Now the room is full of noises: a wail, a sob, a moan, a cry. All Abe.
Not the dark, please, don’t leave me in the dark where I can’t even see what’s about to come out of the ceiling next, no, no, no—
He shuts up once he realizes someone is also standing in the room with him.
There, in the corner. On the opposite side of this tiny, dark room.
Abe can’t see anything, but he can definitely feel the unmistakable presence of another human body.
He can also hear breathing—not his, someone else’s. He holds his own panicky, keening breaths just to be sure, and—yes. Someone else is breathing in here. No doubt about it. Oh God.
A fear he hasn’t felt so keenly since childhood stabs into him.
The Hairlip Man.
The Hairlip Man is in here with him.
The Hairlip Man is going to watch as whatever drops next out of the vent finally fills Abe with enough poison to coagulate his blood and kill him. The Hairlip Man will smile his secret, charming smile while Abe dies in the dark.
For all her complaining and kvetching and reveling in the misery that was her life, Bobbe Meydl never went into too much detail about the incidents that had traumatized her as a child. She liked to keep it vague and mysterious: “If you knew the things that had happened to me when I was a little girl in Poland. . .”
But there was one detail she’d shared with Abe.
He’d been seven years old. For reasons he can’t remember, Bobbe was staying with them for a few days, sleeping in his room while he slept in a pillow fort out in the living room. He’d been so excited about this new arrangement—he loved forts, and he loved the living room because that’s where the television was.
The only problem was, he was coming off of a series of weeks where he’d been having terrible nightmares. Midnight shriekfests that sent him running to his mom’s room for comfort.
It had been long enough since he’d had one of these night terrors that he’d kind of forgotten about them, in the way only children can do. Something about sleeping in a new location must have brought them surging back.
Instead of running to his mom’s, though, he ran to his own room. Weeping, terrified, desperate for the familiar. Bobbe Meydl was sitting up on his bed, blinking sleep from her eyes.
“You have nothing to be afraid of,” she’d said, after he’d breathlessly reported what had happened. Lest he think she was trying to comfort him, she followed up with: “You don’t know what being afraid really is.”
Abe had been defiant, though. “I do! I know all about monsters!” Suddenly it was imperative to him that he convince her. He began rattling off all the scary movies he’d seen (or, more accurately, heard about at school). Freddy and Jason and Chucky and, and, and.
She listened, face pulled in its usual perma-scowl, eyes glittering with smugness. When he finished, she smoothed his hair. He’ll never forget the tingle that sped through his body when she did so—that desperate appreciation of her physical attention.
“This is how I know you’re a child, boychik,” she said. “Your monsters are ridiculous. They are circus clowns. When evil comes, Abraham, it does not wear a mask. It looks as plain as day. I was a little girl when I learned that. The Hairlip Man. . .”
She trailed off. He demanded she tell him what the phrase meant.
She stared at him, then said, “I don’t know if he was a Russian or a German. I only know he was so handsome. Except for that one tiny detail, which made his face memorable. I memorized his face as I watched him do what he did to my mother. As he loomed over me. As he chased me into the woods.”
The Hairlip Man.
Abe felt his eyes going wide. Felt a different kind of chill spreading through his body. He didn’t even know what a hairlip was—let alone that it was really spelled harelip—but it conjured surreal, horrible beauty.
Perhaps she would’ve told him more, if his mom hadn’t come in then, yelling at his grandmother to stop, to not tell little Abe “that story.”
Bobbe Meydl had received her daughter’s outrage with a grin—a devilishly delighted one, Abe thought later. She liked scaring her grandson. “I had to live through it—he can’t bear to hear it from the safety of his pillows?”
He never thought to ask for more details later on. She’d told him enough. The Hairlip Man was firmly planted in his brain from then on. For the next several years—up until high school, really—whenever Abe had another shriekfest in the dark, it was because the Hairlip Man had come for him at last, the fine hairs that made up his lips rippling like underwater kelp.
Now he knows: the Hairlip Man has found him again.
glad glad i’m going to be glad i should be glad because i’m not going to die alone he’s going to be here with me in the dark and
“Shut up.”
Abe hears the voice next to his ear, as real as the pain in his hand, the aches in his muscles.
“Shut up.”
The voice is sharp, like a slap to the face. He physically twitches when he hears it. Then it became deliberate, without sympathy, like hands squeezing a throat shut.
“Don’t let him win. Think.”
He heeds this strange, new voice and shuts up. Takes a steadying breath—which is still very much unsteady. Tries to think.
