I changed into a fresh pair of pajamas, got into the twin-sized bed, and Linda pulled the covers up over me. She handed me two pills and a glass of water.
“Take these new sleeping pills Doctor Hornsby prescribed. I’ll wake you in time for supper.”
My hopes that a different room might be free of rats in the walls were shattered as soon as Linda left me alone. The furious scratchings and scrapings had followed me downstairs like stink follows excrement.
I was afraid of going to sleep, afraid I’d find myself back in that castle under the sea. If Linda hadn’t awakened me when she did, I’d have come face to face with the evil that resided therein.
I must have slept, though, because the next thing I knew, she was calling me to the dining room for supper. If I had dreamt, I could not remember about what.
Julie and Davey were already seated at the table. Linda brought individual salads from the kitchen, then baked tuna casserole in a serving dish. Our children hated green vegetables and fish, and the only way they would eat either was to hide them beneath layers of noodles and cheese. Tonight, however, they both ate their salads without complaint, and they dug into the casserole with an ardor I’d not seen before.
I, too, devoured a salad and consumed two large helpings of casserole. I was hungrier than I thought.
“Feeling better?” Linda asked.
“Those new sleeping pills really worked,” I said. “I got the first decent sleep I’ve had in weeks.”
We managed to get through an entire meal without Julie or Davey beseeching me to buy Brown Jenkin costumes for them. The children were unusually cheerful and complacent tonight.
Maybe I had been unreasonable, as Linda often accused me of being, to forbid our children to dress in such cursed costumes. How unfair it must seem to Davey and Julie that I didn’t want them to be like all their friends. Should I relent at the last moment and allow them to dress like other kids?
I was beginning to see everything so much clearer now after just a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. Perhaps, by tomorrow, I’d have regained a proper perspective. There was still time. I could sleep on it and make a rational decision in the morning.
I told Linda what I was thinking. She smiled at me for the first time in weeks.
She wouldn’t allow me to help with the dishes. “Julie and Davey will do dishes,” she said. “I want you back in bed. Take another sleeping pill. Get a full night’s rest.” She kissed my cheek. “Goodnight, John. Day after tomorrow is Halloween. Then all the nightmares will be over.”
I took her advice, swallowed two more of the new pills, crawled beneath the covers, and fell asleep almost immediately. If I dreamed at all, I couldn’t remember any of it when I awoke.
Bright sunlight streamed through the windows, I glanced at the digital alarm clock next to the bed. It read 10:05 am.
Davey and Julie were attending school where they belonged. Linda was busy at her job downtown. The house was all mine. I could turn over and go back to sleep, if I wanted.
And then I heard the scratchings begin again inside the walls, and I knew I wasn’t alone. I lay in bed and listened. How many rats were there in those four walls? How big were the rodents? How long would it take for them to claw or chew their way through the drywall to reach me?
Why me?
And then it dawned on me, as if the early morning fog had finally burned off my brain to reveal the brightness of naked truth: Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.
If Cthulhu’s minions desired my children as sacrifices to the Great Old Ones on All Hallows’ Eve, they needed to get me out of the way first, either by killing me or by driving me crazy. I knew far too much, and my steadfast refusal to allow Julie and Davey to don Brown Jenkin costumes on Halloween, which provided the mark of the beast to identify suitable sacrifices, foiled their plans.
I was the fly in their ointment. I posed a threat and needed to be eliminated.
Those horrible scratching and scraping, clawing and chewing sounds seemed to grow louder and more frantic with each passing moment. The rats were coming to get me, to rip me apart with their razor-sharp claws and needle-pointed canines.
I decided I had to find a way to kill them before they killed me.
Throwing the covers aside, I leapt out of bed. If I had plenty of time, I’d set rat traps or call in an exterminator. But tomorrow was Halloween. I had to do something today. I needed a moment to think what to do.
I dressed in jeans and an old sweatshirt. Then I went to the kitchen to make coffee. Despite getting a full night’s sleep, I was still drowsy. Those new sleeping pills were powerful, and I’d taken two tablets instead of the prescribed one. I’d think clearer after a cup or two of coffee.
While the coffee brewed, I glanced at today’s paper Linda left for me on the kitchen table.
The date on the masthead read October 31. That had to be wrong.
I checked my cell phone. Then my computer. Then I phoned Linda at work.
“How can today be the thirty-first?”
“You slept for two entire days, John. I knew you need the sleep, so I didn’t try to wake you.”
“Tonight’s Halloween?”
“It is.”
“Shit!” I said and hung up.
There was no time to waste. I had to get rid of those damn rats before they got rid of me.
Get an axe, my brain urged. Rip into the walls and find the little bastards. Chop them up. Make mincemeat of them. Get them all before they get you.
I kept an old axe in the garage, along with other outdoor tools like rakes and shovels. I ran to the garage, found the rusted axe, and returned to the house.
I spent the rest of the day tearing the walls apart, beginning with the second-floor master bedroom and continuing to the children’s rooms, and finally the downstairs bedroom. I found no rats, no evidence of rat droppings, no proof rats had ever existed anywhere in the entire house.
It was almost dark when I finally fell exhausted atop the bed, popped another sleeping pill, and allowed my eyes to close, my mind to go blank. Linda and the children should be home soon, and I didn’t know how to face them. I’d destroyed the drywall in four rooms of the house, caused thousands of dollars of damage, and for what? To fend off something that existed only in fever dreams?
How could I have been wrong about so many things?
When next I woke, the house was completely dark. I switched on a bedside lamp and looked around. I was all alone in an empty house.
Linda and the kids should be home by now. The alarm showed 7:12 pm. Where were they? Why weren’t they here?
Then the doorbell rang, and I heard children’s voices singing, “Trick or treat.”
I picked up the axe and moved into the living room, turned on the porch light, peeked through the peephole in the front door. I saw two small, furry, sharp-toothed things standing on the porch.
The rats were coming for me, and I was ready for them. I raised the axe. I opened the door.
I swung the axe.
One thing marketing geniuses knew that I didn’t was humans, not unlike rats, were herd animals. No one wanted to be different, to feel left out. People, especially children, needed to be accepted as part of the pack, as “normal”, to be essentially the same as everybody else. Of all the things human beings feared, being excluded or left out of the herd topped the list.
Davey and Julie devoutly desired to be among the thousands of children dressed as Brown Jenkin on Halloween. In my fevered state, I’d been oblivious to their pleas. But their mother hadn’t. She’d outfitted them in remnants of the costumes I destroyed at the pharmacy and she’d paid for. On Halloween night, she took them trick or treating, and the children insisted on visiting their father to show me their costumes.