Now, Harold looked down at the red digital numbers on the clock and tried to understand what they implied.
The alarm was set for 1:30. PM.
A time when—as far as he knew—their house should’ve been empty.
* * *
Liz arrived home at close to seven. She gave Kylie a perfunctory hug, then got out her laptop to work while she ate. Harold found himself watching her, scrutinizing every little move. His stomach twisted into knots so hard he ended up scraping his meal into the garbage.
When it was Kylie’s bedtime, he escorted the girl to her room. Harold read her a story from Maurice’s Magical Adventures, her favorite book. For the first time all day, he wasn’t thinking about his strange adventure last night, or…
1:30 PM…
…or anything else. His daughter listened as raptly as though it was the first time, asking questions that had them both giggling. She was a guiding light, a beacon of sanity in a world that got crueler every day.
Harold finished the story and closed the book. “Okay, time for bed.”
“One more?”
“No more. You need some sleep, young lady.”
She wiggled beneath the covers and he pulled them up to her chin. He was just about to stand when she asked, “Daddy…do you love Mommy?”
The question floored him, turned his skin to ice. He stammered, “W-why would you ask something like that?”
“I don’t know. She’s just mean sometimes.”
“That’s…no reason not to love someone, Kylie.” He realized he had expertly avoided her question. “Don’t you still love her? Even when she’s mean?”
“Uh huh.”
“Okay, then. There you go. Now go to sleep.”
She nodded. “Okay Daddy.”
“Goodnight, honey. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
* * *
Liz was already in bed when he entered the room, sitting up and reading a copy of Forbes with a highlighter in hand. She glanced up at him, but said nothing.
Harold stood in the doorway. For some reason, he didn’t want to lie in that bed beside her. He had no real reason to believe the strange alarm clock setting meant anything, but his imagination—already revved up from last night—was working overtime.
“Good...” He stopped and cleared his throat. “Good day at work?”
“Busy,” she answered, without looking up.
“I tried calling you. Around lunchtime.”
“I was in a meeting.”
“Oh? How long did it last?”
Liz slapped the magazine down on her covered thigh. “Jesus, Harold, is this the Spanish Inquisition? It was a meeting, I didn’t check the time! Around 2, I guess!”
She flinched as she said it. Right around the eyes. He was almost sure.
Harold went into the bathroom and began brushing his teeth without another word. Kylie’s question kept swirling around and around in his head.
* * *
Harold stared at the ceiling until he was sure Liz was asleep and then rolled over to study her in the moonlight. She still looked like the woman he’d married—still had a pretty decent ass and tits to match, in all honesty—but, in almost every other way, she’d become a stranger.
He didn’t know when exactly that had happened, and it scared him. The change had no specific event that he could pinpoint; it was more like a houseplant that had been forgotten and allowed to die. The kind of difference you can see only when you look back at the entire length of the road stretched out behind you.
Something was growing between them. Had been, for years. Not a distance, but rather, the exact opposite: a weight, some super dense object whose gravity was slowly crushing them. You could say that Sam’s death started it, but that wasn’t true, it had been there even before.
But that didn’t mean what he was thinking—this crazy idea the alarm clock had put in his head—was true.
And even if it was, Harry ol’ buddy…would that really be so bad?
He glanced at the clock. 1:30 again, but AM now. His gut told him that was no coincidence. If he didn’t do something to get his mind off this, he would go insane.
Liz was snoring as he slipped from beneath the covers. The house had settled into the delicate silence of night’s loneliest hours. Harold tip-toed to the bathroom drawers to rummage for the flashlight he kept there, for the trimming of wild nose hairs. He squeezed the plastic tube in one sweat-slicked fist and went to the bedroom door.
Before opening it, he turned his head and pressed one ear against the wood. What was he even listening for? Crickets, maybe? But all was quiet. Harold turned the knob and pulled the door open, wincing at the almost imperceptible squall of the hinges. He slipped through and eased it firmly closed behind him.
