BEHIND THE SCENES: UNQUIET SLUMBERS

Don't read this until you have read "Unquiet Slumbers." available on this blog, first.

In Danse Macabre, his non-fiction examination of horror, Stephen King discussed the "Tarot Hand" of archetypes that dominate the genre. There is the Ghost (the great granddaddy of all horror archetypes), the Werewolf, the Thing Without a Name, and the Vampire. I don't recall off the top of my head if there was also an archetype called the Bad Place, but if there wasn't there should have been. At any rate, horror stories revolve around these archetypes, whether singularly or in tandem. If it scares you, it probably can be traced back to one or more of them. Unquiet Slumbers, a story I wrote about back in 2003 feverishly and over three days, was a chance to play with a hand of three of those archetypes; the Ghost, the Vampire, and the Bad Place.

Of all those cards, the one I am most cautious to play is the Vampire, an archetype that has frankly been done to death. It is so overused that it is barely ever scary, acting as a "sex symbol" instead (and I mean that both in the sense of being sexy and as being a symbol for sexual relations). The ravenous medieval monster is now a sparkly Mormon messenger telling good girls to save it for their wedding nights. Of course, I wrote Unquiet Slumbers before the world was made to suffer Twilight, but things were already headed in that direction. Vampires had hired PR agents and were rebranding themselves as misunderstood anti-heroes with BDSM overtones (it's not coincidence that the BDSM novel 50 Shades of Grey began as Twilight fan fiction). Even Dracula himself was now a romantic hero, Coppola's curiously named Bram Stoker's Dracula was about as far removed from Bram Stoker's actual Dracula as you could get. I didn't want to ride the Frank Langella/Anne Rice bandwagon.

So what I decided to do was to try and write a very retro vampire story, something almost medieval, stripped of even the 19th century gothic fascination bestowed on the creature. My model was the famous "Mercy Brown" incident, a very real and curious event. For those who don't know it, in Exeter, Rhode Island, at the end of the 19th century, a family named Brown became plagued by tuberculosis, which picked them off one by one. Friends and neighbors persuaded George Brown that it was the work of the undead, and in 1892 he exhumed three family members to find one--the corpse of Mary Brown--still apparently fresh and full of blood. This was taken as a sign that Mary was responsible, so her heart was removed from her body and burnt. Poor George died two months later anyway. But this American vampire story, so close to the 20th century, had been in the back of my head for some time and became the blueprint for Slumbers.

The Vampire was of course the central card in my hand as I told Slumbers (though I decided to never actually use the word "vampire" in the entire tale, a trick I would borrow for a different monster in The Man Cub), but the Ghost and the Bad Place cast shadows over the story too. In my own mind I have never been sure if the spectral apparitions the narrator sees outside the living room windows are vampires like Stephan or the forlorn ghosts of his victims. I lean towards the latter. And the idea of the mountain being dangerous in winter, and of the nasty bend in the road where the narrator lost his parents, were flirtatious with the Bad Place.

The same year I wrote Unquiet Slumbers, I also wrote the novella that would grow up into the novel The Man Cub. I considered likewise expanding and fleshing Slumbers out, but in the end decided I liked this little tale the way it was. But the Vampire, the Ghost, and the Bad Place is a hard hand to beat, and I knew I hadn't written them out of my system yet. So this year I have picked them up to play again in my newest project, Sinclair House, in a larger and more ambitious way. I don't want to say any more about the project at this stage, but despite being very different animals, Sinclair House and Slumbers share a bit of DNA. Stay tuned.

UNQUIET SLUMBERS, PART 13

Denise was unconscious when we bundled her up and carried her to Elijah’s truck. Blood still seeped from the corners of her mouth, and somehow her pallor was getting worse.

I kissed her once she was safely in the truck, pressing my face against her cheek, smelling her hair. My eyes were stinging with tears, and I had the feeling I was never going to see her again.

“I love you,” I whispered in her ear. “I’m going get this thing. It’s all going to be fine, I swear.”

I kissed her a final time, and stood motionless as the truck rolled away. As it rounded the bend, I turned my back and tried to find some courage left.

I had work to do.

I headed for the sheds, my footsteps heavy in the snow. I had to keep moving, because if I stopped for even a moment, the absurdity of what I was about to do would resurface, and I would lose my grip. I envisioned my mind just snapping, and Elijah coming back up the hill to find me grinning, giggling alone on the mountain in a bad Dwight Frye parody. So I kept my motions mechanical, going through this like it was the most routine thing in the world. Letting my body carry it out unburdened by thought.

I unlocked the shed and squeezed my way past the wood pile, taking a hatchet off the wall. Then I picked up the ax I had tripped over the day before and started hacking away at the wood just below the metal head. I didn’t need an ax…it was the strong oak handle I was after.

I was still hacking away when Elijah returned. “She’s down there with my mother,” he said, reading my troubled expression. “She should be safe enough while we do this. There’s plenty of day left before night.”

I nodded grimly. “Okay. Let’s get it over with.”

I had hacked the oak ax haft into a reasonably sharp point, leaving the metal blade in the sawdust on the floor. In the tool shed, we found a pair of shovels, a pick, and a large sledgehammer. Neither of us said a word about what we were going to do.

The walk from the woodshed to the grave under the old oak was one of the longest I had ever taken. The yard seemed to stretch out impossibly long, a football field of bare white snow. With each step, the tree loomed larger, its naked branches scratching at the face of a stone gray sky. I am not sure either of us were prepared for what we found underneath it.

No snow had fallen on Stephan Schroeder's grave; or if any had, all six or seven inches of it had melted down into the earth. All around it, the snow was deep and unmarked--only here was the soil exposed to the sky. The surface was covered with decaying leaves, glued to the earth by thin tendrils of fungus. Small beetles and worms wiggled in the topsoil, apparently kept alive and warm by whatever was lying beneath.

We stared at each other in shock, until finally Elijah lifted his shovel and drove it deep into the naked ground. The ground was unfrozen, and an unpleasant scent, something like rot and mold, was oozing up from the wound he had made.

Taking up my shovel, I joined him, and we began the long work of working our way down into the earth.

After about ten minutes or so, we were both gagging on the stench. But the earth was soft and easily removed, crawling with filthy life. It heaped up around us on the spotless snow, while the sun continued its winter arc down towards the mountain tops. We tried to ignore this fact as we shoveled.

