AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She closed her eyes, still smiling. I left the room to shut the front door, where there was already a fantail of snow almost an inch deep. When I came back, my wife was dead. You may scoff at the idea that our son came to escort her out of this life, and you are welcome to. I, on the other hand, once heard my little boy’s voice coming from his closet while he was dying a dozen miles away.
I never told anyone about that, not even Donna.
These memories circled and circled. They were buzzards, they were rattlesnakes. They pecked, stung, wouldn’t let me go. Around midnight I took two more of Greg’s expired Ambien, lay back down, and waited for them to work. Still thinking of how Donna saw Tad grown to manhood as she passed out of the world. That her life ended in such a way should have had a calming effect on me, but it didn’t. The memory of her deathbed kept connecting to the vision I’d had of the boys falling into the snakepit and coming back to reality to discover my hand going back and forth between TWEEDLEDUM and TWEEDLEDEE. Feeling their leavings. Their remains.
I thought, What if I saw them the way Donna saw Tad at the end? What if I actually saw them? Allie did; I know she did.
Seeing Tad had comforted Donna as she crossed the border from life to death. Would those boys comfort me? I didn’t think so. Their comforter was gone. I was a stranger. I was… what? What was I to them?
I didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to be haunted by them, and the idea that it might be happening… that was what was keeping me awake.
I was just beginning to drift off when I heard the rhythmic squeaking. It started all at once and there was no way I could pretend it was the overhead fan in Greg’s living room; it was coming from the en suite bathroom of this very bedroom.
Squeak and squeak and squeak.
I was terrified as a person can only be when they’re alone in a house at the end of a mostly deserted road. But if Donna could face down a rabid St. Bernard with nothing but a baseball bat in defense of her son, surely I could look into the bathroom. It even crossed my mind, as I turned on the night table lamp and got out of bed, that I was imagining that sound. Hadn’t I read somewhere that Ambien can cause hallucinations?
I walked to the left of the bathroom door and stood there against the wall, biting my lip. I turned the knob and pushed the door open. Now the squeaking was louder than ever. It was a big bathroom. Someone was pushing that stroller around in there, back and forth, back and forth.
I reached around the jamb, terribly afraid—I think we always are in such situations—that a hand would close over mine. I found the light switch, fumbled with it for an agonizing length of time that was probably only two or three seconds, and flicked it up. The overheads were fluorescents, nice and bright. In most cases, light is a reliable dispeller of night terrors. Not this time. I still couldn’t see into the bathroom from where I was standing, but on the wall opposite I could see a large shadow going back and forth. It was too amorphous for me to be sure it was that goddamned stroller, but I knew it was. And were the boys pushing it?
How else could it have gotten here?
Boys, I tried to say, but all that came out was a dry whisper. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Boys, you’re not wanted here. You’re not welcome here.”
I realized I was speaking a bastardized version of the Monster Words, with which I had once comforted my little boy.
“It’s my bathroom, not yours. It’s my house, not yours. Go back to where you came from.”
And where would that be? In two child-sized coffins under the earth of Palmetto Grove Cemetery? Were their rotting bodies—their rotting remains—pushing that stroller maniacally back and forth? Were pieces of their dead flesh falling off onto the floor?
Squeak and squeak and squeak.
The shadow on the wall.
Gathering every last ounce of my courage, I stepped away from the wall and went through the door. The squeaking stopped. The abandoned stroller was standing in front of the glass shower stall. Now there were two pairs of black pants draped over the seats and two black coats draped over the backs. Those were burial suits, meant to be worn forever.
While I stared at the pram, frozen by the horror of this thing that had no earthly way to be there, a rattling replaced the pram’s squeaky wheel. It was low at first, as if coming from a distance, but rising until it was the sound of dry bones being shaken in a dozen gourds. I had been looking at the shower stall. Now I looked at Greg’s fancy clawfoot tub, which was long and deep. It was filled to the brim with rattlesnakes. As I watched, one small, supplicating hand rose from the twisting mass, that bathtub rhumba, and stretched out to me.
I fled.
It was the stroller that brought me back to myself.
It was standing in the middle of the flagstone courtyard, just as it had before… only now its shadow was being thrown by a three-quarter moon instead of morning light. I have no memory of running downstairs, wearing only the gym shorts I slept in, or out the patio door. I know I must have come that way because I found it standing open when I went back in.
I left the stroller where it was.
I went back upstairs, dreading every step, telling myself it had been a dream (except for the stroller outside; its presence was undeniable), knowing it hadn’t been. Not a vision, either. It had been a visitation. The only thing that kept me from spending the rest of the night in my rental car with the doors locked was my clear sense that the visitation was over. The house was empty again except for me. Soon, I told myself, it would be entirely empty. I had no intention of staying on Rattlesnake Key when I had a perfectly good house to go back to in Newburyport. The only ghost there was the memory of my dead wife.
The bathroom was empty, as I’d known it would be. There were no rattlesnakes in the tub and no wheel-tracks on the faux marble floor. I went to the gallery and looked down on the courtyard, hoping the stroller would be gone, too. No such luck. It stood there in the moonlight, as real as roses.
But at least it was outside.
I went back to bed, and believe it or not, I slept.
The stroller was still there in the morning, this time with identical white shorts on the seats. Only when I got closer I saw they weren’t completely identical after all. There were red pinstripes running down the legs of one and blue down the other. The shirts bore identical crows, one named HECKLE and one named JEKYLL. I had no intention of rolling it back down to Allie Bell’s house. After a long career in the advertising business, I knew an exercise in futility when I encountered one. I put it in my garage instead.
You might ask if it all seemed like a dream in the bright light of morning—with the exception of the restless stroller, that is. The answer is simple: it did not. I had heard the squeaking and seen the moving shadow as the twins pelted their pram furiously back and forth in that bathroom, which was almost the size of a modest apartment’s living room. I had seen the tub filled with snakes.
