The Bedtime Story That Keeps Him Awake

The Bedtime Story That Keeps Him Awake

Brian Evenson

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Good Night, Sleep Tight by Brian Evenson

I.

“There is a saying,” his mother had told him several times, just before sleep, when he was still quite young, “always three graves.” She had taken the saying from a book, he discovered years later in college. The same book, as it turned out, from which she had taken many of the stories that, late at night, she had told him to frighten him. Even once he learned that, they still frightened him.

“Why three?” he asked her that first time.

She shrugged. “One for the father,” she said. His own father at the time was already gone, buried. “One for the mother. And, well . . .”

She seemed reluctant to go on. She had been, he now guessed with the perspective of several additional decades, pretending this reluctance, but he hadn’t known this at the time.

“Tell me,” he forced himself to say, though he dreaded what he might hear. But wouldn’t hearing it be better than imagining it?

She shook her head slowly. “I’ve already said too much,” she claimed. And then she turned off the light and left the room, leaving him alone in the darkness.

Later, once he had a child of his own, he wondered why his mother had terrified him so when he himself was just a child. He would never do something like that to his own son. No sane parent would. Was his mother not sane, was that the problem? Or was she simply cruel?

And why was she like that only at night, and not even every night? During the day she was kind, loving. Most nights she was this too. Only one night in twenty would she terrify him. If he was asked what on the whole his childhood had been like, he wouldn’t hesitate to say, Happy.

Seen in that light, what harm, really had been done to him? He had turned out all right, had had a few frightened nights, but ultimately this had had little effect on him. He wasn’t “traumatized,” he didn’t need a therapist, he lived what by all outward appearances was an implacably normal life.

He was, true, still afraid of the dark, but even that was hardly an issue. Anything to disrupt the dark, even the blue dot on the wireless router across the room and beneath the desk, was enough to allay his fear. It was never a problem, his fear was always in check.

Or, rather, it had only been a problem once, years ago, when he and his wife had first bought the house they lived in now and there was a power outage. He had woken up in the pitch dark not knowing where he was and feeling he was back in his childhood room again, in that same dark, having just been told another awful story. This one about a man who accidentally drank a ghost.

He must have gasped, or made an exclamation of some kind. Before he knew it his wife was awake beside him and was touching his side, which made him gasp again—he heard himself this time. And then she spoke. “Are you ok, honey?” she said, or “Sweetie, what’s wrong?” He couldn’t remember which now. Hearing her voice, he knew where he was and his panic began to subside. A moment later there was a beep, and the blue light of the router came on again, and everything was fine.

The strange thing, it seemed to him thinking about it years later, was that she tried to scare me at all. She never did during the day, never even said Boo! to him, was never anything but kind. So why at night? Not every night either, not one night in ten. There was no real regularity, so he could never predict when it might be coming. No matter the night, she would come in first and read to him—nothing scary, just a normal kid’s book pulled from his shelves. She would read to him and then tuck him in, kiss his forehead, and leave the room. She would turn off the light on the way out the door. But on those nights when she was going to frighten him, even though she flicked the switch down as usual, the light somehow stayed on. He did not know how this could be—he had tried to make the switch do that himself but never could. And she always acted too like the light had gone off properly, as if she believed herself to be leaving him in darkness. “Good night,” she said, “sleep tight,” and closed the door.

But a few minutes later the door would silently slide open again and she would come back in, taking her place in the chair beside the bed without a word. She would remain like that for a moment, silent, hands resting lightly on her knees, and then turn to look at him.

“Do you want to hear a scary story?” she would say. And then, whether he said yes or no or nothing at all, she would tell him one.

What made her come back? Why did she return some nights but not most nights? He wasn’t sure. There was no reason that he could make out. She just did.

He asked his mother about it once, when he was older, when he was in college—before he met his wife-to-be and long before his son was born. The two of them were in the living room she generally reserved for company. But now that he was away at college he qualified, he supposed, as company.

In a lull in her recitation of neighborhood gossip, he had asked, “Why did you used to tell me those scary stories?”

She gave him a strange look, as if genuinely surprised. At first he read it to be surprise that he would mention during the day what they never acknowledged except at night, but then she said, “What scary stories?”

“You know,” he said. “At night.”

She made a little noise of disgust. “I never told you scary stories!”

But she had, he insisted. He went on to explain how she had left the room and then come silently back in shortly after.

“What nonsense!” she said. “Once I left I never came back in. Why would I?”

“But you did,” he insisted.