The only way to get through it was to not think. Not to think about why this patch of ground refused to freeze, not to think about the stench, not to think about the thing that we might find lying at the bottom of this grave. For my part, I also tried not to think of my wife and child dying just a mile or two down the hill. None of this was easy to do.

Despite the cold, I was sweating. Muck and filth was covering both of us, and for some reason the ground was growing muddier and more damp the deep we went. It was also beginning to stink even worse. After going down a few feet, the bottom of the grave was starting to fill with some brackish fluid that stank like old blood. As we dug, it spattered over our faces and clothes.

Elijah lost his stomach first. He heaved himself over the side of the grave and started vomiting, loosing the contents of his stomach up on the surface. I ignored him and continued to dig.

Three feet. Four feet. Five…it had to be five. Neither of us expected to find a coffin; according to his mother's account, old Grandpa Conkley and his friends had just buried the bodies in the earth. But as we went deeper and deeper, a terrible cold was beginning to squeeze my chest. There was no sign here of human remains, no body, no living corpse. All we had found was mold and insects, and sickening puddles of purplish blood.

"Jesus, Elijah…he's not here."

Elijah shook his head. "He's got to be here. Dig."

After twenty or thirty more shovels full of dripping mud, we both fell into a kind of frenzy, tearing the muck up as fast as we could. Overhead, the light was growing dim, and horror scenes from a dozen old movies were playing through my head. But we had gone deeper than any normal grave, and now, suddenly, the earth was turning hard, frozen, and stony.

Stephan Schroeder was not there.

Dropping my shovel, I collapsed, gasping, against the muddy wall of the grave. My chest felt like it was on fire, and my heart was pounding. We stared at each other with horrified incomprehension.

"Where can it be…" I asked, my voice more shrill than I wanted it to be. "I don't understand."

Elijah, helpless, shook his head. He looked older than usual, his skin gray under all the mud. The exertion, combined with decades of cigarettes, was clearly taking its toll on him.

"We just assumed it was like the movies," I said, finally. "But it isn't…maybe it doesn't have to be. Jesus Christ…maybe he lies here year round, except winter. Maybe then he's free to walk around, whether it's day or night."

Elijah stared at me in mounting horror. "Oh God...it was day, when I spotted him hunting...I just didn't think..."

I nodded, my heart feeling like someone had just punched through my ribcage to wrap a fist around it. "We have to get down the hill. Fast."

I crawled my way out of the loose grave, feeling like some monster in a low budget zombie movie. Panting, I helped Elijah out, frowning at the growing shadows and the darkening of the light.

Mountain Hollow seemed to be watching us as we shambled up the hill, towards the truck. The house seemed to realize something terrible was happening to it, that it was being abandoned again. I wondered if it feared suffering the same fate as its predecessor.

Slumping behind the steering wheel, Elijah did not look well. He was coughing almost as badly as Denise had been, wheezing to catch his breath. I put my hand on the older man's shoulder, both panicked and concerned for him. "Are you okay, Elijah? Do you want me to drive?"

He shook his head, but the coughing fit would not stop. He seemed to be getting light-headed from it, wobbling a little in his seat. After a couple of minutes, he looked at me and nodded helplessly, leaving his keys dangling in the ignition. We stumbled out of the truck to exchange places, just as a fresh curtain of snow started to fall.

The engine rumbled, complained a little, and then came to life. The smell of gasoline filled the cabin of the truck. I clicked on the headlights and started to back out into the drive, glad of the old truck's weight in the snow.

I had seen this drive in so many seasons. The pale green of spring, dusted with flowers, heavy green summer buzzing with insects, golden autumn and its carpet of leaves. Now, gray winter loomed down on me, blowing against the windshield, turning the poplars into shadowy towers of white. There was something so final in the view before me. I think I had decided, even then, that Mountain Hollow could never be home again.

I pressed the accelerator lightly, wanting to gun the engine, feeling a terrible sense of urgency. But I restrained myself, as I always restrained myself, fearing the awful bend in the road. Conkley was still gagging beside me, his window rolled down for fresh air. Others were also present here in the car, or at least I felt they were, crowding all around us. The dim shapes of the Schroeders, dead these many years. Maria, who lingered in the house that she loved just a few weeks too long, and my parents, their argument never finished, dead on this very road.

I seldom prayed, but as I clutched the steering wheel I begged whatever God could hear me not to add my wife and unborn child to the heap of ghosts shrouding this truck.

We started around the bend, and my heart was racing. The swirling snow made it impossible to see more than a few feet ahead. All around us the mountains and trees had been reduced to dim and hollow shapes, shadows without substance. They were only patterns in the snow. Conkley had finally stopped gagging, both his hands on the dashboard as I fishtailed a little entering the bend.

i swear mike, she intentionally waits until the last minute, just to keep us there longer

My mother's voice echoed in my ears. My lips kept moving of their own accord, soundlessly mouthing "…please…please…please…" I wasn't sure who I was asking for what.

Damnit, jackie, could we not do this again…

"My God…THERE!"

Elijah bolted upright in his seat and shouted, pointing dead ahead. At first, I had no idea what he was talking about, so preoccupied in my memories, in the past.

But as my eyes fixed themselves ahead, through the veil of snow, I saw what he saw standing in the pool of the headlights. And this time, there was no doubt what I was seeing.

He looked no older than a boy of nineteen, my height, maybe less. His dark hair was matted to his skull, caked with mud and earth. He still wore the uniform they had buried him in, the fabric worm-eaten and filthy from years beneath the ground. There, right in the middle of the road, he seemed fearless of the truck rushing down on him. His lips were stretched in something that could have been a smile, a snarl, or a leer. There was no way to tell, because the thing in front of us had long ago forgotten how to make any truly human expression. His teeth were purple-black, his lips dripping wet with blood.

For this, fifteen years ago, my father had swerved. Instead, I pushed my foot down on the accelerator, aiming the car for him. Half a lifetime of anger and pain erupted, and I made some kind of unintelligible scream. Conkley raised his arms as if to ward off some kind of blow.

It never moved, but I could swear in the brief seconds before impact it had faded, dissolving into the snowy air the way an alka-seltzer dissolves in water. There was no bump, no impact. We only plowed our way through snow and air.

I slowed the truck and stopped at the end of the bend, hopping out before Elijah could prevent me. I had no idea what I would do if he was out there, but I was well past the point of reason.

