As always, he found himself marveling through the horror at the detail of the dream, which was more like a very vivid memory than a fabrication of his mind. There had been a bar, bordered by gently undulating palm trees and brightly lit with red and blue and green neon lights. Smoky air, the smell of beer and cheap well-whisky, people all around, crushing him in, the chest-tightening sensation of claustrophobia. Later, the interior of an old car, the seats cracked green leather, the edges of ragged tears sharp against the bare skin of his legs, a man reaching for him, then blood everywhere, warm and salty and thick in his mouth and on his chin.
John stopped sketching and looked down at the page, which was filled now with amateurish drawings of the details he could remember from the dream. As a child, he’d been instructed to do this by a psychologist his parents had taken him to see, and it was a habit with roots sunk deep inside of him. Not only did the act help John to remember his dreams, it also helped him externalize the images, to set them away in a safe place where they weren’t nearly as frightening. He capped the pen and tucked it back into the journal, then stepped inside the apartment and tried to shake off the dream.
His cell phone was lying on the Formica counter between the kitchen and living room. He flipped it open and pressed speed dial 2. The phone only rang once.
“Johnny.”
“Hi, Mom. I didn’t wake you up, did I?” There was really no reason to ask; since his father had taken over the farm in West Chester, Pennsylvania, his parents never slept a tick past five in the morning. Still, calling anywhere so early felt strange. John could picture her right now. She would be in the kitchen with a mug of coffee, sitting at the round oak table in the breakfast nook, looking out over the open fields that in a few weeks would sprout the first nascent stalks of corn.
Beyond the fields, near the barn, two long, windowless cinderblock buildings where the mushrooms grew. Before he left for college, it had been his job to harvest the mushrooms from their tightly layered beds of compost. It was work done in the dark, not because the light would hurt the mushrooms, but because the heat the bulbs threw off would. The growing buildings were like cool, dank caves. He was surprised at the wave of nostalgia that washed over him; he used to hate that chore, but God, how easy it all used to be.
“In my dreams,” his mother said in her gently accented voice, jolting John from the memory. “I keep waiting for that goddamned rooster to die, but I swear to God, it’s immortal.”
“Well,” John said, sitting down on the flimsy futon in the living room, “it is your birthday. I could hire someone to bump him off. Maybe even do the deed myself.” He lowered his voice and affected his best New York accent, which was still pretty horrible. “By midnight, he’ll be sleepin’ wit da fishes, whaddayasay?”
His mother grunted in mock approval. “Don’t tease,” she said, then added, “fuggedabout it.” With the slight lilt of her Mexican upbringing, the New York accent sounded both ridiculous and bizarrely exotic.
“Anyway,” John said, “I just wanted to wish you a happy birthday.”
“Sixty-three,” his mother said. He knew she was shaking her head. “How did this happen?”
“Oh, stop. You never paid attention to age before.”
She sighed. “I’ll get over it. Your father and I are going to drive over to Kennett Square for dinner tonight. Chez Maurice. That’ll be fun.”
“Is Dad there?” John asked.
“Out feeding the animals.”
“Well, maybe he’ll kill the rooster while he’s at it.”
She chuckled. “How are you doing, Johnny?”
“You know,” John said and sipped coffee, sneaking a glance at the clock on the DVD player, “same same.” He didn’t want to tell her about the intensification of his dreams; she’d worry about him and ask him if he wanted to come home, and although the answer to that question would be “yes,” he’d find a reason not to get on a plane up to Philadelphia. A meeting he couldn’t miss, a friend he’d agreed to help move, something, anything.
“Sounds exciting,” his mother replied.
“Like I said.”
His mother paused for a moment, then asked, “Any more dreams?”
“I don’t think they’ll ever stop entirely, but nothing too bad.”
His mother chuckled wryly. “John, you should think about coming home for a while, maybe the next time you have a break at school. For Easter, maybe. You could help out on the farm for a few days, get your hands dirty. They always say a tired body and a calm mind go hand in hand.”
“You should see if Widener offers a PhD in psychology.”
“Avoider.”
“Nag.”
“I love you, Johnny. Let us know if you need anything. We’re here for you.”
“I know, Mom. Happy birthday. Tell Dad I say hi.” He said goodbye and hung up the phone.
* * *
He pulled into the school parking lot at six-thirty. The sun was coming up over the swatch of woods beyond the football field, and John sat there and watched for a while.
Relatively speaking, he’d been teaching at the Denton School for a long time, nearly three years now. Before Denton, he’d worked at independent schools in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Ohio, spending a year or two in each spot, then moving on. College had been no different. He’d left his home in West Chester and headed off to Boston College when he was eighteen, but within two years a violent wanderlust came over him. The last two years of college he’d spent at UVA. Immediately after graduation, he packed up his few belongings and had been bumping around from place to place ever since.
His work references were excellent because John was a talented teacher, but sooner or later schools were going to start looking at his seeming inability to commit to a position and stop hiring him. This was part of the reason he had forced himself to stay put at Denton for as long as he had.
From time to time he went home to Pennsylvania, but every time he did, he felt like he was putting his parents in a bad spot. No, it was more than that. When he went home, he felt—he knew—that he was endangering his mother and father.
