by Dale Bailey
The subject of Ramsey Lomax’s phone call was Dreamland.
“So, tell me, Mr. Prather,” he’d said, “do you believe in ghosts?”
And the sheer unexpectedness of the question—the sheer absurdity of it—had surprised Ben into laughter. “Why? Are you planning to go on a ghost hunt?”
“As a matter of fact,” Lomax had said, in a voice empty of levity, “I am.”
Ben sat up straight in his chair and reached for a notepad. “Where?”
“Are we off the record?”
“Sure.”
“Dreamland.”
A single word—two syllables, that’s all—and it rocked Ben like a blow. He dragged in a long breath. “The housing project?”
“That’s right.”
Silence followed, a silence that spun itself out in a dialogue of bass and tenor sax from the overhead speakers, a silence in which Ben felt his whole world shifting into a network of new relationships, a silence in which Ramsey Lomax’s question—
—do you believe in ghosts—
—took on an added complexity.
It was simple enough on the face of it. But peel back the surface, and what did you see? Wheels inside of wheels inside of wheels, all of them spinning at once. There were ghosts, Ben thought—Hollywood spooks and specters. And then there were ghosts. Inside every cheesy ectoplasmic phantom lay the dizzying abyss of memory and regret—and inside that, the hollow echo where memory failed. Ghosts—real ghosts—were in your head, and just when you thought you had forgotten them—just when you thought you had escaped them forever—they could loom up and seize you once again. They could possess you.
Dreamland, he thought. And what he saw was not the place itself. What he saw was a panoply of grainy black-and-white newspaper photos projected in the merciless glare of a microfilm reader.
How old had he been? Ten? Maybe eleven?
Even now Ben could remember the afternoon hush of the Santa Monica library. Paul Cook had been the one who brought him there, driving him across town in his sagging old Volvo, and Paul had been the one who stood behind his chair with the comforting weight of his hand draped across Ben’s shoulder as Ben gazed down and down into the glowing well of the microfilm reader and felt the entire weight of the unremembered past settle over him like a shroud—the endless nightmares and the panic attacks that gripped him like a vise and the dark compulsion that had unleashed that flood of violent imagery, that deluge of words like poison from a freshly lanced wound. Seven die in hostage stand-off, the headline read, and below that the subhead: Three-year-old survivor catatonic. But it was the photographs that had mesmerized Ben: the aerial shot of Harold P. Taylor Homes—of Dreamland—like a snapshot of his dreams. And below that the gallery of victims. The cop, resplendent in his dress blues; the two shooters, and their first victim, shot dead on the plaza; the family last of all: the woman, her two daughters, and the sole survivor—a three-year-old boy who might have been Ben’s younger cousin, but wasn’t.
No indeed, Ben had thought, staring down into the child’s eyes. Not a cousin at all.
“You there, Mr. Prather?”
Ben swallowed. “Right here,” he said. And then, with more force: “I thought they tore it down. After that girl died, I—”
“Theresa Matheson,” Lomax said. “Her name was Theresa Matheson.”
“Right.” Ben took a deep breath. “I thought they tore the place down.”
“Oh, they started to,” Lomax said. “And they’ll finish the job, too. But not yet. Seven of the towers are down, but number three is still standing. I’ve seen to that.”
“Why?”
“Curiosity,” Lomax said. “Simple curiosity, Mr. Prather. If you accept the premise that hauntings are by products of human violence, then Dreamland is, well, a researcher’s dream. Can you imagine the quantity of blood that’s been spilled in that place?”
Ben, still grappling with his own internal turmoil, hesitated. He could imagine all right. He had no problem on that score, no problem at all. Then, simply to fill the silence, to keep the conversation going, he asked another question, the first one that came to mind. “Do you have—I mean—Is there any evidence?”
