Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  “Well, that’s one way to speed up the paperwork,” Tamara said to the clock above the door, the hands of which never moved. As far as she was concerned, Bennie Hope was still a failure at reading. In the back of Rene Nygard’s folder, slipped in as if by mistake, Tamara found a partial letter in Miss Kopecky’s small, precise, and blocky handwriting. It was merely dated “Friday”:

  Dearest Bea,

  Remember my telling you of the young widow in the apartment next to mine and of the odd experiments? I’m beginning to think she might be on to something. She claims the mountain itself or something inside it is responsible for the disquieting happenings I’ve encountered here. She says some people are more sensitive to whatever it is than others, and that she can help me. You know I’ve always had an interest in the occult.

  I think you’re right in that it was a mistake to stay another year. As I get older, I find I need more sleep, and all this has made me so weary I’m not sure whether I’m being reasonable or, as you suggest, taken in by others. I’m going to try an experiment over spring break. I can think of little else right now. Perhaps I’ll wait to finish this missive until afterward, so I can tell you all about it.

  The mountain, something inside it? Tamara crossed the hall to the unused classroom and stared at the rusty slope out the window. What kind of rubbish did Jerusha Fistler feed poor old Miss Kopecky?

  “Besides being nosy,” she asked Vinnie after classes had resumed and the others worked on tomorrow’s assignments, “what was Miss Kopecky like?”

  “Tall. Skinny.” Vinnie stuck the eraser end of a pencil in her ear, twisted it, pulled it out, and flicked a piece of ear wax onto her history book. “She always wore dresses, even when it was cold. And she had glasses with the little half-circle at the bottom.”

  “Was her hair gray?”

  “Yeah, with lots of curls. And she had pretty scarves she’d put around her neck and pin them to her dress with a different pin every day. The pins were pretty and gave you something to look at when she talked boring.”

  “That sounds like a good idea. Maybe I’ll have to get some jewelry. Did you like Miss Kopecky as a teacher, Vinnie?”

  “No.”

  That night Tamara drank too much coffee while she worked on lessons and daydreamed about Gil’s new wife after she (Tamara) was a highly successful professional person. In her fantasies the exact occupation in which she would miraculously make her mark was never spelled out, but it apparently had nothing to do with education. In this one she walked down a city street on Backra’s arm, aware of how elegant a couple they made, and who should they run into but Gil and his new wife. Elsie was short and frumpy and fat and chewed gum incessantly. Gil had gone to pot and looked an unhappy man.

  Once in bed, Tamara embroidered on this fantasy, and it and the coffee kept her awake late into the night. She heard Adrian get up, and heavy footfalls pass her door. Tamara rolled over, wishing she could dream of Backra tonight, beginning to feel drowsy at last, when she realized Adrian hadn’t returned. “Adrian? Are you sick or something, honey? Adrian?”

  The silence in the house was almost noisy. And just when she might have fallen asleep.… Tamara grabbed her robe and headed for the bathroom. The light was on, but the room was empty. She checked Adrian’s room. Empty. So was the barnlike main room. Alarm began to overcome irritation.

  The door to the utility porch stood open, but when Tamara switched on the light, this room too was empty of Adrian. Two layers of door led from the porch to the wooden stairs outside. The screen was shut, but the heavy winterized door inside was not. Tamara stepped out onto the top step in her bare feet. The chill on the night air held a promise of first frost. “Adrian?”

  The moon was not full, but it was high enough to illuminate the figure moving past Alice’s pen and then the hen house, to give it a ghostly corona as it glided up the mountain to the first row of rusty tracks.

  “Adrian!”

  But Adrian didn’t turn at her mother’s voice, or even pause.

  18

  Tamara stubbed a toe when she raced back into the house for her shoes and a coat and shoes for Adrian. She was outside, crossing the yard in a limping, hopping run seconds later, but Adrian had disappeared.

  Remembering Miss Kopecky’s troubles with sleeping, she wondered if there was something contagious about that apartment. And the funny gliding manner in which Adrian had been moving made her think the girl was sleepwalking. She’d known Adrian to do that only once, several days after she’d been told her parents planned to separate. She’d glided into the guest room, where her father slept, and just stood like a zombie.

