The Game has commenced, and Alan’s fear gives me such a thrill, such a shiver-inducing rush of adrenalin that my heart actually skips a beat.

It is played by two people who possess the Talent. Alan and I are playing it in a little coastal town, which is as good a place to play as any.

There are three, I feel, very significant years between us. Of those years I will say this: I developed quickly in cunning, cruelty, selfishness and greed, meaning Alan never stood a chance by the time our mother drew her last breath, her blood gushing forth onto the sheets that her labour had turned her as white as. I lost the only person I was capable of loving. Alan ripped her open to get here.

He was born with the Talent, as I had been, and I had already heard the first whispers of the Game from an uncle visiting my father, there, in that old Edwardian house that we grew up in. I heard these whispers as they drank whiskey, and my uncle smoked his repugnant pipe. Puff-puff he went, like a little train or a chimney.

 Puff-puff he went as he visited me in my room one hot Sunday afternoon when I was eleven. I had watched him playing with Alan in the garden earlier. I had looked down from my bedroom as he showed Alan one of his tricks. It was impressive, I must admit: he seemed to make a necklace disappear from his hand and then reappear hanging from the low bough of a tree at the bottom of the garden. I suppose that Alan considered himself close to this trickster, but I perceived the real truth of the relationship: a man and his obedient pup.

Puff-puff he went as he closed the door and raised his hand in a gesture which I daresay he meant to be calming. What odd notions these monsters have.

“Shh. Hush. There. See? ‘Tis only I. There now. I hear you are scared of rats.”

I was and am. How did he know? Of course, the answer was simple: Alan.

“It is good for someone with the Talent to confront their fears.”

I recall that he was wearing a V-neck pullover with diamond patterns of yellow and orange. He had ginger hair, combed in a neat side pattern. He wore a white shirt under the pullover.

A movement under the covers, and then the thing was beside me–long, hideous tail and cruel eyes.

“I can’t move,” I said, feeling like a prisoner in my own body.

“Do not panic,” he cautioned as the rat scuttled up first onto my lap, and then up my stomach, and eventually onto my face. It smelled of damp, dirty places.

“Please, make it stop,” I pleaded.

It seemed like I sat there for an eternity before he replied.

“Weak little bastard, aren’t you?”

The rat sank its front teeth into the flesh under my right eye. 

“Please.”

“There,” he said with the wave of the hand, the rat instantly vanishing.

“And now I too must take my leave.”

He walked out the door, and although I could now move, fear kept me sitting on the bed, fear that the rat would return.

My heart thudded as, outside, heat oppressed the world and made everyone capable of no more strenuous an outdoor activity than sipping cold drinks on loungers. In fact, my father, in an act of brotherly loyalty and paternal betrayal that I was never able to forgive him for, insisted that this was exactly what my uncle was at his side doing throughout the whole time that he was, in fact, in my room.

“It bit me, father!” I screamed at him as we had it out in the kitchen on the day that he showed his true colours.

“I see no bite marks.”

There were none. I could not account for this.

“He is my brother, and my truest friend,” he continued. “And it is impossible that he could have been with you at all.”

I returned to my room, and we never spoke of it again.

I formed my first horror that night. The Talent allows you to give form to your imaginings, and my mind had, for some time, been tormented by the image of a cat formed entirely from cat claws.

Take a moment to imagine. Imagine a claw first, just as I did. See it scratching a human hand and infecting it. Feel the invasive burn, like a nasty, filthy hypodermic needle. See the colour, not quite white or grey, and yet not quite yellow. Smell it too: a smell like decaying flesh. Now imagine a pile of such claws, and that piecing them together will form a cat –a hollow-eyed, clicking, scratching cat, always in disagreeable temper, always ready with a hiss. Imagine touching it, how its back would yield slightly. Not that you would ever get to touch it, mind you, unless you were fighting it off.

Creating this horror took me three hours of trial and error. However, once perfected, it was at my command, as every horror I would create henceforth would be. I christened it Horror No.1, fancying I would christen them all in this manner, and that they would one day number in their thousands. I lost count–or lost interest in keeping count–quite early on. Take the most recent horror, the one that Alan awoke to just this morning: she is called Yesterdaytodaytomorrow. I could name her nothing else, and will describe her soon. Suffice, for the moment, to say that she is quite dreadful.

That night, I set the cat upon Alan as he slept. He woke with Horror No.1 sitting on his chest, hissing viciously. He screamed, and I had the thing attack. As I lay on my bed, my attention focused completely on what I was making happen, it cut him as deeply as I had hoped it would, and he still has the four diagonal scars across this left cheek to this day.

He ran from his bed, his screams waking my father, who came to my room and demanded that I destroy the thing. I reluctantly did just that, and somewhere in the house, in the dark corner it had retreated to, Horror No.1 vanished back into my imagination.

