I knew I had to leave her there, too, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. I sat by her body for hours, holding her, talking to her, watching the body I had admired so often change into something that was no longer Natalia. I brought her back inside at dusk and laid her on her bed. I kissed her forehead, her lips, then took the books she had given me and left.
* * * * *
It’s been eleven years since that day. According to the books Nadia gave me – books I spent a week and a half furiously studying and making notes in – the window for casting the ancient endless sleep spell will open tonight, and I’ll have eleven days. The endless sleep, which dreamers managed to learn in secret from the masters themselves, is the only way to put the Sleepless back under for good. Eleven days, and a group of about 600 survivors across the world waiting for my go sign.
I never had anyone but Natalia count on me for anything until now. I hope it works.
I couldn’t protect Nadia, couldn’t keep her safe, but I think she always knew that. She loved me anyway. I think what she did know was that without her, I would throw every fiber of my being into protecting those I could with the tools she gave me, because she wanted it. Because everything she touched became a brighter little piece of an otherwise ugly, twisted world, and what I had learned from those books, what I had spent over a decade teaching others, could maybe bring that brightness back.
If I could give her any reason to love me, to be proud of me, I would. I owe it to her.
I’ve written all this down in this ratty old notebook, because of all the times I couldn’t think of what to say – to Natalia, to my parents, to the well-meaning acolytes and survivors we’ve helped who have asked me about my scars and my story. I put down in words what I want to remember if I survive long enough to go senile, and that I want others to know if the events of the next eleven days prove a failure. I am where I am because I loved a princess. I was never a true hero, at least not like those in the fairy tales, but she made me fight to be a better person.
For her, I will destroy the Sleepless, or die trying.
There is no time for sleep now – The others are waiting for my sign.
Good night, dreamers....
THE ANATHEMA CELL
I – Ray’s Story
WHEN THE WOMAN CAME RUNNING out of the woods and onto the shoulder of North Lake Shore Road, Ray Giamatta told the police, the first thing he noticed was how white her legs looked against all the blood. She was pale – very, very pale – and the contrast of her skin against the streaks of blood that drenched her was nearly luminescent in the early morning light.
“She was covered in it,” he told the cops in the hallway outside her private room. He looked thoughtfully into the foam cup of half-drunk black coffee they’d given him. She’d rattled him, but not because of the blood. Not really the blood, but the suggestions of its sources, which she’d given in broken shouts and mewled half-formed mumblings as he drove her to Sisters of the Holy Rosary Hospital. Giamatta had served in the Gulf War. He had volunteered for over a decade as a fire fighter. He was world-worn, his tan worked well into the deep creases around his eyes and mouth, his hands – especially the knuckles – and the broad forehead. His hair and the light scruff of his face bristled like little spikes of iron. Not the type to get easily rattled in general, Ray was a big man with big, strong hands. But those hands shook just enough to jitter the black coffee. “Soaked in it, actually. It stained her hair pink. Streaks of it on her face, her chest, her arms. Her dress made these wet slapping sounds against her legs when she got in my car....”
“She flagged you down?” The question was posed to Ray by a young-looking detective in a slightly rumpled suit. The detective – Jake Davenport – looked barely old enough to drive a car, let alone investigate what Ray had overheard the cops describing as a number of savage slayings in the woods. Rather, he struck Ray as something of a frat-boy type – blond hair spiked up in front, good looks, clear baby-blue eyes. Actually, it was his eyes, Ray decided, which really told his age. The face awaiting an answer was lineless except around the eyes, which regarded him with weary experience. It was as if the things they had seen had cast a cataract haze of cruelty and perversion over the world, and now, looking through that haze, everything was just a little more grimy and a little less clearly cut. Eyes younger than his own, Ray thought, shouldn’t look like that.
“Not exactly,” Ray answered. He glanced through the doorway into Room 216, where the woman lay sedated in the hospital bed. She couldn’t hear him – at least, he didn’t think she could – but his voice dropped to a hushed tone all the same. “She stumbled in front of me. I swerved because I nearly –”
* * * * *
– hit the ghost in the road. That had been Ray’s first impression, he told Davenport. He hadn’t been thinking about much of anything, other than the stark blackness of his coffee and his ex-wife. Their marriage had gone from warm but quietly loving to coolly indifferent, though in the wake of an amicable divorce, they had reclaimed some of the warmth. Not romantic love – there would be no reconciliation, he was sure of that – but a kind of comfortable affection existed between them that allowed certain favors to be asked and granted without resentment. That particular Monday’s favor, since he had the day off, was fixing a fence in her back yard. He couldn’t have said he was looking forward to it, but it was mindless, easy work, and would no doubt be supplemented by another cup of strong coffee and followed up by a good lunch. Marti had always been a good cook.
