Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  He shifted again, dozed again, woke again. The mother and the breast with the baby on it were gone. The man with a beard who sat in their place turned a page in his newspaper. “I don’t know either. But how do you save the world? Have you seen this?” He slapped the paper angrily and dropped it in Thad’s lap. Thad shifted, dozed.

  About three o’clock in the morning Thad gave up and went in search of a coffee machine. He leaned against it, stuck in two quarters, and saw Bo Smith’s expression, when he’d refused to let Thad stay inside himself, where it was safe. The coffee from these machines was always either so thin it had no taste or so thick it laid an instant coating on the inside of Thad’s mouth. This cup fit the latter category, and he scraped his tongue against his teeth after every sip.

  He stood at a window and watched his reflection against the night and between runway lights. The lines on his face, accentuated by the fitful sleep and the shadow-shading of uneven lighting, showed Thad what the years were doing and what they would bring.

  The coffee had been one of his poorer ideas, and it hit his empty stomach like a fireball. He was soon in search of a breakfast. In the cafeteria he sat next to three men whose manner and dress pegged them as salesmen trying to make the best of a trying situation. Thad ate some pancakes he didn’t want to assuage his stomach, and listened to them swap stories, laugh. He thought of his own survivor-induced relationship with Don Bodecker and Harry Rothnel.

  In the men’s room Thad stared at his unshaven chin and saw the dream woman of whose pain and loss he’d taken advantage, been helpless not to. He put both hands on the edge of the sink, rested his head against the mirror, and clamped his eyes shut. But he saw the gray monster swelling above a maddened ocean, life preservers from the dive boat flinging out to the ends of their rope tethers, shining an odd luminous white against a sooty sky.

  He gripped the sink so hard his fingers ached, but saw the empty stretch of water where the Ambergris should have swung to anchor, the lone pelican diving into the water in the same area and as if the Ambergris had never been. Sweat prickled on his face. He smelled the cloying blossoms on the vine wall, saw Roudan Perdomo against the moonlit temple mound.

  He left the terminal building to walk a concrete parking ramp in a night warm and scented with exhaust fumes. Thad had a premonition of his own death if he should return to Mayan Cay, and of the endless torment of never knowing if he didn’t.

  40

  Neither Tamara nor Agnes could sleep that night. Russ had been off to the village bars with his new friends from Alabama when they returned from the clearing.

  The morning dawned cool and cloudy, with a stiffer breeze off the sea. They had to shake Russ awake and coax him into waking Don and Harry. Tamara even talked Dixie into allowing her to cook an early breakfast for them all in the Mayapan’s kitchen.

  “You got us up for this?” Harry picked up the glasses’ bow and set it down again.

  “That little woman gets on a toot”—Russ mopped egg yolk with toast—“and you might as well give in right now, brother.”

  “It might be nothing, but it was too dark last night to see that much.” Tamara squeezed Agnes’ hand. “And it might be bad news. But three stalwart men cannot let us gals wander around in the jungle alone. Can you? Aren’t you still curious?”

  The three stalwarts exchanged blurry glances.

  “I’m not going anywhere.” Dixie poured another round of coffee. “There’s weather moving in, and I’ve got a hotel to run. There could be flight cancellations, stranded guests. And I don’t like the way the sky looks. I vote we call the whole thing off.”

  “This is Fred’s. I’d know it anywhere.” Agnes put the bow in her purse. Then she patted the purse. “I’m going in to see that place in daylight.”

  “Those things all look alike. Could be anybody’s.” But Russ Burnham looked defeated again.

  Tamara couldn’t budge Dixie, but within the hour had the rest straggling toward the power plant. “If it is nothing … at least we’ll know.”

  My Lady shivered in the cemetery. She looked up as the door to the man’s house opened, but he didn’t come out to leave food for her. Instead, another came to lean on a post of the house and scan the sky, listen to the water, fold her arms above a swollen belly.

