The Sleepwalkers (25 page)

The fire has crept up the walls, now, and dances, hissing, atop the roof. The wood screeches and pops.

The voice is clear: “Margie, help! It’s me!”

And the face at the window isn’t a demon at all; it’s a person. It’s a girl.

“It’s me, from the diner! It’s me, Christine!”

The realization fills Margie with horror.

“Ralph, we have to let her out,” Margie cries.

“Never on your life—that there’s a demon.”

“It’s the Zikry girl!” says Margie. “I know her! Open the door! Let her out!”

“MARGIE! PLEASE!”

“They take forms, don’t ye be deceived!” he says, his eyes shining in the firelight. “That there’s a demon, and that there demon’s gonna die.”

The heat is coming at Margie in waves.

Screams from inside.

“Margie! Help me! Margie! Mr. Parsons! I’m burning!”

The white hands are pounding through the glass, sending sparkling shards into the mud, but they can’t break through the wood muntin bars that hold the glass in place.

“Let her out!” says Margie. “Now!”

Ralph wheels and faces her, and she realizes just how big he is: over six feet tall and very heavy.

“It’s gonna burn,” he says. “Now you give me that shovel.”

Margie looks down. There’s the shovel, forgotten in her trembling hands, still held in a defensive position, except now the demon it’s holding at bay is Ralph Parsons.

He takes a quick step forward, grabbing at the shovel. Margie brings it back, out of his reach, then snaps it forward again with all the force her wiry little body can muster.

A dull ringing sound hangs in the air for an instant, and the shovel is still vibrating in Margie’s hands when Ralph collapses face-first into the mud. She jumps over him as he falls.

“Look out, Christine,” she yells. “I’m breaking you out!”

There’s no sound from inside. The girl is dead, but Margie swings the shovel anyway, not to free the demon locked in the shed, but to vent her rage. Another Hudsonville child lost. How many can they forget?

The shovel splinters the window frame, and she jerks it back and forth, leaving a clean opening.

Margie almost screams, drops the shovel and slips in the mud when the girl, the demon, springs half out of the window frame. Her upper torso extends out of the window, but her legs are still inside.

“Help me, Margie!” she screams, and Margie does. She takes the girl’s hands, pulls as hard as she can, and the next thing she knows they’re lying in the mud together, watching the flames lash the night sky, watching the smoke writhe upward through the treetops.

She hears a trembling breath, looks over and sees the girl, the demon, is crying. Her face is streaked with dirt and soot. Grimy strings of hair hang in her face.

“It’s okay,” Margie says, and she pulls the Zikry girl close, feeling her frail frame shudder as she cries. Why, she can hardly weigh ninety pounds! How could Ralph Parsons have ever been scared of her? Then she thinks of his words:
they take forms; don’t ye be
deceived.

She looks at Christine again, closer, but still all she sees is a scared little girl. She relaxes a little.

“It’s okay, honey,” she says. “You alright? You hurt?”

“I think . . .” the Zikry girl says. “ . . . I think I got burned some, but I’m okay. And I cut my hands . . . on the glass.”

Margie looks under what’s left of what could only be a singed, tattered nightgown, and sees that there are some burns beginning to blister on the girl’s already scarred legs.

“Yeah, you’re burned alright,” she says, “but nothing some salve and a few days of cold baths won’t fix, I think.”

The girl sniffs, puts her hair back behind her ears, and pulls herself up and into a ball.

Margie is reaching for the shovel.

“Now, Christine Zikry, I’m going to ask you a question, and you tell me the truth,” Margie says. “What are you doing out here tonight?”

The girl wipes some snot off her nose and looks at Margie with big, dark eyes.

“I’m not here, Margie. I wish I was, but I’m not. I’m just dreaming.”

Margie holds the girl’s gaze and shivers. Her groping hand finds the shovel, and she grasps it and stands up slowly, backing away.

“I think we’d better have the sheriff decide whether you’re awake or not, Christine, and whether or not you and your friends did something with Mrs. Parsons.”

“What do you mean?” the girl asks, a perfect picture of innocence.

Margie keeps the shovel between them.

“Why are you holding the shovel like that?” the girl asks. “Are you scared of me?”

Margie is deciding how to answer when something distracts her. A stain seeps across the mud toward them, red and thick.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” says Margie, and she rushes over.

But there’s nothing she can do.

Ralph Parsons is already dead.

The fire has burned almost to coals. It paints the room red and draws shadows thickly across the walls. Caleb Mason doesn’t know what he was just dreaming, but he knows he’s now wide awake. He sits up, looking wide-eyed around the still life surrounding him. Nothing has changed. Something has changed. There’s no sound. There is something . . .

He stands up, fire poker in hand. He sticks his feet in his running shoes and slowly crosses the living room to the foyer, slowly mounts the staircase, slowly walks up the steps, down the hall, into his father’s bedroom, up into the attic. The upstairs is dark as the deep sea at night, but he knows there will be a light on in the attic.

And there is.

He walks among the rafters, step after step, into the little room where one clock ticks and seventeen are silent.

15. My father believed if you stand in a room with sixteen ticking clocks for one hour every day, the spirits will come.

Caleb Mason stands staring at the ticking clock. It says three forty-two, but he has no idea if it’s accurate or not. Somehow, he thinks it is. He glances down, and sees a corner of the insulation is loose next to his right foot. He kneels and pulls it back. There are dusty lath boards beneath it, and sitting upon them is a very, very old key.

One by one, Caleb winds each of the clocks.

Maybe the answer to the Dream Center director’s question is:
Agree
.

As Caleb kneels on the dusty particleboard floor, the dissonance of mistimed “ticks” washes over him, then seems to intensify. His arm hurts worse than ever, suddenly throbs so hard he feels nauseated and throws up on the insulation to his left. He wipes his mouth. The ticking is worse than he had imagined. His mind can’t follow all the ticks at once, and the feeling is very uncomfortable, almost maddening. A torture. Suddenly he wants to smash all the clocks. He’s still clutching the fire poker, after all. He doesn’t care if these clocks are antiques or hand-carved—which they look like they are. He doesn’t care if they belonged to his father, and his father is now dead.

17. My father was mad.

No, that’s impossible, because Dad was an attorney. Dad was respected, successful, rich, and . . . had sixteen clocks in his attic.

And when you listen to the ticking of sixteen clocks at once, it makes you . . . makes us a little . . . really makes you feel—

18. I am mad.

He has to smash the clocks now, before they eat away at him anymore. The ticks tickle his brain, like sixteen ants running on his scalp, like sixteen mosquitoes buzzing in his ears, sixteen, sixteen— he closes his eyes and sees Anna Zikry lifted into darkness, that silent movie loop that plays over and over again, but he covers his ears, tries to keep the sound away, and has a horrible thought:

15. My father believed if you stand in a room with sixteen ticking clocks for one hour every day, the spirits will come.

And he closes his eyes. And they do.

Caleb’s eyes are wide, and he sits up. The fire is nothing but a few specks of red in a bed of ash, but there’s still no hint of the sun. Without warning, the house shudders and Caleb gasps, only to realize an instant later that it’s only the sound of thunder. Outside, the wind has picked up. He looks around, remembering everything: ascending the stairs, finding the key, winding the clocks—that horrible ticking. But he doesn’t remember coming back downstairs. And he doesn’t remember going back to sleep.