIN—but they were a kind of mental tape
loop, repeating endlessly in the back of his brain.

Ned stared vacantly at the spot where the
scarecrow had been, wondering if he had really accomplished
anything at all.

* * *

15. Sounds

It was nothing more than an unpleasant buzz
around the ear or the back of the head, and Ned would wave his
hands as if to shoo away a bothersome insect. He never actually saw
or felt anything, but only heard that buzz. It was enough, however,
to worry him. Ned didn't know which to dread more, a bee crawling
in to jab poison through his eardrum or a mosquito sucking blood
from within his head. The worst thing would be an earwig, an insect
that might burrow in and settle down to make a long, slow meal of
his brain. Your abilities, mental and physical, disappearing one by
one down the throat of a bug. Raving insanity followed by a
horrible death. How could you be saved? Picture a doctor using
wicked platinum pliers, fine as needles, to poke into your skull
and drag out the vicious buzzing creature, tearing bits of vital
jelly with it—no, that was not being saved. Even if you lived you'd
be about as bright as a turnip.

A couple of times Ned's mother or father had
come across him flapping his hands, his face screwed up with fear
and anger, and he would suddenly feel foolish. But although they
gave him funny, puzzled looks, they never a*ed him what on earth he
was doing. The buzz went away, of course, whenever either of them
appeared, gone so swiftly Ned wondered if he really had heard it in
the first place. But it always returned, and hardly a day went by
without Ned's being bothered at least once by the unnerving noise.
It could come at any time—he might be reading a book or making a
snack or watching a "Star Trek" rerun. It came when he was alone,
and it usually came during the daylight hours. Ned knew it wasn't
really an insect, but that was no consolation to him.

He wanted to mention it to someone,
anyone—his mother or father, or Peeler and Cloudy—but how could he
explain it without sounding like a silly kid? They'd probably think
he was losing his marbles. That was a worry, too. Maybe there was
something wrong with his head. Something real, something bad.
People did go crazy; that's what they have asylums for, right? It
could happen to him—as far as he knew, kids weren't exempt. This
idea renewed itself whenever Ned realized he was talking out loud
to the sound, out of sheer frustration and mounting anxiety. "Who
is it? Who are you? What are you? Get away .... Leave me alone ....
" But the only sound that came back to him was the same whispered
buzzing. Perhaps he had jarred his head more than he thought in the
fall at the spa. And yet he hadn't been hurt when he hit the
ground, merely had the breath whumped out of him for a minute.

He had heard the sound, or something like
it, once or twice before in recent weeks, and thought nothing of
it. But then it was almost as if the noise had decided to get
serious about Ned, and it started to come regularly, persistently.
He tried to ignore it but that simply proved to be impossible.
Talking back to it, whatever else that might signify, did have a
certain usefulness, as the sound of his own voice provided some
distraction. But it was not enough, and Ned knew that if the
occurrences became much more frequent and uncomfortable he would
have no choice but to tell his parents about it ... and go along
with whatever they decided to do. And that might be
unpleasant—doctors, tests.

The strange light that woke Ned once had not
appeared again, but the nights were not empty. There were ... other
sounds that reached his ears in the dark. Getting rid of the
scarecrow had been a wise move, Ned thought, and for a few nights
after he had done so he felt relieved and slept easily. But then
the sounds began. The noise that would bother him for a minute or
two during the day was one thing, but what he heard at night was
something else altogether.

They never seemed to come from within his
room, but rather from behind the walls and ceiling, beneath the
floorboards or just outside the window screen. Ned's mind would
filter out the familiar—his parents moving around elsewhere in the
house, the chirp of crickets, the wings of birds and bats, a breeze
riffling the trees—and create a zone of silence that would, soon
enough, pick up the unfamiliar.

Ned detected several sounds in the night.
Once, after his mother and father had gone to bed and he knew it
couldn't be either of them, he heard someone or something moving
around in the backyard. Ned crept from his bed to the window, but
he saw nothing. Still the sound continued: feet walking heavily
across the grass, stepping on the flagstone path, and then the
protesting squeak of plastic and tubular metal as if somebody were
sitting down on one of the lawn chairs. But even as he heard these
sounds Ned could see that there was no one walking around out there
and that all the lawn chairs were empty. He was sure the sounds
were too distinct to be just the product of his imagination, but on
the other hand it obviously made no sense for a prowler to stroll
about or sit down on a lawn chair in the middle of the night, as
casually as someone taking the afternoon sun. Perhaps he was
hearing simple, routine sounds, and his mind was magnifying them
into something more. But …

There were other sounds of movement outside.
Some were so sharp they seemed to come from only inches below Ned's
window, and some were as far away as the meadow, feet tramping
through the brush, back and forth, stopping and going, like a
soldier on night watch. But even on the brightest of nights Ned
could see nothing that might have made the sounds he heard. It was
almost enough to make him wish the scarecrow was still there,
because the sound of unseen activity was proving even harder to
deal with. But the scarecrow was gone, and the funny thing was that
Ned couldn't remember ever hearing an unusual sound when it had
been there, moving or not.

