18 Sep I Miss You, Daddy

I can’t explain it, but he’s been here the whole time.

No one believed me; my wife thought I was insane, but he’s been here the whole time.

My son, Dale, was five when he went missing.

We were at the park by our flat when it happened. Park may be too grand a word for it, but that’s what Dale always called it. In reality, it was a big plastic play structure with a couple of slides, a climbing wall, and a sandpit. The whole thing was surrounded by a fifteen-by-fifteen fence with a couple of benches for the parents to sit on. That’s where I was that day, scrolling through Reddit and finishing my cigarette. Dale was playing with a couple of neighborhood kids, their parents sitting on other benches so they didn’t have to breathe my smoke. I looked up in time to see them go beneath the play structure into an area they call The Cave.

The cave is an enclosed area beneath the structure, with a roof that was comfortably close for a kid and downright claustrophobic for an adult.

I heard my phone chirp and looked back down to see a text from my wife. She’d just gotten home from work and wanted Dale and me to come home to help with groceries. So, I pitched my cigarette over the fence and called for Dale.

“Come on, Dale. Mum wants us home.”

No response.

“Come on, Dale. If you can’t listen, we won’t be able to come back tomorrow.”

Usually, this would have brought him running; playing outside was his favorite pastime, but there was still no answer.

Both of his playmates came out the other side then, giggling and laughing as they acted out whatever game they were playing, and I asked them where Dale had gone.

Alicia, a dark-haired girl who was missing her front teeth, lisped, “‘eeth thtill in the cave, Mithter Daweth.”

So, I hunkered my nearly six-foot frame down, looked into the dark underbelly of the play structure, and called for Dale to come on out.

“Come on, Dale. We really have to go. Mum’s waiting on us.”

I still didn’t think anything was amiss other than Dale trying to squeeze in a few more minutes of playtime. I expected him to giggle and poke his head out, baiting me into chasing him or crawling into the cave. He knew that as big as I was, it would be funny to watch me try to get under the structure to run him out, and this was a game we played often.
Instead, there was only silence.

So, I sighed and hunkered down on the damp sand to crawl under and get him. I heard the other two parents chuckle as they watched me, my back scraping at the bottom of the structure as I crawled towards the entrance to the cave. I didn’t mind playing with Dale, but this was a little much. I was tired from my night shift the day before, and my back was sore from lifting freight all night. I resigned myself to having a stern talk with Dale on the way home about not listening and crawled into the dark opening of The Cave.

As I passed from the lighted world outside, the afternoon sun cutting slants across my face through the boards of the structure as I entered the blackness of the cave. I felt a crawling sensation on my neck. I thought I might have picked up a spider and ran a hand over the spot to knock him off. There was nothing there, but the feeling wouldn’t abate. It felt like my hackles were up, that ancient feeling of a predator nearby putting me on edge, and it took everything I had to keep dragging myself through the space. It was only about five feet of blackness, the space preternaturally dark, but it was the weirdest I had felt in years. Was it always this dark here? I had crawled through here before, but I didn’t remember it being this black. Worse still, I didn’t feel like I was alone in here. Of course I’m not, I reminded myself. I came in here to get Dale. As I crawled, though, I began to doubt that my son was still in here, and the sense that something else lived here wouldn’t be easily put aside.

I felt like something hateful lived here, something that was even now hungry and slobbering.

My goal went from getting Dale to getting out of the space, and I came out the other side, expecting to be dragged back in and consumed.

I stood up, wiping dirt off my knees, as the air puffed out of me loudly.

It could have easily been mistaken for exertion, but I’d be a fool to pretend it was anything but fear.

I expected my son to pop out and laugh at his silly old dad then, but he was still nowhere to be found.

“Dale?” I called, my voice becoming fearful after what I had experienced, “DALE?”

The other parents looked up, hearing the jagged quality of my voice, and rose up to see if everything was okay.

“I can’t find my son,” I told them, and they told me not to panic as we searched the play structure.

My wife came walking up just as I started getting frantic, and she must have sensed my concern as she caught sight of me.

She called the police then, and as I ran to check the woods, I heard her say that hateful phrase for the first time.

“Our son has gone missing. Please send help.”

Thirty minutes later, two cars pulled up, and a couple of officers came to render assistance.

I had searched behind the flats, in the scraggy woods nearby, around the little retention pond that I always tried to keep Dale away from, and was just about to start knocking on doors when I saw them. They wanted to talk to me, me being the last to see Dale, and the officer in charge sent two of his men to check nearby houses as they asked me questions for the next few minutes. Where had I seen him? What was he wearing? Was there anyone suspicious around? Who were his mates? Where might he go if he’d left? Did he run away often? And all the time, they assured me they would find him and not to panic.

