by Bryan Smith
Karen said, “Wait!”
Dream hesitated, glancing first at Alicia then meeting Karen’s gaze. “Yes?”
“Shane didn’t want anyone to know, but there’s a gun in his bag. A Glock.” The admission seemed to pain her. “I don’t care what Chad says, there’s something out here.” She swallowed hard. “You should get the gun.”
Dream looked at Alicia. “I don’t know anything about guns.”
Alicia shrugged. “Shit, I sure don’t.” There was a new hint of nervousness in her voice. “And I’m not sure we should be fucking around with firearms anyway.”
Karen said, “Shane took me to the shooting range.” She was trying to sound confident, but her voice was still all ragged edges. “I know how to use it.”
Dream said, “I’ll look for it.”
But she thought, And I’ll leave the goddamn thing right where it is.
She decided to keep the sudden flare of anger she felt toward Shane to herself. The son of a bitch had transported a firearm over several state lines.
In her car!
Karen said, “Thank you.”
Dream moved again toward the road, but pulled up short when she heard Alicia say, “Hey… hear that?”
Dream frowned, and listened. “What? I-“
Alicia made a low shushing noise. “Listen!”
There was a moment of absolute stillness.
Then they heard it.
The sound of something approaching from deeper within the woods. Dream was suddenly very afraid. The rational part of her understood what they were hearing was probably just Shane finally returning from whatever he’d been doing-Dream had a strange, almost extrasensory inkling about that-but she was surprised to find a part of herself suddenly buying Karen’s giant monster story. The now significantly louder approach of lumbering footsteps filled her with dread. Her imagination supplied a very vivid image of some horror-movie abomination emerging from the darkness to eat them alive.
Something was flailing about out there. Something very clumsy, to judge from the sound of it. Then Dream detected another sound. She couldn’t quite make it out. It could have been a moan, or a low growl-the kind of sound a monster might make.
A nearby snapping of twigs made them all flinch.
Dream gasped.
It was even closer than she’d thought.
Run! her mind implored her.
Her feet managed a backward a step or two before the presence finally emerged from the darkness and into the little clearing.
It was Shane.
Only, he was nearly impossible to recognize. He was covered in blood, and his clothes were shredded rags. He staggered toward them, his mouth opening as he attempted to tell them something, but blood burbled out instead. He took one more unsteady step, wobbled, and crashed to the ground.
Karen sank to her knees beside him and wailed.
Dream heard another scream.
Her own.
Chad was more than a quarter mile down the road by the time the situation he was leaving behind attained genuine crisis status. His travel bag was slung over his right shoulder, and he was walking briskly. He was in excellent condition from daily workouts at the neighborhood gym, so a walk into town wouldn’t be too taxing. Of course, he wasn’t so sure how far away this theoretical town was, but he had little doubt an oasis of civilization would be nearby. Soon he’d reach one of those little clusters of mcDonald’s restaurants and Holiday Inns that were so liberally interspersed at regular intervals along the major highways. Any minute now he’d round a bend in the road and the golden arches would be looming in the distance. He didn’t doubt he was doing the right thing by leaving his former friends. Alicia was right, damn her-this break was long overdue. He’d outgrown them. The prospect of a future without the girls was at once exhilarating and frightening. He would establish an identity that wasn’t informed by mostly female perspectives. Yet he couldn’t deny the encroaching feeling of bittersweet regret that was gaining a foothold in his heart. It was a kind of grief, he supposed, the loss one feels at the passage of youth. They’d been such good friends in the old days. He’d always been closest to Dream, but he’d known Alicia since high school and Karen since sophomore year of college.
A sliver of doubt slowed his pace somewhat.
Don’t! a stern voice in his head admonished him.
This was the voice of independence, he realized. The voice he’d been listening to as he stormed out of the woods with Dream’s words echoing in his head. He didn’t like to make major life decisions based on emotional impulse, but he felt now was the time for a bold, unusual move. So he reached inside the unlocked Accord, popped the trunk open, retrieved his bag, and started moving.
