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But as the walls pressed in around her, as she felt her mind disjointed by terror, felt how tightly she and the children were wrapped, dead ended, no escape, the way time expanded so horribly long and narrow in front of them, she knew that nothing was all right.
Things might never be all rightagain.
7
Her daughter pulled at her sleeve. Breathed into her ear, “Mommy, what is he?”
Into her mind’s eye sprung a fully formed image of the man turning inside out to reveal matted fur, yellow eyes, needled teeth.
Stop it.
“It’s just a man,” she whispered. She rested her cheek on the part of her daughter’s hair, pulled her little boy close, inhaled their precious familiarity. Felt her son rub his wet, dribbling nose dry on her robe. “It was just the man doing a scary voice.”
“But I know him.” Her daughter’s voice dripped desperation. “I know that voice. The man in the corner. From my dreams.”
Her head throbbed. No matter how she forced her thoughts toward reason, she felt overtaken by the nightmarish strangeness and physical discomfort. The otherworldliness of that voice, describing how it was owed, how it was better, clung to her like an oily film.
“From a dream?” she whispered. “What do you mean?”
“It’s his voice.” Her daughter gripped her wrist tightly now, terror lapping contagiously through the darkness. “He said he watches from the corner, Mama! Just like the man in my dreams. The Corner man.”
Dreams, not one dream. A recurrent monster that had been haunting her little girl.
“I have bad dreams, too,” she said, thinking of her own nightmares and the shadows that stalked her there. “We all sometimes dream scary things. But this, it’s—he’s—a man.”
“No. The Corner—he sounded different.”
Her daughter was right. The scraping threat of the Corner was altogether unlike the bizarrely childish patter of the voice that had preceded it.
Don’t be crazy, letting yourself get sucked into a little girl’s dreams. Stop thinking of him as this Corner. He’s a person.
“Mama,” her son softly cried, “Mama, I don’t like it. Is it a ghost?”
“Shhhhh, please, loves. We have to be quiet. There’s no such thing as ghosts. It’s not a ghost. Not a nightmare. Not this—Corner—thing, from your dreams. It’s just a man. I’m so sorry, so sorry this is happening. But we’re here, together.”
“You said it was a monster,” her son sniffled. “It’s a monster.”
You shouldn’t have said that. Why did you say that?
Because it’s true.
“I—it’s not a real monster,” she said. “It’s a bad man. A monstrous man.”
“He hides in the corner,” her daughter insisted. “He said so. I know him. He watches me from the corner when he thinks I’m asleep. When I’m sleeping.”
Why didn’t she tell you this before? She can’t know him. But don’t you know him? There’s something familiar, something—what is it? Isn’t there something?
Her sense that yes, she’d seen this Corner man before, heard that voice, ripped at the base of her neck like a pin left in fabric.
She felt sick with the horror of the voice’s unidentifiable familiarity, of the dark room, of being stalked, the unreality of the situation. The way things felt like themselves but also not, familiar but utterly different, as in dreams.
It is like a dream. But it’s real. And it’s happening to you.
And you have to make them be quiet.
“I know it was scary. I know it didn’t sound like the same person talking, but it was. He’s not a monster or a ghost. Not a dream. No Corner man. He’s a person. An angry person. It was scary, like nightmares, but it was just him doing a scary voice.”
“Why? Why would he do that?”
