Darkness Creeping (18 page)

It’s a full moon tonight. The kind that brings out the werewolves—if you believe in that stuff. Our house doesn’t get werewolves, though. Tonight, we get something else.

I’m fast asleep when I first hear Melinda. She’s not screaming, she’s calling my name. “Ryan,” she whispers. I’m dragged feet first out of my dream, and twist through space back into my bed, where I open my eyes and see Melinda looking toward me in the dim blue of the moonlit room. It is four o’clock again. I sigh and wish there were a Sister Fairy who would come in the night to take Melinda away, leaving a quarter beneath my pillow. Fair exchange.

“Ryan,” she whispers. “Do you hear that?”

Scrape, scrape, scrape.
It could be coming from anywhere.

“It’s probably just a stray cat,” I tell her. “Go to sleep.” But the sound gets louder. Scrape! Scrape! Scrape! Now I can hear the hiss and rattle of falling debris.

“It’s coming from the chimney!” says Melinda.

“Naah, it’s probably just Dad making some weird late-night snack,” I say, but now the sound has got me worried, too.

I sit up and listen. There’s a noise coming from the hardwood floor in the living room. The squishy sound of bare feet—
plod-plod-plod
—but then the sound is gone.
It’s in the hallway
, I tell myself.
It’s walking on the carpeted hallway, silently
.

It’s much too quiet. I can hear the ticking of the clock pounding in my ears like a woodpecker. I am about to announce to Melinda that it was just her imagination when a shadow leaps into the room, howling.

It’s a monkey—laughing in a crazy, screeching, evil voice. I see it, but I don’t believe it. I am too shocked to scream.

“Ryan?” Melinda’s high-pitched panicked voice is like a squeaky wheel. “No . . . no,” she whines. She tries to scream, but it’s like her throat is all closed up in fear. She starts batting the air around her. “Go away! Go away!”

A second monkey runs into the room, jumps up on a shelf, and begins throwing books everywhere.

Another monkey comes in through the window and terrorizes Melinda, flailing its hands in her face and making awful noises. Melinda gasps, unable to catch her breath in fear. Then she screams, and so do I. That’s when the room explodes into a mad monkey house. The closet door flies open and they leap out like commandos—not just monkeys, but apes like chimpanzees and orangutans, too. They charge out of the closet as if the closet is a doorway to another world. Small monkeys with long tails and white faces climb out from the dresser drawers and leap from wall to wall. A single gorilla growls in the doorway, making sure we can’t get out. Both of us scream and scream.
Where are our parents? Why can’t we hear them coming down the hall?

One baboon with wild, fiery eyes and sharpened teeth smiles and speaks—
he actually speaks!
“Your parents won’t wake up.” He sneers. “They won’t wake up until morning. We won’t let them.”

I try to help Melinda, but hairy hands grab me and throw me back against the wall. I can only watch as they torment her, tearing apart her stuffed animals, chewing them to bits, shredding her books, leaping across her bed, and swinging wildly through the room. They pull at her arms and tug at her hair as she screams. An orangutan plays her head like the bongo drums. A chimp makes hideous faces at her, and Melinda keeps screaming in terror, until she finally screams herself out. Soon her voice is gone, but her mouth keeps screaming silently. This is her nightmare—but how did it get out of her head?
How?

Finally the raid ends, and the apes and monkeys begin to leave. Some climb out of the window, others vanish into the closet, some climb into the dresser drawers and disappear, and others race out of the room and scurry up the chimney. I look to Melinda. She is pale. She looks straight ahead, frozen, but does not see.

“Melinda?”

She will not answer me. It’s as if she’s gone far away and doesn’t even hear me.

“Melinda?”

But she won’t talk at all. I think she may never talk again.

The last monkey—the baboon with sharpened teeth—looks around the ruined room, at the night’s work. He leaps up to the windowsill to leave, and I say a prayer of thanks that it’s all over. But then he turns to me before he disappears into the night. He smiles at me, showing his terrible teeth. I pull my blanket over me, but it won’t cover me no matter how hard I try.

“Pleasant dreams, Ryan,” he rasps in a deep, scratchy voice.

Then he says, with an awful wink:

“Of course I love you,” says Grandma. “I love you very, very much, Leslie.”

Grandma stands inches away from the hallway wall. There is not so much as a picture on the wall, just white paint.

I can see her from my room. The way she stands there talking to the wall—it scares me.

