Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  “Jerusha, Alice wasn’t an experiment too? One that did fail?” And Miriam Kopecky? And your husband, Abner?

  “Look, Tamara, see this?” Jerusha fondled a cone-shaped bud about two inches long with traces of white and pink at its end. “This will bloom one night soon. And so will this one, and this, all together. Just one night, and I will have a party and you will come, and Adrian. On the night the cereus blooms.” Jerusha turned, a flush on her cheeks that wasn’t makeup, a swath of steam from the vaporizer swirling around her chest, disembodying her head.

  “I’m sending Adrian back to Iowa City to live with my mother, Jerusha Fistler. I know you’re up to something. I don’t want my daughter around here. Around you.”

  “I’m not going,” Adrian said. “I won’t get in the car to be taken to the train, plane, or bus. What are you going to do? I’m bigger than you.”

  “I’m your mother, legally responsible for you, and you’ll do—”

  “No. I lost Daddy. I’m not going to lose you and Jerusha too. You’re all I got left.”

  Tamara wasn’t the first parent to have a child larger than herself. She couldn’t force Adrian physically. If she couldn’t maneuver her in some other way, what could she do? She could hardly call in the police. Nothing illegal in disobeying a parent. What did other parents do? If she could no longer control Adrian, she couldn’t protect her.

  “Honey, I’m worried that you’re in danger here. You’ve always been my first concern, you know that.”

  Adrian slammed her bedroom door in Tamara’s face and turned up the volume on her bedside radio.

  In Columbus, Ohio, Gilbert Whelan pulled his car into the narrow space left beside his wife’s in the basement parking under their condo apartment. He was glad to see she was home from work, and hoped she’d started dinner. He had the day-end lag that only a martini and dinner could ease. Elsie’s kids had better behave themselves tonight. He was too strung out to make even a pretense of patience.

  The smell of something warm and meaty met him at the door. A brisk fire in the fireplace. Rain drove against the windows. Her kids in the den with the television on low. Gil Whelan hung up his coat and leafed through the mail. Thank God for women who could cope.

  “Hey, I’m home.” He peered around the corner into the hallway-kitchen, where Elsie stood mixing his martini, the telephone cradled in her neck. Tall, thin … the flash of costume jewelry and nail polish as she worked. Wrinkles in her pantsuit from sitting at a receptionist’s desk all day.

  “Just a minute. Here he is now.” Elsie handed him the drink first and took the receiver in both hands, covering the mouthpiece. “Your ex,” she whispered, and cocked an eyebrow.

  “X? Who …? Oh, ex.” He took a good gulp of gin before he took the phone. All the rapidly relaxing muscles along his spinal column tensed up again. “Hello … Tam? I’ve been meaning to write to Adrian about—”

  “We heard about your remarriage. Never mind that. I need your help.” The memories that flooded over him at the sound of her voice—most tinged with guilt or anger or both. His stomach was knotting now.

  “Look, we’re both working and can barely make ends meet here. I’ll send something when I can.”

  “Gil, I want you to take Adrian for a few months. She won’t go to her grandmother’s, and I thought she might come to you if you were to ask.”

  “Hey, she should be with her mother, you know that. You got custody. Besides, she’d be lonesome here. There’s nobody around. Elsie’s got two we have to send to nursery school while she works. I’m in real estate now and gone lots of evenings. Business is bad, Tam. And there’s no room. She’d have to sleep on the couch. That’s no life for a girl.”

  “God, don’t you care about anything? She’s your child.”

  “Don’t start that shit again. Of course I care.”

  There’d been an odd laid-back tone to her voice, but now desperation cut through. “I’m worried that Adrian’s life is in danger here.”

  “How could her life be in danger? She’s only ten years old. Who’d—?”

  “She’s twelve now, Gil, going on thirteen. She’s about five-feet-eight and at least forty pounds overweight.”

  “Jesus, how’d you let that happen?”

  “Gil, I’m trying very hard not to lose my temper, because I’m so desperate for Adrian—”

  “Let’s not start the goddamned martyr routine again.”

