The Stranger on the Stairs by Michael Dahl

Author:Michael Dahl [Dahl, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: short stories; anthology; scary; horror; 978-1-4965-2332-7; 978-1-4965-0594-1
Publisher: Capstone
Published: 2015-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

I love comics.

Especially the old-timey ones like my grandpa collects. Whenever I stay overnight at Grandpa’s house, he drags out these big plastic bins from his back room. He calls the room his office, but it’s more like a room-sized junk drawer. He plops the bins down, snaps off the plastic lids, and shows me his favorites.

“Here’s the first Amazing Spider-Man issue,” he says. “And not that guy in the movies. I mean the real deal, the original. See? Here he is, trapped by the Fantastic Four.”

“Cool,” I say. And it is. The Human Torch, another hero, is flaming across the cover. He’s in the Fantastic Four’s headquarters, and Spider-Man is caught inside a big glass tube. This Spider-Man has webs hanging from his arms. Never saw that before!

Each comic book is inside a thin plastic cover that seals at the top. Grandpa says it protects the paper from aging and falling apart. Too bad they couldn’t do that with people. If you could do that with people, when Grandpa got older, I could put him inside one and take him out on special occasions.

Grandpa puts the Spider-Man comic back in the bin carefully. He must have hundreds in there. All stacked up like individual slices of plastic-wrapped cheese.

“Aha! Here’s one you haven’t read before!” Grandpa says. He sounds like he’s just discovered buried treasure. “Superman gets trapped in the far future when the sun grows old and turns red!”

That’s bad. Everyone knows Superman has no powers under a red sun.

At night, before bed, Grandpa always lets me choose two comics to read by myself. “But you can’t lie down. You have to sit up,” he orders. “Otherwise, you’ll fall asleep and roll over on the comic.”

I don’t blame him for wanting to be extra careful. Some of those old comics are worth tons of money. I looked up that first Spider-Man issue online. If Grandpa ever sold it, he could get two thousand bucks!

Tonight, I’m right in the middle of my second comic, a Legion of Super-Heroes adventure.

“Ten o’clock, kid,” Grandpa yells from the hallway. “Lights out!”

Grandpa is strict about his lights-out rule. Even if I’m in the middle of a comic, I have to turn off the light.

Which is why, for this visit, I brought a mini-flashlight with me.

I flip off the light and wait. I count to one hundred. I figure Grandpa will be in bed by now himself. Yup, I can hear him snoring.

I crawl under the covers and switch on the flashlight. It’s perfect. It’s like hiding in a tent. I finish the Legion adventure. Element Lad saves his fellow Legionnaires by turning the bad guy’s feet into uranium, the heaviest element on Earth!

My eyes are droopy, and it’s a little stuffy under the covers. I switch off the light and crawl back toward the pillows. Funny. I can’t feel the edge of the sheet above me. So then I crawl what feels like ten feet. The bed itself is only six feet long.

I crawl farther.

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