Changeling the Lost - Night Horrors - Grim Fears.pdf - Changeling - The lost - RPG

By Stephen DiPesa , Matthew McFarland , John Newman , Alex Scokel ,

Geoff Skellams , Ethan Skemp and Charles Wendig

From the upstairs window, he could

see the light, and it puzzled him.

He stood up and

stretched. He was

done working for

the night. He was

stuck, anyway — the characters in his

novel weren’t doing what he wanted

them to do. He’d try again tomorrow.

He opened the door and his dogs stirred,

and then looked up expectantly. He reas-

sured them that they would, in fact, be

fed tonight, and shooed them down-

stairs to the kitchen.

The house was quiet. The dogs were snoring

gently at his feet. The light was off in his office,

and the computer monitor had changed to the wavy

patterns of the screen saver. He could see from the

window that the yard was quiet and the snow was

undisturbed. Some nights, deer would jump the

fence and poke around the yard for food, but not

tonight.

The archway in the yard was beautiful during the

summer, covered in grape vines and leaves, but during

the cold seasons it was an eyesore. Not that he much

cared. He wasn’t much of a gardener, and although he

seldom wished to be rich, he did wish he could afford

a landscaper on a permanent basis. Work in the yard

was something he wanted to do, but couldn’t seem

to make time for. And if he was being honest, he’d

admit that he’d lost some of his passion for the great

outdoors over the years.

Dog food clattered into bowls. The dogs

sat there, looking up at him, drool pouring

from their jowls. “Free,” he said, and they

started in, frantically gulping their food. He

reached down into each bowl, moving the

kibble around. Neither dog cared, but it was

important to make sure it stayed that way, so

that his daughter wouldn’t get snapped at if she

tried to move the bowls while the dogs ate.

But this summer might be different. His daughter

was old enough to like playing outside, so maybe he

could garden and she could romp with the dogs?

He looked out the kitchen window,

through the archway, and sure enough,

the light was still there. “Will-o-the-wisp,”

he muttered, and smiled, because of course

the notion was absurd. He remembered the

books he’d read about faeries, ghosts and

other legends, and the story of the faerie ire,

the will-o-the-wisp, and the admonition that

came with it — do not follow the light.

The light lickered, and shook him out of his reverie.

It was only visible through the archway, that was the

strange thing. The wooden archway — more of a

square frame, really — stood near the end of the yard,

probably 20 feet from his property line and the decaying

rail fence that marked it. But if he moved his head a

few feet in either direction, looking at the same part

of the yard but around the archway, he couldn’t see it

anymore. The light was orange-yellow, like a ire, but

what would be burning in the dead of winter?

He put the dogs in their crates, and they

lopped down, settling in for the night. He looked

in on his wife and daughter, curled up together

in the master bedroom. His daughter had heard

something some months back that had terriied

her, and hadn’t wanted to sleep in her own

room since then. He didn’t mind. Yes, it

meant that intimacy of a more adult nature had

to wait until she was at Nana’s house, but that

was livable. He’d heard his daughter scream in

fear, and had held her close, wishing he could

give her the words to explain what she had

seen or dreamed that had frightened her so.

Even now, as the trickle of words had become

a lood of sentences, she hadn’t been able to

tell him or his wife what was wrong. But she

wouldn’t go into that room after dark.

The man with the lantern looked around, and then looked

over the man’s shoulder through the archway. “Oh, shit. Sorry

about that. Name’s Jack.”

“Sure it is.” This has to be some kind of prank, he thought.

The bushes were real enough, though. Covered in snow, but

still with visible, vicious-looking thorns.

Jack lowered the lantern, and the man could see that Jack’s

chest was sunken, almost concave. “Tell you what, buddy,” he

said. “You should turn and walk right back through that gateway.

Go back to your wife, and forget you saw me.”

The man wished he’d brought his gun after all. He wasn’t

afraid of an old man with a light, but he suddenly had the

feeling he was far, far out of his depth. “Like I said, this is my

house. So, if you don’t mind, I’d like it if you’d be the one to

turn and walk away, Jack.”

He gathered up the cups and plates from

dinner, musing that his mother would never

have allowed him to eat every meal in front of

the TV. As he put the dishes in the sink, he saw

the light again, and again the notion occurred

to him that it might be a faerie light, an unquiet

spirit leading unwary souls into peril.

Jack shook his head. “You don’t want me to do that.

Besides, do you even see your yard behind me?”

But what peril, anyway? There were no bogs

or cliffs or wild beasts in the suburbs. He laced

up his boots and pulled on his coat, iguring

that it was a light from the nearby church,

somehow positioned so he couldn’t see it from

any other angle. He debated going to get his

gun, but decided against it. It might wake his

wife and child, after all. Besides, he already

had his boots on.

The man looked, but all he saw was the brambles, as far as

he could see under the moonlight. No fence, no church, no

streetlights…no forest. What the hell? “This is…”

“I told you, walk away. I’m not really on your property, and

by the time you get back to your house, you won’t see my

light anymore.” Jack looked annoyed, the man realized. Or

frustrated. As though something was happening out of his

control, something he didn’t like. “But you should go.”

There was a rush of wings and a blast of freezing wind,

and the man was gone. And Jack ‘o the Lantern, because

no one was watching, allowed himself to shed a single tear.

