“Come out,” he croaked.
He watched the toes for a reaction, but they sat like lumps of decaying clay. Maybe it was a joke. The thought capered through his mind in ribbons of hope. Someone, Jason or Jacob, had come here in the middle of the night and put these fake toes in the closet for a prank.
Ha, ha! So funny! Now it can be over, and we can go back to a sane reality in which dead things didn’t hide in closets and wriggle their toes.
Evan took another step, his muscles so tight beneath his skin he thought soon he would hear the snapping of his own tendons. The image of Shaun defenseless and asleep in the other room hardened his crumbling resolve. What if it got past him? What if it got to Shaun?
He lunged forward, gripping the lamp with one hand while he reached for the knob with the other, ready to bash whatever came out of the closet. Before his fingers could graze the handle, the closet door flew open with a bang, and Evan leapt back, his bowels loosening almost past the point of no return.
A solid stench hit him, so strong and putrid he gagged.
The closet was empty.
His body shook as he stepped forward, raising the lamp higher over his head. Nothing looked out of place in the closet. The hanger from which he’d snagged the raincoat swayed a little on the bar, and the tackle box he’d dug through sat at the same angle as before. A whispered gasp left his mouth, becoming a moan as he lowered the makeshift weapon and dropped it to the floor. The smell was gone.
Or maybe it was never there in the first place.
Evan staggered back until his ass hit the outside door. He slid down it, his legs unhinging at the knees in tandem. His eyes watered, but he didn’t attempt to wipe them.
There’s nothing there, there’s nothing there, there’s nothing there.
The mocking echo reverberated through him until he couldn’t stand it any longer and placed his face in his hands to cry in earnest.
~
Evan couldn’t sleep.
The fatigue was a physical thing, a weight of restless hours hanging from his shoulders, his neck, both his eyelids, but he couldn’t shut his mind down long enough to drift off. He tried, laying his blankets and pillows beside Shaun’s bed again, but the vision of the toes poking from beneath the closet door kept returning to him. He wondered how long it took a person to go crazy, how long someone could cling to the jagged edge of sanity without slipping into the void of gibbering madness. Would he know it when it happened fully? Would the things he’d seen over the last few weeks become solid? Physical enough to touch, or to touch him?
That thought was enough to get him back on his feet. Evan moved through the living room, pausing to throw a look at the closet door before beginning to clean up the kitchen. He whiled away the time in silence, with only a lilting song of insanity playing on an endless loop in his mind. He’d heard once that crazy people didn’t wonder if they were crazy; they just went along with it. The idea didn’t comfort him as much as he’d hoped. When the last dish was cleaned and put away, he made a pot of coffee, and sat sipping a cup as the sun rose higher and higher in the east.
They would pack and leave tomorrow, he decided, draining the last dregs in his cup. There was no reason to stay now. The promise of the clock, no matter how insane or unbelievable, was gone, leaving an empty cavern, once filled with a mystical hope, inside him. All he had now was Justin’s interest in the article, and he could do all the necessary research from the comfort of his own home—or Jason’s. Besides, the psychiatrist that he’d seen for grief counseling after Elle died was in Minneapolis. That would be one of his first stops when they got back.
What about your other shrink? You know, the one you’ve made dinner for, talked to for hours, and kissed?
What would he tell her? That he was seeing ghosts and/or losing his mind, so sorry, he had to run away now before he convinced himself that there weren’t any ghosts, only the broken shards of his sanity that continued to snag on reality? Yeah, that would go over well.
“She already knows we weren’t staying forever,” he said to the quiet kitchen.
But the notion had crossed your mind, hadn’t it?
Of course it had. Just the thought of her pretty face smiling at him in the sunshine the day he’d taken her and Shaun fishing and of the way her lips had felt on his had almost cemented the notion of never leaving. It had been years since he’d experienced anything like the sensation of really being alive.
Evan cast the thoughts away and stood, his feet carrying him to his room. He took out his suitcase and began to fill it with clothes.
Shaun woke a half hour later, and Evan cooked him breakfast in the spotless kitchen. After they’d both eaten, he helped Shaun trace the alphabet and numbers to thirty, saying letters and numerals aloud as the dry-erase marker squeaked on the plastic pages. When the books were packed away, they did Shaun’s exercises, though Evan was careful not to push him too hard, for fear of bringing on another seizure. But Shaun looked strong and resilient, with no sign of giving up. Pride washed through Evan, and a smile that would’ve seemed impossible a few hours ago came to his lips. That was the power of children. Sometimes they were the sail that lifted the adults’ minds out of a free fall.
We’re always thinking that we take care of them, and more often than not it’s the other way around.
Bolstered by how well Shaun did, Evan showed him the sunshine glittering off the lake outside.
“Wanna go swimming, buddy?”
The boy looked at him, and then glanced out to the lake, a thoughtful expression on his face.
“Swimming? Do you want to swim?”
“Swum?”