He hit send. They wouldn’t see the message for hours. By then he’d be…wherever. He went to put the phone in his pocket, but instead returned it to his desk. Whatever this journey was he was about to take, he was going to need to be off the grid. He could feel it.
He left his dorm and started down the steep hill into town. Normally, a wander into the unknown would be nerve wracking. But as soon as he left campus, his anxiety started to dissipate. The muscles on either side of his neck uncoiled like overwound clock springs. The urge to leave had been building in him for weeks. He had been struggling against it, swimming slightly harder each day as the current increased. Only when he surrendered did he appreciate how much he’d been fighting it.
A rosy dawn broke over the hill behind him and cast sweeping shadows onto the town below. Ithaca was half in light and half in darkness, and so was he. Other than knowing he had to start moving, he had no idea how or to where. He had no car and only a few hundred dollars in his bank account. He trekked past the old, red brick buildings that dominated the small college town. He wondered if he was just supposed to keep walking. He crossed the railroad tracks at the foot of the hill and saw his answer to the left.
The peeling blue and gray logo of the Greyhound Bus Lines covered the side of a small white building. The lit OPEN sign burned in the window. The current he rode channeled him inside.
The small, empty waiting room was a testimonial to an industry in decline. Worn linoleum tiles buckled up off the floor. Years of sunlight had faded the wall posters to ghosts of their former selves. A solitary, rough, wooden pew sat in the center of the room, ready to make any passenger appreciate the relative comfort of bus seating. The far wall had a single ticket window. Behind it, an older gentleman squinted through half-glasses and organized the day’s clerical necessities.
Pete walked over to a route map on the wall. Great. A map. Worse than useless.
“Well, VPD, where am I supposed go?” he whispered.
A web of colored lines connected nameless colored dots on the map. Only two dots seemed to have titles. The first, in big bold black letters, was ITHACA. Below it and to the right, in arresting red letters, one dot read ATLANTIC CITY.
Yesterday’s ocean themed words. Today’s KING and ACE. Other words and phrases that seemed unrelated from previous weeks (JERSEY, CHIPS) fell into place. Atlantic City. The anxious feeling that had plagued him for weeks vanished.
Pete stepped over to the ticket window. The man peered over his glasses at him. Pete slid his debit card through the window slot.
“One ticket to Atlantic City. One way.”
Chapter Three
Through a combination of boredom, lack of sleep, and the monotone drone of the Greyhound’s diesel, Pete fell sound asleep during the last leg into Atlantic City.
He didn’t have a mansion dream this time. It couldn’t be a mansion dream because she was in it. Dream Girl from last night’s suspension bridge escape was back.
Pete’s continuing dream storylines did not have continuing characters, not characters with clarity. Except for her. Since the middle of last summer, Dream Girl, as he called her, made regular appearances. Usually she co-starred in adventure dreams, but never during excursions to the mansion. He assumed she was some amalgamation of attributes and feelings about girls he had dated, part high school girlfriend, part teenage fantasy, and part a girl that he met one summer when his family spent a week at Lake Placid. The dreams, though never sexual, were always sensual. The dreams she graced had an added, soft emotional tone, no matter what the setting. Their connection was near telepathic and instantaneous. To ask her name seemed superfluous.
In this dream, the two of them were at some subconscious knock-off of the Bronx Zoo. She walked with Pete between exhibits, holding his hand. They passed out of the shade and the sunlight lit a halo around her golden hair . She closed her eyes and gave one of her radiant smiles.
“Could it be more perfect?” she said.
He held her calfskin-soft hand in both of his. “Not likely.”
At the grizzly habitat, only a low picket fence separated the public from the shaggy brown bear. The big bear ambled over to several onlookers and stretched its head over the fence top. The patrons reached out and ruffled the animal’s thick coat. It closed its eyes in blissful happiness.
They stopped at the fence and Dream Girl scratched the bear under its chin. Pete rubbed the side of its head. The silky fur ran through his fingers. The bear smelled of cinnamon and campfires.
