Chapter Four
After dinner I sat reading and listening to some piano music on CD. It was a relaxing time for me. I had forgotten my broken sleep the night before, so I was more tired than I expected. Around nine or so, I drifted off to sleep in my chair with my book still in my hand.
When I awoke, the book was gone. The chair was gone. The camper was gone. I was outside somewhere and it was pitch dark. I tried to find the moon and there was none to find. Not that it was behind the clouds or something. There was no moon. Blackness engulfed me. Wherever I was was almost totally dark. No sight and no sound. Quiet. Dark. Totally alone.
Quickly, I determined I was dreaming. It had to be. I had fallen asleep in my chair with my book in my camper. That was gone now. So, this had to be a dream.
It was so dark I could not get my bearings. I felt solid ground beneath me. Dirt. Not concrete or flooring or anything man made. Maybe even a little spongy, like it hadn't been trod in a long time or many seasons of leaves or pine needles had built up.
I put my hands out in front of me and immediately touched what felt like tree bark. Smooth, cold, rough in small places. A pine tree from the feel. I slipped to the side of the tree and continued on, not knowing what else I was supposed to do. Several steps later, I encountered another tree. Maneuvering around it I stumbled over a root. I assumed it was a root because it was on the ground among the trees. I caught myself and continued on.
Another couple steps and I could feel a cool breeze. Seemed like a cool breeze mixed with a slight, misty effect. It was slightly damp and tingled against my skin where I was bared to the elements. The breeze carried a very salty almost metallic flavor on it as it swirled around me. And it was swirling. Not drifting. Not lifting, but swirling. Back and forth and side to side. Not a normal pattern of mist moving on the evening breeze. Almost as if the mist was creating the breeze and not the other way around.
It struck me that it was cool here but not wintery cold. If I was outside my camper, it would have been very cold. I was wearing indoor clothes, no coat or even a sweater. Once again I was unsure of where I was. This was not like any dream I had ever had before. I took another step and I fell.
My hands landed on something softer than the ground, but just as cold as the trees I had touched. I pushed myself upright immediately. The dark was starting to unnerve me. That was when I smelled it. A foul smell that reeked of death. Something dead was obviously close by. Maybe a deer or some other animal. And it had been dead a while from that awful smell.
I skirted the tree roots and made another few steps before I stumbled again. I didn't fall this time. I caught myself with my hands and pushed myself back up to my feet. Standing, I considered the roots I had just tripped over. They were huge. Maybe I was having a dream about big roots because they had given us so many problems recently in our digging around the campground. It seemed a normal occurrence to me. I was dreaming about what was on my mind. Roots. Now the roots were my nemesis as I tried to navigate around them. Satisfied with my conclusions, I calmly moved on in the darkness surrounded by that putrid stench of decaying flesh.
“I wish I had some light.” I spoke out loud to myself.
I felt the sound would bolster my nerve. Like a scared man backing down a bully by trying to make a louder noise. My words came out strained and dry. My throat was parched like a hot, dry wind had scorched it. That was when I noticed the air was cool and misty but not damp or humid like the ocean breezes I had become accustomed to since moving to the coast. The misty feeling was not so much a dampness as it was an electrical stimulation on the nerves of the bared skin. A light tickling of the senses approaching what I could only classify as dampness. Mist. But without water in it. At least it was not dampening my skin. Just making me tingle.
A few more steps and a stumble or two. I tripped again and landed wholly on something very soft and it rolled slightly beneath me with my shifting of weight to get back to my feet. The stench of rotting flesh was overwhelming. Something was stuck to my hands. Thick and oily feeling. I must have stumbled into the dead thing whatever it was. The thought unnerved me and the disgust I felt rolled deeply in my most inward parts. I felt my stomach heaving and then I threw up. My supper blasted out of my throat and into the darkness.
I pushed myself up, embarrassed that I had lost my dinner in such a way. But the stench seemed to be closing in all around me. It was awful. Standing there in the darkness I wished again for some light.
Then there was a sound that made my blood run cold. An evil, chilling wail that split the night like a siren building in both volume and pitch as it assaulted my ears. I had never heard any sound like it before in my life. A sad sound and yet a mad sound. Both at once. Like someone who has suffered a great loss and has now lost it themselves. Angry at the whole world for something and screaming their refusal to submit. All that flashed through my head as I tried to get a bearing on the scream.