I answered their questions honestly but knew he couldn’t have left the play park.

Dale was small for his age, I told them so, and despite all my misgivings with the flats we lived in, they had done one thing I thanked them for. The clasp on the gate was too heavy for a little tyke to push open. Dale had struggled with it before, and I knew he couldn’t have left without help. The other parents said they hadn’t seen him come out or seen anyone lurking around the playpark that day.

So, the police searched. They searched the play park, the surrounding flats, the woods, and the whole area, basically retreading the ground I had already walked. As night began to fall, they called in more officers to begin canvasing wider. My wife and I were distraught. Dale was our first and only child, but as the days stretched on, it seemed less and less likely that they would find him.
I’m not ashamed to say that I took Dale’s disappearance poorly.

My wife was stoic through it all, but I knew she was hurting too. He was her baby; she had carried him for nine months, but I think she held a lot of her sorrow in because she saw me floundering. I became like a ghost in my own home. Eventually, I went back to work, but my performance suffered. It only takes a little effort to load things onto a truck, but I was falling behind, missing quotas, and making trucks late. The supervisor was a mate from primary school, fortunately, and he saw that I was not doing well. He suggested counseling and told me it might help me, but I didn’t want to tell some stranger about my problems.

A year passed, my wife and I growing distant as the days went by, and as the anniversary of Dale’s disappearance drew closer, I finally really screwed things up at work.

I can’t even say it wasn’t my fault because it absolutely was. I was operating a lift, something I had done since I got certified at nineteen, and as I backed out with a load, I hit a riser. It wasn’t a bad hit, just a bump, really, but the legs on that particular riser, as it turned out, were getting ready to give way. The riser collapsed in spectacular fashion, and when it fell, it fell on one of my coworkers. He lived. They managed to get the pallets off him before they crushed him, but it broke his collarbone, and he had to be hospitalized.

My supervisor was furious, but I could tell he was trying to hold back in the face of my sincere grief.

“I’m recommending you for two weeks of unpaid leave. If it were anyone else, I’d hand them their walking papers here and now, but I know you need help more than you need a trip to unemployment. Take these two weeks, sort your life out, and return to work. If this happens again, mate, I ain’t gonna have a choice.”

I couldn’t look at him. His pity was worse than his anger, and I knew I needed to do something. I nodded, mumbling a thank you, and he showed me out of his office. I walked around for the rest of the night, trying to figure out what I was going to tell my wife and finding nothing. She would be mad, probably mad enough to finally leave me, but as the sun started peeking over the horizon, I knew there wasn’t much else I could do.

She was just as mad as I thought she’d be, but her pity was just as hard to look at as my supervisors had been.

“He’s gone. Dale is gone, and making yourself a martyr over it won’t change the fact. You still have insurance. Go get some counseling and figure this out. I need you back. Not just back at work, but back HERE. I miss him, too, but digging into those wounds won’t make it better. Get some help, for both our sakes.”

There was something unsaid beneath that statement, and I understood it but wasn’t sure what to do about it.

I spent the next four days in a blackout state. I had found my therapy at the bottom of a bottle, something I had avoided up to that point. With no job to go to, I just stayed home and drank my pain away. The wife’s patience finally ran thin. After two days of watching me hunker on the couch like a sot, she told me she was going to see her mother for a few days and suggested I sort myself out while she was gone.

“If I come home and you’re still like this, I can’t promise I’ll be back for long.”

Once she was gone, I spent most of my days in a fermented haze.

That’s how, on the fifth day, I found myself buzzed and sitting on the same bench I had been on when I told Dale we needed to leave.

It was early afternoon, and the playpark was empty, thankfully. It wasn’t the first time I had just come to sit here, and the other parents often found excuses to leave with their kids when I came to wallow in my grief. I was the sad father who came back to the place he’d suffered most, and I really hoped the park had been empty when I got here. Even in my current state, I didn’t want anyone to see me like this. It was embarrassing, and it might frighten some of the children if I came weaving into the park smelling like a distillery. I was staring at the play structure, thinking to myself that it might be time to get some help when I first saw it.

It was just eight words, but those words sobered me up faster than any cold shower could.

On the side of one of the slides, in rough marker, someone had written, ”Where have you gone, Daddy? I miss you.”

I just sat there, staring for what felt like an eternity, and as the tears came, the alcohol came up as well.