And those first steps down the path toward a new life had been so intoxicating. So much so he resented this new infusion of doubt. He wanted to believe himself righteous, but his conscience betrayed him, reminding him of his shameful series of trysts with Karen Hidecki. The guilt he’d been holding at bay for months threatened to emerge from a locked door of his subconscious. His pace slowed, and he realized he was contemplating a return to the Accord.
No! railed the admonishing voice.
It was almost a scream now.
Chad suspected it might not really be the voice of independence. That instead it was a manifestation of intense emotional pain. Of deep hurt. A memory of Dream in high school entered his mind like a taunt from the nether regions of his psyche.
One day after school he’d made the mistake of wandering too near the football team’s practice field. He was new to the school, but he’d already been marked as a loner and a geek. Nobody liked him. Nobody talked to him. This kind of exclusion from the social hierarchy of high school-he wasn’t even a Loser, a status that would have at least afforded him membership in a recognized clique-might have bothered him more if not for the transitory nature of his childhood.
His father was a military man and they moved around a lot.
But he was oblivious to all that now as he walked in the late-summer sunlight, reading from an open paperback as he walked. A group of the football players saw him as he strayed from the path that led from the rear of the school to the nearby public library. He was drawn by the sight of a picnic table. The Gatorade dispensers and stacks of plastic cups should have served as warning, but he was blissfully ignorant of the lurking danger. All he knew was that he was a little tired from the heat and needed a place to rest for a few moments. The picnic table had seemed like a good solution.
Until three very large football players were looming over him.
He remembered looking at their hostile faces and naively asking, “There a problem, guys?”
One of the players repeated his question with an exaggerated lisp.” ‘There a problem, guys?’”
He started to get up, but a big hand clamped around his wrist, wrenched his arm behind his back, and pushed him to his knees. Another player stood in front of him, flexing the fingers of a hand wrapped in tape. “I bet you wanted to watch us run around in our tight uniforms, didn’t you? You fucking butt pirates make me sick.”
Chad started to cry. “Please don’t hurt me.”
The tears and the plea elicited only more of that ugly laughter. Chad wanted to scream for help, but who would help him? Some of the other football players? That didn’t seem likely. A sense of hopelessness began to suffocate him. He wasn’t gay. Not that it mattered. The fucking jocks assumed anyone the slightest bit fey was homosexual. The word “tolerance” wasn’t in the jock dictionary. Their social order was simple, guided by one unyielding principle-the strong of the world exist to subjugate the weak.
They were the strong.
And he was definitely the weak.
Hence, he was fucked.
But then he became aware of another presence. There was a subtle shift in the stance of his tormentors, though they weren’t yet backing off. He heard female voices. A group of girlfriends, maybe, or cheerleaders. Great, they could do a sis-b
oom-bah routine while the athletes took turns using his head as a punching bag.
“What’s going on here?” he heard one of them say.
A leggy blonde pushed through the circle of players, saw Chad pinned to the ground, and unleashed an impressive display of verbal indignation. “What the fuck are you primates doing to this kid!?” She stepped right up to the player holding him down. “Let him go, Moose, or I’ll make sure Mr. Chandler hears all about this.”
Chad recognized the name of the school’s principal, and he was instantly filled with a new source of dread-the prospect of his father hearing about the incident. Chad liked to believe his father had no idea what a reject he was, and he desperately wanted to maintain the facade of a normal kid. A beating at the hands of strangers was infinitely more acceptable than that awful possibility.
But he didn’t yet know that Dream Weaver was one of the most popular girls at his new school. Or that her father was a close friend of Principal Chandler. So he was amazed when the football player who’d been holding him released him and began apologizing profusely to Dream.
“Hey, Dream,” he said, his voice full of patently false good humor. “We didn’t mean any harm, really. We were just messing around, giving the new kid a hard time. So chill, okay? It’s no biggie.”