A man not easily frightened, who in fact might have been immune to fear entirely, my father was simply appalled that his son could have created such a thing as Horror No.1.

“You want to play the Game, I suppose.”

“Yes,” I told him.

“You think you’re a player? Do you see a future in it?” he asked, removing his belt and striking my bare legs. “This is not what the Talent is intended for!” he yelled. “We do not unleash horrors upon the world.” Two more strikes followed, and I thought that a third might follow that, but instead he turned, without saying another word, and left the room.

Now it is February, and it is early morning. I have come to the park, from where I look up into the hills. A car creates a foggy searchlight as it makes its way down towards town. The patchy clouds in the dark morning sky are blast furnace orange, blast furnace black, as the sun begins its slow, furious ascent.

Now, let us say that you had the Talent and wished to play the Game. In general–with some deviations based on style, or upon the whims of the players–it takes the following shape:

 Day 1–dawn: A coin is tossed to determine who will go first. The player who loses the toss drops the mental defences that we are taught to develop from an early age

Day 2: The player going first is given this day to prepare their horror. If it is already prepared, then perhaps the player can refine it.

Day 3–dawn: The horror is given form by the player going first, and it is set upon the opponent, who then must hold their nerve for twenty-four hours. If they do, then, after three days of rest, it is their turn, and so on…

The Game is won when the opponent begs for the horror to be destroyed. He has to say that specific, ancient, most sacred phrase: “No more. Please destroy it. I beg you.”

At this point the victor may withdraw from the game, or agree to another, if their opponent wishes. Some players are content with the glory and retire from playing completely.

And now we come to Yesterdaytodaytomorrow. So-christened because this is what she repeats over and over again in a voice that is more like buzzing–ceaselessly monotone. She is the height and shape of a three-year-old child, but is covered in the feathery hair of a bee. I have given her a yellow dress to wear, and each of her fingers has a venom sack on the end with a stinger protruding from it. The venom is not fatal, but the sting will be far more painful than a cat scratch.

Alan woke one hour ago to find Yesterdaytodaytomorrow standing at the foot of his bed. Her droning recital of the only three words she knows was what stirred him from his sleep. I saw what she saw, saw him sitting up, and the terror on his face. You might wonder how he could have slept at all. However, players know they need their strength for the day to come, and those who have not trained themselves to sleep will often take a remedy.

He ran from the house in his pyjamas. I had Yesterdaytodaytomorrow don a black, oversized, rain poncho that I had purchased especially for her, and pair of red wellington boots. I had her put up the hood as, using my mind, I steered her from the house in pursuit of Alan. If she is challenged–if someone sees her–then I will improvise. These encounters can be amusing sometimes. And should the worst come to the worst and I am forced to destroy her, then I will, and it will be Alan’s turn.

All part of the Game.   

I can give the horror as much attention as is necessary. I am enjoying this early morning stroll, and want to concentrate on that for the most part. Yesterdaytodaytomorrow should catch up with Alan soon. After all, he cannot have got far in his pyjamas.

I check on her progress a little more closely. Imagine an idea or other thought bubbling away at the back of your mind, but enabling you to concentrate on other matters. You can bring it to the forefront whenever you please. That is what I am doing now.

She is buzzing along a street, but it is the wrong one, and she is moving in the wrong direction. In fact, it seems that she is coming towards the park. Gentle early morning tides lap against the beach, and the moon still hangs in the no-longer-night sky.

“Turn,” I command her, and am so perturbed I actually utter the word. “Turn round, Yesterdaytodaytomorrow. Come on.”

I can see her now for real, intently striding towards me, the hood of her poncho still up.

Losing control of a horror is unthinkable. The best ones –the only ones that are worth creating–have to terrify the creator too. It horrifies me to be inside her buzzing head, where all that can be heard is the echoing of those three maddening words.

She has reached the far edge of the park. As she does so, a man comes towards me from the other direction. I assume he has been hiding behind the ruin of a wall that separates the park from the beach. He is, I note, in his pyjamas, although he has acquired a coat and boots from somewhere.

“Alan,” I say by way of a greeting.

“Brother.”

My fair-haired brother, whose handsome face mysteriously no longer has the scars left by Horror No.1.

“What is going on?” I ask, glancing towards Yesterdaytodaytomorrow as she comes to a halt within stinging distance of me. “What have you done?”

“You have at least accepted that I have done something. I am heartened. It saves tiresome explanations, eh?”

I am truly at a loss as to what to say to him. Part of my mind is preoccupied with trying to reason out this conundrum, the other with attempting to regain control of Yesterdaytodaytomorrow.

“Nothing to say, brother?” he asks. “No? Well, I suggest that you begin by asking who won the toss. Who went first?”

