Authors: Christopher Ransom
The Fading
Christopher Ransom is the author of three international bestselling novels. After studying literature at Colorado State University
and managing an international business importing exotic reptiles, he worked at
Entertainment Weekly
magazine in New York, various now deceased technology firms in Los Angeles, and as a copywriter at Famous Footwear in Madison,
Wisconsin. Christopher now lives near his hometown of Boulder, Colorado.
Visit
www.christopherransom.com
to learn more about the author and his work.
The Birthing House
The Haunting of James Hastings
The People Next Door
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 978-0-748-13418-2
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © Christopher Ransom 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
Contents
For Sally
True friend, celestial soul sister,
mother luminescent
gentle thoughts meander through the sand
as the ship made currents reach the land
the omniscient sun paving through the sky
and when it’s done all the seabirds fly
I’d like to stay but
I
couldn’t stay with you
I
have to go,
I
have a lot
I
want to do
pleasures be waiting by the sea
with a smile for all the world to see
diamond waves through sunglass days go by
so beautiful to be here and alive
though I’ve built sometimes so hard
did
I
survive?
feel us shaking
T
HE
S
AMPLES
The true mystery of the world is the
visible, not the invisible.
O
SCAR
W
ILDE
,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
He was still a soft floating consciousness in his mother’s womb when the nameless thing that would destroy his ability to
lead a normal life, even as it allowed him to thrive in darkness and secrets, first reached out and blanketed him. Sheltered
and growing at a rate deemed natural and healthy, the fetus was in his twenty-seventh week, a period known for rapid brain
development and the lids’ first shutterings over newly formed eyes. The shroud fell upon him in less time than is required
for light from a lamp to cross a room and touch the window, lasted 2.45639 seconds, and retreated as quickly as it had arrived.
He registered nothing physically or mentally. It was as though a star had been eclipsed by a strange moon in a planetary system
ten thousand galaxies away, the frictionless vacuum of blackout unobserved and silent, except that here the eclipsed object
was the child and the universe was his mother. There wasn’t much to it that first time. He simply vanished in the absolute
absence of light while sleeping in total darkness, and five
heartbeats later was revealed, still sleeping in total darkness.
His mother, who was napping on the couch while the end credits and depressing chords of
Days of Our Lives
played from the console Zenith, also felt nothing. The shroud left no trace, scar, impairment or disability. No medical test
could detect it. Ultrasound sonograms were not standard at the time, but even if Rebecca Shaker had undergone one at the precise
moment her unborn child disappeared, the sound waves would have painted a normal picture of the life she carried. Sound was
sound, after all, and light was light. One could bounce off what the other could not illuminate.
His change, if it could be called such, happened and unhappened too quickly for the human eye to record. The in-between was
a silent aberration. And so it was that, for lack of a witness to the event, no one would ever know it had found him so young.
Or that it was only beginning to form an attachment to him.
The next incident did not occur until 29 February 1976, a leap day, just fourteen minutes before he began his descent into
the birth canal. He was veiled for a little more than nine seconds, as if the child or forces interested in him were unsure
of his place in the world. Not even Dr Roose, a sober man overseeing his one hundred and eighty-eighth delivery, happened
to see the child depart from and return to the humanly visible spectrum. The mother felt nothing other than the usual contractions
and agony.
The leapling crowned. His shoulders made Rebecca Shaker scream through the final release. The boy slid forth into Dr Roose’s
large gentle hands. The cord was cut. The child took well to breathing. Becky and her husband John, who were young and in
love and could not know their child would lead such an extraordinary life, cried with joy. At seven pounds six ounces, the
Shaker baby – who was named Noel, in honor of a son Becky’s grandmother had lost in his infancy, but whom the grandmother
from then on regarded as her angel of grace and strength – was pronounced intact
and lovely by the senior nurse, his head of black hair most impressive.
A second, younger nurse, who was always anxious during deliveries, noted the cold assessing regard in the baby’s eyes as they
roved around the room with unnatural alertness. He looked lost, searching, as if he had been expecting to find someone or
something else waiting for him upon his arrival. During the weighing, he fixated on one corner of the ceiling, the darkest
point in the room, above the drapes and the cold black pane of glass. His tiny mouth fell open and his breath seemed to catch
before he scrunched his eyes and craned away in apparent genuine revulsion.
The young nurse, whose name was Onnika – a Scandinavian word for light – had inherited her parents’ superstitions about unnatural
darkness and dim rooms. Onnika became momentarily hypnotized by the darkly recessed corner, as the child had been, and moments
later she was blinded. Losing all vision in an instant, Onnika cried out and ran from the delivery room, colliding with the
door and a linen basket on wheels in the hall before fumbling her way to another, empty room, where she fell to the floor
sobbing in distress. After several minutes of frantic praying, her vision was restored.
Onnika did not share the cause of her panic or its blinding effect with Dr Roose or the Shaker parents. She was reprimanded,
but she convincingly explained she had only been tired and overcome with emotion. She was sent home early, but had difficulty
sleeping and required a reading lamp to be left on at her bedside at all hours for several weeks. She did not know what the
child had seen, but feared it was a demon that had followed her home and was waiting above her bed each night, preparing to
take her while she slept. Onnika’s greatest fear was that the demon would occupy her soul and command her to kill herself,
extinguishing the light and life she had been blessed with.
Her fear lessened some months later when she met a nice man named Ian, pronounced like the oxygen-taking gesture which precipitates
sleep, who was visiting Colorado as a member of the Norwegian national ski team. Ian came to the emergency room with a broken
ankle and chapped lips, to which Onnika administered plaster and emollients. Riding the gurney between floors, Ian told her
a joke in Swedish. Onnika stayed past her shift to bring Ian cocoa with freeze-dried marshmallows. He returned to Norway but
wrote her letters weekly, often on the backs of postcards featuring grainy photos of the fjords. Onnika fell asleep reading
Ian’s letters in her bed.
Their courtship, no less intense for its glacial inertia, reminded Onnika she had much to live for, replacing her superstitions
about good and evil, demons and light, with superstitions about love. After Onnika mailed Ian a pair of her white nurse stockings,
he agreed to move to the Unites States. Onnika birthed two boys and a girl. Ian broke his lower back skiing and retired from
the international circuit to launch a line of après ski apparel, which proved so successful he was able to stay home
with his family more often. For much of the remainder of her life Onnika and her children were quite happy, almost never staring
strangely into rooms without lamps, or peering for too long up into ceiling corners beyond light’s reach.
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 into 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 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.