Dream stepped right up to him. “Yeah, no biggie. Like your dick, Moose.”
Some of Dream’s girlfriends laughed.
The football player’s face went a bright shade of scarlet. “Come on, Dream. Lighten up. You know how it is. He’s a geek.”
“No, Moose, I don’t know how it is.” Chad listened to her in awe, unable to believe this girl was showing no fear as she assailed a boy more than twice her size. “But I know that beating up people smaller than you is a real limp-dick thing to do.”
They were gone moments later, thoroughly cowed by this amazing girl.
She helped him to his feet and brushed a fleck of dirt from his face. She smiled, an expression so radiantly beau-beautiful it stirred his heart in a way he could only compare to the way watching a sunset at the beach made him feel. Something about looking at Dream made him feel good, like he was gazing into some marvel of nature when he looked into her eyes. He would soon realize this was part of Dream’s gift. Kindness was her life’s guiding principle. She’d been raised to treat people-all people-with decency and respect, and it was this inward beauty people responded to when they fell under her spell. Her outward beauty only enhanced her admirable personality traits, making her a kind of goddess figure to nearly everyone who met her.
Chad knew this was the real reason her love life was such a shambles. Everything about her intimidated the men who might have been a good match for her. So she screwed a lot of unworthy people.
Like Dan Bishop.
All the while believing he was the only right one for her.
The memory of that afternoon on the practice field stung him now as he thought about his indiscretion with Karen Hidecki. The enormity of the betrayal finally hit him, and he recognized the way the revelation pushed every one of Dream’s emotional hot buttons. To think he’d described her as the “passive-aggressive” side of their relationship.
So here it was, the self-confrontation he could no longer avoid.
He came to a stop, set the bag down on the road, and sighed. “Fuck me.”
Everything was his fault.
Well, what now?
Part of him wanted to run back to the Accord and pour his heart out to Dream. To let her know how much she’d really meant to him over the years. To apologize until his voice was hoarse. To cry on her shoulder while she held him. He could do that. She would forgive him. He knew her too well. But he wasn’t about to forgive himself. There was only one right thing to do, and that was to let Dream get on with her own life. His initial reasoning had been all wrong, but leaving was still the right thing to do.
He picked up the travel bag, slung it over his shoulder again, and resumed walking. But his legs didn’t feel lighter than air anymore. A heavy conscience weighed him down, a burden that imbued every step with lethargy. He was only a few more yards down the road by the time he finally perceived the approach of heavy footsteps somewhere behind him.
The sound of bare feet thumping on the asphalt.
He sensed speed and feral intent.
Chad gripped the shoulder strap of the travel bag tighter, readying to sling it in the face of anything that came near him. The bag left lots to be desired as a weapon, packed as it was with clothes and a few chintzy souvenirs. A pillow might pack a little less wallop. But only a little.
Running didn’t seem like a viable option, either.
His heart pounded as whatever it was pulled up short behind him. He heard moist, smacking sounds, and felt hot breath at the back of his neck. He flashed on Karen’s vague description of a monster, and he muttered a silent apology to her.
Because he really didn’t need to see the thing behind him to know he’d been wrong.
Her monster was real.
And it had found him.
He turned slowly around, a thick lump of fear lodged like a sardine in his throat, and the paper-thin wall separating his conscious mind and an incapacitating wave of terror gave way.
A snippet from an old Monty Python movie floated into his head as he stood there paralyzed by this up-close encounter with the outright surreal: Run awaaay!
Yes, a dash into the woods might be the best idea all around.
Too bad he felt nailed to the asphalt.
The creature commanded his attention, obliterated rational thought. It was big-really big. A huge, misshapen head with a long, leathery snout sat atop a massive body covered with fur and corded with impossibly huge muscles. It leered at him, hissing through a lot of sharp, glittering teeth.
Saliva dripped from its mouth, splashing the pavement.
Chad’s head hurt.
He felt dizzy.
