New Fears 2: Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

THE DEAD THING Paul Tremblay

It’s Thursday and instead of walking with Stacey to the skate park (it’s next to the high school so it isn’t a good place for people (especially seventh grade people (especially seventh grade girls people)) who aren’t in high school to go to unless you like the smell of weed, rape jokes, and getting cigarette filters and lit matches thrown at you), and instead of walking down the train tracks behind the driving school and to the combo gas station Honey Dew Donuts that this late in the day only has plain bagels and stale donut holes left, I decide to go straight home. I feel like I have to go even if I don’t want to because I worry something bad (or worse (worse than the bad that is everyday)) has happened or will happen to Owen, because the elementary school gets out fifteen minutes before the middle school and Owen is probably home and sitting on the couch and burning through another bag of sunflower seeds (eating seeds is how Owen deals with everything and he deals with a lot because he’s too young to know anything or understand like I do so he eats seeds because Dad figured out if Owen had a mouthful of seeds he couldn’t ask about Mom or cry as much so, yeah, sunflower seeds, the ones baseball players eat and spit, and Owen eats so many seeds most days he’s not hungry for dinner or breakfast or whatever food you try to put in front of him, and the kid is getting smaller instead of growing bigger, I swear), and what if Owen is watching TV and he accidentally swallows some of the seed shells (I’ve seen him swallow and scratch at his throat like he was dying and then be okay two seconds later and back with a mouth of seeds, my baby brother the world’s saddest gerbil) instead of spitting the shells into a cup or an empty (or half-empty) can of soda and he’s choking for real, and Dad is passed out next to him on the couch or maybe he didn’t even make it to the couch today, so I’m going home because that feeling of something worse is stuck down in me. Stacey wants to come with me but I told her she can’t and it’s this joke between us how she never gets to go to my house when I go to hers all the time. She only jokes about it with me, which is why she’s the only one I’m totally honest with. I’ve told her why she can’t come. She says she gets it but I don’t think she totally gets it, and it’s not her fault because she hasn’t seen the house, and I mean the inside of the house because her parents have dropped me off so they’ve all seen the outside which is bad (blue paint is fine but the window frames’ white paint is coming apart and the yard is all overgrown) but like a normal bad. Maybe I should let her come home with me once and I can give her a tour and I’d start with the kitchen and tell her, hey, yeah, that’s the sink full of nasty dishes and flies as big as grapes and I keep two bowls (one for me and one for Owen) clean in my room, and don’t open the fridge, you won’t like it, but then I’d point at the walls, which is what she’d probably see first anyway, and using a fancy tour voice tell her that this is where Mom tore all the wallpaper off the walls because she was drunk or high or both, and Dad tried to stop her but she told him, don’t worry, I’ll put up new wallpaper and it’ll be great, and she said that to him while standing on the stained and splintery plywood, which would be the same plywood we’re standing on during the tour because a few months before she ripped down the wallpaper she jacked up all the linoleum tile because home improvement, right?, it was going to be a big project and make our kitchen look like the ones they show on those home improvement shows, and while in tour mode I’d whisper so no one else could hear me that Mom was super-drunk or high or both (and I could tell because her eyes would be red and big and she’d breathe only out of her mouth so it sounded like she was laughing and puking at the same time, and she looked like that when I saw her for the last time or the most recent last time because I don’t know yet if it’s a forever last time), so yeah, it was makeover time for the kitchen, and Dad was drunk or high or both (and I can tell with him because his face and body sags like he’s a human beanbag chair and he huffs more than speaks so the words come out of his nose) and Dad tried (not very hard, in fact, he sucked at trying) to stop Mom from buzzing through the floor tile but she told him to shut his assy mouth (that’s a direct quote) and that she’d put in the new laminate flooring herself and without his worthless assy ass because he was too lazy to do it, and I wouldn’t yell like they yelled while on the tour but I could do perfect impersonations of them fighting if I wanted to. I don’t know if Stacey would make it past the kitchen on the tour so it’s easier just to tell her that she can’t come over today, that I have to help Owen with something and I say something like it’s two different words (some thing) and we both laugh even though it’s kind of stupid and she says okay and tells me to FaceTime her after dinner and I can do that when I’m in my room because my room is like a bomb shelter of regular clean in a nuked house. So I walk home by myself listening to music on my phone and I like to pretend that dressed all in black I’m a shadow or a blur or like a smudge of someone that when you drive by you don’t really see them. I get home and I can hear the TV through the open front windows (no screens) and it sounds super-loud, louder than normal, and I panic because it sounds too loud and that has to mean something’s wrong, or some thing is wrong, so I run inside and drop my backpack and it bass drums on the kitchen floor, and I obstacle course past sagging garbage bags in the hallway to the TV room and Dad is on the couch asleep, passed out, whatever, and sports talking heads are shouting on the TV, but Owen isn’t there, maybe he’s already in his bedroom. I think about asking Dad where Owen is and I think again. I try to turn down the volume without the remote (because when I got close to the couch Dad grumbled something and there were black dots of seeds and shells all over the cushions and I didn’t want him to wake up and blame-yell at me about it) and I can’t find the stupid volume buttons on the side of the TV. The back slider off the kitchen crashes open so Owen must’ve been in the backyard and I somehow didn’t see him out there when I got home. I run back down the hallway and I want to yell, where’ve you been?, and say things to make him cry but I also know that’s not me so I swallow all that down to deal with later (I don’t eat sunflower seeds but I record messages on my phone and write things down and that’s how I deal) and I find him (and I always think that I’m finding him, like he’s lost) closing the slider real careful and slow with his foot, which is poked through the screen at the bottom and he shouldn’t be doing that because he’s making the rip in the screen bigger and we’ll get bugs (more bugs) and mice (more mice) in the house, but then I zoom in on what he’s carrying. Not that I can see it yet because his back is to me and he’s curled around and over whatever it is he’s carrying.