“I did,” I reply, pouncing upon the one thing that I am sure of.

“No, I am afraid not.”

“I did.” I incline my head towards the horror. “And I created her.”

“Untrue. OK, well, let us try something else. What is this town called?” 

It is…on the tip of my tongue. Or is it? Is that merely a memory, or my brain coming up with some generic name for a generic seaside town?

“Come now, brother, you are usually so verbose! The fact is I never gave it a name. Perhaps I should have. It is a coastal town – that is all. To be precise, it is an amalgamation of a few I have visited. I have never had much of an imagination, which is the chief reason why I should never have become a player. You were keen to play me though; and I suspected you would have had the bad form to set horrors upon me anyway–ones even worse than that fucking cat from when we were children. I had to have some boundaries, and those of the Game were all that were afforded me.

“So, there I was, eighteen years of age and playing for the first time. How unprepared I was! The horror you conjured up almost drove me to insanity.

“Almost, but not quite. My sanity remained intact, and I was keen to exact revenge upon you, keen to best you at your precious game. However, your command of the Talent was frightening, and this presented a problem.

“Do you remember our uncle? He was very kind to me and assured me he could help. He had devised a move, based on a skill he had learned from a woman in Argentina. It was a move he had only utilised once, but to great effect. He told me his opponent had never recovered his senses, and that he himself had then retired from the Game. The skill had not gone to waste though, and he had continued to use it for his own ends, his own pleasure.

“It took me three arduous years to learn, and when I was ready, I asked if you would agree to a rematch. You did, and very eagerly, I might add.”

I recall none of this. In fact, I am starting to find that attempting to grasp at any facts in this regard is like grasping at smoke.  

“Now,” he continues, “I needed luck. I could think of no plausible way to fix the toss, and so I had to hope you would lose. If not, I would have to steel myself to endure your horror before I got my turn.

“You lost, you lowered your mental defences, and I made my move.”

“What did you do?”

I can tell by the twitch of a smile on his lip that he recognises how perilously close I am to begging.

“I used the skill our uncle taught me.”

“What is the skill?”

“To create one’s own reality in the mind of another. We are in that reality now, and I control every aspect of it.”

Attempting to refute what he has told me would be foolish, especially in light of how I am now feeling. My mind feels suddenly sleep-deprived, and so my thought processes are…sluggish. Meanwhile, Yesterdaytodaytomorrow shimmers and fades from view, reappears, shimmers and fades, over and over again. Her buzzing repetition has ceased, but a poster on a bus shelter has caught my eye in the dawn light. It depicts me as a child holding my uncle’s hand as we walk through a plastic replica of a seaside town inside what looks like a snow globe. The copy reads: Yesterdaytodaytomorrow.

“Now,” he says, “you will say the words, and I will win.”

“No.”

“Well, we will see if you feel differently as the day wears on.”

He vanishes before my eyes.

I wonder where I am really. I wonder where we are playing the Game. Wherever we are, I picture Alan sitting at my bedside, holding my hand as I endure the trance that he has put me into.

No, this is…ludicrous. I won the toss. I went first.

I won the

I should have argued that this is an illegal move. Would that I felt sharp enough to argue!

I feel a hand take mine. It is so strong, and I cannot resist it as it leads me towards the beach, which is covered, every inch of it, with rats. The air is filled with their maddening screech.

Puff-puff we go. Puff-puff goes the owner of the hand, and he whispers, “Shh. Hush. There. See? ‘Tis only I. There now.”

My father is sitting on a bench beside the slide behind the see-saw. He watches as we go.

“They will bite me, father,” I protest.

“They will not leave a mark,” I hear him reply.

I close my eyes and say the only thing I can think to say.

“No more. Please destroy it. I beg you.”

---

Mr. Laverty notes:

“I am currently working on new horror fiction while editing various other pieces and trying to place them with publishers and agents. I live in Scotland and have two daughters. My main horror influences are M.R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu, William Peter Blatty and David Lynch.”

---

In the stacks, my soul is tossed like a tumbleweed.

For every book here that I have read, there are many thousands more—and each one is a ghost, knocking at my skull and demanding entrance. But since I don’t believe in ghosts, I don’t answer their calls, and instead just walk slowly up and down the narrow aisles, arms outstretched, fingers gently whispering against the old cloth and leather bindings. I’m always amazed how some feel so warm to the touch, and others chill the fingers and send shivers to my shoulders.

College has been a pain in the ass, and there are days I wish it was over and I was home in Abilene, back on the farm, and feeling cowhide that still contained the cow. But on late nights, when the rest of the campus is buzzing with their frat parties or looking for love, I’m always drawn back to these dark, narrow library stacks.