It came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. There was a stirring in the breeze and it seemed to swirl the sound around me like a speaker was being flown around me and confusing me with its placement. I tried to peer through the darkness but only blackness met my stare. No matter how hard I tried, I could not see anything around me. All I had was the soft ground beneath me and the occasional roots and a dead carcass that smelled really bad. This was the weirdest dream I had ever had. Not a nightmare. Not a fantasy. Just a really weird dream. The kind that when you remembered it later you would try and figure out what it meant.
Standing still, I already figured the roots represented the hard work and trials of building the camp. What was the darkness and the dead carcass and the screaming? Weird. Really weird.
A few more steps and I felt the ground grow harder, more rocks and gravel than forest debris. I knew that feeling beneath my feet. One of my roads. Or at least, a road of some kind. I still had no idea where I was. As I walked further into what I considered a road, the wailing noise subsided and then dissipated altogether. Silence flooded back in.
That was when I noticed no sounds at all. Complete silence. Like a sound vacuum or something. No light. No sound. That probably meant something in my dream world, too. But I had no idea what.
I used my feet to define the edges of the road and determine which direction it went. Not that knowing where a road in the darkness went was any consolation. It was just something productive to do. Then I stood in the middle of the blackness in the middle of the road. I could hear my mother's gentle chiding in my head. Don't stand in the middle of the road, child. Well, if mom was here right now, she would stand in the middle of the road, too. Not being able to see anything, the road held a sort of comfort for me. A familiar feel. At least it was identifiable compared to the nothingness of the soft earth I had traveled over. Being able to identify something was a comfort.
I told myself it was one of my roads. Since the roots represented my work issues, I figured the road represented my campground roads. Psychology was never my best subject but logic was. Since one part of my dream dealt with the campground it was logical the rest of the dream did too.
Suddenly there was a glow coming over a rise in the hill. I could see the rise framed in the glow of a strong, white light building behind it. The darkness around me was not retreating but my eyes were focusing better and better on the only light available over that rise. Judging from the direction of the road I had assessed and the direction the light was seemingly coming from, I decided that something was coming over the rise in front of me on the road.
Suddenly I had a feeling of deep dread. Darkness. Silence. Dead carcass. It all spelled out death in my mind. Death or dying or dead. What if what was coming over the rise was death itself? Or something coming to make me dead? A large lump formed up in my already parched throat. It was as though I knew that whatever was about to make its appearance was coming for me.
The lights seemed to be flickering and moving back and forth as they mounted the rise from the other side. Then sound returned. Not a good s
ound either. A crunching, grinding, pulverizing sound assailed my ears. Made louder by the absence of other sounds, I'm sure. Something big was climbing the hill from the other side. And it was heading straight for me.
Thought of flight danced through my head. I had no fight or flight instincts. Only flight. But where? And how? It was too dark. If I ran I would surely slam into a tree. Maybe not the first one but a tree all the same eventually. I had visions of the broken lower tree branches, hardened by weather and drying over the years, ripping my flesh as I passed by. Maybe skewering me if I ran dead on to it. Dead on. Maybe that was what this dream was all about. Some kind of new wave nightmare. A harbinger of things to come. All my hard work and commitment making me dread the coming of death.
And I was dreading it too. The light was brighter on the rise and getting brighter all the time. The crunching sound of whatever it was pulverizing the ground as it advanced like a shriek in my ears. I searched the darkness. There was no avenue of escape available. Too dark.
Resigned to my fate, I turned to face the advancing death that was hunting me. I would face it like a man. Since I could not run, I would die standing still. Bracing myself for what would show itself on the rise, I calculated I had maybe a hundred feet of space between me and where the light was cresting the rise. I couldn't be sure but I felt it was an accurate calculation. The best I could come up with in such darkness.
The light continued to grow brighter. The noise continued to get louder. My imagination was running away with thoughts of huge monstrous creatures. Bulky, shapeless, full of teeth and bad attitudes. Maybe not just one but a whole herd of them coming to pulverize me into the earth before leaving me to become part of the landscape I had been tearing up. That was my impression. This dream was all about me tearing up the woods and building a campground. The woods did not like it. Now they were sending the carriers of death to exact a revenge for my meddling, human impudence.