Owen, what do you have?

Nothing.

Seriously. Tell me.

Nothing.

Don’t be a shit. I won’t tell Dad.

(nothing)

Did you steal something? You can’t be—

I found it.

Where?

Outside.

————What is it?

(nothing)

It better not be a mouse or a squirrel or something. Or like a shrew? Is it a shrew? You can’t keep that in here.

It’s not.

What is it? Tell me?

(nothing)

I could rip it out of his hands and look inside, but I won’t. I could hit him and then take it away from him but I won’t. I don’t hit him, not ever, but that awful terrible no-good thought flickers through my brain like someone waving a flashlight in my face (I see myself hitting him and what I see is more bright than what I normally see and then it goes dark in my head when I shake the thought away or say no no no but then it flashes bright again when I see myself hitting him again and again), and maybe because I don’t hit him I think about hitting him more (and I’m afraid I’m thinking about it more and more because I’m getting older and I’m afraid that’s what goes on in all adults’ heads. I’m afraid all they think about is doing violent, terrible no-good things, and especially to the people they’re supposed to take care of, I mean all the violence in the world has to start in our heads first, right, and I’m mostly afraid I’m thinking like Dad when he stabbed Owen’s Nerf dart gun through the plaster in his bedroom and I’m thinking like Mom when she would tell me what an awful stupid fat-ass daughter I was or like when she wouldn’t say anything to me and just stare at me with her mouth closed so tight and I could hear her saying nothing to me). I won’t ever hit Owen (I’d chew my own hand off first) but it’s hard, it’s all so hard, but I can’t believe he won’t tell me what it is, whatever it is inside the cardboard shoebox that is dark green and doesn’t have a logo, which is weird, I mean, everything has a logo on it, so maybe it isn’t a shoebox (or sneakerbox, I think they should call them sneakerboxes) and is just a rando box. It’s smeared with dirt and mud and there are dark spots on the cover and on the sides, and those dark spots look like the grease spots on the inside cover of a pizza box, so now I’m thinking that whatever is inside the box is nasty and leaking through the cardboard, and I want to tell Owen to wash his hands, but then he’s scurrying past me, or trying to, and I block him, tickle his stomach with my left hand (there really isn’t any stomach to tickle, only his sticklike ribs) and grab for the box with my right, and it works, kind of, because he flinches and for a second I have the box balanced in my hand, only it isn’t very balanced and whatever is inside of it shifts, and whatever it is inside of it feels blob-like, oozy, and it’s so gross I might throw up. Actually, it’s so gross I’m past throwing up because my stomach turns to goo and sloshes down into my toes, and more gross, the bottom of the box, the underside, feels damp, and then, oh my god, the smell, worse than the smell that comes out of the laundry room on a hot day, worse than the septic tank being pumped, and even worse than opening that garbage bag I didn’t realize was full of months-old garbage (because it was sitting in the hall coat closet we never use anymore and I only looked in it because Dad left the doors open and I thought it might be the dolls and toys that manic-phase Mom collected in a “Morgie” bag (and she never told me what Morgie meant or stood for but only that was where your old stuff went to give to the poor people (like us now))), and then Owen whines like a puppy, swats my hand away, and his eyes are all red like he’s been crying and they’re sunken into his head too, and then he is past me and running down the hall, bouncing between all the bags and junk like a miniparkour pro. I yell after him and then Dad slur-shouts something from the TV room, so I stop running, frozen in place, and I don’t want to talk to him now and I tell him to go back to sleep in my head, which I know never really works but it works this time, but it doesn’t matter because Owen gets away and locks himself in his room. I wait until Dad is out again and I tiptoe past him down the hall to Owen’s closed door and I smell the box’s smell (and still feel the box’s feel on the tips (and the insides, I swear) of my fingers).