The nest of shadows on the left side of the room could’ve been solid; a bulging, silken, pulsating egg-sac that offended the eyes and numbed the heart. A black that deep wasn’t natural, shouldn’t be allowed to exist. Harold stood in the living room and stared into it, straining for any sign of that other…
world…
…other place, before switching on the flashlight.
The circle of light splashed against the sky-blue plaster of the living room wall, and Liz’ awful framed Pottery Barn picture of Sicily countryside Liz. He played it across the corner until he was satisfied nothing lurked.
Harold came close, so close, to giving the whole idea up then, going back to bed, and waiting for Kylie to call for her water. That would be the quickest way to begin putting this—all of this—behind him.
But suddenly the idea of ignoring another problem made him ill.
Harold slid the flashlight into his pajama pocket and got down on his hands and knees. He crawled forward, the same way Kylie had as a baby in this very room. The carpet was worn and soft beneath him. Ahead, that dark scar loomed. He could make out the barest outline of the coffee table to his right before sight was lost to him, so much that he couldn’t see his hands or arms beneath him as they shuffled him along. He continued crawling, determined to move forward until his head bumped into the corner.
And then his right hand rose from the carpet, swung forward, and came back down on something else.
Harold froze. The surface beneath his hand was cool and moist, with that same wiggling motion. He moved his left hand up beside the right to confirm this, as though calling the appendage a liar. But no, his left palm gave the same report. He tried to dig his fingers in, but the material was unyielding, like the skin of a hard rubber ball. He slid his hands back toward his sides, feeling for the point where the spongy surface met the carpet under his knees. No definitive line, but more of a blending, a…melding. The carpet fibers began to grow right out of that smooth, rubbery ground and then became more and more sparse before disappearing entirely. He arched his back and stretched out as far as he could, sweeping his hands until he encountered crisp grass in waves.
Harold inched his way forward, until his entire body was off the carpet. It took several seconds of deliberation before he could bring himself to leave this anchor behind. The further he went, the more real this other place became, like objects jumping into sharp relief under a microscope as it magnified. Now there were outdoor sounds coming to him again: breeze soughing through trees, the clicking of leafless branches, the rustling of grass. From somewhere, he could even hear a bizarre k-kreee k-kreee k-kreee that he could, in fact, only liken to crickets. If he closed his eyes (and he really didn’t have to), his ears could fool his brain into believing that he now knelt in the grass on a warm summer night, somewhere far from the constant under-thrum of civilization.
His nose, however, told a different story. The air was filled with that stench from before, of death and rot. A smell that bad could only come from spoiled meat.
It was all so alien…but there was something familiar about it at the same.
“What is this place?” he whispered. His words—the first spoken her
e—fell out of his mouth like dead insects. “Oh God…what is this place?”
There was no answer from God or anyone else. Unease began to creep back in. The darkness was just too oppressive after a while, like being slowly smothered in a pile of blankets. His eyes ached for input. He needed to see something, anything, to ease the tension mounting in his chest. Harold fumbled the flashlight out of his pocket and felt around on it until he found the on switch.
At first, he thought the batteries had died. No yellow beam exited the wide end of the cylinder in his hand when he pointed it at the ground in front of him. But when he turned the instrument around to look into it, he could see the bulb in there, glaring brightly in its reflective metal cup, one tiny bit of visual stimuli in the midst of the darkness.
But the strangest thing…the thing that made him feel small and sick…was that it didn’t even hurt his eyes, the way staring into a flashlight usually would.
Because the illumination it produced didn’t reach past the glass cap over it. The light was muted, sheared off at its source. His hand remained a jet black shadow even when he held it up in front of the flashlight, nothing but a black, featureless outline. His mind recoiled from the impossibility.
This is Dark World. He didn’t know where the stray thought came from, but it felt true. No light on this side of the Mason Dixon, nah uh, not allowed.