In my mind, as I awaited sure death, it made perfect sense. I didn't need reality to know that my dream was making me aware that I had forgotten my own conscience in all this. I was digging up mother nature for the sake of some money. While I was in school I would have never thought like that. Green was my way to go. Natural. Nature's way. Digging up the earth and burying plastic lines and pipes was not nature's way. I felt a pang of guilt even as I sensed the imminent showcase of nature's death squad.
The light blasted through the darkness and blinded me. I put my eyes down to ward off the shock and pain of the bright light. The lights swirled and bounced around me and the sound of its advancement was a thundering grind now. I thought about running again now that the light would show me a path through the trees. But that was fantasy. As soon as I got away from the light, I would be in complete darkness again. I needed the light but could not afford to have it. Death had found me and it had found me wanting. Unworthy of dignity. Unworthy of explanation. Death in the darkness. The ultimate silence in a place of deafening silence. I accepted it. I cringed but I accepted it. I had brought it on myself.
Then the light swerved and a sliding, crunching, grinding sound filled the night. The light stopped moving. The noise stopped, too. I reasoned that whatever creature had been dispatched to kill me, it had stopped when it reached me. I hoped for a reprieve. I hoped for a second chance to do good. My mind was not functioning properly. Fear had reduced me to nothing more advanced than an eight year old wanting his mommy. There was a brief moment when I thought of all the horror movies I had ever seen and wondered how all those heroes and heroines ever got their feet moving. I didn't know what to think. I had come to the end of my thinking and found I was dumb. I had no answers and resented the fact I ever believed I had any. I was disgusted with myself as surely the whole world was now viewing my disgusting life in its entire, faked existence.
“John?”
A woman's voice called out to me. But it had direction. Not like the other sounds I had been plagued with. This one was coming from somewhere. In front of me. I lifted my eyes into the light. I heard that old joke in my head. “Don't go towards the light, John.” It made me smile.
I wondered if that was how your mind flashed back through your life just before death. Not pictures so much as memories. I could see a smiling, satisfied face clearly in my mind as the eyes of the creature bored into my head.
“John. You all right?” The woman's voice again. Familiar. Far away. A long ways behind the light.
I tried to see through the blinding stare of the creature that called my name. My legs were shaking and my adrenaline was pumping full force. I could not have run if I wanted to. It was taking everything in me to keep my bowels from voiding. I was determined not to embarrass myself further.
“John! What's the matter?”
The voice was more adamant. Why did it not attack? Why call my name? The words seemed familiar in a strange context. The voice seemed familiar but out of place on the monster. Why was I still alive? Was the creature toying with me? My mind was racing but going nowhere. I thought that now would be a good time to jump. My mind had strayed to the many times I had jumped into my bed to keep whoever lived under it from grabbing my feet. I was losing it. Tears were coming now. I could not stop them. I tried to stand firm but I was reduced to a sniveling blob of jelly and I slid down on the road to prove it.
“John! John!” A sound of smaller crunching and pulverizing.
So it would start. I would maybe feel it. Maybe not. I was not sure of anything at that moment. I could not think. I could only fear. Fear was my life right then.
It touched me. I fainted. Mercy was with me.
I awoke in the hospital. I know it was a hospital because everything was white. Nobody decorated in white any more except hospitals and rental properties. There was no reason for me to be in a rental property with beeping machines around me. Hence, my opinion I was in a hospital.
Slowly, I did an inventory of my body by moving each part in succession. All accounted for and present. I had survived my dream and somehow made it to a hospital. I tried to remember but there was no memory to access. Or that link had been erased in my mind.
It was quiet. Not like my dream. Normal quiet. There were sounds. Beeping from machines. A phone ringing far away. The sound of a windy day beating against the window. The noise of a heater fan circulating air.
It was daylight, too. The sun was streaming in through a parted, lacy curtain, also white. There was a TV mounted up in one corner of the room and a large. Wooden door off to my left.
I was alive. I was in a hospital but had no idea how I got there. The dream. The creature. They came roaring back to me and I cringed even though I was safely in a bed inside a hospital room with plenty of light around me. I immediately felt embarrassed. A grown man afraid of his own nightmare.
Still, I was in a hospital. How did that happen?
“Hello, there,” The voice sounded happy to see me awake.
I turned toward the voice and saw a nurse in a white smock with little colored chickens on it approaching. Nurses were good. Nurses were safe. I felt safe immediately. The creature from my dream was chased away by her presence. Reality always triumphed over dreams. I breathed a sigh of relief as she neared.
“Feeling better?” she asked.
