Chapter Eight

Across town on Salisbury Road, Cheryl Alders was finishing off a bottle of Pinot Noir Rose by herself.

Her husband, John, had gone to bed earlier in the evening complaining about a headache and cold chills. He hadn’t been feeling well in the past two weeks, and Cheryl was worried that she’d have to drive him to the hospital again. Cheryl had been looking forward to visiting Japan and China for the winter, but John’s intermittent health concerns had put their life on temporary hold.

She was sitting at the kitchen table sipping her sweet wine and staring out into the reflection of the light sconces leading down a stony path to their underground swimming pool in the backyard. A cluster of ten-foot groomed evergreen hedges enclosed the expansive yard, providing privacy from the neighbors and the heavily traveled highway beyond the property.

It was late, but it was these hours around midnight that Cheryl enjoyed the most, sitting quietly by herself and contemplating the sheer bliss of the moment. Her thoughts wandered from her husband sleeping upstairs in their bed to the painting she had purchased that morning at her friend David’s art gallery.

She refilled her wine glass, stood and strolled out of the kitchen, down the hall, an appreciative smile on her warm, tired face. Cheryl felt light-headed from the wine at dinner so she reached out for the back of the camel-hair-upholstered armchair in the den to steady herself. She cleared her throat and released an embarrassing burp, which caused her to laugh. Different from her usual straight-laced behavior, she laughed out loud, tilting the wine glass to her open mouth and swallowing the rest of the wine.

She set the glass on the marble end table, and staggered down the hallway to the conservatory. As she passed the winding metal staircase leading to the second floor, Cheryl thought she heard a noise in the kitchen. A door closed.

Has John come down for a glass of water? He would’ve called out to me.

She gripped the handrail, and listened, staring in the direction of the kitchen. “John?”

Her husband was partially deaf, so she had to raise her voice when she talked to him. Like tonight at dinner, when she’d asked him to pass the wine bottle. She had to ask twice with an authoritative voice, which she despised when talking to the man she loved and respected.

Calling out John’s name again, Cheryl felt a pulse of electricity prickle her skin. Something is wrong. She stared up the staircase to the second-floor landing. She could hear him snoring behind the bedroom door, and footsteps, someone moving. She considered shouting up the stairs but realized how foolish she was being. There was nobody in the house but the two of them.

Blaming the wine, she stumbled down the hall to the conservatory as rain pelted the large stained-glass window in the high-ceilinged atrium, thunder crashed, and lightning sparked and split the dark sky open.

She held out both of her hands, using the walls to help guide her down the long, carpeted hallway. It seemed to go on forever. When she finally approached the conservatory’s closed door, she grasped the glass-cut knob and turned.

A flash of lightning illuminated the room through two skylights and the bay window on the far wall. Cheryl descended down three steps into the room and tottered across to where the painting of In the Dead of Winter hung crookedly on the chiffon-green wallpaper. Marveling at her latest purchase, Cheryl folded her arms across her chest and stared up at the monochrome canvas of the deep surrounding woods in the painting.

She jumped when a splinter of lightning pierced the night through the damp foliage of the adjacent woods surrounding her house. Thunder boomed. In the brief moment of lightning the painting looked different. She angled her head to the right and then the left, catching the depth of the painting from the flickering light.

There was something comforting about this particular artwork, she mused, finding immediate euphoria in the dark colors of the thin shapes of the oak and birch trees. It was as if the painting were alive and moving on its own, the emaciated, arthritic tree branches swaying from an invisible wind, and the small dark dot of movement in the distance growing bigger and creeping closer toward the forefront.

Cheryl stepped back a few inches, her arms tightening across her chest like a snake squeezing itself. She thought she heard footsteps behind her, the floorboards in the hallway creaking and whispering, forcing Cheryl to turn and gasp.

“John?” Her voice was muddled and loose from the alcohol.

She looked out into the hallway. But there was nobody there. Lightning spilled into the house from a bank of windows, the silhouettes of tree limbs dancing across the hall’s white walls.

Cheryl turned back to the painting, noticing something different in the realm of the woods. She stepped closer to the picture frame, examining the details of the scene in the bright moonlight streaming into the room from the skylights. Where there was no rain, it was pouring now. Sleeting. Hard balls of hail pummeling the woods.

Strange. Cheryl also noted that the tall, thin slash of blackness she had seen earlier in the distance was gone. A chill tickled her spine. She brought a hand to her mouth and shivered.

At the edge of the painting, poking out from behind a copse of withered trees, there was a face. He was old, his eyes, dark and strange. Disturbed.

Cheryl let out a stifled scream when the door behind her slammed shut. She climbed the steps to the door and reached out for the handle. But it wouldn’t budge. She knew it couldn’t be locked from the outside.

