Working my way back to room 1007, getting into my clothes again, walking around to the front of the hospital, finding a nice big cab just like my mommy told me to, and then riding home—all that happens without a hitch. Except my toe starts throbbing again.
Coming home to an empty house. I mean, I’ve done it plenty of times, but tonight it’s different. Alone is one thing; alone at night—all night—that’s something else.
Dad has some timers rigged up, so a few lights are on. Still, the place looks like a big old funeral home.
This kid at school named Russell, his dad runs a funeral home on Kenwood. His family lives on the second and third floor of the place. At lunch one day Russell tells me they’ve got a big cooler down in the basement next to the room where his dad gets the bodies ready. He says sometimes they have three or four corpses in the cooler at the same time. And then Jim Weinraub says that when he slept over at Russell’s once, they sneaked down to the basement in the middle of the night and looked at a dead woman.
After I heard that, I didn’t eat lunch with Russell for a month. Stuff like that creeps me out.
I don’t go in the front door of my house because the front porch has a light that goes on whenever anyone walks up the steps. If I go in that way, I’m almost sure Mrs. Trent would see me. She lives next door, and she sits in her big bay window all day and most of the night. She would see me, and then she would probably waddle over to tell me that the police were here earlier. Mrs. Trent is the nosiest woman on the planet, and it doesn’t help that the buildings in my neighborhood are only about fifteen feet apart.
I let myself in at the driveway door on the east side of the house, the side away from Mrs. Trent. This side faces a big duplex apartment house. It’s loaded with college kids. Their place is all lit up, and somebody’s music system is blasting away. I wish I was going there for the night.
First, before I set the alarm system by the back door, before I turn on any other lights, before I even take off my coat and scarf, I go around and shut all the shades and curtains. If Mrs. Trent gets one good look at my empty clothes walking around the house, it‘ll mean the end of life as we know it.
With the alarm set and my coat and stuff dumped by the back door, it’s time to eat. I’m starved again. I watch as I feel my hands throw a peanut butter and jelly sandwich together, and I think how I’d give anything for a double cheeseburger right now. Then this thought: Unless things change, my fast-food days are over. Unless someone else does the buying. Great—I can’t even get a Happy Meal unless my daddy or mommy buys it for me.
Mom!
I grab the kitchen phone, and then I grab a paper towel to wipe the strawberry jelly off it.
I promised Mom I’d call when I got home.
One ring, two rings, three rings. Maybe she’s already asleep. Or in the bathroom.
Four rings. It’s a deep purse. Ringer’s probably set on low.
Five rings. Six rings. Dead? Bad word. I mean the battery in her phone—dead battery.
Then it goes to voice mail. I try not to sound worried about her, but I am. “Mom? Mom, it’s me. I got home fine, and now I’m fixing some food…it’s about nine, I guess. So…say hi to Dad, and I’ll call you tomorrow. Or you can call me. Bye.”
I’ve been at home by myself plenty of times. Tons of times.
But not like this. Never with both my folks away all night. And no one else coming.
I don’t like scary movies, especially the kind where people are alone in a big old house. And I’ve always been a little afraid of the dark. Which is not a bad way to be in this part of Chicago. Even with the cops and the university police all over, there’s still plenty to worry about after sundown. The streetlights are on, but there are shadows. Lots of shadows.
So I turn on more lights. In the TV room I set up a tray table. Then I get some milk and my sandwich.
I should know better than to just turn on the tube. It’s still set to WGN, and it’s a movie preview, the one where Jack Nicholson is holding the ax and trying to push his face through a door. I punch the changer, and it flips to Cinemax. Some teenage vampires are having a meal.
I turn off the set, but then the house feels too quiet, and bad pictures are bouncing around in my head. All three lamps are on, but it still feels dark. So I grab the other remote and turn on the FM. The room fills up with jazz. I concentrate on the trumpet line because that’s my instrument. The trumpet breaks into a high solo, and it’s a bright sound, shiny and clean.
And then I remember my sandwich. I eat it, but it doesn’t feel right in my mouth. It doesn’t feel right when I swallow. And the milk tastes strange. Nothing feels right.
Because when fear begins to crawl, it just keeps coming.
Light is good, light is very good. But the windows behind all the curtains are dark, and behind every curtain there’s a horror story, a real one. It’s the real ones that come crawling at me through the night.
