Tiny Nightmares Read online

  She lives in a loft above a steakhouse with a roommate who is never home. The aroma that lingers in the air shaft means Fern is always hungry for meat, though she’s been vegan for years now. She’s spooning leftover takeout rice into her mouth when she hears a moan. She peeks out the kitchen window, expecting to see a cat in heat. All that’s there is a cook having a cigarette.

  On her bed, the phone has switched on again. It’s frozen on a light blue screen. Fern realizes with a little shiver that it’s the same color as the Fibonacci installation. Then the moaning starts again.

  It’s coming from the phone. She tries to turn it off, pressing the power button repeatedly, but the blue remains. She flings it onto the hardwood floor. This doesn’t do any good either. A minuscule crack has formed in the screen. Smoke curls from beneath the glass. Soon all Fern can smell is frying steak and the burning plastic from the installation. She gags.

  The vertigo sweeps over her and all she can see is blue.

  For the second Thursday night in a row, Fern isn’t at the gallery openings, which is unusual. Amir has wandered through of all of them, refilling a disposable plastic cup with bourbon from his flask. It feels weird to be here without Fern. Her Instagram has changed. It’s video after video of her twirling around in endless circles. Or is it her? It seems the longer he looks, the more her features alter. When he texts, her replies are cryptic: Blue heart emojis. Strings of meaningless words.

  An arm creeps around his waist and he jumps. It’s Bella Thayer, the art critic, drunk.

  “Amir!” she exclaims, shoving a strand of platinum hair away from her face. “Can you explain this pretentious crap to me?” On her phone is a tiny twirling Fern. They watch together.

  “I can’t,” he mutters. He’s cold all of a sudden, though the gallery is stifling.

  “Should we ditch the scene and go somewhere?” says Bella. They are still watching Fern spin, the same panicked look on her face each time it meets the camera.

  “Please,” says Amir. Bella puts her phone away. Arm in arm, the two of them push their way through the crowd to meet the night.

  Unbeknownst

  MATTHEW VOLLMER

  The man woke from a dream in which he and his son had been to a movie and during intermission they had gone outside to see the fireworks but it had been snowing so hard that the rockets tossed by a man for a crowd of gawkers sputtered and died and to get back to the theater they had to follow a trail that passed by some hot springs—the kind you’d see in Yellowstone—and the man had lost sight of his son and turned down a path of sticky ground, which he realized too late was the tongue of a carnivorous plant whose stamen was a purplish brainlike thing and whose leaves, in an act of sinister entrapment, folded over and enclosed him.

  That’s when he woke up.

  The clock read 5:59. He thought about getting up. He’d been telling himself he should get up early, that sleeping until 6:30 or 7:00 or even 7:40 on one recent occasion was irresponsible if not downright slothful and that soon the sun would be up, warming the earth, and because it was summer, it would soon be too hot to comfortably exercise out of doors, which he needed desperately to do. One more minute, he thought.

  He would’ve drifted off again except that this time he began to snore just before he lost consciousness. He opened his eyes. Checked the clock: 5:59. This particular minute, apparently, was longer than usual. The entrance into the realm of not-quite-awake-slash-not-quite-asleep had allowed him to misperceive time, maybe. No big deal. He stared down the clock. As soon as it hit 6:00, he told himself, he’d slide out of bed. He’d walk quietly across the bedroom floor so as not to wake his wife, step into the hallway, close his son’s door, let the dog out to pee.

  5:59.

  He counted down from ten to one, a little thing he did sometimes when waiting for numbers on a clock to change or anticipating a traffic light switching from red to green, enjoying the momentary illusion that he had even a modicum of power over the world and the things in it, that simply by thought control he could enact transformations upon things that were otherwise autonomous or, at the very least, programmed to give that impression.

  5:59.

  He repeated the countdown.

  The clock remained unchanged.

  He glanced toward the window. The light—a paleness that signaled a summer sunrise—was believably 5:59-ish. Back to the clock.

