The Sleepwalkers
Page 21
Today, though, her living room is her living room. She looks up at the dream catchers hanging from the ceiling, and is comforted to know not a single one is out of place.
She sits down heavily, not noticing the waft of dust that rises up from the cushion of her chair as she whops down into its embrace.
And she picks up the bottle, so smooth and hard, so nice-feeling with the little white tatters of the torn-off label as soft as goose down against the palm of her hand. So real. She unscrews the cap slowly, teasing herself.
She glances at the window. Did a shadow move behind the blinds? Did it? Did it?
Now, an instant later, she’s forgotten about the blinds, about the shadow, about everything.
She takes the magic of the bottle inside her, feeling the burn, and the burn is good, because the opposite of the burn is The Thought, is the
First, the spinning in her head steadies, then it feels like she’s doing great wide backflips—except she’s still sitting in her favorite orange and brown plaid armchair, watching the bottle drain
There’s a wind in the trees, and all the birds are flying away. Caleb and Christine walk very close together along the sandy bank of the stream, in and out of light beams filtering through the boughs of the forest. They’ve walked out of the night and into the morning. Sometimes they would think they heard a sound behind them, a footstep or the rattle of a bush, and they’d sneak into the woods, away from the water, and watch. But their pursuers never appeared, neither the cops nor the sleepwalkers.
Christine has wanted desperately to talk, to gush all her feelings and fears and the experiences of her imprisonment to Billy, but every time she takes a breath to speak, fear seizes her jaw and thrusts it shut again. Whether it’s being heard by her pursuers or being alone with Billy that scares her more, she doesn’t know. But for the last hour or so, since the sun has evaporated much of the previous night’s horror and sorrow, she has been marshalling her will to break the silence. Finally, she does.
“Thank you for coming. Even though I don’t remember sending you that letter, I did think of you. I dreamed of you rescuing me. Even though it was completely far-fetched, part of me knew you would.”
“Really? How, after you hadn’t seen me in so long?”
She smiles. “I don’t know, I just knew. Besides—when we would play—you, me, and Anna—you were always the hero. I guess I figured you always would be. You were always a pretty lucky knight, having two damsels in distress.”
Caleb musters a small, sad laugh. “Yeah.”
“Are you sorry you came?”
“No,” he says. “No. When I read your letter, I knew I had to come. I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew I had to do something . . . I’m just sorry Bean came.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she says.
From the look he shoots her, she’s afraid she’s pissed him off big-time. But when she takes his hand, he doesn’t resist.
“How can you say that?” he says. “It’s my fault he’s dead.”
“He’s with Anna now,” she says, “making her laugh. Soon, we’ll be able to hear him too on the radio.”
“How is that possible?”
“The clocks, I think.”
“But how does it work?”
She shrugs, as if to say “it doesn’t matter.”
“It just does,” she says.
“And you listened to the clocks too?”
“Yes.”
“When? Why?”
“The director made me listen to them at the Dream Center. But I could hear them—the voices—before that. I always could, but only really faintly. Since the clocks and the surgery, I hear them everywhere. But I hear them most clearly on the radio, especially 535 AM”
“Wait, you mean you can hear them right now?”
“Yes, but . . . ” she hesitates.
“What do they say?”
“It’s hard to hear. They all talk at once.”
“How many are there?”
She spreads her hands, looking up at the emerald treetops.
“Many,” she whispers.
“And what are they saying right now?”
“Nothing, just . . . ”
“What?”
“One is saying ‘time to reap the field.’ They’re happy because their work is almost done. And the end is near. And they’re happy because . . . ”
“Because of what?”
She looks at him hard, then just shakes her head. “It’s hard to hear,” she mumbles.
“What are they talking about?”
“Who knows?” she says. “Something’s been going on here for a long time. Anna was one of the first to disappear, I think, but there’ve been a lot more. Some folks even called a meeting at town hall when it started. Mom and I were there, and she spoke. She was a lot more ‘together’ back then.”
“What happened?”
She looks down at her feet, then at the swirling water of the river, and sighs to her core.
“Some wanted to fight, but nobody knew who the enemy was. The kids just disappeared. Other people wanted to call in the authorities.
They made the mistake of expecting the mayor and the sheriff to take care of that. Others, just . . . ”
“What?”
“Said nothing.” She smiles sadly.
“So what happened?”
“The mayor didn’t go for any outside help for a long time. When he did, it was too late.”
“What do you mean, too late?”
“The people who he went to for help betrayed him, as far as we could guess. Then he disappeared. He’s in the dark now. The rest of those who still had the will to fight formed a militia. Some of them had seen who took their children, and they didn’t think they were human—not really, anyway—but they were willing to stand and fight all the same. The militia would patrol, even had a phone line for emergencies. But they couldn’t hold guns all the time. They had to sleep and eat, and one by one they disappeared. The few folks left who had a mind to fight changed their tune fast. They shut their mouths and locked their doors at night, and there were no more town meetings.”
