The sign read “Sleeping Room”.
 
Jack stopped across the street and stared. It was a gloomy night, with hardly any stars and only a slice of moon. On top of that, the streetlight he stood under gave out only the barest, yellowest sort of illumination. At first the absence of light, plus his near-absolute hunger and exhaustion, made Jack think he was seeing things.

So he rubbed his eyes, stepped closer to the curb, and peered into the night.

The house stood just across the street. A small, falling-down thing that looked to be at least sixty years old, and cheap at the time, it had a medium-sized sign posted in the front lawn, just to the side of the cracked, stained driveway. Overall, it looked like all the other houses in this section of town, obviously where most of the poor people lived.

Sure enough, Jack saw, he’d been right the first time.

The sign, white with a faded reddish border and attached to a stake driven into the ground, had just two words: “Sleeping Room”.

What the hell, he wondered, is a sleeping room?

Jack had been on the road for longer than he could remember, jumping from town to town, and constantly hassled by the cops, store owners and the general public. Since crossing out of Illinois nearly a week ago, he had yet to find a safe place to lay his head.

He’d gone without any real food for the past three days, his last meal a couple of half-chewed Krispy Kremes that he’d scrounged from a dumpster.

With all of that, he was at the point where he found it damned near impossible simply to keep his eyes open and to keep one foot moving in front of the other.

Sleeping Room.

He first thought that the owner of the house, or someone else who lived there, might be a day sleeper, and they had posted the sign to make casual visitors aware of that. But when he gave it a second thought, that didn’t make much sense. If that was the case, the sign would have just read “Day Sleeper”, or something like that.

Jack shrugged. No matter what, if he didn’t find somewhere to crash soon, he didn’t know what would happen. And as cold as the night had already become, still a few hours before midnight, sleeping out in the air somewhere just didn’t count as an option.

So he wrapped his ratty black duster around his body, grabbed up his soiled, frayed duffel bag, and hiked across the street. Walking up the driveway, he paused and took a closer look at the sign. He saw something that he hadn’t noticed from across the distance.

The sign had numbers printed beneath the words. Faded, barely discernible in the dark, Jack could just trace the faint outlines of a telephone number.

Was the sign an ad for something?

He looked up at the old house. It rested in a small yard, overgrown with weeds and trash. The house itself, painted in a dull mustard color, looked narrow but kind of long, as if it stretched back for a way. At a guess, Jack figured it could possibly hold up to three or four bedrooms.

Sleeping rooms?

Although the porch light was off and most of the house seemed darkened, a dim bluish glow, like from a television set, seeped around the edges of the curtains that draped the front windows.

As a new wave of fatigue swept over Jack, he knew he had to find somewhere to rest soon.

He stepped onto the porch, nearly twisting his ankle when he didn’t notice one of the steps was broken in half. Lurching over the step, he stood for a moment in front of the door, beginning to sweat despite the coolness of the Midwestern winter night.

If he had any real brains, he knew, he’d get far away from here. But he was so damned tired, so hungry, and so fed up with being on his feet all the time.

Gripping his duffel bag a bit tighter, he raised his hand and knocked once, sharply, on the door. For an instant, a loud blurt of sound came from the television inside, then it quieted down. Almost as if someone had tried to mute it and initially hit the wrong button. A moment later, a feeble bulb over Jack’s head flicked on, and a few seconds after that the door opened up to the length of a chain.

“Yes?” The voice sounded weak, tired.

“Uhm, yeah. I’m sorry to bother you this late, but I, uh, I saw your sign outside. The one about rooms? And I was just wondering if you could—” He paused, realizing just how silly he sounded.

The door shut all the way, the chain rattled on the other side, and it opened up again. An old woman, barely visible in the gloom of the interior room, looked out at him.

“You need a room for the night?”

“Yeah,” Jack said, feeling his fatigue more and more with each passing second. “I’m embarrassed to say it, but it’s been a while since—”

“Where you from?” she interrupted.

