As she continued her slow turn, Will struggled to move. He lacked even the power to close his eyes, which at the moment he desperately wanted to do. All it would take would be the movement of just one finger, the twitch of one muscle, then the spell would be broken and he could wake up. Even getting control of his breathing would be enough. Straining to the very last fiber of his being, the realization that he wasn’t going to make it sunk in as her motion started to cause the thick mane of hair to fall away from her face.
“Hey Sleeping Beauty! Rise and shine!”
Will almost exploded out of his sleeping bag, gasping for breath. A frantic look around revealed the sun to be up and Jack grinning at him from over the fence. He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder toward Rowley’s van.
“C’mon! It’s already nine o’clock and Rowley is in a hurry to get back to town and start working on his term papers. I’ll drive, since it looks like neither of you wieners slept worth a damn last night.”
***
The knock on his apartment door came as an unwelcome distraction.
With a groan, Will put down the cup of coffee he had been inhaling and pushed himself away from the book laden table. Rubbing his knuckles into his eyes, he shuffled over to the door. He reeked of coffee and stale cigarette smoke, or as he liked to think of it, “the scent of study.” At this time of the semester, sleep existed as a luxury earned between hard bouts of cramming for exams.
“Coming!” he mumbled aloud as the knock repeated.
Pulling open the door, he grunted in surprise. Rowley stood outside alone and looked even more haggard than he himself felt. He stuck his head out and took a quick look up and down the walkway in front of his apartment, then stared in mild wonder at his guest.
“Where’s Jack?”
“I don’t know, probably studying.”
Will doubted that. Jack had a phenomenal memory, and seldom bothered to study. Hitting the books was for lesser mortals in Jack’s worldview. On the other hand, the fact that Rowley was neither studying nor tagging along behind Jack was something he would have also found hard to believe a moment ago.
“Can I come in for a moment?”
“Oh…uh…sure!” He regrouped. “Don’t mind the mess.”
Rowley shambled in, ignoring the piles of paper and soda cans, and flopped down on the old vinyl chair in the corner. He looked even worse than Will. The sockets of his eyes were dark from lack of sleep behind his glasses.
“Coke or coffee?” Will asked, still bemused by this unexpected visit.
“Coke in a can, if you got it. I know you’re busy so I won’t be staying long.”
“No problem,” he called over his shoulder while moving to the refrigerator, “So what’s up?”
“I had a question for you…um…just something that’s been bugging me.”
“What’s that?” Will returned with the Coke and set it down on the scruffy coffee table beside his guest.
“Do you remember last week, when we were in that little diner in Hearne on our way back from the graveyard”
“Yeah, Jack was lecturing me over confusing sentimentality with morality. I remember.”
Will couldn’t be sure, but it looked to him like Rowley winced while rubbing his temples.
“I know you find him a bit much, Will, but you know he’s a good guy. He’s bailed both of our butts out of tight spots before.”
Will remembered.
Jack had come out of nowhere two years ago at a local nightclub, and rescued him from an enraged redneck who was about to maul him for bumping into his girlfriend. Will remembered the ease with which Jack had handled the situation, first verbally and then when things got physical. Unbelievably competent and self assured, he had been in control of the situation from the moment he stepped into it. He had even gone out with the redneck’s girlfriend a week after the fight.
“Spoils of war” he called it.
After that, Jack had sort of taken him under his wing. Will knew that he “puppy dogged” after Jack for a long time after that, hanging on his every word, every bit as bad as he liked to think Rowley did nowadays. Whatever else Jack was, his picture belonged beside the entry “Alpha Male” in the encyclopedia. Will wondered if realizing that made him start to unconsciously resent Jack. After all, nobody liked to think of themselves as a “Beta Male.”
“Yeah, I know,” Will conceded, “I’ve just been busy. So what about the diner in Hearne?”
“Well, when you two were arguing over him burning the grave marker, there was a point where he sort of slipped and said the name on it. Do you remember what it was?”
Will frowned and tried to think back. Jack had said a name at one point of the conversation, or at least part of a name, but Will had been fuming over being accused of over-romanticizing a pile of bones and not paying attention.
“Um…Charlotte? Carlotta? Victoria?” He looked up to see Rowley staring at him with feverish intensity. “Oh hell, I wasn’t really listening at that moment. I guess it doesn’t matter now.”
Rowley closed his eyes with a sigh, and Will realized he had never seen anybody look so tired before in his life.
“It’s okay.” He rose to leave. “I can’t remember it either. I was kind of distracted by wishing you two would argue quieter in the restaurant. Especially considering the subject, so I was paying more attention to the other people around us at the time.” Rowley turned for the door, but then paused and looked at Will again. “If you do happen to remember that name, give me a call. Okay?”
“Sure thing, man. You need to go home and get some sleep.”
“No can do. Finals are upon us and I haven’t started studying yet.”
Getting up, Will held open the door and watched Rowley exit with concern. He looked like death warmed over. Will could swear he almost detected a wobble in his steps as he headed down the walkway.
“Hey, Rowley!”
The young man paused and looked back.
