The night was quiet. Just breaths of wind outside, sounding nothing more than the swish of paper on paper in my house. The wind leaking in drafts, small slivers of cold that pricked me under my covers. The outside trying to reach in.

A house so quiet the wood settles with creaking sighs, water gags in the pipes.

Downstairs the refrigerator sputters and murmurs its electric drone.

No sleep.

Too much is prodding at me.

Slivers of what’s forgotten trying to prick me under the covers. The outside is trying to reach in. My mind busy mining for fears forgotten.

I’ll lay and mine for hours, the scraps of wind offering no sound cover for what’s inside: when the sound around me dies down the whispering of the head is so much louder.

Louder and tense and dredging up eelskin that hasn’t brushed against me in years. My mind mining for fears as a child I’ve since forgotten. Downward and down still.

Until.

The phone goes off like a Tin Explosion on the nightstand.

A Voice like a friendly old man; comforting yet strong on a cracking wire. A voice that spans a gulf of time the mining mind just broke through.

“Boy,” he says. He said he called because he knew what kind of night it was, he could always peg these nights, as long as I can remember.

I’m the boy. At his house years ago; my parents out at a play. It was a quiet night like tonight where the mind mines and I saw Mary in the Mirror eyeballing me as I writhed to sleep. He knew then and he was there then, silhouetted in the doorway, standing guard with his newspaper until I forgot her bleeding red glare and dreamed off.

His voice on the phone is comfort. It’s protection. He talks lightly, casually, seas of comfort through the line static -

Until -

Low, his voice drops low.

“Do you remember that first fear? The first real fear? Clinging to your fathers leg at your old pap’s service. Pap's face was plastic, - remember? - plastic caked in florescent makeup skin tones, the powdered lips, the jagged black eyelashes, the sculpting trying to cover where - it - entered.”

A man, my childhood guardian but a very sad man. He got to himself before cancer could.

“You swore you could see the jagged ridge where he ended and the embalmer began and that was the first REAL fear.”

No more visits to my guardian’s house. No more guardian. Just nights of quiet mining, digging up impossibly loud things that only whispered in the dark.

The voice dropped to a wheeze. “We’re all down here, you know.”

“All of us. Me.”

“Mary.”

“The scissor man. The coal witch. The burning girl. The face that peeked out at you from behind the furnace. The tar woman.”

“The thing that howled at you from under piles of your mother’s linen. The crooked man. The Devil. The choking dog. The laughing roar that slams your bedroom door shut. The crippled angel. The man with the long fingers who touched your throat. Mr. Grin. The whispering from under your bed...”

“And me. We’re all down here.”

Then there was a wheezing laugh from the phone which through the vents was a wheezing laugh from the basement. A KRAK from the phone line as a the old voice came screaming out of the telephone to me:

“We’re coming up from the cellar to scratch you!”

I ran down the stairs. To the basement door, arm cocked back to throw it shut.

They spring up the stairs so fast.