THE THICKENING

BRIAN EVENSON

I.

When he was very young, Greppur often awoke late at night feeling he could not afford to remain alone. He would creep from his room and down the hall, listening to the swish of his soles against the parquet floor. That and the feel of his hand brushing along the wall were just enough to keep the air from thickening into something else. He would travel by feel to the end of the hall and open the door to his parents’ bedroom as quietly as possible. He could not climb into bed with them because this might wake his father up. If his father awoke, Greppur would be immediately carried back to his own bedroom, locked in this time. But if he was careful, he could creep to the chair just next to his mother’s side of the bed and curl up there.

Once there, if he was unlucky, his father would still sense him and suddenly rough hands would be lifting him, carrying him back to his room, where the thickening would begin.

If he was very lucky indeed, he would fall asleep to the sound of his mother’s breathing and remain in the chair until morning.

Usually he was just lucky enough. After some time in the chair he would calm down, and only then see a glint in the darkness and know his mother’s eyes were open, that she was observing him.

“What is it?” his mother would whisper. “Another bad dream?”

“No,” he would whisper back.

But his mother did not understand that what he meant by this was not that there had not been a bad dream. What he meant was that it hadn’t been a dream at all. That it had been real.

She would nod. Sometimes she let him stay, but even if she sent him back to bed it was usually all right: enough time had gone by that the danger had passed.

As he grew older, he came to understand the thickening never happened more than once per night, and usually not even that. He dreaded it happening, and it was always terrible when it did, but usually he could wake himself in time. If there was another person in the house, as long as he came close enough to them to hear the sound of their breathing he could stop it from happening. Knowing another person was near was enough. Sometimes, though, he woke only when the thickening had already begun, and it was too late.

When, later still, he was in college and sharing a dorm room, it stopped entirely. For a few weeks he thought he was free of it. But when his roommate went home for the weekend, there, there it was again, three nights in a row, nearly unbearable in the way the thing that congealed from the air peered into him. But once his roommate was back, it stopped.

Perhaps this was why he became entangled with someone before college was finished. It seemed a necessity. He first lived with her and then, when her parents, religious, objected, married her. It wasn’t that he didn’t, in his way, love her, only that that was far from his only reason for being with her, not even the primary one. On some level any warm body would have done. Sleeping next to anyone would save him: it just happened to be her.

They were, so everybody said, inseparable. Twenty-five years together, he overheard his wife say proudly once to a friend on the telephone, and not a single night spent apart, which made him cringe. Made him, after so many years, remember. Made him, for the first time in years, nervous about going to sleep.

Nearly a decade later, long after he had forgotten again, his wife died: a sudden thing, a stroke, almost no warning. One moment they were speaking about how they would spend their evening, the next she collapsed. Then he was calling 911, then riding in the ambulance with her, then riding in the ambulance with her corpse. It was a terrible thing, occurring in such fashion as to leave him drenched in guilt and confusion. Coming back to the house alone in the early hours of the morning, he hardly felt like himself. Exhausted, he managed to strip off his coat and flop onto the bed. And then, before he knew it, he was asleep.

But he was not asleep for long.

II.

It was just like it had been when he was a child. He had been dreaming that the air had become thick around him so that it was hard to breathe and even hard to move. He had come gaspingly awake, only he wasn’t sure if he was awake or just dreaming he was awake. Was there time to get up and go find his parents’ room? But no, he suddenly realized with something akin to wonder, I’m not a child anymore: his parents had been dead for many years. His wife too was dead now, and he was alone.

“Greppur,” the thickening in the air crooned. “Greppur?” It was feeling for him with something that, if he squinted and ignored the fact that he could see through it, looked like a hand, but was not a hand. He could not see it, not really: it was like an interruption of the air. He remembered thinking that when he was a child, had taken the phrase, he supposed, from something misunderstood in a children’s story. But he could see it was right, the right phrase, at least for this particular phase of the thickening.

“When did I see you last?” it asked. “Yesterday? Decades ago? It seems like so much time has gone by, and so little.”

It did to Greppur too. Both.

It began to thicken, began to inflict a more substantial form upon the air. The voice was sharper now. What had been a wavering in the air took on firmer shape. It was too late. He could guess where its mouth was already, if he was right to call it a mouth.

“Where are you?” it said in a wheedling tone. “Let me see you, Greppur.”

He tried to close his eyes, but they would not close.

What if he fled to the hall? Would it follow him? What if he made it outside? He tried to get up, grunting with effort, unable, really, to move. It wheeled and faced his way at the sound, though facing was the wrong word since other than the mouth, if it was a mouth, it didn’t yet have a face. It thickened further, visible now, but flattened out and slightly translucent, as if made of paper.

“Ah, there you are,” it said. “I hear you anyway.” And ears began to form.

He tried again to rise and managed to roll out of the bed and fall onto the floor. He could not move his arms to catch his fall. He struck hard, with a thunk.

“What’s that?” it said. “What’s that? What are you trying now, child?” He had fallen facedown and was turned so he was largely looking at the floor, but with his head angled just enough that one eye saw the bottom of the door, a little stretch of baseboard, a few inches of wall.

“We were meant to be together, Greppur,” it said. “You know we were.”

Maybe it is a dream, he told himself, though he knew it was not a dream. He tried to lift his head but could not lift his head. He could move his body a little, just a very little, like a worm, more a shiver than movement proper. He began to do that, began to shiver, rocking a little too, oozing his way slowly, inch by inch, under the bed.

