Wildest Dreams

by Norman Partridge

  WILDEST DREAMS

  by

  Norman Partridge

  Copyright © 1998 by Norman Partridge

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Cemetery Dance Publications

  132-B Industry Lane, Unit #7

  Forest Hill, MD 21050

  http://www.cemeterydance.com

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead,

  is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  First Digital Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-58767-251-4

  Cover Artwork ©

  Digital Design by DH Digital Editions

  For Ron Ezell,

  a book about the bad guys for one of the good guys….

  “But you want me to desecrate the grave!”

  “Don’t give me that crap. There’s nothing sacred about a hole in the ground. Or a man that’s in it. Or you, or me.”

  —Warren Oates answers Isela Vega in Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

  PART ONE:

  A COLD & LONELY EVIL

  The time has been

  That when the brains were out, the man would die,

  And there an end; but now they rise again.

  With twenty mortal murders on their crown.

  —Shakespeare

  Macbeth

  Act III, Scene II

  1

  I see ghosts.

  This one was a little girl with long blonde hair and a black dress. She sat on a footbridge that arched across a rushing creek, her little girl legs dangling over the side as she gazed down at the cold water rushing below.

  I moved toward her, following a fern-choked path through old redwoods, but the little girl didn’t notice me. Sometimes it’s like that. Sometimes the dead don’t see the living at all. Often, in fact. Often ghosts are no more threatening than old movie clips. They’re helpless specters fixed in time and place, forever repeating some action whose significance was lost long ago, perhaps even to them.

  Of course, my footsteps were light. Maybe that was why I went unnoticed. A rusty blanket of dead redwood needles covered the path, but it wouldn’t have mattered if the forest floor was salted with gravel—I can be quiet when I want to. So the sounds I made were hardly sounds at all, and what the little girl would have heard had she been listening was masked by the hollow sigh of clear creek water flowing to the sea.

  Masked, until I stepped onto the wooden bridge and my boot heel rang down like a judge’s gavel.

  The ghost looked up with startled blue eyes that were as clear as the October sky.

  “I’m sorry I scared you,” I said.

  She smiled. “Oh, I wasn’t scared. Not truly. I just didn’t see you coming. Not many people come here, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ll be glad you did, though.” She nodded toward the creek. “It’s a nice place. Sometimes you see fish.”

  I unslung my backpack and sat down beside her. She moved closer. The nearness of her made me shiver, but I masked my unease with a smile. I didn’t want her to think that anything might be wrong.

  We sat there in silence. A bower of heavy redwood branches hid the creek, and the bridge, and the living and the dead from the sun. The shadows did not bother me, and neither did the little girl—there was nothing in her clear October eyes to make me wary, or afraid.

  I knew the girl could not say the same of my eyes. But even though I’d frightened her, she hadn’t looked away from me. She had studied my eyes as if she were searching for everything that lay behind them, and she hadn’t even blinked.

  I hadn’t looked away, either. Strange. I’d seen ghosts since childhood. Maybe because I was born with a caul—that’s the occultist’s favorite explanation, anyway. I’d learned to ignore the dead a long time ago. First the dull ones with their endless pantomimes, and later those whose actions were less predictable. By the time I was a teenager, I could spend a night in a room with a wailing spirit and sleep like a baby.

  But there was something very different about the little girl. I can’t say it any plainer than that. There was a depth to her, an intelligence that was rare in the dead.

  An innocence, as well.

  It was something I’d never seen before.

  Somehow, she seemed very much alive.

  And very, very lonely.

  I knew what it was like to be lonely.

  “Look!” she said suddenly, and her little hand brushed through mine with icy, transparent fingers as she pointed at the creek.

  A steelhead shot through the water like a bullet, fighting the current every inch of the way. A flash of scale like living sunshine, a splash of the steelhead’s dark and powerful tail, and then it was gone.

  The little ghost leaned forward, straining after the fish. “Careful,” I said automatically, realizing too late that my concern was ridiculous.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t fall.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  The girl stared upstream and sighed. “Wasn’t he beautiful?”

  I nodded.

  “He’s going upstream. They go upstream to spawn.”

  I nodded again, and she looked at me with those clear, innocent eyes. I wondered if she knew what happened to steelheads after they spawned. I wasn’t going to tell her. If she didn’t know now, she didn’t ever need to know.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Clay Saunders.”

  “What’s in your backpack, Clay Saunders?”

  Watching the fish, I’d actually forgotten about the backpack. Just for a moment. It was black, and it was canvas, and you couldn’t see the bloodstains on it unless you looked really hard

  I’d bought the pack in Baja six days before. It sat between us on the bridge. Already, flies were circling it.

  I swallowed hard. I’d made a mistake. I didn’t have time for distractions. I should have ignored the little ghost, and taken care of business the way I’d planned, and gone on.