“You know, if Jack isn’t going to tell you, you could go back there and see if any of the writing on that marker survived. Sometimes wood just chars without wiping out whatever design is on it.”
The grin that split Rowley’s features had no humor in it whatsoever.
“Thanks, but I already thought of that.” He gave a weary shake of his head. “The marker is gone.”
With that he slouched on down the walkway toward the parking lot.
***
“Rememberrrr mmmeeee….”
Will’s eyes flew open, and he sat up in his dark bedroom to discover his sheets soaked with sweat.
“What the hell?” he groaned.
He glanced at the clock to discover he still had a chance at three more hours of precious sleep before having to get up and go in for his calculus final. Thanks to all the caffeine, he had already lost valuable time just trying to fall asleep in the first place. Now here he was wasting more of it.
It had been a dream.
Never one to remember his dreams, he struggled to recapture the flitting images that tried to slip through his mental fingers on their way to oblivion. It was like grasping at wisps of smoke. He concentrated harder, wondering why a nightmare that could startle him awake would be so hard to recall. Then, just as that last trailing edge of the dream circled the drain at the back of his mind, he managed to snag it and draw it back.
There wasn’t much to it—just a sharp mental image of being back in Hearne and standing across the street from the diner they ate at on their way back from the graveyard. The full moon flooded the scene, illuminating the parking lot and shining in through the large plate-glass windows to reveal Jack and Rowley sitting at one of the booths in the dark restaurant.
Why they were sitting in a closed restaurant eluded him.
Neither moved, as if the whole scene belonged to a single frame of a longer film. Both looked out the window with different expressions frozen on their faces. Rowley looked sick with terror, while Jack appeared angry and defiant. Both of th
eir gazes were locked on the figure standing outside the window, gazing back in on them from about ten feet away.
Even though he was seeing her from behind again, Will recognized the same figure he had dreamed about in the graveyard.
He stared at the frozen tableau across the street, struggling to make sense of it. That’s when the same sense of menace filled him again. This was dangerous. There was something very wrong here, and that something was a whole lot worse than some aggrieved spirit with a grudge over a burned grave marker. He had been struggling to move, trying desperately to free himself from the dream, when he had woke up.
“Ugh,” Will groaned, putting his face in his hands. “Thanks a lot, Jack. Now I’ve got unresolved guilt issues waking me in the middle of the night. And I didn’t even do anything!”
Another glance at the clock revealed five more beautiful minutes of sleep were lost to him forever. Just what he needed…a minute by minute reminder of how tired he would be when he stumbled into Calc class. Will squeezed his eyes closed, turned away from the offending clock, and flopped back into bed.
“I need new friends,” he muttered darkly and rolled on to his side. “Preferably cute, female, and good at calculus.”
***
“So there you are. Long time no see.”
Jack’s voice interrupted Will’s glassy eyed stare at his lunch tray, and brought him back into the present. The cafeteria of Texas A&M’s Memorial Student Center almost overflowed with students. Many of them wore the same glazed expressions due to finals. Jack had found a seat across from him without him even noticing.
“Hey, Jack. Yeah, I’ve been kind of busy. Us mere mortals have to study, you know.”
“Knock it off.”
“Okay, sorry about that,” Will conceded. “I’m just frazzled. I’ve only got one more exam on Thursday though, and then life can return to its regular programming.”
“So you’re just worn out from schoolwork.”
“Well, yeah. What else would it be?”
Jack looked at him with narrow eyes, and Will realized that his response was being evaluated, although he couldn’t imagine for what. After a moment, it appeared he passed muster. Jack shrugged and moved on with the conversation.
“Have you seen Rowley lately?” Jack pilfered the roll off of Will’s tray and started buttering it. Will didn’t object since he didn’t really feel like eating.
“Not since Sunday. He dropped by for a visit, but he didn’t stay long.”
“So what did he have to say?”
“Not a lot. To tell the truth, I think he only stopped by to ask me the name on that grave marker you burned.”
Jack paused in his buttering.
“Really. So what did you tell him?”
“The truth…that I couldn’t remember.” Will folded his arms on the table and sighed. “Jack, why not just tell him? What difference does it make?”
“It’s the principle of the thing, and more.” Jack finished buttering the roll and took a bite, “Look, Rowley needs to conquer his own illusions here. They are what’s eating away at him and causing nightmares. He has to conquer himself. If I were to tell him what he wants, it would just reinforce the lies that hold him back. He can’t overcome if I feed the very beast that enslaves him. Not to mention, I would also be rendering my own act of liberation meaningless.” He poked the butter knife in Will’s direction to emphasize his points.
“So that’s why you went back and stole the grave marker…to keep Rowley from going back there and finding the name for himself.”
Jack paused in mid bite.
“What?”
“The grave marker. Rowley said he went back there to see if he could read it for himself, but it was gone.”
“Really?” Jack’s eyebrows seemed to crawl up his head. “Now that’s odd.”
“Aw c’mon, Jack.”
