The Black Bedtime

Maurice knew the rules of the house, but rules do not stop the sun from setting. By eight o'clock, the twilight outside the high victorian windows had curdled from a bruised purple to a thick, unyielding ink. The house did not just become dark; it felt as though the dark was spilling out from the baseboards, rising like grease from the floorboards to swallow the furniture. 

It was time for the black bedtime. 

He stood at the foot of his father’s bed, his small hands tucked deep into the pockets of his corduroy trousers to hide their shaking. The room smelled of old linen, damp wool, and the faint, sweet copper tang of something that had gone bad behind the walls. 

On the mattress lay the shape of his father. 

"Is it time, Maurice?" The voice came from beneath the heavy, hand-stitched quilts. It didn't sound like his father anymore. It sounded like stones grinding together at the bottom of a dry well. 

"Yes, Papa," Maurice whispered. He hated how small his voice sounded in the vast, stretching shadows of the room. "The clock downstairs just struck eight. The sun is entirely gone." 

A hand emerged from beneath the quilt. It was pale—not the healthy, calloused white of a man who worked the timber yards, but a slick, translucent gray. The fingernails were long, cracked, and caked with dark, wet soil. Maurice tried not to look at the skin where it met the sleeve of the nightshirt. It looked loose, as if the person inside was wearing his father like an ill-fitting coat. 

"Bring the lantern closer," the shape ordered. "Let me see if you brought enough." 

Maurice reached for the heavy iron lantern on the nightstand, turning the brass wick dial until the flame flared bright and hot. The light pushed the darkness back, forcing the heavy shadows into the corners of the room. But the shadows didn't dissolve. They crowded together against the wardrobe, thick and pulsing, like a crowd of people waiting for a show to begin. 

In the center of the bed, the grey hand flinched from the light. 

"Not too close, boy," the voice hissed. A wet, tearing sound came from inside the throat. "You know what happens if the light stays too bright. It starves." 

"I brought the basket, Papa." Maurice set the wicker basket onto the edge of the mattress. Inside, something shifted. A soft, frantic scratching sound echoed against the wood. 

Six weeks ago, his father had gone into the woods behind the property to clear a fallen elm before the winter freeze. He hadn't returned by nightfall. He hadn't returned by morning. When Maurice finally found him three days later, his father was lying in a ditch, staring blankly at the sky, his eyes wide and completely black from corner to corner. Maurice had dragged him home, poured hot broth down his throat, and tucked him into bed. 

But by midnight, the thing in the bed had stopped breathing. And yet, it kept talking. 

"Good boy," the shape whispered. The quilts peeled back entirely, revealing the torso. The nightshirt was torn open down the center. Where his father's chest should have been, there was only a cavernous, yawning split in the flesh—a jagged, bloodless mouth that opened into an absolute, lightless void. 

It was a pocket of pure, living blackness sewn directly into his father's ribs. 

Maurice opened the wicker basket. A large, fat wood-pigeon blinked up at him, its chest heaving with terror. Maurice pinned its wings behind its back, his fingers slick with the bird’s sweat. Every instinct in his body screamed at him to drop the bird and run out into the night, to run until his lungs burst, to leave this house and never look back. 

But he remembered what happened last Tuesday when he had been too afraid to catch a rabbit. The blackness had crawled out of his father's chest while Maurice slept, pooling over his own face, filling his nose and mouth with the suffocating scent of rotting earth until he nearly choked to death in his dreams. 

Feed the dark, his father’s voice had warned him then. Or it will find its own supper. 

"Put it in," the voice commanded from the pillows. His father’s actual face remained completely still, the jaw locked, the words vibrating out from somewhere deep behind the teeth. "Hurry, Maurice. The bedtime draws near. It needs to rest." 

Maurice held his breath, leaning over the bed. The void in his father’s chest seemed to pull at him, a cold gravity that made the hair on his arms stand on end. He thrust the struggling pigeon directly into the black split in the torso. 

There was no sound of biting. No snapping of bones. 

There was only a soft, wet slurp, like a heavy boot being pulled out of deep mud. The bird’s frantic wings vanished instantly into the dark cavity. For a brief second, Maurice saw the shape of the pigeon pressing outward against his father’s grey skin from the inside, a desperate silhouette trying to escape the ribs, before it was dissolved entirely into the black. 

The split in the chest snapped shut with a sound like wet leather striking wood. 

From beneath the covers, a long, rattling sigh escaped his father's lips. The grey skin looked slightly less translucent now, a faint, sickly flush returning to the cheeks. The blackness in the corners of the room seemed to settle, losing its aggressive, reaching edge. 

"Well done, Maurice," the voice whispered, much softer now, heavy with an unnatural sleep. "The house is safe for another night. Blow out the lantern." 

Maurice reached for the brass dial. His fingers were trembling so violently he could barely grip the metal. He turned it down, down, down, until the flame shivered and died. 

The room vanished. The world vanished. 

In the absolute, suffocating darkness of the bedroom, Maurice stood perfectly still, listening to the rhythmic, heavy thumping of two entirely different hearts beating inside his father's chest. He turned slowly, feeling his way through the pitch black toward his own small cot in the corner of the room, praying that tomorrow night a pigeon would be enough.