Wildest Dreams
Norman Partridge
“But you want me to desecrate the grave!”
“Don’t give me that crap. There’s nothing sacred about a hole in the ground. Or a man that’s in it. Or you, or me.”
PART ONE:
A COLD amp; LONELY EVIL
The time has been That when the brains were out, the man would die, And there an end; but now they rise again. With twenty mortal murders on their crown.
1
I see ghosts.
This one was a little girl with long blonde hair and a black dress. She sat on a footbridge that arched across a rushing creek, her little girl legs dangling over the side as she gazed down at the cold water rushing below.
I moved toward her, following a fern-choked path through old redwoods, but the little girl didn’t notice me. Sometimes it’s like that. Sometimes the dead don’t see the living at all. Often, in fact. Often ghosts are no more threatening than old movie clips. They’re helpless specters fixed in time and place, forever repeating some action whose significance was lost long ago, perhaps even to them.
Of course, my footsteps were light. Maybe that was why I went unnoticed. A rusty blanket of dead redwood needles covered the path, but it wouldn’t have mattered if the forest floor was salted with gravel-I can be quiet when I want to. So the sounds I made were hardly sounds at all, and what the little girl would have heard had she been listening was masked by the hollow sigh of clear creek water flowing to the sea.
Masked, until I stepped onto the wooden bridge and my boot heel rang down like a judge’s gavel.
The ghost looked up with startled blue eyes that were as clear as the October sky.
“I’m sorry I scared you,” I said.
She smiled. “Oh, I wasn’t scared. Not truly. I just didn’t see you coming. Not many people come here, you know.”
“I know.”
“You’ll be glad you did, though.” She nodded toward the creek. “It’s a nice place. Sometimes you see fish.”
I unslung my backpack and sat down beside her. She moved closer. The nearness of her made me shiver, but I masked my unease with a smile. I didn’t want her to think that anything might be wrong.
We sat there in silence. A bower of heavy redwood branches hid the creek, and the bridge, and the living and the dead from the sun. The shadows did not bother me, and neither did the little girl-there was nothing in her clear October eyes to make me wary, or afraid.
I knew the girl could not say the same of my eyes. But even though I’d frightened her, she hadn’t looked away from me. She had studied my eyes as if she were searching for everything that lay behind them, and she hadn’t even blinked.
I hadn’t looked away, either. Strange. I’d seen ghosts since childhood. Maybe because I was born with a caul-that’s the occultist’s favorite explanation, anyway. I’d learned to ignore the dead a long time ago. First the dull ones with their endless pantomimes, and later those whose actions were less predictable. By the time I was a teenager, I could spend a night in a room with a wailing spirit and sleep like a baby.
But there was something very different about the little girl. I can’t say it any plainer than that. There was a depth to her, an intelligence that was rare in the dead.
An innocence, as well.
It was something I’d never seen before.
Somehow, she seemed very much alive.
And very, very lonely.
I knew what it was like to be lonely.
“Look!” she said suddenly, and her little hand brushed through mine with icy, transparent fingers as she pointed at the creek.
A steelhead shot through the water like a bullet, fighting the current every inch of the way. A flash of scale like living sunshine, a splash of the steelhead’s dark and powerful tail, and then it was gone.
The little ghost leaned forward, straining after the fish. “Careful,” I said automatically, realizing too late that my concern was ridiculous.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t fall.”
I didn’t say anything.
The girl stared upstream and sighed. “Wasn’t he beautiful?”
I nodded.
“He’s going upstream. They go upstream to spawn.”
I nodded again, and she looked at me with those clear, innocent eyes. I wondered if she knew what happened to steelheads after they spawned. I wasn’t going to tell her. If she didn’t know now, she didn’t ever need to know.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Clay Saunders.”
“What’s in your backpack, Clay Saunders?”
Watching the fish, I’d actually forgotten about the backpack. Just for a moment. It was black, and it was canvas, and you couldn’t see the bloodstains on it unless you looked really hard
I’d bought the pack in Baja six days before. It sat between us on the bridge. Already, flies were circling it.
I swallowed hard. I’d made a mistake. I didn’t have time for distractions. I should have ignored the little ghost, and taken care of business the way I’d planned, and gone on.
But instead I’d stopped, and now there were questions.
That’s the way it always is.
Anytime you stop, there are questions.
Questions are never good.
Without a word, I rose and slung the pack over one shoulder. I had to laugh at myself. Silly, getting nervous
