Blur (Blur Trilogy)

by Steven James

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Daniel opened his eyes.

  His room was still steeped in darkness, with only a faint smear of light coming through his window from the streetlights down the block.

  A storm had blown in and at first he thought he might have been awakened by the thunder rolling through the night.

  Yes, he confirmed he was still in bed. When he looked down, he could see that he was wearing his clothes and lying on the sheets and everything was soaking wet—his shirt, his pants, his socks, the blankets.

  What on earth? Why are you wet? Why do you have your clothes on? Could this all be a dream?

  Daniel blinked, then squeezed his hand into a fist and felt the pain from when he’d smacked the wall earlier.

  Yes.

  He was awake.

  He felt the bed.

  Yes, absolutely, it was wet.

  He half expected Emily to appear there in his room or at his window, scratching at the glass like in that old Salem’s Lot movie, when the vampires show up at the kid’s house and drag their fingertips against the window, trying to get invited in.

  But she did not.

  Nothing out of the ordinary appeared.

  He checked the time. Quarter after three.

  He would’ve thought that getting wet like this would have awakened him right away, so nothing really made sense—not why he was wearing his clothes, and certainly not why they were drenched.

  Daniel sat up.

  It was pouring outside.

  He had to have been out there, out in the storm.

  Flicking on the bedside light, he looked around the room and noticed his boots lying discarded beside the dresser.

  The soles were covered with mud.

  Muddy tracks and a trail of dribbled water led from his room to the hallway.

  Sleepwalking? He’d never done that before, not that he was aware of, at least, but he couldn’t think of any other explanation for what was going on.

  Really? Sleepwalking? You went outside during a storm and didn’t wake up, and then you took off your boots and climbed into bed? All while you were asleep?

  It seemed utterly unbelievable, but not any crazier than the other things that’d been happening to him all week.

  Daniel swung his feet to the floor. Even though he felt apprehensive about following the tracks, about seeing where they might lead, he also felt the need to do so. He’d been outside. Why?

  If you were sleepwalking in the storm, the rain would have woken you up.

  But it had not.

  He couldn’t remember anything about getting dressed, leaving his room, or returning to bed, and he had no idea how long he’d been lying there before he woke up a few moments ago.

  Whether or not he’d been walking in his sleep, somehow he had been out in the rain, and there was no way he was going to be able to fall back asleep without knowing where he’d been.

  He was already wet, so it only made sense to go back outside without changing clothes, but he didn’t want to trudge more mud through the house, so he decided to put on the boots when he reached the front door.

  Picking them up, he left his room and walked quietly down the hallway, following the muddy tracks.

  If his dad came into the hallway, he had no idea how he would explain why he was soaking wet or why he’d left a trail of water and mud in the hall—or what he’d been doing outside in the first place.

  At the end of the hallway, enough light from the neighborhood seeped through the living room windows and crawled down the hall to make the tracks on the wooden floor visible.

  The wind battered the roof, and a thick drumbeat of thunder rattled the windows, but as far as Daniel could tell, his dad was still asleep in his bedroom.

  Apart from the storm outside and the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen, the house was silent.

  Trying not to wake his father, Daniel crept as silently as he could down the hallway, especially as he passed his dad’s bedroom door.

  He’d never known him to be a light sleeper, but he heard the bed squeak softly as his father turned over in his sleep—either that or got up.

  Daniel froze and listened for the bedsprings to creak again.

  His heart pounded and squirmed like it had a life of its own.

  He listened, waited for the door to open, for his father to appear, but nothing greeted him except an anxious, expectant silence.

  The water dripping from his clothes pooled slowly around his feet.

  It seemed like an eternity passed, but it was probably little more than a minute or two. When Daniel heard no more sounds coming from his dad’s bedroom, he started down the hall again, following the muddy tracks and splats of water.

  His eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark, so it was getting easier to distinguish where the hallway ended and merged with the kitchen on one side and the dining room on the other.

  He’d thought the tracks might lead to the front door, but now he could see that they did not. Instead, they went toward the back door—the one that led to the deck overlooking the garden and the swath of woods that lay behind the house.

  They disappeared outside.

  When he opened the door to the night, a slash of lightning illuminated the yard and he noticed a shovel leaning against the side of the house. It was positioned beneath the overhanging gutter, which protected it from the driving rain.

  The blade had clumps of fresh, wet soil stuck to it.

  So, he’d either been digging something up.

  Or burying something.

  For some reason, probably because of the rain, the night held the damp, earthy smell of spring rather than autumn’s odor of slowly decaying leaves—but that only seemed to add to the disorientation Daniel was feeling.

  It was almost like he’d slipped out of his normal life and landed in a place where time was fluid and could wander back and forth, wavering its way through the seasons, taking him with it.

