Within A Dream

by Vincent L. Scarsella

  Within A Dream

  By: Vincent L Scarsella

  ISBN: 978-1-927134-50-4

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © May, 2011, Vincent L Scarsella

  Cover Art Copyright © May, 2011, Brightling Spur

  Bluewood Publishing Ltd

  Christchurch, 8441, New Zealand

  www.bluewoodpublishing.com

  Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher. No part of this e-book may be reproduced or shared by any electronic or mechanical means, including but not limited to printing, file sharing, and email, without prior written permission from Bluewood Publishing Ltd.

  Dedication

  To my wife, Rosanne, and children, Derek, Kristyn and Vincent.

  All that you see or seem

  Is but a dream within a dream

  - Edgar Allan Poe

  Chapter One

  Charley Finch’s Nightmares

  Charley Finch had been having nightmares about his best friend, Andy Moss, ever since a bad car accident had left Andy in a coma and Andy’s father dead. After about a month of them, Charley’s mother finally took him to the doctor. Old Doc Nuthall moved slowly as he went through the usual check-up routine in one of his musty, cramped examination rooms. He told Charley to cough and breath in deep as he listened to Charley’s heart with a stethoscope so cold that Charley winced as the doctor placed it on his skinny bare chest and then on his back. After that, Doc Nuthall tapped Charley on his knees with a rubber mallet for God-only-knew what reason. Next, he looked into Charley’s mouth and made him say, “Ah,” several times as he poked a wooden tongue depressor so far down his throat it made Charley gag. Finally, he looked at the insides of Charley’s ears with a kind of flashlight, and then flashed it into Charley’s eyes, making him squint and go blind for a few moments afterwards. After all that, Doc Nuthall stood, stretched his back, and scratched the gray stubble on his chin, all the while frowning and mumbling to himself. After a few moments mulling it over, he looked at Mrs. Finch standing in the corner of the room and said there didn’t appear to be anything wrong with the boy. Physically, that is. Then he suggested that she should take Charley to see Dr. T. Arambaala, a child psychiatrist.

  * * * *

  “A shrink?” Charley’s father, Raymond Finch, asked. “Old Doc Nuthall thinks the kid’s nuts?”

  Mary Finch shushed her husband. “Raymond!” she whispered. “He’ll hear you!”

  But Charley had heard him, as he always could, even though the door to his bedroom was shut tight. The Finches lived in a small house on a street in a neighborhood of equally small houses, identical in almost every way, like tiny, plastic Monopoly game houses with little green lawns and walls so thin you could hear the conversations of your next door neighbors, and sometimes even a few houses beyond that, let alone between your own parents in your own house.

  “Doctor Aram-what-la?” Mr. Finch asked. “What the hell kind of name is that anyway? Why can’t he speak with an American shrink?”

  “It’s Arambaala. He’s African, I think,” said Mrs. Finch. “Or, was it Jamaican? I can’t remember which. All I know is that Dr. Nuthall says he comes highly recommended. The best psychiatrist for kids around these parts.”

  “African?” Mr. Finch chuckled to himself. “A real witch doctor, then.”

  Mrs. Finch shushed Mr. Finch again. From his bedroom, Charley had to suppress a laugh. His father was a real cracker sometimes.

  Witch doctor!

  * * * *

  At first glance, Dr. Arambaala did resemble a witch doctor, and a frightening one at that. He was a big, brooding man, probably six foot five, with skin as dark as fudge. The top of his head was shaved bald, shiny as a cue ball. His hands were as huge as snowplows and he had a deep, sonorous voice you could listen to for hours. The words rolled off his tongue like notes off a bass fiddle.

  Mrs. Finch and Charley had taken their seats facing Dr. Arambaala’s wide desk, waiting while he scanned the report which had been faxed over that morning from Dr. Nuthall’s office. It didn’t say much, but Dr. Arambaala scrutinized it with a scowl so fierce that Charley feared there must be something terrible that old Doc Nuthall hadn’t revealed during the appointment the other day. Maybe he had a tumor in his brain, like Patsy Gregory in the fifth grade, who died last year and made all the teachers and mothers cry.

