The Sleepwalkers (34 page)

Looking around the table, Ron smiles. Five strangers were brought together here, and despite the distrust, the uncertainty, the unfamiliarity, right here in this moment they might be a family. They might be the only family he’ll ever have again. And he prays:

Lord,

You have brought us here in fellowship together,

And we thank you.

We do not pretend to know

What your will holds for us,

But we know we are thankful for this food

And for each other,

And for the chance to follow

The path you’re leading us down.

May we stay on that path,

Wherever it takes us,

And may it lead us always to you.

Please bless Keisha,

Bless Caleb’s friend—

“Bean,” Caleb murmurs.

“And Anna,” says Christine.

“And Ralph and Lee Parsons,” says Margie.

“And my father,” says Caleb.

Bless them all, Lord,

And those whose names we don’t know,

And be with us,

As we do your will,

’Til the end.

Amen.

All, even the witch, say amen.

“I think you might’ve been a better preacher than you give yourself credit for, Mister Bent,” says Margie.

And they start eating.

In the paranoia of his mind, Caleb thinks he hears a far-off moan and a clacking sound, so soft it isn’t real at all. It’s the wind through the eves and the rustle of leaves, he tells himself; nothing more. And he forgets about it.

They eat and are full. The place is full of warm energy, of togetherness and anticipation. Christine finally looks at Caleb, and he catches her eye and they smile. He squeezes her hand under the table. Just like that, they’ve made peace.

In Caleb’s frantically churning mind, his plans of a life with Amber are dissipating like an approaching mirage. The question is, when they’re gone what will take their place? For the moment at least, he has no answer. Too many things have turned out to be mirages over the last few days, and he’s having trouble figuring out what
is
real.

“This is delicious,” Ron says.

“My Anna loves lasagna. Wherever she is, I bet she’s fat and healthy and eating it right now,” Mrs. Zikry says, then adds: “She ran away.”

Everybody nods. Christine seems like she’s about to speak, but doesn’t.

“A lot of children’ve run away,” Margie says, “and pretty soon, maybe we’ll find some of them and bring them home.”

“Or die trying,” says Caleb. It was meant to be a joke, but the smile turns sour and dies on his lips.

Instead of laughter, the clink of forks on plates fills the silence.

After a few minutes the eating is done, but nobody moves to pick up the plates.

The witch begins weeping.

Everyone watches her. They look at one another, but nobody comforts her. Christine just stares at her plate, in another world. Finally, Ron speaks.

“My wife,” he says, “she was a strong woman. Way stronger than me. If I came in and tried to steal a piece of bacon before breakfast was done, she’d slap me so hard with her spatula that the welt would still be there after lunch. My brother made some racist comment one time about me being married to a black woman, and she threw a cup of beer in his face before I even knew what was happening. She was a hard worker, too. Started working at the age of twelve, ’cause her daddy made her. At sixteen she was out on her own and had her daddy locked up for beating her mother. She took care of her mom after that and her three little sisters; worked three jobs and went without new socks and underwear most of the time to keep them fed. When I met her, her sisters were grown and she only had two jobs. Her mother was blind with diabetes, and she took care of her. She worked nights at a truck stop and days at a plastics factory. I was driving trucks then, long hauls through South Dakota and Montana and Idaho, from Seattle to Chicago, then sometimes down to Atlanta. Her mother died the week we met and she went on the road with me. Nine months later, we were on the road, in South Dakota near Rapid City, in the Badlands, when our baby came. We had no doctors, no medicine, no nothing. She laid in the sleeper bunk and had that baby. It took all afternoon and all night. We sat all alone on the side of this lonely road in the middle of the night with the wind howling and dust blowing, and had that baby. And I swear to God, she never she cried once.

“I retired from trucking after the baby came. We got a little house, and I got a little job. Then Keisha, my daughter, disappeared. My wife started drinking. She started taking painkillers. More and more. She started looking through me instead of at me. Then she started looking through everything.

“On October twenty-ninth, four years ago, I came home from work and she was on the bed with the covers up to her chin, just like she was sleeping, as tucked in and comfy as could be. Except there was vomit all over. And her eyes weren’t shut; they were open. She was the strongest person I ever knew. But not strong enough.”

His words hang in the air, touching everything with their weight.

Nobody says anything or moves for a long time.

Finally, without turning her tear-filled eyes from her plate, Margie says, “Mr. Bent, why did you tell us all that?”

Ron looks around the table. A small, wistful smile hangs on his lips.

“Because all of us, we’re still here.”

Everyone looks at one another. A few heads nod.

“We should get some rest,” says Christine. “We’ll have to wake before dark.”

Chapter Seventeen

S
EE THE SLEEPING HOUSE
:

The door is locked, the windows shut tight. The afternoon sun that made warm squares of light on the carpet has waned to nothing. It is a silent place. See the master bedroom. Here, two middle-aged women sleep far from one another, each wrapped in her own troubled dreams. See the other bedroom, the room of a teenage girl, with its perfume and posters and books. Here, a young man sleeps. His LA Dodgers cap is tilted down over his eyes. He dreams of a man in chains, whispering
“help me,”
and the dream makes him frown and mumble in his sleep. Now, look down the hall. See the living room. Here sleeps a man who some would call middle-aged, but who would call himself old. He snores softly. He is supposed to be awake, watching, but even the coffee, even the danger couldn’t hold him. He tried pacing, tried watching TV (but found there was no TV to watch), even tried biting his lip. But in the end, the weight of his eyelids was insurmountable. He swore he would only rest his eyes for a few minutes, only for the time it takes to count to one hundred. But by forty, the numbers bled into silence, and the silence became everything.

