POURING THE FOUNDATIONS OF A NIGHTMARE, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, April, 1990.

You can get inside a house and walk around, look out all the windows, knock on all the walls, open all the doors. You can know a house.

You can’t crawl inside a person, even if you decorated some of the rooms in him yourself. The rooms you think you know change around a lot, and some of the walls are solid, and some melt, and you never know which are which until the person’s grown up and everything gets set in concrete.

And sometimes, you don’t even know what’s inside your own house. Opening locked doors can be risky.

I kept thinking my best friend Garrett and I were looking out the same eyes, seeing the same views, but we weren’t, especially after we turned twelve. He changed all the furniture inside, threw out the stuff we did together, like skateboards and video games and costumes and comic books. I couldn’t understand the stuff he put in there instead.

He had nightmares when we were little, and after he stopped having them, I started. Most of my nightmares are about dead people. Garrett’s used to be, too; I know, because I made some of his nightmares up. I’d pour the foundations, and he’d build the nightmares on them. And all the time, I was telling myself something, and I didn’t find out what until just lately, after I talked to Garrett’s dead brother Danny.

My house is tall and gray and goes up straight from the ground to the roof. It’s like a big shoebox with an attic on top. My parents and I and our housekeeper, Mrs.Garrison, live in my house. Garrett’s house is yellow, and twistier; you can get lost in it. When he still lived there, it was his parents, him, and his brother Danny. Now it’s a bunch of apartments, and seven people live there. Our houses stand next door to each other on one of the streets in Spores Ferry, Oregon, that has lots of trees on it, with strips taken out of the sidewalk for plants and pieces of lawn. In our neighborhood, you can ride a bike or a motorcycle through the stop sign intersections without stopping, because usually there’s no traffic coming. Before the accident, I sometimes went through intersections without stopping; Garrett never went through without stopping; and Garrett’s older brother Danny always went through without stopping.

We spent most of our time at Garrett’s house when he was still living there. He and his parents have been gone for a year now—they moved to Florida—and I haven’t been to Garrett’s house since they left.

A lot of my nightmares come from Garrett’s house.

We knew somebody died in Garrett’s house. We heard his parents talking about it. Garrett had nightmares about it from the time he was five. One day when I was really mad at him, I made up a story about the person who died. “Her name was Mad Lucy,” I said as we sat on his bed sucking stolen chocolate chips and getting brown smears on Garrett’s Mad Magazines, “and she had three children, and they all lived in the same room, and at night she would stand in the doorway and listen to them breathing until she could tell the three breaths apart from each other. One night she thought she couldn’t hear one of the babies breathing. She got a knife and stabbed one baby. Only one of the others was breathing. She stabbed the next baby. One of them was still breathing. She stabbed the third baby, and then none of them was breathing, so she came up to THIS ROOM and hanged herself.”

I never had to tell him that story again. It got built into him. When we got on our bikes to ride to school in the morning and he had bloodshot eyes, and looked too pale, and couldn’t listen or talk very well, I knew he’d dreamed about Mad Lucy again, and I felt awful. His nightmares didn’t end until Danny went through an intersection on his motorcycle without stopping for the last time.

The Halloween after Danny died, I dared Garrett to visit Danny’s grave with me in the cemetery, and Garrett just laughed. He said okay, he didn’t care.

The night was cool and misty. The streetlights were yellow; every night looked like Halloween. Dead maple leaves had drifted against the curbs in wet, slippery heaps. The air smelled good from the wood people were burning in their fireplaces. We rode our bikes to the cemetery and locked them to the fence, then snuck in through a gap in the hedge. We’d passed a lot of grown-ups taking little kids around trick-or-treating. Garrett and I were twelve. I had wanted to be a wolfman again this year, but he said that was stupid. “Grow up, Clark,” he had said.

“Free candy, Garrett,” I had said.

“It’s just too stupid,” he had said, and it had only been a month and a half since Danny died, so I decided not to push it. I ended up daring him to go to the graveyard instead. Maybe I was thinking if he’d only have nightmares again he’d turn back into the Garrett I knew, not this calm guy who smiled and acted mature and didn’t get mad anymore. Not this guy who told me he had to stay in and do homework on Saturday nights when I asked him to go to the movies with me.

