The Bald Man nosleep

I created the bald man out of necessity. Afterall, no one likes arriving at home with a bad report card, with guts made of rocks and a pulsating heart, hair standing up straighter than flags. I know the feeling, the fear, the self loathing.

I never made the honor roll. I always got kids, though, I'd like to think. Kids get bored of structure, and so do I. Perhaps I relate to them a little too much. Perhaps if I didn’t, Frankie Walsh’s biggest fear would have been arriving at a house with a bad report card, and not leaving a house in a body bag. We created the bald man out of necessity, but he eclipsed his original purpose. He grew into a monster.

I babysat Frankie Walsh during my university semesters. He happened to live near my campus, and his overworked parents needed someone willing and able to give him attention. He was a good kid. He was certainly smarter than the letters on his report card spelled him out to be.

I got okay grades back at college, but to be honest the only reason my Aunt and Uncle let me continue attending such an expensive educational endeavor had not a pig’s bum to do with my academic achievement. I work enough odd jobs outside of school to justify the cost, though I still get emails from Aunt Cassie saying, “$40 at the convenience store? Samantha B. Murphy, this is unacceptable!”

At first, Frankie became my success. He immediately became my favorite job on the side. I always loved kids, and while with my 2.5 hovering gpa I would never make the big gigs like interning in the Senate like some of my university friends and giving wide-eyed kids tours, I poured myself into babysitting. In the beginning we just played games when we were together, making up alien races and wild stories. He typically designated the role of the villain to me, but I didn’t care. The importance of having him “defeat me” became more and clear.

Unfortunately, Frankie shared some of my less desirable traits. Like I said, he’s smart, and illegally creative, but math and science gave him quite a rough time, even of the third grade variety. So I did what I do best. I improvised. I started incorporating his lessons into our games, so organically he would never notice he was learning, and his grades by some miracle became better and better. Frankie’s parents, both doctors, could not be more thrilled.

"She always has such wonderful games, she's like a fairy godmother come to life," I overheard the mother say as I was leaving one day.

I got so invested, it was like I was somehow atoning for all of my academic mistakes. Besides, who better to teach someone than the one who knows every mistake in the book to make? His eyes would just sparkle every time he defeated me pretending to be an evil insect alien overload by using the skills I taught him. It was like he was defeating his doubts and anxieties at school. Watching him grow, it was like I was conquering something as well.

It didn’t last.

I should have known something was wrong when I tasked Frankie with defeating the evil insect queen Zerboac. With a blanket for a cape and a triangular symbol written in magic marker on my face, I wouldn’t look all too intimidating even to a third grader. Still, Frankie’s face did not hold the usual bright colorful joy it typically did. He looked drained to the bone of color. All he had to do was answer a simple question, and the earth would be saved from the termite people. “What is the biological advantage of being able to detect bad smells?”

Frankie’s cardboard sword shook violently in his hand. I’ve never witnessed someone have a stroke before, nor have I heard of a nine year-old suffering from one, but as the babysitter my mama bear instincts kicked in. I did a mental check to make sure Frankie took his concerta this morning. My memory of an empty medicine case on the kitchen counter told me he had. I felt for my phone in my back pocket, just in case I had to make a call no babysitter ever wants to.

“Do you want to stop playing,” I said, switching to my normal voice.

Frankie shook his head. His tightened, like if he let it loose tears would just flood out of him.

“I can do this! Just hold on!”

I considered perhaps I didn’t word the question appropriately enough for a nine-year old. Switching back to my raspy “alien” vocals, I said, “why is it important that we, human beings, can tell when something smells bad?”

The water works finally burst through.

“I-I-I don’t know! I suck like craaa-ha-hap!”

He buried his face in my stomach. It felt ridiculous, a scream-crying child soaking my shirt with his tears, while I stood there, wearing an unused, unwashed bed sheet for a cape, feeling completely helpless. It was like the alien queen Zerboac had really won.

I eventually calmed him down after what seemed like hours of endless tears. I managed this by sitting on the foot of the staircase eating ice cream with him his parents wouldn’t have wanted him to eat until after dinner. He told me he lied about “dropping” his report card in the sewer, but I already gathered that. I may not be the next Marie Curie. I remembered hiding my own report cards from my parents.

That night, before Frankie’s parents got home, we made a deal. I know, I know, being the mature adult and all that I should have just laid down the law instead of making a deal with a nine-year old, but again, perhaps I related too much to be objective, or even halfway rational.