  Tamara started up the mountain in Adrian’s path. Her real worry was that if her daughter was sleepwalking she might fall into one of the exploratory holes Russ Burnham had warned them of.

  Searching the shadows around the ore cars on the first level of tracks, she hurried on into the company’s no-trespassing area and stopped. On her right, Russ’s blue house and sick petunias slept under a glaring yard light. To her left the hillside rose in shadows. Another yard light stood in the center of the buildings on this level. Yet another over by the main-rail siding lighted the loading area and tall hopper building. But there were many shades of darkness in between, and Tamara studied these for a sign of movement. She didn’t know if Adrian had headed up the side of Iron Mountain or was now wandering among the company buildings, some of the older ones threatening to collapse at any moment.

  Tamara had expected to overtake her easily, had been alarmed but not really frightened until now, when it looked as if the night and this unlikely place had swallowed up her child. Who could well be helpless if sleepwalking, or confused and frightened if awake.

  “Adrian?” She cupped her hands around her mouth, tried to make her voice carry, stretched out the name. No crickets chirped in the chilling grasses. No pebbles loosened by Adrian’s bare feet trickled tellingly down the mountainside. Only the low groan of a wind that had begun as a breeze several days before and had not let up since, and the whir of it through dead and stiffening weeds. The creak of a loosened board on some tumbledown building.

  Tamara shivered because she could see her breath on the air even in the darkness and because instinct spread cold fire through her middle at the thought of her child in danger.

  She moved deeper among the company buildings but glanced up at the mountain at every chance, walked carefully among shadows that looked like puddles on the ground. The smells of motor oil and dust. The sneezy tang of tiny weed spores afloat on the wind. A shadow moved around a corner of light and disappeared with the sound of footsteps.

  “Oh, thank God. Adrian!”

  Tamara lurched around the same corner and grabbed a dark shoulder before she realized it was too large to be Adrian’s. The shoulder seemed to leap away from her as she leaped back, and the figure whirled to shine a flashlight in her face. She glimpsed the double barrels of a shotgun rising to aim at her chest. Tamara fell, with a jolt to her rear that made her bite her tongue. The flashlight blurred through smarting tears.

  “Mrs. Whelan?” Fred Hanley said with relief. “What’re you doing up here this time of night?”

  “I forgot about you being the night watchman. I didn’t mean to startle you, but Adrian’s out walking in her sleep and I—”

  “What?” He lowered the light and the weapon, helped her to stand.

  She’d also forgotten about his hearing difficulty. “Adrian’s out sleepwalking. I saw her come this way,” she yelled slowly. Her tongue was bleeding.

  Fred reached up to adjust the mechanisms in both bows of his eyeglasses. Then he cupped a hand behind each ear, and she could hear the wind beep in his hearing aids. She explained again.

  “Sleepwalkin’, you say?” He shook his head and stepped out to an open area, looked from side to side. He was a stocky man, all torso, with short, bowed legs. “Sure hope she don’t bother them ghosts any.”

  “I’m more worried that she’ll fall into
a hole or cause an old building or wall to fall on her or something,” Tamara said. “I’m afraid I don’t believe in ghosts, Mr. Hanley.”

  “Me neither. Don’t make a point of botherin’ them, just the same.” He was bareheaded and wore an ancient sport coat over a flannel shirt and blue jeans. He handed her his flashlight. “You take everything on this side of that center track there and up the hill a ways, and I’ll take the other side and the lower level. And, Mrs. Whelan, I’d appreciate it if from now on you could keep her at home at night, where she belongs.”

  Tamara bit off a reply as to exactly where Fred Hanley could stick his opinions on Adrian’s nocturnal movements and took off for her prescribed area, trying to carry Adrian’s coat and shoes while using the flashlight and keeping her wraparound robe closed.