  “There’s a woman next door—we live in a tiny dump called Iron Mountain, Wyoming, now—and this woman named Jerusha is, I’m sure, responsible for a number of deaths around here.”

  “Wyoming? I thought you were living with your mother.”

  “She can’t afford to keep us. I’m teaching here. This woman may be after Adrian too. She has an enormous influence over her, and I—”

  “Go to the police, then.”

  “I don’t have any proof. But we can’t take a chance with our daughter’s life.”

  We and our. Couldn’t she see those words would make him see red? “What’s this woman do, put razor blades in their Halloween candy?”

  “She … it’s very hard to explain … but she does these experiments and people dream and sleepwalk and sometimes they just don’t get up at all and they die. I’ve already caught Adrian sleepwalking out on the mountain, and then the dead people or … well, their essence or something comes back like a … ah … ghost. Oh, I know how unreal this must sound, but, Gil—”

  “You can say that again. Look, Tam, I just got home from work. Bad day. Tired. Haven’t had dinner yet. And frankly, I can’t handle this right now. Tell you what, give me your number and I’ll call you back tonight after I’ve had time to get my head straight. Okay?” When he had the number, he added, “Oh … and, Tam … Thanks for not crying.”

  Gil hung up before she could start in again, and looked at his empty glass. He didn’t remember drinking any of its contents. She could even take the joy out of a martini.

  “Pretty tough on her, weren’t you?” Elsie reached around him for some napkins.

  “Just the sound of her voice and all this resentment comes up my throat. When am I ever going to get that woman out of my life?”

  “This is the first time I’ve known her to contact you since we met. She doesn’t hound you like Jeff does me.”

  “She wants Adrian to come live with us.”

  “No way. Not unless you hire some help. I’ve got too much to handle now.”

  “I know. But it sounds like Tam’s really botched things good this time. The kid’s gotten all fat and they’re living in Boondocks, Wyoming, someplace and seeing ghosts. Maybe she’s not responsible enough to raise Adrian. What do I do, Elsie? She claims the kid’s life is in danger.”

  Brian and Donny came screeching through the kitchen on their way to the dining-room table. He wished he could take the two of them and Tamara and send them all to Mars.

  “Maybe you’d better go out there and see for yourself, if you’re going to worry.” Elsie followed the boys into the next room and left him staring at the refrigerator door.

  “I haven’t seen Adrian in two years,” he said to the refrigerator. Total panic gripped his midsection. “What would I say to her?”

  Gil Whelan called his ex-wife back after dinner to reassure her that she was just being overimaginative and that if she would just relax, everything would be all right.

  23

  Thad Backra, he became in Tamara’s fantasy. He wore a white turtleneck and dark blazer. Fluffy silver hair swept back off a tanned face, ash-gray eyes looking cold and unimpressed as she introduced him to Gil Whelan at a party. A possessive arm around her waist swept her away as soon as possibly polite. “How’d you ever come to marry a guy like that?” he said in that low raspy voice Gil wasn’t meant to overhear but did.

  “Mom, Larry took my pencil.”

  “Careful, Johnson.” Mike Nygard snickered. “Adrian might fall on you.”

  “That’s enough.” Tamara saw
she’d doodled in red pencil down the margin of Nate Baggette’s spelling paper. Profiles of Backra, the pattern of the long leaf skeleton, even a fair representation of one of those thatched huts. She shredded it, threw it in the basket, and entered a perfect score for Nate in her grade book.

  After Rene’s private social-studies lesson, Tamara stood at the back of the room, hoping thus to keep herself awake and monitor Larry Johnson’s shenanigans at the same time. She’d been too tired to run the last few days. Running would give her more energy if she’d get up when the alarm went off instead of rolling over for another hour’s rest. And she hadn’t been eating properly, merely munching on whatever was the least hassle instead of planning and preparing nutritious meals. All of this sapped her natural good health, energy, and will. She’d stop this erratic behavior.

  The wooden flooring trembled almost imperceptibly beneath her feet. Outside the window at her elbow, grains of crushed limestone slithered down the huge pile behind the school and out of sight below, long after the vibration had ceased. Earth tremor?

