"There was a man," she started after Dan walked in, "a very old man. I can’t remember his face, just his voice."
"How do you know he was old?" Dan asked, aware that his wife was probably listening on the monitor.
"His voice," she answered as if her answer needed no further explanation. "He was sitting on my bed when I woke up."
"You just had a dream honey. You didn’t wake up until it was over."
She continued, ignoring what he said. "He said he wanted to talk to me. He said he needed to tell me something important. He said that something bad was going to happen. He said a monster was coming..."
"Katey, baby, there are no monsters."
She turned and looked at him. "I said the same thing, and he said that monsters are everywhere. They hide in drainpipes and under bridges and at the bottom of lakes, but they usually can’t hurt you. The only way they can hurt you is if you do something bad. Doing bad things calls them. He said it was like throwing fish into the ocean for sharks."
"Listen to me Kate," Dan said as he set his hand on top of hers. "You didn’t do anything bad, so even if there were monsters..."
"He didn’t say I did anything bad."
The silence between them grew and swelled and filled the room. He didn’t know how long he stared at his daughter, but he was filled with the sudden feeling that this night’s episode wasn’t real at all. Somehow, Kate had heard him and Shelly arguing and created whatever this was. He felt heat rising in his face, and he turned away from his daughter’s unbroken gaze.
"There are no monsters."
He left the room without kissing her forehead, something he never did, and stepped back into the blackness of the hallway. By touch and memory, he glided down the hallway, passing through the sliver of moonlight thrown through the sidelights that flanked the front door. As he did, the moonlight flickered once as if something had passed in front of the moon. He stopped and peered at the slitted windows for a moment, gazing at the front porch and listening to his heartbeat in his own ears.
Nothing stirred.
"She okay?" his wife asked as he rolled back into bed. Her voice was groggy from sleep, and Dan realized she had not been listening in on the conversation.
"Fine," he said with a curt voice, still clinging to the remnants of the argument from before bedtime.
That’s a fine way to be, a voice within whispered. She all but catches you in the act, and you get to act all huffy...
Dan forced the voice to silence and closed his eyes. He wanted to sleep, wanted to be free from thought, free from this endless day. There were things to take care of, but they would wait. There was a way out of all this, and he knew his onetime mistake with a certain co-worker of the opposite sex could be fixed.
No, he thought. Not fixed.
Hidden.
~~~~~
12:15 AM
"Daddy..."
The voice was close, right next to his ear in fact, but it seemed to travel miles in the few inches between. There was a surge of panic in his gut as he rolled over.
"Daddy," Kate said again, more insistent this time. Why had he panicked before? There was something off, but he couldn’t put his finger on precisely what.
"Katey?" he moaned. "What is it?"
"There’s something in our house."
The words echoed passed through his mind almost completely unheeded. All of it was so unreal, too much like a dream to possibly be real. But why?
She never gets out of bed, some slightly more rational and awake part of his mind said. She figured out early on that you and Shelly could hear her through the monitor, so she never got out of bed.
This realization pried his heavy eyelids open, and his daughter’s face came into focus. Beams of moonlight through the blinds patterned her tiny face with the kind of minute details that never seemed to show up in dreams.
Not a dream.
"What did you say?"
She leaned closer, peering slightly over one shoulder toward the yawning blackness of the open bedroom door. Most nights, Dan locked the door, though he could never say why. There was always a twinge of guilt when he spun the latch, a feeling of leaving his daughter to her fate, but he did it all the same. Tonight, however, after the first trip into Kate’s room, he must have forgotten.
"There’s something in our house," she repeated, this time in a whisper barely loud enough to hear. All at once, the world came into focus and he threw the covers off and leapt from the bed.
"Who?" Even in the center of the rush of panic he felt, he knew in some small way that she must have been dreaming. He felt like a sleepwalker who suddenly snaps into consciousness in his front yard. His normal, boring world had somehow tipped off its axis, and he felt himself spinning. "Who’s in our house?"
"Not a who," Kate answered back flatly.
By now, Shelly was awake and sitting up.
"What’s going on?" she asked.
"Kate heard something," he said as he crossed toward the open door. Shelly scooped her daughter up just as he passed into the hallway, which was thick with blackness. He flipped on the light, still more annoyed than afraid, but committed to the task of setting things right as quickly as possible. As a dull yellow light filled the hallway, he rubbed his eyes and stepped blearily toward her room. Inside, he found nothing, so he carried his search into the next room, then the next, flipping on lights and searching for something he knew he would never find. After checking the hall bathroom, he was beginning to feel a slightly silly, even annoyed, when he felt a sting in his foot.
"Ow," he yelped as he pulled his foot up and grabbed it. He was sure he had stepped on a shard of glass, some long forgotten remnant of a shattered cup, but as he peered at the high arch of his foot, he saw it was an ant.
"The hell?"
He flicked it off impatiently and inspected the tiny bite, which was no bigger than a pinhead. Just then, his still blurry eyes noticed more movement on the baseboard. Kneeling for a closer look, he was shocked to see a line of ants working their way slowly down the hall. He traced the perfect line back to the source, shuddering at the sheer number of them. Never in the six years of living here had they seen much more than a random spider or roach here or there, but there were hundreds of them, tiny and black invaders marching like soldiers. He felt oddly violated at this sudden and inexplicable intrusion.
