Softly, the ballad had returned. Not loud enough to recall yet, and maybe easy to ignore, but knowing that it was back made him close his eyes again. Tears broke around his clenched, throbbing eyelids. He’d hoped this was over, but he’d never believed it was. He hated being right. What a day this was turning out to be…he took a deep breath through his nose to calm himself. His stomach coiled. Cleanliness was obviously deceiving to the eye.
This cell was rank.
Chapter 20
Luke hoped all his good dreams were still pending.
He could use some good dreams, but sleep and wakefulness were dreamless places and he had to be thankful for that. The ballad, once gone, was faint now; and from his brief conversation with Dara last night and a “Nope” text from Johnny, it seemed that Luke was the only one who could still hear it. At least he had some idea now how loud the music had to be in order to “remember” it. If it got too close to his mind again, he’d have to get the hell away from his family and the rest of the world.
For now, Dara needed him and Maribel to see her through her hospital stay. The doctors had found identical injuries to her supraspinatus and subscapularis muscles on both shoulders, as though precise incisions had cut through the muscles and the force had driven the humeri out of joint. They’d never seen anything like that, since there had been no external damage; it was as if a knife had cut her from inside instead of outside.
Luke only had a slight fracture to his scaphoid, but in the nightmare he had felt like every bone in his hand had been reduced to meal. The swelling of his thumb and the bruising around his wrist was minimal although he’d seen a blackened mass of dying flesh while inside the nightmare. This might have instilled hope that these twists of reality could not enforce all the horrors they promised, but Dara had made him think up another, darker theory about these sorted outcomes.
We have to want it…the Bone Men would grant us that desire. To die. To end this.
Dara told him she’d been getting pretty close in the backyard. Accepting it, hoping for death, might have been a way out of the agony. Thank God the balladeer had stopped singing at that moment. Luke didn’t want to even think about how close a call that’d been.
On a hunch that Johnny’d given him, he asked Maribel about Allie’s weirdo husband. Turns out he’d been conducting orchestras for a ballet in Los Angeles for the past three days. She’d recorded one that was televised on the Arts channel. Luke watched as much of the man’s stolid performance as his attention span would allow before disavowing all his previous suspicions.
Allie though.
She was still not off the hook.
Luke went to the fridge to get the water pitcher. He drank an entire cup of water and tried to fight off the trembling in his muscles. He supposed he should call his work. LA had officially dropped the contract and would be suing the company to recover monies for the fines accrued by the State and Federal government. But that wasn’t all. The head administrative secretary, Maria, had filed some kind of suit against Luke and the company. Sexual harassment, or something equally outrageous. They were also trying to pin the tank rupture at the sewer plant on him, saying he had signed off on the final design. He’d already called the CEO and offered his verbal resignation, but the board wanted to have a cordial sit-down to discuss the details of his departure. Luke still had to call back to schedule it, but so far he’d considered just forgetting it. With the music growing in his mind, it wasn’t safe to go about life as usual anymore.
He needed to talk to Maribel, who was still an innocent in all this, but had no idea how to broach the bizarre subject. Now he understood what Dara had gone through with him earlier. He found himself dialing the hospital and asking for her room.
“Hi,” Dara rasped. “You coming down here soon? It’s boring.”
“I’m hearing the music again.”
She went silent.
“Did you hear me?”
“Yeah. What are we going to do?”
“It’s still really faint, but I’m going to drive…somewhere, if it gets louder.”
She whispered, “Great...just goddamn….”
“Are you hearing it?”
“I’m so high right now, I have no idea. These drugs are killer.”
“Well, call me if anything changes.”
“Luke?”
“Yeah, hon?”
“I have to tell you about the other day.”
“You don’t.”
“No—I do. See, the nightmare didn’t start at the house.”
“No?”
“I followed Maribel to someone’s house.”
Luke swallowed. Immediately his throat felt lined with sandpaper. “Whose house?”
“I’ve never met them before. They don’t look like anybody from her school. Maybe they are, though.”
“Why would you follow her?”
“You know why.”
There Dara went again. Getting jealous. Getting suspicious. She’d been correct the last time, though.
“I heard her say something.” A loud exhalation came through the phone. “This is stupid. I know there are other things going on. Let’s not worry about it. Sorry to even…just forget it.”
“What did she say? How did you hear her?”
“Look,” Dara said. “I was…nearby.”
“What are you getting at? Did you see Maribel with someone else or not?”
“I think she’s with another couple. I strongly think so.”
“How are you strongly sure? Maybe it was part of the Lifemare. People were acting unusual at the treatment plant too.”
“It wasn’t the Lifemare. I followed her, right before it started. It could have been nothing, but why hasn’t she ever mentioned those people to us?”
“It doesn’t sound like you’re strongly certain, then.”
“Stop harping on that. I don’t have much to go on, but I thought I heard some things said that were…sexual. She called them earlier when I was sleeping. She didn’t know I was listening.”
“What did they talk about?”