“What about the sheriff?”
“He played everyone along for quite a while, but now everyone— or the few of us left, anyway—know he’s part of it, whatever it is. He never lifted a finger to find one missing child.”
“And what about the Dream Center?”
“That came along not long after it all started. I guess the only way the problems ’round here showed up anyplace on official records was in the suicide rate or something, because pretty soon trucks just appeared out of nowhere, rattling up the driveway to the old asylum, and in no time the place was rebuilt. Doc Rodgers knew the director, he said, and he referred almost all his patients over there because they pretty much all had sleeping problems of one kind or another— all of us did with everything going on: babies stolen out of their cribs, kids grabbed off their bikes and never seen again . . .”
“And my father?”
“Just disappeared. I’m sorry, Billy. Around the same time I went into the Dream Center. Some people said he had something to do with what was going on. I think they didn’t trust him because he was educated or something. Other people said he tried to fight it. Either way, he just vanished.”
“So it wasn’t just Anna . . . ”
“She was only the beginning. The tip of the iceberg.”
“And your mother? I met her. She wasn’t doing too well.”
“She was sure magic was the answer. She mixed all kinds of potions and started learning all sorts of crazy spells. She got so far out there people started thinking sh
e had something to do with all the stuff going on. She just missed Anna, I guess, and that was her way of doing something. It was sad. People stopped talking to her. Then they stopped talking to me too. She really wanted to believe that the magic would work, but it was too late: Anna was gone. I knew it, and the more I tried to explain it to her, the more she started to hate me. And then I think she started to believe me because that’s when she started really drinking.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”
“It’s okay. You didn’t know.”
“I should have been here anyway.”
“You weren’t supposed to be, Billy. But you’re supposed to be here now.”
“To do what?” Caleb asks. “What can we do?”
Christine grins strangely. “The ghosts know,” she says, “but all they’ll say about it is ‘charku, charku,’ over and over.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s in a tongue that the living no longer speak. It means ‘bringer of death.’”
Caleb stares off to the horizon, toward the spot where the river disappears, taking in Christine’s words.
“What—or who—is the ‘charku’?” He finally asks.
“Billy,” she says, giving him a surprised look, “it’s you.”
Chapter Sixteen
THESE ARE THE DREAMS OF THE WITCH:
They are fraught with the unsettling faces of strangers. All are watching her. All are judging. She grasps them, claws at them, screams in their ears:
“Where is my daughter? Where is she?”
But every face she sees turns to stone.
These are the dreams of the witch:
The earth is made of sliding sand, with each grain falling, falling as if through an hourglass. It gives way under her feet. She knows she mustn’t be caught, mustn’t go down because down is dark and in the dark she isn’t alone. The dark is filled with invisible stone faces that watch and judge and laugh, hands that take and take, and quiet that smothers.
These are the dreams of the witch:
She mounts the steps of her childhood house, the yellow one with the blue trim on County Road 67. She stands on the porch and looks around, and the leaves on the trees are golden with fall, the grass is crisp and healthy green, the corn is dying in the straight, straight rows her father broke his back to make. All is as it should be. Then the porch swing falls, the windows shatter, the corn plants crack and bow as if genuflecting to some terrible god. And she looks out far over the plain and sees it, a thing that has haunted her dreams ever since her little daughters learned about it in science class and explained it to her. It’s a trap for light. It’s a cancer in the skin of the universe. They call it a black hole. And in that instant, everything melts upward, falling into the gaping mouth of Nothing, and is gone.
These are the dreams of the witch:
Inside that nothing, she meets a little girl named Anna. Anna lives in the dark, and Anna is alone.
“Mommy?”
The witch stirs, whimpers. The stench of alcohol and vomit fouls the air. The puke has run down between her dust-bag tits, but a hand is cleaning it up. The witch feels the brush of a towel on her chest. It’s arousing, and a confusing sensation in this dark place. And then, all at once, she’s in the light.
And Anna is there. And she’s alive!
The witch blinks in uncomprehending joy.
“It’s me,” Anna says, “Christine.”
“Hateful, hateful little—” the witch begins, realizing she’s been fooled. She looks for a weapon and finds one. Snatching the now-empty gin bottle off the table in front of her, she stands up, full of fury and power, cocks back to strike her traitor-child into bleeding, whimpering silence—but the other one, the one she didn’t notice, the little neighbor boy, Billy, now somehow a man, grabs her wrist and snatches her weapon from her hand.
“Awww!” she screams in childish frustration.
“Sit down, Mother,” says Christine.
“You scrawny little whore,” says the witch, drawing herself up in indignation. “You shouldn’t have been born, you traitor; it should have just been Anna, my Anna.”
The witch is almost spitting fire. Caleb takes a step back, alarmed in spite of himself, but Christine stands her ground.
“You slut,” the witch hisses. “You little bitch, you—”
Quickly, without warning, Christine cocks back and swings her small fist. It catches her mother’s face, hard, making a low, sharp “thump” sound.