We were walking along the road in the cemetery, and everything was dark and quiet. I started thinking about all the dead people under the ground. Maybe they were mad at the living, and maybe Halloween was the one night a year when they could come up and do something about it. Maybe that fresh earth smell came from somebody digging their way up. I thought about skeleton hands poking up out of earth shadowed by moonlight on tombstones, like in the Thriller video. The hands would drag us down against the earth and smother us, and then we would turn into skeletons ourselves, and grab other live people. When I heard these yowls like ghouls fighting, I was the one who jumped, and Garrett stayed steady. “It’s all right, Clark,” he said, “the dead won’t hurt you.”

Garrett said that.

I felt strange. All my fear just pissed away, and what I had left was numbness. We never made it to Danny’s grave. We turned around and left. On the way home I watched all those little ghosts and witches and vampires and werewolves and princesses and fairies running from house to house, and I thought, how stupid. Then I went to bed and had my first nightmare, full of skeleton hands reaching for me. By morning the big numb place in the middle of me had came unfrozen, and I just felt really mad because I’d missed out on all that candy. I wanted to punch Garrett.

Pretty soon after that, Garrett and his folks moved away. Their house got remodeled into apartments, and a cousin showed up to live in the basement and be the landlord.

The landlord at Garrett’s house looked a lot like Danny in disguise, and did all the yard work after dark. He wore a beard and glasses, and underneath it all, he looked like Danny.

I dreamed about him. In my dreams, he crept all around the house, through the bushes, rustle, rustle. He was one of those ghouls from Night of the Living Dead, and he wanted to eat me. I heard his fingers scrabbling on the walls, heard him twisting the knob of the front door downstairs, heard glass break in a window, imagined him coming in to get me. Maybe he’d nibble off my fingers first, then bite my face. Maybe he’d go straight for my guts, rip them out of my stomach and suck them up like spaghetti. Every night after I turned off my light I lay in bed and worried about the guy next door. The shadows on the ceiling moved and I wanted to yell. Some nights I talked to Mom and Dad, even after they went to bed. Three times my dad went downstairs to check the windows and the doors for me and tell me everything was all right. After that he stopped checking. He just said everything was all right, go to sleep. So I went back to my room. Usually I didn’t go to sleep.

One summer night, I sat in my upstairs window a couple hours after ten o’clock lights out and watched the guy next door weed. The air smelled like lawns being watered, and smoke from the field-burning outside the city. The yellow streetlight shone brightly on the yard next door. The landlord knelt in the flower bed near our yard—all the flowers were closed—and pulled weeds from the earth, not like my dad, jerking them out and cussing at them, but just, pouring water on the ground, feeling down around the plants’ roots and then pulling them out gently, like he didn’t want to hurt them even though he was killing them. He worked slowly. I thought: Danny wasn’t like that. Danny never did anything slow. He was always racing around like a madman.

I thought I could just watch him a while and then lie in bed and shiver all night wondering when he was coming to get me. Or I could go out there and ask him, get it over with.

I unhooked the screen and climbed out the window onto the branch of the maple tree I had always used as an escape route before I got so scared of the landlord cousin. I sneaked down the tree as quietly as I could, but when I reached the ground and turned around, there was the cousin, sitting back on his heels, staring at me through his clear glasses.

Eat me now, I thought. I’m tired of waiting. I heard my heart in my ears, thudding like a big drum.

I looked back at my house. I wished Mom or Dad would be at the window watching. The cousin couldn’t do anything if anybody was watching, could he? But there was nobody at any of the windows in my house, just a lot of curtains with dark behind them. I looked at his house, the house I used to play in with Garrett, to see if any of the tenants was at a window. The lights were on in the back downstairs apartment, but the curtains were closed. The other three apartments were dark.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hel-Hello,” the cousin said, his voice starting out normal and then dropping down deep. He leaned over and pulled another weed.

He wasn’t acting very dangerous, but I still wished I’d remembered to bring my Swiss Army knife with me. I didn’t know what to do next. I wondered what his teeth looked like. I hadn’t seen him smile in the year I’d been watching him.

“Have you heard anything from Garrett?” I asked.

“What?” He sat back again and stared at me.

“Garrett,” I said. “Your cousin? Used to live in your house. He was my best friend.”

“No,” he said, still in his deep voice. He stared at me and I stared at him. He didn’t smell like rotting meat or even like garbage. He didn’t have claws on his fingers, and he didn’t look too strong. He was just a guy. Just a guy I’d spent a year being terrified of.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, well.” I turned back to the tree and put my arms around it, ready to hug my way up to the lowest branch, and then I realized I was shaking and didn’t have any strength in my arms. I let go of the tree. Nothing like failing something important in front of a scary stranger.