Owen. Come on.

(nothing)

Can I see it?

No.

Why not?

(nothing)

This is stupid. Just let me in.

No. Go away. Please.

You can’t stay in there forever. I’m gonna get in there and I’m gonna see it.

(nothing)

I go to my room and shut the door and instead of screaming or crying or trashing everything, I neaten (old-Mom’s old word) it some more (the room is already clean, so clean you could eat off it (something Mom, old-Mom, used to say with a smile) so it’s like straightening, or picking up stuff and putting it back where it was), and, I’m telling you, neatening is something I never did before Mom left, before things got worse-worse. When I was Owen’s age my room was a pit and I loved it, owned it and it really was a beautiful pit, but now it isn’t. Clothes are in my bureau and hanging up in my closet and books are on the bookshelf and everything has a place (the glass in my two windows are cracked and have pieces missing but you can’t really see it (but you can feel it on cold nights) unless you open the curtains, and I would fix it if I could, but I don’t know how to unbreak broken glass), and none of it makes me feel better, and it makes me feel anxious because my room is the nexus of the universe (something me and Stacey came up with, or she came up with it because the word nexus was in a book she read, she loves to read (I have too much time to read so I don’t and I can’t stay in my head that long without other stuff creeping in so I draw sometimes but most of the time I shut off my brain watching music videos on YouTube and videos that show ghosts are real even though I think most of them are faking even if I want them not to be), or if I’m not that important to be the nexus of the universe, my room is the nexus of this house, which means I have to keep my room like this or the worse-worse will get even worse (it can always get worse) and everything will come crashing down). I try to FaceTime Stacey but she isn’t answering and I hope she isn’t mad at me and I think about making my own video to show her what the rest of the house looks like (besides my room, which she sees every night when we talk) but I hear Dad up and creeping around the house like a creep, and the wooden floors creak and groan and are so tired under him, and then it’s already dinner time, or what is supposed to be dinner time, and I leave my room (with one of my clean bowls, and I hold it like a shield), and Dad is back on the couch eating Pop Tarts and drinking beer, and we still have these plastic one-serving cups of mac ’n cheese and I make one for myself, three minutes thirty seconds in the microwave and add the radioactive yellow cheese dust, and I pour the stuff into my clean bowl (I won’t eat out of the microwaved plastic cup because I don’t trust it’s not melted) and toss the plastic into the full sink because I don’t care if the kitchen is clean or not because the kitchen isn’t the nexus. I stand and eat quickly even though the mac ’n cheese lava burns my tongue and the roof of my mouth and I think about making Owen a bowl and bringing it to him because a good big sister would do that, but I don’t feel good right now, and I’m going to wait him out of his room, like waiting is some action, a thing that I can throw against his door and break it open, but I don’t want to wait, I so don’t want to wait I even go into the TV room to talk to Dad.

