[2010] The Ghost of Blackwood Lane

by Greg Enslen

  Mike shook his head. “Is that all you’ve got to say? I’ve been sitting here complaining about it for a half-hour and you’ve said maybe two words the whole time.” He ate another fry. “You still upset about Rosa?”

  “Yeah, I’m depressed,” Gary said as he took a drink of his soda, wishing for something else in the glass. “And hearing you talk about Denise is reminding me about her.”

  Mike continued, nodding. That seemed to be the answer he was looking for, although Gary didn’t really care much.

  “Just remember: move on,” Mike said. “That’s what I keep telling myself—you’ve just got to keep looking ‘til you find the right one. That’s the whole point of dating all these women, didn’t you know that? You date and date and date some more—it’s like trying on clothes at a store. Everything looks good in the window, but you have to try it on before you see if it fits, right? Denise was a nice girl, but there’ll be a dozen more where she came from.”

  Gary was only half-listening, and when Mike said that about a dozen more, he looked up at him as if he’d been speaking in Swahili. This was a perfect example of the difference between him and Mike, between the way he thought and the way people from Los Angeles thought. People were a commodity here, especially women—there was always another attractive girl arriving on a bus from some hick town, trying to make her way in the “big city.”

  After a second, he remembered what Mike had said and nodded, agreeing. “Yeah, yeah. I know all that. I’ve told you the same exact thing a dozen times, same words and everything,” he said, pointing a French fry at the sandwich in Mike’s hands. “You wouldn’t eat at all for a while after you broke up with that one girl last year, remember?”

  Mike nodded, smiling. “Yeah, there was a good month in there when I was only wearing sweats and watching Springer.”

  They ate in silence for a few minutes, each wrapped in their own thoughts. Gary was sure Mike was thinking about a woman—and in a way, Gary was too. But he was thinking about the voice of the woman in his dream. It sounded familiar.

  “Mike,” Gary said, tentatively. “Have you ever thought about…well, finding, you know...the one?”

  Mike’s eyes widened. “The one? The one what? You mean marriage, Gary?” Mike smiled, in on the joke. “Settling down with a woman and having kids and a mortgage on a house in Thousand Oaks? Come on, Gary, that’s not going to happen to you or me, not here in L.A. This town is about meeting people, but nothing serious is ever going to come out of these relationships. You know that. The women out here, they’re just too....” Mike said, struggling for words.

  Gary knew his friend’s problem: it was hard to qualify the difficulty with socializing in Los Angeles.

  Mike started falsely a couple of times but then seemed to find inspiration. “It’s like the women here in L.A., they’re just out shopping. It’s like they’re all out at the mall or down on Wilshire, but they’ve forgotten their purses. They shop around and pick up things and study them for a while, but they always put them back down and move on. Nothing serious, no commitments. No need to buy anything when you can rent whatever you want, right? Or just borrow it.” He smiled, and Gary could see that he was happy that he’d been able to come up with such a clever analogy.

  Gary looked at him, shaking his head, and ate another bite of his sandwich. “Yeah, I know what you’re saying. It’s just that I’d like something more...stable. I’d like to wake up every morning and know that there was someone there with me, someone to share my life with. Is that wrong?”

  Mike was looking at him strangely, like he’d asked to borrow his spleen.

  “What are you looking at?” Gary asked him, catching him staring. “Trying to figure out my problems?”

  “Yeah, something like that,” Mike said, looking down at his food. “That might’ve been the longest speech I’ve ever heard you make.” Then he was quiet. They ate, Mike working on his chicken salad sandwich and Gary nibbling around the edges of a large pita concoction. The food here was good, but he wasn’t that hungry.

  “Gary, have you been having that dream again?”

  Gary looked up. Mike was one of the few people he’d told about his dreams. But he wasn’t in the mood to talk about it today. Last night’s dream had been...too much.

  “No. No dreams,” he said, and he knew from the look on Mike’s face that he wasn’t buying it.