"My God," he said in disgust. The path led back toward the foyer, and as he turned the corner, he remembered the shape that seemed to pass in front of the moon earlier that night. His hand shook feebly as he reached for the porch light, and he realized that for the first time since laying his daughter down, he was completely awake.
Part of him — the whispering night voice — expected to see something standing just outside the thin panes of the sidelights, but he refused to let this voice control him, and when the bulb lit, he felt vindicated to see nothing but the same empty porch he expected to see. He glanced down and saw that the path of ants led to the bottom pane of glass just six inches above the polished oak floors. A crack had formed there, just large enough for an army of ants to find their way in.
In seconds, he had fetched a broom and a roll of duct tape from the utility room. Using his teeth, he bit off a small strip of duct tape and covered the hole, fairly certain that it would hold until the morning. Then, he wasted no time in sweeping the silent army up into a pile and pushing them all helplessly toward the front door. He clicked the deadbolt and swung the door wide, sure that this odd episode was over, when he gazed down at the welcome mat. There was a patch of mud there, nothing extremely out of the ordinary, but noticeably out of place. It hadn’t rained all week, but this looked fresh, as if the family had trudged in during a storm. Just past the mat was a small, barely visible trail that petered out after a few steps.
Footsteps?
"No," he said aloud. Just a smudge of old dirt.
Not quite, the night voice whispered. Oh, you want it to be a smudge of dirt, but you and I both know you’re loo
king at footsteps that belong to ... something. The same something that your daughter dreamed about, and the same something that put that crack in the window...
Dan slammed the door, silencing whatever else his awful imagination wanted to show him. Back in the bedroom, he heard his wife’s slow, calming breaths, and he knew she had nodded back off. Kate, whom he assumed was asleep next to her mother, rolled over and stared at him. He lay down on the bed next to her as she began to whisper.
"Did you see it?" she asked.
"I saw ... ants," he answered. "Is that what was in the house?"
She rolled back over. "No. Not ants."
For a moment, he considered taking her back to bed. Instead, he leaned back into his pillow feeling itchy and restless, like something was crawling all over his bare skin. He didn’t think he would ever be able to sleep, but a short time later, he did.
~~~~~
1:58 AM
Dan awoke sweating. The room was hot, and Kate had drifted over to his side of the bed. Now, in a mass of sheets and pillows, the pair of them felt sticky with sweat. He threw back the covers and stumbled into the bathroom, tripping on toys and cursing as he went. Sliding the door closed behind him, Dan leaned over the sink and began drinking deep handfuls of water from the tap before taking his cupped hands to his face. The cool water ran down his back and sides, and he leaned back, stretching and taking in deep breaths. Moments later, he stood over the toilet, emptying his bladder and swaying back and forth like an old man suddenly deprived of his cane.
Damn, he was tired, and in that moment he couldn’t even remember why it had been so hard to drift back off. Something had happened — one of Kate’s dreams maybe — but he couldn’t figure out what it was. He was just reaching down to flush the toilet when he heard the first footstep over his head.
He froze, his hand still on the mirrored handle of the toilet, and after a few seconds, he was certain he had imagined it. The house, like all houses, breathed at night, settling and cooling, emitting noises that would make a jumpy man sit up in bed. But Dan wasn’t a jumpy man, and he knew the sounds of a settling house. This wasn’t settling; this was a footstep, and that meant one thing. Something was in the attic. Seconds ticked away, and still he stood motionless for who knows how long, and still, the only thing that broke the silence was his own pounding heart.
Dan had just begun to ease his grip on the handle when he heard it again, this time farther away. It was followed by another step, and another.
"Jesus," he said. "This is really happening."
His eyes focused on the vent above the toilet and stared transfixed on the source of the sounds. The vent led straight to the attic through an exhaust fan. As he watched, something began to press through one of the tiny, plastic slats of the fan cover, something black and awful that he couldn’t quite place until it forced its way out. It wriggled halfway out and hung there for a second, trapped between the ceiling and the floor as if caught in zero gravity. Finally, it worked free and dropped to the floor. Dan recoiled as the centipede righted itself and began crawling across the tiles looking for a safe haven. It went for the toilet immediately, and edged around the bowl and out of sight.
The footsteps had stopped once again, and Dan began to backpedal into the bedroom, moving instinctively away from the source of the sounds. He turned and glared at the bedroom, barely lit by the bathroom light, and he wasn’t surprised to see Kate was sitting up again.
"Do you hear it?" she asked.
"Did you?" he replied.
She nodded her head. For the first time this night, he could see she was afraid, and it jolted him back into his rightful role as a father. Despite how scared he was, he wouldn’t be pushed around his own house. Deep down, he hoped there was still some explanation for all this, though it seemed less likely by the minute. Still, he wasn’t ready to give in to panic, not yet at least, not while his daughter sat shivering in the bed next to him.