My favorite time of year is just after mid-terms, when pretty much every student has found excuses for better places to be, with people whose lives are not measured in the decades since the birth of the printing press. On those days I find myself more often sharing the late-night stacks with old gentlemen, as dry as the leaves of these books, and with as much dust in their hair as these books have on their spines.

Most share a similar look, cut from the same old tweed and straw—retired professors, mostly, who haven’t published since the Nixon administration, but still think their next breakthrough insight is hidden somewhere inside this endless maze.

Mostly, they don’t speak. But they always smile, and they always step aside when they see me enter an aisle.

This past year, as my college career has waned, I’ve found joy in studying the straw men over the tops of these gilt edges, imagining I hear their bones creaking and crackling like old glue, volumes opened for the first time in decades.

It was on one of these late-night stack wanderings that I first saw him.

Older than some. Not as old as most; at least not from what I could see between his floppy hat and upturned collar. I could see the beard that overflowed his coat, which buttoned up to just below his knotted yellow tie. It was a beard of more salt than pepper, and it framed a shadowed face with heavy lids, capped by glasses that distorted his drooping eyes behind impossibly thick lenses.

I don’t quite know why I noticed him, in particular. Perhaps it was because the library seemed especially deserted that night, so there was little else to catch my eye. Or perhaps it was the way he navigated his way through the silence.

Books can take your breath away, to be sure, but they rarely still the rise and fall in your chest for very long. And as I watched the old man in the heavy coat, standing like a redwood among the French poetry, I could swear he wasn’t breathing at all.

One aisle over, I peered at the back of his motionless neck through the shelves, and the only sound I could hear was his thin, bony hand, turning the pages.

Each page was a whisper; a timid mouse poking its nose out of the baseboard and then disappearing again. The moments between those pages were sometimes short and sometimes long, but the stillness between them stirred a loneliness in me that settled like a cloak around my shoulders.

I can’t say I watched him for long. I can’t say I followed him through the library like a balloon on a string. But I can’t say that I didn’t either, because I remember so little of it. Later I only recalled standing at the cold winter window, looking out into the snowy night, and watching my old volume as he emerged from the front of the midnight library. He crossed the street in the yellow glow of the streetlamps and melted into the moonlit campus common. I watched him for as long as I could make out his shadowy form, gliding along as if his long coat met the ground with wheels rather than feet.

I watched him fade and merge with the darkness.

I watched the darkness long after he had faded.

I didn’t expect to recognize the volume of French poetry he had been reading. And yet, when I went looking for it on the shelf, I walked right to it—as if it was marked with invisible ink and radium. When I tried to pull it off the shelf, at first it refused to budge. When I opened it, pages cracked and came loose, and dust angels danced in the fluorescent light.

When I put it away, it rested askew, no matter how many times I tried to make it right.

#

In the days since I saw the Shade (as I’ve come to call him), I have wondered if perhaps he was the product of my late-night imagination, or a bit of undigested dinner, as Dickens might say. I’ve told no one about him, although I don’t know who I would even consider telling. After all, my best friends all wear Dewey Decimal numbers on their spines, and they are much better at speaking than listening.

But there was something about the way he floated through these aisles that left me thrilled and confused, the way you can sometimes feel if you stand up too quickly and fear you will faint. When I think of him, it feels like that moment when you are still conscious enough to plan how you will fall safely, and yet still feel everything slipping away like leaves on the surface of rushing water.

But these feelings have not stopped me from imagining all sorts of stories for him.

I imagine he was born in this very library a century ago, when someone accidentally pushed a copy of Dante off a shelf as they passed. When the book hit the floor, rather that a startling crack, it landed with a whisper and a bloom. I imagine the Shade unfolding silently into being in the swirling dust. I imagine him silent and confused, as startled by his sudden birth as the books that looked upon him in their mute astonishment.

Or I imagine him birthed more slowly, as a patchwork quilt of every discontented college student and tired professor who has ever wandered here. Made up of a sigh here, a laugh there, his is a life of fatigue and panic and joy, all brought together here in this laboratory of the mind. The library seems to ask that he return something to these volumes that have given so much and asked for so little in return.

In this fancy, the Shade isn’t reading the books he scans so silently; he’s recharging them. Giving them life. Keeping them alive for those decades when not a single warm hand turns their pages.

#

He came back a week later.

I had not expected him to, but that didn’t prevent me from spending more and more late nights in French Poetry, or the Classics, or Elizabethan Fiction. I found him with what may have been a copy of Herodotus in his bony fingers. The same dark coat turned up at the collar. The same floppy hat shading his face. The same stillness. The same whispering turn of the page.

This time I made bold enough to turn the corner into his aisle, trying desperately to look casual, as if we had both been drawn to obscure Greek and Roman history. Glancing along each shelf, pretending to read the spines, I worked my way closer to him, listening intently for the gentle stirring of the dusty air as he turned each page.

