Red Dreams

by Dennis Etchison

  "Can I have one of those, please?"

  "I didn't know you were smoking now, Lees."

  "I'm not. Not really."

  The young man crossed the alley.

  Joe froze.

  Then he followed.

  Passing between two houses, he stopped again and dropped to one knee.

  He saw ahead to the next street. The young man had already crossed over and was now hesitating by one of the huts on the other side. Houses, he told himself. Now Joe looked between the trees and houses as down a tunnel: as the street lamp flicked on, the pavement mottled under the new light, his eyes focused through to a square of still-bright sky visible now above the long campus parking lot.

  He waited.

  Another figure, nearly a silhouette, appeared against the sky.

  It was a woman.

  He snapped to, aware that he had lost track of his prey. The young man was gone. He had slipped through, probably to the lot. But—had he gone through, or was he still somewhere on the block between, sidestepping from house to house?

  He had blown it.

  He started to move anyway.

  Then it hit him. The woman. The woman waiting in the lot.

  It had to be his wife.

  "Eliot," said Sharon, "is very into it. And therefore out of it. If you know what I mean. There are moments with us. Not many, but there are. You were right, though. Sometimes I do wonder if it's worth it. God, I've been staring into this box too long. Now it's beginning to stare back." She clicked off the TV with her toes. "I don't need to turn on the tube to see rape, murder and perversion. I can get all that right here at school."

  Lissa heard a record droning upstairs. It sounded like Dylan.

  turn, turn, turn again

  "Tell her to turn it over, will you?" said Sharon. "That song's bumming me out."

  Lissa felt her way to the top of the first landing.

  "Lis-sa? Bring down something to scarf, will you? Um, Screaming Yellow Zonkers. Whatever she's got hidden up there. An-y-thing!"

  Lissa smiled.

  turn, turn to the rain and the wind

  She walked on down the hall.

  Joe had squatted so long that his gaze was fixed, almost as if the rectangle of light sky had somehow been looking back down into him instead. His eyes stung.

  Fatigue. He hoped. Four days a week had seemed fine at first. Enough time to do some good, maybe, but not enough to—but it was late now, much later than he had thought, judging from the color of the sky. Marlene, he realized, blinking alert, had been waiting—how long? How long had he crouched here? And how long before, at the other village? Block, he reminded himself, block.

  He crossed the street, his breath jangling in his ears like dog tags.

  He shot a glance at the patch of sky and the dark figure of his wife.

  His pace quickened.

  As he headed over a lawn, a young man bolted out of the shrubs, a pair of horn-rimmed glasses clattering from his face.

  With Ritz crackers and a five-pack of Hydrox cookies in one hand, she drew the knob toward her, cutting the sliver of light from Kathy's room, and made for the stairs.

  There was a knock on the front door.

  The stairway was an unknown in the dark. She waited.

  Finally, "Sharon? Can you get that?"

  The knock again.

  She descended, pressing against the wall.

  "Just a—" She felt a catch in her throat. Why?

  The door swung open.

  The kid was squirming on the lawn, his face jumping.

  "Whatsa matter? I'm on my way home from a study date! Whatsa matter?"

  Joe closed the cuffs, pressed the key into the notch and set the lock.

  Something in the young man's face, swarming in a film of sweat, refused to let Joe relax. He shoved the glasses at him and pulled him to his feet. He glanced ahead. The sky was dark, too dark to see her.

  He whipped the antenna up on his walkie-talkie. It shook in his hands, waving back and forth in the night air.

  She saw a woman, backlit in the open doorway.

  "I'm sorry," said the woman. "But I wonder if you've seen my husband. He was supposed to meet—"

  "No, I—" stammered Lissa. "Do you mean he was outside?" Where was Sharon? Where? She left the doorway. "Just a minute, okay?"

  She felt around the room. "Share?" she called. I know, she thought. She said she was hungry. I'll check the kitchen. If I can only find the light!

