this time he recognized the man who was trying to push him off the top of the house. It was the man he'd imagined seeing in the closet when Paul was putting away his camera. The man in the portrait. Ephram Korban.
And again Korban had Adam leaning over the railing. The hard wood pressed against the small of his back. Even as he was dreaming, he realized that you weren't supposed to feel pain in your dreams.
But all his senses were working: he could smell the sweet beech trees, hear the aluminum tinkle of the creek, taste the rancid graveyard stench of Korban's breath, see the stars spinning crazily above as the man pushed him backward over the rail.
'You have no vanity,' Korban said. '1 can't eat your dreams. They're made of air.'
Adam's fingers tangled in the man's beard, desperately gripping the coarse hairs. But as Korban pushed him away, the hairs ripped out at their roots. And just as Adam fell, losing his grip on Korban's woolen waistcoat, he stared into the man's eyes.
The eyes flickered from charcoal black to a sizzling amber. Korban's cold iron hands released their grip on Adam's upper arms and Adam screamed as he hurtled to the packed ground sixty feet below.
The air whistled like a teakettle in pain.
The great gulf of space yawned overhead, farther and farther away, its softness lost to him even as he grasped for a handle on the stars.
The house's windows gleamed in streaks, the shutters blurring in his peripheral vision. His blood rushed to his feet. This dream was stranger than any he'd ever had. Because you were supposed to wake up when you fell in your dreams.
But Adam was aware of the impact as his head pounded into the circle of the driveway. He clearly heard the crunching of bone as his spine folded like a paper bird, he gasped as his breath whooshed from his lungs, he bit his tongue in half and the amputated tip squirted from between broken teeth, he tasted his own warm blood, then vomited as his shattered pelvis speared his stomach and kidney.
As his ruined flesh lay sprawled and leaking on the ground, he clearly saw his own eyeballs lying beside his head. The eyeballs glowered at him, their brown irises helpless in the ovate globes of white, the pupils large with shock and fear, no sockets or eyelids to hide their twin disapproval. Even dreaming, he recognized the absurdity of seeing his own eyes. He couldn't wait to tell Paul about this.
Except you also weren't supposed to feel pain in a dream, either. And what else could this be but pain, this sheet of red that dropped on him like a hundred sulfuric guillotines? Ribbons of electricity shot through his broken body, his nerves screaming like four alarms at a firehouse. Adam tried to laugh. Wasn't this funny, experiencing this hellburst of orange that flooded his brain, when he was surely dead?
But wait a second. Can you dream that you're dead?
But how would you know if you were dead… this was the kind of tiling that would give you a headache if you didn't know you were dreaming. But Adam had a headache anyway. He knelt to scrape his spilled brains together, scooped them up, and put them back in their broken shell.
As his fingers stirred through the steaming wrinkles of his own cerebrum, he realized that his body was splayed out before him. This was odd, surreal, Daliesque. He expected to awaken at any moment to find himself giggling into his pillow. But he didn't wake up. He stood, looking at the pool of red that seeped from beneath his body and the sour bile around his head. A splinter of femur protruded from one thigh, angling out from a rip in the gray pajamas. The bone gleamed bright and wet in the pale light. The body's head was turned away in the direction of the wide stone steps that led into Korban Manor.
But his real head, at least the one that housed his soul, was staring higher, at the black portal of the door.
Shapes spilled out of the maw, white wispy forms like bits of shredded cobweb being swept along by the breeze of a broom.
Some coalesced into more or less human figures, men, women, and small children, their faces blank, their eyes as black as the interior of the foyer. Some of them were in coarse crinolines, or trousers with button-up flies, a few men in overalls and felt hats, the women in bonnets or with their hair pinned up in buns. The young boys were in knickers, mended stockings sagging over square leather shoes, the girls in plain shifts, ribbons in their pigtails. An infant materialized at the feet of one of the women, its ragged diaper mingling with its ragged legs.
Adam stepped backward as they walked toward him. Except they weren't walking, they were flitting, floating, flying, arms wide, mouths slack with grim purpose. There were about two dozen figures, and he saw Lilith among them, the maid with the flowing dress, but she was as misty as the others. The plump cook, whom he'd seen earlier pouring dishwater off the back porch, was wiping her hands on her apron.
He screamed, but no one could hear you when you were dead.
It was long past time for waking up.
He tried to run, but stood transfixed, frozen, as cold as a December tombstone.
The crowd gathered around the body that lay on the ground, the ghosts-yes, of course they're ghosts, if I'm going to have a bad dream I might as well go for broke-the ghosts merged and intertwined, showing no concern for the social constraints of personal space. And Adam, now more fascinated than frightened, also looked down at the object of their attention.
It was he, himself, the person formerly know as Adam Andrews. There was the mole on his cheek, the small white scar above his elbow where he'd fallen off his bicycle at age nine, the awkward bend in the second toe of his kicking foot that he'd severely dislocated playing high school soccer. There was his hand, the nails unevenly trimmed, a few threads of Korban's beard hair still clutched in the rigid fingers. There was the silver ring with the garnet stone that Paul had given him.
There lay his blood, his flesh, his body.
A low sound filled the lawn, stretching across the hills, a funeral dirge that reminded Adam of recordings of whales he'd heard. It was a bizarre language, sonorous and sad. The syllables of the tuneless sound phased into aural chaos, a thick clotted noise. It was emanating from the manor, as if the foyer were the building's throat.
The ghosts turned toward the door, solemn as only the dead could be. Adam gulped, looked down at his hands, and saw he was made of the same mist as the others, spun from the same insubstantial threads. He was a ghost. That meant…
He was really dead.
He smiled to himself. He closed his dreaming eyes. He'd have to forget being mad at Paul at least long enough to tell him about the dream. He wondered if he was snoring, then remembered that he'd pushed the beds apart, so he couldn't count on Paul giving him a nudge in the ribs. And right now, he'd love to be tickled, cuddled awake, to pull Paul's body close, to feel some human heat.
Because being dead was a chilly business. He must have kicked the quilts off in his sleep.
Yes, of course. Any crazy thing makes sense if you analyze it long enough. And deciding to leave Paul must have stirred up some funny things in the old Jungian jungle.
But why shouldn't your mind pull a trick or two on you while you 're asleep?
And what could be a better vacation site than this theme park of the deceased? What was that old black- and-white movie? Yeah, Carnival of Souls, dancing with the dead, wake up and say, 'It was all a dream.' And old Ephram Korban IS a nightmare-inducing sort.
So why not enjoy it, laugh it up, go along for the ride? You'll be awake soon enough, back in the real world with real problems. Like how to deal with Paul. For real.
He opened his eyes, and found himself still in his nightmare.
The ghosts were bending, lifting the corpse. Amused, Adam joined them. When one of the bloody arms lolled outward, Adam placed it back over the chest cavity. The ghosts hoisted the body toward the door of the house, pale pallbearers in a silent procession. Adam trailed after them as they wafted up the steps. Waiting at the door was his malefactor, Korban.
The man flashed a cold smile of triumph, his eyes like onyx marbles.
'Welcome to your tunnel of the soul, Adam,' Korban said.
For a moment, Adam forgot he was dreaming. Korban held the door wide as the procession entered the darkness. Adam was unable to keep from following.
Korban's face loomed near, and the man held out a welcoming arm. As Adam drifted into the waiting murk, he realized that it wasn't the manor that was swallowing him. The foyer was a tunnel, a tube of frigid stone-glass walls, an ever-widening mouth, all darkness, beyond light and the things that light touched. Adam shivered, colder
