Nick helped him back into bed, untangling the sheets as best he could and tucking him in. His mother sighed in her sleep but did not stir. For a long while, he watched them to make sure that in their unconscious states they would not be tossed about by their boozy dreams. On other nights like this, they could be trusted to lie as still as a pair of corpses, but he wanted to be sure his father would not fall out of bed again. He swore to himself, as he had a dozen or more times these past few years, that he would never touch a drop of liquor. They had been better able to handle it when he was younger, but over the past few years their drinking had grown worse. Sometimes they seemed to willingly remove themselves so far from reality as to lose their place in it.
Gently shutting the door behind him, Nick returned to his own room and eased into bed. Outside the cold wind blew, and the sheets and pillowcases were ice against his bare skin. With a wriggle he wrapped the comforter around his feet to warm them. He knew that he would be awake as long as he was frozen, that he would not be able to get to sleep anytime soon, and a mild panic set in over the lateness of the hour and the prospect of school in the morning.
“Sleep,” he told himself. “Just go to sleep.”
But he could not sleep. The man on the road filled his thoughts. Mr. Keenan had stopped short and the car jerked them forward against the restraints of their seat belts. Nick had pretended not to see, but he had seen all. Uncurling like a fern, the man had risen from the ground and stood half hunched in anticipation. In the pale moonlight, his bare skin shone white, and he moved with a wild animal’s hesitancy and sudden alarm. A deer caught by surprise, here and then gone, disappearing into the night. He wondered where the man had run off, for to the east lay bare rock tumbling down to the endless sea. Summer days Nick and Jack Peter had hopped about over that same rough slate, dodging crevasses and tidal pools, but he could not imagine how a barefoot man could make his escape or where he might hide or how he might avoid the dark and freezing waters.
The room had grown stifling and close with the constant blast of forced air. He flipped over his pillow and laid his head against the cool fabric, reaching back with his free hand to throw off all the covers except for the thin sheet. Blood rushed to his cheeks, and he felt a slick of perspiration pool along the ridge of his spine. Hot as August. The faint aroma of salt water, sunshine on the beach wafted into the room. He could smell fish and the broken bits of crab and lobster shells too long in the heat. The odor of rot made his eyes water, and he sat up in the dark room, wondering where the smell originated. The rank and humid foulness hit him full blast in the face. The bed seemed to totter momentarily, a boat rocking on a wave, before it settled again, and then the wave reached the wall and slid into the closed closet. Something heavy inside bumped against the surface of the door, hard the first time and then softly again. The hangers rattled like metal chains.
He did not want to get out of bed. The thought of opening the closet frightened him, but the clatter would not stop and the odor intensified with his every breath. Sweat beaded along his brow, and his pajamas clung to his skin like wet napkins. In their bedroom, his parents were out cold. He could call till hoarse, but they would not waken till morning. He knew he would have to face the thing itself. The closet would not let him go.
Curious and afraid, he put one foot on the floor as though to test whether it was safe. Tender as a wing, a flutter beat in rhythm on the inside of the closed door. The stench was now awful, fetid and briny. He wished he had just left the door open, so he could see inside without taking a further step, even if that meant, as it sometimes did, that he would have to deal with the amorphous shapes of his clothes tricking him with their ghostly transformations. The scraping from inside the door continued, insistent as a whisper. The heat pressed upon him, palpable as fog. Nick gingerly put his other foot down and crept across the floor, anxious that he might awaken the man inside, or that thing from the road that he was now sure lingered there, ready to pounce as soon as he turned the doorknob. Muttering a prayer, he steadied his nerves and, deciding at the last moment to get it over with quickly, he flung open the door.