I listened to the sound of my shoes hitting sidewalk. I listened to the sound of my own breathing, calm and steady for the first few blocks, getting a little harsher after that. I had to breathe through my mouth. My nose hurt less that way.
Down to Sheridan, still mostly devoid of traffic. I caught a red light, shot a look each way, and ran across. There’s park all along the lake. Grass and big trees and winding paths for runners and bikers. People take their dogs there. Kids play there.
At this hour of the morning, though, there were just a few runners spaced far apart on the crushed shell path.
There’s an L-shaped pier of concrete blocks. It shelters the powerboat launching ramp. I saw someone sitting out there on the end. Past the railing, perched on a rough, white concrete boulder. I knew right away it was her.
Senna sat gazing out at the mist-shrouded lake, hands pressed down on the rock, legs drawn up to her chin, a little girl. She was wearing a jean jacket a couple of sizes too big.
She looked so small. Weak. Not the creature from my dream.
My steady steps faltered. I heard the different rhythm as my feet slowed, then sped up, then slowed again.
I should have wanted to go to her. But I didn’t. I should have felt lucky. Lucky to see her alone on a morning when I expected to be alone with myself.
But that’s not what I felt.
Dread.
That’s what I felt. Dread.
There was a voice in my head, a lunatic voice screaming, Run away! Run away! A panicky voice.
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked myself, wanting to hear my own, true voice. “Getting jumpy? That knee in the face must have rattled your brain, David.”
I headed toward Senna, toward the start of the pier. But my feet were listening to that other voice, that faint but insistent madman in my brain. My feet were out of rhythm, they missed steps, they dragged, they didn’t want to go any closer.
And then I saw the others. And they saw me, and I swear the chill breeze became a frozen wind that went right through my skin and iced my insides.
Jalil was just pulling up in his car. I saw him clearly. He saw me. I guess we were both trying to look normal, but we both knew there was nothing normal here.
Christopher was walking from the other direction. He looked worried and harassed. Like a guy who’s late for an appointment he doesn’t want to make.
April was sitting on a bench, looking out at Senna. I would be next to her in a dozen steps. I stopped.
“Hi, April,” I said, trying to sound normal.
She turned her startling green eyes on me. “What does it mean, David?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
I heard a car door close. Jalil joined us. He said nothing. He looked at me. He looked at April.
Only his eyes moved. Then, as if he didn’t want to look, as if he didn’t want to have to turn his head, he looked at Senna. At Senna’s profile, because she did not turn to look at us.
“Excuse me, but does anyone else have a case of the unholy creeps?” Christopher asked.
Christopher’s a big guy, bigger than me. Blond. Looks like a surfer dude. His tan was looking a little green.
He had walked up and stopped, like me, a few feet away from April.
“I was blaming it on brain damage,” I said, pointing at my bandaged nose.
“My brain’s fine,” Jalil said. “It’s my stomach telling me to get the hell out of here.”
“Too weird,” Christopher said. “We’re all here? She’s out there? What is this?”
“I heard her leave really early this morning,” April said. “We share a wall between our rooms. She… and then, I felt like I had to follow her.” She shrugged.
“What is this?” Christopher demanded in a loud voice.
Deliberately loud. Maybe loud enough for Senna to hear if she was listening.
“Ask her,” April said.
Slowly Senna climbed to her feet. She turned and looked at us. She was maybe a hundred feet away.
I could see confusion on her face.
Her mouth formed the word “no.”
And then the entire universe ripped apart.
Chapter
V
It was like a fade. Like on a TV show when they fade from one picture to another. One minute you’re seeing one picture, then slowly another picture emerges beneath the first.
Only this was not TV. And this was happening in three dimensions.
The picture had sight, sound, smell. It had the breeze that smelled of damp. It had the soft sounds of water sighing against the shore. It had the feel of chill, and of soft grass under my soles, and of sweat cooling on my body. It had low, heavy clouds that seemed to squeeze the air out of my lungs.
It had Senna, alone, at the end of the pier, and the memory of her lips on mine.
In one sickening moment all that began to shimmer, as if it had all been a reflection in a bowl of water and someone had tapped the bowl. It shimmered and sent a way of fear-sickness through me.
The clouds twisted as if a tornado were forming. The pier seemed almost to curl, like a pig’s tail.
I looked at Jalil. His face was turning inside out. Inside out! I could see the back of his eyes, the gray wrinkled brain, the heaving, gasping trachea in his throat.
I held my hands up instinctively, blocking that vision, but my own hands were twisted and deformed. The skin was flayed and spread out, as if I’d been skinned. I could see blood-soaked muscles beneath, the white bones. I saw the arteries pumping blood up through my wrists.
I cried out. But my moaning voice came from somewhere outside of myself and rang distant and false in my ears.
The ground opened, opened until I could see buried rocks pushing up beneath me. But I didn’t fall. The sky split apart, a blue-gray curtain drawn back to reveal black space and a sun burning too close. The clouds boiled madly.
I’ve gone insane, I cried, I but the thought itself was nothing but dancing electrical charges, sparks between neurons that I could see behind my eyes.
