oak-dotted cliffs called Juniper flats.
In his sleep, Harold’s nightmare prison was just like this real one, measuring eight feet in diameter by thirty feet deep. Uneven slide-prone sides rose in an almost perpendicular fashion from a dank, ram puddled floor to the rounded lip at the top, left by a pile of excavated tailings. Rocks and other things-foul things he didn’t want to think about-littered the floor and made footing uncertain.
In real life, a sturdy barbed-wire fence surrounded the tailings mound and separated it and others like it from the Rocking P’s pasture land.
The fence served as a lifesaving deterrent to thirsty desert-dwelling livestock that might otherwise be drawn to their deaths by the luring smell of water.
In Harold’s dream, the fence never did any good, because it never kept him from falling in and being trapped.
Each time the nightmare opened, Harold would find himself on his hands and knees, his desperate fingers groping and clawing along the steep wall, searching for some hold, some purchase, that would allow him to scramble up and out of his rocky cage, But each movement, each tentative touch, would jar loose stones and pebbles that would rain back down on his body, sending dirt and gravel spewing into his watering eyes and mewling mouth, battering him into the ground like some shamed biblical harlot.
In his terror, he always cried out to Emily “Help me, Em. Please help.”
Of course, Emily never answered his panic stricken cries, and why would she? She’d been dead for five years now and had been out of reach for many years before that. Emily Patterson was long dead but not forgotten.
On this day, though, once his brain cleared, Harold realized this waking nightmare was no dream.
Instead of sopped, sweat-drenched bedsheets beneath him, when he came to himself, there were rocks-real rock that were all too cold and sharp, especially the one that was biting painfully into his shoulder. This time he really was trapped in the dank depths of that very same glory hole, the one he had always avoided whenever possible.
He lay flat on his back and tried squinting up through the darkness at the distant blue far above him. That had to be sky, although he couldn’t really tell for sure, couldn’t actually see it. His glasses had somehow disappeared in what must have been a fall, although Harold couldn’t remember it. Without his trusty spectacles, Harold Patterson was as good as blind.
Blind, he thought grimly, but maybe not helpless. He tried to shift his weight then, to dislodge whatever it was that was digging into his shoulder. But even that slight motion was too much. A crushing wave of pain washed over him-a pain so intense that it flattened him, robbed him of breath, and rolled his eyes back into his head.
Ribs, he thought to himself when he struggled back to wavering consciousness. Shattered ribs. No telling what damage they might do if he tried to move again, if they poked into something vital, a lung perhaps, or maybe even his wildly pounding heart.
So he lay still and tried to think, tried to imagine what he could do to save himself. The glory hole that had for years tormented his sleep was miles from the house, so there was no point in calling out for help. No one would hear him. Unless someone came out there deliberately. Unless they came looking for him.
He tried then to remember how it was that he had come to be near the glory hole in the first place. Had he been out doing chores? Feeding cattle? Working fences? Try as he might, he couldn’t corral his memory into any kind of order. What ever had happened earlier in the day, before he fell into the hole, remained a total mystery, as did the days immediately preceding that. It was as though his memory of the last few days prior to this terrible awakening had been wiped out of existence.
Had he told anyone he’d be working this part of the ranch? Would anyone have an idea of where to start looking once he turned up missing? If he couldn’t remember how or why he had come to be there, would anyone else? Would Ivy realize he was hurt and institute a search, or would she simply shrug her shoulders and forget it, annoyed that her father was once again late for dinner?
At first, shock helped deaden the pain, but as that natural analgesia disappeared, increasing clarity brought with it excruciating agony. Even lying perfectly still, the shattered ribs still stabbed and poked at him with each ragged breath. He was aware of shards of splintered bone pressing and piercing where no bone should have been.
In addition to the pain, he grew increasingly aware of a familiar but fetid smell. It was some time before recognition crystallized in his brain.
The appalling stench - a combination of human excrement and urin - belonged to him. Both bowel and bladder must have let go at once. He had no control whatsoever.
Harold Lamm Patterson was an experienced stockman who understood the meaning of such things. If he was lying in a pool of his own bodily filth and waste with no muscle control and no sensory awareness from the bottom of his fractured ribs down, that meant his back was broken. It meant he was going to die.
That realization was too much for him. Merci fully, he again lost consciousness. For the time being, his physical pain eased, but not the mental torment, for soon the dream came again-the dream this time somehow layered in with nightmarish reality. The part of him that recognized it as a dream welcomed it, even though it was more vivid, more terrifying, than ever before.
The scene had barely opened-he was still crawling around, looking for a way out-when the rocks began to fall in a horrifyingly accurate barrage. At first, only small pebbles rained down on him, but the sizes of the rocks grew steadily larger and their weights heavier. He tried dodging out of the way, but he couldn’t. There was no place to hide. No place to get away.
“Em, help me. Please… please.”
IT TURNED out to be one of the longest days of Joanna Brady’s existence. Once Harold Patterson left her office, the morning seemed to drag. At lunchtime, she drove from Warren up to Old Bisbee for a celebratory, end- of-campaign lunch with Jeff Daniels and Marianne Macula.
Jeff-a full-time, stay-at-home, minister’s husband-had planned the event, weeks earlier-win, lose, or draw. With the election over, Jeff hoped life with his pastor turned campaign manager wife would return to some semblance of normalcy. Their usually neat parsonage had deteriorated to a shambles while Marianne masterminded the whole campaign and Jeff handled the mass mailings out of the room that usually served as Marianne’s study.
It was a great lunch, complete with an appropriate set of toasts.