“I think just about what happened later that day. They lived through the nightmare somehow.”
“You glad?”
“Of course, I’m glad,” she snapped.
Luke put his hand to his forehead. He had cold sweats. “Maybe that’s what our letters are about. Do you still have yours?”
“The Bone Men… I don’t have it anymore.”
“Shit, I lost mine too. Well, this is dumb, we just have to ask her.”
“I’m so scared, Luke. She’s still living life like nothing has changed. If she isn’t doing anything wrong with these people, she’ll hate me and how can I take that? If she is screwing around…does that mean we’re over? Are we going to lose her? Because of me? I don’t think I can take that on top of everything else.”
Luke looked down at his empty glass, watched the condensation on the sides bead down. He absently brushed his thumb through it. “We have to face it, either way.”
“No, we should let this go for now.”
“Let it go?” He heard his voice grow louder.
“We have to figure out the nightmare thing first.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Maribel seems to be stuck right in the middle of that, too.”
“You mean Allie’s diorama box?”
“No, I was thinking about the other stuff in that cupboard. There was a picture of a horse with the word MARBLE under it.”
“Uh-huh. So?”
“The Bone Man told me about something called the Mare. I looked it up on my phone this morning. It’s a mythical creature, the maker of nightmares. It rides on the chests of people and gives them bad dreams. This Mare thing is using the balladeer as its transport. I’ve been thinking about that drawing of the horse. Do
you think that was some kind of sign? The ink is so bled together on the page now that the word Marble could have once read ‘Maribel.’ We didn’t take a close look at it because w
e were too interested in the touchstones.”
“Are you implying what I think?”
“I’ve heard Mari trying to sing the ballad in the shower twice this week.”
“She hears the song, too, that’s obvious, but that doesn’t mean anything. We see her every day and she’s not singing. This balladeer sings non-stop—”
“The singing could all be internal. How do you know, Luke?”
He didn’t. He really didn’t. And his silence gave him away.
“What if she doesn’t know she’s being used by this Mare thing? Maybe this isn’t on purpose.”
A vein in Luke’s temple throbbed. “Maybe it is,” he replied darkly. “She might have stopped the song the other day when she found you in the backyard.”
“Still…there’s Allie. She wrote our names under the items on the diorama.”
“How do we find out?”
Dara let out a quiet groan. “We’ll burn that bridge later, I guess.”
“Hey, I love you. We’ll make sense of this somehow.”
She didn’t sound convincing. “Love you, too. Yeah.”
Maribel or Allie.
The balladeer.
“Talk to you a little later.”
“Visit, if you can.”
“I’ll try.”
“Good.”
Allie or Maribel.
The balladeer.
Could they both be behind this?
Luke ended his call and put the phone away. One of his wives, a piece of his own heart, could be doing all of this. Causing pain and death. Traumatizing reality’s makeup. Unknowing of her puppeteer and its dark plans for their family.
If this was true, what was it intending?
Chorus:
Dreams are soft reality, and space and time are hard reality, and this is highlighted by the scene before him: the play-set distinguishes everything in the spectrum and twists into every geometrical configuration, attracting people from the small parking lot across the grassy field, people who are not nightmare-riddled, for if they are, the ultimate desire is to look away, and He, They, can be at peace for a moment, not notice the tar pits of lifeblood that seep up through the sand where toy buckets and plastic shovels lay discarded, to where one might bend on a knee to gaze at the small discolored hands that, while maimed at the wrists, still hold the handles of said shovels, nor perhaps the grotesque vermillion contents of the buckets, because all of this sends a teeth-breaking current into the soul, making Them call out, we are playing and laying in the hungry sand, whatever tastes better, flesh or marrow, playing and laying in the hungry sand; wheeling away from the scene is inevitable, and foreseeable—except for the man hunched over on the bench, who struggles to hear, move and see what’s occurring in the fun-tunnel, clown face mad with merriment, engorged lips stressed up and down, throat open wide, and the man has to wonder if such a diabolical opening in the mouth had always been present, and the xylophone music and the animal-people killing each other from inside the tunnel are strident even over the nightmare ballad, and answers are scarce, questions impregnate all things, the man’s mental state is in tatters, and though he won’t believe his eyes, bestial acts play out inside the tunnel and imprint them forever on his lenses; shouting, calling out, he awakens for a split second, which is so obvious, for They all do the same, and despite this, he begs, “This is progress! Your voice lowered. Something got through to you. Maybe you can get some food and water for me? I’m dying, sitting here all this time. Don’t you care? Can you listen to my voice for just a minute? Concentrate. I need you to stop singing the song, like you just did a moment ago—you sing even when you sleep, so this is not a small thing. We can win! Just try. We can help each other. Fix this.”
Verse 6: Childcare
Chapter 21
Maribel had to be brave and upfront with her loves.