  Finally, Dr. Arambaala looked up without the least bit of amusement or cordiality.

  “I must speak with the boy,” he intoned, glaring at Mrs. Finch. “Alone.”

  Charley’s mother frowned. After hesitating a moment, she thought better of protesting and, after another moment, simply said, “Of course.” Placing her purse under her left arm, she patted Charley’s head with her free hand and told him she’d be right outside in the waiting room. With an odd look at Dr. Arambaala, as if she wasn’t quite sure she could trust the man with her only child, she clumsily found her way out of the office.

  “So,” Dr. Arambaala said once she was gone, “you’re having bad dreams.”

  “Well, not bad, really,” said Charley. “Just dreams. Funny, odd dreams.”

  “Hmm,” said the doctor. “And you have had these dreams – these funny, odd dreams

  – almost every night for the past two months?”

  Charley smiled. He did not want to seem difficult. But he had to correct the doctor again.

  “Well, not almost every night,” he said. “I have them every night. And, they’re not the same, either. Each one is different.”

  Dr. Arambaala frowned, hummed to himself, and looked down at Dr. Nuthall’s report. “But the dreams you have…” His frown deepened into furrows upon his fudgecolored forehead. “… every night, they may not be the same, but they all involve your best friend, Andy Moss? The boy who’s in a coma?”

  Charley nodded, saddened by the memory of poor Andy, lying on his hospital bed for the past two months. He looked like he was sleeping, but Charley knew it was much

  worse than that. His brain had shut itself off because of the accident – a car accident so bad that Andy’s father had been instantly killed – and the doctors could do nothing, as of yet, to turn Andy’s brain back on.

  “Yes,” Charley said, with his eyes lowered, staring down at the dull blue carpet across the floor of Dr. Arambaala’s dimly lit office. “I dream about Andy.”

  “You dream that you are helping him get out of his coma.”

  Charley looked up. That was it, sort of. It was what he had told Dr. Nuthall. But in most of the dreams, what he was doing to help Andy he couldn’t recall all that clearly. Whenever he woke up, he could remember only fragments of the dream. Bits and pieces. Like the one where they had been running away from a grayish, seven-foot tall, gargoylefaced demon. Like most dreams, it was forgotten a moment or two after waking up.

  “Yes,” Charley said, remembering that the doctor was waiting for an answer,

  “something like that.”

  Dr. Arambaala already had a theory; Charley was having the dreams not because he was really helping Andy wake up from his coma, but because he felt guilty that his best friend was in a coma in the first place, instead of him. Or, maybe it had something to do with his father or his mother, the love that was possibly lacking between Charley and one, or both, of them.

  The questions from the doctor for the next few minutes were directed toward uncovering some evidence to support his theory – that Charley’s dreams were symbols of some problem in his childhood. But to Charley, that seemed ridiculous. Grownups were always doi
ng that – trying to find secret meaning, a “rationale,” they called it, for something that was really very simple to explain.

  “Why couldn’t it really be,” Charley finally blurted out, having grown tired of the doctor’s embarrassing questions, “that in these dreams, I really am trying to help Andy wake up?”

  Dr. Arambaala glared down at Charley and didn’t say much else that session. Finally, he told Charley that he must keep a journal of his dreams, to record every detail as soon as he woke up.

  And that was it. Charley was dismissed.

  An appointment was made for the following week, same time, same day –

  Wednesday afternoon at three-thirty, right after school, though Charley couldn’t understand what good it would be to see Dr. Arambaala again. On the ride home, Mrs. Finch wanted to know what Charley and the doctor had talked about.

  Charley shrugged, sorry he had ever mentioned his dreams about Andy to his mother in the first place. “I’m not supposed to tell,” Charley said. “Dr. Arambaala told me not to talk about it with anyone.” After a sigh, Charley added, “All he really told me was that I should record the dreams about Andy in a journal. You know, write them down so I won’t forget them.”

  Mrs. Finch frowned and squeezed the steering wheel as she came to a stop in the traffic. Maybe Mr. Finch had been right – this Arambaala fellow was a witch doctor, pure and simple.