Standing next to him, I was startled to smell rain. Only a foot away from his hunched shoulders, I was transported to evenings at home in Abilene, alone on the porch, as the rain fell and made everything fresh and new and gray. The whisper of his fingers on the pages was like those gentle drops from the roof into the gardens below. He was only inches away now, and I remembered how I would listen to that gentle sound, safe and dry at the porch railing, while the rain dripped just inches from my nose. I remembered how I would slowly reach a out a hand from the safety of the porch and let those drops cascade across my open palm. I remembered tasting that rain, looking apprehensively over my shoulder for my mother, who would surely scold me and tell me that water off the roof was not clean. Every impulse I had was to dash from the porch into the downpour, to let it coat me and cover me and cleanse me and let me begin life anew.

I reached out and it wasn’t the rain that I felt, but the rough wool of his heavy coat. The journey from Abilene back to the Stacks was brief, but it was not violent or startling. And finding myself standing behind the Shade with my hand on his shoulder was less frightening than it should have been.

But the pages had stopped turning. The stillness was overwhelming. And despite the solidity under my palm, I knew I was now alone with Homer and Herodotus and Aeschylus.

#

The snow was falling as I walked slowly away from the library, for what I knew would be the last time. There were so many more libraries in the world; so many more stacks with dusty books that were craving my touch. This library would be closed for a time, I knew, after they discovered the body of the young man in the classics. I was sad for my family in Abilene, but I knew that my sadness would fade. By the time I found my new library, there would only be the books. There would no longer be any grief, and there would no longer be any loneliness.

Longing was for the young, and I was no longer young. It was time to put away the childish things, as they taught in Sunday School. Or perhaps that was just something I read.

There would be time, someday, for childish things once again. But not until I felt that new hand on my shoulder.

How many decades? How many thousands upon thousands of cracking spines and whispering pages? How many deep, dark, lonely stacks in how many libraries?

New York? Butte Montana? Harvard Square? Oxford?

I’d find my first by morning.

---

Wess Mongo Jolley is a Canadian novelist, editor, podcaster, and poet. His work has appeared in journals such as Off the Coast, PANK, The New Verse News, Danse Macabre, and others. His sprawling supernatural horror trilogy, The Last Handful of Clover, is currently being released serially on Patreon, Wattpad, QSaltLake, and as an audiobook podcast. Find him at http://wessmongojolley.com

---

The Ropel house, one of the most expensive in the neighborhood, was on a cul du sac near the woods.  Fifteen-year-old Carrie, who lived two doors over, had been babysitting for Mrs. Ropel’s six-year-old daughter Simone, as well as other neighborhood families, for about a year.  She’d been sitting since she was twelve, first in Connecticut where she’d spent her first fourteen years and now here in Deerhaven, Illinois, where her family had moved last winter when she’d been a freshman, her sister Evie in kindergarten.  Though her shy, nervous sister didn’t make friends easily, Simone and another neighborhood girl, Lisa, befriended her, and much to her mother’s relief they all began playing at each other’s houses.  Meanwhile, Carrie had nearly flunked both Spanish and algebra last year, and she’d not made one friend.  But neither her mother nor her father had said a word about this, her mother never one to fret over Carrie:  Drop her in the ocean and she’d find her way back, Carrie had sometimes overheard her mother say on the phone.  And yet, her mother seemed to hold this against her, at times indifferent, if not hostile, toward her; in turn, Carrie often hated her mother, as she did now, because she wouldn’t admit that yanking her and Evie out of school mid-year for a new house in a fancy neighborhood had been a mistake.  If her mother only knew.  “Daddy has a lady downstairs.  Don’t tell Mommy,” the Mulvaney’s little Tabitha, tucked in, ready for bed, had suddenly blurted out one night while Carrie had been babysitting.  But the basement door was always locked; then one time it wasn’t.  But she didn’t bother telling her mother what was inside.  She wouldn’t have believed her anyway. 

Tonight was the Ropels again, the first time after a two-month hiatus.  It all had to do with what had happened to Evie, all three of the girls playing over at Simone’s and then somehow ending up in the snowy woods at dusk, an hour later the police with their flashlights finding only two small sets of prints coming out.  “I don’t care what the police said,” Carrie had told her mother.  “They left her there.  You have to do something.  That’s not right.”  And her mother, finally working up the courage, had said, “I’m going to give that woman a piece of my mind.  You’re never babysitting there again.”  But a week later when Carrie had asked what had happened, her mother slapped her.  After that, she and her mother barely spoke, except today when Carrie told her she was sitting for the Mrs. Myers, last year the only neighbor who’d welcomed them on move-in day, leaving a chocolate cake on their doorstep.

