Chapter 12 12

When they summered by the lake in the early 1960s, Will was able to splash in the shallow water with a bright orange double-winged inflatable float bag strapped to his back.Actually his technique is much better than that.Maddie and Jesse have remained good friends despite their age difference.They often go swimming in the Ned Meyer swimming pool.Nedmeyer had a floating pier equipped with a diving platform, and it was there that Jesse began to create her diving style, which first earned her a spot on the high school swim team and then the state swim team in 1971.Diving from the diving board on Nedmeyer's buoy, she remembers the first feeling of jumping through the sweltering summer air into the shimmering green water that greeted her, and the second best feeling of going through the depths Layers of hot and cold water float up.

Coming up from her restless sleep was like that. First, there was a black, raucous chaos, like being in a thunderstorm.She bumped into it, swinging around trying to break free, not having the slightest idea who she was, or when, let alone where, she was.The next floor was warmer and quieter, and she was caught in the worst nightmare ever (at least in her recorded history).But the nightmare is all there ever was, and now it's over.But as the surface approached, she encountered another layer of cold water, and she thought that the reality that lay ahead was almost as bad as a nightmare, maybe worse.

Is that so?she asked herself. What could possibly be worse than what I just went through? She refuses to think about it, the answer is within reach, but if she does, she may decide to turn back and swim back to the deep water again.That's drowning, and maybe drowning isn't the worst way - not as bad as, say, parachuting into a maze of high-voltage power grids.It was overwhelming to think of melting her body into that dry, mineral smell that reminded her of copper and oysters at the same time.Jessie continued to beat the water firmly upwards, telling herself to wait until she actually broke the water before thinking about reality.

The last surface of water she crossed was as warm and terrifying as fresh blood: her arms were perhaps stiffer than tree stumps.She just wants their blood to flow again. Jesse gasped and opened his eyes throbbing.She had no idea how long she had slept, and the alarm clock with the radio on the dresser was repeating its annoying repetitions (12--12--12, the number flickering in the dark, as if time had stood still forever at midnight) .It didn't help her, all she knew for sure was that it was completely dark and that the moonlight was coming in not through the east window but through the skylight.

Hundreds of needles pricked her arm, which shook nervously.She usually hates this feeling so much, but now it doesn't, it's a thousand times better than muscle cramps.She hoped to revive her dead arms at the cost of muscle spasms.After a minute or two, she noticed a patch of wetness under her butt and legs.She realized that her previous desire to pee was gone and her body took care of it for her while she fell asleep. She clenched her fists and carefully pulled her body up a little. The pain in her wrist made her frown, and the movement also caused extreme pain in the back of her hand.That pain is mostly due to you trying to get out of the handcuffs.You can blame no one but yourself, she thought, dear.

The dog started barking again.Each howl was like a shard of glass piercing her eardrum.It was the voice, she realized, that had pulled her from her sleep, and pulled her out of it just as she was about to dive into the depths of the nightmare.The location of the voice told her the dog was outside at the back of the house, and she was glad it had left the house, but also a little confused.Maybe, spending so much time under the roof made it uncomfortable.The idea made some sense...as much as anything in this situation, anyway. "Cheer up, Jessie," she advised herself in serious but sleepy tones.Maybe—just maybe—she was doing it.The panic and irrational shame she felt in the dream was gone.The dream itself seemed to have dried out, to have that strange dry, smoky quality of an overexposed photograph.She realizes it will soon be gone completely.The dreams of the waking hours are like the empty cocoons of moths, or like the cracked empty shells of milkweed pods, like the shells of death in which frail life once surged briefly and furiously.Sometimes this amnesia - if it was a symptom - made her sad.Never in her life had she equated forgetting with compassion so quickly and completely.

And that's okay, it's just a dream after all.I mean, all those heads coming out of the head?Of course, dreams are supposed to have only symbolic meaning - yes, I know that - and I thought maybe there was some kind of symbolism in this dream... maybe even some truth.If nothing else, I thought, now I understand why I hit Will when he poked me that day.Nora Calligan will no doubt be excited -- she'll call it a breakthrough.Maybe so.But it doesn't work at all, it doesn't get me out of this damn prison bracelet, that's my number one problem, does anyone disagree with that?