“No, seriously. I didn’t take it. I didn’t need to. The writing on it was so weathered it was almost unreadable before I burned it. Believe me, there was nothing to read on it afterwards. I checked.”
Will frowned and tried to see any hint of deceit in Jack’s face, but if he was lying, he was doing a great job of it. He also noticed with some surprise that Jack’s eyes bore the marks of missed sleep as well. Maybe the big guy felt the need to study more than he let on.
“Maybe some farmer saw the fire from the night before, came up to check things out the next morning and threw the marker away.” Will mused.
“There you go.” Jack went back to munching on the pilfered roll. “Simple solutions to simple problems.”
“Okay, but, will you do me a favor?”
“What’s that?”
“If Rowley keeps coming apart like this, would you at least consider the idea of making up a name and telling that to him? Yeah, I know…it’s ‘feeding the beast that enslaves him.’” Will made little quotation marks with his fingers. “But at least your own ‘act of liberation’ wouldn’t be compromised.”
Jack looked at him over his half eaten roll with eyes that were surprisingly bloodshot.
“I don’t know, man. I’ll think about it. I don’t like the idea of conceding anything to this thing.”
“What? What thing?”
“Never mind.” Jack crammed the last of the roll into his mouth. “You going to eat that corn on the cob?”
***
After the seventh or eighth ring, Will decided the caller wasn’t going to give up.
Grumbling in sleepy irritation, he pulled himself out of bed and started fumbling his way in the dark toward the telephone. The last final behind him, he resented this interruption of his first full night of sleep. A weak flash of distant lightning though the window gave him a brief but useful glimpse of a path through the piles of dirty laundry to the phone. It rang twice more before he reached it.
“Mmhmm.” He mumbled into the receiver.
“Will! Oh thank God!” Rowley’s whisper had a hysterical edge that snapped Will instantlly awake.
“Rowley? Dude, what’s . . .”
“Will, shut up! I need to know the name on that marker! I need it right now!”
“I don’t rem . . .”
“The name, Will! I’m out of time! You’ve got to remember it now!”
Something about the urgency in Rowley’s voice started to scare Will right down to his slippers. He racked his brain with desperation, trying to call up the conversation in the diner again.
“I’m trying to remember…I really am…but you’re probably going to have to go to Jack for this one.”
“Jack’s gone!” Rowley hissed on the other end of the line. “She got him.”
“What! What are you talking about!”
“Jack’s gone! That dumb s.o.b. and his conquer this and conquer that…now he’s gone and I’m screwed!”
“What about Jack? What do you mean?”
“He’s gone! She got him! I just went over there to talk to him, to try and get that name out of him again before it was too late and …” Will could hear him gulp for breath, “….he’s gone.”
“He probably just stepped out.”
“No, Will. She got him. That burnt marker is propped up at the head of his bed, and his mattress is all covered with dirt and…and…‘Conquer’ my butt! The jerk did nothing but spout Nietzsche, and he should have been reading Poe. There’s only one conqueror!”
“Rowley, calm down.” Will tried to sooth the distraught young man. “You’re talking crazy.”
“You don’t understand.” Rowley’s whisper had a brittle edge. “You slept outside the fence. I don’t think she saw you.”
“What?” Will felt like he had been kicked in the gut. The vision of his dream in the graveyard rose in his mind. “What are you talking about? Where are you now?”
“I’m back at my apartment. I had to get out of there when I saw what happened to Jack. I’m packing some stuff and I’m getting my ass out of town.” That explained the breathless element to Rowley’s whi
spers, but not his statement about the graveyard. Did he have the same dream?
“Rowley, listen…” Another flash of lightning lit up the window, followed by a low rumble.
For a moment, there was silence on the other end of the line.
“Oh crap,” Rowley’s voice whimpered. “She’s here.”
Will’s stomach felt like it sank through the floor.
“Who’s there, Rowley?” he demanded. “Talk to me!”
“She is! I just saw her through the window, out in the parking lot. Oh God, Will! She’s here! I need that name! Think!”
Will pictured Rowley’s apartment in his head and realized that if he could see out into the parking area, he must be in his bedroom on the second floor. He imagined Rowley gripping the phone and peering out the window from a dark bedroom.
“It’s two thirty in the morning. All you saw out there was some girl coming back from the bars.”
He could hear Rowley sobbing on the other end of the line. Whatever was happening over there, his friend was disintegrating fast.
“Rowley! Talk to me! What’s happening?!”
For a moment, he could make out nothing but the sound of Rowley trying to collect himself. Then Rowley returned, the fear in his voice bleeding through the phonelines.
“Will, I’m begging you. I need that name now. Please!”
Will gritted his teeth and searched his memory with distraught ferocity. He didn’t want to believe what he was hearing over the phone, but couldn’t deny the terror in Rowley’s voice.
“Oh shit! I hear the door opening downstairs! I locked it, I know I did!”
“Get out of there.”
No answer
“Rowley! Get out of there!”
“I can’t!” Rowley sobbed over the phone. “I can hear her on the stairs! Oh god, Will. Give me that name! It’s all I’ve got!”
Shades: Eight Tales of Terror Page 10