“Than what?” I managed with a crusty screech from a very dry throat. I remembered the dryness in my dream.
“Better than you were two days ago.” She said it like it was a matter of fact. No cause for concern. Something she dealt with all the time.
“Two days?” It was the only thing my mind would latch onto. Two days? Since when? Starting when?
“Almost,” she laughed. “Brought you in about three in the morning. This is the second sunrise since then. Two days.”
“Who brought me in?”
“Police.”
“Police?”
“That's right, Sweetie.”
She set about taking my pulse and all those other things nurses do.
“She's been
back several times, too, to check on you.”
The nurse leaned closer and gave me a conspiratorial wink and said, “I think she kind of likes you a little bit.”
“She who?” My mind was spinning again. Hospital. Police. She. What happened? Was I in an accident?
“Was I in an accident?” I did not know what else to ask. I was grabbing at anything to make sense of my situation.
“We don't know, Sweetie.” She pulled my arm out and wrapped one of those blood pressure bands around it. “Just found you wandering out in the woods the way I heard it. You were covered with blood and smelled like you had been rolling in road kill. Couldn't find any drugs in your system, though.”
“Drugs?”
“Why else would you be out in the middle of the night, roaming the woods, blathering like an idiot about some creature coming to kill you?”
“Blood? My blood?” I resumed a frantic search of my visible body parts for signs of injury. I must have missed it.
“Not that we could tell, Hon.” She was pumping air into the collar around my arm.
I was embarrassed. Apparently I had told my dream, or part of it, to someone. I could see how my dream would draw attention to myself and cause people to think drugs. It kind of tickled my funny bone a little. My dream must have been something for them to hear. Now everyone in town was thinking the new guy is doing crazy drugs out there in the woods. As Ricky Ricardo often told Lucy, I had some big 'splaining to do.
But blood? Where had the blood come from? Who or what had the blood come from? My head was spinning. Too much mental activity just after waking up. Or maybe there really was something wrong with me. Drugs? I didn't do any drugs. I barely ever took an aspirin.
The nurse finished her tasks and left me alone with a friendly smile and an admonition to just rest and let nature take its course. I laid back on the stiff hospital pillow but rest was the last thing I could command my mind to do. If my mind had been a race car it was doing a hundred miles an hour on an oval track trying to figure out all the turns.
An hour later Kathy came by. When I saw her I put two and two together. The nurse said a cop had brought me in and then she had come back by to check on me. Kathy. Well, at least something was making sense. A puzzle piece placed. I was slightly embarrassed I had not put it together before she came in. Too many factors and variables for my mind to travel the logical path. Too many irrational fears filling my mind.
She looked great. Not just her beauty, although she was something of a sight dressed in her civilian jeans and t-shirt. There was just something about her that made me realize that the real world, the world where she was, was where I was too. She drew me into her world like a flame beckoning a moth. And I would go willingly.
“How you feeling, John?” She seemed genuinely interested. Almost a worried concern written in her face.
“Okay.”
I was not sure how to answer that. I didn't know what had gotten me here yet so I was not sure what answer made it sound like I was okay now. I just know I wanted to sound okay.
“You scared me pretty good out there,” she told me and her hand squeezed mine like we had been touching all our lives. It felt good. Right, somehow. I wondered if she had been holding my hand while I was out for two days.
I gave her a quizzical look. She removed her hand and stepped back. I shook my head slowly and gently, like I was trying to clear my mind somehow. I was sorry she had taken her hand away. I liked it.
“What?” she asked.
I looked down at the space between her hand and mine like she was.
“Not that,” I reached out but she was too far away for me to reach her now. But I could see she understood my gesture.
“Then what?” She stood still, watching me. Assessing.
“What happened?”
“Don't you remember?” She moved closer. She kept her hand to herself.
“Not really. I remember going to sleep while reading and waking up in a dream that was all about darkness and silence and rotting carcasses. Then some bright lights came to kill me and the next thing I remember is waking up in here.”
“Well, you weren't dreaming when I saw you. You were standing in the road as I came over the hill. I had to slam on my brakes to keep from hitting you. When I called out to you, you just stood there and acted like you couldn't hear me. Then all of a sudden you collapsed on the road. I tried to lift you into the car but I couldn't do it. I called for back up and they helped get you into the car. You were covered in blood and I thought you were somehow injured. You smelled awful and were acting strange, not responding to questions and such. Just babbling about monsters and strangers and bad smells. We thought maybe something had happened. You know, poisoning or something.”