From the endless black plain ahead of him, something roared.
The squall was like a cross between a jungle cat and some kind of dinosaur. It rolled across the outdoor expanse, washing over him, bringing a renewed smell of decay. How far (or close) the source was, he couldn’t tell, but it sounded large enough to swallow him in one gulp.
There were wild things here. Things that could never be tamed or kept in a zoo.
And all at once, Harold knew why this place seemed so familiar. Last year, while Liz had been on a business trip, he’d taken Kylie to a safari theme park whose gimmick was allowing you to drive your car through the midst of African animals in a natural habitat. When they’d reached the grass plains where the lions waited, lazing about just a few yards from the road, Harold rolled down the window just the tiniest bit despite the advisements not to do so, wanting Kylie to experience the majestic beasts as close as possible. The world outside their car had felt as dangerous as this, and the same dank, rotten smell hung over those predators of the savannah in an invisible cloud.
Harold wanted to go back now. Ignoring a problem was one thing; running from one in terror was entirely another. Still on his haunches, he scooted backward, stretching behind him with his bare toes to feel for the safety of the carpet.
It wasn’t there. He crawled in reverse and only met more of the moist earth.
Panic tried to persuade him to get to his feet, but he forced himself to stay still and think. If he got disoriented in here, he was liable to get lost again. He couldn’t have moved more than a foot or so past where the carpet petered out. He spun in a careful, calculated half-circle, still on hands and knees, making sure that he faced the exact direction he’d come from.
His eyes could pick out nothing, no sign of the house, but he swallowed his fear and crawled forward blindly. The flashlight slipped from his hand, but he didn’t bother to search for it. The living room had to be ahead somewhere, it had to be. The two spaces overlapped one another, like matching sound frequencies, and maybe that was what this was, that insane darkness in his living room created by ill-conceived architecture matched the one in this place so perfectly, it formed a sort of bridge between the two. His fear made him cling to the theory like it was rock-solid fact.
Harold was moving so fast when he hit the carpet he romped another few feet forward, friction-burning both knees and the place where his right wrist met his palm. He was shaking and panting again, brow dripping sweat, but he scrambled to the wall, looked behind him, and flicked the light switch.
And, for just a split second, he thought the darkness on the left side of the room denied the light. It looked like a black bubble, just as he imagined earlier, a seething vortex eating away at the walls and floor and ceiling, before the clean light from overhead drove it into the corner, shrank it down, down, down, till it was the size of a penny, and then popped it right out of existence.
* * *
The next day, Harold bought a gun.
It was a Mossberg 500 shotgun, long barrel and walnut stock. He’d never even fired a weapon before, but the clerk assured him it would be the easiest for a novice to use and actually hit something.
Liz was going to pop an aneurysm when she found out.
He’d spent the night in Kylie’s room again, stretched out in the floor and watching the door. When she’d asked for water, he scurried to the bathroom and took a moment to examine himself in the mirror. He looked mad—eyes crazed, hair sweaty and disheveled—but even worse were the stains on his palms and the knees of his pajamas. They were a fetid purple color, and smelled of compost and something far richer that made him gag. He washed his hands until they were chafed and red, then rubbed at his knees with a wet washcloth.
In the morning, when he was sure the first thin rays of sunlight from the front of the house reached all the way to the corner of the living room, he emerged and, before Liz awoke, cleaned a trail of similar stains across the living room carpet. They led right up to the wall, and one of them—a perfect imprint of his own hand—stopped right up against the baseboard, as though his fingers had grown right out of the trim. He would’ve just about had to break his hand to leave such a mark in the tight angle between floor and wall.
Unless, of course, the wall hadn’t been there.
After ducking out of work early, he bought the gun, then stopped by the hardware store to buy some flat sheets of lumber and nails. Something had to be done to keep his family safe, to…
…ignore the problem…
…to eliminate the danger the same way he would a gas leak or toxic mold. God forbid Liz or Kylie should wander in there.