  5:59.

  He repeated his countdown thrice more, but only to make it absolutely certain in his mind: the clock was stuck. Maybe, he thought, it had malfunctioned. He’d seen plenty of stopped clocks, but they’d all been analog. This thing, despite being digital, was old. It’d been a wedding present, probably appeared on a gift registry, back when he and his wife had toured a store that specialized in domestic merchandise, carrying a little gun they fired at the UPCs of items they wanted, so as to create their own personalized wish list, an event that had seemed to both of them like the closest they’d ever come to a shopping spree. When he really thought about it, he had to admit that it was kind of amazing, what with the planned obsolescence of all things digital, that such a clock had lasted as long as it had. Back in their old duplex—the first place they’d ever lived together, right after they’d gotten married—they’d left a bedside lamp on too long, its head positioned (who knows why) only inches above the snooze button, and the resultant heat had melted the plastic, warping the button and merging it with the clock body, thus rendering it impossible to delay the inevitable, not that either he or his wife were ever the kind of people to punch a snooze button.

  He slid on a pair of blue shorts with an elastic waistband and three stripes down the sides. In the kitchen, the oven and microwave clocks both read 5:57. As they had never been synchronized with the bedroom clock, which magically set itself once a user plugged it in, they had remained, since the last power outage, two minutes behind, like the watch that the man wore. The watch, as its battery had died a couple of days ago, and had not been replaced due, in part, to procrastination, and in part to the man having visited the one jewelry store he knew in town and finding it closed, showed no numbers at all.

  The man performed the countdown again. And again. Each time, the act only emphasized his powerlessness. He went downstairs to his office, which was on the lower floor of the house, and to get there he had to cross an unfinished storage room, which was vast and windowless and dark. He flicked the light switch but remembered that both bulbs had burned out and that for some reason, when he’d attempted to replace them, the new bulbs hadn’t worked. He’d been meaning to call an electrician. Today, he thought, as he had for over a week now.

  He wiggled the computer mouse. The screen failed to brighten. He tapped on the keyboard. Nada. He unhooked his smartphone, pressed its power button. Nothing changed.

  Back upstairs, he nudged his wife. Said her name. She didn’t respond. He grabbed her wrist. Thought, at first, that he felt a pulse, but couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t his own heartbeat in his fingertips. Still, she was warm. He peeled back her eyelids. He yelled into her ear.

  Nothing.

  He picked up the landline, which his wife insisted they continue to pay for, in case of emergencies. This seemed like it might be one, but there was no dial tone. Outside, on the porch: no breeze. The trees didn’t move. The traffic light in the distance appeared to be stuck on red. No cars appeared on the road.

  He crawled back into bed. What else was there to do but wait? He had a bad feeling, like this wasn’t the kind of dream he could stop by making himself fall asleep inside it. He turned over, faced the wall, and pledged that he wouldn’t open his eyes until he heard a sound: the dog’s collar shaking, the squeak of the wooden ladder as his son descended his bunk, the rustle of covers as his wife finally woke. And then, and only then, he would make a sound of his own, a kind of whine or grunt to protest the fact that she’d gotten up without hugging him first, a sound that his wife, who knew him better than anyone else in the world, would knowingly interpret
and most likely indulge, by hugging him before she got dressed. Yes, he told himself. He could wait, and he would, for however long it took, not knowing, even now, as he was drifting into the dark, imagining his wife’s hand on his face, that she was trying, without success, to shake him awake.

  Lone

  JAC JEMC

  Adrienne woke feeling rested, a surprise after a night camping by herself. She had survived unharmed, with nothing between her and the wilderness but a thin sheet of nylon.

  She committed herself to making it work. She had lost so much since breaking up with Sam and refused to add camping to the list of casualties.

  The couples they’d camped with before were hesitant to commit to a three-person weekend getaway with her. Even the ones who sided more with her seemed to be perennially booked. She asked individual friends to come along, but they all had reasons to say no. Jaclyn insisted she hated roughing it despite Adrienne’s attempts to convince her she had all the gear to make it luxurious—a huge tent, air mattresses, a propane stove to make coffee in the morning easy, and a veritable tank of bourbon. Parra had read a book that didn’t end well about women camping alone together. Mal kept committing and then backing out. Adrienne finally broke down and decided to go solo.

  She’d already booked her site at Summit Lake. She reviewed her Tupperware tote of supplies and added a roll of paper towels and a new bottle of bug spray. She went to the grocery store the day before and chopped vegetables and kneaded hamburger patties and packed everything into the cooler.

  To others, she wanted to appear strong, hiding any clues of vulnerability to encourage them to accompany her, but she was incensed that she did have nerves about camping alone. How dare she be deprived of this? How dare she be kept from a night closer to nature, hearing all those sounds and smelling those smells and feeling just slightly more like an animal who existed in a real, live world. It rejuvenated her. It powered her back up for work and the other mundanities required of her.

  Only one thing sparked the fear: men. Bears or raccoons or spiders did not intimidate her. In fact, Adrienne often thought, she’d be happiest if her death came in the form of an animal attack: a survival of the fittest that she couldn’t disagree with. She could not stand, however, the idea of a man harming her in the woods. She took issue with the way it would so inaccurately reflect the balance of power, the level of need and security of the parties involved.

  She had given so much to Sam just to get him to go, just to be sure he would be okay without her, and still she felt people’s pity when she shared the news of the breakup, as though she were the victim, when, in fact, she had been in charge. He was the one who untagged her from all his photos on social media, unable to deal with the painful memories. He was the one who had unfriended her after she asked him to leave. She flared at the thought.

  When she saw the pair of old hiking boots Sam had left behind in the basement, her first thought was to throw them away. Her second thought was to call him and tell him she’d left them on the front porch for him to pick up, eliminating any need for interaction. But that gave her an idea. She thought of how, after her grandfather died, her grandmother left all the bills in his name, so that if people looked at her mail, they wouldn’t know she lived alone. If Adrienne took the boots with her, and placed them outside the tent, anyone passing by would assume a man slept inside. If a human predator were looking for innocent prey, they’d think twice.

  The night before, she’d set up her tent first and built her fire second. She loved getting the fire going, had always made it her task, even when Sam pretended mastery in the company of friends. She poured herself a bourbon in a tin cup, set out her food on the grate and tended it with care. The sun had set by the time the meat had cooked through. She added logs to the heap and set marshmallows on fire. She took a selfie lit by the flames. She videoed the ooze of a s’more. She took a photo of the sky, disappointed at the dimness of the stars as they appeared on her phone’s screen. She had no service out here, but she would show off her solo camping skills on Sunday when she returned to civilization.

  Her site was near the latrine, and she watched as other campers made their final trips before settling in for the night. By the pairs of people and conversations overheard, she determined the campground to be occupied by couples and families.

  She wondered if she was being paranoid, but, in the end, when the fire had withered, she set the boots outside the tent and zipped herself in. She read a magazine by lantern light on her air mattress with a final finger of liquor, popped a ZzzQuil, and fell asleep.

  In the morning, she made coffee. She loved the dewy chill, how her nose felt both runny and clear. She tugged her hat down over her ears and cradled her mug close as she watched people pass on their morning trips to the latrine. A man waved at her, and Adrienne failed to decipher something in his expression. His smile held some sort of secret. She waited for him to walk back past her, but she didn’t see him again. Maybe he’d gone out for a hike, or he’d walked back to his site a different way. She thought about what she wanted to do that day, but couldn’t get the man’s smile out of her head.

  She’d booked the site for two nights, but she packed the tent up. She threw the tub of supplies and the cooler back into the car. She decided to leave the boots right where they were. Sam would buy a new pair, and Adrienne wouldn’t need them again. Something had changed and, despite the peaceful night, she knew she wouldn’t be camping alone again.

  She made the two-hour drive crying, furious with herself.

  At home she transferred everything from the cooler to the fridge. She threw her bedding in the wash with shaking hands. She poured herself a drink to calm herself down and took out her phone to post the photos with a caption that painted the overnight in the positive light she’d counted on. She opened her photos and understood.

  She saw the selfie in front of the fire and the video of the s’more. She remembered trying to capture the stars.

  But she saw three more photos she hadn’t taken herself: the boots outside the tent in the dark, her sleeping body inside, and then a close-up of the bottom half of a man’s face, grinning.

  2

  Pipeworks

  CHAVISA WOODS

  Sometimes, trees look like men. In the dim light of dusk when they sway in the wind, from a distance, the white trees especially stand out against the forest edge. They appear to be a slim man watching and waiting for something unknown so that he can begin his brutal work.

  When I was very young, I used to see things that no one else saw. One of the things I saw often was a faceless man with a head of bushy white hair. He watched me through windows. I thought he was a real man following me around, just to stare and disappear.

  I saw many things that other people didn’t see. I also heard things that other people didn’t hear, and sometimes, I heard things that other people did hear, but I interpreted them very differently than others would have.

  I was five years old when I discovered the Deep Smoldering Pipeworks. My mother and I were living with a woman named Susan whom my mom had known since high school. Susan lived in a small one-bedroom trailer in the next town over from mine. She had a two-and-a-half-year-old son, and she was an alcoholic, as was my mother, but Susan was sloppier about it than my mom. She was a very violent and argumentative drunk.

  In her one-bedroom trailer, Susan had a queen-size bed boasting an ornate metal headboard and frame. When she got drunk and started arguing with the people she often had over for drinking and arguing, I would go into the bedroom, crawl up in the bed, cover one ear, and press the other against the metal headboard. By pressing my ear against the metal poles, I could hear it. The sonorous metal poles produced a mournful and straining racket that sounded like a combination of an old ironworker’s shop and a torture chamber.

  The fairy-tale movie Legend, which I loved, included many scenes depicting an upper level of Hell where trolls and demons lived in a nightmarish factory just below the earth, where they were
constantly hammering metal and grinding steel and burning coal and torturing the creatures they caught and dragged down and imprisoned in their metal cages. I thought I was hearing this sort of thing—that in some supernatural dimension, the poles of Susan’s bedframe led all the way down to a horrible, mythical pit in the earth, some deep, smoldering Pipeworks, where weapons were being forged from flame and iron, and people were being raped and burned and pulled apart limb by limb, skinned alive; boiled in giant metal cauldrons, and branded with Satan’s irons.

  One night, when I was staying with my mother, Susan went out to the bars with some friends of hers, and my mother and I stayed home to babysit Susan’s two-and-a-half-year-old son. We had a nice time that evening, passing many hours playing games and eating snacks.

  My mother, myself, and Susan’s young son were sitting on the floor of the trailer, and Susan came in slurring and wobbling and talking loudly. She smiled at us and asked if we’d had a good time, then sat in a chair near me, and held her arms open to her baby boy. “Come here,” she said, “give Mommy a hug.” The boy squealed and threw his hands out, laughing, and ran, not to her, but to my mother, Gina. He crawled into my mom’s lap and turned back to his mom. “No!” he squealed, still giggling, “Gina!” Then he hid his face in my mother’s chest, and laughed like a cartoon baby who was being ornery. He was obviously trying to play, but Susan’s response was brutal. Her expression dropped suddenly. Her eyes became dark. Her mouth, a stiff line.

  “You love her more than me?” she asked, not playing in any way. “You want her to be your mom now? Is that it?”

  She grabbed him out of my mom’s lap and sat him in the middle of the floor. The boy began crying. My mom told her to calm down. “You’re just drunk. He knows you’re his momma. We’ve just been having fun, that’s all,” she pleaded.