But there was nothing. In the red tail lights of the truck I saw only snow, and darkness, and our own tracks in the road.

The front door of the Conkley's home was wide open, swinging in the wind.

My knees went weak when I saw it, and the dark house rising lifeless before us. Elijah shouted something and hurtled up the steps. I couldn't make myself move.

After a minute or so, I found him weeping in the living room, his large shoulders shaking. Mrs. Conkley was lying flat on her back, her lips drawn back into a scream, eyes bulging. I had seen the expression before. Her Bible was on the floor beside her, right were she had dropped it while gaping at the terrible figure that must have appeared to her in the room.

I can't explain the icy calm that held me. They say it might have been shock, but it felt more like helplessness and resignation. There was terrible pain, but I felt it only distantly, as if it belonged to someone else entirely. Everything went strangely quiet, as if someone had turned the volume down. I could see Elijah weeping, but I could no longer hear it. The only clear sound was my heart pounding in my ears.

My feet carried me forward into the next room, seemingly without any guidance from my brain. What I found in there, on the bed, was not Denise. Denise was long gone, having abandoned this life at least an hour or two before. What I found was a ruin, a pale husk spattered with what was left of her blood. He had ripped open her blouse, and I found myself staring at what used to be her belly (now just part of an anonymous corpse). I wondered if the tiny life inside her was also a mummified husk, nestled neatly inside her for the rest of eternity.

I had fallen to my knees (when had that happened?), and took the hand of the body in front of me. It felt dry, stiff, and cold.

And all the air just went out of me in a rush.

Tomorrow, I decided, I would go back up the mountain. I would take her with me. We could sit awhile, together, in the house that I had always loved as a child, reminiscing.

And then maybe I would tear up all the floorboards, in the house, in the sheds, in the barn. I would search everywhere I could think of for Stephan's corpse. I would find him, and then burn everything down around him. Because I knew, in the deepest chambers of my heart, that as long as he lay in unquiet slumbers, I would never sleep easily again.

UNQUIET SLUMBERS, PART 12

Elijah didn’t come alone.

I opened the front door to find his mother standing beside him, a great round bulk of a woman with drooping cheeks and the bluest eyes. Her gaze flickered over my features in seconds, reading all that was written there.

I had told him very little on the telephone; only that something terrible had happened, and that Denise was very sick. I told him that she was refusing to leave the house.

Now, after I welcomed them in, Mrs. Conkley fixed me with a fearful look. “Where is she?”

“In the bedroom,” I whispered. She headed straight for it, and I limped after her, my hip still aching from the fall.

Both of them seemed momentarily stunned by the sight of her. I had laid her out on the bed, and now she was sleeping so deeply there was no waking her. Her skin looked pale and waxy, and there were purple shadows gathered around her eyes. The disease was working rapidly in her.

Mrs. Conkley sat on the edge of the bed, placing her palm on Denise’s forehead. She sighed, and her round body seemed to shrink ever so slightly. “Tell me what happened,” she said, turning her face towards me. Something in her expression told me she already knew what she would hear. “All of it, if you please.”

I eased into the chair across from her, with Elijah standing between us. His eyes darted between us as we spoke.

When I opened my mouth, I never expected the accident to come out, but it did. This time, as I told them about the death of my parents, I saw him clearly for the first time. A young man in a military uniform, ghastly pale, his clothes and face covered in mud, standing in the middle of the road. He was completely motionless, as if dazed, wearing a blank expression. But his eyes, there in the wash of the headlights, were twin pits of hell. My father had swerved to miss him, but in those seconds the stranger’s face never changed, never showed a trace of surprise or fear.

As I spoke, other memories fell into place. I remember the awful winter that Maria lingered, and the winter finally caught her. The weather had been so fine, so unseasonably warm, that my grandmother had loitered well into the first week of December. When Denise and I came up that weekend to help her pack up the house, we found her in her bedroom, slumped against the wall.

“The doctors said it was her heart, no doubt about the cause. But when I saw her face…her eyes had been bulging, and her mouth was wide open like a scream. She had been standing there,” I pointed to the space beside the bed, “facing the doorway. And all I could think when I saw her was that someone, something, had scared her to death.”

I closed my eyes, slowly lowering my head. “The doctors explained that the pain of a heart attack accounted for her features, and I believed them. I just brushed it aside.”

Mrs. Conkley nodded. “What happened here last night?”

I told them everything, every detail I could remember. I told them about my nightmares, about the way I found Denise in the morning. Everything. She listened quietly, her face looking gray, lips pressed tightly together. When I had finished, she opened her eyes again and turned towards Denise.

“It’s the sun,” she said simply.

“Excuse me? The sun?”

“She doesn’t want to go out into the sunlight.”

“Why?”

She took Denise’s hand. “I am so sorry, about this. I guess maybe I should have told this story to you when you first came up. But to tell you the truth, I only half believed it myself. My mother had a lot of old ghost stories she liked to tell, but I knew her fear of this place was the real thing. She always swore it wasn’t safe up here ‘…when the nights are long and the days short.’ Those were here words. As a matter of fact, she beat me with a switch once when I came too far up the road one winter to toboggan with a friend.”

She sighed. “You understand this was all well before I was born. I always knew my ma was afraid of the mountain, but she never told me why until the end. By that time, the cancer was eating her up, and a lot of what she said was nonsense. Part of me believed the story, though, because she always had been afraid.

“After the Great War and the Spanish Flu, the Schroeders had given their son up for dead. The government had notified them, in fact, that he had been lost somewhere in the woods of France and was believed to be deceased. His whole platoon, it seemed, had up and disappeared.

“But in December next, just before the snows, Stephan wandered up the hill. He’d lost almost half his weight, and was still wearing his military uniform. He come right up here to the old farmhouse one evening and started beating on the door.

“They said it was shell-shock. He never spoke no more, you see. Just stared at you. No one could get a word out of him. He spent most of the days sleeping, and wandered around the farm at night. My ma told me all the animals seemed shy of him.

“Now…not many people knew of this, but my mother was one of them, because she had been Agnes’ friend. Agnes was just a year or so younger than Stephan, and by all accounts she was a true beauty. Maybe too beautiful. But you know sometimes, especially back then, in those families away up in the hills unnatural things happened, young people being what they are and all. You hear tell of it on occasion today. Why, there’s a family just around the way from us where the teenage girl delivered her own father’s son a year back, and they still all live together…mother, father, daughter, and her own father’s child. As happy as can be.