At Mrs. Ropels’ front door now, Carrie stomped the snow off her boots and then rang the bell.  Little Simone opened up.   She was wearing a pink leotard, tights, and ballet slippers.  With wavy dark hair and milky-brown eyes, a small mole at the corner of her mouth, she was a miniature of her mother.

 “Mom, Carrie’s here!”  She ran back down the hallway.

 Carrie stepped inside and unzipped her parka.  The foyer was just like in her house, one small closet and a slate tile floor.   

Mrs. Ropel was rushing down the steps, as always, running late.  “I’m so glad you could make it, Carrie.  Here, let me take your coat.”  In black pants, a billowing silk blouse, hoop earrings, she smelled mildly of perfume and was briefly pretty, almost likable, someone she might want to be.  But then she thought of her own mother. 

Carrie started pulling off her boots, standing them against the wall as Mrs. Ropel hung up her parka.  Then, turning to Carrie, she clapped her hands together and bowed slightly. “Well…”

 Carrie almost felt bad for her, how awkward it was, but clearing the air would only make things harder.  As is, she wasn’t sure she could go through with it.  She looked back at the door, thinking she should just leave.

“Simone’s eating dinner now,” Mrs. Ropel said.

Carrie followed her down the hallway.

 “Macaroni and cheese.”  She gestured to the stove.  “And there’s some there for you too.  Simone, Carrie’s here.”

Simone, at the table, spoon poised above the bowl, said, “I know, Mom.”

“Hi, Simone,” Carrie said.

Simone looked back and grinned, showing all her teeth.

“I shouldn’t be any later than 10:00.  Simone in bed by 8:00.”  Leaning over Simone, Mrs. Ropel kissed her on the cheek.  “Be good.  Listen to everything Carrie says.  I love you.”  Then, she went back into the hallway. 

Carrie followed.

Back in the foyer, Mrs. Ropel put on her coat and wrapped a scarf around her neck.  It had a kind of hood on it, and she pulled it up over her hair.  “Now be sure to turn the deadbolt.  Don’t let anyone in.  Everything else is locked.”  Before, this lock litany had been merely annoying, but now, after what had happened to Evie, it almost made her laugh, and she thought of the Kleins–they had even more locks on their door—one time how the older boy came at his younger brother with a pair of scissors, Mrs. Klein not believing her, and all those Dr. Spock books on the shelves.   

Mrs. Ropel opened the front door, letting the chill in.  Carrie shut the door after her and turned the deadbolt, knowing Mrs. Ropel wouldn’t leave until she heard it slide into place.   Then, she went into the living room and, through the bay window, watched her car disappear down the dark, snow-packed road.  Now, the place to herself, she could do whatever she wanted, not that she ever drank, smoked, or had friends over.  She actually didn’t have any unless you counted the two dopey sisters next door that once invited her over to smoke marijuana and put on mascara.

Carrie went back to the kitchen.   

Simone pushed her bowl away and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.  “Is my mom gone?”

“Aren’t you supposed to use a napkin?”

She slipped off her chair and got up on the balls of her feet, her arms stretched above her head, and started twirling and then fell down on the floor.  “I take ballet now.  I’m going to be Clara in the Nutcracker.” 

 “Doesn’t Clara have to spot if she doesn’t want to get dizzy?”

Simone got up.  “My mom says I get to wear pointe shoes when I’m twelve.”

 “Is that what you want to be when you grow up—a ballerina?”

“Can I watch TV?”

 “Sure.  But bowl in the sink first please.  Then later we’ll play a game.”

Carrie went over to the stove and lifted the lid, peering at the gooey orange noodles.  Milk, butter, powdered cheese, all the kids loved that boxed stuff, including Evie.  She took a spoonful and then stuck the pot in the refrigerator, her eyes roving over the usual stuff–milk, orange juice, wine, chocolate syrup, eggs, chicken breasts, frozen French fries, a Sarah Lee apple pie, and in the door salad dressings, ketchup, mustard, relish, jam.  No shrinking heads here, though she’d babysat long enough to know that didn’t mean anything, the secret room in the Mulvaney house papered with naked women, and a mannequin in glasses and a wig, two perfect breasts, seated behind a desk.  Well, at least her own father used the basement for better things, buying a pinball machine and ping-pong table to ease their move from Connecticut.  Evie got a pet hamster too, but it turned out to be pregnant, and she ate some of her babies, so now the table was covered with cages, the mother hamster’s the most elaborate, exercise wheels and a maze of tubes. 

“Carrie, can we make popcorn?”  Simone yelled from the living room.

“Sure!” Carrie yelled back.  She didn’t see any point in not being nice.  She pulled some out of a cabinet and stuck it in the microwave watching the bag slowly inflate, and then, after pulling it out, split the bag down the seam, letting the steam out.

Carrie sat down on the couch placing the bowl between them. 

