Night Terrors

The child's laughter was the worst of all. With her red hair cascading down her rotting face, she laughed, always facing Charles, looking dead into his eyes. The wind blew through her tattered dress and tattered torso, the ripped flesh at one moment seeming like a terrible injury and at another like a part that had fallen off naturally. She opened her mouth wide and wailed a screeching laugh that pierced the drums of Charles Wallace's ears.

The child did not walk but appeared and disappeared and re-appeared as a random apparition in the darkened abyss of Charles Wallace’s room in a haunted asylum in the Appalachian foothills. As she grew closer, Charles could define no specific threat the child posed except for her insistence that she existed and the implication that he did not.

That and the fact that she was just a harbinger, for as soon as she disappeared for the last time, the red-haired hag appeared from the same dark corner, replacing the child and adding only the horror of hope. And then, without obeisance, the hag disappeared, and without a sense of having woken from a dream, Charles Wallace sat at the edge of his bed waiting for sunrise.

"These," Charles decided aloud, "are not run-of-the-mill night terrors."

The sunrise he'd waited for in silent solitude made its way over the opposing side of the old farmhouse, stretching long shadows across the dewy valley toward the bases of the Appalachian foothills. The immediate range of mountains presented an impenetrable fortress surrounding the flood plains, cow pastures and pecan groves. Charles watched the morning drama unfold from his third story room in the Avalon Sanitarium.

The shadows stretched and retreated, a dark tide under the sparkling light of antic sprites dispersing across the furtive fog. He'd been awake and afraid since the visitation: sitting, cowering, quietly praying for dawn. And when it broke, indirect light spilled in, casting long shadows in his room—dancing figures that scared away the threat of new visitations.

Charles could smell breakfast cooking downstairs, so he dressed in unnecessarily formal attire that included a neck wrap tucked into his collared shirt. Formality gave Charles a sense of normality, a nostalgic reminder of a life before the sanitarium, a wistful keepsake of a time that he, when pressed, couldn't even vaguely recall.

He plucked his tweed coat from a round iron fixture that had been screwed in about waist-high on the wall—waist-high to Charles, but Charles was tall. There was another one on the opposite wall where he hung his least favorite hat. The large I-bolts, his counselor had told him, had been used when the original owner's wife had come to visit.

Ironically, the wife, who'd inherited the land, had been made a permanent resident of a sanitarium south of the mountain line. Her husband would, on occasion, bring her to the home, but the house had to be modified to accommodate her particular condition. The I-bolts allowed her to be restrained while standing, humanely decreasing bedsores and allowing the wife to look out over the pecan groves and foggy flood plains of Avalon.

The restraints didn't intimidate Charles any more than the mountains or the sanitarium itself. Something comforting, there was, in the formality and conventions of restraints and foothills—a society of boundaries like love. Something, there is, in freedom, however—a lost fragmented memory, a disintegrating structure.

On the way down to breakfast, Charles passed the usual cast of residents who wandered the halls, usually in bathrobes, looking at the various artworks that almost completely hid the walls—paintings of fruit overflowing in bowls and faceless women in white bonnets working the fields. Charles did not know what some of the residents' faces looked like, and the others had expressionless faces anyway. He made no eye contact with any of them as he descended two flights of stairs to the east dining room. The other residents were free to do what they wanted—hopeless cases they were. He, on the other hand, had hope of an appointment.

He sat at his regular place, facing out through the windows of a porch that had been converted into a Florida room. Two poached eggs, melon, and coffee waited. He tried to eat first, and he had started, but he couldn't contain his excitement. He swallowed some coffee and checked under the napkin.

There, he found a small white envelope sealed with a golden fleur-de-lis sticker. He closed his eyes and opened the envelope, trying not to tear the design. Inside, he found the stiff white appointment card he'd longed to find:

Patient  Charles Wallace  

has an appointment to see

counselor  Raya Lethe

at  her office  at  9:00 a.m.

He finished eating and waited as long as he could. He decided that he did not want to be late, so at 8:45 he stood, placed the invitation in his pocket, and walked down the hallway to meet the counselor—his counselor. At first, he sat on a wooden bench outside her office, but he sensed that the office was empty. He could hear no sounds after a few minutes, even though he could hear other residents walking slowly down the carpeted hall around the corner.

