by Bruce Jones
Maser studied him another long moment, then finally picked up his burger again. “I should have weighed you at the office. My fault.”
Richard spread his hands philosophically. “I’m sick, Maze…people sick like I’m sick lose weight.”
Maser chewed, not taking his eyes off his friend. “You’re not losing weight, old buddy, I can tell just by looking at you. You’re losing fat. But you’re gaining muscle-mass. Like someone on steroids. You aren’t chippying on me, are you?”
Richard smiled, head back, dropping in another fry. “Bobby, you are the only doctor in town whose finger I prefer up my ass.”
Maser wasn’t laughing. He heard, but he wasn’t laughing. “Cause I’d kick your ass if I found out you been fucking with steroids.”
Richard steepled his fingers as if praying. “I’m clean, coach—I swear.”
Maser chewed, watching him silently. Suspiciously? “How are you sleeping?”
Richard was reaching for another fry, drew back an empty hand. He wiped his mouth with a napkin from the chrome dispenser and scanned the outside traffic again. “Not well.”
“Insomnia?”
“Nightmares.”
The tab came—a plump Bo-Bo’s waitress that might have worked here forever—and Maser snatched it before Richard could move. When she was gone he said: “The dog?”
Richard’s head snapped to him, heart blipping once. “How’d you know about that?”
“Scroogie told me.”
Richard couldn’t believe it. “Scroogie told you about my nightmare?”
Maser grunted, reaching back for his wallet. “No, Scroogie told me about his nightmare. Comes into his bedroom at night? Stinking like the city dump? Glowers at him from the bedposts?”
Richard was floored.
And suddenly very queasy—probably from so much unaccustomed Bo-Bo’s grease and sugar. “Scroogie’s had the same dream about the rotting dog?”
Maser shook his head, laying a bill across the tab, a vague little tremble to his hand. “A dog, Rich. His nightmare. I didn’t say it was the same one you had.”
“Well, don’t you think—even for a pragmatist like you—that’s pretty coincidental?”
Maser shrugged almost as if he were bored with the subject. “Not really. Scroogie’s been under a lot of stress lately. Stress can make the mind vulnerable, open to suggestion. Where did you tell him about your dog dream?”
“In the woods.”
Maser looked at him. “In the woods?”
“The one by that old farmer’s south pasture, you remember. I ran into Scroogie downtown, we were taking a short cut back home.” He repressed a shudder. “I’d forgotten how creepy those damn woods were.”
“There you go. Creepy woods, creepy dream, dumped on a vulnerable mind.”
“I didn’t dump it on him, Maze!”
“Easy. Just a figure of speech.”
“So why are you looking at me like that, Maze?”
Maser sat back. “The truth?”
“The truth is I look like shit, so tell me a lie. I could use a lie today.”
Maser was gazing at Richard’s hairline. “The truth is you look good.”
Trying not to leap at false hope: “I do?”
Maser nodded. “You do. Better than the last time. You exercising or something?”
“Not really.”
“Well, you look good, kid.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You ever have the dream about the dog?”
Maser smirked, shook his head. “I’m lucky these days if I have a dream about pussy. No, no smelly dogs in the night for me. Actually I rarely remember my dreams.”
Richard nodded absently.
“Maybe you should try the same thing…”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Try keeping your dream to yourself, at least around Scroogie, know what I mean?”
What about me? Richard thought, I’m the one with the goddamn cancer! And the crazy goddamn dead dog dreams! How about you worry about me a little?
But he just nodded instead and said, “Yeah. Okay. Sorry.”
Thought that was the end of it.
But Maser wasn’t smiling, wasn’t even looking up from the table in front of him. And he had his professional face on, his neutral un-judgmental face so he couldn’t help but appear judgmental.
Richard sighed, leaned back in the booth. “Now what!”
Maser finally looked up. Didn’t say anything.
