Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,46

this side of overgrown, the house was majestic on its hill. Grand. Unshakable. Matilda had been right.

The man on the ceiling opens his mouth and begins eating the wall by the staircase. First he has to taste it. He rests the dark holes that have been drilled into his face for nostrils against the brittle flocked wallpaper and sniffs out decades’ worth of noise, conversation, and prayers. Then he slips his teeth over the edges and pulls it away from the wall, shoveling the crackling paper into his dark maw with fingers curved into claws. Tiny trains of silverfish drift down the exposed wall before the man on the ceiling devours them as well, then his abrasive tongue scoops out the crumbling plaster from the wooden lath and minutes later he has started on the framing itself.

Powerless to stop him, I watch as he sups on the dream of my life. Suddenly I am sixteen again and this life I have written for myself is all ahead of me, and impossibly out of reach.

Melanie was looking left at the catalpa tree between the sidewalk and the street, worrying as she did every spring that this time it really would never leaf out and she would discover it was dead, had died over the winter and she hadn’t known, had in fact always been secretly dead, when she turned right to go up the steps to her house. Stumbled. Almost fell. There were no steps. There was no hill.

She looked up. There was no house.

And she knew there never had been.

There never had been a family. She had never had children.

She had somehow made up: sweet troubled Christopher, Mark who heard voices and saw the molecules dancing in tree trunks and most of the time was glad, Veronica of the magnificent chestnut hair and heart bursting painfully with love, Anthony whose laughter had been like seashells, Joe for whom the world was an endless adventure, Gabriella who knew how to go inside herself and knew to tell you what she was doing there: “I be calm.”

She’d made up the golden cat Cinnabar, who would come to purr on her chest and ease the pain away. She’d made up the hoya plant that sent out improbable white flowers off a leafless woody stem too far into the dining room. She’d made up the rainbows on the kitchen walls from the prisms she hung in the south window.

She’d made up Steve.

There had never been love.

There had never been a miracle.

Angels. Our lives are filled with angels.

The man on the ceiling smiles in the midst of the emptiness, his wings beating heavily against the clouds, his teeth the color of the cold I am feeling now. Melanie used to worry so much when I went out late at night for milk, or ice cream for the both of us, that I’d need to call her from a phone booth if I thought I’d be longer than the forty-five minutes it took for her anxiety and her fantasies about all that can happen to people to kick in. Sometimes she fantasized about the police showing up at the door to let her know about the terrible accident I’d had, or sometimes I just didn’t come back—I got the milk or the ice cream and I just kept on going.

I can’t say that I was always helpful. Sometimes I’d tell her I had to come home because the ice cream would melt if I didn’t get it into the freezer right away. I’m not sure that was very reassuring.

What I tried not to think about was what if I never could find my way home, what if things weren’t as I’d left them. What if everything had changed? One night I got lost along the southern edge of the city after a late night movie and wandered for an hour or so convinced that my worst fantasies had come true.

The man on the ceiling smiles and begins devouring my dream of the sky.

A wise man asks me, when I’ve told him this story of my vanishing home again, “And then what?”

I glare at him. He’s supposed to understand me. “What do you mean?”

“And then what happens? After you discover that your house and your family have disappeared?”

“Not disappeared,” I point out irritably. “Have never existed.”

“Yes. Have never existed. And then what happens?”

I’ve never thought of that. The never-having-existed seems final enough, awful enough. I can’t think of anything to say, so I don’t say anything, hoping