Neither Ruth nor Mrs. Burlingame answered, and the other voices were equally silent.In fact, the only answer came from her stomach.Stomach was very upset about what had happened, but it was forced to protest the cancellation of dinner with long bowel rumbles.Funny, in a way--but it won't be so funny when tomorrow comes.By then, the thirst would come back to assail her again, so how long would the last two sips of water last to drive away the thirst?She has no illusions. I have to focus - I have to.The problem wasn't the food, or the water, and at the moment, those problems were as insignificant as me hitting Will in the mouth at his ninth birthday party.The question is how do I—

Her mind suddenly constricted, fear burst into crackling sparks, and her thoughts stopped.Her eyes, which had been wandering aimlessly in the dim room, stopped at the corner, where the pearly moonlight poured in through the skylight, and the wind stirred the shadows of the pine forest wildly. dance. There was a man standing there. A wave of great fear hit her like never before.Her bladder, which had actually only emptied the most uncomfortable parts, now emptied itself with a painless hot stream.Jesse had no idea of ​​that, or anything else.Fear blew her mind temporarily blank, and from wall to wall, from ceiling to floor, there was chaos.She couldn't make a sound, not even the lowest scream.She couldn't make a sound, and her mind couldn't think.The muscles in her neck, shoulders, and arms turned into something that felt like hot water.She slid off the headboard until she was in handcuffs, in a limp, dazed state.She wasn't in a coma -- not even close to it -- but this mental void and the utter physical incapacity that came with it was worse than a coma.When the mind tried to recover, it was first blocked by a featureless, dark wall.

Alone, there is a person in the corner. Although the actual features of the intruder's face were obscured by the shadows of perspective between them, she saw his dark eyes fixed idiotically on her, saw his waxy emaciation. cheeks and high forehead.She saw his slumped shoulders, the simian arms hanging from them, and the long hands at the ends.Somewhere in the triangular black shadow cast by the desk she felt his feet.That was all she saw. She did not know how long she lay in this horrible semi-comatose state, completely paralyzed but conscious, like a beetle stung by a poisonous spider.It seems like a considerable amount of time has passed.As the seconds ticked by, she found herself unable to close her eyes, let alone avoid her strange guest.Her initial fear of him was beginning to lessen a little.But, somehow, the substitute for fear was even worse: terror with an irrational, dream-like nausea.The wellspring of these feelings, Jessie thought later—the most intense negative feelings she had ever experienced in her life, including the one that had swept through her mind only a short while ago as she watched the dingoes prepare to eat Gerald for dinner. That emotion—that's the absolute silence of the thing.