Simone, slouched down, dug in, pulling out a handful.  “That girl just turned into a blueberry,” she said.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was on, the petulant Violet in a purple jumper and black Maryjane shoes chomping on a wad of gum Mr. Wonka told her not to touch, the oompa loompa men now rolling her out to be juiced.   Carrie had seen the movie before.

A commercial came on, and Simone suddenly turned to Carrie, made a pouty face, the corners of her mouth downturned.  “Where were you, Carrie?”

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t like my other babysitter.” 

“How come?”

 “She was mean.  Mrs. Humperdink.  That’s a stupid name, isn’t it?”

Carrie chuckled.  “Is that really her name?”

Simone shrugged and then turned back to the TV, the spoiled Veruca Salt, another bad egg, getting sucked up a garbage shoot, and then Mike Teavee, shrunk small enough to fit into a TV, had now been eliminated too.  Only Charlie and his grandfather left, Mr. Wonka’s face softened as he started explaining how he’d searched the world over for just one sweet, able child to take over the factory.

“Can we watch another movie, Carrie?”

“It’s not over yet though.” 

“I don’t like this part.  It’s stupid.”  Wonka was now escorting Charlie onto his magic elevator.  Soon all of Charlie’s family would be rescued from poverty.  Simone changed the channel, a bald, muscular man, with bushy white eyebrows on now.  Grime-busting Mr. Clean.

“Well then maybe we can play a game,” Carrie said.  “Remember how we used to?”

Simone shrugged again.  “Can we watch another movie?”

“I’m it.”

Thinking, Simone rolled her head around in circle—one of her odd quirks—and then slipped off the couch.  “Count slowly.  No peeking.”

Eyes covered, Carrie started counting “1,2,3 4,” stopping only when she heard Simone heading upstairs.  She always hid in the same spot.  It seemed odd at first, but Carrie had just assumed that getting caught was the best part of the game for Simone.  And in the past, they’d had fun, Carrie in Mrs. Ropel’s bedroom closet pretending to be stumped, Simone jumping out, shouting, “Boo!”  But now she wondered.  Sneaking out of the house, past her watchful mother, Lisa and Evie in tow, out into the woods at night took stealth.

 Carrie pulled her hands away from her eyes and headed upstairs.  In her socks, she could move silently.  She took her time, though, roaming around the other bedrooms, first Simone’s, cozy pink with a strand of blue lights lining the ceiling, and her very own bathroom with a polka-dotted shower curtain, a furry pink bathmat beside the tub.  The other bedroom, blue and smaller, hadn’t changed—wooden crib, rocking chair, a three-drawer dresser with a changing table on top.  Carrie pulled each drawer open—all still empty.  Then, she headed toward Mrs. Ropel’s bedroom.  A small lamp on the bedstand threw off a little light, beside it a magazine—Good Housekeeping—and an alarm clock.  The other bedstand was bare, the Ropels separated, Carrie’s mother had told her.  All the other sitting jobs, the husband usually drove her home in their dark cars, small-talking her, pulling up to her house, as if they were dropping her off from a date.  At school the driver’s ed instructor kept sliding his arm around her shoulders showing her how the dashboard worked.  In the Ropel house, she’d always felt safe though.

 She walked over to the closet.  It was open a crack.  She thought she could hear Simone breathing.   It wasn’t too late.  She could just play the game as they always had.  But then Carrie remembered the snow swirling down from the black sky, her feet so cold they burned as she shivered at the edge of the woods while the police searched for Evie, her hysterical mother waiting at home in her sunken living room, her father trying to comfort her.  

Carrie opened the closet door and leaned in.  “Hello?  Anyone in there?”  Then she went all the way in.  “Anyone here?”  Simone, she knew, could only contain herself for so long, but Carrie continued to play along, turning to the right side first, making a fuss of pushing clothes this way and that way, making the hangers jangle.  Then she turned to the other side, where there were a lot more clothes, dresses and blouses, and did the same thing, Simone, she assumed, crouched somewhere beneath, watching Carrie’s legs, trying to stay quiet.  “Simone?   Are you in here?”  Carrie let out a loud sigh.  “Wherever could she be?  Well, I guess she’s not here.”  Then, as she stepped out and started closing the door, the hangers suddenly jangled.  But Carrie already had the door shut, her hand firmly around the knob as she felt Simone trying to turn it.

“Carrie,” Simone said, “the door’s stuck.” 

  Carrie thought she could hear a twinge of fear rise up in her voice, what Evie must have felt when she first realized she was alone, lost. 

Simone started banging on the door now. 

Letting go of the knob, Carrie quickly swung around, pressing her back against the door.

Then Simone started kicking.  “Let me out!  Let me out!  Let me out!”

Carrie could feel the door shuddering.

