The tide was coming in fast. It would drown her long before he could free her buried body from the sand.
You don’t have to save her, Ralph. Carolyn’s already dead, and it didn’t happen on some deserted beach. It happened in Room 317 of Derry Home Hospital You were with her at the end, and the sound you heard wasn’t surf but sleet betting the window. Remember?
He remembered, but he ran faster nevertheless, sending puffs of sugary sand out behind him.
You won’t ever get to her, though,-you know how it is in dreams, don’t you? Each thing you rush toward turns into something else.
No, that wasn’t how the poem went… or was it? Ralph couldn’t be sure. All he clearly remembered now was that it had ended with the narrator running blindly from something deadly (Glancing over my shoulder I see its shape) which was hunting him through the woods. closing in.
Yet he was getting closer to the dark shape on the sand. it wasn’t changing into anything else, either, and when he felon his knees before Carolyn, he understood at once why he had not been able to recognize his wife of forty-five years, even from a distance: something was terribly wrong with her aura. It clung to her skin like a filthy dry-cleaning bag. When Ralph’s shadow fell on her, Carolyn’s eyes rolled up like the eyes of a horse that has shattered its leg going over a high fence. She was breathing in rapid, frightened gasps, and each expulsion of air sent jets of gray-black aura from her nostrils.
The tattered balloon-string straggling up from the crown of her head was the purple-black of a festering wound. When she opened her mouth to scream again, an unpleasant glowing substance flew from her lips in gummy strings which disappeared almtdst as soon as his eyes had registered their existence.
I’ll save you, Carol! he shouted. He fell on his knees and began digging at sand around her like a dog digging up a bone… and as the thought occurred to him, he realized that Rosalie, the early-morning scavenger of Harris Avenue, was sitting tiredly behind his screaming wife. It was as if the dog had been summoned by the thought. Rosalie, he saw, was also surrounded by one of those filthy black auras. She had Bill McGovern’s missing Panima hat between her paws, and it looked as though she had enjoyed many a good chew on it since it had come into her possession.
So that’s where the, damn hat went, Ralph thought, then tlirneci hunting him and back to Carolyn and began to dig even faster. So far he hadn’t managed to uncover so much as a single shoulder.
Never mind me.” Carolyn screamed at him. I’m already dead, remember? Watch for the white-man tracks, Ralph TheA wave, glassy green on the bottom and the curdled white of soapsuds on top, broke less than ten feet from the beach. It ran up the sand toward them, freezing Ralph’s balls with cold water and burying Carolyn’s head momentarily in a grit-filled surge of foam.
When the wave retreated, Ralph raised his own horror-filled shriek to the indifferent blue sky. The retreating wave had done in seconds what it had taken the radiation treatments almost a month to do; took her hair, washed her bald. And the crown of her head had begun to bulge at the spot where the blackish balloon-string was attached.
Carolyn, no! he howled, digging even faster. The sand was now dank and unpleasantly heavy.
Never mind, she said. Gray-black puffs came from her mouth with each word, like dirty vapor from an industrial smokestack. It’s just the tumor, and it’s inoperable, so don’t lose any sleep over that part of the show. What the hell, it’s a long walk back to Eden, so don’t sweat the small stuff, right? But you have to keep an eye out for those tracks…
Carolyn, I don’t know what you’re talking about!
Another wave came, wetting Ralph to the waist and inundating Carolyn again. When it withdrew, the swelling on the crown of her head was beginning to split open.
You’ll find out soon enough, Carolyn replied, and then the swelling on her head popped with a sound like a hammer striking a slab of meat.
A haze of blood flew into the clear, salt-smelling air, and a horde of black bugs the size of cockroaches came pouring out of her.
Ralph had never seen anything like them before-not even in a dream-and they filled him with an almost hysterical loathing. He would have fled, Carolyn or not, but he was frozen in place, too stunned to move a single finger, let alone get up and run.
Some of the black bugs ran back into Carolyn by way of her screaming mouth, but most of them hurried down her cheek and shoulder to the wet sand. Their accusing, alien eyes never left Ralph as they went. All this is your fault, the eyes seemed to say. You could have saved her, Ralph, and a better man would have saved her.
Carolyn! he screamed. He put his hands out to her, then pulled them back, terrified of the-black bugs, which were still spewing out of her head. Behind her, Rosalie sat in her own small pocket of darkness, looking gravely at him and now holding McGovern’s misplaced chapeau in her mouth.
One of Carolyn’s eyes popped out and lay on the wet sand like a blob of blueberry jelly. Bugs vomited from the now-empty socket.
Carolyn.” he screamed. Carolyn.” Carolyn! Carolyn! Carolyn!
Car-” Suddenly, in the same instant that he knew the dream was over, Ralph was falling. He barely registered the fact before he thumped to the bedroom floor. He managed to break his fall with one outstretched hand, probably saving himself a nasty rap on the head but provoking a howl of pain from beneath the butterfly bandage taped high up on his left side. For the moment, at least, he barely registered the pain.
What he felt was fear, revulsion, a horrible, aching grief… and most of all an overwhelming sense of gratitude. The bad dreamsurely the worst dream he’d ever had-was over, and he was in the world of real things again.
He pulled back his mostly unbuttoned pajama top, checked the bandage for bleeding, saw none, and then sat up. just doing that much seemed to exhaust him; the thought of getting up, even long enough to fall back into bed, seemed out of the question for the time being.