“Where are you?” it said. “Let me see you, child. Let me take a good, long look.”

But this, Greppur felt, was precisely what he could not let it do. He kept shivering, kept inching. Was he making progress? He was,

but was it enough? He could smell dust. He felt something brush the back of his head. Had it found him? No, that was the blanket hanging just over the side of the bed, his head brushing past it as he moved underneath. And then it was growing darker and he could wriggle a little better and there he was, a grown man in his fifties, facedown under his own bed, motes of dust whirling around him.

“Greppur,” the reedy voice still called from somewhere above. “Where are you, my sweet?”

He was more himself under the bed, even if only slightly. He could turn his head a little now. He could see the creature’s legs, looking thick and substantial and opaque, though they left no mark on the carpet wherever they stepped. The feet left the floor, and he knew it was on the bed now, though the bed did not shake or creak. But as soon as he noted this, the bed did shake, did creak, and he became afraid that by questioning it he had made it happen, had thickened the creature further.

Now the mattress was sagging down, resting against his back like a splayed palm. He waited, hidden. I can just wait it out, he told himself. I can just wait until morning. It won’t find me.

As suddenly as it had started, the weight pushing down the mattress was gone. Something was there beside him, deeper under the bed, just behind his head.

Ah, it said, and gave a tinny, tinkling laugh. He felt all of its hands close around his head, the fingers long and bony now. It slowly exerted pressure. His face rubbed along the floor and through the dust, and then there the other face was, right beside his own. It had not finished becoming a face yet, or had gone about it wrongly: where one would expect features there was only a gash for a mouth and two divots for eyes, the surface otherwise smooth and bled of color.

“I told you I would return for you,” the mouth said softly.

Please, he tried to say, but nothing came out.

“Let me have a look in you,” the mouth said, “a good long one.” And then the lipless mouth opened to reveal a blotch of darkness. Slowly, from within drifted up what seemed at first a large, dirty white marble, but then turned to reveal itself to be an eye.

It remained there at the top of the darkness, clasped delicately between the lipless top edge of the mouthgash and the lipless bottom edge of the mouthgash. It vibrated slightly, the pupil dilating and contracting, and stared, stared.

And then the creature said, with delight, Ah, at last!

III.

Whenever it came for him in childhood, it had always gone something like that: it stared into him so deeply it was as if he felt the eye held in the mouth slowly licking away the lining of his skull. It was looking for something, he knew, but he did not know what. Some memory, he supposed, or some concatenation of memories, but he was not even sure of that much. There was always a long moment where he felt he had been backed into a corner of his own mind, and then the voice would say, softly, “Not yet.” And then it was gone and he was left gasping.

After he calmed down, he was, usually, able to convince himself over time it had all been a dream, a bad one, true, but a dream. And, usually, exhausted, he could slip back into sleep, and only wake at daylight, the visit nearly forgotten. He would not think about the creature until, a night or two or three later, it came for him again.

As a child he became quite agile, if agile was the right word, at sensing the thickening coming. He would awaken before it was too late, before it arrived. All he had to do was find someone, be near someone, in the same room as some other human asleep or awake. If he could do that, the thickening would simply dissolve.

But he could not always be agile. Or perhaps as time went on, and he managed to avoid it, it became hungrier and more desperate. It might take a few weeks, a few months, but eventually he would awaken too late, after the thickening was too far along. When that happened, it was hard for him to move and impossible for him to speak. It wandered about the room, crooning his name, not quite able to see him.

But, in the end, it always found him. Just as it had done now, decades later, now that he was an adult, now that it was starving.

In the past, when it was done with him, it would always say, Not yet. I’ll come back for you.

And now it seemed after all these years it had.

IV.

When he awoke, he remembered very little. Bad dreams, the beginning of panic, nightmares. But it was understandable: he’d had a bad day the day before. The worst of days, he felt, he was sure, he was almost sure, even if he couldn’t quite remember what, what exactly, had been so bad.

It must have been bad since he seemed to have slept in his clothes. Why hadn’t his wife helped him undress?

He rolled over in the other direction, curling up against his wife’s back. Her skin was cold. She uttered a little moan of pleasure.

There was something strange, he suddenly felt, something missing. Had he left something somewhere by accident and subconsciously realized it, was feeling vague anxiety as a result? Or if not something left, an appointment forgotten? To what? With whom?

He shook his head slightly, trying to remember. He felt his wife stiffen a little.

“Honey,” she said, still facing away, “darling, what’s wrong?”

“I . . . don’t know,” he said.

It was almost there, on the tip of his tongue.

“Don’t you want to tell me?” she asked.

“I . . . ,” he started, and then realized that no, he did not. Thinking this made him feel guilty. Why shouldn’t he tell his wife?

And then she turned toward him and he knew why: there was something wrong with her features. They were too soft. Almost as he remembered them but not quite.

But then he blinked his eyes and looked again and thought, No, it must have been something wrong with my vision. She looked just as she always had.

Didn’t she? What was it? What was he missing? What had he forgotten?

“Honey,” she said. She almost sang the word. “What is it?” He just shook his head, said nothing.

She stroked his face with all of her hands. Her hands were cold too. “We were meant to be together,” she said. “You know we were.” He tried not to look at her.

“Let me help you,” she said.

And now he did not dare speak or move his head at all in fear that she would take this for assent. But this was his wife. There was no reason to be afraid. What was wrong with him?

Then she opened her mouth wide and looked at him, really looked with another eye entirely, and he realized he had every reason to be afraid, though it was already far too late for something like fear to do him any good.