Then the laugh ended, and Cowles was a man again.
Lenore felt like the gun weighed a thousand pounds. She couldn’t hold it up. She lowered the barrel, and Cowles laughed that hideous, mutated laugh of his. "You can’t do it," he chuckled. "Too afraid. Besides, even if you could," and here he gestured at the gun Lenore held, "no bullets."
Lenore closed her eyes, trembling, waiting for the end to come. She felt Cowles grasp her hand.
But wait! It wasn’t Cowles, it was Jason! She looked down and saw the sheriff put something in her hand. It was the bullet. The golden bullet that he had shown her and Albert earlier: the one that was the remains of the bullets that had killed the sheriff’s family.
She loaded it quickly. She had taken some gun training after her first encounter with Cowles, and though she had never completed the course, she still remembered how to load and chamber the bullet.
She looked back at Cowles. The man was no longer smiling. Something was different.
Lenore aimed the gun at her fear. And she smiled.
"No," whispered Cowles.
"You don’t scare me," she said with disgust. And pulled the trigger.
Light speared out of Cowles as the bullet hit him. He bled, but it was not blood that seeped from the wound. Rather, he oozed light. He fell to the ground, and as he fell Lenore once again glimpsed the creature beneath Cowles; the demon of her fear.
This time, she knew, Cowles would not miraculously resurrect. He was gone.
She threw the gun away and leaned down to Jason. She put his head in her lap and brushed the blood away from his lips. "Don’t leave me," she said.
Jason’s eyes opened. Just a crack, but even as they dimmed Lenore could see that something about the sheriff was different. Something had changed.
He was happy.
"Gotta go," said Jason.
He closed his eyes.
Lenore wept.
And Jason died.
***
TWENTY SEVEN
***
Jason opened his eyes.
He was in the basement still. But Lenore was gone. So was the blood that had been all over the basement just a moment ago. Cowles had disappeared. All was as it had been before any of this nightmare had begun.
But though Lenore and Cowles were gone, Jason was not alone.
Elizabeth and Aaron stood before him.
Jason’s mouth clenched. "You’re not real," he said.
"This time," responded Elizabeth, "we are."
And Jason knew it was true; could tell just by looking at them.
He held his family in his arms.
Dying had been worth it.
He broke down crying, huge sobs that came from deep within him, from a well of feeling that he had covered over on the day that he had buried his wife and son.
"What is it, my love?" asked his wife tenderly. Then, with an impish grin, she asked, "Are you still worried that I’m having that affair with the gardener?"
Jason laughed through his tears, then said, "My fear. It wasn’t losing you. It was dying…and not finding you there waiting for me."
Elizabeth kissed his cheek and held his hand to her heart. "Some things, even fear cannot steal," she said.
Jason smiled and looked down at his son. The boy was still holding the pad and black crayon that he had held on his last day of life. Comprehension dawned in Jason. "The notes…" he said.
Aaaron smiled that beautiful grin of his. "I drawed you letters, Daddy. Drawed everyone letters. Did you like them?"
Jason smiled and hugged his son. "We helped you as much as we could," said Elizabeth. "Sent you the messages, led you to the truth."
"And it worked!" shouted Aaron gleefully.
"Yes, sweetie," said Elizabeth to their boy. "It did." She turned back to Jason. "You saved Lenore. And in so doing, you saved yourself."
She stepped away from Jason then, drawing Aaron with her. Jason reached for them and said, "No, don’t go."
"We have to, Jason," said his wife. "But we’ll be waiting. Have no fear of that."
She smiled, then disappeared. At the same time, Jason cried out as one of the wraiths appeared before him. Then he composed himself as the wraith changed, morphing into someone familiar.
Lenore, he thought, and smiled. He was resting in her lap.
"Don’t go," she was murmuring. "Please don’t go. Don’t go, Sheriff."
He tried to say something, but it only came out as a whisper. Still, it was enough for hope and shock to bloom in Lenore’s eyes.
"What?" she said.
"It’s Jason," he repeated. "Not Sheriff. Just Jason."
Lenore gasped. "You were dead," she said. "You stopped breathing."
"It wasn't time for me to go after all," he whispered. "Don't be afraid of that."
And Lenore laughed and smiled and hugged him.
Jason caught sight of a clock on the corner of the basement.
It was tick-tick-ticking slowly, steadily. The minute and hour hands were visible.
Time had been refound.
He hugged Lenore.
And neither of them was afraid to hold the other.
And don't miss Michaelbrent Collings' newest thriller Perdition...
PERDITION
***
CHAPTER 1
***
The dreams, when they came, were always terrifying.
Usually Benjamin Dirkson slept peacefully and well. But occasionally – just often enough that he approached each night not with full-blown dread, but with a vague sense of unease – he would toss and turn, and awake exhausted. As though he had been running a marathon in his sleep.
He was not chased in the dream. No, he was not even a participant in it, near as he could remember. Rather, he was a mere observer, a spectral wraith watching from afar as the events of the dream unfolded before him.
