Despite the heat, a cold breath prickled the hairs on the back of Brian’s neck. The voice was familiar but Brian couldn’t quite identify it. He adjusted the volume up but there were no more words, just the usual static that had been hissing out of the speakers for weeks. After another moment, he punched the radio off. Then Brian remembered something, and it wasn’t a good something.
Dave Niehouse was dead.
A heart attack had nailed the commentator over a year ago. So, what did that mean? Was Niehouse some kind of auditory hallucination? Was it starting, whatever ‘it’ was? David’s ‘inside-out’ head?
A dog loped out of nowhere, head down, sniffing the hot, grated surface of the road. It appeared oblivious of the packed traffic. Brian gripped the steering wheel and hunched forward. A golden retriever, the dog favored its left hind leg, and Brian recognized her immediately. This was Gypsy, the family dog – back when Brian had a family.
Gypsy was as dead as Dave Niehouse.
The muscles tightened in Brian’s chest. Behind him, somebody laid on a horn, and he jumped half out of his seat. A pair of truck lights glared in his rear-view mirror before swerving around and passing on the right. In the thick traffic the manoeuvre was impossible – but the truck managed it, anyway, as if there were no traffic. Or maybe it was the truck and dog that weren’t really there. That seemed more likely, given what Brian now saw.
Cancerous rust had eaten holes in the Suburban’s left front wheel hub. The driver’s arm hung out the open window with a cigarette. The big, ramshackle SUV cut back in, almost clipping the Ford’s bumper. Brian tapped the brakes. An old California plate, orange numbers on a black background, hung crookedly by a single screw from the Suburban’s bumper.
It was the same truck that had killed Gypsy seven years ago.
Even before Brian could process that idea, the Suburban struck the resurrected dog. Brian almost felt the dull thud of impact reverberate in his bones. The dog yelped in pain.
“Asshole!”
The truck moved off, at times occupying the same space as other vehicles, overlaying them like an optical trick.
Brian pulled into the narrow break-down lane, parked, switched on his hazard flashers. The dog lay smashed against the jersey barrier, where the impact had landed her. Nobody but Brian seemed to notice. The tortured, squeaking yelps of pain drilled into Brian’s mind – just as they had seven years ago. He had been having a rare, loud argument with Sheila. She had just discovered his first affair. David hadn’t come home from school yet – except he had, and neither one of them knew it.
The boy stood by the open front door, listening to the whole thing. Gypsy, always in heedless puppy-behaviour mode, had streaked out the door. David shouted after her. Brian and Sheila stopped yelling at each other. A moment later tires screeched, and Brian bolted out of the house after his son. He got a good look at the Suburban.
Now Brian plugged his ears with his fingers but that didn’t dampen the sound at all. It was as if Gypsy’s heart-breaking whimpering was inside his head. Brian clenched his teeth. Gradually, the yelps and squeals of the dog faded. In his mind, close up, he saw Gypsy’s heaving flank and the blood pumping out of her mouth – his memory like a dream awake in the world. He blinked back tears. When he looked again, the dog was gone. Thank Christ.
What was so scary…? It turned my head inside out.
Brian turned off his hazard flashers and re-entered the traffic flow. His hands were shaking. Just past the Convention Centre he moved into the exit lane and found himself behind the Suburban with its ancient orange-on-black plate hanging by a screw.
A young boy, maybe six-years-old, stared at him out the back window, his face white in Brian’s headlights. David’s face. Brian’s heart pounded. The window was dirty, like looking at the boy through a sheet of crusted brown ice.
David at six years old – the good years.
Brian had pissed all over those years. Oh, he had his excuses lined up, but they all boiled down to his own weakness. The first affair had provided him temporary, selfish relief from an estranged marriage. At least he could pretend that first one was love. Subsequent affairs were just a bad habit.
You thought you got away with it, you fucker…
The voice on the radio, so familiar, had been his own voice. The relentless accuser.
The line of cars started to move. The Suburban pulled away, magically passing through the slower cars, oily blue exhaust belching from its jiggling tailpipe. The David hallucination or whatever it was raised his hand to the window. A shadow loomed behind the boy and yanked him roughly back. Brian made a small, trapped sound in his throat. He goosed the accelerator but could not get around the intervening traffic. The SUV melted away, like a lost opportunity.
On the phone, Trish said, “How are you feeling?”
“Still haven’t slept.”
“Jesus. You’re up to nine days. Okay, I’ve got a number for you. A Dr. Weinstein. That Greek letter on the pills? It identifies them by experimental lot-trial. I made some calls.”
“Thanks. What’s the number?”
She told him and he wrote it down.
“Brian? Maybe you should come over, not be alone.”
“I’m all right.”
“Then maybe you should come over so I don’t have to be alone. I’m just saying.”
“I’ll call you.”
“I doubt it.”
He knew he shouldn’t say anything else, but he did: “What’s wrong?”
“A lot of things.”
“Trish, you know I never said –”
“Here’s what it is. I don’t hear from you for like a month, sometimes even longer. Then you have a crisis, and you want one of two things. The first is a mother. The mother’s the one that listens patiently, commiserates, tells you it’s all better, even takes you to bed, for God’s sake.”