  No birds in the sky this morning, no seabirds screeching arguments over fish heads and entrails at the water’s edge. Waves roared against the surf. Even the water rolling against the beach foamed with anger, crept closer to the tombstones.

  My Lady could smell rain, far off yet, but coming. The heaviness in the air pressed on her body and ears. She scratched at her shoulder with the toenails of a hind foot and whined softly. She glanced at the other dogs who inhabited this graveyard to see if they were getting nervous, and caught the woman with the bloated belly watching her.

  Thad Alexander looked down on piles of dirty, lumpy clouds from his window seat on the 737 over the Gulf of Mexico. The sun shone up where he was, and the cloud cover which seemed to be only a matter of yards beneath the plane looked ominous, impenetrable.

  When the jet did descend into them, turbulence forced the flight attendants to abandon the drink cart and belt themselves in. The plane shuddered, swooped, bucked. The captain’s disembodied voice reassured the passengers in Spanish and then in heavily accented English. The disturbance lasted across Yucatan and until they broke through to the gray world beneath. Clouds left droplets on the plane’s skin, shredded off the wing tip like gauzy fungus. But the landing strip at Belize International Airport was dry.

  The cabdriver who raced him to the sea and the little Mayan Airways terminal shrugged off the weather as just part of life in Central America at this time of year. Only rarely did a storm center reach beyond the ring of protective cays and islands and the second-largest barrier reef in the world to pose much of a threat to the mainland. Of course, the last one that did wiped out half of Belize City and killed thousands, but that was years ago.

  When they reached Mayan Airlines, all flights were canceled until further notice. A man oiled the slides on the tiny building’s wooden storm shutters. Others tied down light aircraft. Thad convinced the driver to rush him to the waterfront, but the supply boat to Mayan Cay had left long ago, just as the driver had promised. He stood on the loading wharf and stared out at the almost imperceptible line where dark clouds met a dark sea.

  But the sun shone bright and hot on Edward P. Alexander III and the man creature who claimed to come from the future.

  “Why does she keep bobbing and fading like that?” Edward asked.

  “Energy waves flaring off in all directions. How can you primitives have formed family and social structures and yet never learned to control yourselves?”

  “Help me,” the specter pleaded in thought like the engineer spoke, her terror almost more palpable than she was.

  “Direct your will to completing yourself,” the engineer, whose name was Herald, told her. “Hold all other ideas and emotions under strict command.”

  Blue jeans, white blouse, arms, hands, and feet in socks levitated just above fluted black coral. A plump, pretty face, a fall of coppery-brown hair fastened with a barrette. The filmy body of a tall, overweight teenager formed in front of them like a three-dimensional transparency. Edward could see foam flecks on the sea and cloudless, sun-flattened sky right through her. He thought he could even see wetness glisten on the skin beneath her phantom eyes.

  She rubbed the knuckle of a forefinger across her cheek and stared at her hand, then up at Herald with an awe normally reserved for gods.

  Edward knew he was dreaming, was probably asleep in the shade of his blind at that very moment and missing the best light and all sorts of iguanas, but he couldn’t help but think this dream had some meaning, something important to tell him. This dreaming could be a warning that he had been premature in reaching certain conclusions in his manuscript.

  The engineer claimed to belong to a race using time to transport people and goods fr
om one place to another, a fancy new system running into trouble because the terminal for arrival and departure had to be in place early on in time, and the people alive at any historical period could mess up something called the funnel. And this engineer was sent to repair the system and became trapped “between” time.

  “Your understanding of time is too limited, too surrounded by misconception and ignorance for there to be any true comprehension,” he said sadly but condescendingly. “The breakthrough won’t occur for centuries. But I had planned to arrive in this century at the Northern Terminal. Not here.”

  “This young lady mess up your funnel?”

  “It’s possible we collided, threw each other out of frame. The question is, why wasn’t the funnel cleared upon my entry, and how did she get into it in the first place?”

  “No, the question is, why are you solid and she isn’t?”