The most disturbing sounds
were those that were closest to Ned's room. One night he had made a
tent of the bed sheet and was curled up inside it reading a Hardy
Boys adventure,
The Ghost at Skeleton
Rock
, when he abruptly turned off the
flashlight. Something had pinged on the window screen. It might
just be an errant moth, but then again it could be something else.
Another sound soon followed. It was as if someone were pressing
hands along the clapboarding on the side of the house near his
window. Pressing, pushing, sliding, rubbing .... And then the sound
was all over, coming from beneath the floorboards, behind the walls
and on the beams above the ceiling, as if these hands held Ned's
whole room and were caressing it. Ned pictured his room as a little
matchbox in the grip of some enormous, invisible giant who would
any minute now detach it from the house and hold it hundreds of
feet up in the air, inspect it, shake it perhaps, and watch Ned
rattle around inside. Maybe it would crush the room like a useless
toy and throw it away. Maybe ...

The next night, the sound was back in a
slightly different form. Again it started around the window, and
there was the softest scratching on the screen. Then a long, deeper
noise, like one heavy surface being dragged across another. On and
on it went, up one side of the window frame, across the top, down
the other side, and then into the house itself, trailing around
Ned's room, zigzagging up the back of the plaster and finally
fading away somewhere overhead. It went on like that for several
nights, each time assuming a new variation—and always it seemed to
grow tighter, closer.

Early one morning in August
Ned woke to find that he couldn't move. His body seemed to be tied
to the bed with a thousand wires holding him in place, and his face
felt like it was covered with stitching. It was difficult even to
breathe through his nose, and he couldn't open his mouth. As he
became more awake and conscious of his situation, the sense of
alarm grew in him. His breathing came shorter and faster, and his
heart raced like a straining motor. Was that sweat trickling down
his neck—or blood oozing from his ears? Then something was on his
face, wispy fine as hair-ends tip-touching his skin, walking across
his cheek, his laced up mouth, crawling over his nose so lightly
but so deliberately—
a
spider!
—and now it was settling atop his
nose, preparing to spin a death cap for Ned's last access to air.
His eyes had already been sewn shut. Ned was sure it was a spider
and he tried desperately to squirm free, to wriggle loose and shake
the monstrous thing from his face. But he was in an iron cocoon,
one that shrank more tightly around him the more he struggled to
move. It became harder to inhale as his chest was slowly being
crushed beneath bands of steel.
Help me, I
can't breathe
, his mind screamed. At that
moment Ned heard a new sound, so near it might have come from the
spider—or whatever it was—sitting on his face. It was a tiny,
distorted, whir rushing of noise that somehow managed to sound
plaintive and doleful, even as it labored on relentlessly. It could
have been a microscopic emanation of the spider echoing its way
along the network to the very center of Ned's brain. It was the
sound of a dying thing, perhaps Ned's own blood, or the ghost of
his breath. It was the music of sadness, broken, mangled and forced
to a level of cacophony that marked nightmare's end.

Ned felt himself exploding
into a shower of brilliant lights and clear air, so pure it hurt at
first. Did he still exist? There was no focus, just a dizzy,
spinning sensation. His brain was a hailstorm of meaningless pieces
tumbling down an endless shaft of light, gradually clumping one to
another. Ned dimly wondered if it could ever be put back together
again, with all the pieces in the right place.
Scarecrow
.

Now he was crying with relief, gulping in
air as sweet and clean as mountain spring water. His parents were
lifting him up off the floor and hugging him. They sat on the bed
and sheltered Ned between their bodies. The feeling of love and
comfort was so overwhelming that Ned started to cry more, wanting
this moment to last forever.

"My God, he's drenched, his pajamas are
soaking wet."

"Bad dream, Ned?"

"Is he running a temperature?"

"No, he's all right."

"Do you think he hurt himself?"

"Kids fall out of bed all the time. He's
just a little shook up, right, Ned?"

Ned nodded his head vaguely, but his mind
was elsewhere. Thoughts were beginning to form again. He knew he
had been through something far more serious than an ordinary
nightmare.

They had come.

They had compromised the safety of his
room.

And they almost got me.

"What'll it be like the next time they
come?"

"What did you say, Ned?"

"He's still dreaming, poor fella.”

"There's a bump on his head."

"It's just a bump, honey. It'll go away in a
while."

Michael and Linda stayed, rocking Ned gently
between them until his eyes finally closed and he found sleep
again.

A couple of days later, when Ned visited the
baithouse, he just had to tell Peeler about the sounds he had been
hearing. But only the external sounds, not the buzzing around his
ears, nor what happened in his bedroom. The old man listened
patiently, sharpening jig hooks while Ned skated around the
subject, trying to appear curious but not overly concerned.

"Ain't nothin' to it," Peeler said. "The
metal frames in the lawn chairs expand as they bake in the sun all
day, and then they contract when they cool down at night. Same
thing with the wire mesh in your window screen. That's what you
hear, take it from Mr. Wizard."

It was just what Ned had been afraid he
might be told, the kind of explanation—so simple, so
down-to-earth—he might have got from his father. That old moon
won't hurt you, son. The only difference was that Ned's father
would say it as if he meant it, while Peeler didn't convey such
certainty. He had given Ned a perfunctory answer and the boy sensed
it.

"What about the other sounds, behind the
walls and ceiling?"

"Every house has its own bag of noises it
makes," Peeler remarked. "A place as old as yours is bound to have
more'n most. Goes on day and night, a house breathin' by itself,
but you only notice it at night 'cause it's quieter then and you
ain't got no other distractions."

Again the easy answer. Did Peeler really
think that Ned wasn't aware of such things, that he had to be told
about them? There had to be other, better answers, even if Peeler
didn't want to go into them today. Ned felt disappointed and weak,
torn between his own reluctance to talk much about what was
bothering him and his yearning for a measure of real
understanding.