Phantom (7 page)

He tried to picture what they looked like.
Two-legged, deformed subhumans with huge blind eyes, from the
bowels of the earth. Hideous plant-men that moved on stalks. Large
mossy valves that could swallow a grown person whole with an oozy
slurp. Or the Sandman, who was not a man at all, whose every
gesture and movement was accompanied by a horrible, gritty,
grinding noise that was like cutting glass, only a thousand times
worse. Or a fat, lurching bag of soupy slime you could poke your
hand into, but if you did ... They came singly or as an army, in
more shapes and forms than anyone could count. Unseen and
untouched. But they came, they were there. A while ago Ned tried to
pin them down in his mind, to make individuals of them and give
them names. Bronk, Lorp, Tsull, Naurgub—but it was like trying to
fix a snowflake on a fish hook.

Another time, years ago, just after his
mother had come back from the hospital, Ned had asked his parents
about night things and phantoms. It was at the dinner table, and
his father herded peas around the plate before answering.

"It's just your imagination, that's all.
People imagine all kinds of things, but that doesn't make them
real."

"Like bad dreams, nightmares," Ned's mother
had said. "You've had them. You know they're very frightening at
the time, but you also know they're not really happening and you
can't be hurt by them. They're only in your head."

"That's all," Ned's father confirmed.

Ned decided there were some things it wasn't
very helpful to talk about with his parents. It was not like
something wrong, a secret that had to be kept from them in nervous
desperation, but rather he had just come to the conclusion that it
was pointless to raise such matters with them. Magic and phantoms
didn't exist for them. It seemed to Ned that his parents had won,
in a way. They were free of the fear and menace that darkness
brought. But if it was a victory for them, Ned sensed that they had
simply landed on the shore of neutrality and the diminished nature
of that achievement held no appeal for him.

It still frightened him to recall what had
happened to his mother that night five years ago. In spite of his
worst fears, she had returned and life went on much as it had
before. But even if the doctors had words for it, even if his
parents thought they knew what it was, Ned was convinced that he
alone understood what had truly happened that night. A phantom. The
dark magic of the night world. It didn't help to know this, in the
same way that it didn't seem to hurt his mother and father not to
know. Either way, it was all beyond the realm of human influence or
control. If it was going to happen again, Ned knew that all the
medicine and machines in the world could not prevent it. You lived
with it, or—or who knows what? But there was no avoiding it. Nobody
could do that.

One night, not long after the day he and
Peeler had pulled crayfish from Old Woods Creek, Ned fell asleep
early. In Washington he would have been awake in his room much
later, reading by flashlight or creating mental pictures to go with
the sounds of the city outside. But in Lynnhaven, more and more it
seemed, the combination of sea air and the extra outdoor activity
he got up to hit Ned as soon as darkness fell.

"Work hard, play hard and sleep hard," Ned's
father had declared shortly after their arrival in the fishing
village. "That's what you want to do out here, and that's the way
it should be."

But some things didn't change. Night
things.

Ned's eyes opened, and the room seemed to be
bathed in a pale, lunar light.

Here there was nothing to use, no rumbling
truck or beeping car horn for the suddenly awake mind to fix on, if
only for a second or two. Here there was nothing but the silence of
the Lynnhaven night. The house was just a little too far away to
catch the sound of the breakers on the shore, or the random clatter
of the bell buoy in the bay.

That light.

Ned had never seen it before. He had never
seen anything before, however many times he had tripped into
consciousness in the middle of the night. Now there was light, a
thin, washed out illumination that gave the room the eerie look of
an aquarium.

To wake with your eyes open and your head
out from under the covers—that was the chanciest circumstance of
all. You might yank the bedclothes up over you in an instantaneous
move, but the slightest twinge of hesitation would bring immediate
paralysis, and then you could only hope to endure.

Ned lay there like a rag doll, body limp and
eyes wide open. What was this light? He could almost make out
certain features, specific objects in the room. They were fuzzy
suggestions at the edge of his sleepy vision. But his mind was
awake enough to recognize the ghostly light as unique. He managed
to shake his head briefly, but the glow remained, imprecise and
persistent as the afterimage of a camera's flash.