  “Really? Because from the way you look, it’s getting worse. You look like crap. How have you been sleeping?” He stared at Gary.

  “Okay, I guess. I’m a little tired, that’s all.”

  Mike shook his head. Gary smiled. He was grateful to have such a close friend—he’d had very few in his life. But Mike was like a bulldog, always rooting in the dirt until he found the truth. “Am I right? Is that where all this talk is coming from, about wives and settling down—this dream is scaring you, isn’t it?”

  Gary was uncomfortable talking too much about himself—he was so used to keeping things inside. “I don’t know. Seriously, I can’t remember every time I have it. Sometimes I just wake up tired, like I didn’t get any sleep. And then other times I can remember the whole thing, and it sticks with me through the whole day....”

  Mike just looked at him, the lunch between them forgotten.

  Gary was quiet for a moment, then looked up and saw his friend looking at him expectantly. He wanted to hear, and Gary wanted to tell. He wanted—needed—to tell someone.

  Slowly, reluctantly, he began. “But this morning, I woke up feeling angry, like I could beat the crap out of someone. The dream was so vivid that I could remember it for hours, everything about it.”

  Mike looked at him as if trying to come up with something positive to say. “I’m sorry, friend. I don’t know what to tell you—it sounded pretty scary to me the last time you told me about it.”

  Gary shook his head. “It’s like total fear, coming at you in complete darkness.” There was also a feeling of having no control over the situation, of being powerless to change it. He always felt trapped, like a wounded animal.

  Gary would always be in a darkened room, a bedroom, but one he didn’t recognize. The source of his fear, unseen, approached from outside the room and began pounding on the closed door, the sound deep and echoing like someone pounding on a coffin. The door would shimmer and slowly buckle and then, finally, burst inwards, spraying bits of wood all over the room. Gary had told Mike that this was when he would wake up, never having seen the thing that had come for him, the source of his bottomless feelings of dread.

  “What were you angry about?” Mike asked. “Do you remember?”

  Gary sighed. “Yeah, the dream’s gotten a lot worse since the last time I told you about it. This is really starting to scare me. This morning, I woke up screaming.”

  Mike looked at him with a mixture of concern and fear. “Screaming? Seriously?”

  “Yeah,” Gary nodded. “Remember that I would always wake up just as the man broke down the door? Well, last night, he got all the way into the room and over to the bed and was holding something behind his back, something I couldn’t see. Some part of me, the part that knew I was just sleeping and that it was all just a dream, that part told me that it wasn’t going to be pretty. Just then, his hand moved, incredibly fast, and I saw the glint of light off a metal blade and I knew it was a knife, a big one. The man was grinning at me, and I could tell he was enjoying himself, like he was living off my fear, stoking it up like a fire. He held the knife over me and stared at me for a few long seconds, a horrible smile on his face, and then he brought the knife down, fast, right at my chest.”

  Gary was quiet for a moment, reliving the dream. He wasn’t used to talking about it, but it felt good to get it out. Was this the way it was for normal people, just talking about themselves to someone else and getting feedback? It felt strange and good, but it also made him feel exposed, vulnerable. For so long, his father had reminded him about secrecy, about the need to be careful. To never share.

/>   “I think I’d scream too,” Mike said, interrupting Gary’s thoughts.

  Gary nodded and ate a couple of fries.

  “Okay,” Mike said. “Well, first of all, this is the first time that you could see the person in your dream was a man. And not just a man, but a Man, like with a capital letter. When did that happen?”

  “Well, the past couple of nights I’ve seen him coming at me after he breaks the door down, but it wasn’t until last night or this morning that I saw the knife.”

  Mike nodded, continuing. “Okay, does this guy look familiar to you? Maybe he’s someone from your past, or maybe your mind is using his face to symbolize something else. Do you know him?”

  Gary shook his head. “Yeah, sort of. Like I recognize him, but I don’t. Maybe I knew him when I was younger?”