Lomax laughed. “Evidence? Of course not. Just tantalizing clues: the residents of Dreamland abandoned Tower Three years before they gave up on the rest of the complex, did you know that? Three years. No one quite knows why—it’s not the sort of thing people are comfortable talking about. But if you ask around long enough you’ll hear rumors. Plenty of rumors. Bad dreams, disembodied voices. A sense that there was something unwholesome about the place. Street people avoid it like the plague. Street people! All those empty rooms, and they stay away. They say it has a way of turning suddenly cold inside, even at the height of summer. They say that sometimes you can hear the elevators running, though the building hasn’t had power in years. They say that once in a while someone wanders inside and simply disappears. No one ever sees them again.” Lomax laughed again, more quietly this time, and without any real humor. “They say. But they’re street people, right? Who’s going to notice if one of them disappears? So no, there’s no evidence at all, not a shred of it.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“I’m going to live there two weeks, that’s all. I’m going to see what happens. Nothing to prove. No scientific crap, no Rhine Institute investigation, no truckload of instruments, none of that bullshit. Just personal curiosity, that’s all. I’m just going to live there and see what happens for myself. And I’d like you to come with me.”
Now, remembering, Ben felt sweep over him the same depthless wave of apprehension he’d felt at the time, a suffocating breaker of dread through which he had managed to squeeze only one final inconsequential question. “Why me?” he’d asked.
But he knew why, didn’t he? He’d known the minute he’d uttered the words.
And Lomax knew as well. He had waited a beat, and then he had said, very softly and with the faintest undercurrent of amusement: “Do I really have to answer that question, Mr. Prather?”
No, Ben had thought. No you don’t.
Now, glancing down into the monitor of his computer, Ben had another nasty little shock. Lomax’s question—
—do you believe in ghosts—
—glimmered patiently up at him from the screen. He had. written it himself, hadn’t he? Just like old times—the self-medication of prose, obsessive and all unconscious, more than a little terrifying. He had no memory of the act, but the muscles in his hands still tingled with its neural echo.
Ben stabbed the delete button, erasing the words letter by letter until finally nothing remained but the pristine void of an empty screen. But even then the question lingered.
Tell me, Mr. Prather. Do you believe in ghosts?
Ben couldn’t answer the question—not really—but he knew one thing: he was haunted. What had happened in Dreamland—whether he could remember it or not—had shaped everything that he had become.
Now, listening to that name—
—Dreamland—
—reverberate in his thoughts, Ben recalled Lomax’s closing words.
“There’s probably a book in it for you,” he had said. “Probably a nice chunk of money.”
But Ben wouldn’t do it for the money—there wasn’t enough money in the world to coax him back into that place. And he wouldn’t do it because he wanted to. He didn’t. Every fiber in his being resisted it. He would do it because he had to—because he had no choice in the matter.
Once, years ago, Ben had done a story on radio astronomy: the giant radar dishes you sometimes saw sprouting like enormous mushrooms along the edge of the highway, the scientists who staffed them. He’d been fascinated by the singular focus of the men and women he had interviewed—men and women who had dedicated their professional lives to studying the ghost of an event they could never truly observe, to isolating amid the cosmic aftermath of catastrophe the outward and expanding arc of the Big Bang itself.
He would go back to Dreamland.
If it came to it, he would do it for free.
6
They made their preparations over the months that followed—Abel and Fletcher Keel, Lara, Ben; Ramsey Lomax most of all. Abel worked the phones as the summer faded, cultivating his contacts in the industry. He guested once or twice on the local morning shows, keeping silent about Ramsey Lomax’s plans for Dreamland (what little he knew of them); he did readings in the afternoon. Aside from his absence on the airwaves, his life continued outwardly unchanged. Inwardly, his doubts and ambitions hung in delicate balance, and that spectral glimpse of Theresa Matheson haunted his dreams.
By the end of September Keel had gotten himself into Alcoholics Anonymous, and by the time jack-o’-lanterns began grinning from the windows of San Antonio, he was celebrating nearly two weeks of sobriety. Fortified by the splotched promise of the bar napkin he kept folded in his wallet, he started going to the gym. As he gradually recovered the sleek musculature he’d let slip away over the years, his fears of Dreamland faded.