And then he walked on.

He trudged out into the snow, and was

surprised to ind that it came up to his calf in

some places. He’d have to plow the driveway

tomorrow.

He walked to the archway and looked

through, and could not understand what

he saw. Through the archway, he saw

snow-covered bushes, brambles, and a man

carrying a lantern walking between them.

But on either side of the archway, all he saw

was his yard. He took a step back, ready to

run, but then stopped. There had to be a

reason for this. There had to be something

he wasn’t thinking of. The man looked

real enough, and so he stepped through the

archway and called out. “Hey!”

“ H e y !”

An hour later, the door to the bedroom opened. A

igure stepped into the room, pulled off a pair of jeans,

a sweatshirt, a pair of damp socks, a pair of block boxer

shorts, and a pair of glasses. He put on a t-shirt and a

pair of pajama bottoms and crawled into bed alongside a

drowsy woman and a three-year-old girl.

The man turned. He was old, wrinkled

and ugly, with an upturned nose and gnarled,

curved ears. He carried a lantern, an old oil-

burning thing, but it blazed with a light that

seemed too bright for it. “Who are you?” the

man rasped.

The girl woke up with the start and made a whining

noise, afraid.

“Uh, you’re in my yard,” he said. “So who

are you?”

“It’s just Daddy, honey. Go back to sleep,” whispered

the woman.

“That’s not Daddy,” said the girl.

But out in the yard, the man sat on the

ground just inside the wooden archway

and wept. He had thought of nothing but his

daughter for so long, and he had thought that

he’d never see her again. When he escaped,

he thought that surely she’d have grown up

and forgotten him, that his wife might have

remarried, that he would ind that cursed

archway and someone else would be living in

his house. But he looked out and saw her,

and he started to sing, because it was a song

that he’d used to lead himself back through the

thorns to his home. And his little girl was still

little, the dogs were still romping in the yard, his

wife was still lovely.

The other igure in the bed said nothing, but simply

turned over and lay still until morning.

Months passed. The snow melted away and returned

several times. The basement of the house took on water,

and then dried out again. The dishwasher broke and was

repaired. The little girl started sleeping in her own room

again, because she felt, though she could not explain

why, that whatever she’d sensed that horrible night had

followed her to her parents’ room. And she gradually came

to call the igure that had come into the room that wintry

night “Daddy,” though she never really believed it.

She was three, going on four, and so she played games

with emotions and words and sounds. She made up songs

about her mother and “Daddy.” She’d tell her mother that

she didn’t love her, that she wanted to go stay with Nana,

that she wanted her doggies to die so that she could get

a new puppy. She didn’t understand these phrases, not

completely, but she knew that they made Mama talk to her

in that serious, sad voice, and that voice gave her a feeling

that she couldn’t explain, a feeling that she loved and feared

at the same time. It was a feeling that things were real.

But if “Daddy” would be home soon, that

meant, somehow, he’d never left. And so he

couldn’t leave the archway just yet.

He waited for hours by the archway, staring

out between the posts and into his own yard.

He waited under the grape vines — thorny

and thick on this side of the archway —

because he was afraid that someone would see

him, like he had seen Jack a lifetime ago. He

waited there, too, because sunlight made his

skin itch. And he sang quietly to himself,

because his voice was the only thing about

him that hadn’t changed.

When she was with “Daddy,” she never got that feeling.

She had memories of her Daddy singing to her, songs about

stars and pigs and ish, songs about oceans and pies and other

things that she couldn’t place. But after “Daddy” had come

into that room, he didn’t sing anymore. He didn’t whistle

or hum, either, or even listen to music in the car. He’d read

stories, but he didn’t do the strange lilt of Jake the Irish Seagull

or the deep rumble of the Mufin-Munching Dragon anymore.

Everything was in the same voice, like Daddy’s but not, and

the girl found herself accepting this. Daddy had gone away.

This “Daddy” looked like him and wore his clothes, but was

different in so many ways.

“You made it,” said a voice behind him. He

pulled himself out of the vines and crouched,

ready to run, ready to vanish into shadow

and leave no footprints. But it was Jack o’ the

Lantern that stood before him, not the creature

that had stolen him and put him in a cage.

“You.”

The irst daffodils poked through the

ground on April the irst, not that the

girl understood dates or months yet. She

knew, though, that those plants hadn’t

been there before, and she ran over

to see them. They were near the big

wooden square in the backyard, and the

dogs were rolling on the ground, chasing

either other and snapping at each other’s

necks. Mama was by the car, taking

groceries out. “Daddy” was still at work.

“ Y o u ”

She touched the slender green shoots, yellowing at the top where

the lowers would appear in a few weeks, and she heard something

from the wooden square. She heard a song, one that she knew, and

she said “Daddy?”

“Yeah, me. You made it back. That’s good.”

The man tensed himself, but Jack shook his

head. “Oh, don’t. It wasn’t my fault, and you

know it. You should have left like I told you.”

Her mother called for her, and she ran to her, crying that

Daddy was home. Mama told her Daddy was at work, and

carried her inside and made her a cup of hot chocolate.

“What are you doing back here, anyway?”

The man stepped back away from the archway,

and motioned for Jack to do the same.

Changeling the Lost - Night Horrors - Grim Fears.pdf

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