When he put his ear to the door, he realized the door was not latched. It opened to a dark room. Charles felt up the side of the wall for a light switch, but he could not find one. He slung the door open, allowing the morning light from the foyer to show him a totally empty room.

There was no chair, no desk, no phone, and no lamp. This arrangement of furniture is what he thought he'd remembered. This, he thought, could have come from the time before, but he had no idea. Regardless, only emptiness filled the room, and as for Lethe, he saw only her absence.

"Stop. Wait." An elderly woman, maybe in her late seventies, had walked down the hall. She looked straight ahead as if she were taking great care not to fall. "Where is the...?"

He could tell the woman was going to walk by. Charles grabbed her by the shoulders to stop her. She looked straight ahead even when Charles stood directly in front of her.

"Where is Miss Lethe—Miss Lethe, the counselor? Where is she?"

The woman waited until Charles let her go, and then she continued her slow, steady pace down the hall. He re-checked the room, and then he re-checked the invitation. He walked back toward the dining room and the staircase where he saw a man looking at an oil painting of another faceless man on a ladder reaching a stick up into an apple tree.

"Where is she?" Charles asked and turned the man around. "Where is Miss Lethe—Miss Raya Lethe? Where is the counselor?" The man simply continued to turn when Charles let him go until he'd spun full circle and stared again at the painting.

He then heard another person descending the stairs, a woman—a younger woman this time—about Charles's age. He ran to the stairs to jump in front of her before she could get to the bottom. She tried to go around him one way, and then the other while Charles asked, "Why has she left me? I have to tell her about the dream. I have to tell her about the visitation."

When the woman gave up trying to walk around Charles, she finally looked him in the eyes and smirked.

"What?" he asked. "What was that?"

Then she laughed a little before laughing a little more until she finally spewed laughter into Charles's distraught face.

"What are you laughing at? What?"

Charles stood aside and let her pass, and when she did, she joined the rest of the residents that Charles had encountered earlier. One at a time, they all broke into laughter. The once lifeless covey of fellow residents had become animated and even cooperative, standing and laughing at Charles.

"Where is she? What have you people done with the counselor? I have to see—"

"No, Mr. Wallace, you want to look."

Charles turned to see a man in overalls standing on the landing at the second floor. At first, the man did not look at Charles; then, he seemed to have been always watching him. Charles ascended to the man at the top of first staircase.

"What do you mean by that?" Charles asked him. "I demand to know...." Without any re-action from the man upstairs, Charles realized he had no right to demand anything, including the right to know.

"I mean simply, my boy, that you go through this cycle every day. Terrors, breakfast, panic, sex, blackout, terrors, and start again. You should get some real sleep, and then try doing something terribly different tomorrow."

Charles had become aware that the laughter had stopped, and then he looked down to see that the rabble had dispersed.

"I can't sleep," Charles told the caretaker. "The nightmare returns. The girl accuses me, and the hag threatens me."

"Nightmares?" the man said. "Oh, I say, you really do need some sleep. What, pray-tell, leads you to the conclusion that she is a nightmare?"

"She? But there are two: a girl and—"

"See, as I say, you look, but you don't see. Try hard, Charles, to do something original tomorrow."

"If only.... If only I could remember what I did before," Charles said.

"Before what, Charles?"

"Wait," Charles said. "How do you even know my name is Charles?"

"How do you know I am the caretaker, Charles?"

Charles had no answer for this. "How did you even know I thought—?"

"Some days," the man continued, "you ask me who I am, and some days you do not. Some days you remember just that much, and some days you don't care. But I keep you from returning to her. Carry on, my boy." The caretaker had begun to descend the stairs. "Carry on."

Charles regained faith and returned to his bedroom where he slung the door open and found the counselor standing and looking out the window where Charles had watched the sunrise spread across the sanitarium yard. She wore an Easter dress with festive flower prints—a mostly white dress with flowers of half the colors in the world. She had long blond hair and blue eyes that sparkled in his soul as she turned to face him.

"You have to sleep, Charlie," she said.

Charles realized this was probably the most beautiful girl who'd ever spoken to him. She was younger, but not unreasonably younger. Charles really couldn't guess her age. Maybe she was whatever age she wanted to be. Or worse—maybe she was whatever age he wanted her to be.