Lara, too, had returned to a physical regimen which the long hours of her residency had rendered impossible. For a time, she feared she’d have to find some temp work to keep herself afloat until the situation at Mercy General resolved itself. But then a letter from Ramsey Lomax arrived—a brief note naming a date, and a check drawn to her name. A sizable check. No strings attached, the note had added, though she was wise enough to know that there were always strings attached. After a pensive afternoon staring at the bills spilling across her battered kitchen table, she cashed the check anyway. And in the mornings that followed—mornings she normally would have spent in the ER—she ran along the lake shore, replaying the events leading to Katie Wright’s death until they burned in her memory.
In between freelance gigs, Ben started delving into Ramsey Lomax’s plans for Dreamland. A friend of a friend of a friend managed to shake loose a copy of Lomax’s lease with the Housing Authority. Ben gasped when he saw the numbers. Much of it was boilerplate—insurance, liability, and so on—but the numbers were anything but standard. Twelve million in redevelopment funds had been necessary to halt the scheduled demolition. Six million more had bought him a six-month lease, September through February. In the emerald gloom of his fern-thronged office on the coast, Ben stared into his monitor and pondered the figures. A million dollars a month. Eighteen million dollars total. Doubtless hundreds of thousands more in insurance and attorney fees, security, renovations. And all of it to buy two weeks inside a slum any sane person would have paid half again as much to escape.
Why? he wondered. What was Lomax really after?
Half a continent away, where Dreamland drowsed beneath a pristine October sky, the diesel roar of destruction had dwindled. The demolition crews withdrew and eighteen-wheelers rumbled down the narrow streets to haul away the bulldozers and the enormous earth-moving trucks, creaking in their nests of chains atop a fleet of flatbed trailers. The next day a square mile of fence went up, enclosing the entire compound inside twenty-five vertical feet of heavy-gauge chain link surmounted by coils of razor wire. Inside, Tower Three alone still stood upright. Two weeks passed, and then another wave of contractors arrived, climbing down from their pickups and riding the sole functioning elevator to the fifth floor. Refuse was hauled away by the truckload. Walls came down amid clouds of dust. As winter closed in, the din of power saws and hammers rang across the broken plaza.
For Ben, as for Lara and the others, those months passed in a fog, a grim limbo of formless apprehension and uneasy dreams. In November, as instructed, Ben dispatched several boxes of personal effects—clothes and books, a few photos, a portable stereo and half a hundred CDs: classic Motown, a healthy sampling from the Blue Note catalog of the fifties and early sixties, a handful from the classical canon. It was like packing up for the dormitories at UCLA all over again, and with a similar mixture of anticipation and dread.
The next week, two moving vans pulled up to the shattered compound from which Tower Three jutted like an accusing finger. A platoon of men hopped down from the warmth of their cabs to wrestle furniture and appliances and load after load of cardboard boxes through the lobby where Theresa Matheson had died.
Christmas came and went, and in the bleak dawn of a new year they began to gather at last—Keel winging his way in from San Antonio, Ben from LAX. On the appointed day, Lara woke up late and ran for hours along the lake shore, until the breath clawed in her lungs and the muscles in her legs screamed for mercy. At home, she showered and dressed. It was already late in the afternoon by the time she strode out of her apartment and caught the El across town. Abel cabbed over, hunched and shivering beneath a lowering January sky as he paid the driver and lifted his eyes to Lomax’s luxurious penthouse apartment, warmly ablaze in the gray air.
Upstairs, Lomax greeted them one by one.
Introductions were made, pleasantries exchanged. And in the tense silence that followed, each of them sensed the wary scrutiny of these strangers, their companions for the weeks to come.
“So,” Lomax said. “Shall we go?”
