Authors: Alan Ryker
Nightmare Man (12 page)
The door is gone. The darkness is perfect. I lie down, so tired, so tired.
A hand on my shoulder shakes me. Warm lips press against my face.
“Oh blech. Ash. Blech.”
I open my eyes and see Shannon crouched over me, cradling my head in her lap. I look around a dark room.
“Where am I?”
“Your top half is in Logan’s room. Your legs are still in Madison’s. You went right through the closet and knocked yourself out on a stud.”
I lift a heavy arm to my forehead and touch a bump that sends electricity jolting through my head.
“It’s over,” I say. “I got him.”
“Sure, honey. It’s over.” Shannon kisses me again. She still emanates sleep warmth, and it’s melting me so that I don’t even want to argue.
Something wraps around my legs, which presses my midsection harder against the busted drywall and bare studs.
“It’s true. Dad did it. He got the shadow man.”
I reach down and rub Logan’s back through his pajama top.
* * *
“So you’re back. You got things settled?” Leslie talks around a cigarette as she holds her peacoat tight to her body with both arms.
“Yeah, things are going good.” I fight the wind, trying to get my cigarette lit. The clouds are heavy overhead, and the wind gusts cold. Why is she standing outside the shelter on a day like this?
“You making time for your art?”
“I’m still trying to get into a routine, but yeah. I even signed up to take classes on Thursday evenings at the community college. Trying to get up-to-date on the computer art stuff. Photoshop and all that.”
“Wow, welcome to the twenty-first century.”
“It feels good to be here. I expected hover boards.”
“Don’t get me started on the hover boards. They promised us hover boards.”
We stare off in the same direction silently. I haven’t seen Leslie since the night at the Purple Moon Lounge, when the flirting went a bit too far. We’re both staying way back in the safe zone.
“I’m sorry I was so hard on you. It was mostly the alcohol. I can be a mean drunk.”
“I don’t think you were very drunk. I think it was the years of listening to me whine.”
She snorts. “Well, there’s that. So how are your night terrors? The nightmare man leaving you alone?”
“No, but he’s leaving Logan alone. I’m doing better though. I almost forgot how much better I feel when I’ve got a creative outlet. How much less anxiety.”
“That’s great. Is Logan still having night terrors?”
I glance over at her. I know what she’s getting at. “Yes, but he’s not having mine anymore.”
“No shadow man?”
“Not my shadow man. He’s got his own nightmares to deal with.”
“You don’t think the overlap might have been a coincidence? I mean, I love a good story, but…”
I shrug. I know what happened. I know I started the problem, and then I solved it, and no one else needs to believe it. I need to believe it. It’s essential I remember what can happen when you let the nightmares grow.
“He’s a really good artist. I mean, he always has been, but I’m trying to encourage him. He’s an anxious kid. He needs an outlet.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“Yeah. Wait until you have kids and you get to feel guilty for passing on all your craziness.”
She sputters, has to pull the cigarette from her mouth. “Wait until I have kids? Oh my God, I hear that ten times a day, but I never thought I’d hear it from you. I should have kids, huh?”
“You should! They’re the only thing that makes life worth living.” I give it a sarcastic tone I don’t exactly feel.
She sticks a finger down her throat.
“You gotta be careful,” she says, “all that encouraging him to do art. Come fifteen he’ll decide accounting is his life. Join the Future Business Whatevers of America.”
“Or even worse, he might decide to be an artist.”
“No, he sounds like a smart kid.” She takes a last hard drag and grinds out her butt on the big, space-age ashtray. “Well, back to it.”
“Back to it.”
Side by side, we fight the wind back up to the call center.
* * *
I pack my wrenches away and look at my handiwork. I push on the desk. It gives a bit, then sways back. Pretty good.
“All right! Come check out your surprise!”
Logan peers down the basement stairs, then comes charging down.
“Is that mine?” he asks.
“Yep. And that’s mine.”
The drafting tables sit side by side. His is a bit smaller, not child-sized, though. I want him to be able to use it for a while, so I got him a taller stool to sit at.
“It’s awesome!” he says, his smile almost splitting his face.
“And you’ve got your own lamp up here.” I flip the switch, and a circle of light illuminates the tilted surface of the desk.
He climbs up onto the stool and we both admire the setup until the sobbing starts.
“Where’s mine?” Madison asks between wails.
“I put your desk right here on the other side of mine.” I guide her over and show her. It’s just the little school desk from her room. She sits at it and fiddles with her own lamp. When I try to turn it on for her, she slaps me with both hands. She eventually gets it on.
“Let’s draw,” Logan says.
We put our sketchpads on our desks. He works on an ambitious drawing of a robot army. On my right, Madison draws a man with a butt for a face she’s named “Dad.” As I predicted, it only takes about five minutes before she’s running upstairs to see what her mom is doing. Maybe when she’s older.
“We should do a project together,” I say.
Logan looks up from his robots. “Like what?”
“Like a comic book. What should it be about?”
His eyes go up, and he twists his mouth to the side. “How about the shadow man?”
Uh oh. “Hmmmm…Maybe. He would be the villain, right?” I don’t mention that very bad things can happen otherwise.
“Duh. He’d be a dumb hero.”
“Yeah, you’d have to be a real numbskull to make him into a hero. So who’s the hero?”
He twists his facial features clockwise again as he thinks. “How about a kid? All the heroes in the comics are grown up.”
“That’s a good idea. Does the kid have powers, or magic or something?”
“He’s real good at drawing, and he finds a magic pencil, no, an
alien
pencil, and anything he draws becomes real.”
“So his power is like—super creativity.”
“And an alien pencil.”
“I love it.”
We do some character sketches, and the dank basement disappears, and the whole world is contained within the glow of two lamps.
But I look up once, and over my shoulder, and with my eyes adjusted to the bright lights, the shadows are impossibly thick. Light doesn’t destroy the dark; it just shifts it around. It’s always there, and you can’t forget that.
I don’t. I acknowledge it. Then I turn back to my art and my son and the world we’re making. Because the other thing you can’t do is stare into the darkness. It will grow under your gaze until you think the whole world has gone dark. What you won’t notice is that you were staring inside yourself, and the darkness has filled you.
But there are places of light. Always. And they can be a haven, even if only for a few people, even if only for a little while. You just have to keep searching them out. I just have to keep searching them out.
About the Author
Alan Ryker is the product of a good, clean country upbringing, and though he now lives with his wife and their purebred pughuameranian in the suburbs of Kansas City, the sun-bleached prairie still haunts his fiction. He is the author of
The Hoard
,
Among Prey
, and the
Vampires of the Plains
series, and is also a member of The Abominable Gentlemen, who publish his short stories in their quarterly magazine of weird fiction,
Penny Dreadnought
. To learn more about his work, go to
www.alanryker.com
.
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