“Back west. Oregon, actually.” It all seemed unreal to Jack. He’d come up to the house as an act of sheer desperation, never really expecting anyone to respond. Now this elderly lady, probably living alone, was standing there chatting with him in the middle of the night.

The door opened wider, and the old lady moved back further into the shadows of the room, as if not wanting to be seen. Jack briefly wondered if she was one of those people who hated ever stepping out of their house. But if that was so, she surely wouldn’t offer up a room to a total stranger.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” she said. From the gloom he could feel her looking him up and down, and Jack felt like blushing a deep crimson. Three days without any real food to speak of, over a week without even seeing soap and water, and nearly a month in the same clothes. He could only imagine what he looked like.

Or smelled like.

“Yep.” He could barely see her nod her head. “You could definitely use a place to rest for a while.”

“Like I said—” Jack hated stammering, but the shame of his situation unnerved him. “I saw your sign, and I wasn’t quite sure—”

“Sign means just what it says. I’ve got an extra room that I loan out as a sleeping room. Lots of people been where you are. Sometimes they just need a place to lay their heads down for a while. Like you.”

“I don’t, uhm, that is, I don’t have any money on me.”

“Not required,” the old woman said as she stepped further back and ushered him into her house. “I just need you to do a favor, and you can do all the sleeping you want.”

Stepping over the threshold, Jack felt, if anything, even worse than he had a moment before.

The poor old lady lived in crushing poverty. The carpet in the living room wasn’t just threadbare, in places it had literally worn down to the matting. The TV that had flickered through the window was an old, boxy version from at least thirty years ago. Peering, Jack couldn’t see any signs of a cable box or VCR. He did, however, clearly see a pair of sagging, twisted rabbit ears that jutted from the back of the set.

The room didn’t hold much beyond a broken-down sofa that could barely seat two people and a single worn, cracked recliner. The small room, he could barely see in the reflected glow of the TV, led to a small hallway that probably ran the length of the narrow house. Beyond that, the lighting was so dim that Jack couldn’t see anything.

He turned to thank the woman, and got another jolt.

She probably wasn’t as old as he’d first imagined, surely no more than fifty. But she sure looked as if rough living had soaked her thoroughly and wrung her dry. Skinny, bone thin, in fact. She didn’t wear glasses, at least not at that moment, but even in the murk Jack could see that one eye contained an obviously large, milky cataract. Brittle, dried up cracks covered the skin of her mouth and hands. Her hair looked far too grey for her years, and patches of it had fallen out, exposing a mottled scalp in places.

And as the two of them stood and stared at each other, Jack became aware of a third element in the scene.

The house smelled.

Not the kind of moldy, piss-in-the-carpets smell that you sometimes got in old places that hadn’t been kept up. This smelled a lot worse, a lot nastier. And if he could detect it, with his present hygiene, Jack wondered just how rank it really was. As the odor became more and more obvious, he suddenly considered it a good thing that he hadn’t eaten in almost three days. If he had, he would probably start throwing up all over the tattered carpet.

Yet with all that, he thought, the house still represented shelter from the elements.

After looking him over more thoroughly, the old lady finally closed the door, leaving them with only the dim illumination provided by the TV and one yellow floor lamp over in a corner.

“There’s two rooms at the end of the hall, one on each side. One’s occupied, and you can have the other for the night. All you’re allowed to do is sleep. I don’t want you shooting anything up in there, or drinking anything down. You don’t get no food or laundry service from me, just a warm bed for the night if you want it. Like the sign says, you get a sleeping room. And that’s all you get.”

Jack’s stomach curdled even more at the sudden thought of how many men and women as soiled and filthy as him had slept in that same room. He only hoped that he could get through the night without discovering what else he’d be sleeping with.

“That’s fine,” he managed to say. “Which side did you say the room is on?”

He instinctively started to step past the old woman when her thin, clawish hand flattened against his chest.