“Can you get in downstairs?” he asked, and it was Danny’s voice coming from behind me.

I didn’t turn around. “Everything’s locked,” I mumbled to the tree. I had checked from the inside. Twice.

“I’ll give you a boost.” Then he was right behind me. I pushed my face against the bark, hugged the tree again, and waited for him to bite down on the back of my neck or tear my arms off.

“Clark,” he said. He touched my shoulder. His fingers felt wet and cool through my T-shirt.

I hugged the tree as hard as I could.

“I can’t help you up if you won’t let go.”

After a long moment I let go of the tree. Maybe that would make it easier for him to carry me off. Maybe that was why he was waiting. He’d take me into the basement and butcher me in the bathtub. I turned around and looked at his face, then thought, what have I got to lose, reached up, and pulled his beard. It came off. I dropped it and put my hands over my mouth.

After a minute he took off his glasses and put them in his shirt pocket. Then he peeled off the mustache. He was Danny, all right.

“Are you going to eat me?” I asked through my hands.

“Nope.” He leaned over, picked up the beard, and stuffed it in a pants pocket. “You going to tell on me?”

“Tell what?” I lowered my hands.

“Well, who I am, I guess. What else could you tell?”

“You’re dead, and you only come out at night.”

“Oh. That.”

“It was all a bunch of lies, wasn’t it? You’re not really dead, are you? It’s like a spy movie or something where you’re a secret witness with a new identity, huh.” I was talking too fast, hoping what I was saying was true.

He smiled. He bent and made a cup with his hands for my foot. “Go to bed, Clark,” he said.

I stepped into his hands and he lifted me until I could grab the lowest branch and climb up. I sat on the branch and looked down at him. “Danny?”

“What?”

“It’s a spy movie, not a horror movie, right?”

“Maybe it’s a comedy.” He got his beard out and pasted it back on. “Doesn’t this look like a comedy?” He put on his round-framed glasses and peered up at me. “Actually, I have heard from Garrett. He’s fine. He asked me about you. What do you want me to tell him?”

“I lost his address, and I miss him.”

“Wait a sec. Don’t go away. I’ll get it for you,” said Danny, and he strolled across the yard and walked down the basement steps in back.

I put my arm around the tree trunk and waited. Danny was dead and he only came out at night. Garrett knew and he never told me. What kind of best friend was that?

Danny came back and handed me a slip of paper with an address on it. I put it in my pocket. “Thanks,” I said. “Are you a zombie?”

“Nope.”

“A ghoul?”

“Nope. What’s the difference?”

“I think zombies are dead people, and ghouls eat dead people, but I’m not sure. Are you a werewolf?”

“Be real, Clark. I have to finish weeding, okay?”

“Am I even warm?”

“No,” he said. “Good night.” He turned around and went back to his sleeping flowers.

I climbed up the maple tree and went in through my window and then sat there, watching him work in the soft yellow light. He was Danny, and he wasn’t Danny. Danny always forgot his chores, too busy off somewhere playing music or cruising, doing things I planned to do three years from now, when I got my driver’s license. He looked like himself, and he acted like an old man.

I hooked the screen and closed the curtains and changed into my PJs and crawled into bed. For the first time in two years, I was going to sleep without nightmares. Danny was just some dead guy who weeded and watered. He told me he wouldn’t eat me, and he wouldn’t lie about a thing like that.

I closed my eyes. I was just falling into the whirly part of sleep where all the edges of everything you think about stretch or shrink when I sat straight up, the fear I was so used to shocking through me. He hadn’t told me what he was. Sure, he had told me he wouldn’t eat me, but then, he wasn’t really Danny, not the way he was acting, so how could I trust him?

I went to the window and looked out. He was loading all the weeds in a wheelbarrow. He wheeled the wheelbarrow around behind the house and dumped the weeds on a pile under a tarp. It was all very un-Danny.

I went back to bed and thought about it. It came to me presently that maybe he wasn’t dead, or a ghoul, or a zombie, or anything like that. Maybe he’d turned into the scariest monster of all. A grown-up.

I lay in bed awake the whole night. If it could happen to Danny, it could happen to anybody.

The next night, I watched him again. He was using a lawnmower, the kind without a motor, that makes a sound like a strong sprinkler but not as wet. My dad had one of those a long time ago and he cussed it harder than he ever cussed the car. It stopped at every clump of grass and dulled its blades on every pebble. He wrestled with it. Finally he put it out with the trash and mumbled about doctors with weird fitness prescriptions.