She wasn’t getting any younger, and her husband and wife’s interest in raising a child had gone from tenuous to nonexistent in the past year. Not being the kind of person to press her needs on others, Maribel had kept quiet about it for too long, and now the bubble was about to burst. It wasn’t that she entirely blamed Dara and Luke, not after rumors started making rounds at GeoGreen, and then the fallout of that horrible interview and her subsequent overreaction.
The path they’d chosen, being a trio, wasn’t easy to accept in many social circles. Nevertheless, Maribel embraced it even more; she liked the idea of leading a pair of reluctant soldiers to victory against oppressors. You only have one life. You only have one chance to be bold in your happiness. Nobody suffered for their joy, as far as she could see, so the rest of the world could go to hell.
Maribel had given Luke and Dara all the reassurances they needed to be at peace with themselves. Now, she needed them to come through for her in the same way. How could she ask for that, though? Voicing it would make it a mandate, and she didn’t want to pressure them. Happiness was exploring, learning, becoming something more. She had never given birth. A couple pregnancy scares in her early twenties was the extent of her experience. She taught children, for crying out loud. She’d even studied midwifery right after college. There was a whole part of her that yearned to see the most important thing her body could produce. Life.
She’d made as many hints as she could and that wasn’t getting through to them. Clearly, Luke and Dara weren’t ready for the next step. In the past, a younger Maribel might have dropped them at the first sign of mutiny, but she’d left a parade of worthy souls in her wake doing just that very thing. This marriage was no farce. It was damned sacred to her, because it had to be—it was the last chance to prove the relationship wasn’t a fanciful experiment but the real deal. If they weren’t going to be torn apart from outside forces, she’d be damned if she’d do any of the world’s dirty work.
No. She couldn’t steamroll over the wishes of her loves. For a change, Maribel had to be strategic to achieve her goal, not breaking down doors and yelling at board members (for starters). She’d grown moody about the whole thing, though, not knowing how to approach the subject. If she could artificially have someone else’s child—not being unfaithful in the process—she would have the experience and they could all be happy. And maybe, this was her ultimate hope, maybe Dara and Luke would be more comfortable with starting a family of their own, having gone through a proxy version. Sort of a trial run.
Opportunities didn’t always fall into your lap like this. She had had a chance discussion one day with a substitute teacher, Kelly McKesson, who couldn’t deliver due to cervical issues and had been on the lookout for a surrogate mother. Maribel had been so excited she had almost rushed home that night to tell Dara and Luke. Good thing she hadn’t— good thing she thought it through first. Had her spouses told her “no,” that would have made her need to defy them, because she couldn’t stand being controlled. That was her flaw and she accepted it. Therefore, she needed to work around that jagged point as best she could. Levelheaded and mildly calculating, she got clear of all that drama by writing the letters, each separately crafted to cater to each personality. It was methodical, but the stakes were high here.
Now she’d wished she hadn’t made it an anniversary letter. The anxiety of what they would say had her on edge, and the prospect of losing the McKessons to someone else made her paranoid enough to drive over there and tell them that she just needed to get the “OK” from her family. Kelly’s husband Robert had thrown her a curve, though.
“What if your family doesn’t want you to? You’ll lose all connection to the child. That’s pretty jarring. It’s no small thing you’re planning to do here.”
After blathering like an imbecile for a moment, Maribel had assured him with a nervous laugh, “They’ll say yes. They better!”
“Will you be scared?” asked Kelly.
“Oh I’ve helped with six natural births, four of which were water births. I know some different scenarios to expect.”
“Actually….” Kelly winced. “I meant with the em
bryo transfer. The entire process puts your body through some hoops.”
Once again, Maribel had been caught off guard, but she recovered more quickly this time.
“I’m not squeamish at all. Ready, set, put it in me, Doc!”
She’d been awarded a laugh then, and finally started feeling better about her plans.
Then Dara and that maze.
(There’d been a maze in the backyard? Yes?)
Of course there’d been a maze, and the Bone Men had tried to cook Dara.
(Aren’t you afraid about that? Terrified for Dara?)
It was to be expected. Just like the fragmented music that kept trying to surface in her mind. Maybe this wasn’t a good time to take a large step. Things had to calm down. Luke and Dara had to heal from their injuries.
And what? How long would that take?
The McKessons called her the day after Dara was admitted to the hospital. Evidently, right after Maribel left, there had been a major disturbance at their house. Kelly almost drowned in their pool, and Robert nearly got crushed when a wall near the piano crumbled to pieces. Some kind of site-specific earthquake or something. Understandably shook up by what happened, they seemed a bit leery about the baby plans. Hopefully after the letters were opened and Dara and Luke had their say, Maribel could deliver some good news to the couple.
Maribel put a stack of workbooks in the cupboard. She’d been selfish about this baby thing, sneaking around, writing letters. Tonight, she had to just be out with it and see where they stood. It would break her heart if they told her no….
Calm down. They haven’t said anything yet. Give them a chance. At break, call Dara and check in on her. Her health comes before all this.
Nightmare Ballad Page 20