“Hold on there, kid. There’s the matter of payment to talk about.”

“Payment? I thought you said I didn’t need to have any money.”

“Money, right. But you have to do me a favor.”

Jack sighed, his eyeballs getting grainier and grainier every second. He was so tired that he almost felt that if he moved too fast the room would swirl around him.

“Oh, sure. Sorry.” He glanced quickly around the dilapidated house. Even in the almost-nonexistent light, he could easily see half a dozen fix-up jobs he could handle for her.

“Tell you what,” he suggested. “You decide what you want me to do, and I’ll get on it first thing in the morning.”

The hand affixed to his chest didn’t move.

“Favor first,” she said, and a different tone had crept into the woman’s scratchy, smoker’s voice. It almost sounded, Jack thought, like a plea.

“Okay,” he said. “What’d you have in mind?”

“This way,” she said, and began walking ahead of him down the narrow hallway. As they crossed the short space to the back part of the house, she gestured towards the bedroom on the left-hand side. “There’s your room for the night.”

Jack began to seriously wonder if, after all, he could stay in this place, even for one night. As they’d crossed from the front to the back, the nauseous, rotting smell he’d noticed earlier had intensified. As they stood in the hallway, between the two rooms, he tried to breathe through his mouth in a futile effort to stifle the stench even a little.

Out of the blue, an old story from a high-school English class popped into his mind. He couldn’t remember the title, or the author’s name, but it was by some old southern dude, and it told about an old woman who kept a dead body up in her attic for years. At the time, Jack had read the story and promptly forgotten it. But he was now beginning to wonder if such nonsense could have any basis in fact.

The old woman—it occurred to Jack that he didn’t even know her name—had moved over and opened the door. Flicking a light switch, she swung the door wide so Jack could see his accommodations for the night.

“This is the sleeping room,” she said.

Not luxury by a damn sight, but he’d seen worse in his years on the road. And it sure as hell beat sleeping in a ditch off the highway. A small room, with another of those low-wattage bulbs that she seemed to use everywhere. The bed was actually more along the lines of a cot, with one thin, stringy blanket covering the top and a scrawny, stained pillow at the head.

But just looking at a bed, no matter how poor the condition, made Jack’s fatigue of the last several days wash over him again. At that moment, he wanted nothing more out of life than to plop onto the mattress and shut his eyes, and to hell with what kind of vermin may be infesting the room. Even the continual growling of his stomach and the odor that filled the hallway were as nothing when stacked up against the total exhaustion of bone, muscle and mind.

He dropped his duffel bag on the floor and took the first step into the room.

“The favor first,” the woman, standing off to the side, reminded him.

“Yeah, of course,” he mumbled, by now barely able to keep his eyes open. “What is it you want?”

She reached past Jack to turn the light off. Pulling him back into the hallway, she shut the door and gestured to the other side. “Let’s look in the other room.”

Numbly Jack turned with her, his initial concerns now turning into outright worry. However, on the road he’d met a lot of strange, bizarre people. And most of them, regardless what the public thought, had turned out to be fairly decent, despite their quirks. He wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt.

But as he faced the other doorway, a new wave of the stench swept over him. Worse than any sewer he’d ever been near, and he’d been around a few stinkholes in his time, Jack was again gripped by the idea that the strange crone could possibly have a dead body, maybe even several, stuck away in that extra room. If such was the case, he’d have to break free as quickly as possible and get past her.

A moment later, he understood just how mistaken he’d been.

The woman threw open the door of the second room. Once again, she reached in to turn on the light, and Jack moved like a zombie and looked inside.

In terms of furnishings, the room looked almost exactly like the one on the other side of the hall. Except that the bed in this room was occupied.

But not by anyone dead.

It took Jack a minute of looking closely to make sure of that. Eventually, he saw the bare chest (there were no covers or blankets) rise and fall. Then, the form on the bed slowly, almost agonizingly, turned its head to look towards the door.

