Clive Barker - The Great and Secret Show

So. Behind their eyes the hope in them was sickening, and in many, dead. They lived from event to event with a subtle terror of the gap between, filling up their lives with distractions to avoid the emptiness where curiosity should have been, and breathing a sigh of relief when the children passed the point of asking questions about what life was for.

Not everyone hid their fears so well, however.

At the age of thirteen Ted Elizando's class was told by a forward-thinking teacher that the superpowers held enough missiles between them to destroy civilization many hundreds of times over. The thought had bothered him far more than it seemed to bother his classmates, so he'd kept his nightmares of Armageddon to himself for fear of being laughed at. The deception worked; on Ted as much as the classmates. Through his teens he'd virtually forgotten the fears. At twenty-one, with a good job in Thousand Oaks, he married Loretta. They were parents the following year. One night, a few months after the birth of baby Dawn, the nightmare of the final fire came back. Sweaty and shaking, Ted got up and went to check on his daughter. She was asleep in her cot, sprawled on her stomach, the way she liked to sleep. He watched her slumbers for an hour or more, then went back to bed. The sequence of events repeated itself almost every night thereafter, until it had the predictability of ritual. Sometimes the baby would turn over in her sleep and her long-lashed eyes would flicker open. Seeing her daddy there by her cot she would smile. The vigil took its toll on Ted, however. Night after night of broken sleep drained him of strength; he found it steadily more difficult to prevent the horrors that came by the hours of darkness invading those of light. Sitting at his desk in the middle of the working day the terrors would visit him. The spring sun, shining on the papers before him, became the blinding brightness mushrooming in front of him. Every breeze, however balmy, carried distant cries to his ears.

And then, one night, standing guard at Dawn's cot, he heard the missiles coming. Terrified, he picked Dawn up, trying to hush her as she wept. Her complaints woke Loretta, who came after her husband. She found him in the dining room, unable to speak for the terror he felt, staring at his daughter, whom he'd let fall when he'd seen her body carbonized in his arms, her skin blackening, her limbs becoming smoking sticks.

He was hospitalized for a month, then returned to the Grove, the medical consensus being that his best hopes for a return to full health lay in the bosom of his family. A year later, Loretta filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. It was granted, as was the custody of the child.

Very few people visited Ted these days. In the four years since his breakdown he'd worked in the pet store in the Mall, a job which had made mercifully few demands upon him. He was happy among the animals, who were, like him, bad dissemblers. There was about him the air of a man who knew no home now but a razor's edge. Tommy-Ray, forbidden pets by Momma, had been indulged by Ted: allowed free access to the store (even minding it on one or two occasions, when Ted had to run errands), playing with the dogs and the snakes. He'd got to know Ted and his story well, though they'd never been friends. He'd never visited Ted at home, for instance, as he did tonight.

"I brought someone to see you, Teddy. Someone I want you to meet."

"It's late."

"This can't wait. See, it's really good news and I had no one to share it with but you."

"Good news?"

"My dad. He came home."

"He did? Well, I'm really happy for you, Tommy-Ray."

"Don't you want to meet him?"

"Well, I—"

"Of course he does," said the Jaff stepping out of the shadow, and extending his hand to Ted. "Any friend of my son's is a friend of mine."

Seeing the power Tommy-Ray had introduced as his father, Teddy took a frightened step back into his house. This was another species of nightmare altogether. Even in the bad old times they'd never come calling. They'd crept up, stealthily. This one talked and smiled and invited itself in.

"I want something from you," the Jaff said.

"What's going on, Tommy-Ray? This is my house. You can't just come in here and take stuff."

"This is something you don't want," the Jaff said, reaching towards Ted, "something you 'II be much happier without."

Tommy-Ray watched, amazed and impressed, as Ted's eyes began to roll up beneath his lids, and he started to make noises that suggested he was about to throw up. But nothing came; at least from his throat. It was out of his pores the prize appeared, the juices of his body bubbling up and thickening, paling, and rising off his skin, soaking through his shirt, through his trousers.

Tommy-Ray danced from side to side, enthralled. It was like some grotesque magic act. The drops of moisture were defying gravity, hanging in the air in front of Ted, touching each other and forming larger drops, those drops in turn meeting and joining, until pieces of solid matter, like a sickly gray cheese, were floating in front of his chest. And still the waters came at the Jaff's call, each mote adding bulk to the body. It had form now, too: the first rough sketches of Ted's private horror. Tommy-Ray grinned to see it: its twitching legs, its mismatched eyes. Poor Ted, to have had this baby inside him and been unable to let it go. Like the Jaff had said, he'd be better off without it.

That was the first of several visits that night, and each time there was some new beast out of the lost soul. All pale, all vaguely reptilian, but in every other regard a personal creation. The Jaff put it best, when the night's adventures were drawing to a close:

"It's an art," he said. "This drawing forth. Don't you think?"

"Yeah. I like it."

"Not the Art, of course. But an echo of it. As, I suppose, is every art."

"Where are we going now?"

"I need to rest. Find somewhere shady, and cool."

"I know some places."

"No. You've got to go home."

"Why?"

"Because I want the Grove to wake up tomorrow morning and believe the world is just as it was."

"What do I tell Jo-Beth?"

"Tell her you remember nothing. If she presses you, apologize."

"I don't want to go," Tommy-Ray said.

"I know," the Jaff said, reaching out to put his hand on Tommy-Ray's shoulder. He massaged the muscle as he spoke. "But we don't want a search party out looking for you. They could discover things we only intend to reveal in our time!"

Tommy-Ray grinned at this.

"How long will that be?"

"You want to see the Grove turned upside down, don't you?"

"I'm counting the hours."

The Jaff laughed.

"Like father, like son," he said. "Hang loose, boy. I'll be back."

And laughing, he led his beasts off into the dark.

The girl of his dreams had been wrong, Howie thought when he woke: the sun doesn't shine in the state of California every day. The dawn was sluggish when he opened the blinds; the sky showing no hint of blue. He dutifully ran through his exercises—the barest minimum his conscience would allow him. They did little or nothing to enliven his system; they simply made him sweat. Having showered and shaved, he dressed and went down to the Mall. He didn't yet have the words of reclamation he was going to need when he saw Jo-Beth. He knew from past experience that any attempt on his part to plan a speech would only result in a hopeless, stammering tangle when he opened his mouth. It would be better to respond to the moment as it came. If she was dismissive, he'd be forceful. If she was contrite, he'd be forgiving. All that mattered was that he mend the breach of the previous day.

If there was some explanation for whatever had happened to them at the motel, hours of soul-searching on his part hadn't unearthed it. All he could conclude was that somehow their shared dream—the idea of which, given the strength of feeling between them, didn't seem so difficult to understand—had been rerouted by an inept telepathic switchboard towards a nightmare which they neither understood nor deserved. It was an astral error of some kind. Nothing to do with them; best forgotten. With a little will on both sides they could pick up their relationship where they'd left it outside Butrick's Steak House, when there'd still been so much promise in the air.