“All right.”
“The other is a child. When it’s the child, you get to take care of me, fix stuff. Convey wisdom about things you know and I don’t know, whatever. Be a comfort. Be a man. Here’s what’s sad. I used to mistake both of these for the wrong thing. Love.”
“I love you,” he mumbled, like a guy coasting into a four-way intersection without conviction, just begging for a bus to T-bone him. And it did.
“You’ve learned to say it, but I think you’re sketchy on the concept.”
“Come on, you don’t even –”
“Don’t get all dramatic. All I’m saying, what I mean is… that I can’t really do it anymore. I can’t alternate between mother and child. Because you know what? I’m not either of those things. If you ever think you’re over yourself, then call.”
“Trish, I have to go.”
“Big surprise.”
“How many did you take?” Dr. Weinstein asked.
“Two.”
“Since you won’t come to my office, I strongly urge you to see your own physician as soon as possible.”
“Won’t the effect just wear off?”
“Eventually, of course. But there is an interim danger. The visions you describe are not, strictly speaking, hallucinations.”
“Then what are they?”
“Dreams. Dreams of a very special type. The drug eliminates your body’s need to sleep but it does not eliminate your mind’s need to dream. I’m afraid we don’t understand very much about this process, Mr. Kerr. But we’ve discovered that a mind deprived of REM sleep will begin to manifest the unconscious in the form of waking dreams.”
“I don’t see what the danger is.”
“I suppose you’re familiar with the adage, ‘You can’t die in a dream?’”
“Sure. You’re falling, or drowning. Whatever. But you always wake up first. Because if you died in a dream you’d really die. Like your mind would just stop your heart. I never believed it.”
“Let me just say, Mr. Kerr, we are now in possession of evidence that lends powerful credence to this particular wives’ tale. These visions are d
reams, but you are already wide awake. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Three no-sleep pills remained in the aspirin tin. In his little kitchen nook at three o’clock in the morning, Brian dropped the pills into the palm of his left hand, his right hand loose around a glass of water. Time passed. He would never have this chance again – this chance to dream awake. Dream of the good time and see it before his eyes as if it were real. He clapped his hand to his mouth and chased the pills down with water.
See his son again, his little boy.
Thirteen days.
David was eighteen and could do what he wanted. But because it was Brian’s insurance paying for rehab, he received a call when David disappeared.
“How can that happen?” Brian said.
“Your son wasn’t sent here on a court order, Mr. Kerr. There’s nothing we can do if a patient decides to leave. Of course, we counsel against it. In this case, David left in the night. Nobody saw him go.”
Brian called his ex to let her know. Talking to Sheila was like talking to his own cranky reflection – the one that constantly blamed him for everything that had gone wrong. Well, she and it had a point. “I know,” she said, when he told her David had checked himself out of rehab.
“Who told you?”
“Nobody. Evidentially I’m out of the loop around here. But I saw Kevin at the drugstore, and he said David was sleeping in Steel Lake Park. He’d talked to him. So I can figure it out from there, that David checked out of rehab.”
“You’re not out of the loop. I’m making this call, right? And who’s Kevin?”
“Of course you wouldn’t know. Kevin was David’s best friend. Honest to God, how can you not know so much? Did you even live here, when you lived here?”
After midnight, Brian left his car in a church parking lot, walked to Steel Lake, and scaled the chain link fence. The grass appeared blue in the moonlight. It was still hot as a sauna. He stood on a grassy slope and turned slowly, searching for movement. David could be lying in the darkness under the trees right now, and Brian would have to step on him to know it.
A baseball smacked solidly into a leather glove.
Brian turned. The figure of a boy stood in the moon shadows. He was no more than a silhouette, his arms hanging slack at his sides, a baseball glove on his left hand. Brian’s breath went shallow. This had been the good place, the good time. It would have continued if only Brian had allowed it. But you didn’t get a second chance.
Except in dreams.
He started across the blue grass towards David.
A car door slammed.
Brian stopped. A vehicle had appeared, mixing dreams and nightmares. A big ramshackle Suburban with California plates. A man, faceless in the dark, strode across the grass, seized the boy and began to drag him towards the truck.
“Davy!” Brian ran towards them. At the last moment, the man released the boy and raised his hand – a knife in his fist. Brian threw himself at the man, driving him off his feet. They rolled down the slope.
“Davy, run, run!”
Thinking: It’s not real. But he was on his back, struggling with the man’s knife hand, fighting with himself. And dreams always felt real when you were in the middle of one.
So did nightmares.
The strength began to drain out of Brian’s arm. The point of the knife descended inexorably.
His fault all the way, the dead marriage, his boy lost to drugs.
Brian stopped resisting.
The knife plunged. He arched his back, heaving into the thrust. A great piercing grief flooded up in his chest.
The killer leaned back, his face finally revealed in moonlight.
It was Brian’s own face.
The nightmare-Brian stood and grabbed Davy’s thin little-boy’s-arm and dragged him to the waiting Suburban. Brian rolled onto his side, reached out, as if he could retrieve every mistake. The engine rumbled up and the headlamps came on like baleful amber eyes.