My tears fell nakedly into the pile of sick that sat between my legs, but as the rage bubbled up, it felt like they were almost burned away.

Someone was mocking me, mocking my son’s loss, and as I staggered towards the super’s office, I was madder than I had any right to be.

Mr. Vinders, the super for the complex, always reminded me of one of the hobbits from the Lord of the Rings. He was short, fat, had a curly brown ring of hair around the bald spot on his crown that got bigger every year, and when he sat at his desk, it was like a child sitting in his father’s chair. He nearly fell out of that chair when I slammed the door to his office open, and his expression of confused anger became one of confused fear as he looked at my face.

He was a small man, and the sight of a large, angry drunk in his office reminded him of his stature rather quickly.

“Someone has written hateful graffiti on your play park slide, and I want to know what you intend to do about it!”

He took a minute or two to collect his thoughts before asking what the hell I was talking about.

I took him out to look at it, leading him to the slide in question, and he looked taken aback as he read the words.

“Who would do such a thing?” he asked, more to himself than anyone.

The way he side-eyed me, I could tell that he thought I might have done it, but one look at my face made him rethink it before he said it.

“I’ll take care of this immediately, Mr. Dawes. In the meantime, why don’t you go home and rest? You seem to be under the weather.”

He had the decency not to call me a drunk out in the open, and I conceded the matter as I went home to sober up a little.

As night began to fall some undetermined amount of time later, I sat up from the couch and listened to the five of six stout cans rattle angrily to the floor.

By the headache and the mealy taste in my mouth, I had not gone home and sobered up.

As I moved into the kitchen to make something for dinner, I remembered the words on the slide and felt angry all over again. As the meat pie I had taken from the freezer spun in the microwave, I wondered if Vinder had taken care of it like he said. I wondered if he would paint over it or wash it off or how would he do it. Were the words still sitting there on that slide?

As the microwave dinged, I resolved to go find out and took my pie and plastic fork on a little field trip.

I watched the steam roll off the top as I walked down to the little park, the night air alive with crickets and night birds. It would have been a pretty evening if I hadn’t been so in my despair. The trees were losing their autumn leaves, becoming bare and skeletal, and the air was crisp enough to make my undershirt unadvisable. My bare feet slapped at the concrete as I walked away from my flat, and the closer I got, the better the view of the offending slide. The words were gone, the pressure washer having left the slide a little lighter for its efforts, but as I came through the gate, I saw that something else had been added to the side of the structure. It looked like the same marker strokes, the handwriting big and childish, and as I read it, I felt a growl rumble in my throat.

“I saw you today, Daddy. I saw you, but you didn’t see me.”

I looked around as the wind rattled the nearby trees, expecting to see a group of snickering youths as they watched me. This had teenagers written all over it, and as the pie slipped out of my hand, I loosed my shout to the sky. Why? Why did they devil me like this? Was this a game to them? When I was a kid, we would have never thought of doing something like this to anyone, let alone a grieving father. The dark offered up no answers, but the side of the playpark did when I turned back.

Beneath the first message, another smaller message was written in the same childish scrawl.

The longer I looked at it, the more I recognized it.

How many times had I watched my son scribble words in his reader just that way, filling in the workbook pages in big looping script as he prepared to go to kindergarten?

“Daddy? I can see you, but you can’t see me. Please help me. It’s scary here.”

I hunkered on my knees in the sand, looking at the words as I ran my fingers over them. They looked just like his, and as I felt a splinter catch in the pad of my thumb, I pulled it back sharply. There was no way he could be here. There was no way he could have been hiding here for a year, but as I watched the play set, I had no doubt that he had written those words.

“Dale?” I said, my voice quavering as I glanced into the shadowy depths of the playground, “DALE?” I shouted a little louder, casting around as I tried to find him.

I walked around to the other side, stumbling in the gritty sand as it sucked at my feet. My head was full of rails, and my words slurred even to my own ears. There were doubtless people looking through their curtains at me as I capered like a sot drunk, but I didn’t care. My boy was here, he was here somewhere, and I needed to find him.

I tripped then, going face down in the sand, and when I came up, I saw a new message on the wet-looking plastiwood. It was hard to see in the shadow that it sat in, but as I got close, I put my trembling fingers on it to make sure it was real. My fingers came away tacky, the tips black as if they had touched wet marker.

“I need you to come get me, Daddy. I’m stuck in the Sad Swamp, and I need help.”

“‘Scuse me, sir? Everything alright, there?”

As their flashlights hit me, I squinted, but the words were like a brand across my eyes.

