Don hovered anxiously behind the table as the boy greeted each patron. The stacks on the table were long-gone, and the piles at the registers and on the shelves behind the counter were also sold-through. Don had Tom and George, a sixteen-year-old kid working a few hours a week after school, bring out all the boxes from the back, the cashiers ripping them open at a frantic pace to keep the lines moving steadily.

Two hours in, and Lake showed no signs of slowing. The kid’s an absolute machine, Don thought as he watched the boy shake every offered hand and casually sign each book, inscribing easily when asked, laughing along with the awkward humor of the acolytes, nodding at their own stories of near-death, of dreams, of visions, of heaven. Don hadn’t noticed the boy’s father leaving. He’d been bouncing between the counter and the signing table, checking the front door and the storage area. He’d been busy.

And where the hell is Sue? Don felt anger rising in his chest, in his neck. Their biggest event of the year and he couldn’t see any of his people on the floor. The line was still over a hundred people long, and those that had their signed copies, Don noticed, weren’t leaving. They were camping out in nooks and crannies of the store’s main floor, their books open on their knees, clutched in sweaty palms, their eyes wide, devouring. As Don scanned some of these people where they huddled in clusters, his vision of the room darkened, as if clouds were thickening outside, blocking the sun. These people look drugged, he thought. Their mouths were slack, eyes glassy, empty. He saw one guy, in a white rumpled suit and disheveled hair, drool as he turned the pages, his chin wet with it, a silver string connecting his face to the words.

He looked back to check on the kid, who had the energy and savvy to meet his eyes with a grin and a wink as he signed the book of a young woman wearing a short, bright-red dress and five-inch heels. As Don watched, she kneeled over the table, pressed her palms beneath her breasts and pushed her cleavage forward. The boy just smiled and raised his ass from the chair, pushed the pen across her tits like a Big Ten quarterback after winning a championship game.

“Hey!” Don said and took a step toward the table. The woman just giggled and grabbed her book, stepped off the dais and into the crowd. Don turned to the boy.

“You shouldn’t do that,” he said, half-heartedly and with all the authority of a substitute teacher. “It’s not right.”

“Sorry, Don,” Lake said, but his blue eyes danced as he greeted the next person in line.

Don dropped to a knee beside the boy’s chair, lowered his voice. “Where’s your father?” he asked, but Lake ignored him, laughing along at some stupidity with the middle-aged woman he was signing for. Don watched another minute, feeling suddenly and inexplicably like an outsider. He stood up, wanting to pace, his anxiety and frustration quickening his blood, tightening his neck and shoulders. A sharp headache pierced his temple and he rubbed at it.

“Fuck this,” Don mumbled and, figuring the kid could hold his own for a few minutes, stalked toward the rear of the store to find his missing employees and the good god-damned Pastor Joseph Divine.

DON PUSHED THROUGH THE DOOR marked “Employees Only” and walked briskly past the small managerial offices toward the storage room—essentially a small warehouse with a rolling door for deliveries, scattered stacks of pallets and a wall of Post-It flagged books set to be shelved or returned. He threw open the metal door, ready to cut loose on whoever was idling back there while he was sweating out the biggest event of the season by himself.

To his surprise (and slight concern), the warehouse was empty. He saw a few empty pallets where the extra copies of Meet Me In Heaven had been stored, but no employees—lazy or otherwise—were in sight.

Anger tilting toward confusion, he turned and walked back into the hallway, made a left toward the employee entrance and the small break room… and stopped.

The door to the break room was closed. Don had never seen this door closed, didn’t realize the room even had a door. It had always been wide open, the room well-lit for employees who dipped in to eat a sack lunch, buy a soda from one of the vending machines, or a cup of coffee from the constantly replenished brewing station. Confusion turned into caution as he approached slowly, gripped the handle.

A pulse from the metal handle sizzled his brain like a jolt of electricity. The air thrummed and his vision flickered, reality jagged and stuttered like film caught in a projector; a bass-heavy buzz filled his ears. He mumbled a curse, shook his head, pinched the bridge of his nose, and shoved the door inward.

The first thing Don noticed was Pastor Joseph, leaning back against a white Formica counter, head bowed as if in prayer. The second thing he noticed was the pastor’s ghost-white legs, followed immediately by the realization that the man’s black suit pants had fallen to his ankles, fabric spilled over his shoes onto the linoleum floor. Before him, on her knees—her head tucked into his crotch and animated with an eager, voracious bobbing motion—was Sue. Her dress had been torn, or opened, and pushed down past her thick waist. Her bra lay on the floor near the upturned soles of her dingy black shoes. Her bare back was pink and fleshy, and jiggled like a Jell-O mold as her head and mouth did their sordid business on the pastor.

“Sue?”

The pastor looked up and saw Don across the room. Don looked away from those shining eyes and back to Sue. She grunted and smacked like a pig neck-deep in a trough. A fat line of blood slid down the pastor’s leg, slipping from beneath Sue’s chin and splitting his white thigh from groin to kneecap. To Don’s astonishment, the pastor was grinning broadly, not in the least concerned about what was happening to him, nor Don’s awareness, his violation, of their act. For her part, Sue didn’t even flinch at the sound of her name and carried on with the same veracity as before.

Don felt the world grow heavy and spin. The ceiling of the break room—white fluorescents and stained foam tiles—glowed bright, a pale yellow that stretched upwards for miles. A stark blue sky swirled like smoke within the walls, giving the space a temporary appearance, as of something in transition from one dimension to another. Don groaned and held fast to the door he’d pushed through for support, for solidity.

