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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Theeaglestrikes on 2024-11-24 04:28:38+00:00.

Don’t read this book if it stumbles upon you.

I say that because you won’t stumble upon it.

My name’s Josiah, and I’m the single father of a two-year-old boy named Robbie. Named after his mother, Roberta. I hope Robbie feels some sort of connection, when he’s older, to the mother he never met — never will meet, thanks to the obstetrician who failed to perform that emergency C-section in a timely manner.

The last two years have trialled and taxed me; taxed my soul to bankruptcy. I’m deep in the red now, with nothing but pain left to pay my debts. Yet, this past week has been the most nightmarish. More nightmarish, even, than seeing my own wife’s body on that icy, steel examination table.

On Monday, Carl and Mary came over. They visit most evenings, actually. I teasingly call it their date night. Anyway, they gifted a children’s story titled:

Peek-A-One-Two-Boo: He Who Shows For Supper

It was a broad, hardy book with paperboard pages. On its cover, against a white backdrop, was a picture of a woman with one hand covering her right eye. She wore a sprawling and unseemly smile — wily, too, as if she were privy to some awful secret; a secret specifically about me.

Anyway, my eyes were drawn to small, black letters beneath her disembodied head and hand. Peek-a-one. And beside her was a man, grinning even more atrociously, with hands covering both eyes. Naturally, then, he was labelled: Peek-a-two. However, there was no Peek-a-boo. Given the name of the book, I had expected that to be the natural conclusion.

“Mary found this whilst cleaning out her grandfather’s attic,” Carl explained. “I said you might want it for Robbie.”

I didn’t, but Carl was a good friend and a sensitive soul; it would’ve hurt his feelings for me to reject the present. Screw me for being a people pleaser. And I know that sounds ungrateful, but it’s hard to articulate what unnerved me. I just didn’t like the look of the book; all frayed around the edges and ridden with mould from an attic untouched for years.

Most of all, I didn’t like what Mary had squealed before her husband passed the book to me.

“I used to love this story as a child. Would’ve kept reading it forever if Grandpa hadn’t hidden it from me.”

What an odd thing to say, I thought.

Only, it wasn’t odd. It was, in some unexplained way, downright terrifying.

I sent my two closest friends home around six in the evening, as I wanted to put Robbie to bed — also wanted to be alone. I love the heck out of Carl and Mary, but they fuss and fuss. Fuss until my head pounds and I reflexively reach for Mr Merlot, my dearest friend of all.

Anyhow, just before bedtime, I started reading Peek-A-One-Two-Boo to a giggling Robbie as he squirmed in my lap. The eight-paged book told the tale of a bizarre man named He Who Shows For Supper.

He shows when you need him

Shows for supper and rest

Peek-a-one, peek-a-two, peek-a-one-two-boo

On Page One, there was a home’s front hallway with an open door looking onto blackness. Blackness beyond night. It felt, to my eyes, painful. More than a printing error. Something was there, worming through the dark.

And should you not feed him

He’ll be far from his best

Peek-a-one, peek-a-two, peek-a-one-two-boo

On Page Two, there wasn’t a dining table, but a bathroom; hardly the right setting for crockery and dining utensils. A blue, floral shower curtain was drawn across the bath. A drape open only a tad at the side of the tub, but the gap was wide enough to reveal a head-shaped shadow on the tiled wall. The head of something sitting in the bath. At least, it looked like a head, presumably belonging to the visitor: He Who Shows For Supper. But I wasn’t convinced by that, and I didn’t like the image at all. Didn’t like any of it.

So set out the china

And a tall glass of red

Peek-a-one, peek-a-two, peek-a-one-two-boo

On Page Three, a set of manly hands cradled an empty wine glass and a white plate of some brown, indiscernible dish — like an artist’s unfinished afterthought or a haunting thing that the publisher had decided to censor. I leant towards the latter. But that unsettled me, so I tried to convince myself it had been either a misprint or an ink smudge from decades of damp.

The bath must be running

For the bump on his head

Peek-a-one, peek-a-two, peek-a-one-two-boo

On Page Four, through the lulling shower curtain, the bathroom light cast a silhouette of what still seemed to be a head. Unlike the third page, however, it had sprouted a large lump.

