“Alright bud, a deal’s a deal. We took you to Pizza Prince, now you have to brush your teeth and get to bed on time.”
“But Daddy, the new SpongeBob-“
“Clay,” I said in a stern tone, giving him a look. My six year old sighed and nodded.
“Okay. I’ll go brush my teeth.”
“Thanks champ.” I watched him run up the stairs and turned to my wife, Connie.
“And now I get to have my fun,” I grinned, pressing the button on my PS5 controller. Connie rolled her eyes.
“On that note, I’m going upstairs. Don’t forget to check the window before you come up, you know the lock’s been faulty.”
“Yeah I gotchu,” I replied absent-mindedly. I was determined to hop online to play with my friends, Arthur and Vince, but just when I was getting settled, I heard Clay calling for me.
I headed up the stairs, coming to a stop in front of my son’s open bedroom door. “What’s up kiddo?”
“Can you read me a story, Daddy? Since you didn’t let me watch SpongeBob.”
Ah yes, the guilt trip. He was definitely his mother’s son.
“Sure thing. What are you feeling?” I asked, walking over to his Thomas the Train bookshelf. “The Gingerbread Man, Beauty and the Beast-“
“I’ve heard all those already. Read this one!” Clay was holding up a wide, brown book. I frowned and walked over to the bed, sitting down beside him and examining the front cover. There was no title or illustration, only a small, oval-shaped mirror that twisted my reflection. Underneath it, scribbled in black marker, was the phrase “L’obscurité prévaut.”
“Where did this come, did Mommy buy it for you?” I asked, but Clay was bouncing up and down.
“Read it read it!”
“Alright alright calm down, you have so much energy for a boy who’s supposed to be going to sleep. Let’s see…” I flipped open the front cover, seeing that someone had drawn, with black crayon, what looked to be a field of flowers. This thing looked like a school assignment that Clay’s teacher had asked him to make, given it’s crudeness and hand-drawn illustrations. I flipped to the next page, where the story actually started.
“It was a quarter to six, and who would have guessed? That someone would tear, and rip mommy’s dress…”
The words were chicken scratch, and the picture that had been drawn appeared to be a little girl, her hair sticking out all over the place, holding a pair of scissors. A dress, colored in red crayon, had obviously been cut to pieces.
“I don’t know if I should be reading a book about destruction of property to you, Clay-“
“Pleeease Daddy! You promised!”
I sighed. “She knew that it was wrong, but Little Lacy wasn’t through; So she went outside and broke daddy’s car too…” I trailed off, staring at the drawing of the wild-haired girl standing on top of a car, her eyes wide and red. Who the hell had given this to my son? Was this Connie’s idea of a joke?
“Yeah Clay, this isn’t the book for you. I’ll find something online for you, okay?”
After reading him the story of “Jack and the Giant Beanstalk”, I kissed my son goodnight and left the room, taking the strange book with me. I went straight to my room, intending to question my wife about it, but she was already fast asleep, dark hair falling over her face, her own book lying open on the bed next to her. Biting my lip, I sat down and stared at the book that seemed to be encouraging terrible behavior. Surely a child couldn’t have written this? But how had it come into Clay’s possession?
I opened it back up to where I had left off at. And when the sky cried and the moon went away, Little Lacy went next door and started to play. She played with the cat and she played with the fish, she swore she’d get even with that son of a bitch.
The book ended there, with the little girl walking between two houses, a man and woman in the window of one, a single man in the window of the other. I went through the book a few more times, looking for any clue that I could find as to who had written it. This was completely fucked up and I needed to get to the bottom of it, so I woke Connie up.
“Hun, take a look at this.” Though she wasn’t happy about me waking her up, Connie flipped through the pages, her annoyance turning to distaste, then to horror.
“Where did he get this?”
“I don’t know, babe. But I’m going to get to the bottom of it tomorrow.” I tossed the cursed book onto the floor next to my bed and laid down. I found myself staring over at it as I waited for sleep to come which, somehow, it finally did.
When I woke the next morning, Connie was gone, off to work. But the book was gone too. I looked under my bed and around the room, but it was nowhere to be found. Had she taken it with her? I headed down the stairs and found Clay sitting at the table, eating cereal.
“Morning Clay. Hey, son, daddy has a question for you.” I sat down next to him and he looked up at me, smiling. “That book last night…where did you get it?”