North Lake Shore Road, also known as U.S. Highway 509, was an old country road that ran from Colliers and Lakehaven through Wexton and Bloomwood all the way up to Ashfield; northern Bloomwood County was full of such gravel-strewn, tree-lined roads. They were almost always empty at that hour of the morning, devoid even of the deer and other wildlife that made homes in the surrounding wooded acreage. Monday morning sunrise had cast a warm, golden glow along the uppermost swells of the trees. The day held a haze of low clouds to it like a shawl, awaiting the full rise and shine of the sun to burn it off.
Ray’s gaze had dipped for just a moment, a mere fraction of a second, to the digital dashboard clock to check the time (“7:03 a.m.,” he clarified for Davenport). When he looked up, there she was, a white phantom glowing against the normal cast of familiar and expected territory, stumbling in her bare feet over the rough stones of the shoulder and then directly into the oncoming traffic lane. He slammed on the brake, his pickup groaning in protest and sliding a little on the road. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t seem to even see him until the sound of flinging gravel drew her gaze upward. Her hair hung in her face, her cheeks and nose filthy with the dirt that had mixed with smears of blood. But Ray could see her eyes, wide as worlds, and they were focused then, sharp with animal instinct, fear, hope, and terrible knowledge.
They didn’t glaze over in shock, he told Davenport, until she’d sunk into the passenger seat, that animal part of her, having found a port of safety, finally shutting down.
* * * * *
“Back up,” Davenport said, shaking his head. “So you stopped the truck. Then what?”
“I got out and went to her,” Ray said, gesturing with his coffee cup. He gestured often with his big hands while talking, as if he could mold and remold and the air in front of him into the occasional visual aid. “I thought she might be hurt.”
“What did you say to her then?”
“I asked her if she was okay. ‘Hey, lady,’ I said to her. ‘Are you –’
* * * * *
“– hurt? Can I...I mean, do you need help? What happened?”
The woman who stood shaking before him in no more than a stained summer nightgown looked to be in her early twenties, verging on a little too thin, but unassumingly pretty in the girl-next-door sort of way. He could see that beneath the matted hair and crusted blood and dirt: a graceful slope of her high cheeks, her pretty split-lipped mouth working silent shapes, clear blue eyes dartin
g wildly from him to the woods to the truck to the woods to the road to the woods....
“Lady?” He made a tentative move forward, intending to gently take her shoulders, but she flinched, squeezing her eyes shut and shaking her head violently and rocking from one foot to the other.
“Let me take you to the hospital.”
She opened her eyes and offered another quick glance to the woods and then back to his face. She wrapped her arms around her shivering frame. Dirty fingernails absently scratched her upper arm.
He found her gaze, locking the frenetic movements onto one single target – his face – and he said to her, “I’m not going to hurt you. I want to help. Let me drive you to the hospital.”
Something inside her, some force holding her up maybe, or keeping her going, wilted a little in relief as his words finally sank in. Tears formed in those big blue eyes, spilling quickly, tracing clean, pale trails through the grime on her cheeks.
“Help me,” she whispered. “Help me.” Sobbing swallowed up any further audible words.
Ray led her gently by the elbow and opened the passenger side door for her. He thought she moved as if she could feel only the barest of physical sensations – as if she were outside herself somehow, dreaming about herself, letting the dream carry the gore-streaked apparition of the avatar her mind had assigned her.
Once she was in his truck, Ray told Davenport, a few odd things struck him at once. For one thing, she smelled like raw meat. Meat and dead leaves and pine sap. For another, he noticed that for all the blood, what few injuries he could see to her actual person looked superficial at best – a scrape on her forehead above her left eye, bruised knuckles on her right hand, a cut on her cheek by the corner of her mouth. But the real kicker was the clump of dirt she was holding.
* * * * *
“Excuse me – dirt?”
Ray thought the younger man before him looked casually indifferent, not quite bored but faintly impatient. That weary, old man’s look again.
“Yes,” Ray said. “She was holding a clump of dirt. That, actually, was what got her talking – my asking her about it.”
Davenport flipped back through his notes. “I didn’t get any kind of information about dirt, except whatever they scraped out from under her fingernails.”
“That’s because it wasn’t really the clump of dirt —”
“You’re losing me,” Davenport said with that same faint impatience.
Ray replied in kind, “I’m trying to explain.”
Davenport nodded an apology. “Please, continue.”
“I noticed she was holding this small clump of dirt. Sort of cradling it, like it was a little dead mouse or something. I glanced at it a few times, because to tell the truth, I thought it was a little dead mouse or chipmunk or something. So I asked her about it. I said –
______
“Uh, miss? Hey, whatcha got there?”
She looked at Ray, the clouds of confusion in her eyes giving way to some degree of clarity. She looked down at the clump in her hands, slowly rolled down the window, and shook the better part of the dirt into the wind. What was left between her slender, mud-streaked fingers was a dirty scrap of cloth. Freed of its earthen prison, she returned it to the safety of her cupped palms. It looked to Ray like a piece of flannel, though its true colors were obscured by the soil worked into the fabric.
“Is that a piece of clothing you got there?” he volunteered.
She looked down at it, then back up at him, and nodded slowly.
“Does that, uh, belong to the, uh, person who hurt you?”