  “As I have said, mind and body travel the funnel separately. She’s mind only, appears to be the victim of some sort of accident. It’s not the first time we’ve had primitives caught up in the funnels. We had no idea the planet was so crawling with human life before the destruction. The system isn’t perfected. There should have been further testing, but those who would profit could not wait … or would not.”

  He thought-said all of this with the total lack of expression he’d worn on arrival, yet Edward could feel the depression washing out from him. “The one nonpolluting, nondestructive, ever-renewable source of energy—time. And immediately there’s trouble.”

  “You can’t go home? Ever?”

  “No. Nor can you, old Edward. Resign yourself.” The engineer paced before the fallen blind, and the apparition followed him like a puppy. “Poor primitive child. Her body must be lost in transit.”

  “No, it’s in Iron Mountain. I saw it in bed. And I came here.” She began to fade and to wail like women will.

  “Control your distress. Picture this Iron Mountain for me.”

  Edward was irritated by the soft deference with which the engineer treated the girl, while he addressed Edward with patient scorn.

  “Ah, the Northern Terminal, I should have guessed. What are you called, child?”

  “Adrian.”

  “Adrian, at the Northern Terminal, or your Iron Mountain, there is a gleaget … a something shaped roughly like this and made of a metal substance.” He closed his eyes briefly, and Edward received a picture in his own mind’s eye.

  “Never saw one that big before.” Edward crawled around on his hands and knees to draw what he’d “seen” in the sand with his finger.

  “Yes, that’s it. What can it be? We’ve been troubled with interference from this gleaget, and I was to have investigated its—”

  “Augie Mapes’s TV antenna,” the apparition exclaimed-thought, and disappeared again.

  “Her disquietude is becoming intolerable.” Herald actually shuddered. “Why does her imagined form carry so much excess flesh?”

  “Some people eat mostly to sustain themselves, others mostly for pleasure. And some people are in constant need of pleasure.”

  “They consume pleasure? Your world will never replace the one I have lost, old man, but it does grow more intriguing.”

  Edward tried to explain the concept behind a TV antenna, but had to admit it was one he knew little about.

  “It transmits nothing? Why erect a receiver that does not transmit a signal as well?”

  “I suspect we’re working on it.”

  A wail from somewhere above them, and Herald comforted the girl back to earth and to her “imagined form.”

  “She’s lost between time too?”

  “Only if this is our first caught moment. If so, she’ll repeat with us. According to theory, at least. If not, she’ll be expelled to wander when we repeat it.”

  Edward felt his impatience rising to equal his curiosity. “Well, if you can travel in time, why didn’t you travel back to see what the problems would be before you made all this mess for everybody?”

  “Traveling in time and traveling through it are two different things. The first is a dangerous undertaking, as witness my own predicament. And we lost over ten percent of all those implanting the terminals to begin with.”

  In time, through time, between time. Edward decided this dream man had trouble with prepositions too. “And people’s minds upset this transportation system?”

  “Energy waves of all sorts. Mental energies, power generation, electrical, micro, macrordial, cresciental.”

  Edward walked off into the bush to urinate, and wondered how the engineer managed this feat in his all-of-a-piece suit. Perhaps he’d progressed beyond the need for this graceless act. He imagined a smirk on the man’s face when he returned. “Well, as long as you’re here to fix things, you might stop feeling so sorry for yourself and take a look at this end of the system.”

  The engineer looked up from a possibly brooding contemplation of the sea. “It does need repairs to its shielding. But without contact with the Northern Terminal, it would be difficult to repair it.”

  “I take it that machine in the temple mound is your doing. Being caught between time doesn’t mean you can’t move around in space, does it?”

  “No one’s ever returned to tell us.” He rose, his suit moving with him like skin, only better. “If she can be expelled, it’s possible that I might be able to send this poor child back to her body at the Northern Terminal. But I can promise nothing—I’m only an engineer, not a krusegan.”

  “Some of your words don’t make sense.”