Jack barely felt the old woman place her hand on his back and edge him into the room. He stumbled for a few steps, pulled himself up just short of the bed, and continued staring down at the form lying on the sheets.

Whatever it was, it sure didn’t look human. It actually resembled nothing so much as a giant, pinkish-red jellyfish. One large enough to fill the entire bed. The chest, where Jack had first noticed respiration, looked somewhat human, but the rest of the thing looked like a mishmash of anatomical parts pulled out of some slaughterhouse somewhere.

It had limbs, almost. The vestigial legs and arms looked more like flippers than anything else. As Jack watched, they seemed to wiggle spasmodically.

Something close to human skin covered parts of the thing’s body, but other places had only that reddish, jelly-like ooze holding everything together.

A deformed, misshapen appendage situated between the two lower limbs suggested that the—thing—had been conceived as a male.

“They said it was dead,” the owner of the house said behind him.

Jack glanced back at her. The hard, wrinkled face she’d worn earlier had softened a bit, rounded out and smoothed out some of the cracks. She now looked closer, sort of, to a possible age of fifty or so. She also had more emotion in her expression than before. She stared at the thing on the bed with something Jack could only consider as concern.

Or maybe even love.

“They said it was dead,” she repeated.

Jack turned away from her and, feeling the walls beginning to twirl around him, looked back, almost unwillingly, at the thing on the bed.

It had two ears, but only one eye. Where most animals would have a nose of some sort was only a round bump of flesh. It didn’t have any hair, not even eyebrows. And instead of a mouth, a ragged slash canted up the side of its face.

The slash gaped open, and for one marrow-freezing moment, Jack had the distinct impression that the monster on the bed was smiling at him.

The thin ridges of skin that seemed to correspond to lips began to squirm and wriggle, like two pink earthworms crawling around a decaying face.

“When they pulled it out of me,” Jack’s hostess continued behind him, “they assured me it was dead. But it wasn’t. You can see that for yourself. For some reason, it just didn’t die.”

“Ma’am,” Jack croaked as he backed up a step, “I really don’t think—”

She moved forward, pressing against his back, somehow her thin, bony frame blocking him from leaving the room.

“It didn’t die,” she repeated. “And after being out of my womb a while, it started growing.”

Jack stopped pressing against the woman, stopped trying to leave the room. Some instinct warned him that if she wanted to, the frail old bitch would be tough as iron. So he stood there, staring at the thing lying in the bed, and waited for whatever would come next.

“And it kept growing,” she continued. “A month or two later its dad took off, saying he just couldn’t stand the sight of it. His own baby, his own flesh and blood, and he couldn’t even look at it.”

The smell that infested the room, Jack now saw, came mainly from all sorts of bodily fluids that seeped and oozed out of the body and onto the bed. The sheets might have been white once, but now they were stained green and yellow, with blotches of crimson here and there. Peering close, Jack could see that some of the viscous fluids had dribbled down onto the floor and hardened, forming scabs on the pale green carpet.

“Lady—”

“It just didn’t seem right that it didn’t die early on, but after its first cry I couldn’t bring myself to put it down. Wouldn’t let its dad do so either. So I just put it in a crib until it got too big for that, then moved it to this bed.”

Jack’s earlier fatigue was now only a distant memory. His hunger, his mental fatigue from being on the road for so long, all had been tamped down by a new sensation.

“Sometimes, I try to let nature take its own course. I don’t let it have any blankets, not even in the winter. Don’t got no air conditioner, so I can’t cool the room down in the summer. I’ve even tried keeping the door shut and not looking in, hoping that eventually it would just pass on.” Her words held a wistful, resigned tone. “But no matter what I do, it keeps on living. Keeps on growing.”

Fear sheathed Jack’s entire body to such a degree that everything hurt. Even his nails and hair ached with the tension, and his empty stomach had turned into a bowl of ice.

