Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

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  Nightmare Country

  Marlys Millhiser

  For Dorothy Frances Millhiser

  What the sage poets taught by th’ heavenly Muse,

  Storied of old in high immortal verse

  Of dire chimeras and enchanted isles

  And rifted rocks whose entrance leads to Hell,—

  For such there be, but unbelief is blind.

  —John Milton

  Chimera—1. A fire-breathing monster represented with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent. 2. A creation of the imagination; an impossible and foolish fancy. 3. Biology. An organism, especially a plant, containing tissues from at least two genetically distinct parents.

  —The American Heritage Dictionary

  of the English Language

  If you can see that the Emperor has no clothes, science will tell you that it’s your eyesight, religion that the Emperor is not an upstanding citizen.

  —Edward P. Alexander III, The Key to Life’s

  Mysteries and the Disharmonies of the Planet

  Prologue

  Out of Time

  1

  Adrian careened through black, through a total absence of light.

  She could feel the heating up of her skin, the too rapid shallowness of her breathing, the crush of dread against her chest, the hard prickles in her fingertips as frenzied chemicals called her body to action, rang and buzzed in her ears, threatened upheaval in her stomach.

  Even though she knew she’d left that body back on Jerusha’s bed.

  This was not like the dreaming, the lethargic floating, sinking, surfacing.

  And there were “things” in this void with her. Unknown, unseen. She could almost hear them, sensed a whisper of their touch as she hurtled past, and felt sickened at the thought of inevitable collision. Collision with something unbearable. Or something solid enough to shatter what remained of her on impact.

  Adrian imagined a scream she had no mouth to utter, imagined it trailing out behind her like a comet in the thick blackness. “Jerusha, please! I don’t want to do this experiment.…”

  No one to hear. Hopeless. Lost. She wanted to die and she wanted to live and she could stand no more. How far she must have traveled from Iron Mountain at this breathless speed.

  A wind or air current jerked her suddenly in another direction, a wind that sucked and pulled instead of pushing from behind. Perhaps her body was a waking, drawing her back. Perhaps she was headed home.

  The wind turned on her, struck her. Adrian tumbled over and over and down, the wind shrieking by her like it would a diving, crashing airplane. She had only an instant to question how she could hear without ears when light exploded into the darkness. And then colors. Blues and greens shimmered, rushed up at her, blurred, separated, formed shapes, reached for her.…

  No sensation on impact. Just an abrupt end to her dizzying drop.

  This was not home. The blues congealed to ocean, the greens to palm trees. The familiar ingredients of too many dreams. She hovered above clumps of tortured black rock with jags and holes.

  An old man knelt among a pile of browned palm fronds, staring in openmouthed astonishment. He wore a khaki-colored shirt-jacket with short sleeves and extra pockets and tabs, like people wore in ancient Tarzan movies. His beard and hair were white and stringy but neatly trimmed, his eyes the color of frost.

  A movement at the edge of her consciousness, a sound of human agony or forced breath. Adrian whirled to see a giant in a lacy suit.

  “You’re an Atlantean,” the old man said.

  The giant raised his arms. “Primitive in the funnel!”

  2

  The engineer walked between lines of admiring travelers and stepped into the clean room of the Northern Terminal. Another day, another problem, and all he really wanted was to keep the tiny face of his new granddaughter in mind. He prayed he’d return in time enough to make the preparations for the celebration.

  His manager read his thoughts before he’d finished suiting up. “Congratulations. I hope I’m invited to the celebration. But for now,” and she reached an arm around his shoulders, “you must concentrate. You’re one of the best. I don’t know who else to send.” She explained the latest in a series of problems tying up the system, gave him a comradely slap on the buttocks as he entered the funnel.

  Her demeanor was stern, the problem inscrutable—as most had become recently. “Your father was an implanter and is gone. Revered, honored, but gone before his time. Be careful. Do nothing foolish. You have many details to attend to on your return, with the event of your granddaughter. Just repair whatever-it-is first.”