"What is it?'

Ned realized it was his own voice, although
it sounded small and distorted, as if it were echoing up from the
bottom of a very deep well. A moment later he began to doubt that
he had spoken at all.

"What is it?"

Now his voice startled him, it was so close
and loud. He blinked his eyes rapidly, hoping the movement would
plunge him back into familiar darkness. But no, the light was still
there. It was real, neither a dream nor an optical side effect of
waking fast. He had pictured a hundred, a thousand different
creatures, but he had never conceived of such a chilly, diffuse
phosphorescence.

This does not happen.

Rooms don't behave like this. Rooms don't
behave at all. Rooms are just—rooms.

This does not happen, but—

It suddenly occurred to Ned that he wasn't
frightened. He felt no fear, in spite of the fact that he was lying
there exposed and defenseless. It was because now he could see
something, whatever it might be. He was surrounded, enveloped in a
room full of the stuff, but he felt no apprehension, only
puzzlement.

"What is it?"

Nothing.

"Who is it?'

Nothing.

"What do you want?"

Nothing, nothing, nothing. Ned wondered if,
when you came right down to it, his parents might not be right
after all. This was nothing.

Nothing.

Was he just a silly little boy with a vivid
imagination, peopling his mind with ridiculous creations that had
no basis in reality? Were the phantoms just that—phantoms of his
mind? Ned screwed his eyes shut and mentally counted off the
seconds of a long minute. Then he let his eyes open again.

Still the light.

Now the fear. He could be wrong, wildly
wrong. He could be underestimating what was going on, assuming it
was nothing when in fact it was more, so much more that he couldn't
even begin to grasp it. Ned's body was shaking now.

"Hello?"

It was the voice of surrender, and he hated
it as soon as he heard it come from within him.

Then the light was suddenly gone. Not a slow
fade or a smooth disappearance. The light was there, and then it
was gone. This was even more upsetting to Ned, because it seemed a
kind of awful proof of what he had feared. It was not nothing that
he had seen. He had been let off this time, but that hardly made
any difference. He felt invaded. There had been a light, unlike any
other light on earth. It had held him in its grip, but still it
hadn't taken him.

Yet.

* * *

5. Old Woods Tales

"Cloudy."

"Yowsir?"

"Is Progger a name?"

"It surely is."

"It is? What's it mean?"

Cloudy was perched on his crate by the pile
of old tires. He was trying to fix an electric clock he had found.
It was plugged into an extension cord that ran to the baithouse
nearby. The second hand swung around the dial as it should, but the
minute and hour hands wouldn't budge from ten past two. Cloudy set
the stubborn device down on his lap and looked at Ned.

"How come you wanna know that?'

"I never heard it before."

"You never heard it before, then how you
know it to ask me what it means?"

"Well, I did hear Peeler say it once."

"Peeler said it, huh." Cloudy resumed his
efforts with the junked clock. The faulty hands moved smoothly
enough when you pushed them with your fingers, but if you let the
clock run on its own they stayed where they were. "Peeler should
say it, he bein' a progger hisself."

"He 1s?'

"'Course he is."

"But what is a progger?"

"What's a progger? Mr. Tadpole, you don't
know nothin' at all, do you?"

"Nope."

Cloudy put down the clock again and assumed
the look of someone who has been called on to explain two plus two.
Actually, he was glad to have a diversion, since he was getting
nowhere with the infernal timepiece.

"A progger, he’s a person spends his time
proggin' around, you see. Now, proggin' is just pokin' around the
swamps and marsh creeks and potholes to catch somethin' you can
use. Could be crawdads—"

"I did that with Peeler."

"See? You been proggin' and you didn't even
know it."

"What else?"

"Any thin' you can get, that's what else.
Crawdads, catfish, muskrat, mink, any old critter you can trap or
hook or bonk on the head. Dippin' for peeler crabs or jiggin' for
eels, and such like that. Clappin' and hollerin' for a snappin'
turkle, a progger do that too sometimes."

"Turkle?”