  Her students appeared to have noticed nothing. Tamara slipped across the hall to look out the windows of the unused classroom. She could see no change in the mountain or the settlement at its base.

  Russ Burnham was on his way down the path to the lower level and headed for the crusher when he felt it too. At first he wasn’t sure it wasn’t just the surprise surfacing of his long-buried dread of a quake under that mountain, with men he knew and liked inside it. But Darrell Johnson came running out of the crusher building and then Russ knew. He was down the path and on the tracks in time to meet Darrell at the portal doors. They grabbed battery-operated lanterns stored at the mouth of the mine.

  “Don’t see any dust, leastways.”

  “Slow and easy. Eyes open and no shouting,” Russ told him, and they started in, looking carefully for piles of rubble or signs of slippage. It wasn’t long before they met Saul Baggette and another miner supporting a man between them.

  “Winn. Just got knocked on the head,” Saul said. “Rest are coming.”

  “Get him on out. Talk to you outside.” When Russ had counted the men passing him and assured himself the mine was empty, he joined the others at the portal doors. Winn Davidson sat with his head in his hands, elbows propped on his knees. Russ put him in the company pickup with Johnson and sent them off to Cheyenne and a doctor. He listened patiently to each man, then ordered them home for the day. Pulling the portal doors closed, he locked them and took Saul Baggette to his house.

  He sat Saul down at the table and poured them each a whiskey. “Okay, now, I want the truth. Nothing else. Nothing you wouldn’t have seen before Abner’s widow started filling everybody’s heads with her motherfuckin’ stories. But I want everything you did see.”

  Saul rubbed his forehead, and dirt balled up in the tracks of his fingers. “The damage isn’t bad if nothing more comes down. Like I told you, the trouble’s in that one wall we couldn’t seem to drill. And, like the guys said, we finally got a bore hole through—all of a sudden, because it was hollow on the other side and the wall came down, part of it on Winn. And we barely got him out of the way before the whole damned shaft caved in at the end there.”

  “Hollow on the other side …”

  “We thought we’d gotten turned around somehow and bored through into one of our own tunnels.”

  “And before the cave-in, you saw this thing too?”

  “Yeah. It was kind of gray and chrome-looking and—”

  “How is it you were all working the same tunnel?”

  “We weren’t, but Winn and Charlie came to get me when they got a hole through, and the men with me came too. You know the trouble we been having there, and then … well, we all been stickin’ fairly close because of the noises.”

  “Noises.”

  “I tried to tell you the other day, but you wouldn’t listen. And don’t ask me to describe ’em, ’cause they’re like nothing I ever heard.”

  “Make a stab at it.”

  “Something like machinery running, maybe. I couldn’t tell you what kind if you paid me. Anyway, it was louder after we got the bore hole through. And it was a lot louder when the wall came down.”

  “And you saw something gray.” Russ poured his underground manager another shot. “You personally.”

  “Yeah. It had a shape embedded in it, and—”

  “Shape of what?”

  “Person maybe. Big rounded one. I don’t know. But there was glass or plastic or something … a see-through film around it.”

  “And you saw all that in the seconds before the cave-in and while frantically trying to dig Winn out of a jam?”

  Saul slammed his glass down with a splash of amber. “Shit, Burnham, I’m not trying to make this up to—”

  “Okay, okay. I just have to get it all straight, sort out the truth from the excitement. Nobody’s calling anybody a liar. We’ll let things settle good, and you and me’ll go in in the morning and scout before letting the men work the tunnels.”

  Tamara didn’t keep her promise to prepare a nutritious meal that evening, but went to bed on canned soup, crackers, and an awful pudding mixture Adrian had concocted in sugar-starved desperation. Too exhausted to care and certainly to dream, she gave herself up to Miriam Kopecky’s expensive mattress before she’d completed grading papers and filling out the preliminary questionnaire of the National Education Council on Learning Disabilities and Modular Systems Planning. Sleep came quickly and deep, and if there were dreams in the first part of the night, they spun into view and around and back into her memory bank without a lasting impression.