“You mean drugs?” I tried to smile.
“Well, yeah. That's an option, too.” She gave me one of her best smiles. If she was interested in me like the nurse and I believed, Kathy was probably very glad to hear that my drug tests had come back negative. I returned her smile.
“What happened?” She still wanted to know.
“I don't know. One minute I was sleeping comfortably in my chair. The next I'm in a dream trying to find my way through the woods.”
“You sure it was a dream? Maybe it was an hallucination,” she suggested.
“Maybe. I never had one before, though.”
She laughed and wrapped her warm fingers around my hand again. It felt so good to be in contact with her. Like we were together and belonging. I felt ten times better now. Dream or no dream. Like things were right again. I had met very few people that made me feel like their presence was making my life better. This woman was one of them.
“Leave it to us to get a new member of our community and he turns out to be full of surprises.”
“That's not the kind of surprise I like, though,” I admitted.
“What kind do you like?” She was beaming with happiness and enthusiasm. What a smile. I could imagine myself perfectly content to gaze a that smile the rest of my life. I was fully conscious of where my mind was taking me.
I grabbed her hand with my other hand, the one with tubes still attached. She looked down at my gesture. I smiled up at her.
“I like the kind where you agree to go to dinner with me.”
“That's not a surprise.” She laughed at me. I started to feel rejected. “That's a done deal.” She laughed again. “Whole town's been talking talking about it. Seems my radio call for help sounded like I was too involved to be rational to a lot of them. People put two and two together and come up with whatever they want to all the time. We're no different here in this town.”
“Will you?” I asked again.
“Sure. Long as we can go somewhere out of town. Enough people in our business already.”
I laughed and nodded my head affirmatively. We had business – together. That was better than a vitamin shot during flu season.
“Besides, we've got to figure out what you were doing out there on that road. And where did all that blood come from. It wasn't yours. Doc says you're all whole. No cuts. Nothing.”
“I thought I was dying.”
I let the thought out. I had been hiding it in the back of my head. Scared of it. I felt she deserved to know whatever I knew. She had found me. She was involved. Or maybe I just wanted to make sure she was.
“What?” Her surprise was expected.
“I thought something was coming for me. To kill me. I smelled something dead in the woods. I think I touched it, or fell on it or something. I thought I was going to die, too.”
“Maybe that's where the blood came from. That explains the funky smell on you, too. But how'd you get out there in the first place? Sleepwalking?”
“Never did it before.” I answered her.
“First time for everything,” she quipped. “Starting a new business is stressful. Maybe all that stress is causing you to sleepwalk.”
I remembered thinking that my dream was all about my campground. Ma
ybe she was right. Maybe I was stressing out too much. It was possible. I shook my head. I didn't know. It bothered me that I didn't know. If the dream was all about the campground and the stress I was feeling, then what part did that awful wailing play? Where did it fit in? Maybe a subconscious part of me was screaming to get out or something.
“I don't know what happened. I am glad you were there to rescue me, though.”
“I did, didn't I?” She smiled more to herself than me.
“Did what?”
“Rescued you.” She looked pleased with herself. Like she had not thought about it before.
“My rescuer.” I breathed it out as a sigh of relief.
Kathy leaned down and hugged me. Her perfume wafted around me and her warm skin felt good against my face. It was an unexpected piece of heaven at a time when I needed a little bit, too. Before she lifted back up she whispered in my ear.
“That's not the only service I can perform for you.”
She stood back up and squeezed my hand. Her eyes told me that she was serious. Fun loving, yes. But serious about life and her relationships. She had chosen me to protect. She had chosen me. And I was going to choose her. I knew it now. It was not some wishful thinking. It was a full on desire that I had to quench. That I would quench. An unexplainable joining of two souls over an insignificant meeting, but unmistakably real. And solidly joined. A miracle, to be sure. But my miracle all the same.
As she held my hand I wanted to pull her down to me and kiss her. I wanted to show her that everything in me was just as protective of her. I don't know why but I felt that I had to protect her. She had rescued me in my time of need. I determined in my heart right then that I would always be there for her. I had to be. I felt it was my destiny. All of life had worked its ways to get me to this point. And now I was going to reach out and grab the golden ring. Kathy was my golden ring.
All of my life I had been working to get to this one place. I had arrived.