Danny mowed. Up, down, up, down. Every once in a while something slowed the mower; then he’d lean into the handle and push the mower over whatever was in the way. Not a single curse. He’d turned into a grown-up, and not even an interesting grown-up.

I got out the letter I’d started writing to Garrett that afternoon. “How come you didn’t tell me Danny wasn’t dead? It took me a year to figure it out. And if he is dead he’s the boringest dead person I ever saw.”

I chewed on my pencil and glanced out the window. Danny lifted the lawnmower in one fist and strolled toward the house with it swaying back and forth like a clock pendulum, then glanced up at my window and dropped it. It thudded, and I ducked. I reached for the light to switch it off, but it was too far away, and I knew he had seen me, anyway. I huddled on the floor, feeling the fear pumping through me, wondering why I was scared. I just saw a guy drop a lawnmower, that was all. After a minute the shakes stopped, and I crept toward the lamp. It was sitting up on my desk. I lay on the floor, reached in under my desk, and yanked the plug out of the wall socket.

“Clark,” whispered a voice from the direction of the window.

I froze.

“Clark?” A little louder now.

I thought about Garrett telling me dead people wouldn’t hurt me. I wondered what kind of dead people they had in Florida. Old dead people, maybe, and drug smugglers. Voodoo dead people. Maybe Garrett had changed his mind by now.

“I just don’t want you to worry,” said Danny’s voice.

I sat up and scooted in under my desk. “Worry about what,” I muttered, my voice rough around the edges.

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

“You’re not the real Danny. How do I know you’re not lying?”

“What?”

He sounded so much like Danny—confused, a little irritated—that I peeked up over the top of my desk. His head was just outside my screen, and it was dark in my room; he was a silhouette, backlit by the streetlight. There were two red spots where his eyes should be. I screamed, not high like a girl, but just a sort of half-swallowed “Aaaaah!” then clapped my hand over my mouth.

“What?” he said. He blinked. I could tell because the red spots winked out and came back.

“Your eyes!”

“Huh?” He turned, looking toward the street, and I saw his nose outlined in yellow, and a sliver of his cheek; the light shone through his fake beard and glinted off his glasses. “Clark? Are you all right?”

“Danny,” I said, hoping my saying his name would turn him into the normal boring person he had seemed like earlier tonight. My mouth was dry. “Your eyes glow red in the dark.”

“Damn,” he said. Like he’d just gotten a popcorn hull stuck in his teeth or something.

“What are you doing up in my tree?”

“I saw you disappear and I thought maybe you fell down. I thought I’d better check. Then the light went out.”

“You dropped the lawnmower. After carrying it like it weighed nothing.”

“Damn. You did see that.”

“Danny,” I said, and it came out a muffled wail, “what are you?”

“Aw, Clark.”

“You gonna suck my blood?”

“Nope.”

“Are you still you at all?”

“Mostly,” he said. “Just dead.”

“How come you—how come you act like a little old man?”

“Is that what’s bothering you?” He paused. “Clark, you’ll find this out pretty soon. You’ve got to pretend to be a grown-up, or people ask too many questions, especially if you’re running around in a big body.”

“You never acted like a grown-up when you were alive. It’s only since you died.”

“Because now more than ever it’s important for me not to make people ask questions. I have to try to look normal.”

“Doing the yardwork at night isn’t normal.”

“It’s more important that the yard looks nice than that I don’t do it at night. I own the building. I have to keep the neighborhood people happy; if they think I’m a bad neighbor, they’ll start talking. And after they talk for a while, they might do something.”

“Like find out you’re a vampire?” It was my last shot. I’d been saving that one, maybe because it fitted the facts best and I didn’t want it to be the truth. Of all the monsters there were, vampires scared me the most, because they had their own minds, and they still hurt people.

“I don’t know if they’d find that out,” said Danny, not saying if he was a vampire or not, “but they might do something legal to me, like take away my property, and I depend on having that house and the income it generates. Damn, I do sound like a grown-up.” He was quiet for a long minute. “Maybe I am a grown-up.”

“You can’t be a grown-up,” I said. I looked at the red spots floating in his head’s shadow and tried to imagine his face around them. “You can’t. You died before you had to be a grown-up.”

“Yeah,” he said after a moment, “and it didn’t work.”

“You can’t be a grown-up and sleep in a coffin.”

“Unless you’re dead.”

“Grown-ups don’t go around sucking peoples’ blood.”

“They do it all the time. They call it something else.”