He had sneaked in while she was asleep, and now he was just standing in the corner, camouflaged by the ever-circling shadows on his face and body, staring greedily at her with his strange black eyes.His eyes were so large, so preoccupied, they reminded her of eye sockets on a dead man's skull. Her guests just stand in the corner, that's all, nothing else. She lay in handcuffs, her arms outstretched, like a woman at the bottom of a deep well.The time passed, only the clock flickered stupidly to tell the time, announcing that it was twelve o'clock, twelve o'clock, twelve o'clock.At last a coherent idea crept into her brain, and it seemed both dangerous and reassuring. There's no one here but you, Jesse, and that man you see in the corner is a mixture of shadow and imagination.that is it. She struggled back to a sitting position.She pulled her body with her arms, her face contorted from the pain in her shoulder from the exertion.She pushed with her feet, trying to insert her bare heels into the bedspread.She pushed hard, panting, and at the same time, never taking her eyes off the horrible, elongated figure in the corner. It's too tall and too skinny to be a real person, Jesse—you get it, don't you?It's nothing but the wind, the shadows, the shining moonlight... a remnant of your nightmare, isn't it? That's about right.She began to relax.Then, the dog outside the house barked hysterically again and again.Could it be that figure in the corner— The figure that was nothing but the wind, the shadow, the glimmer of moonlight—but didn't the non-existent figure turn its head slightly in the direction of the barking dog? No, definitely not.Must be another trick played by wind and dark and shadow. Most likely so.In fact she was almost convinced - the turning of the head - was a hallucination.But what about the rest?What about the shape itself?She couldn't convince herself that it was all imagination, that the figure that looked so much like a man was just an illusion... Could it be? Mrs. Burlingame spoke suddenly.Horrified as her voice was, it wasn't hysterical, at least not so much.Strangely, the thought that maybe she wasn't alone in the room terrified the Ruth part of her that was on the verge of incoherent speech. If that thing wasn't real, said Mrs. Burlingame, why did the dog leave in the first place?I guess it doesn't do that without reason, don't you think? Yet she imagined that Mrs. Burlingame was equally horrified, and longed for an explanation of the dog's departure that did not include the human figure that Jessie saw or thought she saw standing in the corner.The wife pleaded with her that the dog left simply because it was uncomfortable.Or, it was gone for the oldest reason, which was that it smelled another wild dog, a bitch in heat.It was also possible, she thought, that the dog had been frightened away by some sound—a tree branch hitting an upstairs window, for example.She prefers this explanation because it suggests a harsh justice: the dog, too, is spooked by some imaginary intruder.Its barking is used to scare away the non-existent newcomer from touching its dinner. Well, tell me something else like that. Mrs. Burlingame begged her suddenly. Even if you don't believe anything else like it yourself, let me believe it. But the reason she couldn't, she thought, was that there was someone in the corner by the table.It wasn't a hallucination, it wasn't a mixture of windblown tree shadows and her own imagination, it wasn't the remnants of her dreams—spooky ghosts glimpsed in half-asleep, half-awake moments. It was a monster a monster a big monster was coming to eat me... A person, not a monster, is a person.He stood motionless looking at her.The wind creaked the house, and the shadows of the trees danced on his strange, half-hidden face. monster!big monster! This time the thought rose from the depths of her brain to the brightly lit platform of her conscious awareness.She wanted to chase it away again, but the fear returned.The thing in the far corner of the room may be a person.But even so, she was more and more convinced that something was wrong with his face.If only I could see him more clearly! You don't want to watch it. A human voice suggested in a low voice. But I had to speak to it, to make a connection. Jessie thought, and then answered himself in a tense, reproachful voice that sounded like Ruth and Mrs. Burlingame had become one. Don't take that thing for it, Jessie should be for him.Think of it as a person, maybe he is someone lost in the woods, someone who is as frightened as you are. Perhaps, this is good advice.However, Jessie found that she could not recognize the figure in the corner of the room as a him.Nor did she think that the thing in the shadow was either lost or frightened.She felt a harmful long wave coming slowly from the corner. What a fool!Talk to it, Jesse!talk to him! She tried to clear her throat, but there was nothing there—dry as a desert, smooth as soapstone.Now, she could feel her heart beating in her chest, it was beating lightly, quickly, irregularly. The wind was blowing, and the shadows of the trees reflected black and white patterns on the walls and ceiling.Made her feel like a woman caught in a kaleidoscope for the color-blind.For a moment she thought she saw a nose--thin and long and white--underneath those dark, intent eyes. "Who--" At first, she could barely make out a whisper, which was impossible to hear across the bed, let alone across the room.She next, licked her lips and tried again.She realized her hands were clenched into fists in pain.She forced herself to release her fingers. "Who are you?" It was still a whisper, but a little louder than before. That figure didn't answer her, just stood there with thin white hands hanging by his crotch. its knee?knee?Impossible, Jessie - when a person hangs his hands down the side of the body, the hands rest on the upper hips. Ruth answered.Her voice was so low, so frightened, Jessie barely heard it. A normal person's hand goes up to the upper hip, is that what you mean?But do you think a normal person would sneak into someone's house in the middle of the night and then just stand in the corner and watch when he finds the mistress of the house handcuffed to the bed?Just standing there, nothing else? Then, it actually moved a leg—maybe it was just