Why was it just staring at him like that?
Was it toying with him?
Maybe.
The fucker.
But then it was reaching for him, extending one of the unnaturally long, distended arms. …
Chad slumped to the pavement unconscious.
And the creature scooped him up in its arms.
Eddie dreamed of white-water rapids, the heat of the summer sun, and a spray of water against his face as his raft slapped the roiling river. He was with friends he hadn’t seen in what seemed like a span of lifetimes. He dreamed of rum and sweet, slow sex with an island girl on a beach in the Caribbean. He experienced the reassuring solidity of rock beneath his hands as he scaled a mountain in some other exotic place. And now he was with another woman, a stunning blonde like something ripped from the pages of a fashion magazine. She was wearing a flimsy blue shift; it billowed around her and her long hair swirled gently about her head as a breeze redolent with the scent of the sea brushed over him. She stepped into his embrace, held him close, and he shuddered as her soft lips met his own. The wet tip of her tongue probed his mouth, sending another shudder through him, then she slipped free of his embrace and stepped away from him.
God, how beautiful she was!
He swallowed hard. “I need you, Dream.”
So the dream girl was named Dream. This was amusing to him even behind the wall of sleep. Her smile became a seductive pout as she began to disrobe. “Worship me, Eddie.” She turned her head to the sky as the wind stiffened, buffeting her hair like a boat’s sail on the open sea. She raised her hands above her head as the shift fell away. “Worship me.”
No problem there.
Eddie fell to his knees in front of her. “Oh, Dream-“
But something was wrong.
The blue of her eyes was displaced by a yellow gleam, and there was something about the tone of her bare flesh that suggested elasticity. He shuddered with fear as she began to morph into one of those awful things. Her face elongated and there were several audible pops as new bone matter and cords of
muscle formed in her body. Her formerly lovely head swelled to the size of a Halloween pumpkin, and thousands of strands of fur sprouted from her flesh like a fast-spreading fungus.
The transition from human to beast was complete.
Droplets of saliva spilled from the corners of her mouth, which had become, let’s face it, a snout. She was drooling, watching him the way a fat man at a burger joint watches the arrival of his burger and fries.
Eddie thought now would be an excellent time to wake up.
Because this didn’t seem at all like a dream. He was not only awake, he was face-to-face with, well, a werewolf, and it was going to scarf him down like a Happy Meal. The beast loomed over him, opened its enormous mouth wide to display rows of killing teeth, growled at him, then swooped in for the kill.
Eddie woke up with a gasp.
And then he was screaming, because the monster had somehow slipped through a dream matrix. It was here with him-in the closet-teeth clamped to his throat, poised to rip his life out. He clutched at his throat, seized the presence there, and realized he’d been frightened nearly to death by a ball of fur no bigger than one of his hands.
He ceased screaming immediately.
Still, why had the creature attached itself to his throat that way? He looked now into its strange yellow eyes and was struck by how strongly they resembled the eyes of the she-wolf thing in his dream, which were so like those of the shapeshifters that prowled the tunnels Below. The usual subliminal dream alchemy.
Yeah.
But—
He held it well away from his body, waiting for it to change into something else. A werecat, maybe. The kitten felt too substantial in his grip, stronger than something its size should be. His hands tightened instinctively around it, and he had a nearly overpowering urge to snap its little neck.
The animal seemed to sense his intent.
It hissed and thrashed in his grip.
There was an instant when it almost slipped free, but he caught it about the neck and began to choke it. The hell with it. He had to kill the goddamn thing.
Then, just as he began to feel cartilage give way beneath his strong hands, the closet was flooded with light. Eddie blinked. He sensed a physical presence rushing into the room. Panic gripped him, instilled a renewed urge to flee, but there was nowhere to go this time. The row of dresses he was hiding behind was swept back. The beautiful mute girl glared down at him, her eyes gleaming with a fury that made Eddie gulp, and she ripped the cat free of his grip.