“Well, between Agnes and Stephan there had been some fooling around. She told my ma that it was kissing at first, and later, when he got ready to go off to the War, they…well, I’m sure I don’t need to spell it all out for you.

“So then Stephan went off to the war, and while that happened, Agnes got herself a young man. He was a Fleischer, from over the other side of the hill. I don’t know why she decided to do it, but she wrote Stephan a letter to tell him about it.

“The letter she got back was not a sound one. Her brother told her that she was his, that she would always be his, and that no matter what happened, he would be back for her.”

Mrs. Conkley folded her hands between her knees, absent-mindedly twisting a ring on her finger. “I guess Agnes was terrified when Stephan came back, scared that everyone would learn what they done. But of course he said nothing, and she began to think maybe he didn’t even remember any of it clearly. He barely even seemed to know who she was.

“Then, round Christmas time, poor Agnes suddenly took sick. She had a terrible cough, and complained about trouble breathing. She said the sunlight hurt her eyes and made her skin sting. She started getting real pale, and after a few days was coughing up blood.

“Everyone was afraid of TB in those days. It had always been a problem in these parts. So a lot of the families around started to avoid the Schroeders and the hill. I think maybe only old Grandpa Conkley, being their closest neighbor, kept in touch with them. Suspicion fell on Stephan, of course…people said he brought it back from the war. But he had none of the symptoms. Sure, he was pale and thin from the war, but he didn’t seem to have the disease.

“And then…then they caught him. One night they found Stephan in her bedroom, lying on top of her while she slept. He was kissing her so hard that there was blood ob both their mouths.”

I shut my eyes at this, feeling like I was going to throw up. A mental picture of Denise, lying beneath this thing, filled my mind. “Jesus,” I whispered.

“They locked Stephan up in his room, and kept watch over him day and night. Word that he had attacked his sister got out and spread through town. But whatever he had done couldn’t be undone. The poor girl just kept wasting away.

“When the winter came it was a bad one. The road was blocked, and the snow kept falling. When the first thaw finally camp, Grandpa Conkley and some others went up the hill to see what had come of the Schroeders.”

She lowered her head, still wringing her hands. Elijah and I waited in silence, listening to the clock ticking out in the living room. Finally, Mrs. Conkley drew a deep breath.

“My mother told me that they found them dead…all of them. They found Stephan’s younger brother out in the yard, mostly buried in the snow. Looked to them as though he had choked to death on his own blood. The parents they found in the bedroom, wasted away to nothing and bled white. Their mouths were caked with dried blood, and their teeth were practically black with it. Grandpa Conkley said the bodies were as light as scarecrows made of straw.

“Stephan, now, well, he was harder to find. Seems that sometime during the winter, the Conkleys had ripped up some floorboards and nailed them over Stephan’s door and windows, boarding him up in his room. Someone had torn the Gospels out of the family Bible and plastered all them boards with them. All this scared the men so much they weren’t sure they wanted to see what was in the room, but they came up to find out and aimed to get the answer.

“Grandpa Conkley and the others tore them boards down, and broke into the room. They found Stephan there in his military uniform, stone cold dead on the floor. But while Stephan’s family had wasted away, he had put on weight over the winter, gotten plump. They say his skin was stretched out, tight as a drum, all swollen and pink. When they moved his body, it was unaturally heavy, and blood leaked freely from his mouth, nose, and eyes.

“This was before movies, you see. Long before, and round here, not many folk read a lot of books. Heck, I never even heard the name Dracula until Elijah here was a boy. So none of them there that day knew what to make of it. They just up and buried them all out there under the oak tree, and set the house on fire. No one came up here then until Maria, and even after that no one came in the winter. Never.”

I hadn’t thought that anything could be worse than the horrors I had witnessed that night, but I was wrong. This story, the images it conjured, was worse. Far worse.

He was kissing me…so hard…so hard I couldn’t breathe.

Denise’s words echoed in my brain, and I stared at her in horror. Not tuberculosis. Not ghosts. There was another word for this.

He was sucking all the air from my lungs

“Not air,” I whispered, closing my eyes. “Blood.”

Mrs. Conkley stared at me, clearly finished speaking, and now I felt more helpless than ever before.

“What should I do? Take her away? How far away?”

Mrs. Conkley shook her head. “I can’t tell you. I don’t rightly know. I do think that Stephan Schroeder died over there, somewhere, but came back like he had promised for Agnes. They had him locked in his room, watched over Agnes day and night, but somehow still he managed to steal the life from her. After that…after that I guess he just couldn’t rest. And I suppose he still can’t.”

“So even if I took her halfway across the country, he might still be able to kill her, now that he…that he’s done this?”

She spread her hands. “I don’t know, see? Before you came here, I thought it was just a bad story, a ghost story. It scared me, but it wasn’t real. Not like this.”

“Only in the winter,” I said, wringing my hands. “Maybe there’s something to do with the sun…it’s too strong the rest of the year, or something…”

Finally, Elijah spoke up. “Well it seems to me, if this is true…if Schroeder is lying restless, stealing blood…then maybe we need to do what they do in the movies.”

My eyes widened at this. “Christ, I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. You mean we…what? Dig him up? Drive a piece of wood through his chest?”

“Do you have any other ideas?”

I stared helplessly at Denise, my mind spiraling down, a plane crash in my head. No, no I had no other ideas.

“Okay,” I said, feeling like I had lost my mind. “Let’s do that.”

UNQUIET SLUMBERS, PART 11

The snow was about six inches deep.

I started the engine, letting the car warm-up while I brushed snow from the windows, the roof, and the hood. Other than my own, there were no tracks in the snow, not up the steps of the back patio, not up to the French doors. It lay white and undisturbed over the entire length of the lawn.

I began to think I was losing my mind.

As I stood there, waiting for the car to warm, my thoughts returned to the grave. Did snow cover it now? If it was buried, calm beneath this new blanket of white, would that mean that I had dreamed the entire thing, that I was going nuts? But if the grave was disturbed, if there were signs that something had clawed its way out, would that make me feel any better?

So in the end, I simply decided not to look.

Before I re-entered the house, I weighed my options.

