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  It was still dark outside, but he had no idea how long he had been sleeping. His feet were quiet on the carpet as he passed the sleeping girls. The real danger was the door.

  He put his hand on the cold doorknob and realized that he was older today. From his height, he judged he was about thirteen. He held his breath, looking at the shadowed bunk beds for signs of movement, and slowly turned the handle.

  It squeaked slightly. He stopped. The girls did not respond. He turned it more. Then he pulled gently.

  The hinges also squeaked, but the sound was faint. The girls were sleep deeply. He slipped out into the hall and carefully positioned the door so that it was just barely ajar.

  The hall was dark, but a hint of light came from the end that led to the main staircase. He walked quickly toward it, knowing that he would make no noise on the carpet here. As he started down the carpeted staircase, he looked over the banister down into the foyer, but saw no one.

  The light came from the kitchen, leaking under and around the door that made the scraping noise. He remembered Charlotte once mentioning that the kitchen light was always left on at night. Against it, the dark polished banister was a long, massive shape that sent weird, exaggerated shadows to the opposite wall as he descended the stairs, searching the darkness below.

  Finally the banister ended in a great post, bigger than the one he sat on, with four sharp corners on the sides and a top carved into a smooth globe.

  As his bare feet felt the cold, slick hardwood floor of the foyer under them, he stepped around the post and froze. The girl was right in front of him, hiding motionless on the other side of the post, staring at him.

  He stared back. She was skinny, like him, maybe his age or just a little younger. Her hair was the same flat black, and she was naked, as he was. In the shadows, he couldn’t see her very well, but she had the body of a child just starting to develop.

  She seemed to be appraising him the same way. With a jolt of surprise, he realized that she looked enough like him to be his sister. Then, as they watched each other, she slowly began to circle around him to his right.

  When he turned, he realized that she was moving toward the big front door. His feet were cold now, as were his grip and his marbles. He didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything. In a kind of frozen wonder, he watched her snap open the main lock with a loud click, put two small hands on the doorknob, and pull it open.

  The sound of the lock and of the door opening seemed to roar through the house. He could see her more clearly now in the light from the porch; she had hints of breasts and long, thin arms and legs. Her hips were no wider than her waist. Now she unlatched and opened the outer door made of decorative cast iron and some kind of clear safety glass. She stepped out onto the porch with her bare feet, still looking at him, and waited.

  Frigid air swirled into the house from behind her. He looked past her and saw that the ground today was covered in a thick layer of snow.

  It was no longer coming down, and bright moonlight shimmered across the white landscape. The wind was blowing hard, and very cold.

  A door was thrown open upstairs and then slammed shut. Two pairs of feet came pounding in a fast, deliberate stride. Someone had heard the front door open.

  He looked up into the shadowed hall, on reflex, and then back at the girl. Her eyes were wide and quick with fright, too, but she didn’t come back inside. Instead, she stepped backward on the porch, holding the door open for him.

  His gaze moved from her face to the open space that beckoned, then beyond to the frozen night outside. He wanted to go. Yet he didn’t move. All he did was stare, and hear the thudding footsteps upstairs coming closer.

  Frantically, the girl stamped her foot. He waited for her to give up and go, leaving him behind. His feet would not move.

  Suddenly she darted inside, ran up to him, and reached down. She grabbed his grip and pulled him to the door. He followed obediently, as he always had before. Suddenly they were outside and the shock of freezing wind seemed to wake him up.

  She let go of him and they both ran, the cold snow under his feet seeming to burn as they did so. The frigid wind brought tears to his eyes and seemed to chill his body from his skin right through his insides.

  Ahead of him, the night was dark, broken only by yellowish lights from some of the houses and the reflection off the powdery crystals on the blanket of snow.

  He had no idea where he was going.

  The girl was running to his left and just ahead of him, so he stayed with her. His head was pounding in pain with the cold. Then he heard the shouts behind them. She turned, slowing, to look back over her shoulder, her black hair blowing across her face. Her eyes widened with fear.