“C’mon Maze, I know that look, I’ve been seeing that look on your sour puss since I was thirteen! So what is it now, how did I fuck up our chubby little friend this time?”
Maser looked down again at the table, toyed with his unused fork. “Forget it.”
Richard leaned forward quickly, starting to lose it a little. “I won’t goddamn quit it! What did I do to unnerve Scroogie’s poor shattered psyche now?”
“Nothing, Rich. Drop it.”
“Well who, then! Who’s having nightmares about old dead yellow dogs n—“
He froze in place.
Mouth hanging open. Then he shut his mouth. Then opened it again and said, “Shit. Shit. Not Shivers! Are you telling me Pete Shivers is having that same god-awful nightmare as well? Maze? Is that what you’re saying”
Maser looked Richard straight in the eye. “Scroogie told him about your nightmare, I’m sure that’s where he got it! And I’m not saying anything, I’m just a small town doctor minding his own business. You’re the one running around shooting his mouth off and upsetting people!”
He will apologize for that, Richard thought immediately, he will apologize because he didn’t really mean to say something that deliberately hurtful, that instantly condemning, not his good friend Maze, that wasn’t his style.
But Maser was looking out the window now at the traffic, saying nothing.
Making Richard feel not so much alone as cut out.
Like that day old man Yenders got drunk once too often on the Shawnee golf course, making everyone feel uncomfortable and upset. Until his friends kicked him out of the club.
ELEVEN
That night was pretty much a repeat of the previous one.
Richard waiting patiently in bed while Allie did her thing, her teeth brushing and other nightly toiletries, turning off her nightstand light, kissing his cheek and rolling over.
She’d already asked him about his appointment with Maser and Richard had already told her, adding still more lies to the growing mountain of them. And all the variations therein; including the newest fact that the cancer hadn’t spread after all.
“He says its probably just urine retention,” he told his lovely, trusting wife about his erection. “He checked me over in his office and took a specimen but it will be at least a week.” All this said during the casual pursuing of a magazine and with as much glib nonchalance as he could muster.
Allie, of course, cheerleading as Allie always did, was too busy encouraging him (and feeling secretly sorry?) to detect his bullshit, too busy dismissing anything negative attached to the incident.
…of course she was dismissive, dweeb-o, you saw the look of cautious hope in her eyes when the High Hard One was nodding at her…
Yeah, he’d seen it. Seen the look in her eyes and the twitch in her hand there on the bed as if she might actually reach out and touch it, holding herself back instead for fear it would vanish. Except it doesn’t vanish, does it, he reminded himself. He turned over on his side, his back to hers, and stared at the blank bedroom wall. A vanishing cock would be almost preferable. That way he wouldn’t have to look down any longer at the wrinkled, pathetic snail that used to be the surging proof of his virility.
“Fuck this,” he said out loud--instantly praying Allie was already asleep and hadn’t heard. He shut his own eyes defiantly there in the dark, trying to find the elusive doorway to that other darkness, that dream-plane whose landscape was beginning to loo
k more and more like Nightmare County.
What he found, in the quiet corridors of his mind, was another doorway: the vision of the thin, unpainted door to the unfinished sheetrock and bare studs of his father’s little cellar office, standing unlocked and open, as if beckoning, inviting him inside for another quick peek around, another chance to feel and smell that place where his father’s memory was strongest. And--let’s get real, Richo--another chance to see if the old swivel chair was back where he left it before the old steel desk, or if it had magically moved again somewhere else in the little room, jumping around his father’s office like an anxious spider.
Not that he cared. What he cared about was another chance to mosey over and get another look at the towering wall of neatly stacked antiquarian volumes on the office wall. The neatly stacked books, pressed tightly together row upon looming row…except for that one little dark space, one little cobwebbed opening his nearly-anal father would never have allowed…
Richard’s eyes flew open with sudden revelation there in the dark.
The desk!
Why hadn’t he thought of it before?
