*
When I was three years old, my brother locked me in the bathroom and something started growling.
“Davey?” I whispered stupidly. The growling continued. Davey was a brat, a smart brat, even, but lacked the patience for drawn-out schemes. He would have forgotten about me by now.
The growling turned into a deep and awful snarl. I flung the stool up in front of me, covering my eyes. But nothing changed. Nothing charged me, and the growling didn’t stop. It sounded louder, actually, like I had upset it by defending myself.
I needed to get out of there. But to get out, I had to get the stool to the sink. In the direction of the awful, droning noise.
Still clinging on to my make-shift shield, I forced one foot in front of the other. Feet against the floor in sickening slaps. The plink, plink of the leaking toilet would have been a welcome sound, but the sound was overpowered by the rumbling snarl ahead of me. I kept expecting the stool to be pulled down, to be jumped and overtaken. But with each step I took, I remained (for that moment) unharmed.
Crack! I had hit something. I tapped it again with my stool.
The door. I had reached the door.
The growling buzzed in my left ear. I heard teeth grinding.
It was coming from beneath the sink.
I put the stool down, ready to climb to freedom. Looking back, I could say (and sometimes have thought) that I was afraid the growling would wait until I was on the stool, then reach out and grab my ankle, dragging me in to be devoured.
But that would be a lie. I felt my hand drawn to the cabinet, drawn by an invisible force. What I might later describe as an addiction. I would one day grow overly familiar with the vocabulary of unrequited, unquenched, self-destructive desire, my wife only accepting me after I agreed to an endless parade of meetings.
I traced the outline of the door, fingering the hinges. The growling was frenzied now, and I felt vibrations under the wood.
I found the circular knob of the sink cabinet. Put my hand over it. A notched metal circumference with a smooth pearl-like inlay.
The cabinet started shaking. (Or was that me?) Labored breathing, snorts came from behind the door. I thought I heard a wet bark, but not like a dog’s. More like something dying and being born at the same time. The room grew humid, like someone was taking a hot shower. I breathed faster, choked by the humidity, the smell of pee and dust.
I yanked on the handle. I pulled the sink cabinet door open.
My father had only taken our family on one camping trip that I can remember. The food had gone rotten in the cooler. The tent leaked at night and I woke up drenched. Mother and Father didn’t speak to each other the whole way home, an occurrence that became more and more common. My one happy memory of the whole weekend was the campfire, especially the moment when my father struck the match, and the flame slowly grew, consuming the kindling and transforming the pile of wood into a crackling fire.
In the locked bathroom, when I opened the sink cabinet door, trying to put words to the experience was like that fire, but more like I was yanked into the fire and each letter engulfed me.
“R.” My mind flailed, trying to make sense of what I felt, but all that came was a burning “R.”
“E.” The next letter came just as slowly, and I now had the sense of someone striking me, as if I were the match.
“D.” The last letter came, and the fullness of the flaming word wrapped around me.
“Red.” The first word was “red,” a searing word, a loud word.
“Pain.” The next word came more quickly than the first, my kindling catching and spreading.
“Ouch.” My bones splintered like wood crackling, wood turning to cinders.
More words. More fire.
Scream.
Slash.
Red.
Red.
Red.
Teeth.
Snarls.
Pain.
Ouch.
Ouch.
Stop.
Stop.
Stop.
“Stop!” I yelled. I was being dragged from the bathroom and into the light.
“What are you yelling about? What the hell’s the matter?” I squinted up into the face of my mother. My angel mother. “What’s wrong?”
“It… the…” I couldn’t get the words out.
“Well, you’re screaming like a banshee. I didn’t know you had the lungs in you. Come here, baby.” She took me in her arms, those lovely, skinny twig-arms that could hold you so safely and carried me to her room. “What were you doing in the bathroom?” Before I could explain, she removed her hand from my arm and started screaming herself.
“Who did this to you?” she said. I looked down. Three long cuts, deep cuts, ragged cuts, had eaten their way into my arm. They burned, and I tried to cover them up, embarrassed. But that only smeared the blood further down my arm. “Davey!” my mother yelled, stomping off with me in tow.
*
The screaming from the hospital room continues. My wife puts her arm around me. Even though I’m turned away and she can’t see my face, she seems to know what I’m feeling. She always does, which is one of the reasons I married her. She doesn’t mind that I’m a nearly thirty-year-old man who still sleeps with a night-lite. And when we first started dating, she thought it was cute that I went to the bathroom with the door open. “Don’t mind being vulnerable?” she said, the first time it happened. “I can live with that.”
When I was three years old, my older brother locked me in the bathroom. I don’t tell many people this story, not even my wife. When I ask Dave about it, he gets angry, tries to leave the room.
The way he remembers, he went to read a book for ten minutes, then went back when he heard me screaming. He unlocked the door and cleaned up where I had wet myself.
“It was longer than that,” I said. “And mom was the one who rescued me.”
“You were too young. You aren’t remembering it right.”
I wish Mom were still around so I could ask her what really happened. But she passed on shortly after the divorce. Her death, my Dad’s unavailability—both provide excellent excuses for therapy. I haven’t had to tell my counselor the real reason why I have trouble forming relationships, why I can’t use public toilets, why I’m terrified of being alone.
The nurses bring my son out. Two stitches. Hopefully, his wound will heal as well as the cuts on my arm—you can’t even see any scars.
I take him, my son, and he locks his arms around my neck. A nurse ties a balloon to his wrist, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He just growls—once—and falls asleep. His breath is wet in my ear.
On the way home, my wife smiles at me. I must have grimaced, or raised an eyebrow, or done something to show confusion. She shakes her head like I’m the biggest idiot in the world.
“He’ll thank you some day,” she says.
I wonder what for.
#
Deeper into the darkness…
If you liked Locked, you'll love Dreadful Things, a collection of horror shorts. Save 40% over buying the stories individually! Find your flashlight and get it here: vkscott.com/books/dreadful-things
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