  “A gap in your knowledge, old Edward. There are many.”

  “And if she doesn’t get back to her body?”

  “It’ll die and she will wander. Better for her than being locked in here with us. With your eternal questions. I would like to see your machine, primitive. I’m curious to see if we can leave this beach. Anything will be better than this useless chatter.”

  41

  Thad Alexander’s suitcase banged against his leg and swung out to clunk into a sheet of corrugated roofing tacked onto sections of wooden packing case that formed one wall of a half-story shell house. The impact set a baby to screaming on the other side of the kludged wall.

  A man sat on a crumbling step in front of a boarded-up building across the street. He had a bottle in his hand, a slouch to his shoulder blades, and a hard stare for Thad. He spit into the gutter without turning his eyes, and Thad fought the urge to glance over his shoulder when he’d put the man behind him. These streets were no place for a lone, relatively rich Yankee.

  He was looking for Mingo’s Bar—a legendary dive known for its food, booze, and brawls—because a dockhand told him he might find someone there dumb enough to take out a boat in the approaching weather and because he needed lunch. Mingo’s was just a block off the waterfront, but he’d been told this detour was necessary because a small area of the city had been washed out in a storm years ago and never repaired.

  He turned a corner and found more people lounging on the street, a few even sleeping. No sidewalk here, no paving except in neglected patches. What wasn’t shacks or people or gutted buildings filled with blanket tents or chickens or goats or dogs was dirt, packed yet dusty. A poster with a picture of a local politician, one hand raised in an oratorical gesture, his mouth open in the middle of a word, blew across Thad’s path, then flipped over and sailed across the street. He’d seen that poster in the airport. But without the inked-in beard, fatigue hat, and cigar that turned the man in the photograph into a near-likeness of Fidel Castro.

  Two young toughs like you might see anywhere walked close behind him, one brown, the other almost white. One with a thick straight stick threaded through his bent elbows and behind his back. They smiled at him.

  “You lost, mon?” The one without the stick moved up beside Thad.

  “I’m looking for Mingo’s Bar.” Thad was almost bigger than the two of them together, but he probably wasn’t as mean, or as desperate, or as at home. Sweat ti
ckled his chest, his crotch. The wind off the sea was cool. What must this street smell like in the heat that normally prevailed here?

  The boy with the stick flanked his other side and said some jibberish, hardly disturbing his smile. And then he laughed, dropped the stick, which could have made a worthy ax handle, down his back and into his hands.

  Thad held his breath, tightened his hold on the handle of the suitcase, registered the lack of sympathy in the eyes of an old woman dumping something in the dirt gutter not five feet away as the boy’s stick lowered to snare a turd, either human or canine. Thad and the woman watched the turd rise, its center mushed onto the end of the stick, and point to the left.

  “Mingo’s barrio,” the kid whispered through his smile, and sure enough, there was a gate with a small sign burned into wood, and everyone on the street laughed in a crescendo that carried Thad, who walked but wished he weren’t too proud to run, off the street and onto a short and narrow wooden sidewalk flanked incongruously with snow fencing about five feet high. A heavy hemp netting reached from there to a roped arch above, enclosing Thad in a world between. The laughter behind him died, the laughter ahead mixed with the clank of tableware, the mutter of many conversations mingling.

  He had to duck through the doorway, sidestep to let a push broom and the man behind it pass, and then parry a dart with a bright yellow tail on its way to a ringed board. The smells of curry and beer and stale smoke overcame any that may have wafted in from the street. Thad stood still to let his eyes adjust to the dimness and the rest of his senses to the abrupt change of vibrations.

  Mingo’s was smaller than he’d imagined it, more orderly (at least at this early hour). Tables and chairs were all grouped in the center of the room, leaving the corners and sides free for darts. The walls were floor-to-ceiling corkboard, with dart boards ringing the room at regular intervals except for a portion of one wall reserved for the bar. Young men moved among the tables carrying plates ranged along both arms. They wore green carpenters’ aprons.