  He tried once again to remember being out here earlier, hoping that he might be able to recall something—a wash of images, an impression, a fragment of a memory, anything that might give him a clue as to what was going on or why he’d left the house.

  But it was no use; he wasn’t able to remember anything.

  The nearby streetlights cast a bleary glow over the neighborhood, but their light was dampened and obscured by the sheets of rain.

  He was able to make out the faint outline of the woods looming before him, as well as the vague, dark forms of the neighbors’ houses, but that was all. He doubted it would be enough light for him to find what he might have been digging up—or burying—out here in the dark.

  Another flash of lightning ripped through the night.

  The muddy boot prints ended at the edge of the deck.

  The garden lay fifty feet ahead of him.

  The forest rose just beyond that.

  He didn’t want to risk waking up his father by turning on the outdoor deck light.

  Slipping back inside, he grabbed the flashlight he used when he went caving, a headlamp that he typically left stashed in a clutter drawer in the kitchen in case the electricity went out.

  He returned to the deck, turned on the headlamp, laced up his boots, and drew the door softly closed behind him.

  Then he grabbed the shovel and headed into the storm.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-SIX

  Fierce rain sliced through the night, and the wind beat against him like it was trying to drive him back into the house.

  He directed the headlamp’s beam at the ground in front of him, then used one hand to shield his eyes from the rain.

  Even though he’d raked the leaves a couple days ago, the wind had brought a fresh layer of them down and they lay plastered against the grass. The sound of rain pat-spla
ttering against them filled the night around him.

  The storm had erased any evidence of boot impressions on the leaves.

  Turning around, he saw no sign that anyone had been digging in the autumn-dead flower beds that lined the back of the house.

  He aligned himself with the direction of the muddy prints that left the deck, tried to guess where he might have gone earlier when he ventured into the storm, and then angled his light toward the woods in a straight line from where the boot prints ended.

  The garden lay between him and the woods. It was the one that his mom used to keep, the one that was overgrown now, the one that the footpath through the woods began at and—

  No.

  A thought came to him. One that he did not want to consider.

  When his mom took off six months earlier, she’d left her puppy with his dad and him, and when Akira got out of the house and was hit by a car three months after that, Daniel and his father had buried her out here, about twenty feet past the garden, just off the trail through the forest.

  The two of them had placed a large rock over the puppy’s grave to mark the spot and to keep scavenging animals from digging up the corpse.

  Daniel tipped the headlamp up and, at the edge of the light’s beam, saw that the ground was disturbed where Akira had been buried. A mound of dirt lay beside a gaping hole. The stone had been moved aside and leaned against a tree near the pile of soil.

  Someone had dug up Akira’s grave.

  He had.

  From where he stood he couldn’t see into the open grave.

  Carrying the shovel, and peering uneasily through the headlamp’s streak of rain-smeared light, Daniel approached the hole.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Empty.

  So where was the carcass, or bones, or whatever would actually be left of her by now?

  You must have put Akira’s remains somewhere.

  As that thought gripped him, the storm raged around him in the night.

  He spent a few minutes studying the area, but found nothing—no bones, no desiccated corpse, no sign that there had ever been a dead puppy lying in this hole. He even explored along the trail that led through the woods, but didn’t find any evidence of the dog’s remains.

  At last, convinced that there was nothing more out here to see, he refilled the hole with soil and patted it down as best he could with the shovel’s blade, then scattered leaves across the area and rolled the rock back in place.

  If someone knew what to look for and came to this exact spot, he might be able to tell that it had been dug up, but Daniel couldn’t imagine any reason anyone would be coming out here to examine Akira’s grave.

  Where did you put the corpse, Daniel? What did you do with those bones?

  The question felt like a solid weight crushing down on him.

  Once again he tried to remember what had happened earlier in the night when he should have been asleep in his bed, but he came up blank.

  After finishing disguising the hole, he returned to the house, wiped off the shovel, and put it away in the garage. He changed out of his clothes, then tossed them into the washing machine.

  As silently as he could, he cleaned up the mud that lay smeared in the hallway, sopping up the water with rags and old towels.

  As he did, he thought of the conversation he’d had with Kyle about going to take a look at Emily’s grave.

  A visit to a graveyard to look for clues.

  Maybe that’s what was on his mind, at least subconsciously.

  Maybe that’s why he’d done this tonight in his sleep.

  A couple of times as he was cleaning up, he thought he might have awakened his father, but he never came out of his bedroom.

  Finally, Daniel rinsed out the muddy towels and rags and tossed them into the washing machine with his clothes, figuring he could do the wash first thing in the morning, rather than now, when it would wake up his dad.

  After stowing the headlamp, Daniel found his way to his bedroom, removed the sodden sheets from his bed, and dropped them into the washing machine as well.

