The book he selected was composed of handwriting, but he was too tired to make much more than a feeble effort at it. Setting aside this provided book, a glance was spared for the wall-mounted clock. With a minute hand that did not move, only a rounded hour was offered. (The timepiece was assumed to be off by two hours.)
Liam brushed his teeth and prepared for bed.
Two switches were presented on the wall’s switch plate, but the guest could not conceive to what the second switch tended. It produced a distant click when flipped, though only the hall lay outside his door.
With little delay, he crawled onto the bed to blot out these associations. The bedding was ice cold, though the linen sheets were crisp and fragrant. The dark promised unconsciousness, if no respite from pain in his wrist. He was certain, after a few minutes, that he heard the sleeping bag downstairs scratching its way down the stringer door face.
Eventually the sleeper dipped into the equable pond, yet recoiled with myoclonus when his first step found no bottom. A second attempt pushed him through the membrane, and his body sank into turbid, forgotten sensation.
The impression first intruded on a dream, of which Liam could not separate a particular instance of it until the second of his waking. Prior to it, he thought he watched his unlatched bedroom door sway back and forth but never properly open. A strong draft was not responsible for this since a repeated tapping, or swipe of something hard and nail-like, struck the door’s outside stile with each lurch.
This scratching was not excited but methodical, as to rouse a sleeper to the distress of pet seeking entry into the room. This inborn understanding set Liam to execute the task, but the counterpane draping his body became an extension of his paralysis.
The subject matter of this dream was a frequent one. Many more generations of dogs required his assistance in dreams than were a factual number; and perhaps these nocturnal visitations included wolves on the cusp of domestication, whose packs stuck close to campfires and guarded its satellites.
Something had, nevertheless, intruded on his sleep. But the bedroom door pushed from the top of its frame and not the bottom. No dog (unless a very large one) could rear so high on it. This disturbance was not the downstairs sleeping bag, which would have completely deflated by that late hour. More likely this was tree branch scraping an exterior wall.
This quieting logic sent the listener ambling back into light sleep.
It may have been at the end of the next REM cycle, but tapping returned with intensity, and in being fully awakened by it, Liam tracked the sound not to the door but to the window. There, below the ledge, stood a blurry figure staring up at him.
Howard had been throwing pebbles at the panes for sometime.
The riser rubbed the ocular obstruction from his eyes and navigated the dark unfamiliar house to the front door, yet was vexed in imagining how his friend deduced which bedroom he chose to bed in.
“Yours was the only window that was closed, so I guessed you wished to escape the cold draft,” explained the late-hour visitor.
“Why did you come?” was the next necessary question.
“I checked on your house.”
Liam moaned (not a little). “I only just left the house this evening. You are to check it tomorrow.”
The friend nodded, confused, yet showed little excitement in relating, “A trespasser is in your attic.”
“Who is in my attic?”
“Not a who but a what.”
“An animal?”
“I did not fully see it because it was dark, but by its sluggishness I presumed the interloper had been sleeping. Its legs were either broken, or there were more than two of them. They did not, in any scheme, move naturally, and I did not wait around to make a precise determination about their fitness.”
“It was probably a coyote,” said the homeowner. “Run it off with a ladle and pot. Make sure you block the front door with the bookrack and leave by the backdoor, which has a better latch.”
Howard reached into his jacket pocket and produced an item that, in its commendable utility, rescued his travel from being a vain undertaking.
“A flashlight!” heralded Liam. “I forgot to pack one! Don’t you need a light to find your way back and flush the invader from my attic?”
“I have walked these byways many times in sleep, and without a moon.”
This estimation was met skeptically.
“Guard yourself,” advised Howard. “Every window of this house is boarded-up on the ground floor. Who would lure someone into a place under these conditions?”
Liam had not noticed this feature from his earlier examination of the premises.
Gratitude sent his friend away, and the houseguest returned to the staircase, better able to see it with the torch. From the top step, he looked back over his short jog and realized that, curiously, the motion light that greeted his arrival to the house had not come on in due course, either in his descent or ascent of the stairs.
He did not go to bed immediately but returned to his upstairs bedroom window. Nothing of his late night visitor was seen striding across the adjacent field, or toward the road, although a disturbance in a hedge had him thinking Howard had tripped nearby and fallen.
The stubborn window sash gave, allowing the searcher to stick his flashlight over the sill. “Don’t go stumbling over abandoned grocery carts out there,” he called down to the rustle.
He received no reply.
The hedge was luridly green in the glow, and within its shadow other shadows formed. These were distinguished by movement, which he regrettably compared to outlines of streaming individuals tracking in single file parallel to the hedgerow. They may have been glimpsed on a lane beyond the leafage or, bizarrely, their suggestion of shape and motion was a hypnotic product of the shrub itself. Something in how these parading figures overlapped and crept together indicated a threat, first of trespassers, and then of unique segments composing a ravenous caterpillar or millipede.
His friend’s description of what was discovered in his attic was recalled, and then also the choreography he witnessed from the road during his journey. Liam did not leave the window until a wind untangled these nightmarish elements from the landscape and settled everything to natural explanation. He turned off the flashlight, shut the sash, and returned to bed.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.