They went, descending in his private elevator to the cavernous basement garage, where his limo awaited them. By the time the car emerged at street level, the sun was falling in the west. A thin, angry snow had started pelting down.
Arrivals
1
Ben gazed out the window as the car motored through the winter-swept streets, watching the city slip by, the glistening apartment towers, the broad avenues and acres of gleaming sidewalk. And then the limo swung beneath an underpass. In the flickering span of darkness before they emerged once again into the thin January twilight, the city’s geography changed. As always, Ben was struck by the abrupt juxtapositions in American life, the narrow margins between black and white, poverty and prosperity. The chic department stores gave way to pawn shops, the marble-fronted banks to check-cashing stores, their interiors dim beyond steel security gates. The pedestrians were fewer here, their complexions darker. They hurried by, hunched and hooded against the cold, their faces downcast, clutching packages against their breasts. Young men lounged on the corners, hooting at the limo as it passed.
The car stopped at a traffic signal, and then, when the light changed, turned left. Cramped three-story houses crowded the sidewalks, their wind-blasted facades grim and colorless. Wind-blown debris and drifts of ashen week-old snow had collected in the corners by their stoops. Rusty cages enclosed their street-level windows. Here and there, Ben caught an occasional flash of color—a freshly painted door or a glimpse of bright curtains in some upper-story window—but in another block or two even these paltry gestures of defiance dwindled. The street simply gave up. The asphalt was pitted and broken. Cannibalized cars lined the sidewalks, flaking slowly into rust. Most of the houses had fallen into active disrepair—broken glass and boarded-over windows, looping scrawls of graffiti, front doors swinging lazily in the wind. Others existed only as burned-out shells. A child, frail and under-dressed, his brown eyes solemn and enormous in the dark setting of his face, stood on the sidewalk and watched them pass. Ben felt the doctor—Lara, he thought, Lara McGovern—stiffen at his side.
“Any minute now,” Lomax said, his voice tense with anticipation.
Even as the words died away, the limo swung to the right. The last of the houses fell back, and an arid wasteland opened before them. At first Ben didn’t see it—he saw nothing but the high, curving arc of the fence line, glittering in the last rays of the sun, and the bombed-out desert beyond, the gaping mouth of an empty foundation, the jagged heaps of broken masonry and twisted steel. Then Lara McGovern touched his arm. Startled, Ben glanced over at her, the strong almost masculine line of her jaw and the washed-out denim of her eyes and the sense of bones just millimeters under her lightly fr
eckled flesh. She smiled, tentatively, and the spare lines of her face—the harsh, angular bone structure of someone who works out too much—softened.
“There,” she said.
Ben looked, uncertain what she was pointing at. In the same instant that his eye at last isolated a boxy pinnacle edging above the nearest mound of wreckage, the limo made its final turn. The debris field drew back and it was there, Dreamland, squarely before him in the windshield of the limo, wounded, dismembered, arrogant, looming high above the rubble of its toppled siblings. Mesmerized, Ben gazed up at it, feeling nothing, hardly thinking, everything slipping by him as effortlessly as in a dream, the air bluing off toward night and the unremembered past and the limo so noiseless and smooth that it seemed hardly to be moving at all, it seemed to be standing still, it was the building that was moving, it was Dreamland, languorous and arrogant, gliding closer and closer until it towered over him, rearing its crushing height story after story into the cold January air, up and up and up, obliterating everything else, the limo and the heat of his companions and the distant towers downtown, until at last it blotted out even the sky—
He took a breath, and wrenched his gaze away, abruptly conscious of the doctor’s attention. No one else was paying him any mind. They were staring out the windows at the building or into their laps or blankly into the air before their faces, like passengers on a bus.
The limo coasted to a stop.
The driver punched a button. The great automated gate rolled back, and then they were moving forward again, through the gate and past tumbled dunes of shattered concrete, the building drawing inexorably toward them. The driver touched his brakes and parked, idling.