Not to mention that, if he could cross over to Dark World, who was to say the things that lived there—the creatures that called that impenetrable, unknowable darkness home—couldn’t come here?
But when he arrived home with his supplies, he saw how useless the idea was. What would he do, put boards over the walls, the same walls that he’d walked straight through? Should he build a fence through the middle of the room, and forbid anyone to cross over?
Jesus, Liz would have him committed.
And maybe she should, a quiet, and far more rational side of his mind—one that hadn’t gotten the memo that Dark World was real enough to leave grass stains on your pants—whispered.
No. No, he was not crazy. He’d actually been to that other place, with its dank, lion-den stench.
So instead, he propped his shotgun against the coffee table within easy reach, plopped down on the couch, and stared into the corner to think.
He was still sitting like that when the doorbell rang.
* * *
Harold checked the narrow window beside the door. A man stood on his porch, a good-looking guy in his late thirties with curly black hair, dressed in a Dockers-and-V-neck-sweater combo that were too unassuming to be sales attire. A neighbor, perhaps, one he’d never met? When he spotted Harold peeking through the window, he gave a close-lipped smile and nervous wave.
For a moment, Harold considered not answering even though he’d been seen; he didn’t have time to deal with a request to borrow his lawnmower or a cup of sugar. But something about the jittery way the guy stood out there waiting for him to open the door—hands shoved in pockets, rocking on the balls of his feet—made him turn the deadbolt. Harold could imagine Kylie’s future suitors standing much the same way, as he waited to ask his permission for the honor of his daughter’s hand.
“Yes?” he asked, without opening the door all the way.
The man outside bit his upper lip and hesitated. Harold was struck by the notion th
at he was suddenly rethinking whatever had brought him here. “Mister…uh…Taylor? Harold?”
“Yeah, that’s me. Who are you?”
“I’m…I’m Doug. Doug Stratton?” This last was stated as a question, as though Harold should know him. And indeed, the name did ring some distant bells in the back of his head. Stratton started to hold out his hand, seemed to think better of it, and drew back. “You probably don’t remember me. I work with Be…with your wife.”
The name plunked firmly into place for Harold. “We met at the company Christmas party last year.”
“That’s right.”
Harold stared at him for a moment. “Well, Liz isn’t here. She should be at work.”
Stratton nodded. “Oh, I know. I’m…well, I’m actually here to talk to you. I just happened to drive by and see your car.”
“I left work early.” Harold felt suddenly defensive, having to explain why he was in his own home to this stranger. Mostly he was just anxious to get this wrapped up and go back to the problem at hand. “I’m sorry, what is this about, Mr. Stratton?”
“Doug, please.” Stratton looked over his shoulder, as though he’d just committed a robbery and expected the cops to come squealing up at any minute. The street was empty though, the sky slowly being overtaken by a bank of thick clouds with steel-gray underbellies. “Do you think…maybe we could talk inside?”
Harold shrugged irritably and then nodded. He moved aside to allow Stratton past him. The man came through the door and turned immediately to the right, walking through the small vestibule, the dining room, past the partition wall and into the living room, as familiar and confident as if he’d been here many times before. Harold closed the door and went after him.
In the living room, Stratton paced to the couch back and turned to face him, crossing arms over his chest. The guy was bigger than Harold, outweighing him by at least thirty or so pounds that were probably more muscle than fat. Even so, he still had that nervous energy about him, and it seemed to take some effort for him to meet Harold’s eyes.
“Beth doesn’t know I’m here,” he said, before Harold could ask him again what this was about. It took a full five seconds for him to even understand who Stratton was talking about. Liz had never once gone by Beth her entire life. “I just…I want to make that perfectly clear, that she doesn’t know. And this—me coming here—it’s not something I planned. She wants to talk to you herself, but she just can’t work up the nerve, so I thought I would…bring this to a head.”