I made him promise he would work his socks off to raise his grade in biology, and, if I saw he was making a genuine effort and showed improvement, I would help him hide the grade from his parents. However, tossing report cards in sewers would have to stop. Anyone can simply make a phone call to the school and acquire the grades when you just lose the card. You have to get a bit more psychological.

In short, I fabricated an email from the school claiming grades would no longer receive report cards in paper form due to an influx of students intentionally damaging or hiding their papers. You see, that was part of the genius of the lie, there was an element of truth built into it, thus it was halfway believable. It was the same concept as with the stories I made up with Frankie. My email told Mr. and Mrs. Walsh that from that point on, they would have to call “Mr. John Wittenburgh” to receive information pertaining to progress of their student. I helped him create a medium of sorts, code named "The Bald Man." One of my friends back from high school Daniel did voice acting, and so I gave the mother his number and the scheme was born.

The stakes were considerable. On the one hand, Frankie told me if his parents knew he was failing a class they would take him straight out of the “Red Ribbon award winning” Andrew Jackson Elementary School and stick him into the Saint Anthony of Padua’s School of Remedial Education. The kids attending Saint Anthony’s rode a black bus with narrow windows. Whenever the Andrew Jackson Elementary School bus rode by the black bus, Frankie’s friends would mock the riders. Some of the older kids who dominated the back seats of the bus referred to the black bus as the “tart kart,” and while Frankie didn’t know what they meant by that, I certainly did. I would be damned if I was going to let some edgelord sixth graders with emo alternative rock bands in their playlists and energy drink logos on their caps bully Frankie.

On the other hand, Frankie’s principal Ms. Kelly had warned at the beginning of the year that if anyone hid grades they could be held back a year provided his or her academic record indicated mediocre work.

Still, Frankie improved day by day. There were a lot of tears at first, following proclamations of “I can’t do this! I suck like crap!” However, slow yet certain like an engine starting up, Frankie’s jovial glow returned to him with every tug. With every chapter he read, every online quiz he took, every flashcard session he participated in, the gears in his head turned with just a little more ease, the lights behind his eyes returning in ever such soft hues as the machinery worked better and better.

Becoming his surrogate tutor put a little more weight on my back than I imagined. I began carrying around more flashcards for Third Grade biology than flashcards full of college material. Daniel started demanding money for his vocal performance of a forty-year old balding secretary, and thus I had to allocate some of the cash I received from babysitting towards his pay. Because I needed to still pay for general amenities like soap for my dorm room, I lost something ever so precious to a college student: my budget for buying alcohol.

At one point, I dropped a bunch of flashcards in the quad and a cute boy came over to pick them up… ...only to look up at me with a perplexed and condescending eyebrow raise when he saw I had a flashcard written out specifically for remembering why people detect “bad smells.” Still, seeing Frankie’s face light up again made it worth all the cute guys and alcohol money in the world.

One March night, however, something seemed off again. Frankie wasn't jumping up and down like he usually did at the door (yes, he would literally do that, can you believe how cute this kid was?), but rather sat in solemn silence at the foot of the stairs, his preferred safe haven, face kissing his stomach. When his mother waved goodbye, he finally looked up, and he held that same pale to the bone look.

When Mr. and Mrs. Walsh left, I plopped down on the steps next to him.

“What’s wrong, boo-boo?” I said.

Frankie said nothing.

"Frankie, you can tell me anything, okay? Are you scared of getting in trouble?"

Frankie nodded quickly.

"Whatever it is, Frankie, you won't get in trouble. I promise. Frankie, hey! Look at me, it's always better to tell the truth, no matter what it is. Now what is it?"

"I don't want to lie about the bald man anymore!" Frankie blurted out.

I had a feeling this would come up eventually, but I had no idea how to react. I had planned in the event of this happening saying something along the lines of “just let it ride out the rest of the Semester,” but that sounded so stupid and inadequate now even in my head.

As I scanned my brain for an appropriate response, Frankie looked at me with gigantic pupils. He swallowed. Then, he said, "the bald man said I need to stop lying."

I shivered. My tongue went fat in my mouth. My blood drained from my face.

"The-the bald man said to stop lying?" I said, "Frankie, there is no bald man, remember? We made him up."

Frankie shook his head.

“No, no no no.”

He just kept saying it over and over, shaking his head back and forth, back and forth.

“No, no no no no no no.”

“Frankie, what on earth are you talking about?” I said.

"The bald man said if we keep lying, we're both taking the- the black bus straight to Hell."

I turned my head back to see if someone was watching us through the windows on each side of the bright blue front door. Nothing but the quaint woods behind us greeted my vision. “Frankie, the bald man isn’t real.” I said, firm in my voice.

