In the Still of the Night--The Supernaturals II

by David L. Golemon

  John was about to stop the dreamwalk when the bell rang, and he stopped from waking himself up as Gloria slowly approached Dean. She was facing him as though she could see the kid’s gray eyes. She leaned over the desk.

  “Listen, Daddy’s boy, this report is very important to me. The place is important; it may mean a scholarship, which I know you don’t understand, so you’d better not screw this up. Do you hear?” Then she turned and faced the boy with the acne.

  “And while you think commenting on my bra or clothing is funny, you ought to stop and smell yourself, you little bastard. It smells like you have shit your pants.” She wiggled her nose. “Just one of the many curses of being blind is that you are cursed in your other senses!”

  “Oh!” Dean said mockingly as he laughed, and then he stood while his friend tried his best to vanish into the scarred-up desktop.

  * * *

  Dean approached Gloria as she gathered her books and walking cane. She turned on him when her excellent hearing told her he was right behind her.

  “Look, no pleasantries, all right? I’ll say you helped. Miss Kramer will never know; she lives in Montclair, not Moreno.”

  “Look, I never said a word about you, so don’t go tellin’ your dad that I did. He’ll only get into it with my father, and that won’t do either one of us any good.”

  Gloria glanced around as if she were hearing a little voice. “Is that groveling I hear?”

  “Good for you,” John said, watching the little drama play out.

  Strangely, the girl turned her head in John’s direction as if she had heard him. Then she returned her attention to Hadley. Lonetree didn’t think much of it; after all, the girl could hear other things, so it didn’t have to be his voice that caught her momentary attention.

  “Why do you hate me so much?” Dean asked as he angrily placed his schoolbooks under his arm, slipping on his jacket one arm at a time while juggling his things.

  “Hate you?” Gloria stopped gathering her things and turned to face the cocky and brash kid. “We’ve been growing up in the same town for four years, and you have said less than three words to me. Even when our fathers were close, you treated me like blindness was a communicable disease.”

  “Comm—what?” he asked, not understanding the word communicable.

  “A sickness that spreads. But you caught something else, didn’t you, Dean? You caught the arrogant bug. God, you’re such an asshole.”

  John could see the wince of the rebuke on Dean’s face. The comment actually hurt the big man on campus. He saw Dean take a deep breath, and then he tapped Gloria on the shoulder.

  “Okay, what is this big report you have to do that now seems to be in my immediate future?”

  “God, you just don’t know when to cease and desist, do you?”

  “Why do you try to use words you know I have to look up to find out what they mean?” he protested. “You say I’m a snob—do you think I like it when you try to embarrass me? Maybe that’s why I avoid you at home. You’ve always been that way.”

  Gloria seemed like the air had been taken out of her, and her shoulders slumped. She slowly turned and then with her dark glasses slipping down her nose, she adjusted them and shook her head.

  “If I did that, I didn’t mean to. But you know you think you’re better than the rest of us in that town. Going to school here has even made you more arrogant. But as I said, if I did embarrass you, I’m sorry.” She again took her books and turned toward the door as the second bell sounded.

  “So, tell me about this Halloween report.”

  She turned and frowned. “You’re just not going to stop, are you? Why would you want to spend your weekend with a blind chick? There are plenty of girls that would appreciate your company far more.”

  “Come on!”

  Gloria stopped and in resignation said, “Okay, it’s a report on some of the strange things in Moreno.”

  “Like?”

  John’s ears perked up, and he stepped closer to the two kids.

  “Like the old ruins, for one.”

  “You know my dad and yours keep everyone out of there.”

  “Ah, I see. Afraid of Daddy again, are we?” she said as she turned and walked away. She called out over her shoulder as she tapped the chosen path with her cane, “Pick me up at nine tomorrow. We have to sneak in just before the guard change. But if I were you, I would just sleep in until the maid wakes you up, and then you can go and drink beer with the rest of your mutant friends out at Hog Road. I am capable of doing this on my own. Frankly, you would be in the way. But if you insist, I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

  Dean watched Gloria go and wondered just how bad this idea was. He saw her exit the class, and then he slowly left. John felt as well as knew the boy’s thoughts and knew he was truly puzzled by the girl’s passion when it came to her project, which interested Lonetree to no end.

  John thought about Gloria’s project and thought they may be onto something. In his dream state, they were mere days away from the disaster that would eventually destroy the town of Moreno, and he was short of time.

  He felt the weariness grow inside him and knew he was close to waking. He started to leave the class when suddenly he was no longer inside. His breath came in short gasps, as he was now standing in a cold wind as he looked at the ruins. He could see one was an old mission from the aerial photos of Moreno that Leonard had shown them. The other, a run-down shamble of old adobe bricks. It looked abandoned, but John knew better. He tilted his head, as he thought he heard something. The chain-link fencing surrounding the property allowed the wind through, and it made a sad whistling sound as it passed. His eyes moved first toward the ancient mission. Then he turned to his right and spied the ruins of a building which, for a reason he couldn’t understand, made him feel vulnerable and alone. The wind came on stronger, and he knew they had stumbled on a hot spot in the small town of Moreno. He immediately started drifting toward wakefulness as the words echoed in his dream.

  Přiveď ho domů.

  John had never heard the language before in his life, but for a reason he couldn’t fathom, knew the meaning of it. He didn’t know how he knew, but it translated in his mind as if he was being spoken to. The strange words in the foreign language were being said right into his ears as the wind had faded and the dream came to an end. He would wake up with Jennifer and the others hearing those repeated words that had been brought in on that cold breeze.

  Bring him home.

  * * *

  Julie was furiously writing down John’s every word. Leonard had already seized on the last three words to come from the dreamwalk and was running the phonetic trace to translate the strange language. Jennifer was lightly rubbing John’s hand and wrist to get him to come completely back to a wakeful state. Gabriel watched with the syringe with 10 cc of Adrenalin in case John had trouble waking. Kennedy relaxed when he saw Lonetree’s eyes flutter and then come back. The action had taken far less time than Kennedy had hoped for.

  “Look,” George and Damian said at the same moment Dean started to move. John straightened in his chair and stretched his arms just as Hadley sat up straight with his gray eyes wide.

  “Jenny, move John away from the bed,” Gabe said as Hadley turned his head first right and then left, as he searched for something he could not see. As John stumbled from the chair, still groggy after viewing a brief moment in Hadley’s life, Damian and George moved quickly to assist Jennifer in getting him clear of Hadley. Kennedy had explained once that when John dreamwalked while connected to a human host and not an object like Summer Place, the recipient of his strange talent usually awoke with resentment at the fact their most inner thoughts and dreams had been compromised. Even those who had requested John’s intervention woke with a sense of being violated. Damian moved to turn the lights on after he had secured John and Jenny in the far corner next to Leonard’s station.

  “No, Damian, leave the lights off,” Gabriel said, replacing his medical aids in
the small black bag and standing to monitor Hadley’s heart rate. It had skyrocketed. He was in danger of a stroke if they couldn’t get him to calm.

  “Where is she? What have you done?” Hadley said as he continued to move his head as if searching for someone or something.

  In the corner, John came fully awake and then stood on shaky legs. He quickly gestured for Leonard to give him a writing pad. Sickles, wide-eyed, handed him a yellow legal pad, as John was still asleep. Jennifer was also confused, and she stopped Lonetree and mouthed, Are you awake?

  John ignored her and wrote something on the pad and then pushed it hard into Jenny’s hand. The anthropologist read the few words there and then started to hand the pad over to Gabriel, who became aware of the activity behind him and turned as Jenny pointed to the pad and started to give it to him. John vigorously shook his head and tapped Jennifer hard on the shoulder and pointed. He tried to speak, but it was like his mouth was full of cotton. He finally managed to get his point across. “You read it to Hadley,” he said and then accepted the water bottle from Leonard, who was still scared and confused.

  Kennedy nodded when Jennifer showed him the question. Jenny cleared her throat and approached the bed where Dean was still searching the darkened room for someone he knew to be lost.

  “Dean?” Jenny said in a soft, motherly voice. Hadley stopped his search of the bedroom and then fixed his tired eyes on Jenny. She felt he wasn’t seeing her but knew where to look. She definitely had his attention.

  “Why are the ruins in Moreno so important?” she finished the question.

  “That’s private property, you know,” he mumbled, and then his brow furrowed. “What do you mean you’ve been going down there since you were twelve?”

  The others exchanged looks as Hadley slowly replayed something in his memory.

  Suddenly, Hadley broke out into a laugh. It was an unnatural sound, it was forced like a soldier joking during a fierce firefight, it was for bravery’s sake alone.

  “Hey, don’t touch that; that’s mercury. This stuff shouldn’t be here. Look, it’s all over the damn thing. My dad will have a conniption fit if he discovers someone stole mercury from the plant; this stuff could contaminate the entire town, if not the valley if it got into the groundwater.”

  Hadley stayed in the sitting position, and then he slowly fell back onto the pillow. His eyes remained open, and they all could see the tears welling there. They watched as those tears slowly rolled down his cheek to soak into the white pillowcase.

  “Meet … me … at … the … Grenada … we … can … kill … it … there … we … can … kill … it … there … we … can … kill … it … there…”

  Gabriel watched as Hadley closed his eyes. And then in a soft voice, Hadley murmured, “Take me home.”

  The president had gone. He drifted away like an outgoing tide, and they watched the lined face relax. Kennedy nodded, and in the flickering candlelight, Damian flipped on the lights. Both bedside lamps flared, and they all blinked at the brightness.

  Jennifer took Hadley’s vital signs. Gabriel stood and went to the door after blowing out the two candles and then opened it and gestured for the doctors and nurses to enter. They were soon followed by the security detail. Leonard shut down his system after securing it and then transferred the data he had recovered over to his smaller laptop. He nodded and then followed the others out of the room.

  * * *

  The study was silent as they all recovered from the tense session with John. Jennifer gave Lonetree three aspirin, and he dry swallowed them as he stared at the table’s shiny top. He rubbed his eyes and looked up at Kennedy.

  “Those ruins are the key, I believe. When I looked at them, I knew there was something bad connected to them—maybe not the mission so much as the building next to it.”

  “The winery,” Leonard said as he passed around a set of pictures he had downloaded and shown previously.

  They all perused the photos once more, this time with far more interest.

  “He kept talking about mercury. Why?” Jennifer asked John, who shook his head.

  “Outside of the fact that the factory employed most of the town and used mercury in all their products”—Leonard passed another set of printed photos out—“it is the excuse used for the town’s eventual death rattle. Other than that, I have no idea. But Hadley seemed to worry about it quite a bit.”

  John rubbed his eyes again and then opened them. “I got the feeling from the kid that it wasn’t his knowledge that he passed on but his father’s dire warnings about the effects of mercury on the human system. He was basically ignorant. A kid’s warning to another kid. I don’t know. I have to sort out my own feelings.”

  “What did you think of the girl?” Gabriel asked.

  John smiled and felt as if his headache were easing up. “Gloria? I got the intense feeling that all of this, everything, revolved around her in some way.”

  “The report? Halloween?” Julie asked as she reread her notes from the dream session.

  “I have to go back in. And this time, I need to have you tank me, Gabe. There’s a lot more there. It’s like something wants the story told, and I feel it’s coming from the girl.”

  Gabriel looked back at Leonard, who sadly nodded and then leaned over from his chair and slipped him a sheet of paper. Kennedy read it and then closed his eyes. He finally opened them and then saw John was anxiously waiting for the bad news.

  “Gloria Perry, seventeen years, two months, missing, presumed dead in the Grenada Theater fire. Her body and that of four others were never recovered.”

  John felt immense sadness at hearing that. The room was silent as Lonetree absorbed Leonard’s research.

  Julie cleared her throat, ever the reporter. “Her family?”

  “Father only,” Leonard said as he read from the computer screen. “Mother died while her father served overseas during the war, basically the same as our friend Dean Hadley. Raised by an aunt until her father returned.” Leonard raised his brow when he noted an interesting fact. “The father, Franklyn Perry, was an intelligence officer. A captain. Guess who he served with and who his commanding officer in S-2 was?”

  “Robert Hadley Sr.,” John said through pursed lips.

  “Franklyn Perry operated a bar and grill in Moreno and received profits from joint ventures with Hadley. The bar and grill business afforded him the time he needed to assist in his daughter’s infirmity,” Leonard said.

  “She was blind, not infirm. I got the distinct impression that if that girl had not died before her time, we would have heard amazing things about her. No, Leonard, no infirmities.”

  “Bad choice of words.”

  “Hey, do I have competition for your affections?” Jenny joked, and John smiled.

  “Can we agree that it all revolves around that small town in California?” Gabe said as he stood and paced. They all nodded.

  “A disaster this size, why isn’t this incident that well known? The deaths of that many should have been an historical black eye,” Julie said as she again went into her conspiracy mode. This time, Gabriel didn’t think she was wrong.

  “Cover up,” Leonard said. “Who were these men really working for? The United States Army or the OSS, or was it someone even more nefarious?”

  “During the war years, the lines were a little blurred,” Damian said. “I was approached by the CIA after my tours in Iraq. It’s not all that uncommon.”

  “Leonard, is there any possibility you can find out what duties they had during their service time?” Gabe asked.

  “None. No files exist that can be … well … stolen. Whatever they did was blocked from their 201 files. I do have a clue here. The words Přiveď ho domů—and I hope I spelled that right—is Czech and also basically the same meaning in the Yugoslavian dialect. It means, ‘Bring him home.’ I can start there. Maybe their service careers had something to do with the Eastern European liberation by Allied forces.”

  “We may not have the
time to wait for what you may come up with.” All eyes again went to John. “I have to go back in, and this time, Gabe, you have to give me a kicker. Tank me until I am deep.”

  “I disagree, John. A kicker will send you down too deep; even with stimulants, we may not be able to wake you. Your heart may seize.”

  “I’m willing to take that chance.”

  “Well, I’m not!” Jenny said. “You think you can solve something that happened decades ago by tapping into a man who more than likely has murder on his résumé? You heard the tapes of your own voice describing Hadley as an arrogant little prick who has love for only himself.”

  “I always toss initial impressions, you know that. I get a feeling that the kid wasn’t as bad as everyone believed. Why the cover up of the factory explosion? It was widely reported, but there was not one investigation outside of the local authorities. Look, this company made their bones on government funding. Are you telling me that the feds wouldn’t have been all over this? And why didn’t the State of California sue the crap out of Washington over the supposed groundwater contamination that the very same disaster brought on? And most importantly, why would Hadley Corp continue securing a place that was dead and buried in 1962?”

  “Geronimo is right; there’s too much bullshit here to not believe that something happened in Moreno that no one, and I do mean no one, wants out.”

  Everyone looked at Leonard. John was staring a hole in him.

  “Sorry for the Geronimo thing.”

  “I think this stuff has been buried so long that everyone has forgotten where the bodies are, so to speak.” Damian stood and went to the coffee maker. He saw and smelled the old coffee and decided that water would do. “No, as much as I do not appreciate the science as much as you do, I think we stand our best shot with Lonetree.” Damian looked up and shook his head in acknowledging Jennifer and her own dilemma about the dangers posed by John reentering Hadley’s memories.

  Lonetree bit his lip. He didn’t want to say anything about the troubling fact that he suspected Gloria Perry had heard him when he inadvertently laughed during the dreamwalk. That information, as troubling as it was, would be a death knell for going back in. Gabriel would never allow it if there was a hint of interaction between himself and the occupants of Hadley’s dreamworld.