Chapter Twenty-Two

Joan had been asleep for only a few hours when the dream started, the same dream that had driven her screaming into wakefulness a dozen times before. She saw the field of chickweed and clover, the wire fence gleaming dully in the moonlight, and she knew that if she came up over the rise, she would see the spot where Lila had been buried, and the nightmare would have her in its grasp at last.

Already, she could feel that a clammy sweat had started, that a cold knot of panic had formed in her stomach.

So, as she had a dozen times before, she bit her lip hard to wake herself. And saw the field of chickweed and clover undulate, as if it were a reflection on a pond. Then the wire fence, gleaming in the moonlight, lost itself in infinity. And she knew that the awful grip of the dream was starting to fade.

She knew also that she had succeeded only in chasing it off yet again. That it would return until, as Ryerson had told her, "it has played itself out." And even as she woke she knew that her wisest course of action would be to let the dream do just that—play itself out. Complete the circle. "I do it with songs that get stuck in my head," Ryerson had also told her. "I force the song to complete itself, to come to an end. And when it does complete itself, I'm usually free of it."

"Usually?" she'd said.

"Nothing's perfect," he'd said.

But now, in darkness, with the tail end of the dream still in sight, she had no stomach for anything except to turn on the light, sit up in the bed, and get her mind on something else. If she woke Ryerson, too, that was okay.

She opened her eyes. "Rye?" she whispered tentatively, voice quivering. "Wake up, Rye." She reached for him. "Rye?" She turned her head, strained to see in the darkness. "Damn!" she said aloud. The other side of the bed was empty.

She swung her feet to the floor. "Damn!" she said again. She looked about the room, saw only the hulking, dark gray suggestion of the wing chair against the north wall, the chest of drawers near it, the bookcase against the opposite wall.

She saw also that the door to the living room stood open.

"Rye," she called, "are you out there?" and knew almost at once that he wasn't, that his all-but-nonexistent night vision did not allow him to walk around in darkness. And from what she could see through the doorway, the house was dark.

She turned on the bedside lamp. Its low-wattage bulb illuminated a small area around her and turned the rest of the room a dull yellow.

"Rye, are you—" she began, and stopped. Something had moved away from the open door.

~ * ~

Ryerson parked the Woody several blocks from Frank's Place, got out, closed the door softly, and began walking down the center of the narrow street. He sensed little life in the big cement-block buildings around him. Now and then, desperate pieces of drug-induced dreams slapped at him. Now and then, he felt eyes on him and he knew that they were not human eyes.

It was a little past 3:00, that time of the morning when the world is at its darkest; especially here, where the streetlamps had long since burned out, and a low mantle of clouds lay sullen and still overhead.

He walked in the center of the narrow street. He could see very little in darkness such as this, only the dark gray and shimmering geometry of the buildings flat against the black sky and the black pavement. He guessed that there were no hazards in the roadway. On the sidewalk there could be open doors, trash, perhaps even someone sleeping off a hangover, and if he saw any of these things at all, it would be when he was half a heartbeat away from falling over them. So he stuck to the middle of the street, where he could roughly gauge its edges.

He was going to Frank's Place to find Jack Lucas.

~ * ~

"Is that you, Rye?" Joan called, knowing that he probably wouldn't be sulking about in the darkened house. Still, the possibility—remote as it was—was something to cling to: "Don't play games with me, Rye," she called. "I need you." She smiled quickly. "I do need you, Rye. Come in here and hold me."

And a voice answered from the other room, "You'd like that, wouldn't you, Joan?"

~ * ~

Five miles away, on a darkened street, in the desolate and all-but-abandoned area of the city known as "The District," Ryerson Biergarten gasped, doubled over in pain, .rumpled to his knees, got down on all fours. `No," he moaned, "for the love of God, no!" Then, despite the pain, he reared up on his knees, held his arms wide, clenched his fists. “Damn you!" he screamed. "Damn you! Damn you! Damn you!" Because he had realized at last where he had seen the field of chickweed and clover revealed to him when the woman who called herself Doreen had chuckled and her mind had opened up to him very briefly.

He had seen it six months earlier.

He had seen it in Edgewater. At the cemetery where Lila Curtis was buried.

He screamed again, "No! Oh my God, no!"

And from the edges of the buildings around him, a hundred pairs of eyes turned from the psychic storm brewing in the air around him.

~ * ~

Joan wanted to speak but couldn't. Her breathing was shallow and fast and the lack of oxygen was making her dizzy.

"Remember me, Joan?" teased the voice from the other room.

Joan found her voice briefly. "Go away," she pleaded.

"But Joan, I thought we were pals. Aren't we pals?"

"Go away," she whispered.

"No, no, no, Joan. I'm here to stay."

~ * ~

Ryerson hadn't gone far from the Woody, only a hundred feet or so, and, normally, finding his way back to it would have been easy. But not in darkness such as this. Not when his eyes were all but useless. In his panic and desperation, he'd gone right instead of making a 180-degree turn. And though he saw the vague, dirty cream-colored suggestion of the curb, he saw it too late, stumbled over it, and his forward momentum sent him headlong toward the wall only a few feet away. He thrust his hands out to cushion the impact. His arms buckled; he instinctively tucked his head. And hit the wall hard. First with his shoulder, then, spinning around from the momentum, with his back, and got the wind knocked out of him. He fell gasping to one knee, grabbed his shoulder. After what seemed like a very long time, his breathing normalized, he moaned one of his rare curses, and pushed himself to his feet. He stood quietly for a moment, trying to gauge his location. Around him the buildings, the street, and the sky blended into an undulating milky-gray sameness.