the distracting movement of the tree shadows.This time it was the lower part of her vision that found it.The shadows of the trees, the moonlight, and the wind mixed together to give the whole event a great deal of ambiguity.Jessie found herself doubting the veracity of her visitor again: she thought it was possible that she was still asleep at this moment, that her dream about Will's birthday party had taken a strange new direction...but she Didn't really believe it - she was indeed awake. Whether or not the leg actually moved (even if there was one), Jesse's gaze was momentarily drawn down.She thought she saw something dark between the thing's legs.It was impossible to see what it was, for the shadow of the desk made it the darkest part of the room.But her mind suddenly returned to that afternoon.All that time she had been trying to convince Gerald that she meant what she said.The only sound is the wind.Banging doors, barking dogs, loons, and— The object placed on the ground between the visitor's legs was a chainsaw. Jessie confirmed this immediately, her client had been using it earlier, not sawing wood with it, he was sawing people.The dog ran away because it smelled the madman approaching.The man came along the lakeside path, swinging a bloodstained chainsaw with one gloved hand. stop!Mrs. Burlingame cried out indignantly, and stopped the foolishness at once, and seized herself. But she found that she couldn't stop, because it was a dream, and because she became more and more convinced that this figure standing in the corner, this thing that was as silent as the monster created by Doctor Frankenstein before the lightning, was real.Yet even so, he spent his afternoons turning people into chunks of meat with a chainsaw?Of course not - that's just a variation on a movie-inspired summer camp story.This simple but creepy story seems so funny when you're sitting around the fire with the other girls baking marshmallows.But then it was terrible.You lie shivering in your sleeping bag, believing that every crackle of a tree branch is the signal for the coming of the lakesider, a fabled brain-damaged survivor of the Korean War. The thing standing in the corner isn't a lakesider, or a murderer with a chainsaw.But there was something on the ground, (at least she was pretty sure there was something), Jesse speculated, it might be a chainsaw, but it could also be a suitcase...a backpack...a salesman's sample box... Or my imagination. Yes, even though she was staring at it, whatever it was, she knew she couldn't rule out the possibility of imagining it.In a wayward way, though, it only reinforced the idea that the thing itself was real, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for her to dismiss the feeling that it was malevolent.It crawled out of tangled tree shadows and powdery moonlight. It hates me, whatever it is, it hates me.It must hate me, otherwise why would it just stand there and not help me? She looked at the half-hidden face, at the eyes that seemed to glow with greed and longing in their round black sockets, and she began to cry. "Excuse me, is there anyone there?" She said in a low voice, choked with tears, "If there is someone, please help me? Have you seen this pair of handcuffs? The key is beside you, on the desk..." Nothing, no movement, no answer, it just stood there - that is, if it was there - watching her from behind its murderous shadow mask. "If you don't want me to tell anyone I saw you, I won't," she tried again.Her voice trembled, slurred, high and low, and slippery. "I promise not to tell! How... how grateful I would be..." It watches her. That's all, nothing more. Jessie felt tears roll down her cheeks. "You frighten me, you know," she said. "Don't you say something? You can't talk? If you were really there, couldn't you talk to me?" A small but terrifying hysteria gripped her, and she flew away, with an irreplaceable and precious part of her caught in the emaciated fingers of that emotion.She wept and begged the hideous figure that stood motionless in the corner.She was awake all the time, and then sometimes drifted into that strange void that comes when the terror is so strong that it takes the soul out of the body.She heard herself begging the figure hoarsely and cryingly, asking it to help her out of the handcuffs, oh please help, please help her out of the handcuffs.And then she would go into that weird blankness again.She knew her mouth was still moving because she could feel it.She could also feel the sound coming from her mouth.But when she was in the void, those voices were not words, but just incoherent, chattering streams.She could still hear the wind blowing and the dogs barking.Realize but don't know, hear but don't understand.In this half-revealed figure, in this terrible visitor, in the terror this uninvited visitor gave her, she lost everything.She couldn't stop staring at it, its narrow deformed head, its pale cheeks, its bowed shoulders... But it was the hands of the thing that attracted her attention more and more: the long-fingered hands hung there, The distance to park down on the legs is much farther than any normal human hand can reach.An indeterminate amount of time passed in this blank state (12-12-12, the clock on the dressing table reported, unhelpfully).Then she'll wake up a little bit, and start thinking instead of just being bombarded with an endless stream of incoherent images.She would begin to hear words coming from her lips, not just chatter.But she kept moving forward in that void, and her words now had nothing to do with the handcuffs and the keys on the dresser.And what she heard was the wailing bass of a woman, forced to plead for an answer—any answer. "Who are you?" she whimpered. "A man? A devil? Who are you for God's sake?" The wind is blowing. The door was banging. In front of her, the figure's face seemed to change...it seemed to grin upward and open.Jessie felt the center of her sanity finally begin to waver.Before that, it had withstood such attacks with astonishing fortitude. "Dad?" she whispered, "Dad, is that you?" Do not be silly! cried Mrs Burlingame.Now, though, Jessie felt the sound of struggling, swaying to hysterical. Don't be a goose, Jesse! Dad died in 1980! This didn't help, it made things worse.Much worse.Tom Mechter is buried in the basement of his