Noceo

noceo - latin
"I harm"

In folklore, the shadow men, also known as nocebos, noceos, slender men, or the black mass, are featureless persons who stalk children in the darkness.

"You are a nasty little boy."

He stiffens, draws up to his full height, but his baby-sitter grabs him by the arm and yanks him back towards the motel. He digs his feet in, but she's furious and already storming for the room his mother's had to share with him.

Because he was kicked out. Of his latest boarding school. For the third time.

"I'm not doing anything wrong," he argues, trying to evade Roz's brutal grip on his forearm. She turns around and yanks him up onto the sidewalk before the motel room door, clamps her other hand over his wrist, and then she twists.

He shouts, skin raw at the Indian burn, and she smirks back at him.

"You deserved it, you little brat. Your mother's not paying me to chase you down. I have friends coming over. So you sit in your room and do your homework-"

"I don't have homework. They kicked me out."

"Or whatever you do, in that room, alone. I don't want to know. And don't make me come back out after you."

"You're a - you're a - stupid, awful-" His words choke up, failing him.

"How lame," she snorts, rolling her eyes at him. "You're eleven. I'm fifteen. You think I care what you think about me? Stay in the damn room."

She says damn like the boys at Wellford do, like she thinks she's getting away with something. And it makes it so stupid like that, makes it worthless, that it almost makes him more mad than getting dragged around by a girl. He tries to yank his arm out of her grip, twilight is falling and he's missing the best part, but Roz drags him back to his room and shoves him inside - so hard he smacks his head on the tv stand as he falls.

She slams the door before he can get back to his feet, and he hears her twisting the key in the lock.

He'll just unlock it, show her. He'll-

Huh.

It - she's done something to it. It won't unlock from out here. What's going on? This is so not cool. "Hey! Roz! Not fair. Let me out. You let me out of here, or I'll-"

"You'll what, buttface? Tell on me? My dad doesn't care what I do. He owns this place, and you know what means? I own you. Now shut up."

His nostrils flare, he wants to smash things, he can't believe she's sending him to bed like he's five, like he's Max from the book getting no supper and dreaming about Wild Things. He can't believe he's being treated like this by everyone, every single person, and he wants everything to break, everything to shatter apart. So he rears his foot back and kicks the door with all his might.

Ow.

Oh, ow. Ow. That-

"Don't you dare," Roz hisses through the seam of the door. "You break it; you buy it."

He pounds both fists - hard - on the door right where he thinks she's leaning up against, but if he gets her, she doesn't let him know. He just hears her laughter floating away as she leaves him.

But her threat stays his foot and sends him heaving and furious to the end of the bed, his mouth twisting, hating them. All of them. His mother for being too poor to afford someplace better than here but too proud to tell the rest of the cast her son has popped up for the tour. The dumb show and its dumb tour and this dumb guy his mother keeps going on about. His stupid father who doesn't exist anyway and wouldn't get him out of this even if he did. Stupid, mean, awful Roz and her perfect blonde hair that fans out in a feathering-

Stupid, dumb, awful Roz, whom he despises, and he wishes she would drop dead.

And while he's at it, the boys at Wellford Academy who smashed his face into the bricks when they caught him practicing his magic trick and called him a faggot and worse and all he was doing was sawing-a-girl-in-half but there aren't any girls at Wellford and he's got to practice on someone or it all gets flushed down the toilet, all that hard work.

He wishes they would all die. Next place, next school? He's not gonna take that crap from anybody. He's going to do things differently, he's going to prove himself. He'll have to do something - drastic. Something big.

At Wellford, the guys who play pranks - they're the ones who are untouchable. At a new school, he can start it all over again. He can be that. All it takes is some thinking - it's a magic trick, really. Make his old self disappear, the skinny eleven year old with no friends but a boy who doesn't mind contorting himself to make it look like he was sawed in half, and abracadabra, he's the cool kid.