The first day would be fine, an inkling here and there that something wasn’t quite right, but nothing he couldn’t chalk up to the return to a once-familiar place, to somewhere you’d known so intimately as a child, but in which you were now nothing but a stranger, an interloper. And then night would come, and he would find himself going every five minutes to a window, looking for…looking for nothing out in the dark. It was crazy, the kind of thinking that marked not just paranoia, but real mental aberrance. Still, sometimes it was all he could do not to run, to drive away as quickly as possible, leaving the old farmhouse and barn and growing buildings forever behind him in a cloud of dust. As a result, most of his contact with his mother and father was over the phone, a fact that saddened John, especially now that both his parents were in their sixties, his father just south of seventy.
He had become comfortable at Denton, however, though he couldn’t deny the constant nagging feeling that he should leave and move on, a sensation that had intensified in recent months, even as the dreams had reestablished their prominence in his life. But so far he had stayed. He liked the people he worked with, the kids even more than the adults, and though he told himself he would leave after each academic year, he hadn’t yet. Of course, he would leave eventually, but he had no idea where he’d go—someplace completely unfamiliar, most likely, like Iowa or New Hampshire. For now, though, he was here.
On the radio, two local DJs were doing their daily Morons in the News segment, something about a farmer in New Zealand who’d tried to crossbreed a goat and some kind of lizard. Bullshit, no doubt, but not beyond the stupidity of man to attempt.
John turned off the car and, lugging a briefcase full of ungraded papers, headed for his classroom.
* * *
“Hey, John.”
The voice jolted him from his skin. He’d been grading freshman essays at his desk. When he looked up,
Suzie Clusky was standing in the door of his classroom, a Styrofoam cup of coffee in her hand. From behind her, he could hear the buzz of growing activity in the hall. Not loud yet, but it would be soon.
“Suze,” John said. “What’s going on?” As always when he saw her, he felt a mixture of sadness and longing. He and Suzie had dated for several months when John first signed on at Denton, and although that relationship had come to a somewhat bitter end, Suzie had, for whatever reason, allowed John to salvage a friendship with her.
“You okay?”
He looked up at the clock over the door and saw that it was almost seven forty-five. The bulk of the kids, most of them bus riders, wouldn’t get in for another ten or fifteen minutes.
“Yeah,” he said, manufacturing a smile. “Great. Never better.” But even as he said the words, he realized what he had been doing, and why she had asked. There was no essay on the desk in front of him. He had been sitting here for the better part of an hour, a pen in his hand, staring at…at what? On top of that, he remembered the way his reflection had looked in the mirror this morning—the dark shadows beneath his eyes, the unusual pallor of the olive skin he’d inherited from his mother. And he felt strange. Not from simple lack of sleep, either. His eyes felt too wide, his nerves raw; the world almost seemed to tremble in front of his eyes, as though it were supercharged. All he could remember was a few snatches of an imagined scene—a candle-lit room, filthy cots filled with moaning men and women. He was prone to these lost moments—had been since he was a kid—but they never failed to make him feel dislocated.
“You look like you could use some shut-eye.”
“Tell me about it,” he said. “But I’m fine, really. A little insomnia.”
She left, giving him a brief smile, and at around eight John’s homeroom started filtering slowly in.
Most of the morning went pretty well, considering the fact that John was running on reserves. Sleep had always come hard for him, ever since he was a small child. He was a victim of what his middle-school guidance counselor had called “night terrors,” but his hadn’t gone away as he’d gotten older. And now, in the past few months, they had suddenly tripled in power and frequency. Still, John figured he’d get through it; he always had before. For a while the dreams would be there every night—vivid, bloody, terrifying—and then, suddenly, they wouldn’t be. Until they were again. There was no way he could ever get used to such a thing, but over the years he’d grown accustomed to it, and sometimes that familiarity was the only thing that helped him keep going.
He taught four classes, his three sections of freshman English and a senior elective, so he had plenty to keep him busy. But by fourth period, his last class before lunch, he could no longer ignore the growing feeling of panic in his head and chest, the cool buzz all over his skin. It was something like the feeling he often woke with, a tight-throated sense of…of what John could only define as impending danger. The feeling was sharp and nearly acidic, like what he’d heard some people experience right before a tornado touches down; he almost went into the bathroom to see if his hair was standing on end. There was a tight pressure behind his eyes, as if they were swollen in their sockets, or as if his brain had suddenly expanded to fill the rest of the room in his skull.
After lunch, John had a free period, so he went to the faculty lounge and got some coffee, then sat down on one of the old, saggy couches. Normally, this was the time of day when he would try to catch up on grading or planning, but he knew that if he tried to perform any function that required mental focus, he would end up reading and rereading the same five words over and over. Images and words and physical sensations spun through his mind, but John couldn’t latch on to any one particular thing.
The school was situated on the edge of a heavily wooded park, and the best feature of the lounge was a large plate window overlooking the athletic fields, and, beyond those, the rolling expanse of trees that were just beginning to erupt into green life again. When John first came to Denton, he would take advantage of planning periods and walk through the woods on the well-worn paths run flat and wide by fifty years of cross-country teams. It was quiet down there in the mornings and the afternoons; the creek ran sluggishly along its banks behind Denton, not unlike the portions of the Brandywine River and Crum Creek he and his father had canoed when he was young, casting for small-mouth bass and trout.