  The night watchman’s remarks about ghosts had seemed stupid when she was standing near him and practically under a yard light. But now, off by herself, skirting a roofless, windowless building—where things scratched and scurried under a rotting floor and a chilly wind whistled through cracks and around corners—ghosts did not seem so out-of-place.

  If she hadn’t gone back for the coat and shoes, she’d probably have kept Adrian in sight and this late-night escapade wouldn’t have been necessary. Then again, with her own feet so tender, she’d have been no use on the spiny weeds and cold rocky soil. And as long as she had to go to back for her own shoes, it didn’t take that much longer to grab something for Adrian. Still, she had to admit this was one of her split-second decisions that had turned out wrong. It wasn’t the first.

  She walked around a wooden ore car rotting on its side, shining the light into its shadow. She’d read of sleepwalkers curling up in improbable places and waking later, not knowing where they were or how they’d gotten there. Aiming the flashlight’s beam at some huddled bushes whose leaves were beginning to show a frost coating that shimmered back from the bottom of a ravine, Tamara glimpsed motion out of the corner of her eye and swiveled her head to look in that direction before she could sweep the flashlight around to aim at it.

  There was nothing there, either before her light reached the area or after. A leveled heap of boards extending over a fairly vast area, which Russ had told her was once an icehouse. But nothing above it existed to make the movement she’d seen.

  The moon was a funny shape, not half of it showing, and what did looked like a shallow bowl, slightly tipped. Its light was undependable, she decided, making the heavens dark and menacing and causing her to see nonexistent things below. And yet, for a few seconds, she carried the memory image of a human form—a man with dark, possibly red, shirt or jacket and loose trousers and a tannish-colored hat with a narrow brim and rounded crown. The image had been taking long, purposeful strides. It looked straight ahead, as if unaware of her.

  Tamara knew this figure was a manifestation of the hour, the darkness, and the superstitions of others at play on her imagination. But she was reminded of Miss Kopecky’s reference to “disquieting happenings.”

  She moved on slowly now, trying not to see anything but what lay directly in front of her, dreading that she might see more. Every rustling sound or creak of old wood startled her, every shadow held a threat. The skin on her arms prickled at each pore with anticipation of the approach of something sudden and unknown.

  It was times such as this she sorely missed Gilbert Whelan.

  Finally she crossed between the chemist’s shack and the old magazine and started up the side of the hollow mountain, calling out for Adrian at intervals, sweeping the beam of the flashlight from side to side, sweating with nervousness while her teeth chattered with the cold. The mountain loomed shadowed and one-dimensional, moonlight glancing off the edges of things—the side of a boulder or the ends of a frosted weed stalk.

  The thing for which her nerve endings had waited dropped suddenly from a pool of darkness above with the sound of thumping air, like an umbrella being rapidly and repeatedly opened and shut. She sank to the earth as a large bird, all dark but for its eyes, beak, and extended talons, swept over her. It grazed the ground a few feet away and rose into the air once more with a small squealing rodent in its claws.

  “Dumb silly ass,” she called herself aloud, but in a whisper, gathered the things she’d carried, and stood. How could she expect to cope alone in this world, when the mere suggestion of the supernatural (and Fred Hanley was no expert on that or anything) could put her in such an exaggerated state?

  She pulled her robe tightly around her, arranged the shoes and the coat and the flashlight so she could proceed, and looked up to see Backra standing next to an outcrop of rock ahead of and above her.

  He seemed to glow faintly, and he was nude.

  Tamara was too startled to blink. She froze in the teetering position of being about to take a step, her balance off center.

  Backra returned her stare with one of thoughtful consideration, as if trying to determine how to approach her. The wind that pulled at the opening in her robe and tossed her hair did not touch his silver head.

  He took a step forward. She couldn’t move.

  This was her dream Backra. Perhaps she and Adrian were safe asleep in their beds and Tamara was dreaming all this. She’d never seen this man when she was awake before. Or was he really one of Fred’s ghosts, haunting Iron Mountain and what she’d thought to be dreams? Perhaps he’d haunted Miriam Kopecky. Perhaps he’d frightened her so, she’d died of it. Perhaps he appeared before her now in the nude as an enticement to lure her inside the mountain. Maybe he was the thing in the mountain Jerusha had told Miss Kopecky about. She could still see the scars on his body from the horrible battle he’d fought with something. Maybe it had been an angel. Maybe Backra was the devil himself.