"Shelly," he said as he nudged his wife into consciousness.
She turned, fear immediately rising in her eyes. "Wha?"
"There’s something in the attic," he said matter-of-factly, his tone hiding his own aching fear. "Probably a bird or something. Maybe even a raccoon fell onto the roof from a tree."
The confusion on her face was as clear as the weariness. "Just leave it."
"It might be tearing something up. I’m just going to check it out." Upon realizing that she didn’t need to be awake for any of this to occur, he added, "Kate’s scared."
That did it. Shelly sat up and leaned toward her daughter, concern shining in her tired eyes. "It’s okay," she said, soothing as she pulled her daughter down into her embrace. Kate’s tiny blue eyes still cut through the dark of the room, as she leaned backward, never letting her gaze break from her father’s. The words of his wife chased him from the room as those eyes smoldered in his mind.
"Daddy won’t let anything bad happen."
~~~~~
2:02 AM
Dan slipped on a pair of tennis shoes over his bare feet as he crossed the utility room and into the garage. He completed this simple task like a young boy who is told to get dressed before going somewhere he doesn’t want to go — school or church or grandma's. It was deliberate and slow, clearly a man trying to run down the clock.
Run down the clock on what?
The night, of course. Whatever was happening here would never happen under the sane gaze of the sun. Still, that was a long way from here, and there was no denying the simple fact that he was the man of the house. It was his job to check out suspicious noises, just as it was his job to fish dead mice from the crawl spaces or wade ankle deep in the collective slurry of the family’s shit when the septic tank pump died. These were the hallmarks of the man of the house, feminist theory be damned.
Now, as he often had in his life, Dan found himself questioning the unquestionable. "Why are things the way they are?" or some such. Usually, these questions — driven by three or four beers — were just enough to make Shelly smile and roll her eyes in that, "Oh, you men," sort of way. But Dan knew there was a deeper truth there, just hidden under the layers of Stainmaster carpet and satin finish avocado paint, and he knew it was a truth that Shelly would never dare talk about.
Why are we still together?
"Not now," he said, desperately trying to silence the voice in his head. "I don’t have time for this now. This has nothing to do with all that."
Really? I think this might be exactly what this is all about. I think you’ve convinced her. It wasn’t a very persuasive case, certainly nothing that would hold up in court. It worked, just the same, and I think we both know why. She believed you because she wanted to believe.
"There’s something in the house. What the hell does that have to do with..."
I don’t know any more than you do ... but she does.
"Kate?"
That’s right. She knows something’s eating you, and if you don’t get it out and deal with it ... well, before your precious sun comes up, it will eat you up, every single bite...
He slammed the door to the garage, shutting the awful, whispering voice inside his head. Now, with a sudden sick clarity, he realized where he was. The garage was just as he left it, with one very noticeable difference. The ladder to the attic was down.
Dan’s mind clawed at the thousands of threads that swirled in the span of a second, desperately fighting to find an explanation as to why it would be down.
Only, there wasn’t one.
He was the only member of the family that ever went into the attic, and it had been months since he had climbed the ladder himself. When was it? Christmas, maybe longer.
Dan couldn’t answer that question, but when he reached to the tool rack lining the wall and snatched the claw hammer from its perch, he squeezed until his fingers threatened to burst at the seams. The attic light was off. Above him, the opening of the attic was a yawning black mouth as still and empty as a dead man’s.
Just close i
t. Close it now, and whatever is up there will have to stay up there. There’s no other way out, and in the morning, it will be gone; you know it will because it’s not real — it can’t be.
Dan agreed that this was the first good thing his internal voice had said all night. He reached down to grab the folding staircase, and the lights went out. There was no sound, no pop of a light bulb overhead, no scream of fear, just a feeling so incredible, so impossible, that his mind could barely even grasp what had just occurred.
In the second or two it took him to readjust, he stood there, grabbing the bottom step like a statue. But when he heard the shuffling overhead, a burst of fear and adrenaline snapped him back with an almost painful suddenness. He threw the step upward with all his strength, forcing the staircase to fold like an accordion. A rush of relief was cut miserably short when the staircase stopped dead in its tracks three feet from the ceiling.
He scrambled, grabbing with both hands and readjusting his angle, sure that all of this was just user error, the simple, understandable mistake of a man working in total darkness. He was wrong, and this fact became painfully aware as the step began to force itself slowly downward, bending his arms as easily as folding paper. The stranger in the attic was pushing the stairs down from above, and there appeared to be nothing he could do to stop it.
There was no time to formulate a plan, no chance to abandon his attempt and run for it. The stairs lurched forward, breaking his grip and sending him stumbling backward onto the concrete floor. He heard the thump of the bottom step hit the ground, then he heard something else hit near his feet. Something heavy and unmistakably wet. The air was suddenly hot and close, and a stench filled his nostrils and burned his eyes. It smelled like the bottom of a dumpster in the middle of July, and he gagged.
There was movement, something quick dashing toward the door, bolting into the house. Slivers of moonlight shone through living room windows, and in the dim light he saw something tall and slumped shamble off in an unknown direction.