Four
Having Harold as a witness did not, of course, mean that our mothers were going to believe us. Nor did it help matters that when we finally did convince Mom and Aunt Marguerite to come upstairs we found Fluffy sitting on my bed, licking her paws. Glad as I was to see her, the sight gave me a shiver. Nothing had ever come back from underneath my bed before.
Nothing.
“Harold, you know that David has been playing this foolish game for years,” said Aunt Marguerite sharply. “I don't want you to encourage it. His poor mother has enough trouble with him as it is.”
“Just look under the bed,” insisted Harold. “Look at the floor!”
I could have told him what would happen. In fact, now that I think of it, I had told him — several times — when we were younger. He just never believed me. So he was actually surprised that when he finally convinced Aunt Marguerite to get down on her knees and raise the edge of the bedspread all she saw was bare floor.
Harold and my aunt didn't stay much longer. After they left Mom yelled at me for “dragging up that stupid fantasy again.”
And that was the end of things — until later that night, when Fluffy began talking to me.
She had come and curled up on my pillow when I climbed into bed, the way she often did. This had made me a little nervous, but since she had seemed perfectly normal since her reappearance, I had let her stay.
It was storming again when the big clock downstairs struck midnight. As the last chime faded, Fluffy opened her eyes.
They were red.
Now sometimes a cat's eyes will catch the light just the right way to reflect off the back of them or something, and they look red. I've seen that. I know what it looks like.
This was different. Fluffy's eyes were fire red, blazing with their own light. Before I could move she nuzzled her face close to my ear and whispered, “Weztix wants you, David. He wants you to come to the other side.”
I screamed and yanked up the covers, sending Fluffy flying off the bed.
“What's going on up there?” shouted my father.
“It's Fluffy!” I cried. “She's . . . she's . . . “
My voice trailed off as I realized that Dad would never believe me.
“She's what?” he yelled.
“Nothing!” I shouted. “Never mind. Forget it.”
Why did I give up so easily? Because I had been through this a hundred times before. Because I had barely avoided being sent to a mental institution after I had insisted on clinging to the “delusion” that there was something strange under my bed. And most of all, because I didn't know that being sent away would have been infinitely preferable to what lay in store for me.
Fluffy clawed her way back onto the bed. Her eyes blazed in the darkness.
“Go away!” I hissed. “Get out of here!”
Instead of leaving, she slunk onto my chest. “Go under the bed, David,” she hissed. “Weztix wants you under the bed.”
I jumped to my feet, scooped up Fluffy, and threw her out the door. Then I took a flying leap back onto my bed, avoiding at least six feet of the floor. I lay there shaking with terror, wishing I could sleep downstairs for the night. But my parents had put a stop to that one angry night years before.
After I caught my breath, I hung my head over the bed and lifted the edge of the sheet, hoping not to find anything too strange. And what I saw wasn't that strange, really. Just that familiar shimmering grayness. But it scared me now in a way it never had before.
I rolled back onto the bed and stared up into the darkness, wondering if I would make it until morning.
Suddenly I felt something pounce onto the bed. I cut short my scream when I realized it was Fluffy again.
I glanced sideways. The door was still closed.
“How did you get in here?” I whispered.
I know people talk to their pets all the time, but I realized with a kind of terrible fascination that I expected her to answer me.
“The same way I got back from the other side,” she purred. “Once you've been there, doors don't mean that much. But you'd better go soon, David. They're waiting for you.”
“Who?” I asked desperately. “What do they want?”
Instead of answering, Fluffy jumped to the floor and scooted under the bed. I rolled over and stuck my head down again. Heart pounding, I lifted the bedspread. My cat was gone. But the shimmering gray nothingness that had replaced my floor now had a small blue circle in the middle of it.
From the circle came a new voice. “We're waiting for you, David. Come to us. Come to us!”
I rolled back onto the bed, pulled the covers over my head, and tucked the sheets tightly around me, trying to convince myself I would be safe if I just stayed wrapped up that way. I have no idea why I thought that; desperation probably. Who knows? Maybe it would have worked if I hadn't fallen asleep. But when everything is dark and silent and sleep starts tugging at the edges of your mind, even terror can only keep you awake so long. Maybe I could have stayed awake if I had dared to get off the bed and move around. But lying there, wrapped in the sheets, lying still, lying silent, sleep finally claimed me.
Even then, things might have been all right if only I hadn't been such a restless sleeper. But I was, a real tosser and turner, and it probably wasn't long after I fell asleep that I flopped out of my protective cocoon. It probably wasn't much longer before my arm was dangling over the edge of the bed, my fingertips brushing the floor.
I was woken by another hand, cold and damp, grabbing mine.
