Stay Awake

by Dan Chaon

Something bad has been looking for him for a long time, he thinks, and now, at last, it is growing near.

People say that fire “crackles,” but in fact it seems like the amplified sound of tiny creatures eating, little wet mandibles, thousands and thousands of them,

But even that—the beloved apple tree of their childhood, “Jonathan the Apple Tree,” their mother had called it—even that behaved strangely. Its leaves would get a white powdery substance on them and then they curled up and fell off, and the apples themselves were tiny and wrinkled and deformed in a way that made them look like little ugly heads, and as he sat in the backyard on the sleeping bag he heard one drop. … tunk? A sinister little questioning sound. And then, after a long silence, another one—“tunk?”—and he imagined he saw the whispery movement as the shrunken apple rolled through the unmowed grass.

How to explain that he was afraid? How to explain that it felt as if these notes were like the stories she used to tell him about ghostly hands that reached up to grasp your wrist when you weren’t expecting it, hands that tightened and wouldn’t let free?

It will come to him in a moment, O’Sullivan thinks, though actually he doesn’t want it to. It’s that awful, inevitable feeling, the sound a bicycle makes when it is on its side, as the wheel’s spinning slows and comes to a stop. The ticking of a roulette wheel as the marble finally settles in place. “Oh my God,” O’Sullivan says.

Reader, do not ask me who at this very moment is dreaming you.