  "Sha-ron!" she called, and wondered why her voice was breaking.

  "We don't want to hurt you," Joe said. "Believe that."

  He drew his prisoner through the shrubs, crushing twigs and unseen garden creatures in his path.

  He turned up the gain and depressed the call button. He needed back-up. His throat was dry and the back of his tongue hurt.

  A shrill electronic sound whined close by. Instantly he recognized it. It was feedback—his own signal being picked up on another receiver.

  "I guess you wouldn't know who I mean," the woman said from the doorway. "But he's one of the Security…"

  It's so dark, thought Lissa at the door to the kitchen. She forced herself across the chill linoleum, her arms outstretched like antennae.

  She beard a sound—a low voice. It was singing:

  some folks like t' talk about it

  some don't

  A wind from nowhere blew through her chest.

  He pushed the kid ahead of him, following the sound.

  Louder. Joe was relieved. Reinforcements were near.

  Then he noticed his prisoner's stare.

  At the rear of the last house by the parking lot, dark shapes were moving.

  She seemed to swim through darkness past the smooth pulsating refrigerator where there were always tooth marks in the cheese, to the drawer from which the tools had been quietly disappearing for weeks, clamoring for something, anything with which to protect herself. It was silly, she knew, but—there. A butcher knife.

  Joe released his own wrist and locked the kid to the branch of what might have been a rubber tree.

  "We'll be back for you, Charlie," he said.

  She felt herself drawn down the short stone steps from the kitchen to the storage porch, to the low singing and other voices and what sounded like a scratching close to the screen door that opened into the back yard.

  The officer plunges through the shrubbery. At that someone slams out the back door, sees dark forms and the girl held to the dirt and reflexively cocks back an arm, white moons rising on the nails that clench the knife. The officer sees the downed girl, uniforms, another figure lunging into it. There is no time to question, not now while there is still time to stop it before it happens again. He remembers them sitting there dumbly in their baggy pajamas, their wooden bowls empty of the ice cream a few minutes before it happened, and how he had gone away and done nothing, not even when he heard the laughter and the grunting and the automatic fire. And the screams. But not this time. He dodges and grabs the empty hand, wrenching it into a hammerlock as he encircles the waist with his left arm, releasing the wrist with his right and setting his forearm under the chin. The back arches and the legs kick madly, but the hand refuses to let go the knife. Faces turn up. One of the officers stays atop their victim. It is Williams who closes in from the front, spreading his milky palm across the distorted mouth, covering it. "Nice going Joe." He grins. "Now you one of us, too." Joe does not yet understand. Now he feels a slip in the neck and the body swings like the clapper of a bell in his arms. Now he hears new footsteps behind him and a sudden skull-splitting screech. It is the scream of a woman. He thinks he recognizes it but it is too late, now it really is too late as the girl in his arms swings one last anguished time, as her knife slices at the dark with a flash and he sees a face reflected in the blade for an instant before it drops into the leaves. But he must know what he has seen. He has seen the face of a killer. It is the same face he has always seen.

  The moonlight washes do
wn on them all.

  THE CHILL

  The thing that shocked him was that he wasn't shocked.

  Morgan came out of the health food store, cut over the grass at the corner and was about to dig into his jeans for the keys when he clipped it with his foot. It was soft and rubbery.

  Then he was stumbling into some kind of pothole, flailing one arm for balance—only there was no hole. At least there was not supposed to be.

  It was then that he saw the people gathered around.

  He laughed at himself and shook his head. But he wondered why they, all fifteen or twenty of them, continued to watch. He touched his fly, glanced down.

  And saw that he was standing in a small hole in the sidewalk. The cement was cracked down in a concave circle, like a shallow crater.

  "Now wait a minute," he muttered. He shifted his armload of groceries uneasily.

  It was screwy. I walked this way twenty minutes ago, he thought. Same side of the street, too. And there was no hole—there wasn't.

