Nightmare Ballad

by Benjamin Kane Ethridge

  What had happened to Maribel?

  Chapter 30

  The classroom was clean.

  Luke had only seen it this way at the start of the year when Maribel set everything up. It turned out that class had never been in session. He and Dara had spoken briefly to the principal, who matter-of-factly informed them that all the students had been redistributed to other classrooms since the teacher had not arrived or answered phone calls. One child, David, who had been unaccounted for, was picked up in the parking lot of a real-estate office downtown. Severely dehydrated and sunburned, the boy claimed he’d wanted to visit Puppet Town. His parents had taken off work and had him now. They told the school he had a habit of taking buses into the city and had run off before, so it didn’t surprise them. It didn’t sound like they were blaming Maribel or the school.

  “Thank God,” he added.

  After the principal returned to his office, Dara and Luke sat on the children’s desks, stoned by the stillness of the room. Luke had never imagined how much Dara hated herself, not until becoming her. She must be sorting through all his psychoses right now, too—at least she’d understand the guilt he’d had for being unfaithful to her—but then she might have also realized that some things she constantly pointed out, her teeth, her breasts, her nose, had actually become objects of disdain for him as well. He couldn’t help it; she’d made him not like parts of her. He hoped she’d also gleaned that from their experience. Things would never be the same between them. He still loved her, though, and prayed that she still loved him, for better or for insane.

  He watched her, the silence finally getting to him. “Johnny’s Harley’s pretty nuts, now.”

  “Pretty nuts,” she agreed. “It’s amazing what you can take with you out of a nightmare.”

  Luke craned his neck to the ceiling and rolled his head a little. His muscles were jacked up. His hand still hurt. The soles of his feet still felt crisp from burning. He was a wreck. He continued to roll his head until he spotted grimy handprints on the ceiling’s drop tiles. It might have been an odd sight at one time, but with the music alive and well in his mind, he didn’t bother reacting at first. There were bigger things to do. They had to find Maribel so they could get the hell out of this city.

  Johnny was busy packing things and getting the RV ready. The Nightmare Harley could easily fit three riders, possibly four if you counted Johnny as two people, but they wouldn’t be able to live in the motorcycle up in the mountains.

  Johnny Cruz….

  He and Dara understood Johnny quite a bit better now. He had many more issues from his past that he’d not worked through, but they were coming to the surface, sure enough. This ordeal with the Lifemares had forced him to deal with his demons.

  Luke shuddered at the thought of demons. Those people back at his job, eating each other—after what Johnny said, his conscience got the better of him and he had called GeoGreen to ask about survivors.

  The motorcycle company no longer listed him as an employee, though, and he found himself whispering, “I’d just applied not long ago. My name is Alukara. I’m…following up.”

  Dara had leaned over him during the call, consuming every word.

  The company remembered her (them), but said they would have to get back to her because they were experiencing major plumbing problems in their lobby. A giant sink-hole had opened to a subterranean river that stretched across Riverside into Moreno Valley.

  After hanging up, Dara folded her arms over her chest and closed her eyes. Her body trembled. “The company didn’t change back. What will the lifemares leave behind next time?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “These things are going to fuck up the world.”

  Luke snorted derisively. “We won’t be around to care.”

  Dara glared at him.

  “What?”

  She shook her head and pushed off the desk. A squeak broke the silence. Dara’s eyes searched Luke.

  “Wasn’t me.”

  He scanned the room a moment, then heard it again.

  The large closet just beyond the story-time rug.

  They both got up and walked over. Luke reached out, hesitated, and then grabbed the handle.

  Tucked inside the closet, bony knees to her chest and a video camera poised before her blue-lit face, sat Allie. Her swollen, tear-soaked eyes turned to them. Fleshy shapes bobbed on the camera’s viewscreen.

  “I love my husband,” she told them.

  Dara ripped the camera out of her hand.

  “No!” Allie screamed. “You have to let me keep that!”