“John? Is that you?” Pause. “Can you hear me? Help! Somebody’s in the…” she trailed off.

Tugging on the handle, there was resistance on the other side of the door. Stuck? Locked?

“John!”

Thunder shook the room as a spark of lightning flashed across the stormy sky.

Then, the door to the conservatory opened, hesitantly, forcing Cheryl to climb down from the steps, backward. She looked through the tiny crack in the door, staring out into the ghostly lit hall, hearing the unpleasant sound of somebody whispering. Hissing in the churning blackness, shadows coiling like snakes.

“John?”

She choked back a scream, holding a veiny hand to her throat, standing still and quiet. Waiting until the next bout of thunder and lightning, Cheryl, her nerves taut like piano strings, felt frayed from the tension of the moment. She turned around to see the painting on the wall shaking from where she had nailed it earlier that morning, the slash of blackness from the woods coming alive. The small creek that ran through the woods swelled to the edges of the embankment, spilling into the path of fallen pine needles. The wind howled through the bare limbs, the birches and oaks cracking and popping like firewood.

Then someone called out her name.

“Cheryl.”

The voice was weak and far away, strangled from the gust of wind, but Cheryl heard it, right as rain. She looked up at the picture frame shaking violently on the wall.

A dark figure appeared from behind a spindly tree.

Cheryl gasped, shaking her head. Am I hallucinating? Is it the buzz from the alcohol? “No,” she said. “It can’t be.”

But it was real.

The painting was alive and moving.

A pale, sandpapery claw stretched out from around the tree bark, its spidery fingertips gesturing at Cheryl, pointing a sharp finger at her. She turned and raced for the door, nearly tripping up the three steps, stumbling over her own clumsy feet, her breathing fast and labored.

Calling out to John was futile. He wouldn’t hear her.

Breathless, she raced down the hall to the staircase. She started up the first two steps and froze. Her eyes widened with fear. At the top of the stairs, she glimpsed a dark shape gliding past her bedroom door.

Frozen, she tried calling to John, but it was as if her voice was broken, faltering, dying. All she could do was watch as the wraithlike figure descended the stairs.

Clomp. Clomp. Clomp.

Her eyes swam in a blurred panic. She was trembling, her sweaty palm gripping the metal railing. Her heart was drilling so hard she thought it was going to break through her ribs.

A heavy odor of boiled cabbage and mothballs wafted in the air behind the shadowy image as it glided down the staircase toward Cheryl. Ten feet away from her, the slinky shape of a man approached her, his mouth a black, gaping hole, stretching into an elongated slit. The whites of his eyes flickered like a dying light in the dark, getting wider as he approached her. His long, spidery fingerless hand coiled around the railing, and then something unexpected happened before her eyes.

He—it—disappeared.

Abracadabra. Gone.

Cheryl stood taut, let out a ragged breath, pulled her hand away from the railing. The tension in her shoulders loosened, slumped, and fell back into place. She swallowed back the cotton-dry sourness in her mouth.

Climbing the stairs, she yelled for John.

No response.

She ran down the hall to their bedroom and stood in the doorway. A flash of lightning lit the room, and Cheryl could see the bumpy grooves of her husband’s body outlined underneath the bed sheets.

She sighed, content, hanging on the doorjamb for support.

Thunder growled, but it sounded far away, beyond the property and ten-foot hedges, as if the storm was breaking up and blowing in a different direction.

Rain pattered the panes, and from somewhere behind her, the floorboard creaked.

She turned, but she couldn’t make out anything in the dark. Shadows loomed and shifted in the far corners of the hallway and were dense like fog circling the staircase.

She listened, her body tense, spine straight as an arrow.

Then something caught her attention. It wasn’t the whispering floorboards, or the pocket of cold air, or the shifting shadows.

She turned around slowly, staring into the now-still bedroom.

John wasn’t snoring, and a cold shiver coiled around her. Her white-knuckled fingertips clung to the knob. She called out her husband’s name.

He didn’t answer.

“John.” Her voice came out in a whisper.

Footsteps stomped behind her, noticeable over the crashing thunder, but she ignored them and stepped into the bedroom, her hands curling into shaky fists at her side. Her legs felt rubbery, and she thought she might lose her balance, tumble, and fall.

“John?”

She sensed something else in the room with her: small, delicate puffs of air, someone or something breathing on her neck. The tiny bristles of her hair stood on end. She shivered.

“John?” she called out again, ignoring the malevolent force in the room.

She glanced at the landline telephone on the nightstand and thought about calling the police. But jerky movements from beneath the sheets arrested her.