The great witch falls back into her armchair, staring at her daughter with a dazed, quizzical look as a ribbon of blood slithers from her nose and down over her lips.
“I loved her as much as you did, Mother,” says Christine. “It’s not my fault she’s gone.” She rubs her fist gingerly and sighs. To herself, she says: “I should have done that a long time ago.”
Christine pauses, perhaps waiting for a response. When she doesn’t get one, she tosses the towel she had used to sop up the puke to her mother.
“Cover yourself. For Christ’s sake, Mom, have some dignity.”
Again, Mrs. Zikry’s only response is a bleary-eyed stare, but she does cover her breasts with the puke-wet towel.
Caleb speaks: “We shouldn’t stay here long. They must know we’ll be either here or at my old place.”
“We’re safe here until night, I think,” says Christine. “The sleepwalkers won’t be out during the day.”
“Who are they? The sleepwalkers?”
She just shakes her head, still staring at her mother. “Ones like me,” she says. “All I know is what I’ve figured, and what Anna told me. They’re kids from the Dream Center, like I was, and they do the work the ghosts want done. Under the bridge I could hear the spirits urging them—or more like cheering them—on.”
“So what’s the plan?” asks Caleb. He’s clearly antsy, glancing at the door. He doesn’t want to be here—but would they really feel safe anyplace else, either?
“First, I have to clean my mother up,” says Christine. “Come on, Mom, you’re getting in the shower.”
She offers a hand to the great witch of Hudsonville, who now seems very old and frail.
“What do we do when night comes?” asks Caleb. “Do we run?”
“Well, we have two choices. We could run,” Chrsitine says, gently guiding her mother through the living room and into the bathroom, “or we could stay and fight.”
And she disappears into the room and pulls the door shut behind her.
“Yeah, let’s fight,” mutters Caleb, alone now, surveying the hundreds of hanging dream catchers with contempt. “They’ve only taken over the whole town.”
In the other room the shower springs to life. Apparently, the witch somehow got her interior plumbing fixed.
Caleb paces around the small house, still wearing a sarcastic smirk, still dwelling on how stupid it is to risk your life to fix something that the cops should have taken care of a long time ago, something that should, theoretically, not even be happening in the first place.
But then he thinks of Bean, Christine, his father, Anna, even Mrs. Zikry: all those who’ve suffered because of what’s happened in Hudsonville. And he thinks that maybe they should fight after all; because if they don’t, who will?
It’s maybe twenty minutes later. Caleb sits on the couch, half dozed off, having finally convinced himself to ignore the filthy upholstery and make himself comfortable. He only sort of hears the shower click off and the sound of water fade to an indistinct drip. He thinks he hears the far-off sound of moaning, like that of the distant wind. It almost seems like it’s coming from the trailer itself, from the floor— but it might just as easily be coming from just beyond his conscious mind, where sleep is stalking him relentlessly.
The moaning sound fades as he falls out of consciousness. Fantasies flash through his head: he sees himself drinking the last swig of alcohol from the bottle on the table. He sees himself in the heat of battle, cutting down attacking demons like a swash
buckler in a black-and-white movie. He sees Amber in his head—this is the first time he’s thought of her in days—she’s wearing a sexy little pair of underwear and a bra, but despite that fact, his mind discards the image. He’s outgrown Amber. He’s outgrown a lot of things. Next he sees his father. It’s an image Caleb has long since forgotten—or at least it sunk to his deep subconscious for many years before being dredged up today.
His father, with his ever-present beard, sits Indian-style in the foyer of the Hudsonville house, wearing a ten-gallon hat, the kind cowboys wear. A child, hardly more than a toddler, runs around the room, yipping and yelling, riding one of those toy horses that’s really a broomstick with a stuffed, plush horse head attached to it. Little plastic six-shooters in plastic holsters bob at his waist. A little cowboy hat is cocked back on his head. The child is a little Caleb—or a little Billy, as he would have been called in those days. Little Billy dashes around the love seat, laughing as his father, usually a somber man, calls out to him:
“You’d better ride, boy! You gotta rope that steer! Catch those Indians! Ride, or that bull is gonna get you!”
Little equestrian Billy gallops around his father as if he were the barrel in a riding competition.
He’s never seen his dad so excited as he was that Christmas when he gave him that cowboy getup. Of course, the excitement kind of waned when his mother got pissed off about the toy guns. But while it lasted, Billy and Dad had a real good time.
As Caleb sees all this, he’s transported instantly back to that lost day. He smells the gingerbread cooking. He knows his mother is out at the store, having forgotten some important ingredient for Christmas dinner, and left him with his father for some rare alone time. And Caleb thinks he knows why this memory stuck. Because his father would never have been this silly, this carefree, in front of his mother.
Maybe their relationship had already deteriorated too far for fun to exist between them. Maybe there was some other reason, one Caleb would never know; but this is the only time he can remember having this much fun with his father. He lingers here, savoring the memory, studying the child’s laughing face, listening to his beaming father: