Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,8

had whispered through his teeth, and tightened his fingers on the child’s neck. “You’re not a baby. You’re not fooling anybody.” And DJ had actually bared his teeth, making a thin, hissing whine.

He wakes and he can’t breathe. There is a swimming, suffocating sensation of being stared at, being watched by something that hates him, and he gasps, choking for air. A lady is bending over him, and for a moment he expects her to say: “You’re very lucky, young man. You should be dead.”

But it’s Karen. “What are you doing?” she says. It’s morning, and he struggles to orient himself—he’s on the living room floor, and the television is still going.

“Jesus,” he says, and coughs. “Oh, Jesus.” He is sweating, his face feels hot, but he tries to calm himself in the face of Karen’s horrified stare. “A bad dream,” he says, trying to control his panting breaths. “Jesus,” he says, and shakes his head, trying to smile reassuringly for her. “I got up last night and I couldn’t sleep. I must have passed out while I was watching TV.”

But Karen just gazes at him, her expression frightened and uncertain, as if something about him is transforming. “Gene,” she says. “Are you all right?”

“Sure,” he says, hoarsely, and a shudder passes over him involuntarily. “Of course.” And then he realizes that he is naked. He sits up, covering his crotch self-consciously with his hands, and glances around. He doesn’t see his underwear or his pajama bottoms anywhere nearby. He doesn’t even see the afghan, which he’d had draped over him on the couch while he was watching the mummies on TV. He starts to stand up, awkwardly, and he notices that Frankie is standing there in the archway between the kitchen and the living room, watching him, his arms at his sides like a cowboy who is ready to draw his holstered guns.

“Mom?” Frankie says. “I’m thirsty.”

He drives through his deliveries in a daze. The bees, he thinks. He remembers what Frankie had said a few mornings before, about bees inside his head, buzzing and bumping against the inside of his forehead like a windowpane they were tapping against. That’s the feeling he has now. All the things that he doesn’t quite remember are circling and alighting, vibrating their cellophane wings insistently. He sees himself striking Mandy across the face with the flat of his hand, knocking her off her chair; he sees his grip tightening around the back of DJ’s thin, five-year-old neck, shaking him as he grimaced and wept; and he is aware that there are other things, perhaps even worse, if he thought about it hard enough. All the things that he’d prayed that Karen would never know about him.

He was very drunk on the day that he left them, so drunk that he can barely remember. It was hard to believe that he’d made it all the way to Des Moines on the interstate before he went off the road, tumbling end over end, into darkness. He was laughing, he thought, as the car crumpled around him, and he has to pull his van over to the side of the road, out of fear, as the tickling in his head intensifies. There is an image of Mandy, sitting on the couch as he stormed out, with DJ cradled in her arms, one of DJ’s eyes swollen shut and puffy. There is an image of him in the kitchen, throwing glasses and beer bottles onto the floor, listening to them shatter.

And whether they are dead or not, he knows that they don’t wish him well. They would not want him to be happy—in love with his wife and child. His normal, undeserved life.

When he gets home that night, he feels exhausted. He doesn’t want to think anymore, and for a moment, it seems that he will be allowed a small reprieve. Frankie is in the yard, playing contentedly. Karen is in the kitchen, making hamburgers and corn on the cob, and everything seems okay. But when he sits down to take off his boots, she gives him an angry look.

“Don’t do that in the kitchen,” she says, icily. “Please. I’ve asked you before.”

He looks down at his feet: one shoe unlaced, half-off. “Oh,” he says. “Sorry.”

But when he retreats to the living room, to his recliner, she follows him. She leans against the doorframe, her arms folded, watching as he releases his tired feet from the boots and rubs his hand over the bottom of his