Pete felt a wet nudge at the base of his neck and turned around. The other patrons were gone, but a zebra stood behind him on the path. A giraffe bent down and rubbed its head against Dream Girl’s shoulder. She turned from the bear and sighed.
“I was wrong,” she said. “It could be more perfect.”
Pete looked across at her and smiled. Then a sudden force tossed him straight up in the air. When he fell back to the ground…
…he was sitting in the Greyhound bus again. It lurched to a stop in front of a retro 60’s bus station. A neon sign read ATLANTIC CITY. He shook himself awake.
The day’s bus trip had convinced him of a two things. First, his stiff neck said that bus seats were ergonomically unsound places to sleep. Second, he knew why people became so enamored with cars. The boring trip took over ten excruciating hours, a lot longer than driving.
Guilt had forced him to call his parents at the last stop. He tried to explain the inexplicable to them and failed miserably. His father kept asking if he was on some kind of drugs. He assured them he was all right. He didn’t ask them for anything, except to clean out his dorm room and withdraw him from college for the semester. To their chagrin, he also told them that, no, he wasn’t sure about next semester either. He told them he’d call again.
“Atlantic City!” the driver called out. “All out for Atlantic City.”
Pete got up, grabbing his backpack from the seat next to him. The setting sun shone in his eyes through the bus windows. He followed one other transient soul out to the parking lot. Seven remained on board for points unknown beyond the seaside Vegas.
The other traveler was an Army PFC in camouflage fatigues. The sharp-looking, black man was about Pete’s age. As he left the bus, a middle-aged couple standing at the edge of the station spied him. The man wore a button-down, white shirt and a pair of gray dress pants that tried to hide their age behind razor sharp creases. But frayed cuffs could not dispel the man’s dignity. The large woman had on high-heeled shoes and a matching bright yellow dress that afforded no slimming qualities. A huge smile lit her soft face. She spread her arms out wide. Her husband ducked to avoid an inadvertent backhanding.
“Leonard!” she screamed. “My baby!”
Leonard smiled as if he just smelled home cooking. He started walking toward his parents, but the closure rate did not satisfy his mother. Arms still spread like a braking albatross, she came running to him with the short steps her dress and high heels permitted, body parts rolling up and down under her billowing clothes. Her husband followed a few safe, measured steps back. In contrast to his ebullient wife, his face betrayed no emotion.
Leonard’s mother’s arms engulfed her son and she squeezed him like a grape in a big yellow wine press. The driver dropped a long, green, military duffle bag at Leonard’s feet.
“My baby boy’s done come home,” the mother sang, rocking him back and forth. She released him and held his shoulders. “Safe and sound!”
From behind her, Leonard’s father extended his calloused hand to his son.
“Welcome home, son,” his father said.
Leonard reached around his mother and grasped his father’s hand. They exchanged one solid downward shake.
“Good to be back, Pa,” he said. “I told you I’d make it okay.”
“Proud of you, son,” the father said, releasing Leonard’s hand. The threat of tears w
elled up in his eyes. The father reached down and picked up Leonard’s duffle bag.
“Let’s get you home, son.”
The reunited family walked away from the station. Leonard’s mother talked incessantly. Leonard just smiled and nodded, a tacit admission of the futility of attempting to wedge in a response. Leonard’s father followed a step behind, proud and straight, duffle bag slung over his shoulder. Out of the line of sight of his family, he finally allowed the edges of his mouth to enjoy the slightest upward curl.
The door to the bus hissed closed. The diesel engine rumbled and the vehicle departed to its next destination. It passed Pete and belched an extra puff of black smoke from the tailpipe as Pete’s parting gift. Standing there on the near empty street, in a strange city without friends or family, he’d never felt so isolated.
The siren song of legalized gambling enthralled Atlantic City in the 1990s. City leaders approved casino gambling, hoping to rekindle the city’s 1950s glory days as a prime vacation destination. They saw a future where the shuttered boardwalk businesses would reopen, hotels would rebuild and refill. New casino jobs would end the chronic unemployment. The city would arrest the decay that had slowly eaten it alive.
