“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.
AUTUMN SUGAR
THE BOY’S NAME IS SAM. The missing dog—the family dog—is named Tucker, a Springer Spaniel with shaggy, chocolate-patched fur often tangled with bits of leaves and snapped twigs after a spirited run around the Jones’s wild acreage, a domain of half-tamed grass and thin woodland that partially encircle the cream-sided two-story Garrison Colonial, the only home Sam and Tucker have ever known. But now Tucker is nowhere to be found and Sam, only six-years-old, grows tired of searching. Of calling: Tucker! Tuuu—cker! Come here, come here boy! He’s hot inside his blue jeans and wool sweater, annoyed how the coarse collar itches and irritates the sweaty skin at the back of his neck.
Fatigued, he sits heavily beneath the naked, wiry branches of a sugar maple, breathing hard through doll-like lips, his cherubic face dappled with crawling shadow. Around him stands the hemline of an urban forest filled with fat old maples and gnarled oaks, the dark canvas occasionally broken by a spattering of white-barked birch. Only a few weeks prior these trees were alive and vibrant, bursting with hair the colors of fire—bright orange and deep crimson, flares of mustard yellow. Now the hard-barked pillars that surround him shoot from the earth crowned only with a tangle of bare limbs, wretched bent arms reaching toward a flaccid sky in futile agony, desperate to touch the aquamarine pate, demanding their color be returned.
But that silent, distant sun droops listlessly toward earth, weary as an old man reaching the end of a long walk. The deepening red an alarm signaling the dying of the day.
Sam lets his hands rest on the grass between splayed legs—small fingers toying with the star-patterned points of a crisp maple leaf—and stares up into the thickening blue. The hazy cycloptic eye of the interloper moon glares down, out-of-place in the late afternoon, boldly sharing the sky with its sallow counterpart. The sight of it confuses Sam. He knows—has been told—that the moon only shines in the nighttime, and its appearance throws him off balance, disturbs his way of thinking, pricks holes in his self-assurance of knowing the truth of things.
He will ask his father about this new burden, about the day-moon, and about the whereabouts of Tucker. All in a moment, after he cools off a bit, when his racing heart no longer thunders in his ears.