And his new self, on the other side of the magic, will be the most popular, have the best of friends, never get his face smashed against the bricks.

He fought them back, didn't he? He showed them. And it doesn't even matter that he got kicked out because he's a hardship kid and their parents have all the money, and they're legends; it doesn't matter at all.

Because now he's got the chance to do it right from the beginning.

First step?

Magic his way out of the motel room and its locked door.

When the end of his ballpoint pen digs through the last of the paint and cracks the seal of decades' worth of horrid yellow, he exults.

He did it.

He flips open the window's two locks and puts the meat of his palms into the latches and he heaves.

It groans and shimmies in the frame, his knees knock into the wall as he falls into his effort, but the window begins to rise. He closes his eyes, gritting his teeth as the latches bite into his hands, but it's going, it's going up-

He's got it.

He sucks in a breath of chilled, evening air, hears the rustle of wind through dry branches, the February cold stealing inside the room. He shivers and grins into the darkness, watches the limbs tossed by the gusts, the enticing and wonderful freedom.

He turns back to the motel room, its dingy shag carpet, the puke-green bedspread in paisley swirls, and he starts stuffing pillows under the covers, thumping them with his fists to get them into shape. He eyes his work critically, taking a step back, and then he drags one corner of the bedspread up near the headboard and hunches it, like shoulders.

That should work. He's already on his way to becoming a notorious prankster.

He turns back to the window, pops out the screen with the flat of both hands, and then climbs over the sill. His back scrapes nastily against the jagged underside of the window, making him wince and arch to get away, but the paint is sealed and caked into the metal and it gouges him as he goes.

Damn. That hurt. Really hurt.

But it's already full dark and he's gonna miss the best part of the night if he's forced to stay in here. The woods behind the motel are opening up its arms to him, beckoning him forward, and it's like Halloween night out here every single day. He hurriedly pushes the screen back into place, and it's crooked, but he doesn't even care.

The woods. Spooky, creepy, thrilling. He found a little waterfall this afternoon when he first gave Roz the slip, and he discovered a huge spider web glistening with trapped flies. The spider was as big as his fist with a yellow blot over its back - like it might be radioactive, like Spiderman, and he wants to go back and find it, see if it glows in the dark.

And the rock. The huge rock at the top of the ridge, where he can see the whole world, but the world can't see him. He needs to be up there in the darkness, so no one can find him and drag him back, no one can smash his face into the bricks or lock him in a foul-smelling motel room. The Rock and the Woods are more than a magic trick; they are super powers. They are invisibility.

If he's on the Rock, surrounded by the Woods, he can stand up against them all.

He's not supposed to be out here.

That's the thing rushing through his blood and pushing his feet to go faster.

He loves the sharp cold in his nose and how it burns into his lungs; he loves the woods at night and how the branches break and the wind moans. He loves the awful shiver that runs down his back and makes the hair stand on his neck.

It's so good.

It's like an endless, ancient monster. A hundred times better than Central Park which always has people in it and police men and cement water fountains. This is true wildness, this is freedom.

He's escaped Roz and the boys at Wellford; he's running faster, and he's stronger than anyone and he can be out here all night until his mother herself comes home. At least she's already striking the set, at least if she's out all night and drinking and having fun without him, it means this is the last night and the Awful Girl Roz will be left behind tomorrow morning when they head to the next town before lunch.

But so will the Woods. And the Rock. And he wants one more night.

Hollander's Woods. Sleepy Hollow and radioactive spiders and the storm that's creeping up on the clouds - he knows tonight is the night for headless horsemen and glowing things and phantoms.

Awful Roz is penance for getting kicked out of Wellford, and he knows his mother did it on purpose; she looked entirely too delighted when she appointed Roz his guardian, giving him a wink and a pat on the head.

Or, ew, even worse, his mother knows that he likes her - used to think she was really cool and older and she would kiss him if he leaned in and did it right - ew, that's awful to even think, but it's possible. He wouldn't put it past his mother.