First was the cross. It was the cross from his father's church. His father, Danny Dirkson, was a pastor for a small congregation in the town of Brookton, PA, pop. 32,014. Nothing fancy, just enough people to make Sundays meaningful. Occasionally there would be an itinerant preacher that his father would invite to come and preach, and the novelty would swell the ranks of the congregation, but usually there were only between a hundred and a hundred fifty participants in the weekly services.
In spite of the relative paucity of the turnout, however, the church was well-appointed. It was a beautifully constructed house of worship, two stories high. Inside the decorations were luxurious, with everything outfitted in dark mahogany and deep, polished brass. Ben had asked his father once how he could afford to outfit his church so stylishly, but all his father did was smile discreetly and say, "The Lord provides for His servants," with a twinkle in his blue eyes.
And of all the decorations and trimmings, none was so well-constructed or beautifully appointed as the cross that hung from the wall at the front of the church, directly behind the podium from which Ben's father delivered his sermons each Sunday.
It was not that the cross was showy or ostentatious in any way. There was no painstakingly rendered Christus on it, hanging in bloody agony, mouth forever frozen in pain. Ben's father did not like such crosses. "What?" he had been known to say. "Do you think people want to stare at pain for an hour each Sunday? Not exactly the picture of triumph over death, that."
But the cross, in spite of its lack of "flair," was undeniably beautiful. It was made of oak, thick heavy beams that were affixed seamlessly together at the middle. The carpenter who had designed and created the cross had eschewed the traditional right angles, preferring to allow the natural warp and weave of the wood to shine through. The result was a cross that did not stand straight and tall, but rather appeared to almost bow under its own weight. A fitting symbol for the man who had born the weight of the world on His capable shoulders.
The cross was then polished to a sheen so bright that you could see the chapel lights reflected in it, as though seeing them through a glass darkly, as the scr
ipture said. Again, fitting when one contemplated that no matter how close to God one came in this world, there would be an infinitude of knowledge of Him waiting to be discovered in the hereafter.
So the cross was both the central piece of the church, its great work of art, and highly distinctive. That was why it was so easy to recognize in Ben's dreams: surely there could be no other cross like it in the world.
But where in reality the cross stood true at the head of the congregation, brightly lit by the track lamps that Ben's father had installed to highlight the beautiful piece of divine art, in Ben's dream the cross hung somewhere deep, and dark, and secret.
Worst and most ominous of all, it hung upside down in his dreams. The darkly polished gleam of the inverted cross was still present, but it was a dim light, one that seemed not to be reflecting brightness so much as sucking it in, pulling it into the depths of the cross like some oaken black hole.
It frightened Ben. He could feel his stomach muscles clench, even in the dream – even knowing it was a dream – but could do nothing to stop looking at it. It was as though the cross not only pulled in light, but pulled in his gaze, making it impossible to look away. The subtle curve of the arms of the cross seemed to grow greater and greater as he watched, until gradually the arms of the cross turned in on themselves like the limbs of some great insect that had died.
Gradually, in his dream, the cross disappeared, and in its place appeared a man. But not a normal man. Again, though he was just an observer to the dream, Ben could tell that this man was something terrifying. His features were cloaked in darkness, as though a cloud had settled over him, preventing anything but the vague outline of a body to be visible. Sometimes the man was cloaked, other times he was so vague as to be nothing more than a specter in the dim recesses of the dream.
But always, whether cloaked or ghostly, the figure did the same thing. It reached out a hand toward Ben, as though in supplication, palm up as though reaching out for help.
And in that instant, the shadows parted. Light appeared from nowhere and everywhere, a flickering light that brought to mind the diaphanous glint of flame from a bonfire. The light parted the gloom that surrounded the figure. Not much, just enough to notice something on its hand, a mark. The mark itself was nothing too bizarre, just a strangely amorphous red birthmark that seemed to twitch and flit about in the flickering light of the invisible flames that illuminated this part of the dream. But in spite of the fact that there was nothing inherently dangerous about the mark – or the hand that reached out, for that matter – Ben could always feel his presence shrinking away from it, could feel his dream self pulling back, trying to run.
Of course, running was impossible. Futile to attempt, even, in the nowhere of the dream. There was nowhere to run, because nowhere was all around him, and surrounded him.
Still, he tried, tried to run as fast as his unlegs could carry him. But no matter how hard he ran, or how far in this strange place where distance and time stood meaningless and still, the strange figure maintained a constant distance from him; the strangely marked hand reached out plaintively.
Then the flame-light grew brighter, and suddenly the light was not coming from some unexplainable source, but was instead coming from flames and fire. All around him. And somehow, he knew, not just around him, but around everything. Subtly changing, where the dream at first felt like it was nowhere, now it felt as though it were everywhere. As though the entirety of reality were in his mind, in his dreamscape.