If a book had been taken from the primly stacked shelves, it had most likely been taken by his father. And his father had most likely done it out of fear someone (someone young, probably like Richard) might inadvertently stumble upon it, start perusing it. Which meant his father’s most logical choice for a hiding place would be the big, formidable steel desk, with its heavy metal drawers and their heavy heaps of stacked papers and envelopes, under which he could have hidden a small Plymouth, let alone a single antiquarian volume.
The longer Richard lay there pondering it, the more probable the idea seemed.
And the more probable it seemed, the more compelled he felt to pad down there to the cellar right now (who was he kidding, he wasn’t going to sleep anyway) and start pulling at those heavy metal drawers with their slate gray fronts and silver grab handles and ball bearing rollers. How long could it take to search? There were only, what? six drawers, three to a side and one thin one in the center? He could even grab a quick bracer from the kitchen pantry on the way. And if the whole jaunt turned out to be zip—no hidden volume and a wasted trip—well, then, that was one less thing to consider in solving the missing book mystery.
He threw back the covers and sat up, started to rise but sat thinking there in the dark on the edge of the mattress for a moment. ‘The Missing Book Mystery.’
Sounded like a Hardy Boys adventure.
And not much of a mystery, really, at that. Not much of anything but a blank space between two old books in a forgotten old office in a median priced suburban tract home when you thought about it. What was he trying to do here, gather material for some lame attempt at his own book, his own thriller? Set in the childhood house of his protagonist, an aging TV writer unwillingly retired from Hollywood, moved back to the Midwest to be haunted by the lingering spirits of his dead parents? Whose voices seemed to carry to him from the lonely soughing of the night wind: “Find the book, son, and you will find the truth about our double murder…and revive your own stalled career…”
Lame.
Worse than lame. Pathetic.
Richard sat there on the edge of the bed feeling suddenly stupid and out of sorts and hovering perilously close to depression. Yeah, some mystery. An idiotic ‘cozy’ probably based on unconscious feelings of failure before his dead father and his living wife; all it needed was a cat companion and the letters of the alphabet to form cute title continuity: D Is For Dipshit. You’re not a rich lady mystery scribe in Santa Barbara, Richo, you’re a starving ex-screenwriter dying of cancer in the Midwest.
…that’s good, Rich, that’s great! Get halfway excited about a potential writing idea then just beat the living shit out of it and become more depressed than you already are! Why don’t you just slip into the bathroom, grab one of Allie’s plastic “no pull” leg razors and play Let’s Cut Bait on your left carotid? Get it over with, champ!
Please…he begged himself, clamping his eyes tight in search of deeper darkness yet, let’s don’t start on that again…”Denning’s Guide To Painless Suicide.”
But it didn’t work. The deeper dark only put him closer to his already dark alter ego, only amplified its nagging inner-voice: …fine, then let’s at least start telling the truth here—why you really don’t want to write a thriller about a missing book in a weird cellar. Not because you think it’s a lame idea; you’ve read far lamer ideas from the bestseller section at Borders. You don’t want to write it because you’re afraid! Afraid of the research--one bookish little piece in particular. Afraid of the real cellar right here under your feet. Fess up, old man, you got a mystery here all right, only it ain’t a bookstore cozy, it’s the mystery of why a dying man suddenly starts getting younger! …there, I said it…you’re getting younger and all your old schoolboy chums are having the same freaked-out nightmares about ROT-weiler--the Wonder Dog From Beyond!…
Richard opened his eyes, felt himself nodding affirmation in the dark.
It was true. Something was happening all right. To him and the other Deadenders. Only not the kind of something you could make into an even passably digestible novel because no one would buy it. He didn’t buy it himself.
What he did buy was the possibility that the cancer had spread from his liver to his brain and he was just climbing aboard the nonstop Super Chief to Wacky Land to join Porky in the hunt for the last of the Dodos. Not the worst way of dying, maybe.