“Let me give you a hug,” says Grandma. She holds out her arm and grasps the air in front of her, as if she is hugging someone. But no one is there.

She’s been talking to that wall for about a month now. It’s not just the wall, though. She’ll get angry at someone who’s not even in the room. And she treats all of us as if we’re invisible.

Dad hardly seems to notice anymore. He’s too busy remodeling the house, even late at night. Each night I go to sleep to the sound of saws and hammers and drills.

Mom sits on the edge of my bed, and we talk about things. Lately, we just talk about Grandma.

“Sometimes it happens like that when you get old. People just sort of wind down,” Mom tells me. “It’s a part of life.”

I think about that:
winding down
, like old gears . . . like our grandfather clock in the hall, which can never keep the right time. But Grandma’s not a machine; she’s a human being.

I think back to the times when Grandma was okay, before her mind started to slip. She was wonderful and warm and loving. She would take me to the movies and we would talk like the best of friends. But that was a long time ago. Now she’s very different. My friends laugh at her, but there’s nothing funny about it.

I hear a hammer banging away in the garage. In the kitchen, Grandma sits in the dark. I can hear her talking about the ice cream she’s pretending to eat, and then she sings “Happy Birthday” to the empty room. I remember that my birthday is coming up next month.

“That’s all right, honey,” she says to the dark, empty room. “I don’t mind wearing a party hat.”

“Who is she talking to?” I ask Mom. “What is she seeing?”

“I don’t think we’ll ever know,” says Mom.

I know what my birthday wish will be. I’ll wish that Grandma had her mind back.

It is midnight. I hear Grandma. I leave my room and go into the living room, where Grandma sits in the green velvet chair, watching TV by moonlight. But the TV isn’t on.

“They call this music?” she says. “A lot of noise, if you ask me. And look at them—grown men with pink hair.”

She reaches down beside her and moves her hand back and forth. It takes me a moment to figure out what she’s doing. She’s petting a dog. But we don’t have a dog.

“And what’s the point of smashing the guitars?” she says, pointing at the dark TV. “This isn’t music; it’s a circus.”

“Grandma, can you hear me?” I ask.

She looks through me as if I’m not even there. Then, suddenly, she gasps in shock and jumps to her feet. She feels around the walls as if she’s blind.

“I’ll go get the candles,” she says, and then shakes her head with a sigh.

“All this rain,” she says. “I’ve never seen it rain like this.” But outside the stars are out and the moon is bright. It isn’t raining—not a drop.

Dad works hard every weekend, building our new rec room. He pretends that nothing is happening. Grandma is his mother; it must be hard for him to see her like this.

Anyway, he doesn’t like to talk about it, but I keep asking because I want answers. I miss the way Grandma used to be.

“It started about five years ago,” Dad finally says, resting from his work and drinking a Coke. “I remember, I first noticed something was wrong when she started laughing at a joke before the punch line. She just walked away, not even hearing the rest of the joke. Then she would start waking up at all hours of the night. She would go and make herself breakfast and talk at the breakfast table as if we were all there at two o’clock in the morning.” He shook his head. “Anyway, pretty soon she was living in a whole different world from us.”

Dad wipes the sweat from his brow. “She needs us to take care of her now. Okay, Leslie?”

I nod quietly, sorry I made him talk about it.

Dad goes back to his work, burying himself in the room he’s adding on, trying not to think about Grandma. I watch as he takes a heavy sledgehammer and swings it at the hall wall, over and over, creating a huge hole that will become the doorway to our new rec room.

One night before the rec room is finished, Grandma starts screaming at the wall again.

“How dare you!” she screams. “I’m your own flesh and blood!”

The others race in to find her standing in the unfinished rec room. “You’re going to put me in a sanitarium?” she screams at the drywall in the corner. “That’s what you’re going to do? I’m not crazy!”

“I can’t take this anymore, Carl!” my mom screams at my dad. She storms out of the room in tears.

Dad follows her, trying to calm her down, and I’m left alone with Grandma.

There’s no electricity in the rec room yet. The only light comes from the hallway and from the bright, full moon. I watch Grandma staring out of the picture window, as if she can see something in the dark, as if she can see the river that the window overlooks. All I can see is darkness.

There are tears in her eyes. Even though she is standing right next to me, she seems so far away. So alone.

“Grandma,” I ask. “Do you love me?”

“I wish it would stop raining,” she says, looking up at the clear, starlit sky. “All this rain, it can’t be good for the soil.”