  "Move along, son."

  "What?"

  A cop supported Morgan's elbow, helping him out of the chuckhole.

  "Keep the area clear," said the cop, to the others as well. He was big and flat-chested; Morgan got a close-up glimpse of his gun, the polished rosewood grip. As he led Morgan he kept his head down, as if afraid he might step on something.

  Morgan looked down with him. And did a double-take.

  The cop was high-stepping over a pair of white tennis shoes, set out on the pavement at a nice, neat angle. The laces were still tied.

  "Wait a minute," he said again.

  He stopped. The cop kept walking. His fingers left Morgan's elbow.

  "What's going on?"

  Some of the people turned away. A man in a shiny suit escorted a woman through the glass doors of a building. She glanced nervously back at Morgan. At Morgan's feet.

  Morgan looked down again, and to the side and behind him, and saw finally what he had nearly stepped on the first time.

  A hand. A man's hand, gray like the cement. The hand was attached to an arm that led under a mound of dull army-green canvas. The bulk of the tarpaulin lay in the street, between the wheels of a parked car.

  Morgan stumbled backwards, staring at the formless shape. He stumbled again at the curb, regained his balance and crossed the street quickly to the parking lot.

  He sloughed the groceries into the car and stood there by the open door. He started to step in onto the floorboard, then paused, balancing from foot to foot on the blacktop, watching over the roof of the car.

  He thought about the body under the tarp. It must have hit at terrific speed—and, unbelievably, bounced, judging by the dented sedan at the curb.

  Well, the building was tall enough, he guessed. He craned his neck. Ten, twelve… twenty-six stories. Offices or apartments, he couldn't tell which. Gray and black and hazy silver, layered between floors with a thin, dirty metallic icing: mid-twentieth century Crackerbox Imposing. It reminded Morgan of a stack of folded aluminum deck chairs. The filtered glare of the sun, down now behind the crow's feet TV antennae atop the Laundromat, glazed the rows of smoky windows, the reflected light wavy on the glass panes that were lidded by unmoving metal awnings. At the very top, on the roof between a pair of blocklike structures, stood two figures, their trouser legs blowing like flags.

  Morgan considered. The vitamins would keep, certainly, but the half-gallon of raw milk, the natural cheddar, the pound of frozen DES-free ground beef…

  He couldn't take long.

  He locked the car and, dragging his feet, went back to the street.

  He stood at a decent distance, his hands in his back pockets.

  "That was the car, was it?" A man in walking shorts and black socks sidled up to him. The man inclined his head conspiratorially. "You saw him get hit, did you?"

  Morgan made a noncommittal gesture. He needed answers himself. But he knew the police would not bother with his questions now; they were preoccupied with notebooks, with squad car radios, with each other, talking their own kind of reassuring shop in low voices that seemed not to move their lips. An non-uniformed man with crew cut handled a walkie-talkie officiously, aiming it like a pointer at the figures on the roof.

  A woman in a sleeveless blouse came up and took possession of the man in walking shorts. Morgan heard a clucking begin in her throat.

  "Excuse me," he said, and crossed the street.

  At the curb one of his feet caught, nearly causing him to fall.

  He felt a chill coming on as he hurried to the building.

  At the doors a security guard waved him back.

  "I live here," he tried. The guard hesitated. Morgan ducked inside, not looking back, and slipped through the milling crowd in the lobby.

  The desk phones were all in use, hunched over by nervous, quick-eyed men who cupped their hands around the mouthpieces as they spoke. At the elevator he finally looked back at the glass doors. He saw a station wagon stenciled with the call letters of a local TV channel parking across the street. He punched the button and waited.

  He waited while the other elevator opened and closed once, twice, three times; each time a full load of passengers squeezed out, followed by two officers who blocked the door with their shoulders as a third man checked names off a list; then the officers reboarded and took the elevator up again. He watched the light on the wall move up and down and up without a stop.

