(III)
Patricia dreamed of
smoke and fire. She was running through the woods somewhere near
the moonlit water, and though fires raged around her, she felt
nothing even remotely like fear. Instead she felt invulnerable,
safe. Heat wafted about her, but caused no injury. If anything, it
only stoked the heat of her own desires.
“That’s what the heat
is,” a voice calmly pointed out. It was Dr. Sallee sitting in a
chair by a stand of trees. “The symbology of the dream mechanism.
Our will is guided by conscious and subconscious impulses. It
defines us as individuals, in subjective terms that are too complex
for the concrete world around us: dreams.”
The voice drifted
like the smoke. Patricia tried to focus on the doctor’s words and
discern what they might mean with regard to her specifically, but
too many other things nagged at her, such as her calm in the midst
of this raging forest fire, and the hot tingling of her skin. She
felt flushed; she felt . . .
Oh, God . . .
“Just a dream,” she
muttered to herself. At least she knew that. “It’s just a dream, so
I don’t have to worry about it.”
“That’s right,” Dr.
Sallee agreed. But why did he look dead all of a sudden? Face drawn
and pallid as old wax? The dark suit he wore was dust-tinged, its
fabric frayed.
. As though he’d just
climbed out of a coffin after being buried for a long, long
time.
“The death of
Freudian dynamics, I suppose,” he said, disheartened.
“Psychological thesis is dead in this day and age, I’m afraid. I’m
dead.”
For whatever reason,
then, Patricia laughed.
“But you’re right,”
he repeated. Why had his voice reduced to a dark gurgle? “This is a
dream, so you don’t have to worry about it.”
Patricia peered at
him through smoke.
“And you don’t have
to worry about what you do.”
The smoke engulfed
him. The fire blazed behind her, so she ran, though she still felt
no fear. Her feet crunched twigs and leaves, the earth warm beneath
them. Her sexual urgency—her feminine heat—rose with the flames. At one point she broke
through the trees, the smoke hanging behind her, and realized she
was wandering along the edge of a lake—no. . .
A pond.
The realization
seized her then.
This is the pond at Bowen’s Field. . .
.
Moonlight blared in
her face. Even this late at night she could clearly make out her
reflection on the pond’s glass-flat surface.
The vision gave her a
mild shock.
She stood pantiless
in a sheer nightshirt made even more sheer by profuse perspiration.
She seemed a caricature of female sexuality, her parts exaggerated by some aspect of the craft of
the dream. Her breasts were ample in life; in the dream, though,
they were even larger, higher, so swollen she could’ve been
pregnant. The damp nightshirt clung to them, making no secret of
nipples just as magnified, with fleshy ends prominent as olives.
The dream had deepened her curves and widened her hips, and when
(with no volition whatsoever) she raised the hem of the nightshirt,
she saw that she was not only missing her panties, but missing
pubic hair as well.
Her desires squirmed
with her nerves. The night’s heat drew more sweat from her skin,
leaving her in a veneer of indeterminable lust.
It was Ernie who rose
from the water: naked, his smile sweet and eyes reaching.
Patricia’s eyes yearned back, but her own smile was clearly one of
wantonness, the greed to slake her own needs moistening her. She
simply stood there, lifting her hem again up past her
navel.
Why should she feel
guilty now? It was a dream, and even Dr. Sallee—evidently a doctor
whose professional philosophies were dead—had affirmed that she
could do what she wanted. And when she’d talked to the real Dr.
Sallee on the phone, he essentially told her that she had defeated
the trauma of her past.
This dream proved
that, didn’t it? Here she was at the very site of her rape, but she
stood now as a normal and very untraumatized sexual
being.
Her sensibilities
corroded. She felt lewd, trampish. Was this her real self coming
out? Was this the real Patricia? Or was
the dream just giving her the luxury of cutting loose in a way she
couldn’t in real life?
“It’s only your
sexual socialization evolving,” Dr.
Sallee’s unseen voice
guaranteed. “Superego versus id. The societal verisimilitudes of
modem man reinforce the self-maintenance of our regrettable sexual
repression.”
She tried to make
sense of it, but couldn’t.
“We’re all animals,
Patricia. We just act like we’re not. Hence the repression and its
debilitating effect. Ultimately, it’s what? Unnatural.”
What am I doing? This is a dream. Am I waiting for my
doctor’s permission to have sex? She nearly laughed at the
absurdity—in a dream no less. The idea behind his comment hawked
down on her. We’re animals but we pretend that
we’re not.
“Cavemen didn’t
repress themselves,” the doctor’s voice assured her next. “Neither
did cavewomen.”
Well . . .
Her eyes hooked on
Ernie. He was naked in the Water, on his knees. The dream, too, had
augmented him into a puppet of male sexual features all optimized.
A broadened back, shoulders, and neck. Chest and biceps like pumped
bands of meat. The surreally large genitals rising at the vision of
her.
“Come here,” she
said, a slut now. “And bring your mouth. You’re going to need
it.”
