Page 36 of Going Home in the Dark

20Abed in the Spreading Oaks Motor Hotel

Some say that dreams are coded messages from the subconscious, which is attempting to warn the clueless sleeper about destructive habits or about bad decisions that are likely to have a serious negative impact on his or her life. If you dream about piloting a sailboat across a sea of flaming vodka with sails afire and the helm so hot that it burns your hands, maybe you should cut back from five martinis an evening to one. Or let’s say you dream of standing at the altar on your wedding day, with birds singing and flowers everywhere in abundance, with everyone you’ve ever loved present in the pews. As the groom slides the ring onto your finger, you look up into his face and see a naked skull with blood pouring out of its eyeless sockets. Sound advice in such a case would be to consider whether your fiancé might be the serial killer who has dismembered seven women in the past four years and taken their heads to display in some collection wherever he lives.

Whateveryourtheory of dreams, you must understand there are clues in the following dreams that will prepare you to endure the unspeakable horrors to come.

On that first night after three of the amigos returned to Maple Grove to save comatose Ernie Hernishen, Rebecca Crane—also known as enarC accebeR—dreamed that she was Nurse HeatherAshmont making her way through the crimson candescence of a perpetual twilight, in an infinite cornfield, in a state of slowly escalating anxiety. At the center of the field waited an immense oak. The tree was perhaps two hundred feet tall, with a crown at least a hundred fifty feet in diameter, unlike any real-world oak.

She wanted to go directly to the mighty oak, but she lacked the courage to approach it so boldly, moving instead in circles, around and around the tree, each circle bringing her closer to it. This was not characteristic of Nurse Ashmont, who was usually an unrelenting kick-ass. Her anxiety gradually chilled into dread, although not because she anticipated an encounter with Judyface. There was no Judyface here. Something worse shared the cornfield with her. She repeatedly looked behind her. But the rows were taller than she was, and they curved away to the south so that she couldn’t see far enough to be sure no one stalked her through the last witchy light of the day. Besides, the walls of green were so dense that someone or something might have been paralleling her in another passageway and might reach through the corn to seize her.

In a sudden transition, she came out of the cornfield into the immediate presence of the oak. The great tree appeared to be dead, towering leafless, its wildwork of bare limbs impressing a fearsome pattern against the bloody sky of day’s end. The gnarled trunk had the circumference of a redwood hundreds of years old; a car could have been driven through it if someone had carved out a tunnel.

Her dread became a paralyzing fear of imminent violence. In the broad trunk of the tree, a section of bark the size and shape of a door splintered and peeled away. The underlying wood crackled into a fountain of sawdust that gushed forth, and withinthe hollow thus formed stood a tall, powerful man. He wore the clothes that Judyface had worn—engineer boots and denim coveralls over long underwear.

However, this man emerging from the oak wasn’t hiding behind Judy Garland. When Nurse Heather had ripped the mask off Judyface, that psycho killer was horribly scarred and breathed through ragged holes where a nose should have been, but that was the worst of it.Thisman’s skull was as malformed as a squash that had suffered the torment of natural forces most squash were never required to endure. Although he had a nose, it was lumpy and hooked, as different from Tom Cruise’s nose as any nose could get. His mouth was twice as wide as it ought to have been, and his teeth were green.

He came to her and grabbed her by one arm. She tried to resist, but he was strong. Strong and stinky. The smell wasn’t like body odor, but at once astringent yet organic. She couldn’t identify it.

In a deep, raw, wet voice, he declared, “If you don’t go back to Malibu soon, you will be ours forever.”

He pulled her through the carpet of sawdust, toward the hollow in the tree, and she tried to remember what Heather Ashmont had done when Judyface tried to drag her down to the secret room under the barn, but she wasn’t Heather anymore; she was the ditzy blonde, Suzy Pepper, in the hit seriesEnemies, who was such a slut that she would have dated a guy even knowing he was a psycho killer, as long as he was cute and good in bed.

Although Rebecca was almost killed, one way or another, in 97 percent of her dreams, she never perished in one, not one; yet her heart raced as if it would burst, and her fear escalated intobreathless terror. She tried to scream, but no sound escaped her. She tried to scream again, again, and yet again—

—until she sat up in bed in room 208 of the Spreading Oaks Motor Hotel. Awake, the only sound she could produce was a thin squeal like that a field mouse might make in the talons of an owl.

The strange smell came with her out of the dream. She held the scent only briefly, for it wasn’t in the room, just remembered. It couldn’t possibly be in the room, because the man from the tree hadn’t been real, but only the figment of a nightmare.

In room 210, Bobby the Sham was dreaming that he was a dog. This was not unusual. He had been a dog in dreams often before. He believed his canine adventures while sleeping were a consequence of his having written a few bestselling novels about dogs; he seemed to have a talent for creating a believable doggy point of view.

He didn’t have a name in the dream, and his breed wasn’t easy to identify. He was just a generic dog having a good time running on a beach, through a meadow, through a forest, chasing butterflies and rabbits, losing track of his prey every time a new smell or unusual sound distracted him.

In an open wood, Bobby the dog took an interest in a particular small clearing, sniffing in circles. Abruptly, the ground opened and swallowed him. He scrabbled at the closing walls in a panic, trying to claw out of the sinkhole. But it wasn’t a sinkhole. A sucking mouth had yawned wide under him. He slid into the moist throat of—of what, what, what?—something thatseemed to be a giant worm that, although toothless, was taking him down by peristaltic action. Above him, the circle of light that was the open mouth grew smaller as the miserable mutt was drawn deeper, deeper into a darkness that would sooner than later secrete a dissolving acid.