 Then she stopped kicking.  “Carrie please,” she pleaded, “it’s dark in here.”  She started weeping.  “Carrie, I’m scared.  Please, let me out.  Please, Carrie.”  She was trying the knob again, pulling on it, rattling it.

Carrie looked up at the ceiling, at the small ring of light from the lamp.  Evie had been found curled up at the base of a tree, unconscious, her shoes missing.  After laying her on the stretcher, they’d cocooned her in blankets as they snow kept falling.

The rattling stopped.  “If you let me out, I promise I won’t tell on you.”  No longer crying, Simone was trying to modulate her voice now, to reason with Carrie.  Negotiation it was called, what a victim does trying to survive an attack, something she’d learned in psychology class.   But Evie probably didn’t even get that chance, Simone and Lisa running off while she was it, Evie with her eyes covered, counting, afterward the police claiming it was a game of Hide and Seek gone awry.

 Simone started beating her fists on the door again. “That’s not fair.  Let me out!  Let me out!” 

So now you know.  Maybe you’ll think twice.  She’d planned on saying things like that, but now Simone was throwing her body into the door, putting her weight into it, and Carrie, worried she might damage the door or hurt herself, stepped away, and Simone suddenly flew out, landing on her knees.  “Oow.”  She started crying again, real tears now, her lower lip trembling.  She glared up at Carrie.  “I’m going to tell my mom.  You’re going to get in trouble.”   She was breathing heavily, almost gasping.  Then she started coughing.

Carrie reached down and pulled Simone to her feet. 

Simone wiped away her tears.  “I’m going to tell on you.  That you tried to kill me.  Then you’re going to get in trouble.  You’re going to go to jail.  Rats are going to eat you.  Then they’ll put you in the electric chair, and your hair will fall out.”

Carrie stepped back and sat down on the bed.  “Who’s going to believe you?”

“My mom will.  She always does.”

“But there’s not a thing wrong with you.  I bet you don’t even have a bruise or a cut.”

Simone put her hands out in front of her and spread her fingers.  Her knuckles were red, her hands shaking a little.

“See?  Not a thing.”

 Simone pulled her hands back and started rolling her head around again; this time, though, with her flushed face, watery eyes, snotty nose, she looked ghoulish.  Then, after wiping her nose, sniffling a little, she straightened up, lifting her chin, like a proper ballerina, and said, “I’m going to get in my pajamas.  It’s almost my bedtime.”

“Do you want me to read you a story?”  Carrie was still sitting on the bed.

 “I’m too old for that.  Besides I’m going to tell on you.  You’re never coming back.”  Then she scampered out of the room.

The next day Carrie slept late.  She always did on the weekends.  Then in the afternoon she went down to the basement to feed the hamsters; the babies, now plump and furry, were running around their cages.  The mother hamster, though, just sat in her bedding, her dark eyes unblinking, food untouched.  Tapping on the plastic walls, Carrie tried to coax her to move.  Then, opening the cage, she reached in to pick her up, but she just nipped at her hand.

“Carrie, are you down there?”  Her mother was coming down the steps with laundry.  In front of the washer now she put the basket down and then looked over at the ping-pong table.  “When it gets warm, I’m going to let her go.”

Her mother’s eyes looked puffy, like she’d been crying.  She was trying to make up, be friends now.  But Carrie, still angry, wasn’t so sure she wanted to relent.

“If you must know her baby was still-born.  She had to carry it and then give birth to it and then bury it.  Mrs. Ropel.  All before we moved here.”

“That doesn’t excuse it,” Carrie said.  “Evie could have frozen to death.  And then what?”  Carrie looked down at the mother hamster and then over at her mother.  “What do you mean let her go?”

“Behind the house.  Out by the woods.  I’ll just open the cage.”

“But what if she doesn’t go?  What if she gets eaten?  They’re wild animals out there, you know.”  She hammered at her mother. 

“What’s the point of keeping her?  You can’t touch her.  She won’t eat.  They don’t live very long anyway.  Hamsters.”  Her mother turned to the machine and started stuffing the laundry in.”

“Where’s Evie?”

“Upstairs.  Playing.  You know, making her Barbies talk.  By the way, I found your bathing suit.  I’m washing it now.”  Her mother shut the machine door and turned the dial. “Don’t bother,” Carrie said.  “The school won’t let me wear it.  You have to wear one of theirs.”  She recalled last Friday, the first day of swimming, naked and shivering, how she stood in the locker room, the attendant sizing her up.  

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Janet Goldberg’s “A Proper Ballerina” comes from a collection titled Every Small Thing.  Her novel The Proprietor’s Song will be published by Regal House in the summer of 2023:  https://www.regalhousepublishing.com/janet-goldberg/  She also edits fiction for Deep Wild https://deepwildjournal.com/ and teaches writing at a community college in northern California.

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