I thought he was gone. That I had finally escaped his reach, which had seemed infinite at the time. Now, I know that it is.
He began appearing in my dreams when I was three years old. Possibly earlier, but that’s the earliest the archives of my memory will allow me to access. His two legs impossibly long and spindly, his arms nonexistent. Only the stub of a torso and the small head atop it, grossly disproportionate to the rest of him. He crept through the cellars of my mind, waiting in the deep corners, silent and colorless as an old movie. In my dreams, I wandered these hallways in fear, never sure how I got there or how to get out. When I tentatively touched the wall, my fingers recoiled at the soft dampness of it. Then, always, at some point during my travels, the corridors would go quiet: Pipes ceased their resigned sighs, the floor stopped creaking beneath my reluctant feet. The dark world around me held its breath, and I knew he was near.
At this point, strange things began to appear as I traversed the winding halls, looking for something I never wanted to find. Open doorways materialized, and though I tried not to look, I always did. A man with a horse’s head stood at a bathroom sink, looking in the mirror. When I passed, his head slowly turned to look at me. The horse head’s eyes were empty and black. The body of the man lifted his hand and pointed a finger forward. I could feel its eyes on me as I continued walking.
Another doorway: this time with a woman in it. She wore a white short-sleeved blouse speckled with small blue polka dots, and her curly hair stuck out unnaturally from her head like a Medusa. Her face was stretched into a maniacal grin, and her eyes held the same empty blackness as the horse’s. As I watched her, she began bobbing her head from side to side, her grin unwavering. Her hair stuck out like wires, unmoving despite the increasingly frenzied movements of her head. Then, against my better judgment and in spite of my terror, I asked her where I could find him. Her head snapped to attention, suddenly still as death. Her eyes met mine, and the blackness in them threatened to swallow me whole. She began laughing, a shrill cackle that rattled my bones.
And then she gave chase.
My footsteps pounded on the ground, but I couldn’t hear them. The blood roared in my ears like an ocean. I could feel her behind me. She was catching up. Suddenly, I felt her arms around my chest, clammy and fleshy, and her wicked heart beating through her shirt. We were falling now, falling so fast that it seemed after a while that we weren’t moving at all. Then, as if we were suspended mid-air, he appeared out of nowhere and walked toward me through the thin, cold atmosphere. His embrace felt like a phantom limb, like the part of my body that touched his was negative space, something that had ceased to exist.
And then I’d wake up.
As the dreams continued through the years, they came to include more strange encounters. Discs floating through the air that cut me to ribbons upon contact, my blood dripping viscous black. Flowers that melted when I leaned down to smell their bright scents that soon devolved into the odor of death. Black holes swirling around me, their centers as empty as the eyes of the residents of my dreams.
I started seeing things, too, remnants of the dreams in my waking life. The corner of my eye would catch the horse man standing at the bathroom sink, which would turn out to be my brother wearing a baseball cap and washing his hands. My mother’s smile sometimes appeared a little too wide, a little too eager. Every now and then, my father’s dark eyes would seem to deepen a few shades, a small smile curling at his lips.
And the man with the spidery legs was always in the back of my mind, waiting for me to have a fleeting moment of joy so he could appear and destroy it. His wiry frame cast a permanent shadow over my life.
And then, when I was twenty, it stopped.
No more bad dreams. No more catching my family’s eyes in unexpected moments and finding something there that I didn’t want to see. No more searching the folds of my cerebral cortex for the monsters hiding there.
For years, I remained terrified. Every night when I went to sleep, I was sure he would revisit me, bringing all of his horrible associates with him. My husband helped. He’d rub my back until I fell into a small, dreamless sleep, devoid of the sickly corridors I had traveled in my youth.
I’m thirty-three now; my last encounter with the man was thirteen years ago. Until today.
I work as a school counselor, and I was late picking up my daughter Laine due to the traffic from the equestrian team hosting a large event at the high school. Her teacher, a kindly older lady named Mrs. Dunworth, had agreed to watch Laine for the extra half hour.
The wind had really picked up by the time I arrived at the school. As I walked toward the building, a piece of paper blew into my face, held there for a moment by the wind. “Damn it,” I muttered, disentangling it from the hair whipping around my face. A black-and-white flyer for the school carnival. Should be fun for Laine, I thought, noting the date and trying to remember if our family had anything planned for that day. Something at the bottom of the page caught my eye: a clown walking on impossibly high stilts, his grin a rictus, photocopied eyes like two black holes.
A chill ran through me. You’re being stupid, I thought, crumpling up the flyer and throwing it in the trash can outside of the school. Anyway, Ms. Dunworth will send out a reminder about the carnival. I walked into the building, making my way through the winding hallways to Laine’s classroom.
When I stepped into the room, Laine got up from her desk and ran to me, giving me a big hug. “Thanks so much, Mrs. D.,” I said, adjusting my briefcase on my shoulder.
“Of course,” Mrs. Dunworth said brightly.
I walked over to Laine’s desk to collect her things, and my eyes fell to the drawing she had been working on before I’d arrived.
The spindly legs looked just as I remembered.
“Let’s go,” I said, my voice suddenly weak.
“Do you like my drawing, Mom?” Laine asked, picking it up to give me a better look.
“It’s, uh, it’s…” I stammered.
“It’s beautiful,” Mrs. Dunworth said. I looked up. I hadn’t noticed that she had joined us at Laine’s desk.
“Beautiful,” she repeated, looking at Laine. Her eyes were dark. Her polka-dot blouse clung to her underarms, sweat stains yellowing the material.
“Let’s go,” I said, grabbing Laine’s arm. Mrs. Dunworth blocked the aisle.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” she asked me, holding up the paper. I hadn’t seen it before, but there was a small, lonely-looking girl wrapped in the spindly man’s arms.
I shoved past Mrs. Dunworth and ran out of the classroom, holding Laine’s arm in a vice grip. We didn’t stop running until we were in the car. I turned on the engine and sat there, hands on the steering wheel, trying to catch my breath. Laine sat in her booster seat in the back, panting. She didn’t ask any questions.
That evening, Laine came up to me and my husband and handed me a photocopied flyer. I didn’t have to look at it to know what it was.
“Save the date,” she said, the corners of her mouth curling up into a smile.