  Tamara had grown fond of him as a dream, and felt an angry disappointment at the thought he might mean her harm. “Where is Adrian? Do you have my daughter?”

  She threw the flashlight at him. It went through his rib cage and broke on the rocky soil behind. He turned to look at it and then back at her. His lips moving in soundless words, Backra walked toward her, his hands in front of him with palms up, as if in plea.

  A short scream, suddenly cut off. It sounded as if it came from the lower level of the six-hundred-foot portal. Adrian.

  Tamara picked up the skirt of her robe and ran down the slope. She turned once, to see the glowing Backra fade and then vanish.

  Adrian walked down a street of sand, trying not to trip on the icy rails of the track cutting through its center. Darkened houses sat on stilts to either side of her. A rangy cat spit and raced through a gap in a board fence. She came to an intersection of sand streets and a lone streetlight that hung from a utility pole bristling with wires. Similar poles lined the street on either side, but without streetlights.

  Some feeling she couldn’t put a name to drew her toward the end of the street marked ahead by floodlights and a chain-like fence, an open gate. She could smell blossoming flowers over the strong salt smell of the sea, hear dogs yipping and growling down the next side street.

  A paved area with weeds growing in its seams stretched out on the other side of the gate, large enough for a parking lot, but there were no vehicles. Only some lengths of rusty chain, two oil drums, and a rubber tire. And a concrete-block building with giant metal doors standing open to the night. Light streamed through the doors, and so did the repetitive sounds of machinery, a low thumping. All the utility wires from the street behind her converged on this building.

  “Public Service Company of dreamland?” Adrian tried to walk through the gate, but hit her forehead and nose against something that hadn’t been there a moment before. Darkness fell over her head like a cloak. She reached out to feel a barrier that wouldn’t yield to her touch. Adrian fought to get back to the light and the gentleness of the dream place. She pounded on the barrier and stopped at a crunching sound behind her, a hand on her shoulder. Adrian screamed. The hand clamped over her mouth.

  “Quiet, now. You’
ll rile up the ghosts and we’ll all be in trouble.” Mr. Hanley wrapped his jacket around her. “Let’s go find your mother.”

  He led her along some railroad tracks that had rough cindery shoulders. She was unable to reconcile what had just been to what was. She was outside in the cold in pajamas and bare feet. The tracks were like those in her dream, but there was no soft sand here, no power plant. It was like dreaming she was urinating in a toilet, only to awaken while in the act and realize she was wetting her bed. The awful dislocation and shock were the same. What was old Mr. Hanley doing in her dream? Where was her mother? “Did something happen to my mom?”

  “She’s out looking for you. You been sleepwalkin’, girlie.” He led her up a steep path to a more lighted area, and Mr. Burnham came hobbling toward them with his shirttail out and his boots unlaced.

  “What the hell’s going on?” He squinted at Adrian. “Oh, no, not again? Fred, tell me she wasn’t—”

  “Sleepwalkin’. Yep. Just like the other one. You know who Agnes says is causing this, don’t you? Maybe she’s right.”

  Russ stared at her like she was a thing. “Her feet are bleeding.”

  “Couldn’t carry her. Must weigh a ton. Glad I caught her when I did, though. She was trying to get in the lower portal. Pounding on the door.” Mr. Hanley talked about her as if she wasn’t standing right there. Why did people do that? Because she was a kid or because she was fat? “Her mother’s around here somewheres looking for her.”

  As if waiting for that cue, Tamara Whelan rushed out of a nearby shadow in her robe. All windblown and beautiful.

  She looked like she’d seen a ghost.

  19

  After she’d settled Adrian back in her bed, Tamara had dropped off to sleep, only to dream of Backra. It seemed a night full of activity instead of rest. Miriam Kopecky had complained of being tired too.