by Dale Bailey
Lana had died.
She had not caused it, she had not wished it, she could not change it. If she could, she would. But she would not let it own her.
Katie Wright had died as well.
And that was hers to bear, and there would be others, and maybe worse ones. But she would bear them.
You figured out what was yours and what was not.
And you did it by facing it: it was the only way.
She saw that this was the true strength she had to give him: the strength to risk it, the strength not to run away, when there were always reasons to run, and good ones. Good enough that if she insisted, he would defer, and maybe that was what he’d been hoping she’d do all along.
If she let him start down that stairwell without facing it—whatever the risks—she would have failed him. She would have failed them both.
“Okay,” she breathed, the words turning to vapor in the space between them. “Okay.”
38
The clouds were breaking, and a swollen moon hung low in the sky, firing the flawless mantle of snow eighteen stories below with an eerie blue glow that suffused everything.
They stood in the window of a back bedroom—who knows, it might have been his bedroom once—and gazed down at the shattered plaza, and the long curve of the city beyond it.
“What was your name?” she said. “The one you were born with?”
“Jamal.” He turned to look at her. “Jamal Turner. My parents heard the story on the news. They arranged to adopt me. It was like—” He snorted. “I don’t know, their idea of public service or something.”
“You sound angry.”
“I was. For a long time I was. They never told me who I really was. I had to learn it all on my own. You bet I was angry.”
“And now?”
“Now?”
He examined himself for any hint of the anxiety that had triggered the panic attack. It was gone: the events of the last few hours had burned it out of him, leaving … leaving what?
He didn’t know.
But whatever it was—and it would be something, he didn’t doubt that anymore—he would not find it here. Not here, in this stark, cold bedroom, empty but for the corpse of a pigeon that must have strayed in through the window. He prodded it with the length of broken railing and watched it collapse, a house of delicate bone, tented in dry feathers and leathery flesh.
A hollow thing, devoured from within.
The idea sent shivers up his spine. Paltry sustenance indeed for a place that had feasted on such banquets of misery for so long, he thought. And he could almost feel the hunger in the air.
No, he would not find it here.
There was nothing here but hunger and death and hate.
He turned to Lara.
“Now?” he said. “Now, my name is Benjamin Prather.”
They were silent then, there in the moonlit apartment with nothing but their breath to warm them.
“Let’s go,” he said at last. “There’s nothing here. There’s nothing here but hate.”
39
Ben’s first hints that something was wrong were the clutching fingers at his wrist, and Lara’s shocked hiss of intaken breath. She drew him around, choking dread in his throat, the room airless and cold.
He stood frozen by the figure before him, gloom-shrouded, the long goateed face hanging disembodied in the darkness. An apparition, a hollow thing, not a man. “Keel,” he said, and they regarded one another in silence.
Then the figure shifted slightly. A moonlit blade coalesced in the shadows, a blue edge gleaming. The figure slid toward him smoothly and without sound, the blade grinning, everything so dreamlike and strange that Ben could almost let himself believe that it was all some crazy nightmare from which he might wake at any moment. And then he too was moving, pushing Lara back with one hand, bringing the broken length of railing around with the other. It shed a glimmering silver wake, whipping past too fast for his eye to fix and hold, and for an instant he almost dared to hope.
And then Keel, moving with the certainty and grace Ben had first seen at the pool table all those nights ago, reached out and snapped the length of railing from his hand. He hardly seemed to look at it. It clanked away into the darkness, lost, and then Keel was on him, that blue blade snapping down.
“No,” Ben said. He darted forward to meet the blow, to sneak under it, snatching at Keel’s wrist, but the other man’s momentum carried through him. Ben’s legs went out from underneath him. He was momentarily airborne. Then he was down, flat on his back, a bright line of agony stitching itself along his wounded side.
Keel came down on him a moment later with his full weight. Breath burst out of him, a glittering fog of condensation. Ben brought his other arm up, clutching the other man’s wrist with both hands. The blade hung above him in the moonlight, foreshortened: two feet from his heart, then one, Keel bearing down with every bit of his strength. Ben’s forearms trembled with tension. The blade leaped forward an inch, then another.
“No, please,” Lara said from the darkness, a thousand miles away.
Another inch. And another.
“Why?” Ben gasped, but he knew why, he understood that now, and when Keel, or the thing that was in Keel, responded, he understood that, too.
“We hate you,” Keel hissed, his voice venomous. “We hate you.”
And it became a mantra—
“… we hate you, we hate you, we hate you …”
—and Ben understood it. It was the hatred of the cold for what was warm, that hatred. It was the hatred the bone bears toward the flesh, the hatred of the hollow for that which is sustained, the hatred of the void for the full and breathing world. And it did not matter where it came from, that malice. It did not matter whether it had been born here, born in the hearts of men, born from long years of misery and despair that at last turned inward, self-hating and self-destructive, or whether it had descended upon this place through the thin margins of the world from spheres of outer dark, or whether it had been summoned, hunger to hunger, hatred to hate. It did not matter. It mattered only that you combated it, at every turn and every crossing. It mattered only that you stood your ground and did not let the darkness own you.
