And five minutes later the boy had been out of bed again, racing Donnie in the tiny strip of light from the cracked doorway.
The stakes were higher now.
But the methods were the same.
"Alex, I can't do that."
From the other side of the door came a guttural moan that slowly crescendoed to a wail.
"You need to find another way.
Look, like I told you.
Look for a light, or another way to... to go on.
There has to be something."
"DAD-
DEEEEEE!"
Ian lurched into the living room and turned on the TV.
He steadfastly ignored his son's screams.
He thought about going downstairs, to see if it was quieter, but couldn't bear the thought of those cries echoing through the floor so close to the room where he had seen Alex getting raped.
After an hour, he threw on his coat and left through the front door.
Standing on the porch, his breath pluming in the frozen air, he waited and heard nothing.
But it was too cold to stay outside, and when he went back in the cries resumed.
He curled into a ball on the couch and turned up the TV until the music and the voices from the speakers crackled with distortion, and still he heard Alex shrieking in the snatches of silence between commercials.
At 2:30 he put his coat back on, got in his car, and drove.
Alex didn't follow him.
Ian turned on the radio and listened to whatever was on, his mind racing, his soul raw.
He can't keep doing this.
He can't.
I have to figure out a way to tell him.
He has to understand.
There has to be something to convince him.
He thought again about séances and exorcists, Ouija boards and psychics.
The lights of oncoming cars on 169 mesmerized him.
They looked like a river of souls, flowing to heaven.
They were running past him, the other way.
He was in a different river - the one filled with red lights, the one going to hell.
The scream of a horn jerked him awake as he started drifting across the lane marker and into another car.
He wrenched the wheel back and managed not to crash.
He got back home just as dawn broke.
The house was quiet.
He collapsed on the couch, and slept.
He woke at ten, and again at noon.
Each time he struggled to get up as a brick of exhaustion behind his eyes dragged him down.
Each time he surrendered to it, and fell into the grey.
When he woke the next time, the light from the curtains was starting to die.
His bladder drove him from the couch, and once he was up, the jagged kink in his neck made him recoil from the thought of going back to it.
He couldn't stand to stay in the house so he drove away, wincing at the pain in his neck every time he had to check his mirror.
Alex left him alone, and somehow he ended up at the mall where he and Alina used to come to walk.
His stomach grumbled as he parked, but he didn't get anything to eat.
Instead he just wandered the broad halls, shuffled past the other shoppers, surrounded by people but completely alone.
He passed a store that sold Ouija boards and stared at one in the window, wondering if its arcane face would let Alex speak in plain language instead of always aping things he had said in life.
The hand-written price tag said
$17.50.
He bought it.
When the mall closed he threw the board in his trunk and thought about calling Derek, or Alina, or his mom.
Then he went home, ate a banana, and tried to go to bed, hoping to get his sleep schedule back to something resembling normal before work on Monday.
Alex started screaming around eleven.
Ian stood in the empty hallway of his empty house, outside a closed door, and spoke.
"Alex, I know what you're trying to do."
"Dad-
dy!
"
"I know you want me to open the door so you can keep talking to me in the car, and in the living room, and try to get me to read books with you.
Right?"
Screeching.
A tantrum to tear down the heavens.
"But you're still not listening to me."
God, his head hurt.
Exhaustion bulged at the backs of his eyes.
His ability to keep his voice level astounded him.
Thinking back, though, it always had.
Short of an occasional snap or sharp outburst, he had never had trouble keeping his temper with his son.
Even reasoning had always seemed to work best, and Alex was the one person on earth that Ian had always been able to stay level with.
He didn't want to hurt him.
He didn't want him to feel unloved or disliked.
But he still had to teach Alex how to behave, and that meant administering the rules firmly but dispassionately.
It had worked, eventually, with the bedtime tantrums.
In the months before he had been kidnapped, Alex had slept with the door closed every night.
Maybe it would work again.
"I love you, Alex.
You know that.
I need you to trust me."
"OPEN THE
DOOR!
"
"I'm not going to do that."
"
OPEN THE DOOR!"
"Alex, the answer is no.
You need to find your own way.
I can't help you with that."
The depth of his fatigue actually made it easier to keep his calm, to stay detached.
"
DAD-DEEEE!
"
"Go to sleep, Alex."
"
DAD-DEEE!
NO, DAD-DEEEEEE!
"
"It's time for bed now."
Ian went into the living room, tried the same failed strategies there as he had the night before.
