Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,124

gone back in there, then I’m too late anyway. And if they haven’t, my leaping about just might scare them in that direction. In my head, I’m casting around for something to say that will hold them while I swing my gaze back and forth, up to the ceiling and down again.

“I was going to tell you about the possum, right? One night, maybe eight months or so after you were…” The word curls on my tongue like a dead caterpillar. I say it anyway. “Born.” Nothing screams in my face or flies at me, and my voice doesn’t break. And I think something might have fluttered across the room from me, something other than the curtains. I have to believe it did. And the damp is still in here.

“It was pretty amazing,” I say fast, staring at where the flutter was, as though I could pin it there. “Lizzie kicked me and woke me up. ‘You hear that?’ she asked. And of course, I did. Fast, hard scrabbling, click-click-click, from right in here. We came running and saw a tail disappear behind the dresser. There was a dresser, then, I made it myself. The drawers came out sideways and the handles formed kind of a pumpkin-face, just for fun, you know? Anyway, I got down on my hands and knees and found this huge, white possum staring right at me. I didn’t even know there were possums here. This one took a single look at me and keeled over with its feet in the air. Playing dead.”

I throw myself on the ground with my feet in the air. It’s like a memory, a dream, a memory of a dream, but I half-believe I feel a weight on the soles of my feet, as though something has climbed onto them, for a ride, maybe.

“I got a broom. Your…Lizzie got a trash can. And for the next, I don’t know, three hours, probably, we chased this thing around and around the room. We had the windows wide open. All it had to do was hop up and out. Instead, it hid behind the dresser, playing dead, until I poked it with the broom, and then it would race along the baseboard or into the middle of the room and flip on its back again, as if to say, okay, now I’m really dead, and we couldn’t get it to go up and out. We couldn’t get it to do anything but die. Over and over and over. And…”

I stop, lower my legs abruptly, sit up. I don’t say the rest. How, at 3:45 in the morning, Lizzie dropped the trash can to the floor, looked at me, and burst out crying. Threw her glasses at the wall and broke one of the lenses and wept while I stood there, so tired, with this possum belly-up at my feet and the sea air flooding the room. I’d loved the laughing. I could hardly stand up for exhaustion, and I’d loved laughing with Lizzie so goddamn much.

“Lizzie,” I’d said. “I mean, fuck. Not everything has to relate to that. Does it? Does everything we ever think or do, for the rest of our lives…” But of course, it does. I think I even knew that then. And that was after only one.

“Would you like to go for a walk?” I say carefully, clearly. Because this is it. The only thing I can think of, and therefore the only chance we have. How does one get a child to listen, really? I wouldn’t know. “We’ll go for a stroll, okay? Get nice and sleepy?” I still can’t see anything. Most of the other times, I’ve caught half a glimpse, at some point, a trail of shadow. Turning, leaving the door cracked open behind me, I head for the living room. I slide my trench coat over my boxers and Green Apple T-shirt, slip my tennis shoes onto my bare feet. My ankles will be freezing. In the pocket of my coat, I feel the matchbook I left there, the single, tiny, silver key. It has been two months, at least, since the last time they came, or at least since they let me know it. But I have stayed ready.

As I step onto our stoop, wait a few seconds, and pull the door closed, I am flooded with sensory memory—it’s like being dunked—of the day I first became aware. Over two years ago, now. Over a year after the first one. Halfway to dreaming,