  Since his mattress was still wet, he left it uncovered so it could start to dry. Instead of sleeping on top of it, he spent the rest of the night on the floor in his sleeping bag, trying to grab as much sleep as he could.

  It didn’t go so well.

  With Akira’s missing remains on his mind, he kept waking up and fluctuating into and out of a tired, dream-encrusted haze until his alarm rang at seven thirty.

  They were leaving for the doctor’s office in Superior in thirty minutes.

  Yawning, he got dressed. Even though he normally didn’t drink coffee, some caffeine was probably in order or he couldn’t see himself making it through the morning without crashing and burning.

  He was about to punch the button on the washing machine when his father walked in on him. “You’re getting an early start on that.”

  “I had some clothes I needed to throw in.”

  “They’re not going to finish before we leave. We won’t be able to dry them until we get back this afternoon. Why don’t you just wait until then?”

  The tension from last night’s conversation in the garage hadn’t disappeared yet, and everything both of them said was marked with a cool, objective distance.

  “I already put the soap in. Might as well get it done now.”

  His dad mulled that over. Daniel had the sense that he was going to press things, but he changed the subject instead. “Did you get breakfast yet?”

  “No. I’ll be right in.”

  “Alright. Remember, we need to leave by eight if we’re going to make the appointment.”

  “Yeah. I’ll be ready.”

  His dad left for the kitchen, and Daniel leaned a hand against the washing machine and let out a long breath.

  He had no idea what he would have said if his dad had looked into the machine and seen the muddy towels.

  You dug up Akira.

  You did it in your sleep.

  Even though it was some weird type of sleepwalking and wasn’t officially a hallucination, his research on their causes came to mind.

  A brain tumor.

  Some kind of head injury he wasn’t aware of.

  Or maybe, based on how he seemed to be losing touch with reality, schizophrenia.

  Maybe he really was going crazy.

  Honestly, the thought of going insane frightened him even more than the possibility of having a tumor growing in his brain.

  Instead of digging up the grave, what if he’d walked into the middle of the road as a car was approaching? Or gotten into his own car and driven off the road into a ditch or off the embankment into Pine River?

  He’d heard about people who’d actually killed family members in their sleep. What if he’d attacked his father?

  No, this couldn’t go on. The visions, the nightmares, the sleepwalking. He needed some answers before something serious happened.

  Though he didn’t like admitting it, the sooner he could get checked out to see what was wrong, the better.

  After starting the wash, he grabbed some coffee and a bite to eat, packed his laptop so he could work on his U.S. History report in the car or while he was waiting to be seen at the doctor’s office, and then he left the house with his dad.

  And saw what he had done with Akira’s corpse.

  He’d left it on the hood of his dad’s car.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  His father stared at the rain-soaked carcass of the dog, then gazed at his son.

  “What do you know about this, Daniel?”

  Why would you have left Akira’s body there? What is wrong with you?

  “I don’t know why anyone would’ve done that.” Daniel felt limp and somewhat dizzy, like he was standing on ground th
at was made of sand and he was slipping down into a world where he would no longer be able to tell what was real from what was not.

  Languishing in a nightmare. Trapped forever in a dream.

  The words came to him just as the phrases for his blog had come the other night when Kyle was over: Dark birds that feed on the flesh of his dead dreams. Picking them clean until only the bones remain.

  Yes.

  They are.

  And they’re ripping through the fabric of his sanity.

  Of your sanity.

  Thankfully, the corpse was old enough that the area didn’t reek of rot and death, but there was a faint odor of decay, probably made more distinct by the damp morning air.

  “How many people know where Akira was buried?” his dad asked.

  “Just us and Kyle.”

  He threaded things together. “The laundry, huh? But why would you do this? What’s going on with you?”

  Daniel might have felt more reassured somehow if his dad had been angry, but he didn’t sound mad at all. Just deeply worried.

  “I don’t know,” Daniel said. “I don’t remember anything.”

  “But it wasn’t Kyle, was it?”

  A long pause. “No.”

  Here it comes.

  “Go on, get in the car.”

  His father went for a garbage bag and retrieved the shovel from the garage, then used it to carry the dog’s remains to the backyard. When he returned he said simply, “We’ll take care of it when we get back home.”

  “Honestly, Dad, I don’t know what happened. I woke up wet. I must have sleepwalked.”

  “Alright.” But from his tone it didn’t sound like he thought things were alright. “A headache? Did you have one when you went to bed last night? Do you have one now?”

  “No. Have I ever sleepwalked before? Maybe when I was little or something?”

  “Only once.”

  “When was that?”

  “When you were five. After your grandfather died. Your mother and I were in the living room and you walked past us on your way to the front door.”

  “Where was I going?”

  “We asked you that. You said you were going to find him.”