  But instead I’d stopped, and now there were questions.

  That’s the way it always is.

  Anytime you stop, there are questions.

  Questions are never good.

  Without a word, I rose and slung the pack over one shoulder. I had to laugh at myself. Silly, getting nervous like that. Way past paranoid. After all, it wouldn’t matter if I told the girl what was inside the backpack. She was dead. She wasn’t going to tell anyone.

  Still, I didn’t want her to know.

  I’d already scared her once, and once was enough.

  A fly buzzed around her head. She swatted at it, not noticing as the insect passed through her hand. “You can trust me,” she said. “I know how to keep a secret.”

  “So do I, and I promised I’d keep this one all to myself.”

  My words weren’t meant to sound harsh, but they did to the little girl. She apologized quickly, and I could tell that she was both embarrassed and ashamed.

  “Maybe you can help me,” I said, hoping to smooth things over. “There’s someone I’m supposed to meet, and I think I might have missed them.”

  “A boy or a girl?”

  “A girl.”

  She giggled, at ease now. “Clay’s got a girlfriend.”

  “Not quite.” I laughed, but I didn’t like the blush that warmed my face. Even if I was talking to a ghost, I was talking too much.

  The girl didn’t notice my discomfort. She stared into the creek, pretendin
g to watch for another fish. But I knew that she was only pretending now. She hadn’t forgotten me, or my backpack, at all.

  She couldn’t keep quiet for long. “I’ve been here all day,” she said finally, “and I haven’t seen any girl. Only you.”

  “We’re not supposed to meet here, exactly.” I glanced up at the redwood boughs that hid the sky from view. “I think I’m on the right trail, but I’m a city boy. Put me in the woods and I’m lost.”

  “I’m lost, too. At least I think I am. My mom said Daddy would meet me here, but he hasn’t come. It’s been a long time, too. But I just keep waiting, because that’s what my mom told me to do.” She paused, staring at the water. “I don’t mind waiting. Not really. It’s nice here.”

  She reached out for my hand.

  “We’re alone, just like Hansel and Gretel,” she said, and her voice whispered through the forest like a lonely wind that touches no one. But her fingers were like the wind, too, and though they passed through mine I knew that she had touched me, even if she could not hold my hand.

  She kept on trying, though. Without a word. She didn’t give up.

  I tried, too. It was like trying to hold a five-fingered breeze. And while I tried, I wondered how long the little girl had been here. Her clothes were hard to place. That little black dress, simple and severe, like something out of The Addams Family, but timeless in its way.

  Maybe she’d been here a hundred years, or maybe a hundred days. I couldn’t decide. I only knew that as long as she’d been here, she’d been all alone.

  I wondered how long it had been since someone had spoken to her. How long since she’d shared a smile or a laugh, or tried to hold someone’s hand.

  I didn’t want to ask those questions. Questions are never good.

  But there was one question I had to ask. “I’m looking for the bottle house,” I began. “Do you know where it is?”

  “Sure.” Her fingers drifted away from mine. “It’s not far.” She seemed to float away. “Follow me.”

  I did.

  2

  “There it is,” the little girl said.

  I didn’t see the bottle house at first. There was the ocean to look at, so different from the blue waters that washed the golden beaches of Mexico. Two thousand miles north of Los Cabos, the Pacific was wild and cruel. The coast here was framed by arthritic knots of cypress, gray limbs crippled by winds that were as cold as they were relentless. Iron-colored combers crashed against a beach shaped like a reaper’s scythe. The sand was as dark as freshly poured concrete, and the sound of each wave shook me to the bone.

  Just like an ordinary little girl, the ghost scrambled over a fallen redwood. I followed. We threaded our way through knots of bleached driftwood as we crossed the concrete beach. My boots compacted damp sand, but the little girl’s shoes left no mark at all.

  A splash of sunlight washed the shoreline and I spotted the bottle house, nestled on the cresting cliff that dropped cleanly into the ocean at the south end of the beach.

  I wondered why I’d had trouble finding it. After all, it was exactly where Circe Whistler had said it would be.

  The sand slowed me down, but there was no slowing the girl. She started up a narrow trail that climbed the cliff, cutting through heavy underbrush. For a while I lost track of her. I hurried to the trail, picking my way through tall stands of beach grass that hid the girl and the house from view.

  I was afraid that she would be gone by the time I reached the house. Sometimes it happened that way. Some ghosts have territories which bind them to a plot of ground the same way fear binds an agoraphobic.

  But that’s not the way it was. Not this time. When I reached a set of concrete steps and a twisted wrought iron railing, there she was, waiting on the patio above.

  The patio was concrete, too. Beach grass knifed through wide cracks that brought California earthquakes to mind, and I suddenly found myself wondering if we were anywhere close to a fault line.