  “Just once I wish she’d go out there,” he thought in the safety of the shield.

  “Sorry about your role in life,” his wife would have smugly answered that thought. He tried to concentrate on the problem as the cylinder whirled, but a half-formed dread that all would not go well this trip intruded, and he lifted from the funnel with that mixture of doom and excitement he’d known before. It was the half-knowledge of all whose occupations woo disaster once they are committed to a dangerous mission. The squirmy sensation of regret that it was too late to join the ranks of the safe and the ordinary.

  Still, his shock was genuine when the impression of tumbling ceased and he found himself confronted by the old man on the craggy coral beach. And it was some moments before the truth of the situation penetrated his anger, the knowledge that what he’d always known could happen, had.

  Visions of loved ones vied with those of colleagues similarly lost to the half-death of time. Now he would discover their fate firsthand, never know his family again. Visions of the Northern Terminal, the respectful glances of those who helped him step into danger when there was a need … he’d be only another martyr now to the convenience of others.

  “You’re an Atlantean.” The old man spoke with an unpleasant rasping of voice and movements of mouth showing yellowed teeth, while a foolish jumble of thoughts circled his words.

  The prospect of spending eternity with this simple-witted, hairy man-beast overwhelmed the engineer, and a hope that it wasn’t too late, that the funnel hadn’t closed him out, dissolved even as it formed. He raised his arms and pleaded, “Primitive in the funnel!”

  3

  The old man’s son stood on another beach, and another time, in a cemetery in the sand. Broken pieces of rough-hewn concrete, scattered remnants of plastic flowers, footprints of the living, a salt-scoured picket fence that leaned over the grave of a child.

  Thad Alexander had come to Mayan Cay to find his father and had stayed to dream.

  REPORTED MISSING: Edward P. Alexander III, noted adventurer and author, has been reported missing by authorities in the tiny Central American country of Belize, formerly British Honduras. Alexander, the author of many controversial books and articles on …

  It was one of those “People in the News” things from a wire service and in a newspaper Thad was wadding up to start a fire when the picture of his father caught his eye. An old one off a book jacket. The rest of the article was smeared with animal blood, and he couldn’t read it. He hadn’t seen the elder Alexander in fourteen years.

  Thad squinted against the glitter of sun on sea, had the foolish notion the cemetery was cooking like his brain was cooking, basted in alcohol, stirred by dream. Aromatic spices released in the heat of conch chowder and frying plantain drifted from his father’s house to blend with the slimy scent of ocean-born decay.

  A man-o’-war bird floated above him on steamy air, wings
almost motionless. Its shadow crossed the features of the Virgin Mary on the statue at the head of the grave of Maria Elena Esquivel. The bird’s rapier shadow glided over a jagged hole in a sarcophagus, rippled out on the water, where a cross had been cut away in the seaweed.

  A dog dug to damp sand in the shade of a tombstone, curled her tawny body into the hole. She stared at him mournfully. He tried to ignore her.

  But she felt his pain. It swept over her as he turned toward the house. They almost made contact. She closed her eyes, curled into a tighter ball. She’d never touched thoughts with a human. They were the most guarded of all creatures. The sharp scent of cooking fish cut through her as he slammed the door.

  When moonlight softened the sun’s heat on the sand and humans slept or laughed and talked in creamy light pools behind windows, the cemetery dog stretched away stiffness and prepared to join others to scavenge fish heads and entrails along the water’s edge, tidbits that sea gulls had not already snatched. And scraps left unprotected in backyards and outside hotel kitchens. She shook sand from her coat, perked pointed ears at the yips and snarls of a fight in progress somewhere in the village.

  And in the house behind the cemetery, Thad Alexander sank from a fitful sleep into a deep well of dreams. He lay still as death and dreamed of a place he’d never seen when awake—of a ruined mountain pierced by railroad tracks.