Then he sensed that there were eyes on him again. The same eyes that had been watching him since he'd gotten out of the Woody and started walking. The eyes of nocturnal predators and scavengers. Eyes hat were easily a hundred times more sensitive than any man's. Eyes that he could use f only he could make the tiny brains behind them open up and communicate with him.

~ * ~

"Who are you?" Joan pleaded. "Please, who are you?"

"Oh, come on, Joan," said the voice in the other room. "You know me." Then, at the edges of the dull yellow light cast by her bedside lamp, she could see that something vas moving with graceful and deliberate lowness toward her through the living room, and she screamed, "Who are you, goddammit, who are you?!"

She heard a chuckle, low and menacing, then another, and another and another, until they blended into a kind of loud rushing noise, like dirt falling on metal.

It ended abruptly.

Doreen appeared in her bedroom doorway. And smiled a huge seductive smile. And said, her voice dripping with apology, "I gotta hurt you, Joan. I gotta hurt you!"

Joan screamed, "I don't know you!"

"Course you don't. But I know you." She stuck two fingers into her ample cleavage.

"What ... are you doing?" Joan stammered.

Doreen withdrew a small silver folding knife, held it up in front of her eyes, and snapped it open with a flick of the wrist. The blade was short, almost harmless-looking. Doreen whispered hoarsely, as if emotion were pinching her voice, "Don't look like much, does it, Joan? Hell, it ain't much, really. But let me ask you something; you ever seen what a cat can do with its tiny little claws? I'll tell you, Joan, a cat can do lots of damage. It can blind a dog, for sure. Kill it, maybe, if it catches it right." She cocked her head. "So why don't you just think of me as a cat." She cocked her head the other way and nodded at the knife she still held in front of her eyes. "And this," she said, “is my claw."

~ * ~

The world Ryerson was seeing was a world no human eyes had ever seen before. It was a black and white world whose focus shifted from moment to moment as the creature viewing it gauged where a threat lay and where food could be had. At the moment those were the creature's primary concerns. It was also trying to take the measure of the man who had invaded its territory, trying to determine if the man was going to close in on its nest, or if the man was going to fall over—as some of them did—and so make a kind of offering of himself.

And because the creature's concerns included the man, the world Ryerson was seeing included—from random moment to random moment—himself. His tweed sport coat, his corduroy slacks, his Wallabees. And his fear. The rigid set of his jaw, the stiffness of his limbs. Fear that he would not make it back to the car in time. Fear that he would again become blind because the creature whose eyes he was using would run off in search of something more interesting.

So Ryerson began to commit to memory all that he was seeing through the eyes of the creature watching him—the doorway a few feet to his right (it had the word "DELIVERY" over it), the wall behind him, the broad expanse of the curb in front of him. Then the creature's gaze shifted and he saw the street like a mouth yawning wide, and the great gray walls of the buildings.

The creature's gaze shifted quickly about. Ryerson saw windows high on the wall above him; to the east, the heavily chromed front end of the Woody, parked a hundred feet away; beyond it, the suggestion of movement, as of someone moving on the street. Then he saw himself; he saw his fear again. And he felt, as well, the sudden and overwhelming onslaught of a much more primal kind of fear from the creature whose eyes he was using.

And a flash of matted fur fell into that creature's line of vision; a great gaping mouth and huge almond-shaped eyes appeared, and the creature's gaze steadied for just an instant on that mouth and those eyes. Then it bolted. But too late. The black and white geometry of its world faded and was gone.

And Ryerson, having committed to memory exactly what he had seen through that poor damned creature's eyes, set off blindly toward the Woody.

~ * ~

Doreen moved in her graceful and deliberate way into Joan's bedroom, brandishing the small silver knife ahead of her.

Joan sat very still on the bed. She whispered, "I don't know you, I don't know you!"

And Doreen said again, "Of course you don't. But I know you."

Joan shook her head. "Please don't hurt me."

Doreen continued advancing very slowly and deliberately on her. "Hurtin's what I was made to do, honey. It's what we were all made to do. It's what we have to do, or we don't do nothin' no more," she said, and took an amazingly quick swing with the knife and opened a long thin wound across the top of Joan's chest, just above her blue nightgown. The wound seeped blood at once. Joan gasped, put her hand to the wound, looked at her fingers, saw the blood there, and looked in awe at Doreen. "But I don't know you, I don't know you," she pleaded, her voice a breathy, incredulous whisper.

And Doreen said, "You don't really believe that anymore, do ya, honey? I think you know who I am. I think you want me to cut you up." She grinned a wide grin of amusement and expectation. "And you know what? That's exactly what I'm gonna do." She took another swing. Joan tried to back away from it, but too late. The knife sank an inch into her chest just below the first wound. Joan reeled backward, across the bed, hand clutching the new wound. "No," she screeched, "please, no!"

Doreen cooed, "I got to, Joan. I really got to." And she lunged.