Clay screwed up his face, clearly trying to remember. “It was in my room daddy, like all the other books.”
Interesting.
I managed to push the incident to the back of my mind as I trudged through my workday. This had been some kind of prank by Connie, surely; A bad prank, but a prank nonetheless. When I got home, however, Connie was livid; She was pacing back and forth in the living room, red in the face. Clay was nowhere in sight.
“Everything okay, honey?” I asked tentatively, hanging my raincoat up on the hook.
“No everything is not fucking okay! Do you know what your son did?”
“I will when you tell me.”
Connie turned around and picked up what used to be her favorite dress. My heart dropped. Formerly red and form-fitting, it was now butchered, hanging in shreds that were barely clinging together.
“Look at this! He wouldn’t confess to it so I sent him to his room.”
My mind was on Little Lacy and the damned children’s book. I imagined a little girl with hair like an animal’s savaging my wife’s dress, then hiding in our closet and waiting for us to come into the room. I massaged my temple, looking at Connie.
“Okay. No T.V. for him until he admits to it then. We’ve never seen him do anything like this before, though.”
“Yeah, well, there’s a first time for everything I guess.”
We ate dinner in mostly silence that night, save for the thunder that was booming outside the walls. It was really coming down tonight; I thought about the book again, but then dismissed it. Clay couldn’t have written those words, drawn those pictures…I refused to believe it…
Clay didn’t dare ask to watch any of his shows, so after dinner he headed back up to his room. Connie and I followed him up, questioning him about the dress, but he was adamant that he had not done the deed. I got a text from Vince, asking me if I was getting on the game, but tonight was not the night. That book and the assault on the dress seemed to have sucked all the joy out of the house. I fell asleep lying on the couch, lost in my thoughts.
I dreamt of a woman entering my room, reaching out and caressing my face. She smelled of vanilla and cherries, her hair gold like the sun; As I reached out for her, however, her hair shriveled up into her head, becoming unkempt and as black as the night; her eyes were bloodshot and her mouth was full of sharp teeth, and she had a pair of scissors that she was suddenly plunging into my chest-
I sat up, covered in sweat, and looked towards my front door. The storm was still coming down so heavily that I could barely hear it, but my car alarm was going off…
I dashed out the front door and came to a stop in my yard, staring at my white Lexus. All of the windows had been smashed out, and someone had keyed the driver’s side door. “What the fuck,” I said out loud, and then turned when I felt someone coming towards me. The man was wearing a green, hooded jacket and was holding something in his hand; I reacted defensively, swinging and hitting him in the face. He fell to the ground but was back up in an instant, tackling me and bringing me down into the mud. We rolled around in the rain, and he got another hit in on me, but then I heard my wife’s voice.
“What the hell is going on out here?”
Me and the man both stopped fighting and looked over at my front door. Connie and Clay were both standing there, looking mortified. I turned to the man who I had been scuffling with and was surprised to see the face of my neighbor, Louis Lambert.
“Louis?” I stood up, offering him a hand, but he smacked it away and stood up on his own. Though he was an older man, he was still bigger than me; There was a look that was nothing short of pure rage as he glowered at me.
“Oh, so you’re friendly now that your wife and kid are watching, eh? It wasn’t enough to fucking kill my cat, but you had to hit me too, eh?”
“Your cat? Louis what the-“
He held up the orange cat, clearly lifeless, and I heard Connie gasp behind me. She grabbed Clay and they retreated back into the house.
“Louis, why do you think I had anything to do with this?”
“Because I saw you running back into your gate! This damn rain is coming down, but I still saw you closing your gate!” He was pointing at the fence that surrounded my backyard. I stared over at it, and then back at him.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. I was sleeping on my couch-“
“I’m calling the cops! I’ve taken it easy on you before, on account of your wife and kid, but not this time Cooper!” He shoved me, hard, and I fell back into the mud as Louis stormed off to his house. I glanced at my car again before heading back inside. Connie was standing in the living room, wet from the rain.
“What was that all about?”
“He said he saw someone going into our backyard…I’m gonna go and-“
“YES!”
Connie and I both glanced towards the top of the stairs, where our son was standing, looking triumphant. He was holding something up that was terribly familiar.
“There’s a new story in here, Daddy!”