Owen won’t come out of his room for dinner.

I’ll take care of it.

He needs to eat.

Worry about yourself.

Dad—

He’ll eat when he wants to.

(nothing)

This isn’t going to go well because I know, I can feel it, that Owen shouldn’t be in his room by himself with whatever it is he found in that box, that dead-smelling thing, and that’s all I can imagine is in the box, some dead thing, and why would he save that?, and I picture him just staring into the box at some awful mess that used to be alive, and there’s blood and ripped-up fur and pink guts and dark, empty eye sockets (and in my head the eye sockets look like his do now, and then I can’t unsee Owen standing there looking into the cardboard box with no eyes, with nothing eyes) and I see him touching it and he’s there in his room crying by himself and he’s sad for the dead thing because he doesn’t really understand what dead means, and I think he thinks it means you simply go away when you’re dead because like a week after Mom left he asked if she was dead and Dad laughed and said Why not? So I’m standing here with steam coming out of my mac ’n cheese bowl and it feels like it’s coming out of my ears too because I’m so mad and so don’t-know-what-to-do and I stomp out of the TV room the way Dad hates, like really hates, and I yell at Owen to come out and bring out the shoebox and I pound on his door, and then Dad comes thundering down the hallway yelling at me, at us, at everything. Normally Dad being Dad would turn me quiet and small but I’m so mad I don’t really hear him and it sounds like everything is underwater and I throw my bowl at Owen’s bedroom door and it bounces off and shatters on the floor and Dad is too drunk-slow to grab me but it doesn’t stop him from wrecking-balling into a wall trying to block my escape, but I easily sidestep him and duck into my own room and lock the door and then he’s banging on my door swearing at me and calling me names and saying I’m just like Mom but I don’t care about any of that and I let his pounding and yelling be underwater sounds, but I’m crying because I broke the bowl and now there’s only one clean one in the whole fucking stupid fucking house.

