I had never seen anything like it in my life.
I screamed and pulled my hand back, then found myself falling backwards over the bench, head over heels. I landed hard on the floor, my heart pounding like a hammer inside my chest, an ache at the back of my head where my head had struck the linoleum.
Jude laughed. “I told you it wouldn’t hurt you.”
“What ... what was that?”
She took back the bag, folded it neatly into fourths, and then stuffed it into the canvas tote.
“A daydream.”
“What?”
“Your daydream to be more specific.”
“But what about yesterday?”
“That was yours, too.”
“The snow? The stars?”
“All of it. Yours.”
“Impossible.”
“But true.”
“Prove it.”
“Close your eyes,” she said.
I may be a goof, Bryan, but I’m not an idiot. I wasn’t going to trust her again. Not that easily.
“Okay, don’t close your eyes. Just focus on something in your thoughts.”
“Like what?”
“Anything. It doesn’t matter. An apple. A poster. Your favorite movie. A Halloween mask. Anything.”
It should have been easy, but it wasn’t. My head was reeling with the image of that creature. I tried to think about familiar things: my room at home, the desk, the television, the last movie I had watched, the knife I had received from Uncle Chet on my birthday.
And it happened just like that. The knife appeared. It was that tactical knife Uncle Chet called a Generation IV. Remember that one, Bryan? It opened smooth as velvet, nice and easy, like a key locking in place? Remember that? The ported grip? The matte-silver finish?
It was a nice little knife, but it was hovering in the air right in front of my face.
“How do I get rid of it?”
The blade slid out of the handle grip, the tip inches away from my eyes.
“Jude?”
“Think of something else.”
“What?”
“Anything. It doesn’t matter.”
You find yourself staring at a knife and your mind goes into its own little version of panic, Bryan. Let me tell you. I mean, your thoughts really aren’t your own anymore. They pour through your head like alphabet soup, some of the letters forming words, most of them forming gibberish. I don’t know where I got the image of the feather, but suddenly there it was ... floating in place of the knife, the color striations as clear and as real as if I had just plucked it out of the tail of a pheasant.
Jude laughed again. “See, that wasn’t so hard.”
I watched the feather float back and forth on an invisible current until finally it touched down on the table. Then it was gone.
“What happened to it?”
“It lost your attention.”
The cafeteria was nearly empty now. There were some fourth grade girls across the room, dressed in Brownie uniforms and huddled around a tray of beads one of them had brought for making necklaces. The last of the food had already been removed from the serving line, the stainless steel counter cleaned up, most of the kids on kitchen duty let go. It was as alone and as quiet as it ever got at school.
“How come I couldn’t do this stuff before?”
“Before when?”
“Before you.”
“You weren’t ready,” Jude said.
8.
Weed was an odd little town. Just south of the Oregon border. Flat, nestled in a sprawling valley, the elevation somewhere around three or four thousand feet. It looked a little like a forgotten town, a place where people a hundred years from now might stop and visit because over the past century it hadn’t changed much.
I got off I-5, off the beaten tract, and found myself driving through old town, past the Cedar Lanes Bowling Alley, the Palace Theater, The Pizza Factory. Rick had given me directions, but in my haste to get them down my handwriting had been so sloppy that I was having trouble reading it now. Though ... if it turned out that I couldn’t find the place that might not be so terrible when all was said and done. I could probably convince myself that I had at least made the effort. More of an effort than he deserved.
I wondered what he looked like now, how much he had changed. I wasn’t sure I would even recognize him anymore. It had been nearly twenty-five years. A person changes in twenty-five years. I had changed.
I glanced again at the letters on the seat beside me, then pulled to the curb to see if I could figure out where I was and how I was going to get there from here. It was no longer a matter of hours now. Only a matter of minutes.
9.
From my brother’s letters over the years:
What scares you, Bryan?
I mean really scares you.
Sleep does it for me. That’s when I don’t have any control over the pictures in my head. I close my eyes, drift off to sleep, and the movies start rolling. I’m just another member of the audience. What happens happens.
That night I dreamed about Halloween. I think that’s what she wanted. I think that was what she had in mind from the very beginning. Halloween. Looking back on it now, it was the perfect time, wasn’t it? All Hallow’s Eve. The festival of the dead. A time when the devil and the witches are free to roam the earth and cause their havoc.
In the dream, I was at the school Halloween party, though it was outside, at a beach somewhere, with a huge bonfire and flames reaching ten or fifteen feet into the air. Everyone was dressed in costume. From the Mad Hatter to the Wicked Witch of the West. I was the Grim Reaper. It felt weird, but I liked it. Jude was there, too. Dressed as a ghost. Her white, airy gown flowing like wings on the ocean breeze. I don’t remember much of what went on during the dance, only that at the end when everyone stood in a circle around the fire and removed their masks, my mask wouldn’t come off.