The most reasonable thing was to get Denise to a hospital. Maybe I didn’t have to tell them anything that I had seen, or what I suspected. Maybe I could just tell them I woke up to find my wife spitting up blood, and let the machinery take over.

But none of this was reasonable, and I doubted reasonable responses could handle the problem. If what I now believed was true, what guarantee did I have that Denise would be safe in any hospital? Somewhere in the night I had been dragged across an invisible line into frightening new territory, and I no longer trusted my ability to make sound decisions there. In this new world, this realm of shadows, I didn’t know any of the rules. Maybe, there were no rules any more.

In the end, I wasn’t certain whether I was more frightened by the notion of the dead menacing the living, or the fact that I had no idea what to do about it, how to react.

With uncertain steps, I returned to the house. Denise had lapsed back into unconsciousness, pale as the snow out in the yard. I would have carried her out if I trusted my feet on the icy steps of the back patio, but I didn’t. Instead, I roused her as gently as I could.

“C’mon, sweetie. We’ve got to go.” I put my arm under her, and helped her up, bearing most of the weight. She started coughing again, raw and hoarse. Blood and foam flecked her lips.

Faltering, half stumbling, we crossed the living room towards the back deck. I ran what little I knew about tuberculosis through my mind. I knew that it destroyed lung tissue, eventually suffocating the victim with his own blood. I knew Doc Holliday had suffered from it. I knew there was no cure. Apart from that, I knew nothing. How contagious it was, how long it took to spread through the lungs, or if it could be treated…these facts remained beyond me.

Stepping out into the morning light, Denise winced, her legs buckling beneath her. I rushed to support her, catching her up in my arms as she shielded her eyes from the weak winter sun.

“…no…no…” She started shaking her head back and forth, suddenly struggling to get away from me and back into the house. Her eyes were screwed shut in pain.

“Denise, please. Just a few more steps to the car…”

She shook her head violently, yanking away from me. “I can’t.”

“Denise…we’ve got to get out of here.” I put my arms around her again, pulling her back out into the daylight.

She gave another shriek, something fragile and brittle, an agonized, high-pitched wheeze. Her hands flailed in front of her face, clawing at the air, and she jerked backwards so hard we both lost our footing. Toppling, we slammed down against the snow-covered stones.

Pain bolted through my right arm and hip, another jolt to the brain. Denise was crawling back through the doorway, finally collapsing into a motionless pile of clothes and flesh. I forced myself up after her, feeling her throat for a pulse. It was there, but weak. Blood was trickling from her mouth.

In a bare moment of helplessness, the morning caught me. I screwed my eyes shut and did something I had not done since my parents died.

It fell like a summer shower, and passed nearly as fast. Yet sobbing had released something from me. The fear wasn’t gone, but it had lessened. A calm was settling over me.

And in a moment of perfect clarity, I realized I couldn’t do this by myself.

UnQUIET SLUMBERS, PART 10

Every life has turning points. In that moment, everything changes. The pre-existing pattern is shattered, and the pieces come together in a different shape. Afterwards, nothing is the same.

When I discovered my parents putting presents under the Christmas tree, the world suddenly became smaller. Santa Claus ceased to exist; Michael Farber (a kindergarten pest) was right after all. And with Santa went the Elves, the eight tiny reindeer, the Eastern Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and eventually, God. With the cutting of one string, the entire supernatural web encasing my innocence began to unravel.

The afternoon I lost my virginity, lying naked and sweaty next to Janet Elder in my summer bedroom, was the same. In a brief, explosive moment, my entire perception of the opposite sex had changed. That afternoon re-ordered all my adolescent priorities, and continued to color my relationships with women throughout my adult life. I learned what it was to desire.

And the death of my parents had taught me mortality. In twenty terrible seconds, death began to truly exist in my life. It was a reality, not some abstraction. It was real and it took people away…forever. And someday, the same would happen to me. I would cease to exist, snuffed out. All that I was would simply disappear.

The nineteenth of December, the year we moved in Mountain Hollow, turned out to be another turning point, a dangerous bend in the road that once rounded left no room for turning back.

I awoke face-down on the floor, a puddle of drool spreading under my chin.

Pushing myself up off the floor, my cheek peeled away from the wood like tape. A sharp pain shot through my neck from lying so long at so strange and angle. I felt disoriented, and couldn’t remember how I had gotten there, as if I had drank too much the night before. Dawn was seeping in through the windows, a weak glow barely struggling through the curtains. It was so early I could still see a single bright star winking in the sky.

The room was bitter cold, and I realized I was shaking. The fire was long dead, and the air smelled of old wood smoke. Outside, the snow was piled in a deep drift against the French doors, and frost had etched spider-web patterns on every pane of glass. I could see puffs of my own breath.

Sitting up, strange images began to surface in my mind. Pale faces. Swirling snow. I turned my head towards the sofa, and spent the next several seconds trying to figure out where the scream I was hearing was coming from.

It was coming from my own throat.

Denise was lying half naked across the sofa, her arm dangling towards the floor. The covers had been pulled down, heaped up in a mountain around her feet, and the cream color sweater I had gotten her for her birthday was lying on the floor. Her bra was discarded, leaving her torso exposed and pale. Blood was painted all across her naked breasts and belly, and her lips—slightly parted—were wet and crimson. She was struggling to breathe, a ragged wheezing in her throat.

I scrabbled up so quickly that I slammed my head against the piano bench, toppling it over. Simultaneously, pain shot through my skull, bringing tears to my eyes, and the bench fell open, spilling sheet music across the floor. I barely noticed either, almost racing on my knees to the sofa, a distance of three feet that felt like thirty miles.

I almost couldn’t touch her, wide-eyed and sick at the blood drying at her skin. There were no visible wounds on her body, and I had no idea where all the blood had come from. As I drew closer, I could see that the blood had been smeared over her body, dark circles of gore traced around her nipples and down her belly towards a slightly exposed pubic area. Insanely, it reminded me of finger painting. But no trace of blood was visible on her own fingers, which meant someone else had down this…had caressed her flesh with hands wet with blood. I choked on the vomit welling up in the back of my throat.

My face was wet with tears, but it was something closer to shock than despair that had brought them. I seized her bare shoulders, wincing inwardly at how cold she was, and shook her.

“Denise! Denise!”

