Doctor Nine pointed a finger at Rain. “Mine.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWO
And another voice rang out.
“No. She’s mine.”
Doctor Nine turned. They all did. All the thousands gathered there. All of them looking as Dylan rose to his feet, bloody and small and starved, and he stood in front of his mother, arms held protectively wide.
“She’s my mom, and you can’t have her.”
The doctor laughed. The Shadow People laughed. It was an ugly sound, like rat feet over old boards. A flock of nightbirds flew in through the open door and swept upward to circle the dance floor.
In the absence of the Music, the club seemed oddly frail, like it could crack open as easily as Doctor Nine’s car had shattered the hospital walls.
“You called me here, sweet Lorraine,” said the doctor.
“No, I didn’t,” cried Rain. “That’s bullshit. You’re lying.”
Doctor Nine leered at her. “Why would I lie? Why would I need to? You begged and wept me into existence.”
Like a magician conjuring an illusion, he swept his hands upward, and a figure appeared in front of him. Noah. Whole and alive, as he was the last time Rain had seen him. Alive and happy, giving her a brave smile as he stepped onto the bus to head to join his unit for the long trip across water and sand.
Then the Humvee was there again. Whole one moment, bursting and burning the next. The screams of all those men rose in a hellish chorus, and like a conductor, Doctor Nine extending a single finger to silence everyone but a single shrieking voice. It was the sound of Noah burning to death.
“Stop it!” cried Rain. “Stop it!”
“I’m trying to, Lorraine,” said the doctor. “That’s exactly what I’ve always been trying to do. You think I’m a monster, but I’m not. I don’t steal your dreams or your hope. I am the drug that stops you from caring about what you lost. I’ve always been there for you, through the long years of long nights. Who else was ever there for you? Your mother? That hag? She’s with me now.”
One of the shadows behind Doctor Nine coalesced into the form of her mother. Alyson Creighton-Thomas stood there, dressed in a white silk bathrobe, leaning on her cane, her eyes unfocused and empty, her mouth turned down into its usual frown of disapproval.
“Mom?” said Rain, stepping forward. Dylan shifted to block her, and she stopped.
“She was in pain for so many years,” said the doctor, “but now, see? No pain. No jealousy. She is purified of all of that.”
Her mother stared with a terminal vacuity that was unbearable. Rain did not know if this meant that her mother was dead or if she had become transformed into a shadow creature. Like the nurse. Like the version of Dylan who had tried to kill her.
“Oh … Mom…”
The dead eyes blinked, and then her mother looked at her.
“All I ever wanted to do was dance,” she said. It was something Rain had heard before, but back then, there had always been a wistful quality to it, even if it was painted over with bitterness. Now it was an empty comment, devoid of passion.
“I know, Mom,” said Rain, bowing her head. “I’m sorry.”
For a moment, the whole room pulsed, the lights fading to blackness and then coming back on.
Dylan spun around. “No! It’s one minute to midnight. You can’t say things like that.”
The watching crowds, still and silent until now, like mannequins in a store display, turned, and several stepped back to let a figure walk out onto the dance floor. Thin, old, with grizzled hair and a gentle face, dressed in soiled work clothes. The Shadow People recoiled from him, but not Doctor Nine.
“You have no say here,” said the doctor.
Caster gave him a weary smile. “This is the Fire Zone; everyone has a say. I bet even your dusty friend there,” he said, nodding to the Mulatto, “could find his voice here. If he wanted to.”
Doctor Nine took a challenging step toward the old man but pointed to Rain and Dylan. “This is mine to do. She is mine. The boy is mine.”
“Not yet.”
“The clock is running out, the hour has come, and they are both mine.”
Caster looked at him, his face troubled, then he turned to Rain. “Tell me, my girl, what is it you want?”
“I want my son.”
She said it without hesitation. Dylan looked at her, and there was an expression on his face that she had never before seen on those features. Not on his actual face.
There was love.
“I love you, Mom,” he said.
She dropped down to her knees in front of him. “If I could go back,” she said, “if I could undo it all, I would. I’d never give you up. I’d keep you with me. You and me, Dylan. We’d be together; we’d be amazing. That’s what I always wanted. No matter what else happened. Even if we had nothing at all, we’d have that.”
Doctor Nine began clapping, slowly, mocking her words, sneering at her. “And the Academy Award goes to—”
“Shut up,” growled Rain.
Caster Bootey came over and bent to whisper in her ear. It was the same thing that had been written on the fortune cookie the other night. He said, “Life’s too short to spend so much of it on your knees.”
She shook her head. Too much of her hurt, too much was broken, and even though Dylan was inches away, she wasn’t able to touch him. “I can’t.”
“You haven’t tried,” said the old man.
“I’m broken. This isn’t really me. I’m in a hospital bed, and I’m broken.”
“The clock hasn’t struck midnight yet, child,” he said gently. “There’s still time.”
“Time to do what?”
It was Dylan who answered. “It’s time to dance, Mommy.”
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
“No,” said Doctor Nine, “you can’t.”
She nodded, accepting it.
Caster squatted down and hooked a finger under her chin, lifting her face. “Listen to me,” he said. “Your personal midnight is almost here. You’re correct, your body is elsewhere and it’s broken, but your spirit is here. Don’t you even understand what the Fire Zone is?”
Rain shook her head.
“The Fire Zone is possibility,” he said. “It’s potential. It’s intention. It’s hope. Right here. All around you. You are inside a place made up of pure source energy. Everything you see was born in someone’s dream. Every sound you hear, the smells, the floor beneath your feet, the stars above us, are all dreams from the head of a dreamer. They wished it into being and it has existed, in one form or another, forever, and it will burn with a wonderful heat forever. Look around, Lorraine. Look at these people.”
She turned to see the thousands of faces watching in silence.
“They are dreaming of you as you are dreaming of them. As Doctor Nine is dreaming of you. As your son is. Life is what you dream it is.”
Rain shook her head again.
“You wanted to be a dancer. Being a mother took that away, but did you ever try to get it back?”
“My leg…”
“Is a leg. You’ve dreamed that it won’t ever lift you like a bird or sail you like a swan across a stage. Do you think a dancer is defined by a standard of perfection as fragile as that? No. A dancer dances. A singer sings. A writer writes. Believe that. Go further. A child imagines being an adult, and he becomes one. A prisoner closes his eyes and walks free. A dying woman walks through a door and is born again.”
“Does that mean I have to die?”
“No,” said Dylan.
“Yes,” said Doctor Nine.
“Hush,” said Caster to both of them. “It means that if you want to dance, you can dance. Don’t impose a need for perfection. Dance for the joy of it. Dance for your life, Lorraine.”
He rose and held out his hand to her.
“Stay down, my sweet,” said the Doctor. “Stand and you will fall. Try and you will fail. There is only more pain for you. There is nothing
but defeat if you walk out onto that dance floor.”
“Stay down,” said her mother in a listless voice. “Be sensible.”
Dylan stood, too. He walked out on the floor, past Doctor Nine and the shadows. He stopped and turned. “Come on,” he said, looking back. “Come on and dance with me, Mommy.”
Doctor Nine stepped onto the floor, too. “I promise you this, Lorraine Thomas, that if you do this, you will die. Come with me and you live. You and your mother will be together. It will all be fine. No more pain. No more worries.”
“No joy,” said Caster, but Doctor Nine laughed.
“Joy is fleeting, and it’s a lie.”
Rain looked at Dylan.
“This is a dream,” said the doctor. “So what if you dance here? Your body is dying. In fact, if you do this, I will have my nurse cut your throat.”
He snapped his fingers, and the Shadow People vanished. The nurse, the Mulatto, all the others. Only Rain’s mother remained, gray and silent.
“They are at the hospital,” said the doctor. “They are going to kill you. They will kill you, and no one here can stop them. Not even Caster can stop them, because that’s the real world and this, as he so rightly said, is a dream.”
It was easy to stay down. It hurt less. She felt her heart breaking.
But she took Caster’s hand. It took so much effort to stand. Dancing was going to be impossible, and she stood there, swaying, in agony, feeling her heart beating in all the wrong ways.
Even so, she turned to Caster and smiled. “Life’s too short to spend so much of it on my knees,” she said.
It was Doctor Nine who answered. Three small words. Cold and filled with bottomless promise.
“So be it.”
The Music began to play.
Rain limped toward the dance floor but stopped at the edge of the apron. Other people were moving out to dance as the Music swelled. It was a song she did not know but felt she should know. A kind of synth pop but with classical undertones in the bass line. Deceptive, intriguing, but fast and dangerous. The other dancers were immediately caught up in it, and Rain lost sight of her son. The last fleeting image she had of him was of Dylan moving. To run or to dance? There was no way to tell.
Doctor Nine stood only a few feet away, and Caster was on her other side.
“Dance, Lorraine,” murmured the old man, his voice nearly lost beneath the Music. “Dance as if your life depends on it.”
Rain shook her head, and yet one rebellious foot—too weak to resist any longer—stepped off the wooden apron, and she was instantly dragged along into the sound and the fury.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THREE
Waves of Music slammed into Rain, and she staggered, gasping, but the beat mastered her and she was held upright, dominated entirely, completely in its thrall. Her battered legs did not collapse under her. In fact, they moved with surprising freedom, carrying her deeper into the press of dancers. Her pelvis swung around, and she arched back. Rain felt like a surfer crouched atop a heavy roller that was swelling, gathering big chunks of the ocean as it raced toward the shoreline. The Music soared upward from the floor, and she rode it shakily, fighting for control.