  I

  The Dream Connection

  1

  The occupants of the Toyota station wagon thought they were never to reach the mountain of Thad Alexander’s dream. But Tamara Whelan could see it on the horizon now. She loosened her grip on the wheel and tried to relax the cramp in her back. They’d not met a car since turning off the interstate near Cheyenne. Just treeless hills and telephone wires and fenceposts and power poles rubbed white where cattle had scratched rough hides against them. A windmill, etched against unending sky, blades stilled in the torpor of an August afternoon.

  Tamara had worried about the frozen foods in the grocery bags, about being stranded with car trouble and no one to ask for help, about the stiff misery of the girl beside her.

  Insects in the weeds of roadside ditches made clicking sounds that rattled on wind rushing through open windows, the wind so dry it burned the tissues in their noses, mouths, and throats. Their teeth felt like chalk. Their eyes stung from lack of tears.

  A ridge of hills and rock outcropping ahead, as if a giant’s fingernail had scratched up a section of the rolling yellow-green and buff prairie. And in the middle, the mountain. Really too low to be called a mountain. Too big for a hill. Ragged, gouged, stained. The color of dead, rusty coffee grounds.

  The road dipped to a creek lined with bushes, a bridge, an intersecting road of crushed limestone, and a sign shaped like an arrow. IRON MOUNTAIN.

  “We’re almost there, Adrian.” Tamara turned the station wagon onto crushed limestone. Her daughter didn’t bother to answer, but a flush spread over creamy cheeks, fingers clamped over knees as if trying to bruise them. White dust puffed behind the Toyota, rocks pinged against its underbelly.

  “At least there’s no air pollution out here,” Tamara tried again. Or Seven-Elevens or grocery stores to stock junk food.

  “I’m hungry.”

  “There’s apples in one of the bags in the backseat.”

  “I don’t want apples.”

  “Now, look, I know this isn’t easy, but it’s not the end of the world,” Tamara said, and then wished she hadn’t. Iron Mountain and the settlement at its base, which bore the same name, came into full view. And that’s just what it looked like—the end of the world.

  She let the Toyota stall and die as it came up to the bridge that recrossed the creek, blocking all traffic because the bridge was one lane. There was no traffic. They sat staring through the glare on the windshield.

  “It’s fairly isolated, Mrs. Whelan,” Mr. Curtis had said, sitting comfortably near his air conditioner in Cheyenne. “But there are only seven students, and the parents aren’t demanding. We don’t expect you to stay forever. Nobody does. It’s a good place to start, gain some experience for your record. Get your feet wet slowly.” Mr. Curtis had scratched his scalp with the eraser end of a lead pencil and laughed.

  Adrian turned toward her mother, lovely eyes afloat with tears that managed not to drip down her cheeks. “Life isn’t fair.”

  “Oh, baby, this is the only offer I had. And I know how you hate me to repeat the obvious, but we do have to eat. Let’s try to make the best of it.” Why do I use the same dumb clichés my mother used? Tamara coaxed the Toyota into a rumble. Why am I so tired?

  “If you hadn’t left Daddy, we wouldn’t be in this mess.” Hurt and anger mixed to sound like hate.

  “He left me.” How much patience is one parent supposed to have?

  “Daddy wouldn’t do that unless you did something awful to him.”

  “Don’t chew on your nails.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  Iron Mountain watched as the green Toyota pulled up beside the flagpole at the schoolhouse. The light movement of a curtain here, a shadow hand at a window there. The only sound—a dog barking. The only movement—that of a man in his undershirt bringing a cigarette to his lips. He sat on the low concrete step at his back door. When Tamara Whelan stepped from her car, he untied the dog and took it into the house.

  The quiet now was more empty than peaceful.

  The school was an ugly block of formed concrete in a faded mustard color. Its yard and playground were the crushed white limestone of the road leading to Iron Mountain and of its only street. A great mound of the stuff hovered above the school at the rear.

  Adrian slouched against a fender. She was taller than her mother. Only the eyes and color and texture of their hair indicated a blood relationship, the hair a soft auburn that curled tightly where it touched perspiring skin. Adrian wore hers long, gathered from the forehead and fastened at the crown with a barrette. Her mother’s was short, and it fluffed toward her face.