Seeing Don’s stupefied expression must have tickled the pastor, for Joseph began to laugh—a deep, throaty cackle that permeated the small room like dusty explosions. His eyes widened as he glared at Don with insane glee, the whites swallowed by a sparkling black, glittering like a night sky filled with a single star. They spiraled inside his pale face, adding to the illusory dissipation of reality, and Don didn’t know whether to scream in anger, or horror, or fear. Or madness, a part of his mind screamed, but he pushed the thought away, forced himself back to the moment.

“Sue!” he cried, this time sounding every bit terrified, like a man calling back a friend whose foot was aloft, ready to step down onto a mine. “Sue, please …. Sue, what the fuck?”

Sue released the pastor from her mouth and turned with a ferocious, animal glower toward Don. To his shame, he saw the tips of her breasts plainly as she did so. Giant, fatty sacks of flesh with dark nipples that stared at him as accusingly as her dark, threatening eyes. Her lips and cheek and chin were red with blood.

“Fuck off, Don!” she snarled, teeth bared, and turned eagerly back to her business. Pastor Joseph guffawed even louder at this, and Don, physically sickened, backed out of the room, stunned and confused and ashamed.

It was then that he heard the first scream.

DON SPRINTED DOWN THE HALL toward the retail space and slammed through the employee door. More screaming now. What the hell was happening?

He entered the signing area, expecting chaos, a terrorist attack, gunfire … something. But it was quiet. Calm. Lake still sat at the table, signing books for those who remained in line, which appeared to be no more than fifteen or twenty now. Don looked around at the people littering the store, yellow books gripped in their hands. Despite his anxiety—there had been screaming I heard it!—he couldn’t help but notice the now-familiar slack looks on the faces of all the readers, the way some of their hands trembled while holding the books, their eyes moving with rapid side-to-side precision, as if speedreading. Pages flapped like the fluttering wings of birds, a roomful of white doves taking flight.

Then he heard it. A gargled groan. A death-rattle.

Deep in the aisles, near Psychology. He moved closer … heard it again. A moan of pain … of defeat. A plea.

A few faces from those reading their books tilted up, eyes targeting the noise, but those eyes found Don and went quickly back to the pages. Some wore small, knowing smiles on their faces, like classroom children avoiding a teacher’s scowl by pretending to work.

Slowly, Don walked toward the Psychology section, closer to the strange sounds of struggle, of a dying animal ….

And found Tom.

His neck had been sliced open from right earlobe to the jugular notch at the base of his throat. The blood from the wound pumped fresh torrents over his flesh and into the drab brown carpeting. Tom’s eyes were wide and empty, his face blood-spattered. His blue vest was soaked to black, the white shirt underneath scarlet. His name tag was unreadable, his identity hidden by a wet curtain of crimson. A book on Carl Jung lay splayed open by one clawed hand, as if he had reached for it while falling, pulled it down into the darkness with him.

Don, numb with shock but, more deeply, burning with terror, immediately spun around and ran for the entrance. The police! he thought. There are police out front! A squad car ….

He made it to the front doors, found them closed tight. He struggled to pull one open and was not surprised to find it bolted shut. He patted his pocket for keys, but the ball of jagged metal had vanished, his khakis flat on his thigh.

Panic rising, he put his face against the glass. He banged his fist against the door, yelled out. “Hey!”

The two officers were gone. The curb where the patrol car had rested all morning now empty. Don slapped his palm against the glass again and again, harder now. The doors rattled but did not budge. “Hey! Hey!” he screamed.

But no one came. No passersby, no curious garbage men, no dog-walkers or street vendors. Pressing his cheek to the cool glass, he looked left and right, but the street was empty. And dark.

Impossible! It’s the middle of the day, he thought, and jerked his face toward the sky. Charcoal-gray clouds billowed far above the building-tops. The sun was blacked out. Don’s first thought was that a thunderstorm was rolling in, but part of him knew it was something else, something unnatural and sinister. Something you’d see in a horror movie, or a dream.

He backed away from the doors, heard murmuring from behind him, swelling. The beginning of a sad, broken hymn; the early tendrils of a Gregorian chant. He turned to see Lake walking amongst those who had gathered, all of them now on their knees, many with hands raised in passion, muttering nonsense. Most read from the book.

The chanting was not English. The sounds were guttural, choking. But in unison there was a clarity that Don could not deny. Something triggered in the back of his brain, that sharp heat he had experienced earlier that morning…

And the veil fell away.

The crowd was hollow-eyed and gray. The books moldy black ruins. The boy shone like a star as he went amongst them, through a grayscale world, tapping foreheads and outstretched hands.

“Dream,” he said, then touched another. “Dream.”

One-by-one the followers collapsed in ecstasy. Fell into the dream.

Despite himself, Don walked toward the gathering, toward the boy who wanted to show them the way to Dreamland, to the new Earth, to the pale sky and the gold-ringed moon, to the creatures who crept in the woods and flew across a blood-red sun, twisted and perched on golden spires. To the acolytes who scrambled at the feet of high priests walking down diamond streets. To the new Gods.

Unknown hands pressed hard on Don’s shoulders, forced him to his knees. The lights inside the room seemed to flicker and dim; the great windows facing the street grew dark as night. Feverish, terrified, afraid of the exultation that coursed through him, Don looked up in time to see the boy approach, his blue eyes bright as flames, his black hair spilled long over his pale skull, his lips red and smiling.

Tears fell down Don’s cheeks and he laughed aloud as the boy reached a hand toward him and gently tapped his forehead. The familiar sensation of a liquid heat that spurted from the top of his spine and into his brain consumed him fully. A volcanic eruption of white-hot light blasted wide behind his eyes, a tingling, dissolving warmth spread over his skin…

And then no more. Nothing but the dark passage which led to the light, and the undying echo of the boy’s ethereal, eternal, whispered command:

Dream.