At least had been the plan.
Instead, the city became schizophrenic. Across Atlantic Avenue on the bus station’s right glowed the promised new Atlantic City. Towering buildings sporting “Taj Mahal” and “Bally’s” signs beckoned with bright lights and the assurance of quick payouts. Expensive cars dropped the well-coiffed at red carpets. Busses disgorged pensioners ready to strike it rich.
The uninviting streets to the left offered none of the above. The four lanes of Atlantic Avenue formed an impermeable barrier to the vitality and cash that flowed through the casinos. The high-rises ended as abruptly as the Cliffs of Dover and west of Atlantic Avenue nothing stood taller than three stories. Dim streetlights, spaced far apart, left most of them in forgiving, cloaking shadows.
VPD warning lights flashed in his brain. A few blocks from the bus station and he’d be lost for good with his poor sense of direction. With no idea where he was, and no idea where to go, he waited for the inspiration that drew him here to point the way.
A breeze blew in from the sea past the casinos. A white plastic shopping bag skittered westward. He figured he wasn’t called here for the gaming. Pete turned from the boardwalk and walked into the grittier neighborhood.
The world west of Atlantic Avenue was gray and black. The overcast sky masked the sun. Tightly packed buildings ran the whole block with no alleys between them. Most were three stories and narrow, single-family homes long comfortable with housing many more than that. The decaying buildings wore their faded paint like shabby coats and lined each street like the homeless at a soup kitchen. Some buildings were completely boarded up. Others had only one window covered, reminding Pete of a boxer’s eye swollen shut after a punishing round. Signs on the street proclaimed it a “Drug Free Zone,” indicators that it most certainly was not.
People eyed Pete with suspicion as he passed. He was an outsider, and they all seemed to know it.
The farther he penetrated the dying neighborhood, the gloomier he felt. He was in a strange city with nowhere to live and no source of income. After the bus ticket purchase and obtaining a roadside lunch that still sat leaden in his belly, he estimated he had two-hundred fifty dollars in the bank. In retrospect, following his VPD was a dumb idea.
He trudged down the street. His backpack weighed a thousand pounds. He needed a plan.
Chapter Four
In another corner of Atlantic City, Prosperidad sat motionless across from her client. Two burning tapers reflected in her brown eyes and banished the darkness to the round table’s edge. Her floral head wrap draped down across the shoulders of her matching dress. A wooden cross dangled from her neck on a length of rough twine. Her chocolate skin glistened in the dancing light.
A chicken’s foot, some small bones, and a braid of hair sat jumbled in the table’s center. Prosperidad stared transfixed at the talismans. Her hands passed over the assemblage with a quick inward dart followed by a slow retreat, as if drawing some unseen power from them.
“The signs will not please you,” the seer said. Her gaze never left the table. Her words sang with a thick Caribbean lilt. “A dreamwalker comes. Your plans may be in danger. The future grows more cloudy.”
From the darkness on the table’s far side, her client’s countenance appeared in the candlelight. The thin, black face sported a moustache and goatee. Long dreadlocks hung Medusa-like past his high cheekbones. The chain around his neck swayed forward, propelled by the weight of a gold, twin-snake medallion. The whites of his eyes glowed in stark contrast to his jet-black skin.
“This dreamwalker,” Jean St. Croix said with a Haitian accent, “where is he from?”
“He traveled far,” Prosperidad answered, “but is here already. He influences the bones.” She pointed at the tabletop.
“He is powerful, this one?” St. Croix asked. His eyes narrowed and he leaned into the table, as if to draw more details from the seer.
“Only in the other world,” Prosperidad said. “But he is unaware of his strength.”
St. Croix gave a predatory smiled and nodded. After so many years in his service, Prosperidad could read that expression. St. Croix now contemplated dark, despicable deeds and relished the thoughts.
