Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 60, No. 1. Whole No. 344, July 1972

by Carole Rosenthal{© 1972 by Carole Rosenthal.}

Remember, Joey, all the things you see in this room are in your imagination. They’re not real...”

He didn’t like being locked in this way. All alone in the damp winter darkness with the lights off. And even when cars passed below on the hazy street, their beams flickering on the cracked ceiling, his terror did not lessen. The lights were like strange wordless messages, like signals from someone unknown.

Still, he was glad when he could see. If the snakes hiding under the bed crawled toward him — if spiders came out of the walls — if the closet door opened and a red giant appeared — it was better to know than to lie waiting in bed, covers pulled tight around his body, and a silent parched scream tense in his throat.

But he couldn’t scream tonight. About that Mommy had been firm.

“If you scream tonight, Joey,” she said, pulling his arms through the sleeves of his yellow cotton pajamas, “I’m going to be so angry at you. Mommy needs all the sleep she can get since the new baby came. Do you understand?”

He understood so well that his neck stiffened and he couldn’t even nod.

“Bend your head, Joey,” Mommy said. “I can’t spend all night just getting you ready for bed.”

And Mommy, who smelled so good — just like chocolate pudding — hurried Joey down the hall to the little dark room.

“It’s your own little room, after all,” Mommy said, smoothing his hair with her cool shadowy hand, “and you should be very glad to have it. Remember, Joey, all the things you see in this room are in your imagination. They’re not real!”

Then, her body looming over Joey, she pressed her damp lips to his cheek, leaving a small snail track of affection. “You’re a big boy now, Joey, and there’s nothing to be frightened of. Not another peep out of you tonight.”

Joey held the hem of Mommy’s rose-colored nightgown, but Mommy was pulling away from him. She opened the door and flicked off the light. Her shadow said softly, “Go to sleep, Joey” — and the door shut, then clicked as she turned the lock from the other side to keep Joey in his room. Last week, while Mommy was still asleep, he had almost started a fire trying to cook breakfast.

Her house slippers swished rapidly down the hall.

Joey lay rigid in the narrow bed, his shoulders bunched forward on the pillow, the white sheet pulled up against his small pointed chin. If he didn’t move, they would think he was dead, would come up near him and see a hunched, unbreathing white shell in yellow pajamas, and would go away.

He shut his eyes. When he opened them it would be morning. Mommy would unlock the door and he would play in the sunlit kitchen.

He opened his eyes. It was very dark.

Nothing moved around him. Mommy had forgotten to pull down the window shade and he could see by the light from the neighboring apartment building that the clothes in his chair had not yet changed shape, that the closet door was still closed. And as he settled back in bed, arms pressed against his body, he noticed that he could see people moving around inside two windows of the adjoining building. Like in a television set. He saw the people very clearly when they stood near the windows, though when they moved farther back in the room he had to squint to see. He decided to watch them until the lights went off. That way he would be safe.

In one window a balding man with a large sagging belly stood in his undershirt and watched himself in the mirror on his closet door. In the other window Mr. and Mrs. Shafer — Joey knew them because Mommy and her friends used to talk about them — were eating dinner in their kitchen and Mrs. Shafer seemed to be yelling at her husband until his face turned the color of the spaghetti sauce he was eating.

Joey took one more look around his room before settling back to watch. “You’re not real,” he whispered, daring them out loud to come into the open. Nothing moved.

The Fat Man in one of the windows walked toward the center of his room, faced Joey, and slowly bent down with his arms outstretched in front of him, disappearing from sight. Then, like a jack-in-the-box, he bobbed back up again quickly. Joey smiled appreciatively. He did it again, and this time Joey laughed.

In the next window Mr. Shafer tugged at his ear and stood up behind the table.

Joey watched the bouncing Fat Man for a while. Up! Down. Up! Down. Faster and faster.

In the adjoining apartment he saw Mrs. Shafer punching her fists into her hips, her big apron stretching smooth across her stomach as she loomed over her husband.

Then the Fat Man went down and didn’t bounce up again right away. Joey craned his neck, but he couldn’t see him. When the Fat Man rose slowly back into view, his face was round and red, and he leaned his hands against the window sill, shaking his head. He stayed that way for a time, then he began to rhythmically flex his arms back and forth across his chest.

Where was Mr. Shafer? Joey couldn’t find him when he turned back to the other window, though Mrs. Shafer still stood in the same spot. Joey squinted hard. Mr. Shafer had moved way back in the kitchen, in the shadows near the cupboard.

The Fat Man did something funny again. He walked back to the mirror, poked his fingers into his ears, and began wiggling his fingers. Then he smacked himself hard with the flat of his hand against his stomach. Gosh, he was silly! Joey didn’t know grownups played silly games.

Mr. and Mrs. Shafer were now chasing each other around the table, and Joey thought they were being silly, too. Mr. Shafer held one hand low at his waist and walked in a strange sideways and crablike way toward his wife. She seemed to be telling him something, her head jerking up and down and her fingers running through her hair. She reached behind her uncertainly and put her hand on a chair.

The Fat Man drew up a faded green armchair and began to read.

Both windows were still. Joey hoped they wouldn’t turn the lights off soon. Then, suddenly, Mrs. Shafer lurched backward into her window. Pink kitchen curtains fell half out of the open window and onto the fire escape. Mr. Shafer, only partially visible behind his wife, his chin almost resting on his hunched shoulder, edged slowly forward.

Why didn’t the Fat Man get up and do something? Joey didn’t really like this any more. It was like the time he watched “Pinocchio” on television, and Pinocchio got locked in a cage. Later that afternoon Joey had come down with chicken pox and he had cried and cried.

Mr. Shafer had a knife in his hand.

“You’re not real,” Joey said to the window. Hadn’t Mommy said so? And didn’t she tell him that things weren’t real on television? It was only his imagination.

A mysterious change came over Mrs. Shafer. Her back still filled up the window frame, and she neither stirred nor yelled, but her entire body changed. She seemed shrunken, as if her clothes had suddenly grown too large, or as if an enormous tiredness was settling on her. After a long stillness she shuddered, and Mr. Shafer darted forward. Quickly. Not like a crab any more, but like a snake, uncoiling his right arm at her stomach.

Mrs. Shafer turned around in the window and screamed. Her mouth was bigger and more like a cave than Joey could have imagined. For a moment she rose and her rage trumpeted across the air shaft before her voice rattled like an almost-empty cookie jar. She stopped abruptly and slid backward, sinking flabbily out of sight.

Maybe Mommy would wake up from all that noise. Maybe she would rush in with a thermometer and turn on the light. “I told you that what happened in this room was your imagination, Joey,” she would say as she pulled down the window shade. “So what in the world are you so frightened of?”

He knotted his thumb into the stretchy material of his pajama top and shut his eyes except for a tiny slit. In the Shafer window Mrs. Shafer was crawling across the floor, little burbles of spit coming out of her lips, just like Baby after he ate. Her white apron turned very red across the stomach, and Mr. Shafer, still holding the long knife, was on his knees beside her and wiping his eyes. Then he stood up, backed across the room, knocked over a chair, and crawled through the window onto the fire escape where the pink curtains hung limply. He inhaled a great big gasp of wet air and crouched against the side of the building.

The door in the Shafer kitchen splintered and a hand came through it. The Fat Man, followed by three women in bathrobes, opened the door and the women started screaming.

Mr. Shafer, crouched pale and wet in a dark corner of the fire escape across from Joey, began to shake.

Joey was shaking, too. He pulled the covers over his head and pushed the pillow against his mouth. He must not scream, though. Over and over again he recited the alphabet to himself.

When he finally peeked again, it was because he heard a noise. But he pretended he didn’t.

Why didn’t the noise go away?

A deep breath, a scream really, gathered in the bottom of his stomach. But it wouldn’t work itself up fast enough.