Her eyelids fluttered, but there was no other sign of consciousness returning. Her face looked sunken, her cheekbones rising in sharp peaks below the pits of her eyes. She had wasted away virtually overnight, looking like an escapee from a prison camp.

“Please, honey, please…”

Her eyes popped open, wide and glassy. She stared at me without recognition, and I felt sure at any moment she would scream.

Instead, she coughed, explosively, sending a spray of red droplets over my face and hands. The cough dissolved into wet, raw, gagging. It seemed to erupt from deep within her, shuddering through her body. And each gag brought up a fresh gout of blood. She kept coughing it up, spilling purple teaspoonfuls of semi-coagulated blood down her chin. At least I knew now where she was wounded. It was internal…and she was drowning in her own blood.

I rolled her over, tilting her face over the edge of the sofa, towards the floor. I kept hitting her back, between her shoulder blades, as hard as I dared. There were fresh scratches all over her back. I tried to ignore them.

The blood kept spilling out of her, spattering all over the floor. After awhile, the gagging stopped, and she was taking deep gulps of air. I helped her up into a sitting position, and she reacted with horror at the sight of her naked breasts.

She buried her face against my chest, sobbing. She felt like she was made of straw, light and dry.

“God, Denise…baby…we’ve got to get out of here.” I clasped her face in my hands, tilting her eyes into mine. “Do you understand me? Can you make it?”

Maybe I should have called an ambulance, gotten a doctor, but to be honest, I had crossed a turning point. Yesterday, I had woken up in a world that made sense. Physics had laws, human behavior could largely be reduced to electrical activity in the brain, and the dead did not get out of their graves. These were facts.

But this morning there was no doubt in my mind that some thing dead and buried more than eighty years ago had walked into my house the night before and assaulted my wife. Somehow, she now showed signs of the same consumption that destroyed the Schroeders eight decades before. And my only thought at the time was to get her as far from those graves beneath the oak as I could. This was the only thing that made sense to me; I did not believe that science, policemen, or doctors could help us any more. We were alone.

Denise whimpered, seeming to slip in and out of consciousness. “…my chest hurts…” she rasped. “…I can’t breathe…”

Gently, I lay her back on the sofa and tugged the blankets up around her. “We have to leave this house, Denise. I’ve got to get you out of here.”

She nodded slightly, but her eyes showed no sign that she understood what I was saying. Maybe it was shock from blood loss…or from what had happened in the dark. But I thought maybe I should be thankful for it, for the fact that she was not awake and alert enough to fully understand—as I did—what had happened to her.

I rushed into the kitchen and ran the hot water, soaking a cloth with it. Then I went back into the living room to clean the blood from her and get her dressed.

She wept the entire time, shaking. I tried to keep calm, to be strong, but terror and disbelief were waging war in my brain. “Please baby, please don’t cry.”

“…I dreamed…” she said in a harsh, mummy’s whisper. “…I dreamed I was with another man…not you. He was kissing me…so hard…so hard I couldn’t breathe. He was sucking all the air from my lungs…”

My hands were shaking, fingers nearly useless, as I pulled the sweater down around her. “Denise…did you have this dream before? The night before you got sick? When I found you out here on the sofa?”

She nodded. “…yes, but couldn’t…tell you. I felt, so ashamed…”

Her words broke up into gagging coughs, but this time, only a little blood flecked her lips.

Once she calmed down, I rushed to the bedroom, trying to ignore the throbbing pain in my head. I had hit it harder than I thought, and I felt dizzy. I packed a few things as quickly as possible, trying not to panic. I couldn’t think straight, and the only mantra circling my brain was to get out. My thoughts refused any attempt at order. Anarchy filled my brain.

I stopped back in the living room to check on her, and sat for a few minutes stroking her hair. “I need to go outside now and warm up the 4x4. There’s a lot of snow. Will you be alright?”

She gave a weak nod, barely moving her lips. I had to lean in close to hear what she was saying.

“…baby…okay?”

Tears filled my eyes. “I don’t know, baby, I just don’t know.”

UNQUIET SLUMBERS, PART 9

I said nothing to Denise about the grave, and that was my second mistake.

Elijah and I had found the perfect tree, a blue spruce just over eight feet tall. Denise was really excited when she saw it, clapping her hands like a schoolgirl. We managed to get it standing in a corner of the living room, rearranging the furniture around it. By the time all the work was done, neither of us had the enthusiasm to trim it. I was still too preoccupied with what I had heard and seen, and Denise—as much as she denied it—was still not feeling well. So we passed a quiet evening in front of the fireplace, watching out the windows as the flurries began to fall again.

By ten o’clock, the snow was coming fast and heavy, fluttering against the glass like a cloud of tiny white moths. It seemed like a living thing, something aware and watching. I found myself staring at it for quite some time before I realized Denise had dozed off again, her held tilted back and mouth open. It sounded like she was still havy difficulty breathing.

I tried to wake her. She mumbled something unintelligible and brushed my hand away. After a few repeated attempts, I gave up. Instead, I brought in a pillow and a heavy blanket from the bed, trying to make her as comfortable on the sofa as I could. Lying down, she seemed to be breathing much better, but her lips were moving, and I could see her eyes rolling behind closed lids. I wondered where she was in those dreams.

Reluctant to leave her, I sat on the carpet beside the sofa, holding her hand. Outside, the snow was really beginning to pile up, forming a low mound against the glass of the French doors. I could feel the cold burning its way through the glass.

This was, I realized, the first real storm of the season. I watched the snowflakes dance, seeming to form shapes and patterns, hinting at concealed images and secret forms. I thought, again, of the grave lying under that tree.

I am not usually a sound sleeper, but that night I remember a heavy drowsiness coming over my limbs. I started to have trouble keeping my eyelids open. Maybe it was the hypnotic kaleidoscope of snow, or the heat of the fire, or the events of the day final exhausting me. Resting my head against Denise, listening to her breath, I started to cross that no-man’s-land between waking and dreaming.

At first, random images flashed through my mind. The red tractor out in the barn. The surface of the pond on a summer evening. A stone wall in the upper field. An open grave. But after awhile, all these images, and others, started to settle.

I slept.

Were my eyes open?

The room was dark around me, the fire dead. Still, the snow swirled. Somehow, I could see it even in the absence of any light, as if it possessed its own luminescence. I thought I was dreaming, the blizzard I had watched carried over with me into sleep. The patterns the flakes made seemed more definite, more solid, like figures emerging from fog. Distinct shapes now moved out on the back patio, just beyond the glass.

