There was a full moon overhead turning the black night purple and I could make out Orion, Cassiopeia and the two dippers juxtaposed, a wild melee of constellations drawn out more starkly than mere Greek imagination. The wind blew straight up from the ground, inflating my pant legs and lifting my bangs into the night. I turned around and tried to focus on the world, but too many things were shifting in and out, at first seeming far away but then, after a blink, being at arm's length. When had I been drinking? Nearby a red neon sign blazed "Bar" above a white, nondescript wooden door.
A newspaper box was chained to a nearby street lamp and I walked over and knelt down to read the date on the paper but couldn't find one. The headline, all in bold, black letters, read "THE END IS NEAR." I dropped my hand to my side and felt the hilt of my sword in its scabbard. I looked up and down the deserted street at the dormant automobiles; across the street in the playground a swing tangled and untangled and tangled again in the upward wind while the slide and monkey bars stood quietly.
The bar door burst open and Sarah tumbled out. She was dressed in a blue business outfit, her hair piled high in a bouffant. Her briefcase followed her out the door a moment later, arcing high through the air and crashing onto the pavement in spray of white papers that immediately took flight and swirled in the air. She looked up from the ground, her eyes wide with fear, her palms scraped and bleeding.
"Nick, oh, Nick, we've got to get out of here," she said frantically.
"Where do we have to go?" I said calmly.
"We have to go, Nick, help me," she pleaded. "I broke one of my heels and I'm no good at running without shoes."
"Run to where?"
"Away. Please," her voice dissolved into sobs and she shook her head. For a moment, she warped to the other side of the street and then she was back in front of me. It was as if I had looked at her through the wrong end of telescope for a moment before turning it back around the right way.
"Okay, but where? Where are we going?"
There was a rumble in the distance that soon washed over us, making it impossible to distinguish from it originated. Sarah began to cry. I stood up, curled my fingers around the sword's hilt and looked down at her.
"C'mon, what do you want me to do?"
The rumble turned into a deep, throaty chuckle in four-four time and I reached down, grabbed Sarah's jacket lapel and pulled her to her feet. Mascara ran down her cheeks in thin, black streams and her eyes were surrounded in dark puddles. I laced the fingers of my left hand through her right hand and pulled her along behind me as we quickly walked down the street.
"Oh, Nick, where are you taking us? Is this the right way?" Sarah asked. "Why didn't we leave when we should have?"
"We're leaving now, baby, c'mon," I said and led her along.
And then a sewer grate tripped me and I sprawled on the street, smacking my chin on the pavement while my sword clanged noisily against the asphalt. There was blood in my mouth and I let it drool out as I lay on the street. There was a shriek behind me. Sarah's voice. I rolled over to see her over the shoulder of the Monster as it ran down the street with great bounding steps. I sprung up and raced through the shadows after them as the Monster turned a corner into darkness. I pulled the sword from the scabbard and charged along, sword held out like the Olympic torch. I turned the corner moments later and saw nothing but a short alley, dumpsters and a wall at the end. No Sarah. No Monster. No sound. No wind. Only darkness and quiet.
"Sarah," I shouted, my voice echoing off the walls.
Then a shadow blackened the area where I stood and I turned to see the Monster. Its red eyes glowed menacingly, its breathing was loud and raspy, its breath stale. The Monster flung a paw out and knocked the sword to the wall and it fell with the clatter of a handful of coins dropped on a tin plate. I backed down the alley and the Monster took one step and stopped and placed its arms akimbo, cocked its head to the side and growled.
"Sarah," I shouted again, looking up to the tops of the buildings hemming him in. If only I could leap three floors. "Sarah," I shouted again.
And then the Monster was on me, grabbing each shoulder and lifting me up to its eye level, its jaw gaping wide as
"Wake up, wake up, for God's sake, wake up," Sarah said urgently, her arms on his chest as she shook him into the mattress.
Nick stared at her darkened form and swallowed hard, feeling a dull pain on his tongue and tasting blood in his saliva. His back was covered in sweat and he stuck to the sheet beneath him.
"Are you having another nightmare?" Sarah asked.
Nick took a gulp of air and nodded. "I, ... I dreamed the Monster had gotten you and I couldn't get you back."
Sarah tucked some hair behind and ear and bit her lower lip. "You were tossing in bed and mumbling my name over and over."
