Eric McCormack - Cloud

But now, lying there in bed thinking about those words, I suddenly began to worry. For some reason, I felt paranoid.

Acting on instinct, I then did something quite bizarre. I got out of bed, went down to the garage, and found my old long-handled chopping axe, quite rusty from lack of use. Glad that no one could see my foolishness, I took it with me to the bedroom and put it beside the nightstand. I climbed back into bed and switched off the light. In the dark room, as I lay there listening, the slow blades of the ceiling fan above me were like the legs of a huge spider circling its web.

SURE ENOUGH, after no more than ten minutes, I thought I heard a peculiar noise coming from the area of the walk-in closet — a rustling, snickering sound. My heart began hammering so fast I could hardly breathe. I’d absolutely no doubt that was the sound I’d heard in the guest room at Institute 77 on the night Griffin paid me a visit.

I tried to calm myself, then reached out cautiously and switched on the little bedside lamp. A quick glance around the room revealed no sign of any intruder. Of course, that was small comfort in the case of someone so hard to detect as Griffin.

So, I lifted the chopping axe from beside the nightstand with my right hand and slithered out of bed. I heard that sound again — it seemed to be coming from behind the half-open door of the closet. I took a deep breath and, reassured by the heft of the axe, began to tiptoe across the floor. My left hand I kept stretched out in front of me, sifting the seemingly empty space with my fingers in case of an unseeable predator.

In this way I arrived outside the closet, the half-open door revealing only its dark and fearsome interior. I took several more deep breaths. Then with my axe held high, I crouched in the attacking position, snatched the door fully ajar, and switched on the closet light.

Nothing. But the garments were swaying ominously, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

I had no intention of retreating. I steeled myself once more, stepped inside the closet, and began moving cautiously along the array of shirts, jackets, and pants. My free left hand probed amongst them, feeling for her almost-human flesh.

Nothing.

I was about to breathe again, to relax. When all at once that sound — a rustling, a snickering — was right behind me.

The hair on the back of my head bristled. There was no room for me to squirm away or turn and lash out with my axe. I hunched over like a rabbit paralyzed with fear, waiting for the predator to strike me down.

Nothing happened.

I waited and I waited. But still no blow came, no predator struck me down. Instead, very soon, what did begin to strike me was the absurdity of what I was doing — a grown man with a rusty chopping axe in his hand looking for a monster in his clothes closet! Of course I couldn’t see Griffin there — because she wasn’t in this closet, she wasn’t anywhere in Camberloo, she wasn’t even in Canada! The sound I’d taken as her mocking laughter must have been the innocent rustling of sports coats and office shirts and striped ties on their hangers, caused by the draft from the ceiling fan on this warm summer night. The clothes had swayed that ominous way only because I’d jerked the closet door open with such force.

In fact, the one genuine thing had been my terror. The rest was just the result of tiredness and an overstimulated imagination. The entire scene had come from that workshop in the mind that begins its operations when the rational part shuts down for the night.

BACK IN MY BED once more, I thought about the significance of what had just happened. It hadn’t been a dream: I’d been wide awake when I tiptoed across the bedroom with a chopping axe at the ready. I really had been standing there in the clothes closet feeling like an idiot. That surely meant that for the very first time, the world of nightmare had intruded into my waking life. Long ago, Gordon Smith had told me he was glad he wasn’t a chronic dreamer because of this very possibility — and I’d laughed at the idea. But now I’d experienced it, and I didn’t like it. In fact, I was so worried by it that I lay there for the longest time, trying to keep myself awake. In the end, I did fall asleep and — of course — I did dream.

Dupont, complete with twin-pointed beard and bells, was showing me Griffin through iron bars. She was quite visible, sitting on her bed, her skin much greyer than before — a deathly grey. In her thin, grey arms, she was cradling a tiny baby and was leaning forward as though to kiss it. Then, not unexpectedly, the crunching sound began: she was devouring its tiny fingers. She held it out towards me, as if to share the hideous feast. Her eyes were silver slits and her face was grey. Her open mouth was a bloody cavern.

“What a tasty meal,” Dupont was saying, his little bells all a-jingle.

NOW, THE MORNING AFTER, I’m sitting here in the kitchen drinking my coffee beneath the photograph of Miriam I retrieved from Duncairn Manor. But neither its presence, nor the faint songs of birds through the window, the distant swish of cars and trucks— these reassuring, mundane sounds — have done much to put me at ease after a night such as I’ve just passed. Even though Griffin didn’t actually visit me, the aura of menace in the bedroom was so real it still makes me shudder. The dream that followed was equally powerful, and its horrific images are still prominent in my mind.

When I think about the two disquieting experiences in broad daylight, in a calm and objective way — as an engineer might consider them — it isn’t hard to figure out a rational explanation. Their genesis is really quite logical. During Sarah’s visit, Dupont’s name and his work at Institute 77 came up several times. Naturally, those conversations led me to think about Griffin. She, in turn, eventually became the centrepiece of my recent terror in the closet as well as in the subsequent dream.

Even that image of her feasting on the baby has a simple explanation. It’s just a skewed version of the incident in my reallife African journey with Dupont — when my fellow travellers ate the little tree monkeys on skewers. That grisly scene had been imprinted on my memory.

The point I’m making is that when I’m being calm and objective, I have no trouble whatsoever finding reasons for the state of mind that made me so susceptible last night. Indeed, I could add to them the fact that I’ve been under some stress — needlessly, as it turns out — over how Frank and Sarah would get along when they met. I could even include the traumatic news about the awful death of Macbane, a man with whom I have a unique connection, a man I’d come to consider, almost, as my closest friend. I suppose I really haven’t got over that yet.

The accumulation of all these things must have made me vulnerable.

SO MUCH FOR when I’m being calm and objective.

But when that state of mind passes, the catalogue of rational explanations appears to me desperate and empty. They’re nothing but self-deception, a way for me to avoid acknowledging the thing I’m really terrified of, so much so that I’m almost afraid to put it into words, in case the words become prophetic.

That dreadful truth is as follows.

I was indeed euphoric over the finding of my daughter, Sarah, and being able to witness her joyous coming together with Frank. But my happiness was moderated by a frightening notion that began lurking in a dark corner of my mind. It emerged from hiding, full-blown, last night.

What I’d been trying not to think about was this: the possibility that Griffin, too, might have had a child by me, as a result of our night together at Institute 77.

If that were the case, her primitive maternal urge to share her child might well drive her to come looking for me, its father. Then I’d have to acknowledge to the world — especially to my own children — my paternity of her baby. After that, would Frank want anything to do with this other half-sibling, with its half-human mother, or with me? And as for Sarah — when she found out what I’d done, would she be left with anything but contempt for the newly-discovered father she’d almost come to love?