  Luke watched the screen with Dara, and his gorge began to rise. A sweaty, naked, moaning Maribel stretched over the classroom tables. One tall white guy was sticking her in the mouth with his long, curved erection, while a black guy penetrated her ass. Breasts swaying under her, a woman that looked like Allie hovered above Maribel and dipped two fingers in her vagina.

  Dara almost dropped the camera as Allie lunged for it. Luke caught the woman and shoved her against the closed closet door. “Where is she?”

  “This isn’t her,” said Dara, her voice intense. “It’s NOT.”

  A quaking smile broke over Allie’s face. “She doesn’t love you anymore. You two are old news. Didn’t you get the memos?”

  “Tell us where she went.”

  Allie tried to move, and Luke put his hand on her throat. At first he thought Dara would tell him to stop, or shove his hand away, but instead she leaned forward and got in the woman’s face. “Tell us, or you’ll be sorry. I promise.”

  Fear surfaced in Allie’s eyes. “She got a new job. She’s moved on. She doesn’t love any of us. She doesn’t love anyone. But she will be loved wherever she goes. That’s how Maribel operates.”

  “Where?” Luke asked sharply, dismissing all the other bullshit.

  “Where she belongs.”

  Dara’s brow furrowed, and she shook her head angrily.

  “What are you talking about, Allie?” Luke pressed.

  “She is the new Queen.”

  Chapter 31

  His tools littered the floor.

  Dara didn’t like looking at the mess but was in no mood to aggravate Luke’s foul attitude since watching that video yesterday. They’d not said a word about it to Johnny, because he would have wanted to see it for himself. As it was, they’d watched it a few times, growing number with every viewing. Though they couldn’t agree on very much right now, she and Luke decided they didn’t want to take the camera with them to the mountains. Allie hadn’t provided them with anything except that “Queen” nonsense, but they both wondered if it meant something sexual and therefore horrible.

  Luke struggled underneath the bar stool. The loose leg had finally come out, and he was wasting his time trying to thread it into the stripped socket. After another failure he pushed the useless stool away, its remaining two legs sticking awkwardly in the air.

  “I need to just glue the fucking thing,” he said.

  “There are enough folding chairs in the RV. I told you to forget about it.”

  “And I told you I won’t leave a broken chair for us to come home to!” He reached for the stool again, then got up resignedly to fetch some glue.

  Dara tapped her cell phone. After deciding against calling Maribel for the thirty-seventh time, she brought up a medieval role-playing game she’d recently downloaded. The suit of armor on the title screen reminded her of the crusader back in the lobby…back when they were Alukara.

  She shut off the phone.

  Luke knows everything about me now. Probably knows I didn’t want to ever come back to him after meeting Maribel. Maribel had incorrectly thought that Dara wasn’t ready to leave him completely, and the rest was history. True, she’d fallen back in love with Luke, but Maribel had given their relationship an energy it had lacked before.

  Now look at us. Our battery’s been removed.

  Where was she? There had been another curtain. Had that been Maribel’s, a
nd had she escaped?

  Her husband shuffled across the carpet and dropped down on the tile, knees first, a bottle of glue in each hand. He bent over the two legged stool.

  “What happened to her, Luke?” Dara asked softly.

  “You saw.”

  “I can’t believe the video.”

  “You won’t believe that…but you saw her go to those other people’s house.”

  “But in her classroom? That’s crazy. She cared too much about her job. She respected kids to much to do something like that.”

  “Maybe she isn’t who we think she is.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Easy.” He raked his forearm over his nose and sniffed. “After all this…whatever it is, I can say just about anything.”

  “What about that fourth curtain?”

  “Your curtain disappeared once, too, remember?”

  “That was when the music stopped for everyone, though.”

  “Yeah,” Luke breathed and considered the glues for a moment.