"I was screaming."
She touched his chin with a finger. "It was just a dream, shh."
"But it got you. I was trying to get you out of somewhere when it came out of nowhere and got you. Took you away and then when I caught up to it, you were gone."
"I'm right here," she said softly.
"But it took you. And then it grabbed me," Nick said, sliding up and sitting against the headboard. "It took you and there was nothing I could do. I had a sword, even."
"Shh," Sarah said. She leaned forward and put her arms around him and kissed his cheek. "Nothing happened; it was only a dream."
Nick nodded and swallowed hard, his saliva thick with phlegm and blood. "I need to get a drink of water."
Sarah nodded and he walked out of the room, poured a glass of water and sat down in the living room. On the coffee table sat a bottle of Scotch, half empty, and a glass. He shook his head, remembering he had been drinking, lightly, he thought, as he and Sarah watched television. She had herbal tea. Not even Scotch had helped, tonight, he thought.
And the Monster had touched him. Lifted him up and shaken him. He took a sip of water and lit a cigarette. What would it have done had he slept another ten or fifteen seconds? Killed him in his sleep? Unloosed the symbiont fully into his consciousness?
He dragged deeply and shuddered. He pulled the waistband of his boxers to the side and stared down at the lump on his side, it appeared no different, and wondered if it were only a lump. It had to be just that -- a doctor had said so. Just a lump of fat placed asymmetrically. He pressed the lump with his index finger: it was soft and malleable like the layer of fat just above his hip. There was nothing to indicate it could be anything other than ordinary flab in an odd place.
"And these dreams can't possibly have anything to do with anything," Nick said in a stream of smoke aimed at the ceiling.
He walked back into the bedroom and smiled at Sarah. She was sitting up against the headboard, her head laying lazily against it and her eyes half-closed as she fought off sleep. She smiled sleepily back as he slipped beneath the covers.
"Are you going to be okay?" she asked.
Nick shrugged and then nodded. "Yeah."
She leaned over and kissed him lightly on the cheek. "Well, let's get back to sleep; we've got to be up in a couple hours."
Sarah turned out the lamp on the nightstand and Nick closed his eyes. Moments later, Sarah shook him awake.
"Nick, phone. It's work."
Nick sat up and took the phone as he looked for the clock radio. It was just after four.
"Hello?"
"Hey, sorry to wake you, Nick, this is Lee Bittner," the voice said. Lee Bittner was the overnight copy desk chief whose additional duty was listening to the police scanner and dispatching sleepy, often drunk, reporters to crime scenes, water main breaks and bad highway accidents. Nick grimaced.
"What's up?" Nick asked.
"There's a big fire about a mile from your place. On Strathmore Street. Sounds like a residential house or something," Bittner said. "I've already sent Viet there, so he'll meet you. Call me if it's anything so I can set space aside."
"Yeah, sure. Thanks," Nick said, handing the phone back to Sarah.<
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"What is it?" she asked.
"A fire. Somebody's house is burning down and I get to go ask the people how they feel."
Twenty-minutes later he turned onto Strathmore and saw a half-dozen fire trucks parked helter-skelter on either side of the road, their red lights twirling maddeningly. He parked his car at the police line, showed the police officer his credentials, and walked down the sidewalk toward the burning house. Neighbors wearing bathrobes and sweatpants lined the yards on the opposite side of the street, their arms folded as they looked on with bewilderment and sorrow. Then Nick realized it was Bill Maxell's house that was spouting yellow flames into the night. He stopped and stared at the smoke pouring from the roof of the house. In the front yard several teams of firemen aimed hoses at various points of the building, the streams of water splattering the roof and jetting in through broken windows. Videographers from the local news stations hovered about, training their cameras on the fire. Nick looked around for Maxell and didn't see him.
Nick pulled out his notebook and walked closer, spotting Viet crouching next to a tanker truck and aiming his lens along a hose and over the back of several firemen. He walked over and stood alongside him.
"How long you been here, Viet?" Nick asked.
Viet looked away from his camera, keeping it pointed at the house, and scrunched his nose. "Eh, I don't know. Half hour, maybe."
"See the owner anywhere?"
Viet nodded. "He's talking to some cop. I got a couple of shots of him bawling his eyes out a little while ago. Good stuff. He's over there, I think," Viet said, tilting his head toward a police cruiser at the end of the row of fire trucks.