Cloudy nodded enthusiastically. "Lotta them
around, but you must do a regular song and dance to make 'em pop up
so's you can grab 'em, and then you better make sure he can't get
you. Big snappin' turkle, he can chomp your little finger clean
off."

"You mean a snapping turtle."

"That's right, snappin' turkle."

Cloudy prodded the clock tentatively with
one finger as if he half expected the machine to lunge suddenly and
bite him.

"Are you a progger too, Cloudy?"

"I'm what you call your weekend progger,
like Grandma Moses. I'm a part-time progger, you see, I do it when
I ain't got nothin' else to do. Now you take Peeler, he got
proggin' in his blood, he's the real progger."

"Peeler sure drinks a lot of beer." Ned
didn't know why he had just changed the subject; maybe Peeler's
style was rubbing off on him.

"He likes the beer," Cloudy agreed.

"But you don't drink it, do you,
Cloudy?"

The black man looked somewhat indignant.
"Oh, Lord, no, no, I don't drink at all, not no more I don't." Now
he held up the clock and studied it as if it were some remarkable
object from a strange civilization in the far reaches of outer
space.

"How come?"

"How come what?"

"You don't like beer, is that it?"

Cloudy turned his attention to the boy
again. "Don't you never start, Mr. Tadpole. What happened to me, I
used to drink all the time. Like beer? I loved it. Every chance I
got, I took a drink, 'cause when you're younger you think you can
do whatever you want and it won't bother you none. But the thing of
it is, I had a friend, name of Mr. Eustace Boggs." Ned laughed at
that. "You think that's funny?" Cloudy continued. "Well, everybody
called him Useless. That's the truth. Useless Boggs. Anyway, he was
in an accident one day, I don't remember exactly what it was, but
old Useless, he lost his legs or he couldn't walk no more,
somethin' like that, and then he really was useless. Stuck in the
house, in bed most of the time, and oh, he had a plague of a wife.
Marylou Boggs. Talk? That woman'd make the wallpaper curl up and
block its ears, the way she'd go on. It was Useless this and
Useless that, and poor old Useless couldn't do nothin' 'cept sit
there and listen. Well, I don't know why, but I kinda liked that
poor sucker. I guess I'd knowed him a long time. So I used to take
the newspaper up to him at his house every day and tell him what's
goin' on, jokes and gossip and stuff like that. Nobody else
bothered with him, so I was his only contact with the outside
world, you see. Now, we had a little system goin' between us and it
was a nice one. I'd wrap up a bottle of rye whiskey for him,
smuggle it in past Marylou, and Useless'd pay me for it. Sometimes
he give me a ten, sometimes a twenty, and I got to keep the change,
so we both done well out of the deal. He had a lotta money, see, on
account of the accident. He got a big payoff for losin' his legs,
so money was no problem.

"At first I didn't like the idea, you know.
I said to him, 'Useless, did your doctor tell you not to take no
drink?' He says, 'No, the doctor never say nothin' like that to me.
My wife did, but she's no doctor.' So you see, Marylou was the one
who didn't want him to have a drink, but what else has the poor man
got? He can't go nowhere, nor do nothin' without his legs, so I had
to help him out. I don't know what he did with it all, maybe he
watered the plants with it too, but he had to have a new bottle
every single day. Imagine that. Boy, we sure had some kinda system
goin' there for a while. Then it stopped."

"How come?"

"He died, for cryin' out loud. Fell right
outta his bed onto the floor. Useless Boggs, dead with a pint of
rye whiskey in his hand. Didn't spill a drop, neither, I heard. I
don't know, the doctor must've talked to somebody .... I never did
notice it myself but they say his liver was the size of a
basketball. And that's when I stopped drinkin' myself, right then
and there. "

"A basketball, gosh."

Cloudy began to laugh. "Yeah, it sure killed
him good, and I learned my lesson. That was the best payin' job I
ever had, and what I'd done was kill the goose that laid the golden
eggs, see. If I had it to do all over again I'd make Useless take
it a little slower like, so we'd both get a little more mileage
outta the situation. But you know one thing I never did find out
about him?"