  The light over his elevator never wavered from the top floor. After a few minutes it went off, and the words NOT IN SERVICE blinked on.

  He pivoted slowly, casually—only to find himself reaching out for balance again. He groped, found an ashtray, steadied himself, hoping no one would notice.

  He scanned the busy faces. No one had.

  What happened?

  His foot, no, his whole lower leg was asleep.

  From standing, waiting so long? That was it.

  He pretended to adjust the ashtray, a sand-filled canister into which countless cigarettes had plunged and extinguished. Shake a leg, he thought, shake a leg.

  He made his way down the hall.

  Morgan found a service elevator at the first turn, at the end of a row of offices, flanked by a maintenance closet and a restroom for EMP. ONLY.

  He thumbed the button and tried to focus through the safety glass, waiting for the compartment to lower into view.

  The double doors parted; it was already there.

  He leaned his head back into the padded interior. He shut his eyes.

  He squinted down through slitted lids at his legs. The right leg still felt cold. The foot, through some oddity of perspective, appeared very far away. He tried to thrum his toes but felt nothing, though the round, scuffed rubber end of the sneaker flexed like a mound of earth beneath which some unseen creature moved.

  In fact the sensation, or lack of it, had now crept up to his knee; he rocked forward, took a step, but felt nothing.

  No blood coursing, no pins-and-needles. Only a coldness.

  The floor locked into place, and the doors slid back.

  Well, he could still walk.

  He hobbled into the hall.

  2642…2644…twenty-sixth floor.

  The elevator thumped closed behind him.

  He had come up here for something. What? So I'm just as morbid as the rest of them, he thought. Maybe worse. No, he decided, not worse; they'd all be up here now, too, if they could, just to see where it happened, to savor the thought of it, turning it over and over before their minds' eyes like the secret behind the door at the end of the hall in the middle of the night in a house they thought they'd forgotten.

  But he was already as high as the machinery would take him. He'd have to take the stairs the rest of the way, to the roof.

  All but dragging one leg, Morgan tried to make it to the end of the long hall.

  He passed door after door, yet he had the impression that they were moving past him while he remained in place, as if struggling on
a treadmill. Each door was closed tight, sealed. Only if the doors were suddenly to swing wide could the lives they hid impinge upon him, or he upon them. And what then? Would their eyes recoil at the unexpected contact, would they slam soundproofed doors at his passing? Or would they stand frozen, fascinated?

  Probably neither, he decided. They would most likely pretend that he was not there, that he did not exist.

  He wondered in passing how many of the guests, insulated within these structures in which their lives played out—how many of them knew what was down there in the street right now? Would they want to know? What about the one who had chosen to leave his hermetic safety, to climb out under an alien sky, to scream down, straining to burn like a shooting star in the steely dusk?

  He stopped, breathing heavily.

  He leaned against a wall, and felt something cold touch his skin.

  He turned: a fire extinguisher.

  In the glass, behind the words BREAK IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, the reflection of his face.

  The dim image reminded him: twenty-five, thirty extra pounds, so that the lines of his features were now soft, the face puffed, the skull beneath almost hidden by granola, wheat germ, yogurt, honey, unpasteurized milk, acidophilus culture, desiccated liver, torula yeast, turbinado sugar, dried fruits and cashew butter and whole wheat spaghetti and Brockmeyer's ice cream and date nut bread and carrot cake, and brown rice…it was good food. But now he looked at himself, unable for the moment to walk, and the fear returned, the fear that sapped and took the place of his will, and he forced himself to see and be reassured. But he could not look back, not for long. That's right, nodding sadly, turning away, you can serve it up, can't you? But when it's on the plate, you can't see it. Can you?

  "Shit," he said aloud. The first thing he had thought when he saw him in the street was, I'm glad it wasn't me!

  The left side of his body was cold, and growing colder.