  The music hadn’t stopped this time. The ballad was as close as it had ever been, but the notes had been rattled around something fierce for everyone. For Luke and Johnny, it could come at any moment, but a day had passed since their last recall.

  “I don’t think either one of these will work on galvanized steel.” Luke inspected the back of each bottle.

  “Just leave it.”

  His face went red. “I just want to fix it. All right? Do you have an issue with that? You aren’t the only thing in this universe that needs fixing.”

  “Oh fuck you.” She went into the kitchen, though she had no idea for what. She was far from feeling like eating or drinking. So alone, so utterly and completely alone, she hated that her first impulse was to go back to Luke with tears in her eyes. At first her mental state didn’t register with him. Then, almost out of irritation, he dropped a screw driver and stood up to hold her.

  “That stuff on the camera. Is it real? Or something manufactured from the dream?”

  “I don’t know,” he said into her hair. “And it doesn’t matter, anyway.”

  She pulled back from him to look him in the eyes. “Why not?”

  His left eyelid twitched as he considered her a moment. “It happened. Just like GeoGreen isn’t an engineering firm anymore. This stuff is real now. She was with those people. Whether she wanted to be…or not.”

  “Those people might not have even been real. I had my arms cut off and boiled—I healed myself after being blown into atoms. Anything is possible.”

  “Exactly, Dara. So Maribel might not even remember us anymore. Don’t you get it? Do you think I’m so miserable because I’m just a worthless asshole? No… I’m miserable because it’s all changed. Our lives can never be put back the way they were.”

  “Oh come on, how can you be jealous when you know—?”

  “It’s not jealousy I’m talking about…she’s gone, goddamn it anyway. I don’t think she’s coming back, either. Do you?”

  That was a loaded question. “We have to find her.”

  Luke shook his head and leaned into the counter.

  Johnny bustled through the front door with a plaid sleeping bag under his arm. He was really slimming down these days. It wasn’t surprising since none of them had wanted to eat much. “Is it okay if I take this one?”

  “Yeah,” Luke said.

  Sensing something amiss, Johnny would have normally hit the road, but he too had a better understanding of them now. He dropped the sleeping bag at his feet and walked over. “I’m thirsty,” he announced. “Got anything in the fridge?”

  “Just lemonade.”

  “Good enough.” He poured himself a glass. The sound of his glugging was obnoxious.

  “So,” he said, coming out of the kitchen, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his Entombed t-shirt, “are you two really broken up about that video?”

  They turned to him at the same time, and he chuckled. “Guess that’s a yes.”

  “How do you know about it?”

  “I stayed here last night, remember? I heard you guys watching it. I figured it was important.”

  “It’s nothing,” said Dara.

  “I know,” said Johnny, “because I copied it and watched it on my lap top.”

  “How?” Luke straightened, the color leaching from his face.

  “There’s a little port in the side—”

  “I know how you copied it, dumbass, but why?”

  Johnny’s face stiffened as though to say, what’s the big deal? “I figured we were pretty tight after yesterday—not that we weren’t before.”

  “Not that tight.”

  Johnny cocked his head to the side. “I know you guys are worried about Maribel. But that video isn’t anything I’d be concerned about. She wasn’t being hurt or anything.”

  “That’s hardly why we were bothered by it, Johnny,” said Dara, shaking her head.

  “What am I missing then? It’s a shit video for one—bunch of static and jumps, and for two, Maribel is chasing around some of her students in the classroom. They look pretty wild and the camera’s moving around like crazy, but I watched the whole thing, and I don’t see what the big friggin’ deal is. The rest is white noise and ant races.”

  Dara narrowed her eyes at Luke, who suddenly looked paralyzed. “You must have copied the wrong video,” he said.

  “That was the only one on there. Lap top is in the RV. It’s fully charged. You can see for yourself. So your video is different than mine?”

  Luke shook his head. “Forget it.”

  “I should have watched it on the viewfinder. Damn.”