“Grown-ups don’t have eyes that glow red in the dark.”

“You got me on that one.”

I crawled up and sat on my desk, right near the window. I put my hand on the screen, and Danny touched it through the mesh. His fingers felt cool. After a minute I took my hand down and he put his down. “Honest you’re not going to hurt me?” I said.

“Honest.”

“I been having bad dreams about you.”

“I’m sorry. Listen, you’re safe as long as you don’t invite me in.”

I had forgotten about that vampire rule. “Can you turn into a bat?” I asked.

“Uh-huh. Not very well yet.”

“No grown-up could do that.”

He was quiet for a while. He looked toward the street again. The yellow light touched the surface of his eye and covered the red glow. “Clark,” he said, “growing up isn’t something you can stop from happening. Not very easily, anyway. I did my best, and it didn’t work. You don’t have to worry about it for a while. But when you do, it won’t really hurt that much.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I whispered. “Waking up one day and it’ll be too late. I won’t have felt it happening.” The nightmares were really to keep me from sleeping my way into being a grown-up.

“What’s wrong with being a grown-up?”

Words came out of me, thoughts I hadn’t noticed having. “There’s no magic. All of a sudden everything happens because of something you can explain, and you don’t have to be afraid of anything, and—” I thought about Garrett walking calmly through a cemetery on Halloween night. That was what was wrong. All of a sudden, Garrett was a grown-up, and I wasn’t. He had lost his nightmares.

I had found mine.

“—and you don’t see anything anymore.” I thought about Dad, telling me everything was all right downstairs without even checking. “’Cause you’re not even looking. And nothing’s important, and nothing’s happening right now. I been watching Mom and Dad and people on TV, and they talk like it’s all yesterday or tomorrow, how are we going to pay for this, when are we going on vacation, how could you spend that much on clothes? I’m going to turn fourteen this year. I have this nightmare where I fall asleep the night before my birthday, and when I wake up the next morning, bam! Instant grown-up.”

Being a grown-up was like being dead. Skeleton hands, reaching up to smother. Drag everybody else under the ground to die and be a grown-up too.

“I had that nightmare, too,” Danny said. “It didn’t happen like that.”

“But it did happen, didn’t it? How?”

“Oh, Clark,” he said, and sighed.

“It happens when you start thinking your parents are right about everything and you worry about paying taxes and balancing the check book and stuff like that, right?”

“That’s part of it.”

“If I never, never do that, maybe it won’t happen.”

“I don’t think that’ll work. But I think—I have to think about this. There might be something…”

Mom knocked on my door. “Clark?” she called. “Who are you talking to? Are you listening to the radio? Why are you still awake? Go to sleep!”

I looked out the window. Danny had disappeared.

“Okay, Mom,” I said. I climbed into bed and lay under the sheet, thinking about Danny. All day maybe he lay in a coffin in the basement next door. In the movies they always got all the stuff together, garlic, crosses, stake and a hammer to pound it with, and hunted out the coffins and killed the vampires like they were cockroaches. What if Danny’s tenants figured out what he was? How could they not know? What if they got into his apartment and staked him out?

But they were grown-ups. They wouldn’t wonder about it. They wouldn’t believe it. I turned over and went to sleep.

The next night I went over to Garrett’s house before bedtime, around 9:15, when the sun had been down for a few minutes, and sat on the basement steps. Danny, in disguise, came out a couple minutes later. He jumped when he saw me.

“Look,” I said, “I believe in you.”

“I know that about you, Clark. Can we talk later? I have to go visit a couple friends.”

“No, I mean, I believe in you, and no grown-up would believe in vampires if they weren’t one, would they?”

“So?”

“So as long as I believe in you, I won’t be a grown-up.”

He gave me a grin that showed all his teeth. They looked like normal teeth. “That’s great,” he said, and I almost lost it. How could he be a vampire and have normal teeth? Except for the chip on the front one; he’d had that for years. When I first asked him about it, I was six. He said he got it in a bicycle accident when he was too young to ride motorcycles. So, maybe he wasn’t a vampire, and that blew my protection against being a grown-up out of the water. “I have to go, Clark,” he said, and saved me again.

He turned into mist and blew away, even though there was no wind.

“Clark, it’s almost bedtime,” yelled my mom from the back door. “Come home and brush your teeth!”

I walked across Danny’s carefully tended yard and hugged my secret. I started a new letter in my head. “Dear Garrett,” it said, “greetings from my nightmare.”

As long as my house is haunted, I don’t think any grown-up will move in.