Down below, on the soccer field, a group of middle-schoolers zipped around in brightly colored pinnies, chasing the black and white ball. All as it should be. But still, it wasn’t.
Feeling restless, John took his Styrofoam cup and left the lounge. He took the stairs down to the ground level of the school and had just reached the door to the main office, on the way to check his mailbox, when something stopped him cold. Voices raised, frantic, the sound of something or someone slamming into a locker.
Oh God, he thought, here it comes, then immediately: What does that mean?
Clarence Drake, the physics teacher, rounded the corner, coming from the building’s main entrance, a frantic look in his eyes, his face flushed so deeply crimson that John wondered if maybe he was suffering a heart attack or stroke. John was so shocked by Drake’s appearance that it took him a moment to see the wet blood covering both of his hands and soaked into the front and sleeves of his white Oxford shirt. There was a chunk of something wet and glistening on Drake’s electric-blue and maroon striped tie and John couldn’t take his eyes off it.
“Clarence,” John said, feeling suddenly breathless, “what happened? What’s wrong?” He looked Clarence up and down for an injury of some kind, but couldn’t find one.
Clarence lurched over to John, grabbed him by the shoulders. His fingers were hooked like talons, and they dug painfully into John’s shoulders. John flashed back to his childhood, when he had pulled a much younger boy floundering in the deep end of the pool to safety; Drake clung to him in precisely the same way, nearly unhinged with whatever he had seen. Fuck nearly, John thought, he’s done. Done and gone.
“Kyra,” Clarence said, and he was sobbing now. “Kyra Metheny. We were out front of the school working on her Doppler Effect project—she must have stepped into the—someone—someone ran her down! Jesus, John, someone ran her down!”
“What?” John felt the skin on the back of his neck constrict, felt a flush rising in his face.
“Someone ran her down! Hit her and drove off! Oh, Jesus, her head! It’s all over me.”
“Call 911,” John said, shoving Clarence toward the phone at the back of the lounge, and then he was out the door, sprinting toward the main entrance of the Denton School.
Behind him, he could hear Clarence still yelling, repeating the same two words over and over. “Her head! Her head! Her head!”
* * *
There was a crowd of kids, the rest of Clarence’s class, John knew, gathered at the side of the road, near the semicircular drop-off/pick-up port at the front of the school.
As John ran toward them, the heels of his scuffed Rockports clapping on the concrete, he realized that he could hear and see everything with a bizarre clarity. He’d heard of the intensification of the senses that accompanied an adrenaline rush, but this was the first time he’d ever experienced it. His head felt like it was stretching to allow all of the sensory details rushing to fill it.
From above, in the branches of the trees that canopied the entrance of the school, he could hear squirrels scrabbling over the rough bark; somewhere far down the suburban street, he could hear a dog whining to be let out; and though I-85 was a good two miles off, he could hear the six lanes of traffic rushing along as though he was standing on the shoulder of the Interstate.
Davey Stuart, a big kid from the football team who anchored both the offensive and defensive lines, turned. His face was completely devoid of color and John knew that he was in severe shock. When he spoke, his words came out slurred, as though he were drunk.
“Mr. B.,” he said in a tone so flat he sounded lobotomized, “there’s
something coming out of her head.”
John nodded, amazed at the preternatural calm that was filling him. There was still that acute awareness, but now it was accompanied by the sensation of total and complete control. A sudden thought stepped into his mind: It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be just fine.
“Listen, Davey,” John said, taking him by the shoulders, not as Clarence had done to John moments before, but gently, reassuringly. “I need you to do something for me, okay?”
Davey nodded, his eyes wide, the pupils unnaturally dilated, but as John held the boy, he thought he saw some sense of awareness come back.
John spoke slowly. “Go to the office. Tell them what happened. Tell them to call 911. Mr. Drake should have already, but we can’t be too safe. Got it?”
Davey nodded, and—it shocked John to do it as much as it must have shocked Davey to see it—John smiled. A small smile, but a smile nonetheless. A thought then, quick and terrible, but not frightening. Not scary.
Something is happening to me.
Davey stumbled off toward the school and John headed again for the side of the road, where more of the students had turned to look at him, the same blank glaze on their mask-like faces as the one that had been pasted onto Davey’s. He’d seen a painting by Picasso once during an exhibit at the Tait Gallery in London, Portrait of Madame Matisse, that resembled the way the students’ faces looked now. Death masks. Pale, unlined, porcelain-like, mouths and eyes expressionless slits, windows not into their souls but into whatever colorless void people’s minds accessed when confronted with an experience that is simply too much, too horrifying, to comprehend. John remembered that Picasso, when asked why he’d chosen to paint Madame Matisse’s face in the manner of a death mask, had said that he knew the woman far too intimately to see her how she really was anymore. The exact opposite was true here; these children had come into contact with something about which they knew nothing whatsoever—death—and it had shattered them.