  “Leave the camera alone okay. It’s… look, ours has Maribel…with other people.” Dara could feel Luke’s eyes drill into her back, but she didn’t care.

  “Oh,” Johnny said, trying not to overreact. “Oh! Two different versions then. How the hell does that happen?”

  “That’s the question of the hour.”

  Johnny leaned against the kitchen door jamb. He looked focused for a change, but she could tell that part of that was him fighting the ballad in his head. Luke also had that flighty look about him. He went over to the bar and hopped up to sit. “It’s possible she was caught in one of the Lifemares…okay, Dara? I’m willing to give you that. But she hasn’t come back home. The curtain is gone, so—”

  “So we just give up on her?”

  “Let me finish.” He tried to be calm but it wasn’t working. His nostrils flared several times and he licked his lips. “Back in that tunnel, in the water, with that Frogman trying to kill me…I was in so much pain. My lungs hurt so much. I wanted air, but I began to want death more. I know what you went through Dara—with the bomb.”

  “I didn’t even—”

  “Doesn’t matter. I know you wanted to give it all up. You were a part of me yesterday, remember? Just like you, Johnny. I know how you were going to let your wives rip you apart that night outside the plant. You’d do it again, only this time, there would be no hesitation.”

  “Why are you saying this shit?” asked Johnny, stone-faced.

  “Because I’m there too—this thing has worn us. We won’t be able to fight it much longer. The next time we’re faced with such pain, we’ll ask for the end. And that will be that. We have no idea when the ballad will come together again—what if it comes just before we fall asleep, like it did to you, Dara? The forest is plenty big, and it’ll let us by, give us options for a time, but for how long? The ballad wasn’t even that loud during my bath and then suddenly—I’m pulled down into that tunnel. How can we even hope to predict these things?”

  Johnny’s bandito mustache made his frown look deeper.

  “What is it?” asked Dara.

  “There’s this dog I met.”

  Luke’s eyebrows rose. “A dog?”

  “Yeah, a mean ass dog with a big fuckin’ head.”

  “And?”

  Johnny shook away a memory. “I think the dog actu
ally liked the nightmare.”

  “Weird…what’s your point?”

  “The dog knew when it was coming, like it had intuition or something. It got all excited and everything. It probably could have come after me and ripped me to shit, but it waited for the nightmare to fall. It got to wagging its tail. It was happy as hell. I don’t know where the dog is now…but if we can find it, we could use it up in the mountains, like an alarm system. If it gets excited in the same way, we know we better find somewhere new.”

  Dara wasn’t certain she followed him. “This is a mean dog, right?”

  “Yeah…but like I said, it didn’t really care about me. Shit, I think it wanted to be part of the nightmare. It got off on it.”

  “This dog was from the nightmare?”

  “No…not at first. I just think he’s one fucked-up animal, to tell you the truth. His owner called him The Count.”

  “Wonderful,” said Luke. “Sounds like just the kind of problem we need to keep around us.”

  “It’s no crazier than anything else,” Dara said. “We should use whatever we can. How do we find it though?”

  “It’s somewhere in the old neighborhood, that’s all I know.”

  “Was it like a mastiff?” Luke asked.

  Johnny shrugged. “Maybe. Black coat. Blood-shot eyes.”

  Luke nodded. “I had a feeling. I know that dog. I almost hit it with my car. I was in the old neighborhood. I got the feeling this dog was headed toward the curtain. Maybe it was trailing the nightmare.”

  “Likely, I guess.”

  “So it’s possible we could lure it with one, then maybe catch it, muzzle it. Just hope we don’t get our asses chewed off in the process.”

  “No guarantees there, but getting a heads-up on these nightmares might be worth it.”

  “We can head out sometime today, then.”

  Johnny nodded. “Let’s do it.”

  Dara spoke up, “Should I come, too?”

  “Somebody should stay here in case Maribel shows.”

  A knock echoed through the house and everybody froze.

  Someone was at the door.