Partially veiled by darkness and snow, I caught only glimpses. Faces. Pale hands. Watching eyes. I thought I could see Maria, or some other old woman, peering through the window. Her breath left no mist on the glass.

Movement.

A whole row of faces now, silent and watchful. They stood there in a line, heedless of the storm, motionless and unblinking. I thought I could make out the face of a young boy, and a very pretty girl. And it seemed to me that I could see the snow falling right through them, as if they were made of smoke, or just reflections of people on the window glass.

A dream. I was dreaming.

One of these figures seemed larger, denser. He had no features, just a dark silhouette standing slightly apart from all the others. His presence was palpable, immediate.

Then I realized he was inside the window, standing just a few feet away. When he took a step forward, the floorboards creaked under his weight.

Panic rose in me, but before it could break the surface, it sank back down, curiously weighted. A calm washed over me, stilling the rapid acceleration of my heart, soothing my mind. My thoughts seemed to go out on the tide, drifted away from me. The undertow was carrying me down into a deeper, and dreamless, sleep.

My eyelids fluttered (my god are my eyes open) a last time, and I thought I could see him stepping over me, joining Denise on the sofa (wake up wake up). I could hear her groan suddenly, whimpering in her sleep (wake up WAKE UP). There were wet sounds, sloppy, like a kiss gone wrong, and Denise making frightened sounds in the back of her throat (this is not a dream).

The last thing I heard, before the darkness took me, were sucking sounds.

UNQUIET SLUMBERS, PART 8

A few days later, I went looking for a Christmas tree.

Under a sudden burst of bright sunlight, the snow had receded a little, drawing back into the shadows beside the house and under the trees. Denise seemed to become more herself again, color returning to her cheeks and the cough subsiding. After a day or two of having difficulty swallowing anything solid without pain, she was eating again. We took a walk along the tree line in one of the upper fields, and the fresh air seemed to revive her.

When Elijah Conkley dropped in for another visit, Denise was working again, busy in her office.

We shared some coffee, and talked about nothing in particular. When I mentioned, casually, that Denise hadn’t been feeling well, a shadow passed across his face.

“She had a bit of a sore throat, and a cough, but she’s much better now.”

Conkley said nothing, but he had a lousy poker face. “Well, there’s been a bit of a cold going around.”

I wanted to say something, but didn’t. “Yeah, well, she’s on the mend.”

“What about your plans for Christmas?”

He was changing the subject, and I let him. “Something quiet, I think. Just the two of us.”

“If you’d like, I know a good spot up the hill where we could find you a good tree.”

“Really?”

“Sure, lot’s of nice ones, right about the right age and size.”

I thought about it for a moment or two, and excused myself to run it by Denise.

“That sounds terrific,” she beamed, clearly excited by the prospect. “If you’d like, I can dig out the box of ornaments from the loft while you’re gone. We could decorate tonight.”

I smiled, then, leaned over to kiss her. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“We’ll be back well before dinner, I’m sure.”

“Okay.”

When I returned to the living room, feeling enthusiastic, I found Conkley standing by the glass of the French doors, close enough for his breath to fog up the glass. He was staring towards the old oak.

“Okay, Elijah,” I said after clearing my throat. “Let’s do it.”

He seemed startled, jumping slightly at the sound of my voice. “Yeah? Sure. We can take my truck.”

He turned cautiously from the window, avoiding my gaze.

Silently, I followed. Whatever he was thinking, about Denise getting sick, or his grandmother’s fears, he clearly had decided to keep to himself.

Outside, the air was bitter, and the sky was pressing down even heavier than the weeks before. The clouds were so low they had flattened the tops of the mountains. There was a thick silence over the entire farm. No breeze stirred the branches, no blade of frozen grass moved. Even the animals seemed to have wandered away. It was like walking through a picture, a snapshot where nothing could stray from its fixed place.

I crunched through patches of snow towards the woodshed to get my chainsaw. Inside, it took awhile for my eyes to adjust to the dimness, and I tripped over a heavy, thick-hafted ax I used to split wood. I made sure there was gasoline in the chainsaw before I lugged it back out.

I went back around the house, towards Conkley’s truck, but he was nowhere to be found. His keys were in the ignition, and I dropped the chainsaw in the bed of the truck, opening my mouth to call his name. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted him.

I almost shouted for him, but reluctantly (why, reluctant, I wondered?) I trudged across the lawn towards him instead.

In the shadow of the old oak, the snow still lay heavy on the ground. It spread out it a broad white sheet, virgin and undisturbed. The worn headstones, jutting up from the ground, looked gray and dirty by comparison, like rotting teeth.

But his eyes, and mine, were not fixed on those stones, nor even on the snow. We were both staring at the bare patch.

It was roughly the size, and the shape, of a doorway, an exposed patch of naked earth, surrounded on all sides by snow. And it was not that the space had been cleared, the snow had simply refused to remain there, melting as it fell, swallowed into the soil flake by flake. It was as if the earth there, in that oblong patch, was warmer than all the ground around it

The snow had melted there, only there, in a nearly perfect rectangle.

I felt the irrational urge to touch it, so I kneeled slowly and pressed my hand against the earth. Against my palm the topsoil was cool and spongy, like ground newly thawed in spring. It seemed to move slightly, crawling under my touch. I snapped my hand back as if I had touched something hot.

“Elijah…it’s not even frozen…” I whispered. I wasn’t even sure he heard me.

This was what he had seen from the window, why he had come down here. I realized he was no longer staring at the bare patch, but at me.

My mind groped blindly for explanations, for an answer. Did the sun somehow shine directly on this spot and nowhere else around it? Did something…something…

Stephan Schroeder’s headstone stood at the top of the bare patch, leaning slightly forward. It seemed to stare at me, defying me to come up with an answer, to explain what was happening here. I had no response.

Instead, I turned and looked up at Conkley. “You expected this, didn’t you. Something like this?”

Elijah lit a cigarette, and shook his head. “Expected…no. Not exactly.”

“But you asked me about these graves, Elijah. You asked me if I had seen anything strange.” I turned my eyes back to the ground. “And I’m not going to lie to you, Elijah. This is pretty damn strange. What the hell is going on?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “It don’t take a college education to put two and two together. This grave here is warmer than all the ground around it. Something under there is keeping it warm.”