So it's penance and Wellford was a mistake he'll learn how to fix; he won't be that kid next time.

But the Woods. And the Rock. And the cold winter strangling his every breath as he runs deeper and deeper, heading for the nothingness, the darkness, ready for it this time.

Penance.

He learned penance from Love's Labour's Lost, the play his mother is currently performing in - delightfully, of course, Mother, delightfully - and if he gets out of this kicked-out-of-boarding-school-number-three alive, he'll thank Shakespeare every night for comedy rather than tragedy. And the guy she keeps slipping away with.

It's all a play, that's what Shakespeare said, right? All a play and he's just a player, a blip on the radar screen, not even enough to make his mother strut or fret anything other than the stage.

But the Woods. They're more than a stage; the Woods are old and alive and they have secrets for him.

It's invigorating. He loves it out here; he runs and trips over roots and runs some more and when he's out of breath, he stops with his hands on his knees and gulps, leaves scattered at his feet.

Something cracks deep in the trees and he goes dead still, listening.

He hears his own breath, mostly, just his heart pounding in his chest and the cold. The cold is a sound. He's never noticed that before, how it cracks in the trees and pops in his ears. Cold.

He moves forward again, slower now, slipping under a low-hanging branch and scuffling through dead leaves, kicking them up in the darkness. There's barely a moon, a fingernail of a moon tonight, and the grey clouds stalking across the sky. He feels a round wetness on the web of his thumb and finger, another drop in the crook of his arm, a splash against his cheek.

A little rain is mixed with the curiously grey clouds, eerily illuminated by a moon he can no longer see.

He didn't bring a jacket; he was only thinking about getting out. His back feels raw and maybe it's bleeding and sticking his shirt to his skin, but now with the wet scent of the air and the feeling he gets in his chest when the moon disappears behind the clouds, it's worth it.

There could be wolves. Werewolves. Shifting in and out of form as the moon is masked by the clouds.

The dark closes down on the woods again, like the trees have been dipped in black ink, suddenly and completely doused. A living night, not a matte black, a thing alive and deep and wild.

He hears the animals out there, just beyond him, staying well clear of him, the threatening human. They hush as he passes, hunkering down, and he grins in the trickle of moonlight as it struggles to the earth.

They're all afraid of him. Everything out here is smaller than he is, and he's the smallest kid in his class, and even if those stupid assholes who trash talked him, playing magic tricks like a baby, doesn't matter here. Doesn't matter at all out here, under these trees, branches knitting together like an old woman's gnarled fingers.

He is king. King of the Wild Things.

He follows the trails he found days ago, nights ago, trails leading through dead shrubs with snagging little branches, briars and thistles and roots, along rocks grown long cold and immovable, over rotting trunks that have fallen in the way. He comes to the forked tree sooner than he expected, the twisted limbs looking like they want to claw right out of the ground. He follows the left hand side, the sinister limb that points out the direction, and now it's rougher going.

He stops, listening, hears only his breath, but-

He thought he heard someone out there, something stepping as he steps, disturbing the woods. Something stalking just as the clouds are stalking the moon.

Is something breathing out there?

He tries to clamp down on the sound of his own blood rushing in his body, listening intently, but it's just the darkness and the waiting of animals, waiting for him to pass, and no matter how tightly he strains his eyes, he doesn't see anything. Just black and wild night.

So on he goes, climbing up, going up the sloped side of the ridge.

He has to get on his hands and knees at the end, grab tree branches and dried-out roots, hoist himself up. He's panting and his hands are damp with exertion, slipping a little, but his breath is so cold, like ice in his lungs.

He gets his knee in the last toehold of the embankment and pulls himself up onto the ridge.

He stands there, gulping breath, chest heaving, blinking the darkness out of his eyes until he finally sees it.