Now, hear the creak of the floor. Hear the shuffling tread of slow, tender steps crossing the carpet, crossing the stained linoleum of the kitchen. Hear the breathing. It is deep and slow, but there is the faintest hiss as breath passes teeth. The footsteps stop. Hear the brush of a hand on the counter. Hear a metallic rasping sound, followed by a soft, momentary ringing of steel. Watch, as the figure crosses the kitchen and advances, slow and certain. See her eyelids, closed tight as coffins, the eyes behind them thrashing back and forth as if trying to get out. Watch her cross into the living room. Watch as her footsteps stop at the couch where the old man sleeps. Watch as the girl, the sleepwalking girl, suddenly makes a hideous, rage-warped face and jerks back the long, long carving knife.

Listen very, very closely, and in the bedroom, in the boy’s dream, you might hear the man in chains screaming
“wake up!’”

And Caleb does, and rolls over.

And in the living room, Ron Bent opens his eyes just in time to see the mercurial streak as the knife blade speeds toward his face.

He snatches her tiny wrist in his hand.

The killing point of the blade quivers an inch above his left eye.

“Christine!” screams Caleb, just entering the room. “Wake up!”

She only snarls, jerks free of Ron, and raises the knife again.

Ron can hardly believe her strength, can hardly digest the nightmare image hovering over him. Shocked, he doesn’t utter a sound.

When the knife comes down a second time, he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to stop it.

“Christine!” Caleb yells again, as behind the apparition of a girl, Margie and Mrs. Zikry rush into the room and stand in the doorway, still groggy with sleep. Christine snarls again, and the knife blade falls, bringing death on its tip.

Ron knows his reaction is too slow, and waits for the sound of the blade ripping his skin, popping the lining of his stomach, biting into his spine.

Instead, at the last instant Christine is jerked sideways, tackled by Caleb, and Ron deflects the knife.

Now Christine is on the ground, under Caleb, eyes still closed, mouth still folded into a quivering, evil grimace.

Ron glances at the knife, now jutting from the arm of the couch only a few inches from his head. Then he rises, takes a deep breath to clear his head, and stoops to help Caleb restrain Christine.

“WAKE UP!” Caleb shouts, his face close to hers, his hands clamped on her wrists. “WAKE UP!”

And she does.

“What’s going on?” Mrs. Zikry says.

Caleb doesn’t say anything. He’s staring at Christine and struggling to regain his breath.

Ron watches, utterly still.

Margie, stepping into the room, pipes up: “She tried to kill him, that’s what’s happening.”

“She’s a bad girl . . . ” says the witch next to Margie.

“No,” says Christine, “I didn’t mean to.”

“Don’t just stand there,” Margie says, nudging Ron. “We have to do something with her, or she’s going to kill us all!”

“No!” says Christine, still pinned to the ground, tears filling her eyes. “I’m so sorry, Billy. I swear I wasn’t trying to hurt him. I would never hurt him, I swear! You believe me, right?”

Caleb looks around, at a loss for words.

“Right? Ron? I’m sorry, I would never . . . ”

“You had a knife, Christine,” Caleb says finally. “We all saw what you tried to do.”

“I wasn’t me!” says Christine. “You have to believe me! It’s whatever he put in my head! It makes them come.”

“Makes who come, sweetie?” says Ron.

“Them!” she says. “The ghosts.”

Caleb rolls off Christine, and they sit up, both shaking.

“Why do the ghosts want you to kill me?” Ron presses.

“They want to kill all of us,” she says. “Because they think we’ll stop them from waking the devil from where he sleeps in the dark.

And the director wants the end of the world. But Anna says . . . ”

Christine leans against the couch now and her head drops into her shaking hands.

“What does Anna say?” Caleb asks.

“She says it’s already too late.”

And from just outside the window comes a low voice filled with poisonous mirth: “Five little blackbirds, baked in a pie. . . .”

Caleb spins around and slaps the curtains back from the window.

No one is there—only the black outlines of trees against the deep blue of twilight.

“It is too late,” says Christine. “We should have run away. We should have left town during the daylight, when we had the chance.

Now they’re all around us.”

A pounding begins at the front door. Then there’s a pounding at the wall of the room behind Christine, then on the wall next to Margie.

“Sweet Jesus Christ,” she says.

Now there is pounding on every wall. The entire trailer is shaking.

The witch leans against the door frame, covering her ears and moaning. Finally, she steps over to the nearest wall and starts pounding back.

“Stop!” she screams. “Stop, stop, stop!”

“Do we have any weapons?” Ron asks.

“Only the knives in the kitchen,” says Christine. “But they won’t do us any good.”

“Let’s get one for each of us,” Ron says. “I have a gun in the car,” he adds. “But I doubt if they’ll let me run out and get it.”

And suddenly the pounding stops.

The five look at each other.

“Let’s get those knives,” says Ron.