Frankie just pointed towards the kitchen.

“I-I-In there,” he said.

I made my way to the kitchen, my head empty and light, my arms useless at my sides, my knees weak, as though I would pass out before I reached the hardwood floor. I felt in my back pocket for my phone. If there someone in the house, how would the parents not notice before leaving? It didn’t matter. Whatever was going on, Frankie’s safety was my number one priority. I would call Mr. and Mrs. Walsh if shit hit the fan, even if it meant revealing myself. Maybe I could explain to Ms. Kelly that this was all my fault, that he didn’t deserve to get in trouble when a woman-child had enabled him to-

My thought process slammed to a halt when I reached the kitchen. The smell hit me like the smack of a wooden bat. Oh god, the smell. From the refrigerator oozed a stench of a rotting fat animal. I tied a washcloth around my face and, after letting out a large sigh, thrust open the refrigerator.

Inside lay the carcass of a pig, more gray than pink, with random parts of its stomach sliced open. From university level biology I had certain parts of a pig’s insides lodged into my brain, and the dissection work on this pig brought it all out. Someone had sliced the thymus, punctured the kidney, and left the pig in the refrigerator.

“Frankie, oh my God, Frankie,” I said, “I’m so sorry. Do your parents know this is in here?”

Frankie shook his head.

“I hid it from them like I hide my grades. I don’t want to hide things anymore!”

“Frankie, why would you hide this?” I said, “did you steal this from a lab or something?”

“Just flip it over,” Frankie said.

Flip it over? Seeing no other choice, as undesirable as it was, took the washcloth from my face to use as a makeshift glove. Without the nasal protection, the stench smacked at me again. I flipped over the carcass, knocking over a bottle of milk.

Bumph. The milk spilled all over the wooden floor, but I ignored that. Taped to the dorsal side of the pig was a flashcard. On it read the following:

Samantha and Frankie are gonna’ take the black bus straight to Hell.

I took the pig outside, placed it on the ground, ripped open a nearby garbage bag, poured out all of the trash inside, and stuck the carcass to the bottom. Then I screamed. For the next few months nightmares berated my sleep. I could still smell the rotting flesh in my dreams. The smell was nothing like the stench on the pigs in laboratories I had to work in. They had reached rigor mortis. They smelled bad, but not like this. Not anything like the smells in the night.

I ate almost nothing. I argued with my roommate over not taking out the trash, and when she proved to me it was my turn, I kicked it over. I stopped going to my office hours, and when my English professor stopped me as I was leaving class to ask why we never chatted anymore, I just shrugged, looking down at the floor, and said said I was “tired.” In a sense, it was true. I felt tired all the time now. From the moment each class started I prayed for its end, and while I never missed class altogether, I no longer sprinted to class with my backpack clanging behind me to make it on the dot as I had become infamous across campus for doing.

Meanwhile, the more thin and exhausted I became, the more full and productive Frankie seemed. He started to receive grades in the 90s and even a few 100s. In a parent teacher conference, Frankie’s biology and homeroom teacher raised the possibility that Frankie had begun cheating, but Mr. and Mrs. Walsh shot down the accusation citing “Frankie’s wonderful helper.” Mr. and Mrs. Walsh seemed more and more elated whenever I saw them. They gave me a raise, but I no longer wanted or needed an alcohol budget. I never went out anymore. I just felt too exhausted all the time. I spent the money on anxiety pills.

It wasn’t the dead pig that finally broke me, I’ve come to realize. It wasn’t even the possibility that with my selfish enabling of a lie I had somehow but some crazy cosmic force allowed a child I was responsible for to be endangered by some stalker or something, though that sat right up as number two on the list of reasons I fell apart come late Spring.

The reason it all came crashing down for me was a realization. I had used “The Bald Man” strategy before. I couldn’t believe it slipped my mind. I must have blocked him out, because I used to use him to lie about everything. I’d say a bald man mugged me of a drawstring bag that I was holding my report card in at the time. I’d say a bald man came into the house and broke a plate when my parents weren’t home. I’d say a bald man locked the bathroom door from the inside when my dad had to use a drill to tear off the knob. With the night in the kitchen came a resurfaced memory that since played in my nightmares on repeat like an all day showing of a classic film on a movie television network.

When I was nine, I had slept in my bed, clutching onto my froggy stuffed animal, when I smelled something. It smelled burnt and crisp, but awful, like the smell had been dipped in a bucket of worms and whatever weird, ash smelling aroma had perviated through my great grandfather’s funeral.

