At Least They're Committed

Standing in the fading light in the farthest bedroom in the house, I was talking to DSII, but then came to realize that the silhouette in the dusk was not DSII, just a boy his height and build with eyes that looked a little too flat and glowed a little too much as the day went gray. DSII, I felt, was standing behind me.

I gasped and awoke. Lying in my bed, I worried for a flash about DSII’s safety. At 13, he’s ripe to sprout and trapped somewhere between boy and man. No need to worry, though. He rose from the other side of D, stretched out in the covers with us. As if answering my unspoken fear, he explained, “I got kicked out of my room. DS and his friends are in there.” We were cramped in the bed, we three (D and I have had to share a bed more often since Bugaboo moved back in), yet I didn’t care. I rolled facing outward on the bed, secure, and slept comfortably.

Awakened by breath on my face in the deep of the night, DSII’s face stared at mine, his slender body squeezed in next me on the thin shoulder. He didn’t look right and I realized something, an entity, the child from the far room, was beneath him as if laying in wait or a parasitic force holding my child in bond. In my mind I could hear DSII chant, “Kill it! Kill it! Kill it now!” And I frantically pushed beneath my son to dislodge what lay beneath. I looked into my 13-year-old’s face as I struggled, a mere couple inches from my own, and saw not the eyes of my child but of those of the other, and it occurred to me this might not be my son — he and the entity I wrestled with might be one and the same. And as this thought came to me, the glossy eyes before me started to roll and the face contorted, the jaw slacked, gaping open to expose a black chasm, a gateway into hell. The face, the head started to twitch then to seize, back and forth in lightning spasms. I started to scream, once weakly, then louder, then louder and D’s hand was on my shoulder and he said “Shhhhhhh.” And I was truly awake. It was 1 a.m. and the garage door started to life. DS, 19, was pulling in. DSII was asleep in his own bed. All was well . . .

. . . at 2:30 a.m. D started to yell, croaking out from his sleep, “Get out of here! Get out of heeeere! Get OUUUTTT!” I grabbed him: “It’s OK! It’s OK, it’s a dream!” No doubt the man who keeps appearing in his dreams; dapper, old, sometimes standing beside a youth. He stopped and fell deep back into sleep. I began to pray.