The Sleepwalkers
The
S
LEEPWALKERS
The
S
LEEPWALKERS
J. GABRIEL GATES
Health Communications, Inc.
Deerfield Beach, Florida
www.hcibooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gates, J. Gabriel.
The sleepwalkers / J. Gabriel Gates.
p. cm.
Summary: When he receives a mysterious, disturbing letter from his long-lost childhood playmate Christine, privileged and popular Caleb, celebrating his high school graduation, travels to his tiny hometown of Hudsonville, Florida, to find her, uncovering terrifying prophecies of the spirits.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7573-1588-6 (trade paper)
ISBN-10: 0-7573-1588-7 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7573-9173-6 (e-book)
ISBN-10: 0-7573-9173-7 (e-book)
[1. Horror stories. 2. Mystery and detective stories. 3. Supernatural—Fiction.
4. Florida—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.G222Sl 2011
[Fic]—dc23
2011011959
©2011 J. Gabriel Gates
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
HCI, its logos, and marks are trademarks of Health Communications, Inc.
Publisher: Health Communications, Inc.
3201 S.W. 15th Street
Deerfield Beach, FL 33442–8190
Cover design by Larissa Hise Henoch
Interior design by Lawna Patterson Oldfield
Interior formatting by Dawn Von Strolley Grove
This book is dedicated to my mother,
Cynthia Walker, a wonderful mom,
an extraordinary teacher,
and my first reader.
Thank you.
Contents
S
omething in the ruins waits.
A daydreamy, hot Southern summer, the sky above like a great blue
eye. Watching. Two little girls with laughter in their smiles. Two same
smiles, giggling. They hug. They hit one another. Two sisters, and me.
High, dry weeds, brown and scraping. We fight through them together.
The forest behind is black liquid. Pathways through the weeds, a thousand
pathways, a game of chase. Now lying amongst the long grasses,
giggles give way to sighing.
Something waits.
I get up. I whisper to one of the girls. (This has happened before.)
Her hair is long and straight. Eyes glitter. There are no sounds, as if
this were a silent movie or something, but there is one word that bleeds
through like a subliminal message:
dare.
Eyes glittering, this is a childish
contest of pride. I smile my dare to her—I feel the smile on my face.
She swallows once in fear, then giggles it away. The other sister says
nothing, watches with sad, distant eyes. Long, straight hair. Through
the weeds again now. Shuffling, we three. Biting burrs on white socks.
A little hill. We reach the top and the air stops. There it is. Edifice.
Eclipsing all. Empty. A thousand windows stare through us like blind
eyes, black and shattered, the lights that once waited inside them now
betrayed to darkness. Another word bleeds through:
hospital.
Their momma told them not to go.
The dare hangs all around us. Two little girls, just alike. Dirty dresses
and dimples. One stands still and scratches her leg.
The other, the Dared, has half crossed the clearing already. She’s
passing the swimming pond, sleeping mirror. Tiny girl, she blazes
through the weeds on scabbed, bruised legs.
She keeps walking.
She’ll show us she isn’t afraid. But she’s very afraid. She walks slowly.
Keeps looking back. Acting brave. I look up at the too-many windows,
and they gape at me like gnawing, starving maws. Suddenly, I want
to call her back. My stomach aches, I want to call her back so bad.
But I don’t. I watch her. She sneaks under the chain-link fence, little
dared one, catches her dress as she wriggles through but tears herself
free. Crosses a patch of cracked, scarred cement; the heat waves from it
dilute her for an instant; for an instant she seems almost to melt away,
but she walks on, over old beer cans and fallen bricks, patches of grass
poking through the cement. Up to the stoop. Up to the door.
The back door. A black hole. Her tiny feet follow each other forward,
one after another, closer and closer, and she pauses at the threshold,
looks back at us. Even from so far away there’s no mistaking, no denying
the meaning in her pleading silence: “Take back the dare.” But she’s
already there.
Then it happens, too fast to be real. The little girl next to me screams,
only her breath goes in instead of out and makes the words:
“Something in the ruins waits!”
And in the black square of the doorway, something jerks the other
little girl backwards into the dark.
Forever gone.
T
HE CEILING IS BLUE
. His first thought is that nothing is real. Nothing is to be trusted. He pushes himself up against the headboard and stares at the knob on his closet door, waiting for the feeling to drain out of him. The knob is glass. Antique. He half expects it to move, but it does not. Nothing moves. The room is saturated in stillness. When there’s no sound, no motion, it’s easy to see how flimsy everything is. Reality seems mushy. Liquid, almost, in this half-light. The little illumination leaking through the curtains is tinted with blue. It must be late. The clock says six o’clock exactly.
The hum of the silence is disconcerting. He keeps thinking he hears something. Somehow, the sound of the non-noise has the same quality of a real sound. It sounds like . . . what? He can’t put his finger on it, but it doesn’t go away.
He gets out of bed, twists his boxers, straightening them, and walks across the rug and onto the hardwood floor. It creaks under his weight and he’s grateful; it chases away the non-sound for a moment. He opens his door, steps into the hall. Here, the stagnant air is filled with the same timid light as his room. Twilight. He walks over to the stairs and leans over the rail.
“Hey, what’s for dinner?”
No answer, except for a barely perceptible echo. He walks back up the hall. His legs hurt. Shin splints. He walks into the bathroom, blows his nose on some toilet paper, pulls on a pair of jeans—the belt is conveniently waiting in the loops from the last time he wore them—and walks back down the hall, thinking about the dream. Trying not to think about it, actually, but reliving it in spite of himself. It won’t leave. Even now, as he’s going through the motions of life, performing all these normal actions, the fear still aches in his bones. He acts like he’s ignoring it, but he cannot.
He crosses back down the hall, listening intently for some familiar sound—the chopping of vegetables for dinner, the mindless, chattering drone of the TV, the moan of the garage door as one of the parents makes an early appearance home from work. There are no sounds. The ache in his bones won’t stop. He can’t shake the dream. Hell, maybe he’s still asleep; maybe this is just another hallway in the labyrinth of his subconscious. Maybe he woke to a world where he’s the only survivor of a terrible cataclysm; maybe he’s the last person left alive on earth.
Or maybe—and this thought really chills him—maybe this is where the door the little girl was pulled into so many years ago led— maybe, in some terrible metaphysical contortion, that black doorway leads here, to the shadowed foyer of his own empty house.
As that thought seeps through his mind, dripping from the land of fleeting fancy into more primal regions, it almost freezes him in his tracks. It’s a horrible idea, the kind that keeps coming back to you, like the image from a video he saw in history class of the Buddhist monks who burned themselves to protest the war in Vietnam. When you turned away, when you closed your eyes, the sight remained.
He’s made his way downstairs now. He passes the coatrack in the hall, trips over the shoes he shuffled off an hour earlier, before his nap, and continues toward the kitchen. It’s getting deeply dark outside and here, away from any windows that might leak in the last residual rays of the dying sun, the blackness is almost total. He fumbles with his hand—here’s the table, here’s one of the doilies his mom insists on draping over everything, even though it looks archaic and lame—and here’s the lamp. He traces his hand up the smooth brass shaft of its neck, without seeing it, bumps the shade with his elbow, finds the switch with his clumsy, still-waking fingertips, and twists. There’s a click and a flash. He gasps.