It was a cause for amusement at first. The others gathered around, taking some sort of twisted delight in watching the goof struggling with his mask. I fell to my knees, prying my fingers under the edges, trying to rip it away from my face, nearly suffocating in the process. But it held on. It wouldn’t let go. And gradually, one by one as it dawned on the others that the mask wasn’t going to come off, the laughter began to turn to fear.
You know why, Bryan?
Because suddenly I wasn’t the goof anymore.
Suddenly I was the Grim Reaper!
I woke up with a start.
The bed was soaked; I had been sweating like a damn race horse. I pushed back the covers, sat up, and leaned against the wall, my mouth dry, my breath short. There was a faint hint of sulfur in the air, a thin layer of smoke hovering just above the level of my desk, tendrils of the stuff still rising out of the wastepaper basket.
I didn’t even get out of bed to open the window. I pulled the covers up around me, and sat there for what seemed like hours, rewinding the dream over and over again until I couldn’t find a way around it any longer. A door had been opened, Bryan. It was as if I was standing in the doorway looking in on an ugly part of myself, a part I had always suspected was there, but had managed somehow to keep hidden.
I slept the rest of the night sitting up, my back against the wall. In the morning, the room was still full of that smoky musk. I opened the window to air it out, and then discovered the pile of ashes in the wastepaper basket next to my desk. Left over from the dream, I figured. Because dreams and daydreams were kissing cousins, and if daydreams could get me a feather, it only made sense that the ashes – in all their smoky glory – had made their appearance in the same fashion.
But there was something else, too. I had been only vaguely aware of it last night, but this morning, it seemed remarkably clear in my mind. Someone or something had been in the room with me.
I asked Jude about it at lunch that day.
“Residue,” she said.
“What?”
“Leftovers. From your dreams.” She leane
d forward and lowered her voice. There was something different about her. I didn’t know what it was exactly, only that something wasn’t quite right. “You don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?”
“It’s all made of the same stuff, Rick. Your dreams. The snow in the cigar box. The feather from yesterday. They all come from you. From inside your head.”
In all honesty, Bryan, I don’t think I really understood any of it before that moment. Then it came home to me like a light going on and the shadows scurrying back into the recesses of a darkened room with only the stairs illuminated. The magic was in me. Not the cigar box. Not the paper bag. Not even Jude. It was me.
“Residue,” I said, mostly to myself.
“Exactly.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. You’re starting to get it now, aren’t you?”
“I think so,” I said, looking into her blue eyes and finally realizing what it was that was different about her. The cafeteria was awash in fluorescent light, casting a false brightness over everything. Everything except Jude, who looked as if she had just stepped out of a slightly overexposed photograph. The color had begun to fade from her face. That was what was different.
“Are you okay?”
She looked past me at a group of girls exiting the cafeteria. It was almost as if her eyes were both luminous and transparent at the same time. “I didn’t think it would happen so soon.”
“What would happen?”
“Nothing important.”
The cafeteria was nearly empty. Outside, the sun had shown itself for the first time in nearly two weeks and even the Brownies were soaking up the warmth. I could hear the clatter of dishes coming from the kitchen, a teacher’s voice as she scolded some kids for littering, and in the back of my mind I could hear Jude’s voice whispering, It’s just the residue, Rick. Residue.
She didn’t just look different, I realized. She looked ill. She looked like an old tee-shirt with the color washed out. Pale, I suppose you might say. But more than that. If the light had been at her back, I think I might have been able to see right through her.
“No. Something’s wrong with you,” I said. “You don’t look right.”
“I’ll be fine.”
There are different kinds of monsters in the world, Bryan. I know you think I’m the biggest monster of all, but you’re wrong about that. And you’re wrong about what you think happened that night at the Halloween party. Jude knew what was going to happen long before she ever met me. And she knew it would make her well again.
10.
There are different kinds of monsters in the world.
I turned into the parking lot of the Motel Ranchero, and drove slowly around the outer edge, past an old Chevy pickup with a camper shell, past the weeds growing out of the asphalt, past a dimly-lit cubby-hole with a handwritten sign on the door that said Office.
Rick hadn’t mentioned anything about staying at a motel. I had assumed the number he gave me was an apartment number. But I probably should have known better. I don’t think he ever stayed longer than a month or two in any one place.
I pulled into one of a long line of empty spaces, turned off the engine and sat for a moment, staring at the door to room 118. It was morning now. A bank of angry-looking rain clouds was rolling in over the mountains to the west. The temperature had dropped a bit.
I don’t know exactly how long I sat there, but eventually, Rick pulled back the curtains and peered out through the motel window at me. He looked like a stranger I guess you could say. His hair was shoulder-length, stringy, gray over the ears. He held a pack of cigarettes in one hand, along with a lighter, and an unlit cigarette in his mouth.
He waved me in.
It was a long walk from the car to that motel door. I hadn’t told Traci this, but I had come here because I wanted to put an end to the letters and the calls, and I knew the only way that was ever going to happen was if I looked my brother in the eye and told him in no uncertain terms that our relationship was over. We had been brothers once, but that had been a long time ago. Maybe not in Rick’s mind, but in my mind, it was a dead relationship.