  Chapter Two

  The Hospital Visit

  At four o’clock in the morning Charley woke up screaming. Mrs. Finch rushed into his room and turned on the light. The sudden glare hurt Charley’s eyes.

  “Write it down,” Mrs. Finch scolded.

  From the small night table next to Charley’s bed, she lifted the small spiral notebook she had bought for Charley at the mall and handed it to him. “Write down the dream. Like Doctor Arambaala said.”

  Charley yawned. “But I’m so tired.”

  “Just do it.”

  Charley opened the notebook to the first blank page and Mrs. Finch handed him a pen. Taking it, Charley began scribbling what he could still remember about the dream. We were in a vast field. There were flowers all around us. They smelled good, like sweet candy. We were laughing at something, when out of the sky came a large, ugly bird. Not a dragon, like before in other dreams. More like a hawk, this one was. A giant hawk with a sharp, hooked beak. Riding on his back was the demon, Zorl. We started running as the hawk swooped down on us. He reached our level and his claws reached for Andy, almost grabbing him, and then they did grab him. I took hold of Andy and pulled. Then we were both airborne and rising into the sky, with Zorl throwing his head back, crowing and laughing. Higher and higher we soared, until we were above the clouds. We had no clue where the hawk was taking us. To his lair, I supposed, where we would then be devoured. And Andy would finally die. As for me, I didn’t know or care. Then I saw another bird, an eagle, zooming down from above us. On the eagle’s back was a man. A handsome, young man. I heard Andy shout “Dad!” Soon I was yelling,“Mister Moss!” It really was Andy’s dad, back from the dead. Only now, he was younger than he had been before. His hair was thick and dark, not gray anymore. He had come to help us. The eagle swooped down, knocking into the hawk, and we all fell off into the great void, falling and falling…and at some point I fell straight into Zorl’s lap. I screamed. Charley put down the pen and handed the notebook to his mother. The whole first page was filled with his scribbling. The letters Charley wrote in blue ink were tall and straight and deep into the page. Legible, for the most part. Mrs. Finch only had to ask him to identify three or four words.

  “Zorl?” she asked. “Who’s that?”

  Charley yawned. “He’s some kind of demon,” Charley said. “He’s trying to get Andy and take him somewhere. Into Hell, maybe.” Charley frowned. “Or something like that. Zorl hates me, too, I think.”

  Mrs. Finch went back to reading the page and when she had finished, she looked at Charley with frightened eyes. She asked, “Are you rescued? In the dream? It—it just stops.”

  “I’ll find out later,” Charley said, “when I fall back to sleep and dream again.”

  Mrs. Finch frowned and shook her head. “And you saw Mister Moss again,” she said.

  Charley had the dream about Mr. Moss the first time about a week ago, when he showed up to rescue Charley and Andy from Zorl’s herd of dragons.

  “Can we go to the hospital tomorrow?” Charley asked. “To see Andy?”

  She hadn’t taken Charley in more than a week, ever since she had embraced the idea that the dreams were not part of the normal grieving process.

  “I would really like to see him,” he said.

  Mrs. Finch thought a moment. She had asked Dr. Arambaala, during the few moments alone with him during Charley’s visit that afternoon, whether it was a good idea for Charley to visit Andy in the hospital.

  “Why not?” Dr. Arambaala had said. “In reality, he’s still Charley’s best friend.”

  “Sure, Charley,” Mrs. Finch said. “We’ll visit him first thing when you come home from school.”

  When Charley finally got back to sleep that night, the dream began with him back in the field of sweet scented flowers. He was on the ground with a bologna sandwich in his hand. It was just the way he liked it, with a thick smear of mustard spread across the top slice of bread. Sitting beside him was Mr. Moss, munching a sandwich of his own. He winked when Charley looked his way. A few feet away from them a giant eagle was pecking at some gravel on the ground. Suddenly, Charley realized that Andy was sitting on Mr. Moss’s lap. Somehow, Charley had been rescued from Zorl’s clutches on the back of the demon’s giant, ugly hawk. It must have been with the help of Mr. Moss. Charley didn’t care to ask how it had all been resolved in the dream after he had awakened. Sometimes things just worked out okay while he wasn’t part of the dream, when he went back into the reality of everyday life.

