It was Timmy’s cries, not Tommy’s screams, that woke Maddy. The three of them had anticipated a typical Saturday morning in the Balkman household: hugs, pancakes, chores, a little TV, some more hugs, and then a hike in the park near their house.
No, no, no, no!
Her heart was in her heels as she ran in slow motion to the twins’ bedroom. She hadn’t even checked the time before leaping from bed.
Please no! Please, please, please!
She felt nauseous as her brain flashed back to a memory from two weeks earlier.
“Mom, Mom, there’s a monster under my bed!” Tommy cried.
She’d had her back to the door and thought it was Timmy who’d walked into the kitchen until he spoke. Most people couldn’t tell them apart. That always amused Maddy and Kenneth, who could easily tell them apart from how they spoke. She missed Kenneth so much; at night her empty arms ached for him.
God rest his soul.
He’d been gone four years.
Her twins looked like a carbon copy of him, with midnight black hair and athletic builds. Everyone said that even Timmy was bound to be a star athlete someday. Kenny had played college football, but then Maddy was pregnant and that was the end of that dream. Not that Kenny minded; as big as his desire to be a professional wide receiver was, he found being a father fulfilling and less stressful on his knees.
How quickly we adapt to the impossible, she thought. It had been seven years since the rare alignment of Mars, Saturn, and Pluto coincident with a lunar eclipse that had flipped some cosmic switch and set life on Earth into turmoil. The twins had just turned one when the first reports started coming in.
Just seven years ago, I would’ve been having a very different kind of talk with my son, the kind of talk that focused on imagination, about how it could be both a good thing and a bad thing. Those days are gone.
She glanced at the picture that rested on the windowsill beyond the kitchen sink. It was a picture of her and Kenneth taken at the state fair; they are both impossibly beautiful, vibrant, and alive. He was fit, toned, lean, and smiling the impossible smile with all those white teeth. It was his smile that first drew her to him. In the photograph, she saw a couple that would live forever. She saw a couple that would never wrinkle, never grow old and die. Even in black and white, his teeth popped and her angel-fine, blonde hair shimmered.
I miss you, K-Man.
She’d always pronounced it ‘Cayman.’
Thoughts of Kenneth always lead her to recoil at the stupid unfairness that undiagnosed somnambulism was what took him from her.
Why didn’t we just buy the damn restraints?
Many families had opted to go that route. Their ACROW system worked great, but it wasn’t enough. It hadn’t been enough to protect Kenneth.
Such an unlikely-looking defense: a ring of PVC pipe three feet high, encircling each bed, with its softly purring pump, circulating saline water clockwise around the sleepers.
If we’d had the restraints, K-Man would still be here; the boys would still have their father.
Maddy couldn’t know that for sure, but it was something she told herself at night when the darkness closed in on her and she had to attack the only person she could think of to blame–herself.
After what felt like a week, Maddy finally crossed the thirteen feet between the two bedrooms. On the far side of the king-sized bed, Timmy was hugging his brother, crying, begging him to wake up. But she could tell.
Why didn’t we buy the damn restraints?
She knew her nocturnal ruminations were about to get a whole lot worse.
But it’s a king-size bed. The boys will be fine, Mads.
That had been Kenneth’s opinion. Her trust in him had always been complete.
But she wouldn’t hide behind that. She was the parent, the only parent left, and this happened on her watch, had been her fault.
Tommy had been firstborn, beating Timmy by a full eighteen minutes. In life, he had lived that pattern over and over. He was usually the first. The first to walk. The first to learn to ride a bike, skate, read, hit a baseball. He was always going to be just a bit faster, a bit better than Timmy. Identical twins, but not in every way.
Stepping into the boys’ room, she gasped in horror.
Timmy’s was still so black it looked like a special effect, like a magic trick in which his hair absorbed all the light. But Tommy’s hair had turned pure white.
She knew.
Tommy shivered and drooled. But the worst part was his eyes. They had fully dilated, making his eyes look black, not the same brown he shared with his brother and his departed father. His shell shook while his empty eyes continued to look while seeing nothing. It was as if all that black from his hair had come loose and settled in his eyes.
Tommy, as she had known him, was gone. All that was left was his shell.
Her eyes needed some break from studying her son’s face of madness. She turned away from the white-white hair and the black-black eyes and she noticed something. Something awful. Like father, like son. Her eyes swept down his leg, and she noticed his left foot was hanging over the edge of the tube of circulating water. The ACROW system worked great, but you had to keep your body within its inscribed area for it to work.
Some foul and wicked ghost, set loose by some damnable configuration of the planets, had left its home beneath their bed and caressed his foot while he slept, filling his mind with such horrific images that his existence became a nightmare from which he would never awaken.
During the days, ghosts were, as they had been since the dawn of time, dormant, but at night, they were no longer restricted to children’s imagination or paranoia. From 12:06 AM to 7:06 AM, they came out to play.
Timmy continued to weep and shake his brother. But Maddy fell to the floor, shoved her head beneath the bed, and wailed. For an hour she wept, screamed, pleaded, and threatened. Her fury had been unleashed and she promised them, there was no place in hell they could hide where she wouldn’t find them, wouldn’t make them regret they’d taken her son and husband. Oh, yes, she would find them. If it took her spirit a billion years, she would hunt them down and find them. She would make them regret they’d been born. She would make hell seem like a happy hour by the time she was done with them.
Stories by Shawn 