He opened the door before I got there. “Oh, man, you came. I knew you would. I knew it.”
Rick didn’t look any better up close than he had at the window. It had been three or four days since he had shaven, and his beard, unlike the gray in his hair, was as black as ever. He lit the cigarette in his mouth, blew out the match and tossed it at the ash tray on the table next to the window.
“Come in, man. Sit down. I know it ain’t the best place in the world, but I cleaned it up for you.”
I sat in the nearest chair.
“Let me get a shirt on, okay?”
The first thing I noticed, besides the fact that he had, indeed, cleaned up the room, was how thin Rick had become. He was a couple of years younger than me, almost thirty-eight, and he had always been on the slight side, but he looked haggard, as if he had been living on the streets a good part of the past twenty-or-so years. I also noticed the tattoo. It was on his right arm, up near the shoulder. The Grim Reaper, holding his scythe in one hand and flipping off the world with the other.
“Look,” he said, reappearing with a shirt. “I know you think I’m a nut case. And I don’t blame you. But what happened that night ... it’s not what you think.”
“What did happen?”
He had opened the bottom drawer of the dresser and was digging through it, looking for something, when he stopped and gave me a crooked glance. There was the oddest expression on his face. For a moment, I thought he might break down and cry, but he didn’t. He nodded slightly instead. “You know, that’s the first time you’ve ever asked me that question.”
“Is it?”
He nodded again, more visibly this time, then pulled an old shoe box out of the drawer and sat in a chair across the table from me. He placed the box on the table between us. “You really want to know?”
“That’s why I asked.”
“It was like a dream, Bryan.” He gazed through the window. A middle-aged woman, her husband and two kids, were hauling luggage out to their Datsun. Shadows moved across the parking lot as a cloud blocked the sun and swallowed them up as if they were only shadows themselves. “I mean sometimes I think back to that night and it’s like it happened to someone else. It’s like a scene out of movie, something I saw as a kid that belongs to me now.”
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.
Rick took a long draw on his cigarette. “Jude was there, you know. At the party? Go on, she kept saying. Do it.”
“Do what?”
“You’ve got to understand, Bryan. It was Halloween. That was the whole point. I just thought it would be a big laugh. That’s all.” He took another long draw on his cigarette, and stuffed it out in the ash tray. “But she wouldn’t let up. Go on, have a little fun, she said. We had talked about it for days, and I won’t deny it sounded like fun. Fact is ... once it got going, for awhile at least, it was fun.”
“Rick,” I said.
He looked at me.
“You’re stalling.”
“Yeah, I guess I am.” He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, looked at them, then tossed them aside. “They were everywhere that night. It was like snapping your fingers. I didn’t even have to close my eyes. An image would come into my head and there it was, alive and kicking, right in front of me. Just like that. I can’t remember them all, there were so many. I remember the scarecrow. He had this dirty straw face with these two empty eye sockets, nothing else, and he was carrying this scythe with an old rusty blade that looked like it had been out in the rain for years. I remember that. And I remember this huge griffin or gargoyle or some such thing, I don’t know exactly what the hell it was. Its wing span was like ... just incredible.”
Rick stared off into his memories, his voice just above a whisper and fighting through a tremor. “There were others. This guy that was nothing but bones and a little hanging
flesh. He had these perfect teeth. All I remember about them is how they kept chattering, like he was trying to say something. God, there were so many others. Snap! Just like that they were everywhere.”
I looked at my brother, who seemed a thousand miles away, and felt an odd mix of loathing and sadness. It had been more than twenty years and Rick was still entwined in his own self-denial. I remembered the scarecrow, too. Or at least the story of the scarecrow. The part Rick always seemed to forget, though, was that he had been the one who had taken the scythe to the party. I still don’t know where he had gotten it from, but for weeks afterward the newspapers reported that he had wrapped it tin foil to make it look like a harmless prop.
“At first it was kind of funny, you know. Watching the kids freak. Half of them were out the door before anything happened. And the other half were heading out right behind them. I didn’t think anyone was going to get hurt. I mean, that never even crossed my mind. It was just supposed to be a prank.”
Rick glanced at me, as if he were checking to see how much of this I was going to believe, then his dark-eyed stare returned to the window. “I don’t know exactly when things started to go wrong. I guess I didn’t realize anything was wrong until I heard the screaming and saw one of the kids fall. I think it was Manny Bunkin who went down first. The griffin swooped down on him from behind. It just seemed to fly past him, as innocent as that. Then Manny’s head kind of fell off to one side of his shoulders and he collapsed. It was crazy after that. I mean you couldn’t make any sense out of what was going on.”
“Thirteen kids were dying,” I said tightly.
My brother fell silent.
“Thirteen of them, Rick.”
“Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I haven’t had nightmares about it every night since it happened? I was there, man. I saw the blood. I saw the dead bodies.”
The Night In Fog Page 2
