* * *
The night was restless,and so were Gregory’s dreams.
He regretted not asking Hanna up to watch movies and find comfort in each other after the strangeness in the basement. Perhaps he could have banished the sounds of screaming from his mind with her laughter, or erased the sensation of weight on his chest with the feeling of her cuddled against him. Time alone meant time spent dwelling on every horrific detail of his basement hallucinations and brooding over the ominous blank spot in his childhood memories.
When he laid down, he didn’t know how he would sleep at all, but unconsciousness pulled him under to drown him in nightmares. He struggled against them, tried to wake from them. They held him in a grip of cold iron and refused to let him go.
The crying comes first. Incessant, offended, the cries of an infant whose needs have not been met. Those cries have gone on for a child’s forever, an ever-present part of his awareness. Cries while he crouches in the darkness, surrounded by the scent of old wool and mothballs, cheap alcohol and acrid smoke, and wishes he could disappear into the darkness.
Because he knows what comes next. The shouting, a man’s slurred voice pitched at the loudness of one whose compromised state has stolen his awareness of volume. “Can’t you shut that kid up? Pop a tit in its mouth or something!”
Young Gregory, the boy in the dream, knows that voice. His mother’s boyfriend. Almost a stepfather, if he spent less time drunk and high and arguing with Gregory’s mother.
Dimly, beneath the dream, an older Gregory knows that voice, too. He cannot place it, not as trapped as he is, but it rings with familiarity every time the man speaks.
“You do it! I’m fucking tired of having that thing attached to me. Get him a fucking binkie.” His mother sounds stoned. Tired. Out of patience and worn thin, even more than usual.
The crying goes on. Gregory covers his ears.
“He just spits it out. God, why can’t he shut up. He’s so loud. All day. All night. Darlene, shut him the fuck up.” Stomping footsteps. The creak of couch springs.
Crying. Always crying.
“Don’t you think I would have shut him up if I knew how? I don’t know what the fuck his problem is.” Stomping footsteps, different ones. Darlene shrieks, “Just shut up! Stop fucking crying for once! Shut up!”
Gregory covers his ears tighter, trying to force out the screaming. It hurts to hear, comes with mental images of her red, contorted face as she screams at him. He just wants it to stop. The screaming. The crying. Stop. Please stop. Please stop. Please stop.
The crying dims, muffles. He presses harder on his ears, thinks it’s working. If he presses hard enough, he won’t be able to hear his mother’s angry shouts or the crying that never stops.
Until it does.
It isn’t silence that follows. It is a pause, an inhalation, an anticipation of what must come after.
The shout of the male voice, suddenly sober and horrified. “What have you done?”
Now, silence falls, and Gregory hates it more than the crying. The closet door slams against the wall as he throws it open–
The shutter on the bedroom window slammed against the wall. A violent gust of wind tore past, battering the shutter over and over with crashes that threatened to shatter it. Startled, confused, Gregory lunged out of bed to grab it and secure it before it broke.
Continued crashing sounds echoed throughout the house.What the hell?Dread seeped into his guts and crawled over his nerves as he listened to the rhythmic slams, all too like the sound of the closet door.
A shriek startled him out of his own fear. “Gran?Gran!”
He pulled on a pair of sweats, then bolted into the hall.
* * *
Hanna dreamedof holding Stuart in her arms as he cried.
Homesickness. Fear. Dread of every sunrise. He has much to cry about, and as she rubs her hand over his back, she knows she can’t allow this to go further. She hadn’t believed the murmurs from the other staff, the whispers about the children from before. A tiny baby. A toddler. A child who would never see a fourth birthday. Now, she does, and she will never forgive herself if she allows it to continue.
Others had failed those children. She wouldn’t fail this one. A governess’s duty was to care for her charge. This one, she would save. Murderous history would not return for another victim.
A scream of darkest rage scares them both. She pushes Stuart away from her to hold him at arm’s length. “Go. Hide in the closet. Tomorrow, I am going to speak to the doctor. We will find a way to end this. Everything will be all right. You’ll see.”
With gentle, urgent hands, she ushers him into the closet. Another bellow startles her, and she slams the closet door–
Hanna woke with a start. The sense of a presence in the room with her struck her before her eyes had even focused. As she blinked away the fog of sleep, the presence coalesced, gathered light from the darkness to become a shape at the end of her bed.