The thing on the bed gurgled, and its eye blinked at him.

Jack flinched backwards but couldn’t move far because of the woman’s body pressed against his.

“Look, miss—” he tried again.

“It needs a daddy,” she whispered in his ear. And Jack, who had thought he couldn’t get any more freaked out, began to tremble.

“Just not right for a baby to not have a father. Thirty years and more it’s been waiting.”

Jack’s head whirled. He couldn’t have heard that right. Thirty years? The old bitch surely couldn’t have kept that—thing—in her home for so long. Yet it was so big. Even without arms and legs, it nearly filled the bed.

“Stay and be its daddy,” she pleaded. “Such a simple thing to ask. You can have the sleeping room for as long as you want. I’ll even feed you, buy you stuff. Just stick around and help me take care of it. It’s been so long, and I’m so worn out from doing it on my own.”

Jack wanted to respond. Wanted to say not only no, but hell no. His nerves, though, were frozen, and the sheer terror caused by the sight of the thing in the bed kept him from moving or reacting.

Or was the mother possibly the more frightening of the two?

In the next instant, Jack’s night went from hellish to purely insane.

The thing began squirming, as if repositioning itself on the mattress. It flopped partially onto its side, and the eye and the slit in the face that must have served as a mouth were now turned completely towards Jack.

The slit opened, and the crawly things that passed for lips began to move. A low, croaking sound came from somewhere in the throat area of the thing.

“Da—”

Like the sudden cutting of a cord, Jack had command of his body again. Turning, he shouldered the woman into the wall and bolted from the room. When she crashed into the wall, Jack thought he heard a bone or two snap, but he couldn’t tell for sure and didn’t really care.

A few rapid steps took him out of the hallway and into the musty, dim living room. Without looking to either side, he threw open the front door and stumbled across the porch and into the weed-filled yard.

He stopped for a moment, fell to the ground on all fours, and gathered his breath. He should have kept on running, but the weakness and fear gripped him, and for a second, he could do nothing but kneel in the grass and tremble.

Something thudded into the ground next to him. Jack blinked at his duffel bag. He turned to look back at the house but saw only a final sliver of light as the door slammed shut.

Sighing, he grabbed his duffel and staggered to his feet.

His first instinct was to find the nearest cop and report what he’d seen. A moment later, he knew he couldn’t do that.

If he told the cops, they’d doubtless want to hang onto him for a while as they sorted things out. When his record came up, let alone his vagrancy, he’d probably find himself locked away.

Who could tell? He could even have the old witch and her—offspring—as cell mates.

No. He realized that the best, the safest, thing for him would be to take off as quick and as far as he could.

He took only three steps and paused—right next to the faded old yard sign.

Sleeping Room.

The house was shut tight behind him, and obviously the old coot wasn’t about to set foot outside. Considering the secret she kept in there, Jack couldn’t blame her.

The sign.

He wondered for a second how long that sign had stood in the grass, how many bums and transients like himself had found themselves lured and enticed by the words. He wondered, also, if all of them had gotten off as easily as he had.

Thirty years, the old woman had said.

Making a snap decision, Jack reached down and grasped the stake attached to the sign, intending to pull the sign out and dump it somewhere. The old lady would probably make a new one in a day or two, but it was the least Jack could do for the next poor soul to come wandering down this street, down on his luck and desperately needing a place to rest for the night.

He gripped the stake, then hesitated. Glancing back one last time at the house, now with no light peeping out at all, he started thinking about the deformed, grotesque lump of flesh lying in that small room, waiting for so many years for someone to come along.

Jack didn’t know for sure, but it was quite possible that he had himself been careless and left a few kids behind in his younger days. He’d never worried much about being a father, mainly because, what with the drinking and the beatings, he and his old man had never gotten along all that well.

Jack let go of the sign, straightened up, and headed across the cracked driveway and towards the street.

Everyone, he realized, no matter what their condition, deserved a dad.

As long as it was someone else.