10
TINA DIDN’T GET HOME FROM THE OPENING-NIGHT party until shortly before two o’clock Wednesday morning. Exhausted, slightly tipsy, she went directly to bed and fell into a sound sleep.
Later, after no more than two dreamless hours, she suffered another nightmare about Danny. He was trapped at the bottom of a deep hole. She heard his frightened voice calling to her, and she peered over the edge of the pit, and he was so far below her that his face was only a tiny, pale smudge. He was desperate to get out, and she was frantic to rescue him; but he was chained, unable to climb, and the sides of the pit were sheer and smooth, so she had no way to reach him. Then a man dressed entirely in black from head to foot, his face hidden by shadows, appeared at the far side of the pit and began to shovel dirt into it. Danny’s cry escalated into a scream of terror; he was being buried alive. Tina shouted at the man in black, but he ignored her and kept shoveling dirt on top of Danny. She edged around the pit, determined to make the hateful bastard stop what he was doing, but he took a step away from her for every step that she took toward him, and he always stayed directly across the hole from her. She couldn’t reach him, and she couldn’t reach Danny, and the dirt was up to the boy’s knees, and now up to his hips, and now over his shoulders. Danny wailed and shrieked, and now the earth was even with his chin, but the man in black wouldn’t stop filling in the hole. She wanted to kill the bastard, club him to death with his own shovel. When she thought of clubbing him, he looked at her, and she saw his face: a fleshless skull with rotting skin stretched over the bones, burning red eyes, a yellow-toothed grin. A disgusting cluster of maggots clung to the man’s left cheek and to the corner of his eye, feeding off him. Tina’s terror over Danny’s impending entombment was suddenly mixed with fear for her own life. Though Danny’s screams were increasingly muffled, they were even more urgent than before, because the dirt began to cover his face and pour into his mouth. She had to get down to him and push the earth away from his face before he suffocated, so in blind panic she threw herself over the edge of the pit, into the terrible abyss, falling and falling—
Gasping, shuddering, she wrenched herself out of sleep. She was convinced that the man in black was in her bedroom, standing silently in the darkness, grinning. Heart pounding, she fumbled with the bedside lamp. She blinked in the sudden light and saw that she was alone.
“Jesus,” she said weakly.
She wiped one hand across her face, sloughing off a film of perspiration. She dried her hand on the sheets.
She did some deep-breathing exercises, trying to calm herself. She couldn’t stop shaking.
In the bathroom, she washed her face. The mirror
revealed a person whom she hardly recognized: a haggard, bloodless, sunken-eyed fright. Her mouth was dry and sour. She drank a glass of cold water.
Back in bed, she didn’t want to turn off the light. Her fear made her angry with herself, and at last she twisted the switch.
The returning darkness was threatening.
She wasn’t sure she would be able to get any more sleep, but she had to try. It wasn’t even five o’clock. She’d been asleep less than three hours.
In the morning, she would clean out Danny’s room. Then the dreams would stop. She was pretty much convinced of that.
She remembered the two words that she had twice erased from Danny’s chalkboard— NOT DEAD—and she realized that she’d forgotten to call Michael. She had to confront him with her suspicions. She had to know if he’d been in the house, in Danny’s room, without her knowledge or permission.
It had to be Michael.
She could turn on the light and call him now. He would be sleeping, but she wouldn’t feel guilty if she woke him, not after all the sleepless nights that he had given her. Right now, however, she didn’t feel up to the battle. Her wits were dulled by wine and exhaustion. And if Michael had slipped into the house like a little boy playing a cruel prank, if he had written that message on the chalkboard, then his hatred of her was far greater than she had thought. He might even be a desperately sick man. If he became verbally violent and abusive, if he were irrational, she would need to have a clear head to deal with him. She would call him in the morning when she had regained some of her strength.
She yawned and turned over and drifted off to sleep. She didn’t dream anymore, and when she woke at ten o’clock, she was refreshed and newly excited by the previous night’s success.
She phoned Michael, but he wasn’t home. Unless he’d changed shifts in the past six months, he didn’t go to work until noon. She decided to try his number again in half an hour.
After retrieving the morning newspaper from the front stoop, she read the rave review of Magyck! written by the Review-Journal’s entertainment critic. He couldn’t find anything wrong with the show. His praise was so effusive that, even reading it by herself, in her own kitchen, she was slightly embarrassed by the effusiveness of the praise.
She ate a light breakfast of grapefruit juice and one English muffin, then went to Danny’s room to pack his belongings. When she opened the door, she gasped and halted.
The room was a mess. The airplane models were no longer in the display case; they were strewn across the floor, and a few were broken. Danny’s collection of paperbacks had been pulled from the bookcase and tossed into every corner. The tubes of glue, miniature bottles of enamel, and model-crafting tools that had stood on his desk were now on the floor with everything else. A poster of one of the movie monsters had been ripped apart; it hung from the wall in several pieces. The action figures had been knocked off the headboard. The closet doors were open, and all the clothes inside appeared to have been thrown on the floor. The game table had been overturned. The easel lay on the carpet, the chalkboard facing down.
Shaking with rage, Tina slowly crossed the room, care-fully stepping through the debris. She stopped at the easel, set it up as it belonged, hesitated, then turned the chalkboard toward her.
NOT DEAD
“Damn!” she said, furious.
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