The massive rock, glacial in its proportions, jutting precariously out of the ridge and shoving aside the trees. There's a kind of clearing here, because the rock is so wide and fierce that nothing can overgrow it, and he scales it with numb fingers and toes made slippery with leaves and mud.

He gets to the top where he slowly surveys the woods he conquered days ago, the woods which have been his playground while his mother played Shakespeare's Princess of France and he played King of the Wild Things, the woods which have given over its wild-thing secrets.

And then he lays down on the flattest part of the rock, at the pinnacle, his breath sounding so loud now that he's still again.

He can feel his heart beating back against the rock he lays on, and he can see the knots of clouds over the moon and texturing the black sky. The breeze picks up again and burns icy across his cheeks and lips, makes his eye lashes stiff.

He's not supposed to be here, and that - that is one of the best reasons to be lying on this rock and feeling his own heart coming down from the climb.

The sky is so black and heavy above him and yet so infinite and forever and it's like he's being opened up and poured into, everything of the night sucking down into the angry black hole of his own body, and it's a whirlpool, a sucking drag at the whole woods being drawn down into him.

He closes his eyes in near-panic to feel the cold beneath him and the way the rock catches at his clothes and skin, grounding him, anchoring him. He can sense the trees close and their waiting branches, the hushed breath of woods, the stillness of night. The sky is eons above him, stretching so far out and limitless that for a second, he feels like he might fall off the earth as it hurtles through the universe, spinning so fast he has to hold on.

The whole night goes silent.

Everything. Everything goes completely, impossibly silent.

He gasps and flattens his palms to the rock, dizzy, and he has to open his eyes to orient-

A face looms over him.

He screams.

His panic jerks him off the rock and he falls.

He falls right off the ridge and rolls down the other side, roots and scrub brush whipping at his face. He feels fingers, strong and skinny, grasping at his shirt, plucking at him, and he can hear himself still yelling as the adrenaline dumps hard in his blood.

He scrambles to his feet at the bottom and hears It, hears It gliding down the side like it's nothing, effortless, and he runs.

He runs.

He sprints hard through the narrow tree trunks, slams into one when he can't see, pinballing back but always, ever on. He pushes over roots and branches and briars, too scared to think, too scared to cry, too scared to breathe, running, dodging, weaving, running in the darkness with hands held out to fend off the trees and drag himself along.

It's calling his name. His name. He can hear It, thin and high, unreal. Calling his name like an echo in the darkness, a sing-song, and he just runs.

His own breathing is noisy and stuttering in his chest, and he crashes through the woods, not stopping, can't stop. He trips and dodges a rotting limb in the path, scrambles up a slight embankment, heads for the lightening in the distance, like the trees might be thinning, like civilization or a road, anything other.

He can't hear anything anymore. Just himself. His whole body is shaking, he can feel it as he runs, how his chest tightens and his hands are jittery and his feet flying and every breath is a sucking wind. He's going to collapse just from all the terror sitting high and hard in his throat, and he can't keep this up.

It's the darkness that does him in.

He trips hard and goes sprawling, flat on his face with mud and wet leaves in his mouth, knees blossoming with pain. He tries to get up but he tumbles down a rise and stops painfully against a tree trunk, jammed deep in a thicket, and he just lays there. He just lays there.

He can't breathe for a second and the thicket is snarled over his head, hiding him, snagging at his clothes, and he should have gotten a jacket, even here where it's not so freezing, he shouldn't have pushed up his window and sneaked outside, he should have made up homework to do and stayed in.

He's not crying. He won't cry.

The trunk of the tree is wide and knobby and it grinds into his spine every time he tries to pull in a breath, and he aches all over, but he's not going to cry.

He screamed like a girl, and he's never been this scared even when those two guys followed him in Central Park last year, and then he ran crazy and yelling and maybe some tears - but at least no one saw it. No one saw him scream and fall off the ridge and run for his life from a ghost.

A phantom. Who's not even here now, who never was chasing him, a face composed of merely of clouds above him-

A limb cracks on the path and he freezes, heart stopped dead cold, the wet earth seeping into his back, the gully scant shelter.