Her mouth dropped open. She couldn’t scream. Tears clouded her vision; her hands clung to her sides, stock still.

She watched in terror as the large shape beneath the white sheet twisted itself into a sedentary position, the sound of bones cracking and shifting into place.

Cheryl shook violently as tears spilled down her cheeks. Her teeth clamped down hard, chattering. She made small mousy murmurs. A lingering smell of garbage assaulted her.

Clomp. Clomp. Clomp.

Heavy footsteps.

From the corner of her eye, she noticed an obscure outline of—fingers?—slithering in the dark.

She gasped at the freezer-burnt temperature of its touch on her neck, recoiling from the wet, slithering snake tongue of her visitor. This isn’t a dream, and that isn’t John under the sheets either. Bones snapped, and the large white lump under the sheet started to squirm.

“John?” She managed to mumble her husband’s name, but it was lost in the frenzy of the moment. “Dear God.”

The room was chilly; a cloud of air drifted in front of her face. Blood filled her mouth; panic raced through her head.

She closed her eyes.

The floor rumbled, but it wasn’t from the passing thunderstorm.

Rain struck the windowpanes.

The night raged on.

Cheryl managed to shuffle toward the edge of the bed. Slowly, cautiously, she crept along the room to the other side of the bed, drawing closer to the telephone on the nightstand. She felt the cold draft of an invisible force trailing behind her. She kept moving, didn’t want to take a chance to look back into the faceless thing.

A lingering stench of mildew drifted past her, the poisonous vapors of the black form from the painting clinging to her skin, hair, and nostrils. The sound of chattering teeth emitted from the thing on the bed, the white sheet twisted in the broken nodules of its thrashing body. Quivering, Cheryl reached out for the phone, but she froze by what she saw next. Without turning to the chilly cloud of breath behind her, lifting the ends of her hair, Cheryl stood motionless, staring as a hemorrhage of blood oozed from beneath the top of the bed sheet, growing larger, bleeding the white fabric into a dark crimson.

She brushed a tear from her eye before it could fall down her face and, with a trembling hand, yanked up the phone receiver. But something gripped her, piercing her wrist with a sharp claw. Cheryl yelled, dropped the phone. The thing under the bloody sheet growled and revealed itself, chomping at the air toward Cheryl.

She screamed and ran to the master bathroom, locking the door behind her.

A loud banging on the other side of the door, a clanging of claws, scraping the length of the wall forced her back toward the master bath and elicited a muffled scream.

“Go away! Leave me alone!” She drew the see-through shower curtain open and crawled into the deep bathtub. Sat and pulled her knees up to her chest, shuddering. She listened to heavy thumps on the closed door and chattering teeth and murmured whispers playing the air like a cacophony of nightmare sounds.

Rocking back and forth, Cheryl held both hands up to her ears to shut out the skin-crawling noises.

Seconds passed.

Minutes.

More time passed, and as she pulled her hands away from her face she looked to the closed door. As she reached for the handrail she’d had installed for John after his operation and needed assistance in the shower, she felt the warm dampness between her legs. She was embarrassed, lifting one leg over the edge of the tub/shower and holding on to the counter to steady herself as she lifted the other leg out and stood in the center of the room.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She looked ragged and old. At least I’m alive after everything that had happened tonight.

And whatever had happened tonight, she knew she’d survive it. She had to be strong. For John, or whatever the fuck was on the other side of the door.

She took deep breaths, like she’d learned in yoga class, closing her eyes and feeling the rush of air filling her lungs. Inhale. Exhale. Stay calm, she heard her yoga instructor telling her.

She felt calmer, the tension in her chest slowly dissipating at the imparting voice in her head. When she opened her eyes, the room swayed, her bloodstream still swimming from the three glasses of wine. She was dizzy, dazed, as if she’d come off a Ferris wheel.

Wobbling across the room toward the door, she held a hand out in front of her, reaching for the glass handle. But she stopped. Pressed the side of her face against the door. Listened, hard.

Silence.

It was jarringly still.

Deep breaths, Cheryl.

Stay calm.

She turned the doorknob.

Slowly.

Her palms, greasy with sweat, slipped from the glass handle, as if the skin on her hands was melting.

She was shaking, breathing hard, raspy, fast. Chest heaving.

Shallow breathing, she told herself.

Open the fucking door, Cheryl!

Look on the other side.

John is waiting for you.

He can hear you.

Don’t make him mad.

Talk to him.

Show him there is nothing to fear.

Be brave. Be strong.

Go to him.

Tell him you love him.

Before it is too late.

Do it!

Now!

Open the fucking door, Cheryl!

Cheryl took one last breath and swung the door open.