  He looked back, too.

  Charlotte and a strange man were running after them from the front door, and gaining easily on their longer legs. She had thrown on a long, heavy, light blue robe and some kind of black snow boots. Her golden hair still glistened beautifully as she ran toward them through slivers of light. The man with her, who wore only a pair of blue jeans and shoes, was solidly built and tall, but had little muscle definition.

  The girl turned suddenly and angled toward trees to her left. The man changed direction to cut her off. Her short, skinny legs flashed across the snow and her feet kicked up tufts of powder after her.

  Meanwhile, he could hear Charlotte running right behind him as he turned to stay with the girl. Charlotte’s breath wheezed in his ears.

  He was so cold now that he wondered if his marbles would even hurt when she slammed him.

  Suddenly the girl turned in front of him, stumbling. He bumped into her, struggling to keep his balance on nearly numb feet, coming to a halt. The man had grabbed her upper arm and had yanked her around in front of him.

  While the man nearly lifted her off her feet, and she flailed wordlessly to get free, he quickly darted under the man’s arm so that he was in close to the man’s blue jeans. If there was any one way he could fight, this was it. He went up on the toes of his left foot, at the same time jamming his thin right knee as high as he could between the man’s legs. The man made a sharp, gruff sound in his throat and fell forward, releasing the girl.

  He avoided the man by dodging away to one side. The man dropped face first against Charlotte’s legs, making her stumble. The girl now pushed Charlotte face down across the man, and they both tumbled into the snow. The skirt of the light blue robe skewed open and

  Charlotte’s long legs sprawled across the white powder.

  For a moment, he stood over Charlotte and the man, breathing the cold, harsh air as he looked down at them. His whole body quivered with uncontrollable shivering; his teeth were clenched against chattering.

  Then he looked up into the face of the girl. She met his eyes for a moment.

  Behind them, the house stood firm and tall and warm in its own haze of lights against the sky. Neither of them looked at it.

  Together, without a word, they ran away from the house into the frozen wastes of the unknown night.

  Morning Terrors

  By Peter Crowther

  An Englishman from North Yorkshire, Peter Crowther writes some of the cleanest, sharpest prose we’ve ever seen. His stories are distinctive because of their originality and their harsh vision of characters rendered utterly helpless by forces beyond their ken and control. In person, he is such a warm, friendly chap, it’s hard to imagine he is the guy responsible for something as truly disturbing as the following journey beyond conventional madness.

  He awoke like clockwork, jerking upright in bed, images racing through his mind in a steady stream, sweating feverishly and gripping his bottom lip with his teeth. He was already whining.

  The luminous display of the clock on the mantelpiece, strangely twisted out of true and shimmering as though about to disappear, registered

  3:08. To his left, the curtains were wafting gently, billowed inwards by a gentle breeze which muttered around the outside of the house. He could see t
hem out of the corner of his eye but refused to look at the window full on. Not yet. That would come soon.

  He shook his head and whimpered, protesting like a cowed child.

  “… no,” he whispered faintly, as though trying not to let anyone else hear him. “… no, please, no.” The bed creaked and strained as the figure next to him moved slightly. He swallowed and tried to concentrate on the mantelpiece but already felt the first signs of detached curiosity that would cause him to turn around.

  The wall in front of him looked wet and slimy and uneven: that had happened a week ago Tuesday. The wardrobe that should be next to the mantelpiece was not there: that had gone on the Friday. Nor was the old wicker crib-and-stand in front of the radiator attached to the right-hand wall: the following Sunday.

  Last week it had stopped here. The week before, it had stopped at the mantelpiece. The first week, as soon as he had woken up. Last weekend he had first looked at the curtains. The weekend before, the first pains in his chest had started.

  Last night he had noticed the duvet.