"I've tried, but the visits—they wake me up, and then I just sit on the bed there and wait for daylight."

"Here on this bed?" she asked, sitting on the edge of the bed.

"Like this?" she asked. She patted the bed. He didn't respond.

"Why do you wait for daylight, Charlie?"

"Because," he said, "you come at daylight. When you are here, the visitors are not."

"Sit with me, Charlie." She patted the bed. This time, he could not refuse. "Do you realize," she said, "that this is the first time you've ever admitted this? You've never admitted that you needed me. In fact, you've never admitted any weakness at all. Ever."

"Why would I do that now?" he asked honestly. "Do you think it's because...?"

He stopped because she had started to smile. She closed her eyes, smiled, and even rolled her head around as if she were getting a massage or was hearing her favorite song.

"Go ahead, Charlie. Go ahead and say it."

"I was just going to say that...that maybe I admitted something...something more because we met here...in my bedroom...in my bed."

"Oh, Charlie. Where did we meet yesterday, Charlie?"

"In your...." He really didn't recall, but he assumed, "We met in your office like we always do. Like we always do."

"Oh, Charlie, can you remember ever meeting in my office? Where did you sit? What did we talk about?"

"I remember you. I remember you are pretty." Charlie closed his eyes, and a flood of soothing realities washed away the darkness in his mind. "I remember the ghosts not being there. I remember a bright light of sweet oblivion where regret and fear will never reach me. Never."

"Do you remember making love to me, Charlie?"

When he opened his eyes, Lethe had disrobed, and Charlie threw his arms around her, allowing himself to be engulfed into her endless light where regret and fear lost all meaning.

"Give yourself to me, Charlie," she said, or someone said. Charlie wasn't sure who said it.

"What? Who are you?"

"Give yourself to me."

Charlie didn't remember saying no, but when he opened his eyes to a room of utter darkness, he knew he must have denied something.

Charlie tried to look out the window, but the world had grown so dark that the night was indistinguishable from the room. He rubbed his right arm down his left shoulder, which was wet from sweat, and he, Charles Wallace, found himself naked and alone.

He knew they would be coming—the visitors, and no sooner did he know than did the little girl walk out of the dark corner. She had red hair, and her white teeth showed through her left cheek where the skin had fallen. He could even see her tongue between her teeth when she laughed. And she fizzled into oblivion on one side of the room and zapped into being in another. And she laughed.

And in a voice he recognized, she said, "Why do you remember me? And you don't remember my sister, the smiling one?" She laughed again. Then she said in that recognizable voice with the rhythm of a nursery rhyme, "She falls away as I now do, and rot away we do. It's true. But she would not--oh she would not--laugh at you as I must do."

"Why? What have I done?"

"Oh, poor man, there is no sin, only regret for what could have been."

Charles closed his eyes. He could take no more. He wanted to scream, maybe for help. Where was sweet Miss Lethe? But he did not scream for fear that his voice would conjure what he loathed most, and when he thought of that, he heard her voice and knew he'd thought aloud.

"And fear of what shall be?"

The hag now stood in the darkness beyond the table in the middle of the room. A single candle arrangement showed that, as always, the girl had been replaced by the hag. She stood beside an empty bookcase and draped her arm across an orange chair covered in protective plastic.

She approached him slowly, saying nothing as usual. He wanted to holler at her to admit something, to threaten him, to tell him what she wanted. But she admitted nothing, and approached at a steady speed that brought her closer but never closer than infinitely far away.

"You think she doesn't really want me," he said. "You think she'll leave me again. Every day, another death. That's what you think."

The hag laughed a shrill little howl and admitted nothing of the sort.

"But it's different now. It's different."

Charles looked at the hag as he never had before. He looked without wavering, like watching a white spot in the darkness until it disappears. This time, however, the hag stopped her laugh, not so much in defeat but in acceptance. She stepped into the corner and looked back at Charles. In the recognizable voice, she said, "But it's nothing, Charles. Can you fathom nothing? Do you not fear nothing and eternity?"

Charles closed his eyes: "Not more than this," he said.

And when he opened his eyes, his counselor walked out of a bright light in the corner that ate the darkness and the furnishings and the sanitarium. Charles, standing, embraced her as she enveloped him.

"This," Charles decided aloud, "was not the run-of-the-mill bliss."