And so Ben whispered, seeking that which yet respired in the hollow places, seeking the warm and living flesh cleaving yet to bone. “Keel,” Ben whispered. “Fletcher, please.”
Still the knife inched closer, closer. He could feel the bright tip bearing down upon his breast, his shirt parting with a whisper to admit it.
Lara sobbed.
Ben’s mind reeled with terror, the first distant memorandum of pain firing along his nerves as the tip first indented his skin, and then bit through, a bare millimeter into the flesh beneath.
“Please,” Ben whispered, and then inspiration struck him, something Lara had said to him just moments ago—
—your name, the one you were born with—
“John,” he gasped, the memory of Abel’s words in the kitchen—
—what would your daddy think of that—
—slamming through his brain. And he repeated it, seeking the child that lived inside the hollow man, saying, “John, John, please, you don’t want to do this, John, this is your father, John, this is your father, John, you make me proud—”
Keel’s voice faltered, dying, and something flickered deep inside those cold eyes. The pressure of the blade eased.
“You make me proud,” Ben said. “You make me proud.”
In Fletcher Keel’s moonstruck face confusion reigned. “Dad?” he said. “Dad?”
He cocked his head, listening, and Ben heard it, too: a distant whistling sound in the air. Ben glimpsed a blur of silver, Keel’s eyes widening in surprise, and then, abruptly, the weight upon his chest was gone.
40
Lara, clutching the length of handrail like a bat, had thought the blow would be enough to kill it.
But no, it was not. The impact of the stroke had dislodged it, had sent
it rolling across the barren room, the blue blade flashing in the air. But it was on its feet again almost in the same motion, on its feet and coming for her. The impact seemed hardly to have slowed it down.
She saw it, then, she saw its eyes, and whatever tiny fragment of Fletcher Keel had glimmered there before, whatever vestigial humanity had lingered in the moment before she struck it down, it was gone now. Suddenly it was there inside him, entirely there, Dreamland, the force of it unbelievable, inhuman, vibrating in the air. It came at her in wordless fury, intent. She screamed and she struck at it again and again, smashing at it with the post, with the jagged spike.
Still it came, swinging the blade at her. Lara swung the metal post, smashing it in the face, the arms—everywhere, everything whirling around her, everything crazy. It lurched toward her, staggering now, and she swung, snapping its head around in a spray of blood and snot. And again. And again. And still it came, unstoppable, backing her and backing her until it had jammed her hard into a corner.
Her shoulder blades rammed the wall. She had nowhere else to go. “Please,” she whispered. “Please.”
And still it came, brandishing the knife before it, its eyes glittering and inhuman. She swung the length of rail again, swung it with everything she had, driving all three inches of the sharpened spike right through one of those eyes, into its brain. The spike lodged there, hooked inside its eye socket. The thing straightened abruptly. Its hand opened, and she saw the knife hit the floor. It pawed ineffectually at the post, its fingers crooked into claws
Lara moaned. Her mouth gaped in wordless horror, one hand cupped before it.
And then, still spasming, the thing pitched forward, its weight sagging against her, its face empty and inhuman. The last thing she remembered was its fingers raking her face, catching in the fine chain around her neck, and dragging her down atop it.
41
Dreamland shrieked, a soundless, rending cry, splitting the air.
42
In the moment just after Lara struck the thing atop Benjamin Prather’s chest, in the moment when it came screaming to its feet before her, its eyes utterly bereft of humanity, Abel Williams, deep inside his wainscot labyrinth of self, felt the black presence in his breast flare like a filament, its attention elsewhere, and slowly die away.
Suddenly, he was himself again, wholly himself.
He staggered to his feet, his thigh aching, to find himself in the lobby, clutching a length of castaway pipe like a club before him. Memory flickered inside his mind, and he knew—knew with that same black certainty—his murderous function here: should Fletcher Keel fail in the warren of empty apartments above, then they would fall to him, Dreamland’s blood deeds.
He retched, heaving a vile spew of acid.
“God,” he whispered. “God.”
He hurled the pipe clanking to the floor. Then, fury rising inside him—fury at himself, fury at the hellish place that had entrapped him—he kicked the pipe, kicked it and kicked it again, launching it at last into the darkness of the gaping elevator shaft. It fell for a long time, and then it hit concrete far below. Echoes rolled up to him through that stone throat, the noise reminding him of his first visit to Dreamland, the empty liquor bottle the cameraman had kicked into the abyss, the sound of shattering glass like hysterical laughter.
He turned away, trembling. He thought of the others, of Ben and Lara, trapped somewhere high above him, wanting to help them, wanting somehow to redeem himself, knowing what he had to do instead.
If he stayed here, it would seize him yet again.
It would use him.
His wounded thigh throbbing, Abel limped toward the plywood-paneled doors.
“I’m sorry,” he sobbed to himself, “I’m sorry.”