Bobby the dog howled deep in the worm’s throat—and Bobby the Sham whimpered pitiably in his hotel bed—and the worm spat him out as if the taste must be offensive. A voice from somewhere, nowhere, deep and growling, a voice that was nothing like what Bobby would expect a worm’s voice to be, said, “Ernest Hernishen belongs to me, not to you.”

With that, Bobby catapulted out of sleep and found himself standing beside the bed, gasping and shaking.

In room 212, Spencer Truedove dreamed that he was his brother, Vlademir, though in the real world he had no brother named Vlademir or anything else. Vlad was strapped to a bed in a mental hospital, where a sinister doctor with one white-filmed eye prepared to give him an injection. The barrel of the syringe looked at least eight inches long and an inch in diameter; it was filled with a milky solution that appeared as if it had been squeezed out of the physician’s bad eye. “This,” declared the doctor, “will turn you into a female gorilla, and you will live free in the jungles of Africa.” Instead, the shot turned Vlademir (who was really Spencer) into a panda named Mum-Mum. Mum-Mum lived in a Manhattan apartment with Norman and Beverly Shore. Norman worked at a hedge fund, and Beverly was an attorney at a prominent law firm. During the day, when Norm and Bevwere at work, Mum-Mum took care of their toddler, Sherman, who loved his panda nanny. From time to time, as Mum-Mum and Sherman chased each other through the infinite apartment or played hide-and-seek, Sherman would open the coat closet door, where a comatose Ernie Hernishen hung from the rod. A monster who shared the closet always shouted, “He’s ours, OURS, you little shit!” The monster routinely slammed the door in the toddler’s face, and little Sherman screamed for nanny. Mum-Mum sometimes required an hour and much ice cream to quiet the terrified, weeping child, but at least the monster, which smelled like poisonous mushroom soup, never came out of the closet to rip them to pieces.

When artists spend their days painting abstract works that are open to thousands of interpretations but have no real meaning, their dreams are not like yours and mine. A gifted psychiatrist with a keen understanding of the human mind might question their mental stability, but we must admit that their dreams are immeasurably more entertaining than ours.

Insufficiently frightened, Spencer Truedove did not wake in a cold sweat but lay giggling in his bedclothes until he received a wake-up call from the front desk at 6:30 in the morning.

21Bobby Suddenly Recalls a Night of Terror

Alone in his motel room, having showered and dressed for the day, Bobby Shamrock ate the free continental breakfast that was provided by the establishment. This proved to be a small pastry with raisins and white icing, served on a paper plate sealed in Saran Wrap. He didn’t want the sweet roll, but if he left it untouched, the management might be offended. If there was one thing Bobby was loath to do—actually, there were many—it was to offend someone who meant well.

He devoured the dry and tasteless roll while standing in the bathroom so the crumbs would fall into the sink, from which they could be flushed away with water. Then he wiped out the sink with a handful of Kleenex. He wrapped the damp tissues in the Saran Wrap and dropped everything in the trash can along with the paper plate, which he rinsed off prior to disposal. Bobby was something of a neatness freak. He might not be teetering on the edge of mysophobia (the fear of dirt) or ataxiophobia (the fear of disorder), which Rebecca sometimes seemed to be, but he definitely had his issues.

The amigos had agreed to meet at the diner adjacent to the motel at 7:30. It was seven o’clock. He was uncomfortable sitting in a room with an unmade bed. After he had addressed thisproblem, the condition of the bed suggested he’d slept on the floor.

With twenty minutes to kill, he sat in the room’s only armchair and found himself recalling a visit to Saint Mark’s rectory, which had until now been bleached from his memory.

After that long-ago Saturday when the amigos followed Pastor Larry around Maple Grove without turning up a clue as to why there had been monsters in the church basement, they were more determined than ever to learn what nefarious business the clergyman might be up to. They decided to attend the Sunday morning service at Saint Mark’s, on the off chance that revelation would occur. As a member of the choir, Ernie had been for days practicing the scheduled hymns in order to irritate his mother; although she would be fuming that he’d gone to church, she would be grateful for the silence. Spencer lived alone in his father’s house, so he could do what he wanted and go anywhere he wanted. On weekends, Rebecca’s grandparents had more time to spend together; they preferred she stayed out of the house most of each day. Her absence enabled them to devote themselves more ardently to the illusion of being lovebirds while sharpening their hatred, devising subtler, ever more vicious verbal skewerings and mean tricks. Having fostered Bobby, Adam and Evelyn Pinchbeck had allowed him to raise himself and do as he wished, because to lay down rules would require them to speak, an activity that seemed to exhaust them quickly.

While Ernie stood proudly with the other singers in the choir enclosure between the chancel railing and the presbytery, histhree amigos sat together in a pew at the very back of the church. They regarded the gathered parishioners with deep distrust, alert for suspicious behavior. They didn’t know what specifically that would look like, but they believed they would know it when they saw it.

Most of their attention was directed toward Pastor Larry, who drifted through the service like a cloud of ectoplasm shaped into human form to be inhabited by a revenant. After his homily, he made a few announcements, one of which electrified the amigos. This very afternoon, the reverend would be going upstate to visit his sister and take care of her cats while she recovered from dental surgery scheduled for Tuesday. He expected to return on Wednesday, though he might not get back until Thursday, depending on whether or not she developed painful gum inflammation. In the event a parishioner died during the pastor’s absence, arrangements had been made with the Reverend Aleem Robinson, of the Northside Baptist Church, to conduct services in an approximate Lutheran manner and provide consolation to the family and friends of the deceased.

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