Only you aren’t dying, are you? Not anymore. You know it and Maser knows it. He just won’t admit what he can’t explain—won’t risk making himself look professionally inept…you know fussy ole Maze, always had to be the right one, just as Scroogie always had to be the rich one and Shivers always had to be the one in the spotlight. And let’s not leave out curvaceous little Laurie Seasons while we’re at it—Laurie Seasons of the bright eyes and “exotic” mind, who was more than just your first, loverboy--she was your best! Let’s get it all out in the open here, put all our hard-ons on the table, so to speak…
“Allie is a wonderful lover,” Richard whispered to himself in the dark.
…yeah, great tits, faithful to the end--but no Laurie, face it—no wild little Laurie-I’ll-Do-Anything-Seasons…none of them were ever like her…
Richard sat there in the dark two feet from his sleeping wife feeling a million miles away and completely alone in the Universe. “Maybe,” he nodded at the silent room, “maybe…”
…right…so why don’t you call her…?
“She’s probably married,” Richard muttered with the voice of an automaton, face blank as the black pane of glass before him, “probably got kids…”
…and probably sick of the whole thing and—knowing our Laurie—bored out of her sexy mind…why don’t you call her, Richo…you know you want to…
It’s late, Richard thought.
…which means hubby will be asleep…
Just shut-up, huh? Just crawl back into your little Id hole and stop bothering me!
Besides, I don’t have her number.
…that’s why God made phone books, chicken-shit…
Leave me alone.
…lying over there in her own dark bedroom right now, probably…her husband’s back turned, snoring keeping her awake…thinking about the day…or maybe the old days…maybe thinking of you, sport…right this second…
Richard found himself turning to the bedside nightstand, the barely discernable outline of the phone atop it. The old kind--with a rotary dialer--like the one he used to talk to Laurie with. What would he say after all these years…?
As he sat staring quietly at it, the phone rang loudly in the dark.
He flinched, heart crashing. Jesus!
--and before it could cut the silence a second time—wake up Allie—he grabbed out and fumbled the receiver from the hook. “–yes, hello--?”
“Richard?”
He became aware he’d actually placed his palm a
gainst his crashing heart as if to still it. “Who is this?”
“It’s Scroogie. Did I--you sound like you’re still up.”
Richard had to take a deep breath to keep the shaking out of his voice. “What’s the matter, John? You sound weird. You been drinking?”
Silence for a moment—Scroogie getting his own winded breath, or had he hung up?
“Scroogie? You drunk?”
“Rich, have you seen it?”
“What? Seen what?”
More silence, and now Richard could hear his friend’s distant heavy breathing—frightened breathing—as if he were holding the mouthpiece away from his mouth to cover it. “It was here, Rich! It was just here!”
What? Richard started to say—wanted to say—but he knew well enough. A chill snake tracked his spine to raise gooseflesh across his shoulders. “Scroogie—you’ve had a little too much tonight, haven’t you, pal?”
Not bothering to cover his panting breath now: “I did a terrible thing, Rich! A terrible thing!”
“Calm down, now. What happened?”
“I heard it…just like you said. It came across the backyard…got in the garage side door somehow! I could hear it coming across the foyer but I was too scared to move! When I got to the stairs I started to wake Sally—but then I thought, what if it gets her! And what about the kids!”
“Scroogie, slow down, I can hardly understand you—“
“It came into the bedroom, Rich! Sat there at the foot of our bed, looking at me with those…those red eyes! God, the stink of it!”
“Scroogie, it was only a dream…”
“Huh-uh,” Scroogie agreed limply, voice trailing now, falling apart with fear, “sure, Richo…you and me and Shiv, the same dream—I don’t think so! The thing is real!”
“Look…turn on all the lights, Scrooge…call the police if it’ll make you feel better—“
“Rich, I’m sorry!” sounding far away now, as if his head were turned from the mouthpiece, craning around in anticipation of something, “I did a terrible thing!”
“Keep your voice down, you’re going to wake Sally…”