Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

“Maybe I could help.”

“Get your ass to bed, Peter!”

The following day, I see neither Daddy nor Toby, but when I’m outside playing in the yard, kicking a ball across the scrub grass and dirt, I hear evidence of their presence in the workshop. Whispers. The clicking of tools. At one point, I kick my ball toward the back wall of the workshop and press my ear close to the blackened window. The glass muffles Daddy’s voice, but I recognize his tone, and I realize he is doing all of the talking. I want to hear the words but they are garbled and incomprehensible like prayers spoken under water.

I imagine my father and brother hunched over the slide projector and various electrical wires and components. Daddy might be pointing at a device and a wire and explaining why the two must be joined in a specific way, and I think Toby is lucky to be spending so much time with Daddy. A tickle of jealousy joins my curiosity, and for a time I forget that Toby is being punished, or that he’s not well. I still don’t understand his condition, but I know I want to join them in the workshop, to be part of the project. Resting my foot on the red ball, I look around the yard, searching for an excuse to knock on the workshop door. But instead of finding a magic key that will justify my intrusion, I see Mama standing at the corner of the house. Her arms are crossed, and she frowns at me.

Later that night, I’m watching television. It is near my bedtime. Mama has given me a plate of two cookies and a small glass of milk to enjoy while Carol Burnett and her co-stars stumble and mug for the camera.

Just as a skit is about to end, the lights in my house dim and the television screen goes green-black in a hiccup of electric current. I think little of it. Such hiccups are common during storms or high winds. But it isn’t storming, and I hear no gusts in the eaves. A roar of laughter, harsh and mocking, pours from the television when it comes back on, and I feel a chill. A minute later, the lights flicker off again.

Vast stretches of darkness gave way to the occasional streetlamp. Driving toward my childhood home, I attempted to shake off the memories, hoping to loosen the tightness in my chest, but the program in my head was nearing an end, and I didn’t have a switch to turn it off, not even a rheostat to adjust its power.

What I remembered clearly was that things in our house seemed to return to normal after the night of the flickering lights. The next morning, I found Toby at the breakfast table. He appeared exhausted and confused, but his fatigue didn’t seem quite so dire. He wore a clean white t-shirt and a baseball cap, which he’d pulled low on his brow. Mama had fixed pancakes and bacon and Toby tore through them. My father joined us. Unlike Toby, he barely ate. His exhaustion remained, and he smoked cigarettes through the meal, blowing smoke onto his plate, as if in a trance.

Nothing was said about Toby or the workshop or what they had constructed within it, but apparently the experiment had done some good, because for the first time in a week, Toby slept in our room. He went to school on Monday, and when he came home he let himself into the workshop, where he would stay for an hour. And then supper. And then to bed. The spark in his eyes had not returned, and he wore his baseball cap everywhere, somehow eluding Mama’s rule about hats at the dining table, which also distressed me because it wasn’t usual, but he was back in the house and things had reached a level of normality. And I started to believe the darkness that had tarnished our golden boy was finally being wiped away.

A week before Christmas, my father had his first aneurism. It didn’t kill him, that would take six more years and two more “cerebral events,” but that night, he died some in my eyes, because I saw what he’d built. I discovered his answer to my brother’s troubles.

After my mother’s tears and my father’s expression of perplexed misery, and after the paramedics and the ambulance, and after the red lights vanish over the hill and the front door closes behind me, I trudge to the sofa and fall onto it. Toby is already there, staring at the television; both his face and the appliance screen are dark.

“Do you think Daddy’s going to die, Toby?”

“No,” he snaps. His gaze doesn’t wander from the blank-glass nothing of the TV. “He can’t.”

“He looked real bad.”

“He’s a great man, Petey. He’s strong. He’ll be okay.”

And I know Toby is not stating a fact; he is voicing a wish.

“But what if he’s not?” I ask.

“Shut up, Petey,” Toby says. His command scalds me into silence and I lower my head because I can’t look at him anymore. We’re silent for a time before he says, “Go on up to bed. I’ve got things to do.”

I do as I am told and I lay in bed, but my eyes are open, and I’m angry at Toby for dismissing me. Abandoning me. The house still stinks of the fish Mama fried for supper. My pillow is as hard as stone and the pillowcase feels scratchy and hot on my neck. My thoughts crackle and pop like damp kindling. I don’t understand how my family could crumble, just fall apart like a dirt wall in a hard wind. I don’t understand because no one has told me anything that sounds true. Toby will be okay. Daddy will be okay . But how can anyone know that? They can’t is the answer, but I’m supposed to accept the meaningless phrases as gospel?

Daddy is in the shadows staining my ceiling, and Toby is there, too. They are strangers to me.

I leave the bed and cross to the window and look down on the workshop, and I know Toby is there, and I decide I deserve to know what is happening. So, I walk out of the room, down the stairs, and out the front door, and I cross the walk to the dirt drive and I stare at the workshop door. Toby has done an excellent job and the windows are impenetrably black, but there is a narrow crack beneath the door and I see it is filled with gray light. The light remains for twenty seconds and then goes out, only to reignite after a single beat of my heart. I reach out for the doorknob and pause. The light goes out again; it returns.

Holding my breath, I turn the knob and push the door open. Initially a glaring disc beaming from across the room blinds me. The odors of the place — oil, sawdust, and sour sweat — burrow into my nostrils. A dull hum fills my ears. I lift my hand to shield my eyes from the light and it goes out, but a fog of green covers my vision the way it does after a camera’s flash. I close my eyes and the swirling murk remains. The lamp ignites again and before I open my eyes, I turn away.

I am aware of the shelves on the right side of the workshop and that something — One of Mama’s sheets? — hangs against the nearest wall. But my gaze lands on my brother and fills with the sight of him.

Toby lies on his cot. He has pushed his hands through leather straps affixed to the metal frame, and they are knotted into fists. His eyes are wide and he’s shaking his head frantically. There is something on his head. It is a small cap with metal arms that reach out to press against his temples. Rubber tubing hangs from these shiny appendages and drape the sides of his face where they connect to a wooden dowel wrapped in gauze. Toby clamps the dowel between his teeth like a horse bit. He struggles to get his hands free of the leather straps when the light goes out again.