  “We’re going fishing after lunch,” Andy told Charley, looking back at Mr. Moss with a wide smile. “Right, Dad?”

  Mr. Moss nodded. “Sure, Andy. We got the whole afternoon.”

  For the rest of that dream, Charley, Andy, and Mr. Moss fished from a boat on a clear blue lake under a cool, sunny sky, and from time to time Charley bit into a never-ending bologna sandwich.

  * * * *

  Charley didn’t mind hospitals. They were busy places where the nurses and doctors seemed to know what they were doing most of the time without being bothered by the sickness and sadness around them. After visiting so often over the past few weeks, Charley was even thinking it might not be a bad thing to become a doctor some day, and work in a hospital. He had even gotten used to the smell, either too clean like the toilet bowl in the bathrooms on Saturday mornings, after his mother cleaned it, or the awful odor of stale piss that came out of some of the rooms. Andy had a private room on the pediatric floor at the University Medical Center. He just laid on the narrow, uncomfortable looking bed day after day, his eyes closed. For the most part he looked asleep, peaceful, except for the tube sticking into his windpipe to help him breathe. Gross! His right arm had a needle in it, attached to another thin tube that led to a bottle on a metal rack. It fed Andy a clear liquid containing medicine and

  nutrients. Ugh! A milky fluid went through yet another directly into his stomach, which was a further disgusting sight. Worst of all, someone had stuck a tube straight through the hole into his penis that ran into a plastic container at the edge of the bed. It seemed always filled to bursting with Andy’s dark yellow piss. How Andy shat, Charley didn't care to know. Though all of it was truly repulsive, somehow Charley had gotten used to seeing his best friend’s body so utterly defiled.

  Charley edged close to Andy’s pillow and whispered into his ear. His mother asked him what he had said but Charley only shrugged. “I told him it’s me,” was all Charley said. In fact, he had murmured their secret greeting: “Oh-la-wa-hie!”

  It was from an army show on TV that they had both loved so much. I
n fact, in some of the dreams, Andy and Charley had been soldiers in Normandy, fighting the German troops of Zorl, Hitler’s favorite general.

  “He looks so pale today,” remarked Mrs. Finch. “And bloated.” Like a corpse, she thought to herself.

  Andy was Charley’s best friend. They had been friends since the second grade. Charley knew just about everything there was to know about Andy, and vice versa. Charley knew, for instance, that Andy really liked Jessica Clayton. On the day of the accident, Andy had even finally told Jessica that he liked her. That he might give her a ring. That he certainly was going to take her to the dance the next Friday. But Andy never made it to the dance. Charley went, because his mother felt it would be good for him to do the normal things he would have done if Andy were around. Jessica was there, dancing with Billy Addelman. She was laughing and smooching up to him as if Andy had never even existed. That night she showed up in Charley’s dream. She was looking mighty uncomfortable as Zorl held her—forcibly it seemed—in his arms. This time Zorl looked like a fourteen year old kid, just like them. Zorl was laughing as his hand went around her shoulders, down her back, and definitely down to her ass. Come and get her, Zorl had urged Andy, and he would have jumped for it if Charley hadn’t held him back. Finally, Andy let out a frustrated scream, knowing it was just another of Zorl’s perverted scams. That’s when Charley knew Andy really liked Jessica. When they had run off, and the vision of Zorl and Jessica faded in the gray distance of the dream, Charley had to tell Andy that Jessica appeared to be Billy Addelman’s girlfriend now.

  “That’s only because she thinks I’m dead,” Andy had snapped, and Charley let it go at that. He was probably more annoyed than ever about his predicament. Early on, Andy had made Charley promise to always truthfully report his physical condition during his visits to the hospital.

  “You look kinda pale today,” Charley whispered into Andy’s ear. “And your mother had that worried look again when we came in.” Charley was worried, too, and he wondered if tonight when he dreamed he’d be entering a maelstrom where Andy and Mr. Moss would be under a particularly heavy attack from Zorl and his legions of doom. Mrs. Finch scowled from the chair in the corner of the room while Charley continued whispering to Andy.