And in all this twisted chaos, all this hallucinatory madness, I still Senna, whole, complete, herself.
The gray, choppy surface of the lake swelled up, rising higher and higher, as if it would crash down on us in a tidal wave. It rose, and as it did, the chop roughened, lengthened, formed itself into a mountain of shaggy gray fur.
The mountain pulled up and back, bringing more into view.
Two ears, a brow, eyes! Brown and yellow eyes the size of backyard kiddie pools. Intelligent, cold, gleeful, malicious.
Up rose the snout of the wolf’s head. Up behind Senna, who still looked at me, right at me.
Up it came and opened wide, with glittering teeth that may have been six feet long.
The wolf’s mouth opened wide and lunged.
Only then did Senna turn away from me and face the wolf.
She held her thin arms up in a pathetic gesture of resistance, but the wolf snatched her up in one swift bite.
It closed its jaws around her, but gently, holding her helpless, limp, unresisting now.
“Senna!” I shouted. “Senna!” And now the voice was coming from inside me, and it sounded real and raw and impotent.
The ground became the ground again. My hand was skin over muscle over bone. Jalil’s face was a face twisted by shock, but a human face.
It was ending.
It was ending with the wolf, the monstrous wolf, sinking slowly back into the water. In a few seconds it would be gone.
I had been frozen in place, but now my legs moved.
Shaking, wobbling, my stomach twisted, I ran after her. Down to the pier.
“David! Don’t do it!” Jalil yelled.
It was Christopher who answered him. “Like hell,” he said.
“That thing’s got her!”
Then Christopher was running, too. And April behind him, and Jalil behind her. We were all four running, our footsteps pounding.
The clo
ser we came to the wolf, the more the universe around us became twisted and distorted again. The pier itself suddenly swooped uphill, soft and twisted as a piece of taffy.
But we ran.
Courage? Panic? Rage? Some stupid, animal instinct?
I don’t know. I don’t know why we ran after that monster from another world.
We ran as it turned away. We ran, the twisted universe receding with us, racing the wave of distortion.
Suddenly, the sound of feet on damp concrete stopped.
There was nothing beneath my feet. I leaped!
Chapter
VI
I leaped and was frozen.
Still, utterly still, unable to move, unable to do more than slowly, slowly aim my eyes. I shifted my slowmotion gaze from nothing to nothing to nothing more.
I was buried in cotton, cloud, whiteness all around me. It didn’t touch me. Nothing touched me.
I floated, naked. Exposed.
Watched?
Yes, maybe. I felt something. Yes, watched.
“Play your story for me, David. Show me your secrets.”
I was in summer camp. I didn’t want to go to summer camp.
My parents made me. Good for me, you see. But I knew things were wrong at home, I knew there was trouble between my parents; I had felt the hard, sure edges of my life beginning to crumble.
I said, “But I don’t want to go.”
“Once you get there, you’ll like it.”
Awake, pretending to be asleep in my bunk. Listening to the snores and farts and crying and sleep-mumbling of a dozen kids around me.
Pretending not to hear Donny’s footsteps. White nylon camp windbreaker bright in reflected moonlight, moving confidently, arrogantly. He had the power. The counselor. We were just kids.
Why was he doing it? Why didn’t he just go away?
He stopped beside the same cot as before. It was wrong, what he was doing. It was bad. Why didn’t the kid cry out? Why didn’t he yell?
Save him, David. Don’t pretend to sleep, don’t inch the blanket higher around your head. Don’t press your hands over your ears. Don’t…
“Will you save me, David?”
Later, older, last year. Last year?
Walking out of the gym, sweaty from some after-school one-on-one. Walking past the coach’s office. It was none of my business.
A loud, berating voice.
“What’s the matter with you!”
I slow my walk and look through the glass door. Some kid from the junior varsity football team, in jersey and shoulder pads, sitting there, head hung.
“You disgust me, you make me sick, your attitude out there on the field. You make me want to throw up. You might as well be a little girl. Are you a man, or are you some kind of faggot?”
I open the door. Some part of me, some part of my brain has taken over my body in a flash, no thought, no hesitation. The switch has been thrown. The rage adrenaline is flooding my arms and legs, stiff with repressed energy.
The kid is crying. Crying in his cot.
“Leave him alone.”
“What are you doing in here, Levin? Get the hell out of my office!”
“I can take care of myself,” the kid yells, nearly hysterical, face streaked with mud and tears, turning his anger on me.
I’m two feet away from the coach. He’s my size. Older, though, fat in the middle, slow.
“Leave the kid alone.”
“I ought to kick your ass!” the coach roars.
“Screw you! Screw you!” the kid yells, at me. “You think you’re so tough.”
I walk away.
“Ah,” a voice says. “I see.”
Chapter
VII
I woke in agony.
Pain in every muscle fiber, every joint. I tried to move but something was wrong. My arms were pinned, my legs seemed to be dangling, my chest was stretched, my spine…
My eyes snapped open.
I couldn’t make sense of what I saw. It was like that moment when you wake from a dream and look around your room, unable to figure out where you are or what things mean.