A voice, out there, a body close, coming closer, calling his name.

Oh, God. Oh, God. I-

Calling his name. Calling for him, moving this way, taking practiced steps, predatory steps, coming this direction.

He can't move. He's lying as flat as the earth and hard roots will allow, squeezing his eyes shut like that will help hide him.

"Where are you, you stupid boy? I saw you come through here."

Oh. Oh, it's just Roz.

He lets out a little breath, giddy with relief, almost enough relief that he would jump up and hug her, but in that very instant, another sound cuts through the darkness. A sound like wasps in the winter, a sound like sawing a man in half.

He freezes.

And then. "Who are you?"

He opens his eyes - so slowly, oh God, dreading it - and he turns his head and he can see her feet on the path that he fell off of, can see her purple shoes in the black night, the laces glowing as if electric. The thicket over him hides her face but he can see the wash of her jeans and the darkness flooding the path.

"Who are you? These are my dad's-"

Her voice is cut off with a bubbling and a terror that crawls right down into his guts.

He's crying, he knows he's crying, but it's silent and desperate as the sound of her chokes in the frozen air. Blood drips from her fingers to the path, drop by drop, splattering the leaves. And then he sees her body fall to the path and hears the nothing of the woods around him, the silent and fearful woods. She slumps to the mud and she's lying there face to face with him in his hidden spot in the thicket, just a sloping gully between them and her eyes catch his and she forms his name on a blood-leaked breath.

He stares, frozen in a fear that has dug its talons in him, and then It. It is a blurred darkness on the path moving off now, effortless and light, the sounds of It only like the wind scratching the trees.

She's still. She's still and dim, and he can't move, can only watch as the slick blood wells and weeps out over the leaves, spilling out, spurts of it as her heart still weakly pumps and pumps and pumps.

His name, a movement of her mouth on his name, and voiceless, and the woods don't move and he doesn't move and she stops moving too.

The blood keeps leaking out of her even when her eyes are fixed and sightless.

It collects in pools and seeps into the ground and the wet leaves around him and he just stares, leaking tears like blood.

No one asks him.

When he gets back, the manager is sitting on the porch with his chew-cup and a foot up on the sill of the front office window, his hat pushed down over his eyes and giving him only a lazy look as he passes the office, dirty and trembling, white as the moon that's disappeared.

He opens the motel room and shuts the door behind him and the chain rattles against the plastic as he pushes it in and locks it.

He turns and his mother is passed out on her own bed and it is still inside but it's not that quiet really, if he listens, and he moves towards the other bed.

He peels off his clothes and stuffs them in the too-small garbage can, but then he sees his hands shaking and he can't, he can't, the fear is like a stink on him, and he pulls the muddy clothes back out. He's shaking still and his nose is running and his eyes are puffed up with crying and with branches that slapped him in the face as he ran back to the motel even as he cried.

He pushes his clothes down into the bottom of his duffle bag and he pulls on pajamas and sits on his mud-stained hands on the edge of his mother's bed and he watches the door with the thin chain lock.

He watches the door until the sun has come all the way up and his mother grunts something and rolls away from him and he pulls his feet up then and sees the mud there too.

He slowly puts his damp socks under the covers and puts his back against the headboard and wraps his arms around his ribs and holds himself in.

The grey light filters weakly through the clouds and the morning is beginning and he's cold and no one has asked him what were you doing where is she and he presses his cheek to his raised knee and watches the door.

He watches the metal chain on the door.

He begins to stop shaking.

He unfolds his arms from his chest and hugs his knees instead.

It is closer to dawn now.

He slides his feet under her covers and his mother tightens her arm around the pillow and avoids the light, pushing deeper into sleep and away from him. She smells like fruity sweet sugar and make-up and cigarettes.