“Who's there?” I cried, trying to push myself up from the bed.
The cold hand linked with mine gripped me tighter, holding me in place. I screamed, loudly, not caring what my parents thought this time, not caring if I got sent away for special treatment, as long as it got me out of this room, away from this house.
I heard my parents pounding up the stairs, my father cursing as he ran. I continued to scream as loudly as I could. “Let go!” I shrieked. “LET GO!”
The hand began pulling harder.
“David, what's going on in there?” cried Dad. He tried to open the door — I could hear him rattling the knob — but it wouldn't budge, despite the fact that it had no lock. “David? DAVID!”
“It's got me!” I screamed. “It won't let go!”
“What has you?” cried my mother. “David, what is it? What's wrong? Harvey, can't you get that door down?”
The door shuddered as my father threw himself against it, but it held solid.
Another hand grabbed my wrist, adding its strength to the first. Thrashing, twisting, fighting every inch of the way, I was drawn over the edge of the bed. I hit the floor with a thump. The hands continued to pull. Soon my arm was under the bed up to my elbow. With nothing on the floor to hold on to, nothing to give me traction, the rest of my body would soon follow.
“No!” I screamed, pushing my free hand against the side of the bed. “No! No! Let me go!”
I heard my father throw himself against the door again.
The cold hands kept pulling and pulling. I swung myself around, jamming my shoulder against the side of the bed, deciding I would rather let them pull my arm out of its socket than let them pull me under the bed.
A third time my father slammed against the door. It splintered and burst open. Too late. My bed slid across the floor to reveal the swirling gray nothingness that lay waiting beneath it. A horrible crackling filled the air as the nothingness sucked me in.
Somewhere above me, I heard my parents shouting my name.
“Now do you believe me?” I cried.
I was sinking into something like a thick, foul-smelling pudding. It was colder than anything I had ever experienced — a cold that worked its way into the deepest parts of me, penetrating to the center of my bones.
Then, suddenly, I was through the coldness and falling into dark.
The fall only lasted an instant. I landed with a dull thump against something that felt like a mattress, but turned out to be a huge fungus. Above me swirled a cool gray circle with a spot of blue in the center — the place through which I had fallen.
I could still hear my parents shouting my name.
Four torches, mounted on poles, formed a square around me. I heard an evil chuckle to my right. I turned toward it, and the flickering light provided my first sight of the creature who had dragged me here. He was foul looking, with long hair that hung around his shoulders in greasy strings. When he beckoned to me, I saw that he had long, yellowed fingernails; when he smiled, he showed sharp, rotting teeth. His eyes glittered with malice from their deep sockets. Yet for all that, I could tell that he had once been human, which may have been the scariest thing of all.
That, and the fact that he looked oddly familiar. With a shudder, I realized I had seen him in my dreams — or, to be more accurate, in my nightmares.
“Got you at lasssst,” he said in a hissing voice that was filled with deep satisfaction. “Got you at lasssst.”
My terror was so deep that at first I was unable to speak. When I finally realized that he wasn't going to kill me on the spot, I asked in a trembling voice, “Who are you?”
“You mean you don't know?” he replied, sounding genuinely astonished.
I shook my head.
He laughed. “Weztix will tell you,” he said, making an odd little leap. “Weztix will tell you!”
He reached for my hand. When I drew back, his eyes blazed. “Stand up!” he snapped. “We're going to ssssee Weztix.”
“I want to go home,” I whimpered.
“Don't be sssstupid! Now come along. I don't want to have to hurt you.”
He said this last with such feeling that I actually believed him — though if I had understood just why he didn't want to hurt me, I might have been even more terrified than I already was.
It was a terrible journey. The place into which I had fallen was a sort of living nightmare, darkened by strange shadows that stretched and twisted around us, though I could see no source of light, nor anything to block it and cause the shadows. It was as if the darkness had a life and a mind of its own.
I could hear unpleasant noises in the distance: desperate, cackling laughter; sighs so deep they could have been made by a mountain; an odd rumbling; an occasional scream. The dank air smelled so weird I was almost afraid to breathe it.
Eyes peered out at us from the darkness. I was terrified that they might belong to some new creature that would reach out to snatch me away. (Though what could be worse than the situation I was in already is hard to imagine.) Later, unseen hands did pluck at me, but my captor shouted and drove them away. In several places spider webs stretched across our path, and since I was forced to walk in the lead, they continually wrapped themselves across my face. I shuddered each time they did. Other things, less familiar, seemed to brush over my face as well, which was even more frightening.
“Are we in hell?” I asked at one point.
The creature behind me hissed and said, “Don't be ssssilly."
– End Chapter Four –