home in Falmouth, less than a hundred miles away.Jessie's terrified, feverish mind persisted in showing her a hunchbacked figure, its clothes and rotten shoes covered with green, fuzzy moss, slinking across moonlit fields, hurrying through the suburban landscape between newly built housing estates. An irregular forest.As it fell she saw gravity working on its aging arm muscles, its muscles kept being pulled by the gods until the hands dangled at the sides of the knees.This is her dad.It was this man who carried her on his shoulders when she was three years old and made her very happy.When she was six years old, a clown making faces made her cry, and it was this man who comforted her again.It was the same man who told her stories before she went to sleep.Until she was eight—he said eight was old enough to read her own stories. This was her father, who had made some homemade filters on the afternoon of the eclipse, and held her in his lap during the moment of totality.Don't worry about anything, this father said...don't worry, don't look back.However, she thought at the time that maybe he was worried, because his voice was thick and a little erratic, not at all like his usual voice. In the corner, the thing's mouth seemed to open further.Suddenly the room was filled with that dull, half-metallic, half-organic smell that reminded her of creamy oysters, the smell of your hands after you've grabbed a handful of coins, and the air before a thunderstorm. the taste of. "Dad, is that you?" She asked the shadowy thing in the corner. From nowhere came the faint cry of a loon.Jessie felt tears roll down her cheeks.A very strange thing was happening at this moment, which she hadn't expected at all, as she became more and more convinced that this was her father, that it was Tom Mechter standing in the corner of the room, whether he Twelve years had passed since her death, and that's when the fear began to leave her.She had tucked her legs in just now, but now she put them back and stretched them out.As she did so, a broken piece of her dream reappeared—Daddy's little girl, painted on her bosom with Peppermint Dew lipstick. "Okay, come on," she said to the figure.Her voice was hoarse, but steady. "That's why you came back, isn't it? Come on, then. Anyway, how can I stop you?" Just promise me to uncuff me afterwards.Promise me, unlock the lock for me, let me go. The figure didn't answer in any form, just stood under the stick-like shadow of the tree and the dreamy moonlight, grinning at her, and the time passed by second by second (1-12-12, dressing up The clock on the stage indicated, as if to imply that the whole concept of time passing was an illusion, that time was in fact completely frozen), Jessie thought, maybe she was right in the first place, that no one was actually with her here at all.She began to feel like a weathercock, in the hands of that mischievously leaping and moving wind.It sometimes blows before a big thunderstorm or tornado. Your dad can't come back from the dead. said Mrs. Burlingame.She tried to hold her voice, but sadly couldn't.Still, Jessie pays tribute to her efforts.No matter what happens, the wife is still there, constantly giving her advice. This isn't a horror movie, or an episode of Low Light Layers, Jesse, this is real life. But there's another part of her - this part is probably home to the voices of some real unknown beings in her head, not the subconscious bugging her conscious mind somewhere, this thing is like a ridiculous (maybe supernatural) Shadows trail behind the heels of logic.The voice insisted that things had changed in the dark.It says things especially change when a person is alone in the dark.At such times, the locks on the boxes of imagination will come off, and anything-anything may be released. It could be your dad. whispered the very unfamiliar part of her.Jesse shuddered and mistook it for a mix of madness and reason. Probably yes, never doubt it.In broad daylight, people are almost always safe from ghosts or the recently dead.It is also usually safe at night if you are with other people.But when one is alone in the dark, all bets are off and everything changes.Men and women alone in the dark are like doors open, Jessie, and if they yell or scream for help God knows what terrible things will answer?Who knows what they saw as they walked alone to their death?Is it very unbelievable that some people may die of fear no matter what is written on their death certificates? "I don't believe that," she said in a slurred, trembling voice.Her voice rose a little, trying to show that she wasn't actually feeling firm. "You're not my father! I don't think you're anyone! You're just a moonlight-made thing, I think!" As if in answer to her words, the figure leaned forward ironically in a bowing gesture.For a moment its face - a face too real to doubt - loomed from the shadows.Jesse let out a hoarse scream as the pale moonlight smeared its features a brilliant gold through the skylight.This was not her father, and what she saw in the visitor's face was evil and madness, compared to the fact that she would have welcomed her father even after he had been lying in a cold coffin for twelve years.At this moment, those deep-socketed eyes were looking at her with a terrible light, and their eye sockets were red and wrinkled.The lips twisted upward, and the mouth grinned open, revealing discolored sun teeth and jagged canines that seemed almost as long as the dingo's fangs. In the darkness, one of its white hands lifted something at its feet that she had half seen, half intuitively noticed.At first she thought it had taken Gerald's briefcase from the shed, which Gerald had used as a study while he was there.But when she lifted the box-shaped thing into the light, she saw that it was much larger and older than Gerald's briefcase.It looked like one of those sample boxes that traveling salesmen used to carry. "Please," she whispered weakly and breathlessly, "whoever you are, please don't hurt me. If you don't want to let me go, it's okay, but please don't hurt me. " The grin widened, and she saw tiny glints in the depths of the mouth—clearly, her visitor had gold teeth, or filled them with gold, like Gerald had.It seemed to laugh silently, as if her terror satisfied it.Then its long fingers went to open the lock of the box.