Barry did his best to eat, but he had no appetite. When his mother asked him what was wrong, he didn't reply. The look on his father's face halted further discussion. After dinner, Barry tried to watch television. He couldn't focus on the show. Later on, his father got very drunk, split Barry' s lip open with a backhand slap, and chased his mother around the house with a belt, laughing and shouting. Barry fled for the safety of his bedroom, and put his fingers in his ears to block out the sounds of leather meeting flesh, and of his mother 's screams, and his father's curses. He' d tried to help her once before, and as a result, had been out of school for a week until the bruises faded. Afterward, his mother had made him promise never to do it again. And he hadn't. Not because of his promise, but because he was afraid. Afraid of what his father would do the next time.
So he did nothing.
Under his pillow was a BB pistol, powered by a CO2 cartridge. It looked just like the gun Clint Eastwood used in his Dirty Harry movies. Barry often wished it were the real thing. Sometimes, when his father was passed out drunk and there was no danger of waking him up, Barry would creep up beside him in the darkness and point the BB pistol at his head.
But not tonight.
Barry cried himself to sleep; hot tears, full of shame and anger and hopelessness. He dreamed of monsters.
Doug cowered in bed; dirty flannel SpiderMan sheets pulled up over his head, he listened to his mother pawing at his doorknob, pleading drunkenly, her speech slurred by vodka, whispering the things she wanted to do to him, things Doug had read about in Hustler. Dirty things. He' d never told Barry or Timmy, but those things filled him with dread. The same pictures of naked women that his friends drooled and snickered over made him feel queasy.
He'd seen those private feminine parts in real life, and it was horrible. The thing his mother had between her legs looked nothing like the women in the pictures. It didn ' t offer the same promise. It was a dark place, full of shame and guilt and nausea.
'Doug? Dougie? Come on, baby, open the door for Mommy.'
'Go away,' Doug whispered. 'Please, go away.'
Over his bed were three movie posters from Friday the 13th, Parts 2, 3, and 4. Though none of the boys were old enough to see the films at the theater, they all knew the story. Doug stared at the sinister image the killer, Jason, with his bloody machete. It was preferable to what waited outside his door.
'Doug? I know you're awake. Open up.'
'Go away and leave me alone.'
'I've got a present for you. It's a surprise.'
He bit his lip and fought back tears.
'Can you guess what it is? I'm wearing it. Let me in and we'll do some new things.' He stayed silent.
'Doug? Open this door. Quit being a baby. I've told you before. You're not Mommy's little boy anymore. You're Mommy' s man. And Mommy needs a man. Mommy needs a man bad.'
She shoved against the door with all her weight, but the deadbolt he'd installed held firm. He'd purchased the lock at the hardware store; paid for it with money he'd earned raking the neighbor's yards last fall. Timmy and Barry had teased him about it, not knowing its real purpose.
'Douglas Elmore Keiser, you open this door right fucking now.' She hammered on the door with her fists. Doug heard a glass bottle roll across the floor. He stifled his sobs so that she wouldn' t hear. He plucked a tiny yellow Lego block from the floor and squeezed it until his knuckles turned white. The hard plastic contours dug into his palm.
Eventually, she stumbled back into the living room, but not before telling Doug through the closed door that he was just as worthless as his nogood, limpdick father. Doug knew why his father had left, knew why he'd run off with that waitress. It didn't matter what he told his friends; he told himself the same lies during the day. At night, he understood the real reason.
He fell asleep, crying and nauseated.
He also dreamed of monsters.
Timmy lay in bed with his headphones on, tuned in to 98YCR out of Hanover, but they were playing 'Pass the Dutchy' by Musical Youth, which he hated, so he switched over to 98Rock out of Baltimore, and listened to 'Yeah, Yeah, Yeah' by Kix instead. That was much better. His parents didn't like him listening to that type of music, especially Ozzy Osbourne (whom Reverend Moore had deemed a Satanist) so, of course, Timmy listened to it every chance he got. Kix had played at the York Fairgrounds the year before. He' d begged his parents to let him go, and of course, they hadn't.
Earlier, he'd been watching a movie on his little blackandwhite television, The Car, which had been corny but sort of cool, too. At least it had taken his mind off things for a while. But then his mother had told him to turn it off and go to sleep. He 'd obeyed the first command, but found the second one impossible.
He was exhausted, both physically and emotionally, but Timmy couldn't sleep. His mind kept running through the day' s events, playing back the funeral. When he closed his eyes, he saw his grandfather lying in his coffin. His mother 's voice echoed in his mind. 'It looks like he's sleeping.'
Timmy turned on his flashlight, careful not to let the beam shine under the crack of his door, which would alert his parents to the fact that he was still awake. He shined it around the room.
G.I. Joe and Star Wars action figures stared back at him. A toy motorcycle and his baseball glove stuck out from under the bed. Posters adorned the wall: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and The Empire Strikes Back, Madonna lying on her back, pouting for the camera; Joan Jett, sexy with a guitar; the album covers for Iron Maiden 's Powerslave and Dio's The Last In Line (much to his mother' s chagrin); all of the heroes and villains that populated the Marvel Comics Universe, as depicted by John Romita, Jr.; dinosaurs pulled from the pages of National Geographic.
His bookshelves overflowed with books, magazines, and comics; Hardy Boys hardcovers, Paul Zindel paperbacks (Zindel was the boys' version of Judy Blume), back issues of Boys Life, Mad, Crazy, and others. Other treasures sat atop his dressera model of SpiderMan fighting Kraven the Hunter that his father had helped him build, his piggy bank that doubled as a globe, a blue glass race car that had once held Avon aftershave, and a small wooden box that his grandfather had given him. Inside were his most secret possessions: a wooden nickel and pocketknife (also both given to him by his grandfather), a rubber whoopee cushion, fauxgold collector 's coin featuring the Hulk, the rattle from a rattlesnake his grandfather had killed while hunting, marbles, some of his father' s old fly lures from when he was a boy, and buried in the bottom, a dried dandelion and a note. Katie Moore had given him the last two items at a church picnic when they were much younger first and second grades, respectively. The note simply said, in a childish scrawl, I like you Timmy. He' d been embarrassed by it at the time, still under the firm belief that girls were infected with cooties. Despite that, he 'd never thrown it out, nor shown it to anyone else.
In the darkness, he reread the latest issue of G.I. Combat with a flashlight, until his eyes finally drooped, then closed. The flashlight slipped from his limp hand and rolled onto the floor. Eventually, the batteries died.
Timmy's breathing grew shallow. Tears soaked his pillow as he slept. He dreamed about his grandfather, and in the dream, Dane Graco' s grave was an empty hole in the ground. In the distance, he heard a woman screaming.
Closer to him, something growled.
Although he didn't want to, Timmy shuffled closer to his grandfather's empty grave. When he looked closer, he saw that it wasn't empty after all. The hole was full of monsters.
Chapter Four
The dead slept, too, but did not dream.
James Sawyer was fortythree when he died of complications from Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Before that, he' d worked second shift at the paper mill, where he operated a forklift in the shipping and receiving department. In his spare time, he enjoyed going deer hunting and putting model cars and airplanes