The Sad Swamps were what Dale called the Swamps of Sadness from his favorite movie, The Never Ending Story. We had watched it about a thousand times, and when the VHS I had owned as a kid finally broke in the VCR, we had searched for it on DVD until we found it at the local thrift store. He watched it every day before his afternoon nap, and I imagined he could just about quote it word for word. Seeing the word Sad Swamps made me certain it was Dale talking, but how? How could he be talking to me from…

The light was right in my face now, and I put up a hand to block it out.

“Some of your neighbors were worried you were faring poorly, Mr. Dawes. They heard you shouting and wanted us to check on you.”

They were being kind. It seemed that everyone was being “kind” these days to poor ole drunk Mr. Dawes, but I didn’t have time for them. I had seen something under the edge of the play structure, half a word that was buried in shadows. It was his latest message, and as I staggered towards it a little, I hoped it would tell me how to get him back.

“What happened?” one of them asked in his tone jovial as he leaned down. “Wife lock you out after you came home snookered? Well, we can get you a place to sleep it off, sir, never-” He had put a hand on my shoulder, but I pulled away from him as I tried to see the words that were beneath the structure. It was just six words, but I couldn’t see the last one, and the last one seemed the most important.

The police grabbed hold of me, but I fought to get away as I tried to see that last word.

I got as close as I could, both catching me under an arm as they pulled me away from the structure and finally saw it.

I repeated it again and again as they put me in the back of the car, all the fight out of me now, wanting to commit it to memory before my drink-addled brain made a muck of it.
“We’ll phone the missus and let her know she can come pick you up in the tank, Mr. Dawes. If she don’t wanna, then I guess you’re sobering up on a bench for the night, s’long as you don’t try any more of that.”

I ignored them as we left the parking lot, my flat disappearing behind us as I repeated those six words like a mantra.

Look for me inside the cave.

The police hadn’t been wrong; my wife was livid.

She came down to the station, her clothes clearly thrown on hastily, and glowered at me through the bars of the holding cell. It was just me in there with a few old gaffers, and they were snoring in a corner as I slouched on the bench. I was still imprinting those words into my brain, mumbling them like a magic spell, when I heard her voice and looked up into her scowling face.

“I can’t believe you’ve done this. It isn’t enough that you get sent home from work, that you do nothing but blunder around like an old tramp, and won’t get any help to get yourself out of this rut, but now you go and get yourself tossed in the drunk tank. I’m done, Malcolm. Do you understand me? This is the last straw. I won’t stay here and watch you destroy yourself.”

“He’s alive,” I rasped out, and when she looked at me, I saw all the anger leak out of her, only to be replaced with pity.

“I miss him just as much as you do, but you have to let him go. It’s been a year, Malcolm. He’s not coming home. It wasn’t your fault what happened to him, and you have to stop blaming yourself for it.”

“He’s been leaving me messages at the play park, Stephanie. I can prove it. Come with me, and I’ll show you. We can find him, we can be a family again, we can,” but she cut me off with the first sob I heard from her in months.

“I’m leaving, Malcolm. When they release you in the morning, don’t call me. Go back to the flat, go to your mother’s house, go to hell for all I care. I can’t watch you do this anymore.”

She left me there with the other drunks, but I had already decided what I had to do.

They turned me loose in the morning, and after a brisk walk home, I got the things I’d need. I brought a torch, some string, and a big hunting knife I’d had since I was a teenager and set off for the play park. It was early morning, and I had the place to myself, save for the pigeons still gobbling at my spilled pie’s remains. I didn’t see any new graffiti, but I didn’t need any. I knew where Dale was, and as I got on my hands and knees, I crawled under the playground and into the cave.

Even in my assuredness, I felt foolish as I moved into the cave. It was dark, but I could still see the light streaming in from the other end. I didn’t feel that same sense of foreboding like I had before, no sense of a monster coming to gobble me up, and I turned on the torch as I checked out the corners. The cave was a box of four walls with a roof of thick plastic overhead, and I should have been able to see all four walls. Three of the walls were normal enough, but as I looked to the west-facing wall, I was aware of another opening that led into a space that shouldn’t exist.

An opening between that led into deeper darkness.

As my torch burned against that encroaching blackness, I turned my body in a ponderous circle and started crawling into it.

If I meant to get my son back, I would need to hobble into the Sad Swamp and come out the other side.

