فصل 03 - بخش 04

3

Shortly after midnight (around the time the last remaining member of the Peterson family was learning how to make a hangman’s noose, courtesy of Wikipedia), Marcy Maitland awoke to the sound of screams from her elder daughter’s bedroom. It was Grace at first – a mother always knows – but then Sarah joined her, creating a terrible two-part harmony. It was the girls’ first night out of the bedroom Marcy had shared with Terry, but of course the kids were still bunking together, and she thought they might do that for some time to come. Which was fine.

What wasn’t fine were those screams.

Marcy didn’t remember running down the hall to Sarah’s bedroom. All she remembered was getting out of bed and then standing inside the open door of Sarah’s room and beholding her daughters, sitting bolt upright in bed and clutching each other in the light of the full July moon that came flooding through the window.

‘What?’ Marcy asked, looking around for an intruder. At first she thought he (surely it was a he) was crouched in the corner, but that was only a pile of cast-off jumpers, tee-shirts, and sneakers.

‘It was her!’ Sarah cried. ‘It was G! She said there was a man! God, Mom, she scared me so bad!’

Marcy sat on the bed and pried her younger daughter from Sarah’s arms and took Grace in her own. She was still looking around. Was he in the closet? He might be, the accordion doors were closed. He could have done that when he heard her coming. Or under the bed? Every childhood fear flooded back while she waited for a hand to close around her ankle. In the other would be a knife.

‘Grace? Gracie? Who did you see? Where was he?’

Grace was crying too hard to answer, but she pointed at the window.

Marcy went there, her knees threatening to come unhinged at every step. Were the police still watching the house? Howie said they would be making regular passes for awhile, but that didn’t mean they were there all the time, and besides, Sarah’s bedroom window – all of their bedroom windows – looked out on either the backyard or the side yard, between their house and the Gundersons’. And the Gundersons were away on vacation.

The window was locked. The yard – every single blade of grass seeming to cast a shadow in the moonlight – was empty.

She came back to the bed, sat, and stroked Grace’s hair, which was clumped and sweaty. ‘Sarah? Did you see anything?’

‘I …’ Sarah considered. She was still holding Grace, who was sobbing against her big sister’s shoulder. ‘No. I might have thought I did, just for a second, but that was because she was screaming, “The man, the man.” There was no one there.’ And, to Gracie, ‘No one, G. Really.’

‘You had a bad dream, honey,’ Marcy said. Thinking, Probably the first of many.

‘He was there,’ Gracie whispered.

‘He must have been floating, then,’ Sarah said, speaking with admirable reasonableness for someone who had been scared out of sleep only minutes before. ‘Because we’re on the second floor, y’know.’

‘I don’t care. I saw him. His hair was short and black and standing up. His face was lumpy, like Play-Doh. He had straws for eyes.’

‘Nightmare,’ Sarah said matter-of-factly, as if this closed the subject.

‘Come on, you two,’ Marcy said, striving for that same matter-of-fact tone. ‘You’re with me for the rest of the night.’

They came without protest, and five minutes after she had them settled in, one on each side of her, ten-year-old Gracie had fallen asleep again.

‘Mom?’ Sarah whispered.

‘What, honey?’

‘I’m scared of Daddy’s funeral.’

‘So am I.’

‘I don’t want to go, and neither does G.’

‘That makes three of us, sweetheart. But we’ll do it. We’ll be brave. It’s what your dad would have wanted.’

‘I miss him so much I can’t think of anything else.’

Marcy kissed the gently beating hollow of Sarah’s temple. ‘Go to sleep, honey.’

Sarah eventually did. Marcy lay awake between her daughters, looking up at the ceiling and thinking of Grace turning to the window in a dream so real she thought she was awake.

He had straws for eyes.