The alarm system is blinking. That’s supposed to make me feel safe. It’s blinking next to every door. The alarm system has eyes and fingers all over the house. It senses things. The system will shriek when something outside starts to come through a door or a window.
But fear doesn’t need doors and windows. It works from the inside.
I hurry to the study, flipping on other lights as I go. I swivel the big computer monitor around so I can sit and not have my back toward the doorway or the big curtained window. The jazz keeps coming from the TV room, but it’s a different tune now, and a saxophone starts wailing.
The computer boots up, and then I’m online and I’ve got a messenger window open, and I tap in Kenny Temple’s screen name, Gandolf375. Kenny’s a Tolkien freak, which is why we’re sort of friends. So this’ll be good. I can talk to Kenny online, just talk a little. Like about jazz band. Because jazz band practiced today after school. Without me.
No response. I key his name again. Nothing. I try a few other names, kids I ask about homework sometimes. Like Jeff. I can ask Jeff what I missed in biology today. Or maybe Ellen Beck. She lives over on Blackstone—practically a neighbor. She’ll know. And I can ask her about English too.
Nobody’s online.
Then I remember. Midterms are coming. Nobody’s online.
A digit changes on the clock at the upper corner of the computer screen. It’s now 9:11. I shut the box down. The hard drive whines to a stop, the screen gives a static crackle and goes dark, and it hits me that it’s so early. Eight, maybe nine more hours before dawn. The lights are burning here, but darkness is all around me—in the alley, in the attic, in the basement, in every closet. The night is everywhere. Hours and hours and hours of night.
I’m sitting at the desk in the study, and I see my clothes reflected there in the dark computer screen.
If I could see my eyes there where my face should be, what would they look like right now? Would they look uneasy? More than that. Maybe haunted? Would my eyes look haunted? Were that lady’s eyes open? The eyes of that dead lady down in the basement cooler at Russell’s house? What did her eyes look like?
I’m running up the front stairs, flipping on lights as I go, and I get to my room and turn on the lights, and I shut the door, and I lock the door, and I sit on my bed, and I grab my pillow, and I hug it against my stomach. Because of the fear. It’s cranked up. It’s up past terror, past panic. I’m thinking this must be dread. Except I’m not thinking. There’s no room for thinking, just feeling, feeling like the dread is oozing up through the cracks between the boards on my floor. Bubbling up through the heater grates. I can feel it rising. Like water. Like black blood. Like the fluids. Like the fluids. The fluids that Russell’s dad pumps into the dead bodies down in the basement of the funeral home. The dread is filling my locked room and my mouth and my nose and my ears and my eyes and my lungs, and I’m drowning in it.
But I sit there and I don’t. I don’t drown. I’m breathing so fast, I feel faint. I have to yawn. But I’m getting a thought. It’s a real thought, a memory. About fear. And I’m thinking it. And the thought is simple. It’s simple: nothing to fear but fear itself. From a history class. Just words. Until now.
And then it’s like I’m five feet away. And I’m looking at me, at this guy sitting on a bed. And I can see he’s not under attack. There is no danger. And I can see that the fear is the thing. It’s just fear.
Another memory, another thought. I’m walking out of the library about a year ago behind two college girls. And one of them says, “I am so upset, I am just so upset! And the thing that upsets me the most is that I’m so upset!” That’s what she says, and I listen to this and I think, How stupid is that? If you don’t want to be so upset, just stop being upset!
And now it’s the fear. It’s the same. Like being upset because you’re upset. It keeps feeding itself. And then it gets you to feed it. And you just have to stop it.
I have to stop it.
I stand up and toss my pillow back onto the bed. I take deep breaths. I go over to my dresser and look in the mirror. I wonder what my hair looks like. So I grab a comb and pull it across my head, patting my hair with the other hand. Feels right. It’s Bobby, the well-groomed spook. What a clear complexion he has.
Then I walk over and unlock my bedroom door, and I go downstairs. I shut off the radio, and I take my dishes from the TV room back to the kitchen, and I scoop myself a bowl of chocolate chip ice cream. I go back to the couch, and I pull the blue fleece blanket around me, and I turn on Nick at Nite. It’s I Love Lucy, and it’s funny. I start laughing, and I am eating ice cream, and I am not afraid.
Still, when I finally go upstairs, I lock my bedroom door again.
And I sleep with my lights on.
I mean, I know I can get past the fear. I just did it. But I don’t kid myself.
The bogeyman isn’t really dead, not forever. He’s just not here. Not tonight.