Ernie obeyed without
pause, a slave to her summons: He crawled to her on hands and
knees: every woman’s perfect man. Patricia remained standing, the
dream enforcing her need to be higher than him, to reduce him to
subservience. She gave her plumpened breasts a shameless caress
through the top and felt their gorge of nervous desire gust to her
loins. She parted her legs some more, closing her eyes with a
commariding smile, waiting for his mouth to give her succor. . .
.
But nothing
happened.
She looked down again
and saw that he was gone without a trace.
Unless the gentle
ripple in the water could be called a trace.
What crawled out next
wasn’t Ernie. It was something thin, gray, and very
dead.
A woman. She couldn’t
have weighed ninety pounds. Gray skin seemed stretched over a
struggling framework of bones, and Patricia could see those bones
moving as the woman crawled hence. Hollow eyes looked up from the
skull-like face showing through the open vee of straggly,
waterlogged hair. Patricia wasn’t sure—not that details mattered in
a dream—but it seemed that the corpse woman possessed crude
stitches about her waist, as though she’d been cut in half and
later reconnected by slipshod surgeons. A pendant with a stone of
some kind swung about the starved neck as she continued to
crawl.
“Flee this evil
place, child,” rumbled some semblance of a voice. Was that a
Squatter accent leaking through the corrosion that death had
brought to her larynx? “Run outta here now, and beg God’s grace to
go with ya. Run. Run.”
“Run from what?”
Patricia asked.
The cadaver collapsed
as though all of her joints at once had lost their connective
tissue.
Patricia’s query
wasn’t answered, and when she heard stomping behind her—something
coming out of the woods—she didn’t need an answer to run just the
same.
Her feet kicked up
splotches of mud when she dashed along the edge of the pond. Before
she could turn off in another direction . . . were there things in
the pond, close to the surface, looking at her or addressing her in
some way?
She didn’t want to
know. She plunged back into the woods and their moonlit darkness,
the fire still blazing deeper within. Smoke stung her eyes, and
when she felt small, fragile things crunching under her bare soles,
she realized what they were: cicadas, having been cooked to crisps
while trying to fly away
The stomping still
pounded behind her.
She thrashed farther
into the woods, hoping she was heading away from the fires.
Who’s following me? But was it even a
who? This was a dream, and that fact,
now, she had to keep reminding herself of.
“It’s something
you’re never meant to see.” Dr. Sallee’s voice somehow suffused her
head. He was nowhere to be seen, of course. “Sometimes we chase
ourselves. We’re our own worst predators. Could it be that the
person or thing that’s chasing you is actually an aspect of
yourself?”
I don’t care! she thought at this point. Now she
truly felt fear, and she expected more Freudian backlash when it
became apparent that her previous sexual arousal had increased
tenfold. I don’t believe that I subconsciously
want to be raped again! She felt absolutely sure.
Freud can kiss my ass! Her
dream-enhanced breasts - swayed vigorously beneath the tight fabric
of the nightshirt. Her nipples buzzed. Then—
Shit!
Patricia fell to the
ground belly-first. She’d tripped over something. A vine? A
branch?
No, because when she
looked back, she saw in a network of moonlight what it had been: a
severed head.
Dwayne’s head, she
knew.
And the wild
footfalls of her pursuer drew closer. But . . .
What’s . . . that?
Did she hear a
pounding in the back of the dream? Like
someone knocking on a door, she thought. But there were no
doors here in the burning woods. The woods signified her desires,
she knew, and the dangers that accompanied them, and her pursuer:
the unknown.
But what of the
pounding?
It scarcely mattered.
She heaved herself up, was about to sprint off again, but then she
saw another slant of moonlight painting the tree right before
her.
There was a design
carved in the tree’s bark . . . but was the bark bleeding? No, of
course not, it must be sap. And it was the design that riveted her:
a crude yet elaborate cross framed by the intricate etchings and
squiggles of the Stanherd clan’s symbol for good luck.
She squirmed, flat on
her back now. The dream was gone, and all she could feel were the
throes of orgasm, her nerves pulsing, her hand fervid between her
legs, and then—
“Patricia!
Patricia!”
Her sister’s
voice.
Patricia snapped
away. She was confused at first, for the moonlit darkness of the
bedroom matched that of the woods in her dream. Of course, she’d
wakened, and it was Judy who’d wakened her.
“Patricia, I’m so
sorry ta wake ya at this hour, but—”
Oh, Jesus . . . The first thing she noticed was
that her nightshirt—the same one from the dream—was pulled up over
her breasts. Her nipples throbbed in delicious pain, and she knew
how they’d gotten that way: from self-plucking. The sheet lay
aside, her legs splayed. She knew she’d been masturbating in her
sleep again, to the point of climax.
She second thing she
noticed was the smell of smoke.
“Is the house on
fire?” she blurted. Why else would Judy be waking her up so late
and so abruptly?
“No, no, dear me, no.