He glances down and his hands are slimed with mud and his nails are caked with it and his nose is still running and he lifts his arm and wipes it on his shirt and gets off the bed.

He goes into the bathroom and shuts the little hollow door and runs water in the bathtub, small as he can so he won't bother her, and he strips off everything.

He washes off the mud with the plastic-tacky bar of soap free from the motel and he watches the red earth spin out and down the drain and he scrubs at himself until his skin is red.

His back is stinging and he straightens up, standing naked in the tub, and then the soap squirts out of his fingers and stops the drain and he reaches out and shuts off the water and stares at the soap and suds and the dark grainy mud and the red tint in the bathtub.

His eyes burn.

He steps out of the cold tub and grabs a towel and wraps it around his body to keep from shivering, but he is again, and he walks out of the bathroom and into the motel where his mother is asleep and he finds the other double bed and crawls into it and under the covers where his pillows are scattered.

He can't close his eyes, but somehow he falls asleep like that.

"Richard, what are you wearing? A towel? Get up, darling, we're off. The show must go on."

His mother laughs at her own joke and flits away from him, dumping cosmetics from the bathroom counter into a train case and depositing it hard on the end of his bed. His eyes ache, dried out. He sits up and the towel falls away, damp, and the sheets are damp and the sun is brilliant in a very blue winter sky, so intense it aches.

He gets to his feet with the towel sagging at his bony hips and he walks numbly towards the bathroom.

He uses the toilet and ignores the ring in the bath tub, and he drags on the pajama pants and underwear still on the floor and then he washes his hands and his mother ruffles his hair as she passes. She smells like perfume and powder and his eyes close and she laughs something and the television is on and it is the sounds of a normal moving morning on tour, and nothing has happened at all.

He gets dressed with her fussing and humming and singing around him, and he makes sure it is all carefully neat and straight for when they come. He packs his own bag so she won't do it, won't see, and he keeps from seeing it too, and she's opening the door to a friend from the theatre, a burly guy who is wide in the doorway, not the guy she was sneaking out of scenes with but someone new.

His mother turns. "Come on, darling, don't dawdle. You remember Gary?"

"Yes," he croaks out.

"Richard!" she exclaims. "Where are your manners? Come along. We need to be leaving." She turns to Gary. "I'm so sorry. You know he just got expelled - again - he's too much for them, such a handful - he really does need a strong male in his life-"

Gary is laughing with her and smiling and not really look at him, ignoring him, but he takes all of Mother's baggage and hefts it easily for her, and that's good.

That's good today. Gary will be there when they come.

It's a usual late morning and filling up the tour bus and the rowdy cast and the drivers trying to get the luggage on underneath, and today he doesn't crawl in after the bags and move them around and cause problems. He waits there for as long as he can, waiting for them to come, but they don't come. Everyone is getting on and off the bus and no one is looking at him and no one is coming or asking anything at all.

He walks to the bus and goes up the steep steps and down the narrow aisle and sits in the very back and puts his nose to the window to look for them so he'll know when they come.

The motel is loud and people are moving around and cars are pulling out and the manager is there with his chew cup and his boots and he's inside the office now and then back out again, waving receipts and getting paid, and he doesn't even notice she's not there and no one asks.

No one asks him, where is she?

When the bus driver closes up the undercarriage and the luggage is all stored and the crew members and cast have paired up in the seats and he's alone in the back, his mother comes down the aisle with Gary and hands him a used comic book.

It's X-Men and it's safe and one he's already read, someone had it at Wellford, but he takes it and thanks her, and she goes back up with Gary, laughing and telling a joke that makes his ears burn, and the driver starts the bus.

It rolls out of the parking lot and off the lot, and someone near the front starts singing, and someone else brings out a guitar, and he sits hunched over in the back with his hands wrapped around the comic book and his eyes darting to the woods, to the road, but no one comes.

When the woods slip away, when they're gone, he leans back in the seat and closes his eyes, and still no one asks.

And he will never tell.