She shook her head. “You must have dreamed it,” she said.

He hadn’t dreamed it, he was sure he hadn’t. Why would she lie? he wondered, once back in his dorm room. Shame, perhaps. Or perhaps she genuinely didn’t remember.

He lay on his bed, staring up at the flaking acoustic tiles. On the other side of the room he could hear his roommate talking to himself as he tried to complete his chemistry homework, mumbling scraps of formulae. Or maybe, he thought, even at the time she didn’t know she was doing it.

One story she told was about a creature that looked human but wasn’t. Mostly it couldn’t be distinguished from a human but it was, so she said, “capable of atrocious self-distortion.” To him, very young, the phrase sounded like a spell. “It was capable, for instance,” his mother said, “of growing as tall as the ceiling, and then across it, and then lengthening itself down the wall. You can walk into a room only to find it behind you and above you and before you all at once. The worst thing to do is notice it. If you notice it, well, what choice does it have but to fall all around you and do away with you?” She gave him a smile—or half her mouth did anyway. The other half tried to smile but failed. “Good night,” she said, and turned off the light and left him alone in the dark.

Another story: this one told slowly, in almost hypnotic tones, about a boy. “A boy not unlike yourself,” his mother said, and smiled. A boy who went into the woods and crawled into a hole he found there, and found, at the bottom of that hole, not roots and grubs and rocks, but a long glittering passageway, illuminated by torches and lined down one side in mirrors.The boy had heard enough fairy tales to feel optimistic about where this passageway would lead. Walking along it, his reflection pacing beside him in the mirrored glass, he dreamed of piles of gold, enchanted princesses, witches and ogres and other villains that he would defeat with one deft twist of his clever mind.

He was so caught up in his thoughts that he did not notice that even though the mirrors had come to an end long ago, his reflection still walked beside him, more and more solid, matching him step for step, indistinguishable from him in every detail except that the creature that used to be his reflection couldn’t smile properly. Every time it tried to smile, it came out glittering and terrifying, little shards of mirrored glass in place of teeth.

His mother stopped speaking, rocking slowly in her chair, staring at nothing.

“When did he notice?” the boy finally asked.

“Eh?” said his mother, coming to. “Only when it was too late.”

“Too late for what?”

His mother stretched, stood. She went to the doorway and lingered in it a moment, then reached out with what seemed an unnatural slowness and switched off the light.

“Let’s just say,” said her voice out of the darkness, “that someone who either was the boy or looked like the boy came back down the passage a few hours later, spattered with blood. When he reached the part of the hall that was mirrored, it made no reflection of him at all.” 

His mother claimed to have never told him that story either. 

II.

He was naturally thinking about this, couldn’t help but think about it, when he and his wife and son went to visit his mother. Normally they stayed in a hotel, ostensibly so as not to be a bother to her, but the real reason, a reason which he didn’t share with his wife or his mother, and certainly not his son, was that he was worried his mother would offer to read a bedtime story to his son, worried too about whether she would frighten him once she was done, just as she had done to him growing up.

This time, his mother had specifically asked for them to stay with her. “But we don’t want to bother you,” he said. It wouldn’t be a bother, she claimed: when they stayed in a hotel she didn’t see as much of them as she would like. She would, she claimed, sleep in the recliner. She didn’t mind: most nights she slept in the recliner anyway. He and his wife could have her bed.

He protested. They couldn’t do that to her!

But no, she insisted, they could. They should! And as far as their son went, he could simply take his father’s old room.

Later, speaking to his wife about it, he found himself hard-pressed to know how to justify his desire to cancel their trip. “You’re being ridiculous,” his wife said. “She’s old. She won’t be around much longer. If she wants us to stay with her, so what? If it gives her satisfaction, we should say yes.”

“But what if she tells our son stories?” he asked, hearing even as he said it how ridiculous it sounded.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Scary stories,” he said.

His wife laughed. “Your mom?” she said. “That sweet old thing? She would never do something like that.”

And yet she had, he wanted to say. She did it to me. But since he had never managed to say this to his wife before, he did not feel like he could start now. It would sound like a lie he was telling to get his way.

Still, when he called his mother back to let her know they’d be staying with her, he couldn’t stop himself from telling her there was one rule.

“Rule?” she said. 

“No scary stories,” he said. “You can read to him and even put him to bed, but you can’t scare him. Not like you used to do to me.”

She made a disgusted noise. “This again!” she said. “You and your delusions! I thought we’d moved past them long ago.”

“Promise,” he said, ignoring her.