Brian’s heart jerked and clenched.
“Dad?”
The Suburban started to roll, bouncing across the field, taking it all away.
“Dad?”
The Suburban dimmed back into his mind, and Brian looked up. “David.”
The boy stood over him, a backpack slung from one shoulder. “What are you doing here, Dad?”
“I came to find you but I was too late. Fifteen years too late.” Speaking was difficult. He couldn’t seem to draw enough air into his lungs.
David laughed uncertainly. “I’m right here.”
“Yeah, so I see.” Somehow this lanky, dishevelled kid was less real than the dream-boy. Maybe that was the problem. Brian sat up, grimaced, placed his hand flat over his chest. His shirt was sopped with blood only he could see. The grief-wound.
“What’s wrong, is there something wrong with your heart?” David dropped his backpack, hunkered beside him.
“No. Listen, I found those pills in your car. The ones from the UW. I took them.”
“How many?”
“All of them.”
“Dad, that wasn’t such a great idea.”
“No kidding.”
“Are you… seeing things?”
Brian nodded. “You bugged out of rehab. Are you using again?”
“No,” David said. “I just needed to get out of that place. I mean, like I didn’t think I could be there. I might go back, though. Hey, you really don’t look good. Is something happening?”
“Seeing things.”
“Pretty bad?”
“Yeah.” His breathing labored. If you ever died in a dream... “You remember we used to come here? I taught you to play catch.”
“I remember.”
The next words stuck in Brian’s throat a couple of times before he could get them out, but he did get them out. “I’m really sorry about screwing everything up for you. I know it’s mostly my fault.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The way things turned out. If I’d been a better father, maybe –”
“Dad, it doesn’t have anything to do with you. I’m an addict. Even before I started using, I was an addict. I’ll always be one. I wish you’d quit blaming yourself for everything. It’s my life, not yours. How long have you been awake, anyway?”
“Two weeks.”
“Whoa.”
“When you were a little kid, we used to have a great time.”
“I’m not a little kid anymore.”
“Right, I get that.”
“You really don’t look so good.”
Brian lay back on the blue grass and closed his eyes. “I’ll be okay in a couple of minutes.”
“Let me see your phone.”
“David –”
“Come on. I don’t have mine.”
Brian reluctantly slipped the phone out of his pocket. David grabbed it and flipped it open.
“Hey, slow down. I don’t need any –”
David ignored him. He punched three numbers and moments later said, “Yeah, I think my Dad’s having a heart attack or something.”
In the ambulance the paramedic immediately rigged an I.V. drip, something to compensate for Brian’s inexplicably low blood pressure. Of course, the medic did not see what Brian saw: the front of his shirt saturated with blood.
Brian turned his head on the flat, Clorox-smelling pillow. David slouched on the other bench seat, hands shoved in his pockets, affecting indifference. But he was there. Brian studied his face. The eyes were all that was left of that six-year-old.
After a while, David said, “What?”
“Just looking.”
“Okay.”
At the hospital they wheeled him into Emergency. Brian craned his head around. David, backpack slung from one shoulder, stood talking to the admitting nurse. The nurse wrote on a clipboard.
Behind a curtain, in a brightly-lit room, a young doctor asked Brian questions.
“I’ll be all right if I can get over myself,” Brian said.
<
br /> “Please try to focus on what I’m asking you, Mr. Kerr.”
“Okay.
Staring at the white acoustical ceiling tiles, Brian felt himself slipping away. Don’t get all dramatic, Trish had told him. Maybe Brian was the six-year-old around here. If you died in a dream, you really died. But Brian didn’t want to die.
He interrupted the doctor. “I want to see my son.”
“Where is he?”
“He was talking to the admitting nurse, I think. I really want to see him, if he hasn’t already left.”
“Why would I leave?” David said, in his usual half-belligerent tone, as he stepped around the curtain.
“No reason, son.”
Brian opened his hand and moved it toward David. After a moment’s hesitation, David took it – and the dream dissolved. The hand, however, was still there.
MOONCAKES
MIKE RESNICK AND LAURIE TOM
Mike Resnick is a long-established and highly-respected science fiction author, whose work has been entertaining readers for decades, whereas Laurie Tom’s promising career has only just begun. The two met when Laurie won the 2010 Writers of the Future Award with her story ‘Living Rooms’. Mike was one of the judges. Awards are something Mike knows a fair bit about, having been nominated for a Hugo some thirty-five times, which, he feels confident, makes him the greatest ever Hugo loser. Along the way, of course, he’s also picked up a whole hatful of awards, including a Hugo and five Nebulas. In fact, as of 2011, Mike occupies 1st place in the Locus list of all-time award winners for short fiction. Mike is the author of 64 novels, over 250 short stories and two screen plays, and his work has been translated into 25 languages. Laurie has loved fantasy and science fiction for as long as she can remember. There came a point where other people’s worlds simply weren’t enough for her, so she determined to create her own. “Mooncakes” represents Laurie and Mike’s first collaboration.
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