The flames flickered and waxed and waned, and in them he thought he could see – with what eyes, he knew not, since he was bodiless as any specter here – people, numberless multitudes, as many as the sands of the seas or the stars of the skies, reaching forth, reaching out. Unlike the strange figure, they were not reaching out in supplication, they were reaching out in agony, hands crooked and ashen, skin falling from the bones in sloughing sheets and leaving only bright white bone behind.
The world was burning, he knew. And not just burning, but being utterly razed to the ground, destroyed beyond hope of ever being rejuvenated. No primordial mass would remain from which life could once again grow. The land was burnt utterly, leaving behind not so much as a single microbe. The oceans boiled, purging them of all life and all possibility of ever living again.
The universe – at least, the universe as he knew it – ended in his dreams. Only he and the figure remained. And then he heard something. A child's voice, speaking in whispered tones.
But he could not hear the words. He knew that he knew them, knew that if he could only hear them clearly he would be able to speak along with them, as though they were from a song half-remembered, a tune from his youth. He felt compelled to speak the unknown words, to sing them aloud with the child, as though by doing so he might bring back the whole of creation from its fallen state of sunless ash.
But he could not. He never could. For in that instant, Ben Dirkson awoke.
Always he awoke the same way: bathed in a sweat that drenched the sheets around him, so wet that he could not return to sleep until he had gotten up and showered, so wet that when he did return to sleep he did not return to his bed, but rather slept out on the couch. His wife, Lillian, joked that she would never have to get mad and send him out to sleep on the couch as penance for any kind of marital transgression; he went voluntarily there at least one or two nights a month, so what would be the point?
And so it was that Ben woke this night, bathed in sweat, hoping against hope that he could speak the magical words that would somehow allow light and life to return to his world, but knowing in his heart that such was not going to occur.
He woke, and felt the sheets squish beneath him, utterly sopping with his sweat. Lillian, beside him, was now attuned enough to his nightmares that she half-awoke and said in a dream-drenched voice, "The dream?"
Ben nodded, then realized that there was no way that such a nod would tell anything to Lillian. The room they slept in was utterly dark. No nightlight brightened the space, not even a luminous clock could be seen. That was Lillian's idea. She thought perhaps if they slept in a place that verged on being a sensory deprivation chamber, it might increase Ben's chances of sleeping through the night – and her own, since she inevitably woke when he did.
But it hadn't helped. Indeed, he thought sometimes that it made things worse, because at least if there was a clock in the room when he woke up, he could look at it and see that the world had not, in fact, ended. That once out of the nowhere of his dream it was once again one or two or three in the morning, and that by extension there was a morning on its way, and the whole world had not been burned with the coming of the shadow-man of his dreams.
Still, even though Lillian could not see his nod, he was loathe to answer her. She was pregnant with their first child, and he knew that the pregnancy had not been easy on her. The first trimester had seen her throwing up every six hours like clockwork, and this trimester had been marked by sudden chills and sweats, as though the baby had a tiny hand on her internal thermostat and was vigorously shaking it periodically. As a result, Lillian got little sleep, tossing and turning uncomfortably even on those occasions when her husband was not struggling under his own sleep-related problems.
"You okay?" she asked again.
"Sure," he answered.
"Shower?" she said.
"Yes," he said.
He got out of bed and showered, and as he usually did after The Dream – for so he thought of it, not as just any dream, but as The Dream, the one dream, the dream that was the only dream that he could ever remember having in his almost thirty-three years – he went to the couch afterward.
The one consolation on nights where he had The Dream was that it only came once. He had never had it twice in the same night, so could at least look forward to several hours of blessed oblivion before the day began. It made falling asleep after The Dream that much easier.
But tonight, in spite of that fact, sleep eluded him. He tossed and turned on the
worn couch, feeling the weave of the cushions scratching at his skin as though during The Dream he had been converted to the princess of fable, so sensitive that she could not sleep if even a pea was beneath the mattress.
He spun around for a good half hour before finally sitting up and turning on the television. Another first. He never watched television at night, reasoning that if you were trying to sleep, the last way to get that done would be to involve yourself in a show of some kind. Plus he had concluded some years before that there was nothing of value to be seen on television between the hours of midnight and five a.m. All that could be found were infomercials, women wearing far too little clothing for him to think about watching – he was happily married and tried to avoid such things, even when his wife wasn't sleeping mere feet away from him – and music videos.
So when he turned on the television, he wasn't too surprised to find that there was very little on. He finally settled for watching reruns of Happy Days on one of the cable channels, and absently stared as the Fonz walked around like the king of the world, as Richie tried to find a girl, as the Cunningham parents worked awkwardly but endearingly to keep their brood together and wholesome in the rose-colored reimagining of life in the nineteen fifties.
He stayed there until morning, watching old television shows that appeared and disappeared before his eyes without leaving so much as a single trace of their existence behind. He could have been watching anything and it would have left the same lack of impression. All he could see before his eyes was the specter, standing in front of a burning world. All he could hear was a child's voice, speaking in whispered, almost reverent tones that were so low he could not quite make out the words.
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