  “Or maybe your mind is just using a face from your past or someone you saw in a movie or on TV. Could he be someone from St. Louis? Maybe you could look through your old yearbooks or something. Do you still have any of that stuff?”

  “No, he’s not from St. Louis.”

  “You’re sure? You don’t talk about it much, so maybe....”

  Gary interrupted him brusquely. “No, he’s not from there. And I don’t have anything from back then.”

  Mike looked at him oddly. It was the look of someone wanting to know more about his past than he was willing to tell. Gary was used to that look.

  “Okay. Sorry, didn’t mean to pry. Now, you said the room was completely dark?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, and you also said that when he lifted the knife, you saw the glint of steel. Where did that light come from?”

  Gary relaxed a little, thinking about it for a moment. “I don’t know. I don’t remember any light in the room, but when he crashed through the door, there was light all around him. I guess there was light coming from the other room. And I remember the knife very clearly, because it scared the hell out of me. My heart was pounding when I woke up.”

  Mike nodded. “Well, that doesn’t surprise me. Dreams can be very stressful, and they can seem very real. And a lot of times they’re just your mind or subconscious trying to tell you something through symbols.”

  “Yeah, I can understand that. The realism, that’s what scares me—it felt too damn real to just be a dream. It was like it was all really happening, like I was really there. This guy was busting down that door, and I was lying in that bed, unable to move. It’s the first time I can ever remember having a dream where I knew I was dreaming the whole time.”

  Mike looked away and then picked up his sandwich and finished the last two bites. This had started off as such a quiet lunch, no big deal. Now the rest of Gary’s sandwich sat on the tray in front of him, unfinished. “Yeah, well, it had to be a dream. Oh, I was going to ask you: was there any sound, any at all, during the whole thing?”

  Gary felt a chill pass over him. “Yeah, now that you mention it, he did say something to me. I can remember it as clear as day.”

  “Well, what did he say?” Mike said impatiently.

  Gary stared at Mike. “He looked down at me for a long moment, the knife held over me, and just before he brought it down, he called me something...and he was so angry when he said it.” He didn’t want to think about the dream anymore, but it was impossible not to.

  “And? What did he call you? You gonna make me wait all day?”

  Gary shook his head. “Sorry, I was just trying to figure it all out. Anyway, he called me a ‘whore.’”

  ------

  Gary leaned over his drafting table, trying to concentrate on his work, but he couldn’t. His lunch with Mike had stirred up memories, things he hadn’t remembered about the dream, and now they ran riot in his mind.

  The dream was getting worse every time he had it, like a cancer growing in his mind. What did it mean? Who was the guy? At first, he’d thought the dream might just be a memory of a story he’d once heard, or maybe a scene from a forgotten movie, but now he didn’t know.

  Mike was his best friend and a good listener, but talking to him wasn’t helping. Gary felt like if this went on much longer, he would have to break down and talk to a professional.

  He looked up at the other drafters around him, each of them bent over their slanted desks, surrounded by plans and proposals and elevations for a dozen different projects. He worked in a large, high-ceilinged room with good ventilation and great lighting (necessary for the draftsmen), but he still felt cramped, like he was suffocating. His shirt suddenly felt too tight and he stood, weaving between the other desks and out into the hallway, heading for the restroom.

  Gary went in and splashed cold water on his face. He rolled up the sleeves on his starched white dress shirt, ignoring the office’s unspoken but formal dress code. He ran cold water along his arms and wrists, letting it drip off his elbows like a doctor preparing for surgery. It felt good. After a couple of minutes, he shut off the water and dried his face and arms, rolling his sleeves back down. He felt better, much better. And then he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror.

  There was something different about him, something he couldn’t define. His hair, his face, his clothes, they all looked normal. His eyes were dark and bloodshot—it looked like he was coming off a long night of drinking.

  If only that were the case.

  The door to the bathroom swung open and one of the other draftsmen came in, greeting Gary warmly and making his way over to one of the urinals. Gary said his good-bye and left, leaving the man to his privacy.