His eyes widened.

Mr. Shafer’s narrow body heaved as he threw one leg and then the other across Joey’s window sill.

Joey couldn’t move. He had known he couldn’t move if anything really happened, if Mommy had been wrong. His body grew stiff, as inflexible as a floorboard. His chest felt cold and empty, his throat closed so tight he couldn’t squeak. And Mommy wouldn’t come even if he screamed. So he pretended to be dead.

Mr. Shafer’s sour breath filled the room and closed in on Joey. A quivering hand tensed on his shoulder, moist nostrils came near his cheek. Joey pushed the round hard knots of his breath into his chest. Even he could hardly feel himself alive. When Mr. Shafer nudged him with an elbow, Joey stayed still, and when the cool knife pressed against his neck he didn’t move. He was dead already, he told himself.

“Boy?” Mr. Shafer’s tiny voice said close to Joey’s ear. “I want you to answer if you’re not asleep.”

Joey didn’t answer.

Mr. Shafer wrapped his stringy arms around Joey, pulling him up very close, until Joey could feel his own heart beating. It beat very fast, very fluttery, like the heart of the sick cat Joey had once found in the rain and brought home. It scared him, but still he didn’t move. Finally, the arms let go and Mr. Shafer shuffled backward, stumbling.

“I didn’t mean to do it.” Mr. Shafer made little snuffling noises. “If you hear me, believe me, but don’t say so because if you do I’ll have to kill you.” He started crying so loud that Joey almost moved. “I’m not a killer! I’m not a killer at all!”

For a long time — maybe hours — Joey stayed dead. It was safer that way, here in this little dark room, where Mr. Shafer crouched against the window holding the long shiny kitchen knife and listening to the police noises across the air shaft. And lying so still, Joey found himself getting very, very tired. It wasn’t real anyway. Mommy had said so, and Mommy who smelled so clean and felt so soft, who fed him pancakes in the morning and poured golden syrup over them, Mommy wouldn’t lie to him. Nothing that happened in this room at night was real, she had said, and waves of sleep were beginning to spread over him like vast blue sails.

Occasionally Mr. Shafer’s sobs pierced the cool oceanic air in which Joey floated, but the blue sails soon billowed and carried him away...

The dusty morning light was filtering slowly into the room. The ragged sound of crying made Joey start awake. He saw Mr. Shafer fumble at the locked door to his bedroom and then, muttering, back away, and crawl out onto the fire escape.

Mr. Shafer rose unsteadily, leaning against the railing. Then Joey heard crashing, rattling sounds. A long scream, rising and falling like a broken doll’s voice, started near Joey’s window and grew farther and farther away, ending a long distance below his room.

He pulled the pillow over his head. It was very soft and he was very tired. When Mommy unlocked the door he would get up and play.

The morning sun glinted hard and brittle on the other side of the kitchen window. But under the table, where Joey crouched on his hands and knees, there were, shadows. Joey was a wild lion hiding in jungle underbrush, waiting for someone to fight. He placed his paw firmly down on the black-and-white linoleum tile grass. King of the Jungle!

Mommy’s nylon-encased leg, long and inviting, waggled slowly back and forth in front of him as she sat talking on the telephone.

“Well, Nancy,” she said, “I can’t tell you how shocking it was. I mean, fighting is one thing, but something like that happening right in the next building...”

She paused. “Yes, d-e-a-d as a doornail, right under our window, and all covered with more b-l-o-o-d than... No, I’m spelling because a certain person is sitting right here under the table playing...

“Joey? Would you believe it? Slept right through it! First time he didn’t wake me since the baby came. I’ve been telling him that the things he saw in his room at night weren’t real and I guess he finally overcame his imaginary fears.”

She reached down to ruffle Joey’s hair.

“Funny, isn’t it? Kids have such strange ideas of reality. I wonder where they get them from.”

Joey gathered a mighty roar In his mouth. He wondered how loud Mommy would yell if he took a big bite of her leg.