What are his options? If he lets himself stand here, panic churning in his chest like a hot tub gone haywire, imagining what might be pouring out of the ceiling vent, he’s gonna literally lose his mind. He might wind up bashing his brains out on the wall or floor like one of those desperate orcas he heard about, purposefully ramming their snouts into their tank to escape their amusement park prisons.
But what to do about the person in here with him, watching him? Can he really hope to fight a human blind when fighting just a spider in full light took so much out of him? He’s an out-of-shape bassist—what will he do when this stranger is suddenly next to him, grabbing him, touching him—
“No one’s in here and you know it,” that other, sharper voice insists, and then he realizes—it’s himself who’s speaking. Bobbe’s no-love attitude, but out of his throat. “You’ve been staring at every inch of this bathroom for at least a couple hours now—how would anyone have gotten in without you noticing?”
That’s true. He doesn’t believe it, but he can’t argue with it.
Regardless, there’s still the matter of other critters dropping from the vent to join him. That’s a very plausible threat.
First thing to do, then: make his eyes adjust as much as possible. He squeezes them shut, counts to five, and when he opens them again, he’s able to see a little bit more than before.
Better. As far as he can tell nothing is skittering towards him yet. The light coming from under the door helps a little bit too, and—
Looking down at that crack of light, he notices something white and rectangular on the floor.
Another note.
At first, the usual dread surges through him at the thought of what new word in this torturous puzzle waits for him to decipher. Then, a more confounding thought:
Why would the person tormenting him slip him a note and then cut the power so he can’t read it? Abe was obviously being held by a psychopath, but that? That just doesn’t make sense.
He thinks back to what happened the moments before the lights cut out.
“Wait. . .”
He slaps his hands against the wall behind him until he feels the telltale ridges and shapes of a light switch.
He flicks the switch in the opposite direction.
The fluorescents blink back on. A sickly yellow, blue stuttering that makes his eyes water a little.
“Son of a bitch,” he says in a shocked gasp. “Goddammit.”
The laughter comes first. Great gales of it. Laughter until his abs hurt.
Then come the sobs. They burble out of him in hitching, gulping waves. He tries to quiet them down as quickly as they arise, but somehow that makes them even stronger. He’s at their mercy until they finally ebb a few minutes later.
“Son of a bitch,” he says again, wiping the tears and snot with his forearm.
Ever mindful of the vent in the ceiling, he walks over to the sink and splashes some water on his face.
He makes brief eye contact with his tear-puffed face in the mirror and then immediately looks away. He’s feeling relief. He’s feeling embarrassment. He’s feeling anger—fury, even—at how vulnerable he is in this fucking room. But underneath all these things, he’s feeling something which scares him and disturbs him and keeps him from being able to look at himself.
Gratitude.
A warped kind of gratitude.
Being trapped in the dark caused a level of fear he’d never felt spike through his body. When the lights came back on, when he realized it had just been a mistake and that his captor was trying to kill him and/or drive him insane, but at least wasn’t leaving him alone in the dark, Abe felt grateful for that bit of kindness.
“Jesus fucking Chruuuuh,” he mutters. He wants to puke.
There’s a toilet right there, bro, he imagines Ty saying, and if there wasn’t the dead body of a large rattlesnake draped inside, he might take the opportunity.
Aren’t rattlesnakes still dangerous after they’re dead?
Abe vaguely recalls more random shit from the internet. Texas farmers sent to the hospital because of bite reflexes from dead snakes or something. Doesn’t matter. The toilet is off limits for the sheer gag factor alone. If he has to puke over that horrible snake body he might never stop.
No puking. Just thinking. Puke later. Survive to puke another day.
That new note on the floor beckons him.
He goes over to pick it up, but stops when he reaches the light switch by the door. He gives the room one last suspicious look.
“I really thought someone was in here with me,” he mumbles.
Bobbe answers—in her own voice this time.
Fear will do that. Fear makes you stupid.
But it wasn’t just fear or him being stupid. It was the breathing. He would have sworn he’d heard breathing.
Partially as an experiment and partially to just confirm what had happened, Abe reaches over and turns out the lights again.
Perfect darkness.
Perfect silence.
No breathing noises this time.
Had Abe imagined the breathing before? In the same way his eyes had imagined the shape of a (Hairlip) man in the corner?
Or maybe . . . had his captor been on the other side of this door, listening? Breathing heavily?
Whoever is trapping me in here is very interested in what I do.
How can I use that against him?
Abe turns the lights back on.
Then he bends down to pick up the note, curious to see what he’s supposed to be so glad about.