“He won’t live to learn what he can do,” St. Croix said. He pulled his head back from the circle of light. Beads clicked against beads in the darkness as he left the reading room.
Prosperidad had not told him all. Jean St. Croix was an unpredictable man, and often held accountable those who delivered bad news. So she kept the disconcerting, ambiguous part of her divination from him, just in case. But she’d seen a river of blood. Whose, she couldn’t say.
She hoped her silence ensured it wouldn’t be her own.
Last month, she’d called upon the Antelope Spirit to bring a deliverer, someone who could halt the wicked events unfolding at St. Croix’s hand. Could this dreamwalker be the one? For the sake of the city, she hoped so. But the one she saw was so young…
He would be heartbreaking to sacrifice.
Chapter Five
Darkness consumed the rough edge of Atlantic City as Pete walked deeper into the town. The force that drew him east from Ithaca now drew him back northwest along Tennessee Avenue.
A third of the way across one street, Pete caught a flash of yellow from the corner of his eye. A taxi came careening around the corner.
The yellow Crown Victoria had seen better days, but not in the current decade. It rode low on worn-out springs, which all but collapsed on the far side as it squealed through the high speed turn. The generic, black-stenciled letters on the door read ISLAND CAB CO, with a pair of crossed palm trees below it, one white and one black. The driver was barely visible over the steering wheel, just a rapid succession of hands as the cabby overcorrected to force the wheezing four-door to hold the road.
Pete leapt back. The bumper of the city cab grazed his leg. The fleeting impact sent him sprawling against the curb.
“Son of a bitch!” Pete said.
The cracked taillights disappeared down another street.
“Welcome to Atlantic City,” he said to himself.
Pete picked himself up out of the stinking gutter and flicked something damp and gray from the leg of his jeans. He didn’t want to know what it was. Or had been.
He crossed the street. This wasn’t Panera Bread territory. Too much risk and too little disposable income. The mom-and-pop stores he passed were remnants of businesses once vibrant, before Atlantic City flat-lined and needed casinos for a pacemaker. A corner grocery, a liquor store, a barber shop. All clearly had regular business. He guessed that the liquor store had the most. But the days of reinvesting profits into paint and plaster were long gone. Th
e tired storefronts, beaten by the summer sun and salt air, bent under the weight of decades of customers. For these dowager queens of the business world, no longer enamored with outside appearance, waking each day and seeing cash was victory enough.
The wafting smell of garlic and tomatoes reminded him he hadn’t eaten decent food all day. Spaghetti and meatballs suddenly sounded like manna from Heaven.
The mouthwatering scent floated over from a small Italian restaurant on the bottom floor of a two-story building up ahead. This corner building was still in surprisingly good repair. The windows were clean and the paint around the frames still had some gloss. Soft lighting lit the inviting interior like a vintage oil painting.
The large plate glass window in front had DISTEPHANO’S painted on it in gold letters. Rows of round tables crossed the black and white tile floor. Red and white checkered cloths draped each table complemented by a centerpiece of salt and pepper shakers, a flickering votive candle, and a jar of crushed red peppers, practically a set from The Godfather.
A sign in the bottom left corner of the window read:
APARTMENT FOR RENT
He looked up at the windows on the floor above the restaurant. The apartment had to be a walkup from DiStephano’s. In this neighborhood, it couldn’t cost much.
“I’ve got to start looking somewhere,” he said to himself.
He entered the restaurant. The endemic smell of garlic and other spices sent his stomach grumbling in anticipation of hot food. It was 6:25, and the restaurant was empty. He walked to the back table where a portly man in a stained white apron and black pants shuffled papers and smacked a calculator with fingers that could double as sausages. Pete slung his pack to the floor.
The man looked to be in his late 50s. Gray nearly replaced the black in his short hair. Under a prominent Roman nose, his thick moustache had yet to yield to the silver onslaught. He huffed a series of short, sharp, frustrated sighs.
Dreamwalker Page 2