“Of course I promise,” she said. “I’d never scare any little boy, and never have.”

“What about—” he started.

“I never have,” she said firmly.

“But—”

“I’m getting off the phone,” she said, speaking louder now. “I’m expecting a call. If you don’t want to stay with me, then don’t. But be honest about it. Stop making up these ridiculous stories to justify it.”

But she had told him those stories, she had. Yes, it didn’t sound like something she’d do. Yes, it was hard to believe it had happened unless you had been the boy in the room forced to listen to them. But if you were that boy, which he was, you knew she had told them, even if you couldn’t convince anybody else.

It upset him that she denied it, that she continued to deny it after all these years. If she would just admit it, that would be enough. It hadn’t damaged him, he wasn’t traumatized, he didn’t need a therapist, he was ok, he was normal, he was, he was, and yet this nagged at him, nagged and nagged. It stood in the way of him and his mother having a real relationship, and had been in the way ever since he was eight.

They went. They stayed with his mother, that lovely, harmless old lady who wouldn’t hurt a fly, but who had periodically terrified him while he was growing up. And they weren’t even her stories! She had stolen them out of a book! Did that make it better or worse?

She made them a lovely meal and they sat at the table and chatted with her about the neighborhood gossip, until the moment his wife looked to him and said, “You’re awfully quiet tonight.”

He was awfully quiet. He was lost in his thoughts. He was thinking about what he’d have to do to catch his mother telling scary stories to his son.

But he rallied, joined the chatter. Better to do that, better to do nothing suspicious, nothing to give himself away.

After supper, his son put his pajamas on, then sat playing with some action figures he had brought with him. Soon, he started to yawn.

“Somebody’s getting sleepy,” his grandmother said.

The man didn’t say anything.

“Sweetie, do you want your granny to read to you and tuck you in?”

His wife looked at him when his mother said it, to see what he would do. But he still didn’t say anything.

“Sure,” his son said.

And there was his son, with his hand clasped gently in his grandmother’s hand as she led him away.

“Are you all right?” his wife asked.

“Fine,” he said, his voice strained. “Just fine.” He kissed her. At a little distance he heard the door to his former room open, then close.

They hugged, then separated. “I’m going to take a shower,” his wife said.

“I’ll be along in a little bit,” he said. “I’m going to read.”

But he did not read. Instead, he snuck into the dark hall that led to his son’s room, stationing himself at one end of it. He would, he believed, be invisible to anyone coming out of the bedroom, and if not he could pretend he was just going to or coming from the master bedroom, which was at the other end of the hall.

He could hear his mother’s voice, gentle, a distant murmuring, from his old room. He could see a sharp line of light beneath the door.

Some time went by. After a while, his mother came out.

“Good night,” she said from the doorway. “Sleep tight.” She walked toward him. And then, without seeing him, even though she came just five or six feet away, she turned out of the hall and into the living room.

I should have reached out and touched her, he thought. Then I would be the one scaring her. The thought made him smile.

But no, that wasn’t why he was there. He needed to be patient, to wait.

From his vantage he could see his mother. She was in the recliner, sleepy, leaned all the way back. She was reading, but her head jerked a little each time she almost nodded off.

She wasn’t going to go back in, he thought. There was no point waiting. They might have to stay with his mother twenty nights before anything happened. He had accomplished nothing. He was getting tired. He rubbed his face. He should have scared her after all.

And then, suddenly, he thought he heard something down the hall. His wife, maybe? He peered through the darkness and yes, there was someone there, near his son’s room, and his eyes had adjusted enough for him to see that it was his mother.

How did she creep so quietly from her chair? he wondered. Almost involuntarily, his eyes flicked toward the living room. There, in the chair, was his mother.

Panicked, he looked back at his son’s door. The light in his son’s room was on now—he could see the band of light under the door. And there, outside of the door, was his mother too. She was in the chair and in the hall at the same time.

He took one shaky step forward then found, abruptly, that he couldn’t move. He tried to speak, but the sound came out strangled and weak, hardly a sound at all.

From down the hall, his mother was looking at him, her eyes glittering coldly in the dark. There was something off about her smile, even in the dark. About one side of her smile.

To the other side of him, in the living room, out of sight now, he could hear his mother, his other mother, snoring softly.

The mother outside the door reached out. It seemed to him that her arm stretched a little longer than an arm should be able to stretch before her hand closed around the doorknob. She eased the door open and silently entered his son’s room, his old room, leaving him helpless, still unable to move, alone in the dark.