I wake up and it’s the kind of dark that fills you through more than just your eyes (when I was little I used to ask my parents about how I slept at night because I didn’t like thinking about me lying there with my mouth open so anything could go inside and I wouldn’t know and I would get upset and ask them to check on me (this is what they used to tell me) and push my mouth closed if it was open before they went to bed and I’d ask them to double and triple check my mouth if they woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom). The house feels quiet but like a fake kind of quiet, like there are things crouched and waiting to jump out at me and then I realize there are noises in the hallway and they were there when I woke up and I heard them without hearing them which means the sounds were probably there when I was asleep too, and that makes it sound worse now, so I listen and I don’t know what is making those wet sounds, not like something dripping, but more like a squish, a wet sponge in a fist, and then maybe that sponge is sliding and slurping across a door, not my door but Owen’s. I sneak out of my bed, grab my phone (I fell asleep watching videos and I didn’t plug in and charge so there’s only three per cent battery left) and sneak across the room and stand with my ear only inches away from my door and I cover my mouth (not because I think something will go inside) to keep from breathing too loudly and keep myself from calling out, not because I think Dad is out there cleaning (yeah, like he’d ever be out there cleaning, ever, never mind the middle of the night when he’s likely a case of beer deep into his blackout) but because it must be Owen cleaning up the mac ’n cheese mess, and that means he’s out of his room, standing in front of his door and that means his door is not locked and if it’s not locked, then I’ll be able to get in his room and to the shoebox if I’m quick and I’m careful, and no, forget quick, I don’t want to scare him, so I turn the knob slow and hope he doesn’t hear the little click that sounds like a crash, and I’m about to open the door when I notice there’s no light coming from the hallway, and I used to always go to bed with the hall light on and I’d stare at that glowing line under my door until I fell asleep, so, okay, that’s really weird, right?, I mean, why would Owen be out there cleaning up in the dark (he hates the dark more than I ever did and he usually sleeps with a light on in his room)? He must really be trying to not wake me or Dad up, and if he doesn’t want to wake me it’s because he doesn’t want me going into his room, and it’s like he’s making me and Dad out to be the same person, and we’re so not, and I want to cry and instead I open the door and start to tell Owen that I’m sorry I was all over him earlier and that I grabbed the box away from him and that I won’t make him do anything he doesn’t want me to do or see and maybe I can help him clean up the mess and then I’m worrying he’s out in his bare feet and there are probably still big shards of broken cereal bowl on the floor (when I was seven I cut my wrist and had to get stitches after falling on a broken coffee mug and the scar is a fat red worm or a slug curling down my wrist), and then my door is wide open and the hallway is so dark and empty, and it’s hard to tell but there’s no outline of Owen standing in front of his door at the end of the hallway, but I think the door is open, and, yes, it is and it’s open into more darkness. I’m standing there in the hallway and the wet sounds have stopped and I hear my ears trying to hear in the silence and there’s a small, muffled clap from down the hall, near the collection of dark lumps that is the broken cereal bowl, at least I think it’s the cereal bowl, and I turn on my phone’s flashlight app, and the light it throws is a weird white, like bones on an X-ray, and on the floor is Owen’s shoebox, all by itself, I mean there’s no cereal bowl and the mac ’n cheese mess is all gone, just the shoebox, and it looks bigger than I remember it, way bigger actually, like it almost stretches from wall to wall in the hallway, and is it a different box? Its colour is hard to tell in the flashlight, but I can see some of those damp spots on the cover, and it’s a few feet away from Owen’s door and I can’t smell it, but I know if I get closer I would, so do I get closer? This is my chance to see inside of it, yeah? Instead I stand there and listen and there’s only the electric hum of the fridge coming from the kitchen, and I whisper Owen’s name, and he must be in his room because I don’t hear him in the bathroom or in the kitchen or anywhere, I mean, he was just out here cleaning up the mess, right? That’s what I heard, I swear, and I don’t know why he’d leave the box on the floor and his door open, and my feet finally shuffle forward and then the phone flashlight dies and it’s like the house and the world and everything went away and left me floating in darkness, and I blink my eyelids as fast as a hummingbird’s wings trying to adjust, and I say Owen’s name again, a little louder and a little less braver, and instead of the shoebox I look where his open door is and I can sorta make out the doorframe and then within that dark I see something move, or I think I do, sliding around the corner, coming out from Owen’s room, or more like the shape is expanding, like how a balloon fills up, and it’s big, or tall, and it’s not Owen, way too big for Owen, so it’s Dad, but that’s me putting the math of who’s in the house together to come up with it’s Dad because I swear it doesn’t feel like it’s Dad and I know middle-of-the-night-stuff is always weird and wrong and off but I’m totally awake and totally aware, like super-aware, like an animal instinct aware, right, and I can’t see Dad, and he doesn’t say anything to me, which is whatever because he’s probably drunk, but again this doesn’t seem like what’s going on, and now his breathing sounds broken down and not in rhythm, and like real underwater sounds, and he must’ve knocked the box over (not that I hear it) because the dead thing smell takes over the hallway and I cough and I back up and go into my room and shut the door and run to my bed and go under the covers and I leave the light off because I don’t want him to know I’m awake, if he’s drunk enough he’ll forget or not bother, and I’m always dying and surviving because of his not-bother, and the hallway floor creaks with his weight then the creaking stops, and it didn’t stop in front of my door, and there’s a long nothing, the longest nothing, and my mouth is covered and I breathe through my nose just in case, and then I hear the cardboard box sliding on the hallway floor, slowly, sliding away down the hall, away from my door, and in my head I see Owen (not Dad) dragging the box across the floor and into his room because it’s now too heavy for him to carry.