  He lifted his hands to his face and started to sob quietly, sniveling mucous out of his nose.

  Between his fingers he could still make out the orange light that shone through the curtains. He breathed in deep and wiped his eyes with his fingers, roughly. And then he turned to face the window.

  It was the same again. Orange. The sky outside the window shone orange through the paisley floor-length curtains into the room. No sign of the streetlight which lit the road between his house and number 20.

  No vague outline of the houses across the road. No faint sound of the latenight/early-morning trucks on the motorway. Just orange, pulsating.

  And hissing distantly.

  Staring at the window, willing it to change, he caught sight, in the lower periphery of his vision, of the shape which was no longer his wife curled up on the other side of the bed. In front of him, wrapped tightly in what had once been a duvet, the figure moved, growing increasingly restless.

  “Shhhhhh,” he said softly, ignoring the tingling feeling which jabbed through his chest.

  Now, he thought. Come back now.

  This was where it had ended last night. A sound started in his throat, long and guttural, building in pitch, as he started to lower his head to look down fully at the bed.

  As he lowered his eyes he saw again that it was not a duvet which covered him and his wife but an old skin of some kind. Patches of the thick and coarse hair had worn through in some places and, in others, stains shone darkly, spotted occasionally with what looked like pieces of meat and dried grass. It smelt like the insides of the dustbins out in the yard.

  The figure beneath the skin was huge. It was not … could not possibly be … Katherine. And it was misshapen, becoming larger at the feet end than at the middle, where the skin fell inwards. At the top, it was enormous.

  He had seen hints of all of this last night. Tonight he had seen it close up. And now he saw one more thing: the top of his wife’s head protruding from the duvet.

  And it was starting to move as though waking up.

  “Nonononojesusjesusjesusjesusjee”

  Katherine’s hands were on him suddenly, shaking him roughly.

  He heard her voice and almost cried. “There, there, sweetie,” it said gently. “Another dream?”

  He opened his eyes and looked around, realizing vaguely that she had turned on the lamp on her side table.

  He was half kneeling in front of her, facing the window. The curtains were still blowing and he could make out the muted white glow of the light outside. Somewhere in the distance a horn sounded, followed by the haunting lonely call of a big truck, dopplering from and back to nothingness.

  He looked at the clock. It registered 3:14.

  Next to the mantelpiece stood the wardrobe.

  In front of the radiator stood the wicker crib-and-stand, filled with all of Katherine’s toy animals.

  He looked down at the unmistakable swirls and splashes of the duvet.

  And then he looked up, through blurred eyes, at his wife. She stared at him wide-eyed and shook her head, settling back into bed and rubbing her hands through her long brown hair. He shuffled from his kneeling position, slipped out of the bed and padded across the carpet to the hall and the waiting toilet. His bladder felt like it was going to burst.

  As he let loose a thick, strong-smelling stream into the water below,

  Katherine’s voice called to him from the bedroom. “I don’t care what you say, Terry, but it’s doctor’s for you in the morning.”

  He groaned with relief as he finished and flushed the toilet.

  “You hear me?”

  “Yes, I hear you,” he said. He rubbed his chest. It felt strange, almost tight. And it was sticky to the touch. Must be sweat. At least the pain had gone. He rubbed his hands down the sides of his legs and ran softly back to the bedroom.

  Snuggling into Katherine’s back in the now-restored darkness, he pulled one of his pillows so that it went down the outside of the bed behind him, protecting him from the room beyond.

  He kissed the back of her head. “Love you.”

  “Love you too, sweetie,” she said, her voice drifting back to him over her shoulder. “But you must go to the doctor’s tomorrow.”

  “I will.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  And, his vision concentrated on the shine of the outside lamp, he slipped off into the dreamless sleep of exhaustion.

  “Okay, you can put on your, er, shirt again.”

  Terry sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed and reached for his shirt. “So what’s the verdict, doctor?”