“No,” she said, her voice faded to an afterthought of sound. “Tim would never hurt me.”
“Tim?”
Her eyes filled with tears. “He’s dead. He’s all torn up. They all are.”
“Jesus,” Ray muttered. He considered reaching out a consoling hand to pat her knee or shoulder or something, then thought better of it. “What happened to you?”
The girl had closed her eyes and turned her face up toward the sun. It was not an expression of peace or contentment; the slight crinkling of her eyebrows and downturn of her lips suggested pain she was only just learning to sublimate. She hadn’t answered him.
* * * * *
“That’s all she said?”
“No.” Ray took a sip of his coffee. “There was a little bit more.”
Davenport watched him with that expectant, slightly impatient expression. Ray found it condescending, and so took another leisurely sip of his coffee before continuing.
“There’s a part of North Lakeshore Road that dips into the woods, after the Exxon up there. If you keep going straight instead, you end up veering off onto another road entirely. To continue on North Lakeshore – this confuses a lot of folks – you have to bear right into the woods. So that’s the way I went. And that’s when she started flipping out.”
“Screaming?”
“No, not at first. At first it was just mumbling. I couldn’t understand much of it. Then it became little pieces of words, pieces of sentences. ‘God-out’ was one, or maybe ‘got-out.’ Something about metal, something about poison in the ground. ‘The woods,’ she kept saying. Let’s see....’Lef for us.’ And ‘the room.’ And she kept repeating ‘Danger, danger’ over and over. Like a chant.” Like a warding off spell, was actually the thought that had crossed Ray’s mind, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to phrase it that way out loud.
“Any names?”
“Well, that guy named Tim, in reference to her scrap of cloth.”
Davenport flipped through his notebook and his pen alighted on a spot near the bottom of the page. “How about a Lance Gilray?”
Ray thought about it a moment then shook his head. “Who’s he?”
The detective made a face expressive of distaste that Ray didn’t think was meant for the civilian public. “A crackpot, is my guess. Lured those people out there to —” Davenport stopped abruptly and looked up. “Did she say anything else? Anything at all?”
Ray considered answering his question with a question – he thought the least the detective could do was to fill him in a little bit on what happened to the girl. But Davenport was likely obligated by law to say little, and driven by personality to say less. Ray sighed. “She asked me to take her home. I told her that it would be better if I took her to the hospital first, and she didn’t argue.”
“Was that before or after the mumbling stuff?”
“Kind of in the middle. She had a few moments of clarity again, like she remembered I was there. The first time she asked me to take her home, like I said. Then she saw us dipping into the woods and she started clawing the door, the window, whimpering, pulling at her clothes and hair. I tried to calm her down, but she was crawling up the door like a coked-up cat until we were out of the woods again. Then the second time, she shouted at me to bury it. I asked her what I was supposed to bury, and she told me ‘All of it.’”
“All of what?” Davenport asked.
“Don’t know. I couldn’t get her to say. And there was one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“She asked —”
* * * * *
“Where do you belong?”
Ray glanced at her from the driver’s seat. They were almost to the hospital, and she had seemed to calm down. Her ragged breathing had slowed and steadied, she had stopped pulling her hair and scratching at her arms, and though her eyes still darted like a wild animal’s, there was something returning behind them, something clearing through the fog of trauma.
He didn’t understand the question, but attempted to answer anyway. “Well, nowhere, really. I’m supposed to fix a fence for my ex-wife, but —”
She shook her head with violent frustration. “We let it out but it never should have...it doesn’t....”
“What doesn’t?”
“It doesn’t belong here. It changes things. Changes people. And then we don’t belong.” She started leaking a thin, high, hysterical so
und.
“Lady, I don’t follow. What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know what it is,” she said, and giggled uncontrollably until they pulled up at the Emergency door to the Sisters of the Holy Rosary Hospital.
II – Room 216
She awoke to bright light from a tidy drop ceiling and to antiseptic air, to sheets a shade whiter than the limp hands that lay on them. Her hands. A hospital. The nice man had taken her to a hospital. Surrounding her were mostly unfamiliar faces wearing serious expressions. She tried to speak but the words stuck to the dryness in her throat. She ached all over but she could see, could feel that she was clean, her hair and skin free of the traces of –
The memories came flooding back and she tried to sit up. The faces loomed closer, murmuring to her to lie back, lie still.
“Hey there,” one of the faces said. It was a handsome face, young but with very old eyes, and it belonged to a man with a low voice, softened for her. “Just relax. You’ve obviously been through a lot, and we want you to get better.”
She nodded once. His voice soothed her. His eyes made her feel safe.
The man spoke again. “I’m a detective – Jake Davenport. I’m sure you already know Dr. Seever. That big guy over there is my partner, Ed, and over there is a face you might recognize.” He said this last with a small smile, and indicated a man hovering uncertainly in the doorway. It was the nice man who had picked her up from the road and saved her from the woods.
She smiled at him and whispered, “Hi.”
Night Movies Page 16