CHAPTER THREE
When Noel was seven months and ten days old, his mother awoke to the sound of his cries making their way down the hall. Rebecca exited her bed in one smooth rise that did not disturb her husband and, still half asleep, shambled blindly to in the spare bedroom. As if appeased by the comforting sound of his mother’s approach, Noel ceased his bawling by the time she reached the threshold. John had painted the walls blue with silver and gold moons that now looked too real, as though their home was open and balanced on the edge of the solar system. The bare wood floorboards were cold against Becky’s soles. Swaying, she steadied herself in the doorway a moment.
Eight feet away, on the other side of his room, a blurry white shape filled the four-square window above his birch crib. The shape was of a small man, from the waist up, wearing a white suit and matching rounded top hat. His features were as indistinct as hers in the darkness, the face a smeared oval with dark sockets and a reddish ring around the unsmiling mouth.
Becky gasped and thrust herself into the room to protect her child. Within her first two steps the figure in the window retreated and was replaced by her own hazy reflection, bringing her to a halt. Absurd though she knew it to be, she reached up and patted her hair, half-expecting and hoping to find a hat, or that she had pinned up her hair in a bun or some other nest which might suggest the shape she had seen in the window. But her hair was down, hanging around her chin and barely protecting her bare shoulders from the draft now seeping through the window frame.
Her heart slowed its frantic beating as she gazed down at Noel. He was staring up at her, face bunching with a fresh round of squalls. She checked his diaper and found it dry. His forehead wasn’t hot. His chest was not clammy. He was hungry, that was all.
She settled into the reading chair beside the small table and lowered the right strap of her nightgown. He began to feed at once, pulling at her with resentment. She touched his eyebrows and wiped something that had dried at his nose, then folded the hem of her gown up around his legs and torso. Oh God, she was tired. Everyone said motherhood stretched you thin, but no one came right out and told you just how utterly flattened the daily cycle of caring for an infant left you. She didn’t want to fall asleep in here again, waking with a sore neck, but she couldn’t help closing her eyes for just a moment. Soon she began to doze.
Outside the tiny bedroom, a winter wind rolled down from the Rockies and crooned against the frozen gutters and brittle window panes. Becky’s mind swirled with dream-state images of their first family Christmas to come, gathering candles and strings of light and the cookies she would bake into a cozy tableau, and with the next gust abandoned these thoughts as instinct warned her to wake up, check the baby, make sure he’s all right.
But of course he’s all right.
In a minute . . . I’m so tired I could sleep for a month.
Eyes closed, she could feel him there, suckling, the small but growing weight of him in the basket of her arms.
But that shape in the window . . .
Groggily she glanced down to see if his eyes were narrowing with the fulfillment of his midnight meal.
He wasn’t there.
Her thickened nipple stood glistening in the moonlight, still warm from his mouth as a single drop of milk fell slowly into the air over her lap and was absorbed into . . . nothing. Her arms were empty, but her panic was still a distant thing, slowed by the dreamy unreality of the vision and lessened by her crushing fatigue.
What a strange dream. My boy is gone and my body has turned to gold.
Against her will her eyes closed again. She must have gotten up, set him back in his crib, and sat back down, too tired to return to bed. This had happened before, on those nights when she didn’t want to leave him. Not out of fear, but the love of watching him sleep. She would drift off in the chair, sometimes reading a mystery novel that always wound up face down in her lap, and wake just before the sun began to cast its morning blue into the room.
The wet pressure at her nipple, which had ceased some time ago, grew more insistent. The weight in her tired arms became real, as real as the whetted smack of his lips, as real as the hardening edge of his gums clinging to her.
Becky found the lamp switch and clicked soft yellow light into the room. Her eyes scrunched in reflex against the glare, but not before she once more glimpsed the emptiness in her arms and the glossy bud of her breast still shining with saliva and the fine beads of milk he had left encircling the darker ring where his mouth should have been. She forced her eyes open wide and snapped forward in the chair.
He’s gone, he’s gone . . . !
Noel was there, of course. His mottled blushing forehead, the tiny squib of his nose, his narrow chest and his hot plump belly within the mint green terrycloth jumper. He was here. Here. For a moment her mind raced with the knowledge that something was wrong. Something had happened to him, to them, and it wasn’t normal. Something had come between them while she dozed, taking him away, only now he was back.
She arched from the chair and turned toward the window, where she had seen the little man in the white suit and top hat. The window was dark, closed and latched, empty but for the outline of their backyard.
But something was here. It came inside and took Noel away.
But that was silly because . . . what could it be? What could have happened to make her think her child was here, then not here, then here again? Either she had, sleepwalking, put him back in his crib and then fetched him again. Or she was simply confused, half asleep, letting her imagination run away from her.
The phrase sleep deprivation came back to her. Dr. Roose had warned her about this common symptom of early motherhood. That’s all it was, that’s all it could be. She was tired. Her mind had slipped, the way it had slipped a few days ago when she went to unload the dishwasher and put half of the cups and plates away before realizing they were still dried with mashed potatoes and apple juice.
Noel continued to rap at the food source with one bunched fist. His color was robust, his eyes drooping. She felt his forehead again, then her own. No, there was nothing wrong with him. As for her, she needed another six hours of real sleep.
“Don’t you do that, Noel-baby,” she whispered. “Don’t you try to get away from Mommy ever again.”
She stayed with her son until almost five a.m. In the morning he was fine and she was relieved. Her protective nature had pulled one over on her sleepy mind. After a month or so, she had forgotten what she had seen (the face in the window) and not seen (her son where he was supposed to be). Noel was growing, changing, becoming more of a handful every day. There were a lot of sleepless nights. A lot of strange dreams, but none featuring a small man in a white suit and top hat.
There would be more episodes in the months and years to come. Some as short as twenty seconds, others as long as sixteen minutes, and many which happened in the middle of the night. But by luck or fate or perhaps even his parents’ need to deny the barely glimpsed and totally unexplainable phenomena, almost three years of his life would pass before anyone noticed the arrival or departure of Noel’s fleeting affliction.
This first eye-witnessed account was also the moment in Noel Shaker’s life when, with some regularity, terrible things began to happen.
***
Excerpted from the forthcoming novel, The Fading, by Christopher Ransom.
On Sale in the United Kingdom 6.24.12