  Gary started back toward the “pit,” as the drafting room was known, but took a quick detour to the kitchen, a small room off to one side of the pit that held a refrigerator, microwave, and a couple of tables with chairs. Draftsmen and other employees sat at the tables, sipping old coffee and chatting. Gary greeted a couple of people he knew, bought a soda, and headed back to his desk.

  He was working on the plans for a new hospital to be built in San Francisco. Gary had been put in charge of the ventilation and air circulation plans, something he had very little experience in. But it was a semi-promotion, being put in charge of a specific aspect of an ongoing project, and he had eagerly accepted the challenge.

  There were a few other draftsmen in the room working on other aspects of the hospital plans: structural, lighting and electrical, plumbing and utilities, elevation, and seismologic plans were all underway or already completed. One of the facade planners, those who designed the outside of the building, had already constructed a large-scale model of the hospital exterior and placed it on one of the high display tables at the front of the large room. Sometimes, when Gary would glance up from his work and look around at some of the others involved in the design of St. Jude’s, he would see them staring at the model with glazed-over eyes, and he knew exactly what they were doing: looking at the model and seeing the completed building in their heads, filling in all of the details and laying them out on the plans before them. It was good to have a model to look at. It gave them something tangible to hang their dreams on.

  Other draftsmen in the pit were working on various plans: a detailed plan for the new International Airport in Austin, Texas; a bank in Tokyo; and an extension campus for the University of Iowa. Some of the projects were only proposals, ideas submitted to the coordination teams for each project in hopes that MacMillan Architecture would receive the bid and be allowed to design the final structure.

  They had received the St. Jude’s Hospital contract only after several months of preliminary designs and submissions had been FedEx’ed to the contractor’s office in San Francisco, and Gary counted himself lucky that he was working on an actual project rather than just on proposed structures—it made him feel like his work was actually useful.

  MacMillan Architecture was one of the premier design firms in Los Angeles, and Gary had been lucky to hire on with them. He had started out doing erasures and cleanups on others’ work, but after several months, he’d been asked to work on the underground
parking structure design for a hotel being built in Queens, New York. He had warmed to the task and come in with his drawing early and spotless, earning him a reputation for producing good work quickly. In his three years with Macmillan, he’d progressed slowly, and now, he felt like things in his professional life were finally firing on all cylinders. Amazing, considering how much of his past was a fabrication. Even the social security number that showed up on his paychecks was not the real thing.

  But he was used to that kind of life, and his days here at the firm were good ones, filled with hard work and good pay, and he felt like he was finally getting out from under the shadow of what had happened in St. Louis and Sacramento.

  It was his nights that he worried about.

  Gary bent back over his work, trying to find a place for ventilation ducts in the emergency room, referring constantly to the appropriate state and federal regulations for their placement. Next to his drafting table was a side table covered with notes and books and photocopies—the government strictly regulated airflow and circulation in hospitals, especially in areas such as surgery, maternity rooms, and emergency wards. Gary had to find a way to make that type of airflow happen while at the same time locating the air shafts and vents along central avenues convenient to the air circulation system. And he had to use the minimum amount of piping and venting to keep costs down.

  He lost himself in the hospital. In his mind, he navigated the halls and rooms, feeling a breath of cool air on his face as he walked past the imaginary vents. It was the only way he could plan a space: imagine it all in his head and then step into his mind, the ultimate in virtual reality.

  The afternoon passed quickly as he worked out the details, and by five o’clock, the plans were nearing completion. The airshafts and ducting systems were in place, and he felt sure that by Friday, his deadline, he would have something that he could be proud of to submit to Simmons, his supervisor.

  Mike, coat and briefcase in hand, came over to Gary’s desk and glanced at the plans. He was a drafter also, seated three desks away, and Gary knew he’d spent the day working on the Austin Airport proposal. He studied the plans for a long moment, taking the structure in, before saying anything.