Just turn both your eyeballs

And keep his growth low

Peek-a-one, peek-a-two, peek-a-one-two-boo

On Page Five, the bathwater was overflowing — running over the upper rim of the tub in streaks of a murky brown; ink that I hoped, like the blurry meal on the third page, to be an unintended discolouration of some sort.

And once his head’s level

He should get up and go

On Page Six, there was an image staring down the barrel of the upstairs hallway, directly to the bathroom’s open door. And within that tall frame was only blackness, much like that very first image. Oh, believe me, I wanted to stop reading, but I didn’t. Couldn’t, perhaps.

But if not, then oh, no

On Page Seven, there was only white text against a black page.

Peek-a-one, peek-a-two, peek-a-one-two-boo

And in reverse, on Page Eight, there was only black text against white.

“Well, that was haunting, Robbie,” I said as the boy sucked his thumb and contentedly eyed me. “Thanks, Mary, for sharing your childhood trauma with us. Peek-a-boo.”

“Pikachu…” Robbie said, tittering away gleefully in my lap.

“Nearly,” I laughed. “Boy, do I wish we were watching Pokémon.”

“BOO!” my son loudly responded, making me jump; making himself chuckle more noisily.

“Are you proud of yourself for that?” I asked, stifling a laugh. “I’m glad one of us enjoyed it.”

“Bed,” Robbie yawned, mashing his eyes with tiny, balled-up fists.

“Is it bedtime for me?” I teased. “Or for peek-a-you?”

“Peek-a-one-two-boo,” hissed a voice small, child-like, but false.

Instinctively, my fearful eyes shot down to Robbie. Mid-yawn, the boy dozily eyed his racecar bed. Now, it could’ve been him who whispered those five horrid words in quick succession, but it wasn’t. Robbie rarely strings more than a pair of words together. He occasionally stretches to three words, and perhaps even four, but not five. And not those five. Certainly not in such a clear, eloquent manner. And not in such a hushed whisper.

I blamed it on sleep-deprivation, like everything else; everything that happened to me, and everything I made happen. Then I put both the book and Robbie to bed. I don’t remember what I ate or watched on the television from there onwards. My life has been a series of motions for a long time. I live so that Robbie lives.

I blinked, then it was Tuesday. I invited Carl and Mary over, and they didn’t need to be asked twice. It’s a rarity for me to reach out. Of course, they weren’t expecting to be apprehended.

“This isn’t a children’s book,” I said, waving Peek-A-One-Two-Boo in their faces before they’d even taken off their coats. “It’s a horror story about a stranger eating supper in the bath.”

Mary raised an eyebrow, eyed her husband, then she laughed. “I don’t know what you read last night, but it wasn’t Peek-A-One-Two-Boo.”

“What?” I asked.

She smirked, then replied, “Grandpa read that book to me every single day. I remember the story. It’s about a picnic on a train.”

I answered by thrusting the book into my friend’s hands, and she rolled her eyes before skimming through the pages. But her face quickly whitened.

“What?” she whispered. “Josiah, this isn’t… I don’t understand. This must be, I don’t know, some other book in the Peak-A-One-Two-Boo series?”

“Well, you tell me,” I said. “You gave it to me. This haunting thing.”

“You sound just like Grandpa,” Mary smirked. “He hated it too. I even caught him throwing the book out once. It ended up right back in the living room though. Gosh, you should’ve seen the look on his face when it showed up. Like he’d seen a ghost.”

Something deeply unnerved me about that anecdote. And I was so focused on Mary that I didn’t even realise Carl had the book in his hands.

“He shows when you need him,” he read. “For some—”

But before my friend made it any farther, he was interrupted by knocking on the front door. Something that made Mary and Carl chuckle. And part of me — the part that still believes, in some way, that monsters live under my bed — expected to see a man at the door.

But it was the pizza delivery boy, standing in the rain and frowning. Frowning as thick, murky water poured off the lip of the awning onto his face. It was, strangely, muddying his face, and he quickly shoved the boxes into my hands before scurrying away.

Well, obviously, I thought my home’s exterior might need a clean. However, when I stepped off the porch to take a look, I was also muddied; muddied by rain from the very sky above. Water just as filthy as that trickling off the edge of my awning. Brown paste marring my skin. And strangely, as I looked out at the neighbourhood beyond my property line, the rain looked clearer. As if some dirty cloud were hanging only …

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