Maybe after his panicky, racing heart slowed down a little.
Can people die of bad dreams? he wondered, and in answer he heard Joe Wyzer’s voice: You bet they can, Ralph, although the medical examiner usually ends up writing suicide on the cause-of-death line.
In the shaky aftermath of his nightmare, sitting on the floor and hugging his knees with his right arm, Ralph had no real doubt that some dreams were powerful enough to kill. The details of this one were fading out now, but he could still remember the climax all too well: that thudding sound, like a hammer hitting a thick cut of beef, and the vile spew of bugs from Carolyn’s head. Plump they had been, plump and lively, and why not? They had been feasting on his dead wife’s brain.
Ralph uttered a low, watery moan and swiped at his face with his left hand, provoking another jolt from beneath the bandage. His palm came away slick with sweat.
What, exactly, had she been telling him to watch out for?
Whiteman traps? No-tracks, not traps. White-man tracks, whatever they were. Had there been more? Maybe, maybe not. He couldn’t remember for sure, and so what? It had been a dream, for Christ’s sake, just a dream, and outside of the fantasy-world described in the tabloid newspapers, dreams meant nothing and proved nothing.
When a person went to sleep, his mind seemed to turn into a kind of rathouse bargain hunter, sifting through the discount bins of mostly worthless short- term memories, looking not for items which were valuable or even useful but only for things that were still bright and shiny. These it put together in freakshow collages which were often striking but had, for the most part, all the sense of Natalie Deepneau’s conversation. Rosalie the dog had turned up, even Bill’s missing Panama had made a cameo appearance, but it all meant nothing.
… except tomorrow night he would not take one of the pain-pills the
E.M.T had given him even if his arm felt like it was falling off.
Not only had the one he’d taken during the late news failed to keep him under, as he had hoped and half-expected; it had probably played its own part in causing the nightmare.
Ralph managed to get up off the floor and sit on the edge of the bed.
A wave of faintness floated through his head like parachute silk, and he shut his eyes until the feeling passed. While he was sitting there with his head down and his eyes closed, he groped for the lamp on the bedside table and turned it on. When he opened his eyes, the area of the bedroom lit by its warm yellow glow looked very bright and very real.
He looked at the clock beside the lamp. 1:48 a.m and he felt totally awake and totally alert, pain-pill or no pain-pill. He got up, walked slowly into the kitchen, and put on the teakettle. Then he leaned against the counter, absently massaging the bandage beneath his left armpit, trying to quiet the throbbing his most recent adventures had awakened there. When the kettle steamed, he poured hot water over a bag of Sleepy time-there was a joke for you-and then took the cup into the living room. He plopped into the wing-back chair without bothering to turn on a light; the streetlamps and the dim glow coming from the bedroom provided all he needed.
Well, he thought, here I am again, front row center. Let the play begin.
Time passed, just how much he could not have said, but the throbbing beneath his arm had eased and the tea had gone from hot to barely lukewarm when he registered movement at the corner of his eye.
Ralph turned his head, expecting to see Rosalie, but it wasn’t Rosalie.
It was two men stepping out onto the stoop of a house on the other side of Harris Avenue. Ralph couldn’t make out the colors of the house-the orange arc- sodiums the city had installed several years ago provided great visibility but made any perception of true colors almost impossible-yet he could see that the color of the trim was radically different from the color of the rest. That, coupled with its location, made Ralph almost positive it was May Locher’s house.
The two men on May Locher’s stoop were very short, probably no more than four feet tall. They appeared to be surrounded by greenish auras.
They were dressed in identical white smocks, which looked to Ralph like the ones worn by actors in those old TV docoperas-black-and-white melodramas like Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare.
One of them had something in his hand. Ralph squinted. He couldn’t make it out, but it had a sharp and hungry look. He could not have sworn under oath that it was a knife, but he thought it might be.
Yes, it might very well be a knife.
His first clear evaluative thought about this experience was that the men over there looked like aliens in a movie about UFO abductions-Communion, perhaps, or Fire in the Sky. His second was that he had fallen asleep again, right here in his wing-chair, without even noticing.
That’s right, Ralph-it’s Just a little more rummage-sale action, probably brought on by the stress of being stabbed and helped along by that frigging pal-n- pill.
He sensed nothing frightening about the two figures on May Locher’s stoop other than the long, sharp-looking thing one of them was holding.
Ralph supposed that not even your dreaming mind could do much with a couple of short bald guys wearing white tunics which looked left over from Central Casting. Also, there was nothing frightening about their behavior-nothing furtive, nothing menacing. They stood on the stoop as if they had every right to be there in the darkest, stillest hour of the morning. They were facing each other, the attitudes of their bodies and large bald heads suggesting two old friends having a sober, civilized conversation. They looked thoughtful and intelligent-the kind of space-travellers who would be more apt to say “We come in peace” than kidnap you, stick a probe up your ass, and then take notes on your reaction.
All right, so maybe this new dream’s not an out-and-out nightmare.
After the last one, are you complaining?
No, of course he wasn’t. Winding up on the floor once a night was plenty, thanks. Yet there was something very disquieting about this dream, just the same; it felt real in a way that his dream of Carolyn had not. This was his own living room, after all, not some weird, deserted beach he had never seen before. He was sitting in the same wing-back chair where he sat every morning, holding a cup of tea which was now almost cold in his left hand, and when he raised the fingers of his right hand to his nose, as he was doing now, he could still smell a