Then I heard it. A sound like the last moan of some large, feral animal creaking out its last desperate attempts to ask for salvation as its vocals rotted away. The sound began as a low pitched groan, and transitioned into a pained, twisted screech.

UuuuughhuaaAAAAAAA!

I pulled my blanket over my face for protection and waited for whatever it was to go away, but when the moaning stopped, it was only replaced with rustling from the kitchen. Glasses smashed on the floor. The sounds of ransacking echoed up the steps into the halls near my room. I screamed for my mom, but only silent darkness from the hall outside greeted me.

I walked down the stairs, my heart screaming at each squeak of those old steps, and froze when I got to the kitchen. Some naked man was sliding a tray with what looked like pink meat into the refrigerator. No, not a person. Though from behind he looked to be a normal, if obese, bald pink-skinned man, I felt no warmth radiating from his body. The air around him frosted over where he stood. I could no longer feel my heartbeat.

I stubbed my toed on the corner of the kitchen counter, producing a thud. The thing must have heard me, because he- it turned its head. The man had the face of a what I could only describe as a melted hog. His nose was almost comically large, the fats of his cheeks sagged like water balloons, and his eyes- -he had no eyes, only empty, penetrating sockets. He stared at me as I all but strangled froggy in my grip, and he made produced the dreaded moan.

UuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuughhuhuuuuuuaAAAAAAAAAAA!

I flew up the stairs and screamed bloody murder for my parents. When my mom woke up, she immediately comforted me. When she came down stairs and saw the mess in the kitchen, however she took on a more scolding tone. All of the evidence had vanished, including what I now know must have been a pig carcass the bald man had tried to thrust into the fridge. Needless to say, she didn’t believe me this time when I said “the bald man did it.”

While this nightmare of past haunting relentlessly plagues my sanity, one of possible future premonition crawls at something even deeper within me.

In this dream, it’s May 4th, the last day of the Semester. Frankie’s report card sits on the table; four As and a B. We are ecstatic. Despite the dream setting, the joy feels so real, so damn real Even if he only landed a B in biology, a passing grade is a passing grade. I spend a few hours readying another email from Andrew Jackson Elementary School about how the report system has switched yet again and they’re back to using good old paper, while Frankie treats himself to a few hours of well earned video gaming playing. The time slips away ever so quickly in this dream, and before either of us know it, the time says 10:00 p.m. and it’s time to put Frankie to bed.

Even in the dream, I realize Frankie’s parents should have come home by now. This is the first mark that something is off. I feel my gut drop every time I check my phone for a message from Mr. or Mrs. Walsh, no matter how many times I relive the dream, when messages come up blank. I run downstairs and lock every door and window. I check the garage door to make sure it’s shut. Then, I bolt it.

I sit in beside Frankie’s bed as he sleeps, waiting for a text from his parents that will never come, that the narrative of my nightmares will never allow.

Then, without fail, I hear rumbling in the kitchen. I smell rotting flesh.

And I hear that moan, that awful, awful moan.

UuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuughhuhuuuuuuaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

I realize I forgot to lock the back screen door. No matter how many times I have this dream, I always forget to lock the back screen door, just like no matter how many times I studied I would always draw a blank on test days.

I do not have time to fully process my inadequacy. In my dream, I react so quickly I barely register my actions, and I watch myself make up Frankie, take out a spare key to his neighbor’s house his parents entrusted me with in case of a home invasion, and sprint out the door clutching Frankie’s hand.

I call the police as I run across our lawn to the neighbor’s house. I babble well-nigh incoherently, but I manage a few buzzwords. The address. The words “home invasion.” The word “help.”

I lock every door and window in the neighbor’s house, and this time I make sure twice I lock the back screen door. I tell Frankie to run up the stairs and lock himself in a bedroom. I go into the garage to find a weapon. I rummage through spider web coded buckets until I find an old aluminum bat. Though it is clearly meant for little league use, I can barely hold it in my numb arms. I sniffle back tears at a rate of twice per three seconds.

And then I know.

In dreams, sometimes you just know things. Your mind whispers absolutes into your subconscious, and I know, I just know, that you can’t lock out the bald man. I know that it wouldn’t have even mattered if I did lock the back screen door. I know that he always finds a way, that he can bend and squeeze himself into any situation, because I made him that way.

As I exit the garage and enter the living room, the first thing I see is the back of his bald head.

I haven’t stopped having this dream since that night in March. Today is April 29th. It’s the week of May 4th.

I don’t know what the correct answer is.

Submitted May 04, 2017 at 02:13AM by ilovetigersmore http://ift.tt/2qGi7Na nosleep