In contrast to the “dark cave” behind me, the space I entered was pitch black. The edges of my light curled oddly, the darkness seeming to retract like felt as I moved deeper. I wasn’t underground; I was still heading forward, but given the dimensions of the play structure, the place I crawled shouldn’t exist. The length was wrong. The longer I crawled, the more I expected to wake up and find that I had fallen asleep in the drunk tank. The space was cramped but felt vast as it stretched on. It was like an underground cave, the claustrophobic passages threatening to collapse in on you at any minute.

Besides being dark, it was also utterly silent. Besides the crunch of my knees as they moved over the sand, no other sound seemed to exist. My own labored breathing seemed to be absorbed by the thick midnight around me, and every painful drag of my body sent a spasm of need through me. It was a primal need, a need to stand at my full height and stretch my arms up high to dissipate the confining gloom that hung around me. The same part of my brain made it pretty clear, however, how bad an idea that would be.

What if my hand should pass into that darkness and never return?

What if the darkness came back with the hand?

I kept crawling into that inky soup, wondering if I would simply wander here forever. It was pitch outside the protective beam of my torch, and with every struggling shuffle, I wondered why I didn’t turn out and go back. Nothing could survive down here. Nothing could live in this pitch blackness. If I didn’t go back now, I’d never find my way and be forced to wander endlessly in this void until my torch went out and then what?

I knew I wasn’t alone when I heard the soft scuff of feet on sand. I looked into the black expanse, expecting to see the beast that had terrified me the last time and finding nothing. The beam of my torch didn’t go very far, but at the end of the light, I could hear the scuff of bare feet on sand. Something was coming towards me, and I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to find. Would it be my son, or would it be a monster to end my journey?

When a dirty, half-starved little boy buried me in a hug that circled my shoulders, I knew I’d found him.

“Dale?” I whispered, but he could only nod and cry against me.

I didn’t waste time or breath; I just scooped him up and didn’t stop moving until I was back in the lighted world of the playpark.

As we moved, I could feel that clawing, penetrating glare from behind me. Something had noticed I was taking their prize, and they were unhappy. I kept crawling, kept pulling, but I could hear those scrabbling feet as they kicked up sand. They were getting closer now, their growl loud and thunderous, and on a whim, I turned my torch on them.

Bathed in the light, they yelped wildly and kicked up sand as they backpedaled.

I didn’t dare look to see what had been tailing me. I put on a burst of speed, crawling like our lives depended on it, and when I collapsed in the light of day, I was aware of people shouting at me to get out of there. Their kids were asking who I was and why I was so dirty, and they must have thought I was a bum. When they saw Dale, they tried to take him from me, but I held on like my life depended on it, and when they finally recognized us, I heard their anger turn to surprise.

They took us both to the hospital, and I’m glad to say that aside from being underfed and very dirty, Dale was completely fine.

My wife came to the hospital, and we both cried as she apologized for doubting me.

I refused it, telling her she had nothing to apologize for.

“I doubted myself. I fell into the bottle and nearly lost myself in my grief. I should be apologizing to you for putting you through all this for the last year.”

She sat with me at the hospital, both of us afraid to take our eyes off Dale as he sat placidly in his hospital bed.

I asked him about what he had gone through, but he couldn’t tell me much. He said that he got lost in the cave, and he crawled and crawled until he came out in the playpark again. Only it wasn’t his playpark. The playpark he found was different, and me and his friends were gone.

“The sky was, sort of, purple, and the clouds were too thick looking to be real. I couldn’t get the gate open, but that was probably good. There were these big things that would come by, like living shadows, and they would look at me like how we look at animals in the zoo. I drank some water from a gross puddle, but there was no food. I sometimes went to sleep in the caves, but I always felt like something was watching me there. It never tried to hurt me, but it always felt like I was hiding and waiting for someone to catch me. I thought I was gonna starve before I heard you breathing in the cave. I had run away to get away from some shadowy people who were looking at me, and I heard you down there and went to see what the sound was.”

I asked him about the messages, and he said he’d found a marker of some sort in the sand in the other play park.

That was about the time he’d started seeing a shadow inside the park.

“I knew it was you, I just knew it, but you couldn’t see me. So I started leaving messages, hoping you would find them. I guess you must have.”

The strangest part is that Dale swears that he was only there for a week. He says he kept going back into the cave but that he only slept a few times while he was away. What’s more, the doctors say he doesn’t appear to have grown any in the time he was gone. His dental records and growth structure are the same as they were at his last check-up about a month before he disappeared.

I’m glad to have Dale back, but I don’t let him play in the cave anymore. We still visit the playpark, and I still let him slide on the slides and run on the structure like he used to, but he is forbidden to go underneath anymore. It’s a rule he doesn’t mind following, lest he get lost in those dark tunnels for a second time.