  The other man sat down behind a wide desk and laid his stethoscope gently in an open felt-lined box. “Well, there’s nothing wrong with your heart,” he said, carefully avoiding looking Terry in the eye.

  It didn’t bother Terry at all. The man was very shy and never locked eyes with anybody. There were seven doctors in the practice, not counting the endless run of trainees who spent a few months learning the ropes, and Terry rarely got to see the doctor with whom he was officially registered. He had been seen by this fellow before.

  He stood up and tucked his shirt into his trousers, giving an exaggerated breath of relief. “So I’ll live?”

  Doctor Platt allowed himself a nervous smile and pushed his glasses farther back on the bridge of his nose. “Yes, I think it’s, er, safe to say that.”

  Terry finished tying his necktie and folded down his shirt collar while the doctor keyed something into the computer. “So what about these dreams?”

  “Well, those are probably caused by stress, tension, any number of, er, things.” He scratched absentmindedly at his beard and made a further adjustment to his glasses. “How are things at work, er, what is it that you do again?”

  “I’m in advertising,” Terry said. He hated having to explain the complexities of his job with the bank, and advertising seemed to be the likeliest catchall.

  “Busy?”

  Does a wooden horse have a hickory dick? “Very,” he replied.

  “Well, it’s probably just morning terrors. You probably need to, er, take a rest.”

  Terry nodded and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  The doctor finished what he was doing at the computer screen and looked over it at the wall behind. “Everything okay at home?”

  “Everything’s fine at home.” Terry was feeling better already. The pain in his chest which had lingered with him for the past week, steadily growing worse had gone completely today.

  The doctor stroked his beard and then turned to face Terry, his eyes locking onto the chair back just to Terry’s right. “Well, I’ll give you something to help you sleep,” he said, “and some cream to clear up that, er, irritation on your chest.”

  “Irritation on my chest?”

  “Yes, just around your, er, nipples.” Doctor Platt cleared his throat and reached for a pen.

 
“My nipples?” Terry was beginning to feel like a parrot.

  “Mmmm, it’s just a bit of soreness. Nothing to worry about probably been caused by rubbing, maybe a shirt or …” He let his voice trail off.

  “Or?”

  “Well, er, just by a shirt.” He turned his attention to the little prescription pad and wrote quickly. “See if your, er, wife has recently changed washing powders. That can often cause irritation.” He finished writing and placed the top carefully back on his fountain pen.

  “Hadn’t you noticed it?”

  Terry shook his head. “No, not at all.”

  “Well,” he held out the slip of paper to Terry while continuing to talk to the chairback. “That’s, er, all right then.”

  “Your nipples?” Katherine laughed loudly as she removed her coat.

  “And what did he say about the dreams?”

  “He said what I expected him to say, that I was just run down and that I need a rest.” Terry watched her watching him. “He gave me something to put on it, anyway,” he added. “A cream. And he gave me something to help me sleep better. He said it was just a case of morning terrors.”

  She walked over and turned on the gas beneath the kettle. “And are you satisfied with that?”

  “Yes. Yes, I’m satisfied with that,” he said, scratching at his left nipple without even realizing that he was doing it.

  This time the clock had gone completely.

  He felt groggy, half-doped. Must be the pills. Certainly he did not feel so concerned at waking up in what must still be the middle of the night.

  The room was again bathed in an orange glow but tonight it was not silent. Tonight there was a muted sound of activity. Nothing that he could separate and identify: more a sense of things going on around him. And there was another sound, a low and pained moaning … several moans all joining together, drifting and wafting. He stared at the wall in front of him and suddenly realized that it looked to be farther away. He allowed his eyes to travel upwards.

  The wall now bore no resemblance at all to the wall of his and Katherine’s bedroom. As far as he could make out in the dim orange light, it was a rock wall that went all the way up and over. Like the wall of a cave. And he could sense movements on the floor in front of him and around him.