Nick walked over and peeked around the fire truck. Leaning up against the hood was Maxell, a blanket thrown over his shoulders and his arm wrapped around a thin woman with graying hair. They stood expressionless, staring up at the flames as if hypnotized. He took a deep breath and took the last few steps.
"Not exactly how I thought we'd meet again," Nick said as he stepped over a hose and stopped a few feet from Maxell.
Maxell looked at him. It took a second for him to recognize Nick.
"Nick Case, hello," Maxell said, not moving. "No, I never expected this." He paused for a second and added, "This is my wife, Susan."
Nick licked his lips and looked over at the house. There would be no saving this house; the flames curled out of every window and the flowers lining the beds along the base of the house had already dried out and burned.
"Do you know how it started?" Nick asked.
Maxell shook his head. "No. One minute we were sleeping, the next minute the smoke alarm was going off. All of them were going off. We just jumped out of bed and ran outside. Everything was already burning. Everything."
"Who called it in?" Nick asked, turning off his feelings and slipping into journalist mode. It was easier to ask questions this way, pretending to be a figure rather than a person. The only way to ask about someone's pain was to purposefully detach oneself from empathizing with it. He was always amazed, afterward, anyone answered.
"Stan Conner from across the street called. He said he heard an explosion or something that woke him up. He told me he just looked out the window and saw our house burning and then saw us run out into the front yard."
"No one else inside?" Nick asked. Explosion?
Maxell shook his head.
"What about your paintings? You don't have sprinkler up there, do you?"
Nick saw the woman's shoulders drop and her head tilt down as he asked.
"No," Maxell said, tears filling his eyes as he looked up at the top of the house. "They're all gone, now. All gone."
Nick stood silently next to them and stared up at the flames. After a few minutes he backed away from them and began searching through the crowd on the other side of the street for Stan Conner, who, when found, described the early moments of the fire, of the windows being blown out and glass fragments flying out like shrapnel.
"Do you have your cell phone handy?" he asked Viet a few minutes after leaving Stan Conner.
The firemen had the fire under control and the flames were slowly shrinking back into the house as the eastern horizon relinquished black to gray.
"Yeah, in my bag. Here," Viet said, pulling the phone from his camera bag and handing it to him.
Nick called the office and spoke with Bittner, telling him to hold some space for photos and a story on the fire of a local art collector whose collection was destroyed. Bittner wanted to know how long it would be and they haggled for a while over the length before Nick, growing agitated, told Bittner to enlarge the photo if he didn't write enough copy. By now one of the fire crews was rolling up its hose while the another continued to spray the roof while a third crew had moved inside the front door.
"Hey, I gotta go. Good stuff, I think," Viet said, stuffing his camera into his bag and walking down the street to his car.
Nick looked around and saw that the Maxells had gone. The crowd on the other side of the street had also dwindled down to an assortment of housewives and older children preparing to go to school, all of them catching the last moments of the tragedy across the street. He jotted a few more notes and turned toward his car to find Detective Tagget standing in front of him.
"Well, good morning, detective, how are you?" Nick asked.
"Why am I not surprised to see you here?" Tagget asked.
"Just a coincidence. I live close by so the overnight editor called me. And you?"
Tagget smiled a thin straight line. "Just trying to find out what the latest twist in the story is. And, this is off the record, this is quite some twist. Who'd have thought?"
Nick looked over his shoulder at the smoldering house.
"What do you mean?" Nick asked.
Tagget cocked his head to one side and shrugged. "It'll be interesting to find out if they really lost their paintings in this fire," Tagget said, pulling a cigar from the pocket of his blazer and lighting it purposefully. "I mean, with such a totally devastating fire, who'll ever know if what's in the frames on the third floor was what was really there three months ago? Not me, not you, not an insurance adjuster."
"You think they just burned their own house down?"
Tagget shrugged. "Who the hell knows? But you have to admit, it's pretty odd that a guy who lost some paintings to thefts a couple of months ago now loses everything, his whole collection, to a fire."
"It could just be bad luck."
Tagget took a deep drag off his cigar and blew the smoke up into the brightening sky. "Nobody's luck is that bad. Somebody's setting somebody up to take a fall and I can't wait to find out who the sucker is."
TWENTY-TWO