But it was the only way. It was all that he could do. Still sobbing, he shoved open the door and staggered into the moonlit night beyond.
43
Lara came to herself, sobbing, rocking in the warmth of someone’s arms. “It’s okay now,” he was saying. “It’s over.”
44
That dark presence made one last run at Abel. It found him in the snow, slumped against the distant fence, his face turned to the sky. The cold had already gotten to him by then. His fingers had curled into blue talons. Frost rimed his eyebrows. His legs were like brittle toothpicks carved of ice.
Still, it came for him, a black fluttering like wings about his shoulders.
Dreamland.
All unwilling, Abel stumbled to his feet at its behest, but his legs could no longer hold him by then. He collapsed facedown in the snow, blood congealing in his veins, and Dreamland, seeing he was useless, abandoned him.
Abel laughed aloud in something like joy. Too late, he thought, too late. I beat you. And then, because he wanted to die with his face to the stars, he used the last of his strength to wrench himself over on his back. The moon cast its cold eye down upon him. The chill deepened.
Abel took a breath and closed his eyes.
A long time later, he didn’t know how long, he managed to heave them open again. He stared into the cage of shadows on his ceiling, listening to a watch tick in the darkness, time moving on again, the crack down the face of the world healing over at last. It was warm here, with the sheets tucked close around his chin. The snow was gone, or maybe there had been no snow. Maybe he had dreamed it. Maybe he had dreamed it all. He was drifting off to sleep, and still more dreams, when he heard a door somewhere open and felt a shadow fall across his bed.
“Dad?” he whispered drowsily. “Dad?”
The mattress gave beneath the shadow’s weight, and rough hands caressed his face. A whisper stirred in the darkness. “I’m here, son,” it said, “I’m right here.”
Abel tried to open his eyes, to look into his father’s face, but he was tired, he was so tired. So he settled for a final drowsy murmur. “I’m glad you’re home, Dad,” he said. “I’m awful glad.”
And then he slept.
45
They huddled together all night, high above a world struck dumb with winter, sleeping and waking and talking quietly in dreamlike intervals where time itself seemed to drag to a halt.
Lara remembered dreaming that the body across the room twitched and lurched up, the broken length of rail still embedded in its eye, and she remembered waking from the dream to stumble to her feet. “What are you doing?” Ben asked. “I want to know he’s dead,” she said. “I have to be sure.” And kneeling down by him, she made herself sure.
Later, she remembered wondering if Dreamland would come for them, as well. Ben didn’t think so. “It takes the weak,” he said. “It takes the vulnerable. People who are broken inside.”
“Aren’t we weak?” she said, knowing the answer already, but wanting to hear it on his lips. “Aren’t we broken?” she asked. He smoothed the hair back from her forehead. “Not when we’re together,” he said, and she knew that it was true, knew that hand in hand they could stand against whatever came—even if Abel came, or Dreamland in Abel’s guise. But Abel did not come.
And then, sometime in the far reaches of the night, when even the moon had fallen and the lights of the city were distant in the windows, she remembered his fingers in her hair, his lips against her lips.
And then the long night ended.
Just before dawn they stood once again in a window, looking out at a world where the black sky came down to meet the snow, and there was no line between them.
46
In the first blue light, Lara knelt to retrieve her necklace. It was still knotted in Fletcher Keel’s fist, the locket cupped securely in his cold, cold palm. She could not bring herself to break the silver chain again, and she would not touch his dead, gray fingers.
In the end, she left it.
47
In the ruined lobby, Ben found himself thinking of Paul Cook. There was brain knowledge, Paul had told him, and there was heart knowledge and they were not the same. The brain categorizes and classifies. The brain divides
.
The heart—the heart connects.
“You ready?” Lara asked.
“I’m ready.”
And then, like newborn children, hand in hand they stole out across the virgin snow.
Acknowledgments
Many people had a hand in bringing this book to fruition. The experts who granted me cheerful assistance and specialized knowledge include John Dodge, who provided information on caskets and embalming practices, and shaped my depiction of Lana’s funeral; Sherrie Bohrman, Sally Deskins, and Karen Singley, all of whom contributed to my understanding of various medical issues; and Steve Sanderson, MD, who developed the scenario of Katie Wright’s death and didn’t even charge me for an office visit. I hope all of these generous people will forgive me to the extent that I’ve inevitably misunderstood, misconstrued, or misrepresented the information they were generous enough to share.
I’d also like to thank my agent, Matt Bialer, and my editor, Laura Anne Gilman, for their apparently endless reservoirs of patience, their kindness, and their good advice; Barry Malzberg, Batya Yasgur, and Wayne Singley, for encouraging words during some of the darker moments; and Jack Slay, Jr., both for listening and for commenting on various chapters in progress. My parents, Frederick and Lavonne Bailey, also read the manuscript and made countless other contributions, large and small. Finally, I am especially indebted to those who had to live with me during the process: my wife Jean and my daughter Carson. No mere acknowledgment could convey the magnitude of their support, generosity, and love. I hope a simple thanks will do.