The sun is bright in my room and I bolt upright in bed and I’m in a panic because I can’t miss school, not because I love it (I hate it (and I hate almost everything and everyone there except for Stacey and few other kids and Ms Whiting is cool too, I guess) and my stomach turns into a stinging ball of pain when I’m there most days) but because I stupidly hope doing well in that awful school is my only chance, which isn’t much of a chance at all, and I have no idea what time it is and how could I have slept through my alarm? Then I look at my phone and it’s dead and I remember last night and the hallway and it seems far away and at the same time it’s still there in the room with me because the rest of the house is still and quiet even if I’m running around my room slamming drawers and putting clothes on. Why didn’t Owen wake me up? He’s usually awake before me and watching TV (the morning is pretty much his only chance to have the TV to himself) and then I make him and me breakfast with the two clean bowls and I walk him to the bus stop and it’s all fine because Dad isn’t there to yell at us or do nothing. I go out into the hallway hoping that Owen is out there waiting for me (maybe he didn’t come in to wake me up because he was afraid I’d get mad he was coming into my room when he doesn’t let me go into his), and the hallway and the house is quieter than it was last night, and I tiptoe (afraid to disturb something, and maybe I still should be asleep, like I woke up during some secret hour or time I shouldn’t see, that no one should see) into the TV room and no one is there (just empty beer cans on the floor and chip bags and sunflower seed bags on the couch) and then I dance around the big trash bags and into the kitchen and no one is there (just more trash and dish piles and open and empty cabinets), and then I go back to the hallway, our hallway and the floor near Owen’s door is clear (no broken cereal bowl, no mac ’n cheese, no shoebox) and his door is open halfway, so I walk toward it, and my stomach is in that ball of pain, and I don’t want to go in his room now that it’s open. I whisper-yell.

Owen? You still asleep?

(nothing)

It’s time to get up. We don’t want to miss school.

(nothing)

We’ll get in trouble.

(nothing)

I’m coming in. Okay?

(nothing)

I stand there, listening. Maybe I can hear Owen breathing or turning in the covers if I listen hard enough, and the weakest saddest scardest lost-est youngest part of me screams at me to go get Dad, go get Dad, but I will not, no matter what, and I shimmy through the open door, careful to not make contact with the wood (as my face passes by, I notice there’s no evidence of last night’s mac ’n cheese explosion) and I can’t remember the last time I’ve been in Owen’s room and by the looks of it, maybe it has been since Mom left, maybe it’s been for as long as he’s been alive, and I start crying because as bad as the kitchen is and the rest of the house is, his room is worse, because it smells like an unchanged hamster cage and it smells like a dead thing, and I can’t see the floor through a sea of trash and toys and torn up books and clothes and stained underwear and seeds and seeds and seeds, empty shells spit out everywhere, and half-full plastic cups and over-full cups on the windowsill and seeds and smaller seed-shaped pellets that I’m afraid aren’t seeds and are mouse poops (I’ve seen plenty of those throughout the house) and water stains on the wallpaper, and his elevated bed frame has no box spring and mattress (they must be on the floor under everything else) and there are cans of Coke on the platform where the mattress used to be and some cans are on their sides and caked in seeds and there’s one can upside down stuck in the corner of the bed frame, and I can follow the syrupy stain leading down the frame and splashed black on the walls, and I turn away and I see his closet behind me and it has no door and it’s full of trash and I see empty beer cans and maybe full ones (does Dad hide them in here? Does Owen hide them from Dad?), and I can’t possibly see it all, and now all I’m thinking is that I’m going to pull Owen out of here no matter what it takes and not let him back in this place, and then the smell again, like in the kitchen when he brought in the shoebox and last night in the hallway, and I wade through the room whispering Owen’s name, and to where I think the box spring and mattress must be underneath the pile of bedding and I pull away the blankets and it’s the shoebox but now it’s the size of the mattress and it’s the same colour with the same stains, but it can’t be the same, it can’t be, and without thinking I scream for Dad.

(nothing)

And there’s rustling inside the giant box and so I open the cover, and the cover is heavy but I can handle it and it feels wet and damp and cold, and that cold gets under the skin of my hands, and I hate touching it but I don’t let go, and inside is darkness, is all the darkness collected and saved, and way down inside I can hear noises and they are faint but I can hear the slurping, sloshing, wet noises I heard when I held the box and in the hallway last night, the dead thing noises, and I hold the cover open over my head and look down and down and down.

Owen? Are you in there?

(nothing)

Please, Owen?

(nothing)

We’ll go away, okay? We’ll run away to someplace better? We’ll be okay there.

(nothing)

We won’t get in trouble. I promise.

(nothing)

I’m coming in. Okay?

(nothing)