Schrader - What Goes On In the Walls At Night

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Finally, I do not pretend to have set down... a true, or even a consistent model of the universe. I can only say that here is a bit of my personal universe, the universe traversed in a long and uncompleted journey.

If my record, like those of the sixteenth-century voyagers, is confused by strange beasts or monstrous thoughts or sights of abortive men, these are no more than my eyes saw or my mind conceived. On the world island we are all castaways, so that what is seen by one may often be dark or obscure to another.

Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey

I've seen the future and I've left it behind.

Black Sabbath

I didnt sleep during most of seventh and eighth grade. Around two or three in the morning, every night, Id wake up terrified that someone was waiting for me in the hallway. Id peek out over the rolling dunes of my covers and watch shadows pace back and forth in the crack between the floor and the bottom of the door.

Sometimes the shadows whispered things to me, though I dont remember what they said. Occasionally Id fall asleep again an hour or two later, after I grew too tired to keep watch. But most nights I stayed on guard until morning.

Those years I wandered around in sleep-deprived numbness, never really awake. I developed a paranoid personality and acted out at school. I had few real friends. Fortunately, I had books and movies to look forward to during the day and to comfort me at night.

About this time I discovered the books of Shorty Gray. Vanish Into Midnight was one fiction paperback I found at a thrift store and never saw again: A man and wife are preyed upon by shadow people in the forest. Terrifying for twelve year-old me; I could relate.

Ironically, reading horror stories gave me courage and helped me stay sane and functioning. In time, the shadows left me alone, although I still rarely sleep for more than four hours a night and am often stalked in the jungle darkness by the two panthers called Panic and Terror.

F or a long time I forgot about Shorty Gray. I read somewhere that hed published twenty books, maybe more, both fiction and nonfiction of all genres, in addition to essays and short fiction in magazines, yet most of his work is out of print. I still hunt for his books. I rarely find them.

But what a life. He rode trains cross-country in the sixties, helped occupy Wounded Knee in 1973, spat on President Nixon once in protest. He had never cared much for readership or about making money. I found so little information about his personal life, it was impossible to know if he had a family. He wore no wedding ring, as far as anyone knew. Then again, no one could really know: Shorty Gray always wore a long, black sleeve and glove covering his left arm and hand.

One night, about two months ago, after a convention on book publishing, I checked into a cheap hotel outside of Philadelphia, in a place so old the wallpaper had taken root in the walls. I set my stuff down on my squeaky mattress, sat around, grew bored, then wandered down to the hotel den. It was dark and damp in there, lit up only by a few solitary yellow-lamp blobs floating in the black.

A light turned on. In the darkest corner of the room, laid back in a comfy armchair, sipping a glass of whiskey, amazingly, was Shorty Gray.

I froze, undecided about whether to approach or not. He must have seen me staring, because the next thing I knew he was holding up the bottle and motioning me to sit. Soon I was having a conversation with my lost hero.

We talked all through the night; or, rather, he talked and I listened.

He told me about how, when he was eight years old, hed worked the grounds at a place called Pickering Cemetery with his parents out in Connecticut. How one night there, in the basement, hed heard shadowy voices in the walls, whispering to each other, telling stories, one after another, all night long.

You know what Im talking about? The... shadows? The voices? he asked, his bushy eyebrows raised, as I leaned forward in full attention.

I nodded. I knew it too well.

Sap from the logs in the fire popped loudly. He sighed and said, This may sound... strange, but I have something Id like to tell you. Im dying, and dont have much longer to go. Cancer. Maybe a few weeks, a month. Who can tell? Ive had a good life, a life of adventure. But theres one event that I havent written about. It was the catalyst for everything, my writing, my wandering... In any case, Id like to tell you about it... if you have the time.

Of course I said yes, and took out my pen and paper.

I was only eight years old when it happened, he started. My parents and I had taken jobs as caretakers of Pickering Cemetery, living there. A large place, hilly, rolling, almost fifty acres in size.

Something unusual about this cemetery: it had a columbarium, an ornate structure the size of a small church. Housed inside were hundreds of urns containing ashes, and some bodies. Its front loomed thirty feet tall, with protective gargoyles perched at the tops on both sides. My mother told me that long, cavernous tunnels ran underneath, in mazes carved in the dirt. When I had to pass by the columbarium to get homehome was only a few hundred feet pastI would run and never linger lest the massive door fly open and let the spirits out...

Our own little home was made of brick and had only three rooms above grounda kitchen, a bedroom, and a small living space. There was, however, a basement. I never did like the cold much, and was much more sensitive than my parents, so I spent nights below, listening to the furnace gurgle and belch, its metals expanding and contracting and heating me while I slept.

One night after work I went downstairs, dog tired, dirt rolling off my hair and onto my pillow, and fell into a deep sleep. But at some point I was awoken by the sound of scratching.

At first I thought the furnace was making noises, but all I heard was the tick-tick-tick of it cooling. No, this was behind me, behind the brick walls, somewhere deep in the earth. I put my ear up to the wall; I heard rustling followed by scattered sounds of dirt or rock falling, or being pushed, through a hole. What it was I couldnt guesswhat moves in solid dirt? A mole?