I was hanging by my arms. My back was against a stone wal . Stones as big as cars. Chains were at ached to my wrists with shackles. The chains and shackles could have held King Kong.
A dream! Had to be. Wake up!
Come on, David, wake up!
I slammed my head back against wet, mildewed stone. The pain was real. I closed my eyes tight and opened them again.
I was still hanging by my wrists. My clothes were shredded. I could feel my partly bare butt scraping against the stone. My heels kicked back and hit rock.
I was hanging like a piece of meat, dangling stretched, helpless.
“Hey! Is anyone there?” I yelled. Not a brilliant thing to say.
But what do you say when you wake up to find yourself hanging against a wall?
“We’re all here,” a harsh, strained voice said.
“April?” I pushed my head out and twisted it to look around my own armpits.
She was hanging about ten feet away on the same wall. I could see her wrists. They were scraped raw. Blood had run down her arm and dried. We’d been hanging for a while. I was cold. Very cold.
“Yes, it’s me,” she said. Her voice came out in ragged gasps.
I guess mine did, too.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“I don’t really know, David,” she said with surprising gentleness, despite her strained breathing.
She even managed just a hint of mockery. “I don’t think I’m familiar with this place. But I can tell you one thing. Don’t look down.”
I looked down. Down was a long, long way. My running shoes were hundreds of feet above jumbled, jagged rocks that formed a shoreline. If I fell, I’d have plenty of time to scream before I was sliced and smashed.
I looked up. This was harder to do, but more reassuring.
There was an end to the wall. A parapet, I guess you’d have to cal it. The wall rose only six or eight feet above my head, topped by tall, stone teeth. My chains went up between two of the teeth.
“Are you okay?” I asked April.
“I’m alive,” she said. “I think Jalil’s breathing, but he’s still unconscious. I can’t see Christopher very well. He’s on the other side of you.”
I twisted my head to the left and saw Christopher. He must have just awakened. He was looking around, wild-eyed, till he spotted me.
“Well, this isn’t good,” Christopher said. “Where are we?”
I sighed. Then, a thought. “Senna? Is she here?”
“No,” April said. “At least not that I can see. Maybe on the far side of Jalil. I can’t tell.”
“Jalil!” I yelled. “Jalil, wake up!”
“What? What?” he said. “Oh, man!”
“Got that right,” Christopher muttered.
“Jalil, is anyone hanging to your right?” I asked.
“No. No one else.”
“This is one bitch of a dream,” Christopher said.
“Not a dream,” Jalil said. “Doesn’t feel right for a dream.”
“Of course it’s a dream,” Christopher said scornfully. “What, we’re actually hanging by our wrists on some castle wall? I don’t think so.”
“Maybe he’s right,” I said to April. “Maybe I’m dreaming.”
“Then dream me up a parka. It’s cold,” April said.
I looked away from her and out across the landscape. It was a gray day, just like it had been. But nothing else was the same.
The castle, if that’s what it was, seemed to be at the end of an unbelievably steep chasm. Rugged, bare, black stone walls rose sheer on both sides. In the bottom of this canyon was a lake, or maybe an inlet. One way or the other, there was dark, glass-smooth water. It reflected the harsh cliffs so that they seemed to go down forever.
It was a picture in shades of gray, from near black to near white, but with never a splash of color.
&nb
sp; Until a dot of red appeared. I squinted and focused. Down along the left-side cliff wall, maybe a half mile away, there was a boat. It was bow-on to us, so I couldn’t see how big it was.
But it was flashing out a sail as it rounded a point of land. A square sail with some sort of logo or symbol in red.
Were there people on that boat? I couldn’t see that far.
“There’s a boat,” I said.
“Maybe they’ll help us,” Christopher said. “I can’t take this, man. My arms… my wrists are all bloody. I think maybe one of my shoulders is dislocated.”
“I have Advil in my backpack,” April said. “I think I still have it on. But it’s going to be hard to get anything out.”
I glanced over. She was wearing a backpack. It pushed her out from the wall. It must have been painful.
This was ridiculous. We were hanging by our wrists! Where was the lake? Where was the city?
There’s no castle in the Chicago area. Where were we?
I took a couple of deep breaths, fighting down the urge to start yelling. If I started acting scared I’d start being even more scared. I was scared plenty. I was good and scared.
But being scared was one thing. That was normal. How you acted once you were scared — that’s what mattered.
My dad told me that. He has two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star that prove he has a right to talk about fear.
“Has to be a nightmare,” Christopher grunted, trying to reassure himself. “Has to be. The whole thing. Senna, the wolf, this, all of it.”
“I don’t think so,” Jalil said. “It’s going on too long. It doesn’t have the feel of a dream. It’s bizarre, but I think it’s real. I push my legs back, my body goes away from the wall: cause and effect. In dreams you lose normal cause and effect. You jump around in time. This is reality.”
“Dammit, someone help us! Help! Help!” Christopher yelled.
“Help us! Help!” I guess he was tired of hearing Jalil analyze things.
I kept my attention on the boat. It was something to focus on.
Something better than focusing on pain and fear.