Keeping it warm. I jerked my eyes back towards the house, towards Denise and the baby. I had to get her out of here, now.

Conkley exhaled a long stream of smoke into the air, and gestured towards the truck. “Let’s you and I go get that tree, and have ourselves a little talk.”

I stared blankly at him. Was he seriously talking about Christmas trees? “But Elijah…”

He ignored me, and started walking towards his truck. I watched him go, stunned, my mouth hanging open.

it was a deer, i told the police it was a deer

Then I jogged after him, my boots crunching on the frozen ground. I felt a sense of relief at being away from that patch of earth. I tried to empty my mind, to ignore the thawed grave and more than that, my cloudy memories of the accident. But my head was like a snow globe, with everything swirling around inside it. Only when I finally caught up with him, and climbed into the passenger seat of the truck, did I feel calm. I listened to him fire the ignition, and the engine turn over. A sense of normalcy returned to my thoughts.

Conkley, at least on the outside, seemed strangely calm. We started up the hill as if nothing at all had happened, bouncing along a narrow dirt road, along a low stone wall. When this had been a working farm, nearly a century ago, stone walls like these divided up the fields, cobbled together from loose pieces of slate turned up by the plow. Now, most of those walls had tumbled down or been swallowed up by the trees. More than once, as a boy rambling all through these woods, I had come across one of those walls, lost and ruined. They were a constant reminder that the land had a past, a history. And now, maybe, secrets.

We stopped at the edge of one of the upper fields, and Conkley killed the engine. He stubbed out the rest of his cigarette, and nodded at me. I followed him back out into the cold.

The sky seemed even lower up here, as if I could stretch up my arm and brush the tips of my fingers against it. For miles around, there was no sound except that of our boots, crunching over the field. Conkley pointed towards a distant copse of pines, and we started in that direction. He seemed withdrawn, gathering his thoughts.

“So I used to come up here all the time when I was younger, and your grandma was away. I looked over the property for her and did some hunting. Lots of deer used to come through here. You can find their trails all through the woods round here.”

He paused for a moment to catch his breath. “I’m getting too old. Damn cigarettes. Should probably quit.”

I said nothing, but resumed walking alongside him once he caught his breath.

“I came trudging up this way one December, say, ten or fifteen years ago. Was around now, around Christmas time. It was real cold that year; I remember the pipes in the house kept freezing up. And I spent the better part of a day up here, freezing my butt off without seeing a single sign of deer. I made up my mind to get back down the hill.

“The sun was heading down, though you couldn’t see it on account of all the clouds. I stopped back there aways, on top of the ridge overlooking the house, ‘cause I thought I saw something moving. Guess I thought maybe my luck had changed and I’d found a deer after all.

“But it wasn’t no deer. It was a person. He caught sight of me too and just stopped to stare. He was right on down there, under the oak tree, by them graves.

“He wasn’t a local fella. The town was no bigger then than it is today, and I pretty much knew all the faces in it. And he was dressed funny, but exactly how I can’t say. He was wearing something green and muddy looking. His face and hands were real pale, and his hair looked all wet.”

Conkley stopped walking again, this time on the edge of a group of young pines. He was right—there were some fine trees here, all the perfect size and shape, like a tree farm. They were blue spruce, and the air was heavy with the scent of evergreens. Had I not been thinking of something else, something fifteen years away, I might have enjoyed being there.

“I raised my hand to him, just a simple wave. But the fella didn’t move. He just kept on staring at me until I started to get uncomfortable with it.

“And I suppose that if I had been somewhere else, or here anytime other than the winter, I would have gone on down to speak with him. But…” He paused again, shaking his head. “…but my grandma’s stories were all in my head, and I took to thinking maybe it wasn’t a fella after all. So I high-tailed it back down to the house, never looking back.”

We wandered silently among the trees, and I found myself thinking of the accident again. Had I seen a deer? Or had it been him, Conkley’s stranger, standing there in the middle of the road? I couldn’t remember. I honestly could not, and the more I tried the more unruly my thoughts became, rioting like a mob.

Instead of trying, I stopped and looked at Conkley. He seemed lost in his own thoughts. “Do you think you saw…”

“…Stephan Schroeder? A ghost?” Elijah finished the question for me, still looking over the trees. He gave a nonchalant shrug, or at least one that attempted nonchalance. But I could see his mind working furiously, flashing behind his eyes. “Well, what do I know…what does anyone know, about death? I mean, to some folks dead is just dead. And to others, they expect there to be something that comes after. A lot of people think that, don’t they?”

I nodded. I wasn’t one of those people, the type who believed in life after death, but Denise was. To me, the soul was a spark that went out when the breathing stopped. Maria, my parents, for me they no longer existed. Their ghosts lingered only in my memories.

“If there is something after…Heaven, Hell, whatever…maybe some folks get lost along the way, or maybe they choose not to go. For me, I guess I think death is like sleeping, and maybe…just maybe mind you…some folk don’t sleep as sound as others.”

I closed my eyes, my mind sailing back to Emily Bronte in a college literature course. “…and I wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”

Conkley looked over at me. “What’s that?”

I shook my head. “Just a line in a book. For some reason it always stuck in my head.” I shut my eyes, thinking of the warm grave, and did not like what I was beginning to imagine was lying within it. “But do you think it—he—is dangerous?”

Slowly, Elijah shook his head. “I do believe that Stephan Schroeder is not sleeping quiet, but dangerous? No, not dangerous. I can’t see how.”

I tried to accept that, but my thoughts kept returning to Denise and the baby. “But your grandmother, and mine, they both said the mountain was dangerous in winter. Why would they say that?”

“I told you, I don’t know. Maybe my ma knows something, has heard some story, from my grandma. But I have never heard of anything bad ever happening to anyone up here since the Schroeders. Except, of course, your folks. But that had nothing to do with any ghost.”

a deer…i saw a deer

“If you could ask her, Elijah, if you could ask your mom, I’d appreciate it.” I felt, honestly, like an idiot, a child afraid of the dark. Of course it was ridiculous and impossible, but if there was even the most remote chance that Denise could be in danger here, I couldn’t take that risk. And even if the thing itself was not dangerous…the sudden appearance of it could be startling, shocking. Dangerous.

I just couldn’t take that chance.