  Another look at the bottle house and I stopped wondering. If this were earthquake country, the place wouldn’t be here at all. Composed almost entirely of old bottles set in concrete, the abandoned structure looked about as stable as a sand castle.

  But looks could be deceiving. I knew that the house had stood for nearly forty years, since Circe Whistler’s father had cemented the crowning bottle with his own two hands.

  Several PRIVATE PROPERTY and NO TRESPASSING signs flapped in the wind, but the house wasn’t exactly secure—there was no door at all, only a battered wooden jam with rusting hinges that held nothing but air. The concrete walls were golden brown with white flecks that caught the afternoon light and added to the sand castle impression. The bottles were of every color, their bases facing out from the walls like startled eyes.

  A passing cloud eclipsed the sun. A hundred glass eyes closed all at once, and the wind whipped through the open doorway and played in as many glass throats, the sound a terminal inhalation.

  “Some people think this place is haunted,” the girl whispered.

  “People believe a lot of strange things.”

  She hesitated, drawing close. “I don’t want to go inside.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I will.” She looked up at me, a trembling smile on her face. “If you come with me.”

  * * *

  “Do you suppose your girlfriend is late?”

  “Anything’s possible.” We were inside now, and I wasn’t surprised to find that the house’s interior was just as unusual as the exterior. The flagstone floor rose and fell at funhouse angles, throwing off my sense of balance. There was no furniture at all, only a pile of dry tinder heaped near an empty fireplace as if a group of kids had decided to have a party in the ruin only to think better of it as night closed around them.

  It seemed a reasonable explanation. Even in the daylight, there was no escaping the spectral wind that played in the open bottles. It sounded like a dying man wheezing through glass lungs. If that kind of thing got to you, it would certainly get to you here. And good.

  “No one ever lived here,” the girl said. “Not truly.”

  “I can see why.”

  The child nodded, staying close to the door. “My mom said this place was like a church. She said there were always people here. Even when it was empty.”

  I smiled. “You mean ghosts?”

  “I don’t know. I only know that what my mom said scared me. I don’t like creepy places, and I don’t like creepy stories. I guess I’m just a scaredy cat.”

  “Stories are just stories,” I said. “They can’t hurt you.”

  I might have said more, but that was when I heard the flies.

  Trapped inside the bottles, buzzing to be free.

  I stared at the wall of glass. A few corked bottles, but most were open. Narrow throats and wide throats. Lips polished and dirty, cracked and smooth...but no flies.

  Not yet.

  But soon. That was a certainty. Because I had what the flies wanted. They had scented the bloody thing in my backpack.

  I couldn’t wait to be rid of that thing, and all that came with it, and all that it attracted.

  Flies…and a woman named Circe Whistler.

  The woman I’d come to meet. But I wouldn’t wait for Circe here. I’d wait outside, and I’d take the little girl with me.

  “Let’s go,” I said, and that was when I noticed that the little girl was already gone.

  I took a step back and my heel struck an uneven stone in the floor. It seemed to wobble underfoot, or maybe it was me who wobbled, but the end result was the same. I nearly lost my balance.

  The first fly brushed past my cheek.

  If I waited another minute, I’d be crawling with the things.

  I turned, a chill of disgust capering up my spine.

  A woman blocked my way.

  * * *

  I only knew two things about the woman: she wasn’t afraid of flies, and she wasn’t Circe Whistler.

  “I
was expecting someone else,” I said.

  “Plans change,” she said. “Life is fluid.”

  “Life is clockwork. Or it should be.”

  “Maybe where you come from, but things are different here. Anyway, I didn’t mean to give you such a start.”

  She smiled. Blonde and slight, but she didn’t look at all weak. And the way she held onto her amused expression reminded me of some smartass kid who’d just spotted a zipper on Godzilla’s back.

  We stood outside, away from the flies. The little girl was nowhere in sight, and I was surprised to find that I was worried about her. I couldn’t help wondering if she’d seen the woman, if this stranger had scared her off—

  “What’s wrong?” the blonde asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  I stared at her. Maybe she’d seen the little girl and was being coy with me. Maybe she hadn’t. I couldn’t decide—her eyes were flat and cold, like the ocean.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked.

  “I believe in many things. For instance, I believe that the bottle house is a place of intense energies. Both positive and negative. Souls dwell here. I’ve spoken to them.”

  “Really,” I said, doing my best to sound diplomatic. But my new age radar was going up, and going up fast. The last thing I needed was a lecture on energies, or dynamics or—

  “Faith is the key, of course,” she said. “This place was a temple, you know. A place of intense faith. And faith is power. Intense power. Don’t you agree?”

  “I’m getting the all-over heebie-jeebies just thinking about it.” I bit off the remark as fast as I could and held out my hand, one last stab at diplomacy. “Clay Saunders.”

  She looked at my hand like I’d offered her a bug on a silver platter. “Forgive me if I don’t shake.”