she was slammed right back into the breathtaking wonderfulness of it all, so that her tummy fluttered and the nape of her neck tingled.
Naomi stepped into the hall. She went to her room.
At the play table, Minnie looked up from her LEGO project. “I saw this clown once wearing a blue beret with a red pompon.”
“Put-down humor is simply
“No, I mean there really was this clown in a hat like that.”
Putting her purse and flute on her desk, shrugging out of her blazer, Naomi said, “If you say so.”
“Was Mr. Hummelstein at orchestra practice?”
“He’s the conductor. He’s always there.”
“Has he trimmed out his ears yet?”
Flopping on her bed, Naomi said, “No, they are still two great thickets, you expect a flock of ducks to be startled out of them.”
“Did you play your solo?”
“Yes. Twice.”
“Is that all?”
Mentally reviewing the contents of the attache case, Naomi said, “All what?”
“There wasn’t a standing ovation, applause like thunder, no crowd of admirers with fresh roses at the stage door?”
Naomi thought about eggs. They were very symbolic objects. What might an empty egg represent?
Minnie came to the bed. “What’re you up to?”
“What do you mean? I’m lying here exhausted.”
“You’re up to something,” Minnie said, frowning down at her.
“My paranoid sister, if you aren’t careful, you’ll grow up to be the Lord High Inquisitioner and Torturer to some crazed dictator.”
“You’re up to something, all right.”
Naomi let out a long-suffering sigh.
“Something’s going to happen,” Minnie said.
“Well, maybe something wonderful will happen.”
“No. Something very bad.”
“Here comes Miss Gloomy Bloomers again.”
“Something’s wrong with this house,” Minnie said, looking toward the ceiling. “It started with the mirror.”
“You painted the mirror black.”
“Maybe that wasn’t good enough.”
Minnie went to the window and stood staring into the twilight.
Sitting up on the edge of the bed, Naomi said, “The frost is on the briar rose.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” Naomi said, “but doesn’t it make you feel just totally delicious?”
“No. I’m scared.”
Naomi went to the window and put a hand on Minnie’s shoulder. “There’s nothing to be scared of, sweetie.”
Gazing at the fading sky, Minnie said, “There’s everything to be scared of.”
“Sometimes it looks that way when you’re eight. But when you’re eleven, you have a whole different perspective.”
44
FOR A WHILE, EVERYTHING MOTORED ALONG ON CRUISE CONTROL, not exactly normal but not in-your- face bizarre, and then Zach began to dream about Ugly Al again—though with a difference. These new mind movies were megatons worse than nightmares. They were so radically real that Zach woke up to throw up more than once, barely making it to the bathroom in time.
The dumb-ass cliche carnival wasn’t a locale anymore. These dreams were set in their house or outside on their property, and though they were horror-movie stuff, they didn’t have a bonehead horror-movie feel. They felt like documentaries.
In the first of them, Zach climbed into the stupid playhouse high in the stupid cedar, where he
He could smell everything too, which never happened in other dreams. He smelled the cedar as he ascended through its boughs. He smelled the wet wood of the playhouse—and the blood when he went inside.
In throbbing lantern light, Naomi’s severed head stood in a puddle on the playhouse table. Stepping out of shadows, Ugly Al said, “I have lots of uses for her fine little body, but I didn’t need her head. You can have the little slut’s head.” Zach tried to back away, couldn’t. Ugly Al shoved the head into his hands. Zach could feel the slickness and fading warmth of the blood, her hair tickling his wrists. All this did worse than terrify him. He was grief-stricken, such anguish, he was sobbing, his throat felt raw from sobbing. His sister was
The dreams got a lot worse after that.
Zach knew that he should tell his parents, because the dreams were so godawful intense and so strange that maybe he had a freaking brain tumor the size of an orange or something. He intended to tell them, but then the dreams got sick in a different way from how they had been, still violent but also way perverse. Disgusting, demented syphilitic-monkey things happened in these supercharged nightmares, things Zach could never in a million years tell anyone about because they would think that he must be a walking pus bag, that he must be rabid-bat deranged if he could even imagine such grotesque stuff. In fact, he didn’t think he was imagining any of it, he felt like he was
On the night of October eighteenth, any lingering thought he had of sharing his nightmares with his father and mother was vaporized like a teaspoon of water at ground zero in a nuclear blast. Something happened that so shamed him, he had no option but silently to endure this torment until it either stopped or he went into full brain melt.
In the dream, Ugly Al tried to force Zach to do something so evil and repulsive that even Hell wouldn’t let him in if he did it. When he refused, Ugly Al produced a meat cleaver and chopped once, twice, three times at Zach’s crotch.
Screaming in a dry breathless whisper, he sat up in bed with a lap full of warm blood. After desperately, interminably fumbling for the lamp switch, he discovered that of course he wasn’t emasculated for real, only symbolically: He had wet the stupid bed. He had
Leaping out of bed as if it were a skillet full of sizzling-hot oil, he peeled out of his saturated underwear and threw them on the bedclothes. He stripped the bed fast, before the mattress sustained damage, and piled everything on his desk after sweeping the blotter and his drawing tablet to the floor. He would have preferred to heap the reeking bundle on his desk chair; but because he had become a godawful paranoid dumb-ass, the chair was bracing shut the closet door.