Eventually his detachment frayed, and he winced at every new shriek like it was a cattle prod.
They drove him into the kitchen, where he stared at the basement door for several minutes, flinching, before going through.
He and Alina had sought refuge in the basement before - when Alex was an infant, learning to sleep through the night.
Sometimes he'd been hungry, sure, but sometimes he had just been defiant, and in an effort to get him to start recognizing the difference, they would let him cry for up to twenty minutes at a time.
They'd always go into the basement for that, where his cries would be somewhat muffled.
The trips below were Ian's idea, because his wife seemed to be going mad from sleep deprivation, and he wanted to shield her from the yawning, bottomless demands of motherhood as much as he could.
You stay here,
he'd tell her.
In twenty minutes I'll go up.
I'll take care of him.
Just try to get some sleep.
Her haggard eyes would accost him -
You can't care for him.
He needs to be breastfed.
It's my job. -
and he would stare back, or even say out loud,
One bottle of formula every couple days is not going to kill him.
We can't let him run us into the ground.
We both still need to sleep, and you especially.
She had gotten so mad at him, sometimes!
The literature had convinced her that every time she let Alex cry or let him drink formula, she was shortening his lifespan or destroying his brain cells.
But later, when Alex had started sleeping through, she had thanked Ian.
For being there when she was too exhausted to think.
For standing up for her.
The stairs lurched beneath him, and he tripped.
He shot a hand out to grab the railing, but momentum twisted him around and knocked his feet from the steps.
He ended up stretched like a man on a rack, his feet brushing the cheap carpet, his arm bent weirdly to hang on.
"God dammit," he whispered.
The floor was thinner than it used to be, or Alex's voice was stronger.
His shrieks were barely muffled at all.
Walgreen's sold earplugs.
He bought a pack and drove home.
Just as it had been Saturday night, the air outside the house was still.
As he locked the door behind him, Alex's shrieks started up again as if they had never stopped.
Ian closed his bedroom door and put in two of the plugs.
They expanded in his ears like a rush of water over his head, bulging against his flesh and filling his head with echoing stillness.
He crawled into bed and buried his head under the blankets, clenching his eyes shut.
He could still hear his son.
After an hour he gave up, ripped out the plugs, and went again to his son's door to entreat him to stop.
It didn't work, but a little later the sun rose, and Alex's screams wound down to sobs, then to moans, then to silence.
Sunday night he handed out candy, but when the trick-or-treaters stopped, Alex began.
Ian stayed up all night, reeling, and finally found one place in the house where he could barely hear Alex: the shower.
He used it at 4 am, dressed, then left for work.
He parked at the far end of the lot, set his cell phone alarm for 7:55, and slept for two and a half hours.
The callers he got all had nasty viruses or registry issues; no one needed a simple driver update or an advertised program install.
Their questions scraped against his brain like sandpaper.
Once, he nodded off with a caller on hold.
He jerked awake in such a panic that he nearly toppled out of his chair.
At lunch, he sneaked out to his car for a nap.
He awoke even groggier, his head throbbing.
The advantage to this was that his headache would not permit him to doze between calls.
He drove home in a stupor, and fell asleep on the couch until Alex's screaming woke him for the night.
"Mah niggah!"
"Hey."
"What's goin' on?"
"I...
I'm sorry to ask, I know it's weird, is there any chance I could stay over there tonight again?"
A heartbeat.
"
Tonight?
"
Ian bit back the urge to apologize again.
"Yeah."
The road was swimming as he drove home; he blinked at it, trying to make it hold still.
"God... you do know it's Tuesday?"
"Yeah."
"Ah, man.
Tonight... Jake's staying here tonight, we've had it set up for like a week now."
Absurdly, tears boiled into Ian's eyes.
"Oh."
"I'm sorry, Ian, I wish I could.
Those dreams coming back?"
Ian blinked again.
"I... yeah, I guess so.
They're waking me up, every night, waking me."
A concerned sigh.
"Oh, man."
"I can't... I haven't slept in days, he just... keeps
screaming.
"
From a distant cavern in his mind, Ian wondered if this had been saying too much.
It didn't matter.
His brain felt like a leaking orange juice carton on the fridge shelf.
The words had just seeped out.
"Ian... god, you sound terrible."
"I'm so tired."
"Man... listen.
I'm really sorry about tonight.
Just... try to get some sleep, okay?
Maybe take some, like.... sleep medicine?
Or something?
It might help.
I never dream when I'm on that stuff."