  But later, every time Bennie Hope would sniff, Tamara brought a ruler down on his head until it became almost rhythmical—sniff-slap, sniff-slap—and Larry Johnson laughed and cheered her on, and Vinnie cried. And Tamara felt the cruelty in what she was doing but couldn’t stop. And even worse was the sensation of glee in finally repaying the child for hours of nerve-rasping sniffles. Her guilt over this last was so heavy she found herself reeling under its weight as she followed Backra down the sand street. He glided like Adrian had on the mountain. He wore only pajama pants.

  A series of ugly scabs still marred one shoulder, but when he stopped and turned to stare at something she couldn’t see, she noticed the swelling on the bridge of his nose had receded and his profile was once more clean and smooth in the moonlight.

  They passed darkened houses, a side street, a cat on a board fence that arched and spit and ran away, a shuttered storefront with cases of empty Coke bottles stacked waist-high along one wall. Backra turned at the next corner and again at the next, so he was going back the way he’d come. He stepped into a doorless, roofless structure made of concrete. By the arches on the window holes Tamara guessed it to be a church under construction, but there was no building mess or scaffolding about.

  A scurrying, a succession of ruffs and growls and then yips and barks. She turned to see what looked like a miniature dinosaur with shortened legs, perhaps the ugliest creature she’d ever seen. Shivers tingled over her skin as the creature, who did not look built for such speed, ran-slithered across the floor. He was green, over three feet long, and with a ridge of spines along his back. He had wartlike bumps all over his face and inch-long toenails that clicked on the concrete. His tail and hindquarters swiveled from side to side as he ran. And close behind him, in a scramble of feet and fur, came a pack of canines, perhaps four or five, who skidded to a wide-eyed and squealing halt at the sight of Tamara. They turned and left the green creature to make good his escape out the opposite door hole, across the beach, and over the edge of a dike or breakwater of some sort.

  The commotion made Backra stop and turn. He looked past her, again at something she couldn’t see. And a dark mass she’d taken for a shadow became instead a kneeling woman with a black shawl draped over her head. She stared openmouthed at Tamara as she rose to her feet and crossed herself. Tamara was surprised that someone other than a dog o
r Backra could see her. There seemed to be a progression in her dreams. At first she wasn’t visible to anyone, but recently more and more of the dream island’s occupants could see her. Were dreams really meaningful, as some people claimed? Were these dreams trying to tell her something by way of this progression?

  The woman backed carefully toward the door hole that led to the beach. “Thaddeus, come with me. You must wake and get away from this place. An evil one is here.” Her whisper trembled, and her eyes never left Tamara. “Thaddeus, please, this is Rafaela. We must …” The woman in black was out the door and gone.

  Backra had taken no notice of her, and now wandered back toward the hole he’d entered by and out into the sand street once more. Tamara followed. In this place of green monsters, he alone seemed safe and familiar. She kept close behind him now, fearing that strange creatures lurked in every shadow, beneath every house. Her dream senses sharpened, making her aware of the background throbbing she always heard here but rarely listened to, and the constant sounds of the sea.

  They came to a tall chain-link fence. The throbbing sound came from a lighted building behind it. Backra seemed confused by the fence. As if he could feel it but not see it. A gate stood open not ten feet to his right, but he moved to his left instead, feeling along the fence as he went. When he came to the corner, he started off into the jungle.

  “Don’t go in there barefoot! Dammit, Tamara, this is just a dream.” But she hurried in after him, worried about what could happen to a sleepwalker here. That woman with the pop eyes had spoken of sinkholes.

  He floated through shadows and out into moonlight again, unaware of the plant life clawing at his pajama pants, the debris fallen from the tangle of palms and low trees that might harbor poisonous insects. The air here was filled less with the brine smell of the sea and heavier with the odors of blossom, fruit, vegetable rot, and damp. It smelled as she imagined a snake would, and she wouldn’t have been surprised to see all sorts of green demons with spines along their backs