But—”
“And . . . I heard
this loud pounding,” she said, quickly dragging the nightshirt back
down.
“That was Sergeant
Trey, knocking on the front door.”
The police? “What did he want?”
“To tell me what
happened. There’s been a burnin’ on the Point, in Squatterville.
Now hurry up ’n’ put somethin’ on so’s we can go see.”
A fire on the Point. Real smoke, evidently, had
pursued her in the dream. “I’ll be right there,” she
said.
Judy turned before
she left, the slyest smile in the dark. “You were havin’ yourself
one racy dream, sister.”
Thank God she
couldn’t see Patricia blushing.
“Ain’t nothin’ wrong
with a gal takin’ care a’ herself,” Judy added. “Now hurry! We’ll
meet’cha out front.”
My God, Patricia thought when she left.
My own sister just caught me
masturbating. . . . She pulled on a blouse, shorts, and
sneakers. Before she left she glanced out her open window and saw
flames from afar.
It wasn’t the kind of
sight anyone would ever expect to see in a place like Agan’s Point.
Ever. Blossoms of flashing red, blue, and white lights throbbed out
into the night. Several fire trucks parked askew, tentacle-like
hoses reaching out. A half dozen police cars bracketed the end of
the perimeter—several state cars, Patricia noted—with poker-faced
officers prowling the scene. Patricia, Judy, and Ernie looked on in
macabre awe.
“Oh, Lord, no.” Judy
gasped.
“It’s David Eald’s
shack,” Ernie said, “so I guess that’s—”
Ernie didn’t finish
as the three of them watched firemen bring out a black body bag
atop a stretcher.
A smell in the air
nauseated Patricia; it wasn’t a stench she might expect; it was an
aroma—something akin to pork roast. Oh,
Jesus, she thought, her stomach flipping.
“That ain’t the worst
of it, I’m afraid,” Sergeant Trey. told them. His face shifted in
various luminous shades from the flashing lights.
“David Eald has a
daughter, doesn’t he?” Judy choked out the question.
Both Trey and Ernie
nodded at the same time, and a moment later a second stretcher was
carried out.
Had a daughter, Patricia thought.
The trucks had put
the fire out, a fire that had incinerated the dilapidated wooden
shed that had comprised David Eald’s home. Several trees had caught
fire too, leaving blackened posts in their place, smoke still
wafting.
“I know all the
electrical connections ‘n’ junction boxes were good,” Ernie said.
Did he seem worried that someone might think he’d made a mistake?
“They’re all to spec. I installed ’em myself, every hookup in
Squatterville.”
“Just one a’ those
things,” Trey offered. “Happens all the time, bad as it is. He ’n’
his daughter probably went to bed and forgot to turn off the stove.
The smoke conks ’em out in their sleep; then the place bums
down.”
A common tragedy.
You read about accidents like
this all the time
in the paper, Patricia acknowledged, and you never really think much about it. . . .
“There’re an awful lot of police, though. And why all the state
troopers?”
“That does seem
strange,” Judy added. “The nearest state police station is a half
hour away.”
“On account a’ what
happened earlier,” Trey said. “With the Hilds. They’re still
investigating that . . . and now
this happens.”
“But the Hilds’
murders and this fire can’t possibly be related,” Patricia
supposed.
“I don’t know about
that, not now.” Another voice sneaked up from behind. Chief
Sutter’s disheartened bulk stepped out of the
darkness.
Judy looked puzzled.
“Whatever do ya mean, Chief?”
“The Hilds were
closet druggers—crystal meth.” The chief’s eyes roved the cinders
that were once the Eald shack. “Ain’t much left a’ the place now,
but the state cops found some charred chemical bottles inside, and
a burned pot on the stove with somethin’ at the bottom of it that
they say ain’t food.”
Patricia immediately
remembered what she’d read on the Internet earlier. “A
methamphetamine lab,” she said. “Is that what the police
think?”
“They’re sendin’ the
bottles and other stuff to their lab for tests, but it sure looks
like it.” Sutter shook his head. “Kinda makes sense when you think
about it.”
It was pretty sad
sense.
Judy stood in
something like a state of shock as she watched the police and
firemen stalk about.
Patricia asked the
grimmest question yet. “How old was this man’s
daughter?”
“Thirteen, fourteen,
thereabouts,” Ernie replied.
Judy stifled a
sob.
“It’s all the damn
drugs,” Sutter regarded. “Goddamn evil shit . . .”
Patricia could feel
streams of heat eddying off the cinders. The night felt more and
more like something she was disconnected from—she was a watcher
looking down. This quaint little town really
is going to hell fast. Four deaths just in the few days I’ve been
here. Plus Dwayne . . .
The night swallowed
the heavy thunks of the ambulance doors. Radio squawk etched the
air. Patricia put her arm around her sister, who was already
blinking tears out of her eyes. Judy’s lower lip quivered when she
finally said, “I might have to sell this land after
all.”
No one said anything
after that.
And no one noticed
the split second in which Sergeant Trey smiled.