  Tamara stared down an incline at the scattered car bodies lying amidst dried weeds and dulled with a coating of the powdery dust. “Mr. Curtis said there was an apartment here for us.”

  Two trailer houses connected by a wooden shed supported a monstrous TV antenna. A battered couch leaned against one trailer. In front of it a porcelain bathtub stood on little paw feet. Across the street, a row of four identical triplexes with a gap on the end where there should have been a fifth. All that remained of the latter was a foundation and blackened rubble. The rusty mountain soared behind the lot of them, promising in winter to cut off the sun by three in the afternoon.

  “Let’s quit and go back to Grandma’s.”

  “Grandma has all she can do to take care of herself and Great-Grandma. We’re on our own, and—”

  “And we’d better learn to make the best of it,” Adrian said in a perfect imitation of her mother’s voice.

  The street ended just past the school in a metal gate connecting a chain-link fence and a NO TRESPASSING sign. A man in a white shirt and tie, Levi’s, and a yellow hard hat stood rolling his sleeves up to his armpits.

  Russ Burnham didn’t think the women looked like vagrants or hippies. Maybe tourists who got off on the wrong road? Then he caught the tight expression on the smaller one’s face. Oh, shit, not another schoolteacher. He wanted to turn around and pretend he hadn’t seen them, but knew he couldn’t get away with it. Curtis, you son of a bitch!

  “Excuse me, I wonder if you could help us.” The smaller woman hurried toward him now, her expression harried and a little frightened, her eyes probing to discover whether he was made of safe or dangerous material. “I’m Tamara Whelan and this is my daughter, Adrian. I’d assumed we were expected, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone … around.”

  The Whelans stopped at a safe distance. They were careful people. Both wore the pallor of the East. The daughter was just a kid. A big kid.

  “You the new teacher?”

 
“Yes.” Tamara Whelan seemed to relax. “Did Mr. Curtis—?”

  “No.” He swiped the back of his wrist across the sweat on his forehead and stepped through the gate. “Company provides an apartment. You just have to pay utilities.”

  Russ nodded toward the brick triplexes with the garish green shingles, blackened around the chimneys from the days when coal was used to heat. He thought of an old family story. A great-great-aunt of his dad’s had been torn from her fancy parlor and moved west to a sod hut. She went beserk and killed her baby and herself. A fragile woman, according to family memory.

  “Perhaps you’d show it to us, Mr.…” the fragile-looking woman in front of him said.

  “Burnham. Russ Burnham.” He liked the way sun picked out the copper in their hair. “It’s not lush, but better than a sod hut.”

  “I should hope so. Isn’t it unusual for a company to provide housing for a schoolteacher?”

  “It’s not like we’re crowded. B & H is responsible for most of the children here.” He led her past the burned-out foundation to the second triplex in the line.

  “B & H. That’s sugar, isn’t it? Mr. Curtis said this was a mining town.”

  “We mine limestone. Used in the processing of sugar.” Why was he always the only one out and about when the teachers showed up? Her next question would be: “Then why is it called Iron Mountain?”

  “Why is it called Iron Mountain if—?”

  “Because of the color.” What’s Curtis doing sending someone like her out here? Creep’s got the brain of a dead gnat. “But then, he used to be a teacher too.”

  “What?” Tamara Whelan stopped on the concrete steps up to the chicken-wire fence. “Who?”

  “Just talking to myself.” Wait till you’ve been here awhile, and you’ll be doing it. But he was embarrassed and kicked at the wooden gate. The remaining hinge gave up, and the gate fell into the weeds. He ignored it with a growl. “This one’s been altered. Abner Fistler knocked out inner walls. Made three apartments into two. Makes more room for you and Mrs. Fistler. Also gives you three doors instead of two. Made old Kopecky nervous.” He stomped up more concrete steps to the porch and tried the front door. Locked.