The Music settled into a pattern now, and Rain was able to dance. She danced by instinct, by reflex, her muscles remembering how to move to rhythm and beat even if her body was too badly injured to do it with grace. She felt as if she were still caught in that tidal wave and was beginning to be afraid of what would happen when it smacked down on the beach. Or maybe it was more like a river speeding onward to a waterfall. Would there be jagged rocks down there? Would she sink down in waters infested with biting sharks? Or would there be something more monstrous, something as alien as this place? Were the Shadow People lurking within the song, waiting for her to make a false step so they could take her? Or would there be some resolution to this madness, some solution beyond imagination? There was no way to tell.
Something brushed against her shoulder, and she turned. It was Doctor Nine. He gave Rain a slow, lascivious wink.
She recoiled, her stomach churning, a shriek caught in her throat.
Laughing, the doctor vanished into the crowd, but his passage had torn open a hole in Rain’s brain, spilling out the memories she had long ago locked. Memories of loss and pain, of failure and descent into addiction. Memories she could not afford and certainly could not face right now, not with all the madness boiling around her. Everything that she had smashed down into the bottom of her Box of Rain was fighting to be let out, let loose. She reeled across the dance floor, careening into other dancers, but even her screams became part of the Music.
“Help me!”
The piercing squeal of a child, her son, in terrible pain silenced her own cries and made her whirl, but there was nothing behind her except the wildly thrashing dancers. The screams rose again; and they went on and on until they blotted out even the Music. “Oh, God! No! Please don’t! Mommy … please … help me!”
Rain stared in horror even as she realized that this was some kind of trick. Like a recording of what her son had endured, played back to torture her now. In her mind, the Box of Rain creaked threateningly, straining against the locks and chains she’d placed around it.
“No!” she said as much to herself as in denial that the voice of her screaming child was real. “Goddamn it! No!”
“Please, help!” The tone of the scream was caught and blended with a guitar note that rose and warped and vanished into the next progression of distortion-heavy guitar chords. The illusion, the trick, was ended. What would Doctor Nine try now? she wondered.
“I need to get air!” she cried.
All time and reality went sideways. The bass rhythms of the Music shook her like thunder; lasers flashed like lightning and stabbed Rain repeatedly through the heart. The floor canted, and she felt herself sliding, shoes scuffling on the Lucite as the pit tried to suck her down into despair. Pain flared in her sides as she dragged in air, and she wondered how she could have become so terribly exhausted in mere minutes on the dance floor. Surely it was well past midnight now. Surely her time had all run out.
“No!” she cried, then she cringed, feeling terribly exposed and vulnerable. She tried to match her own heartbeat to the pulse of the Music, sensing somehow that this might save her, that this was what she was supposed to do if she wanted to survive this. Rain opened up, stretched out, let the Music in so she could match it note for note. The pain flared as the Music invaded her completely.
“No…”
In the dark niches of consciousness, Rain heard the whispering voice of the Music. It asked her terrible questions; it revealed to her awful truths. It held before her eyes the key that would unlock the Box of Rain and let out all her demons. Failure and addiction and need and loss. Inside was the proof that she was rotten, ruined, worthless. Already dead.
“No!”
The sound of her voice was instantly blended with the backbeat, an unexpected but useful note, percussing and concussing with the drums. She prayed desperately that it would peak soon. Peak, and be over, even if it meant that she would die with it—just so that it would be over. Failure was better than suffering, right? That had to be a truth. She thought that even the fatal plunge downward to destruction would be a foundation on which she could somehow stabilize herself.
Twitching and stumbling to the beat, she found it almost impossible to feel her body. Rain was aware only of a proportionless cloud of pain and fear. Only the Music’s raw and commanding force kept her spinning like a marionette on wildly jerking strings; without its power, she would have collapsed in a boneless heap on the plastic floor that looked down on hell. She staggered after each note, hands reaching and fingers clawing, knowing by the grace of some alien instinct that if she could survive just a few notes longer, she’d be safe.
“Nononononononononono,” she mumbled insanely. In confusion, she pulled the glasses from her face, hoping that without them the world would lock back into place, that thi
ngs would make sense. The glasses hung from their chain, and she kept screaming.
The song galloped toward its climax. Just a fistful of notes hung between her and salvation as the song burned its way to its explosion. Rain tensed as she moved, waiting and craving for the last note that, once resolved, would save her. Left unresolved, she knew she would be as good as dead, or perhaps dead in fact. The Music was not a wave anymore but a vast mountain rising between her and survival. The notes climbed the jagged cliff of the crescendo, and her sanity climbed after. The notes burned themselves into her mind. Rain’s sanity clung to the need to hear that last resolving, sanctifying, redeeming note.
The penultimate note slashed at her and she drew in breath, ready to scream. The gap between the notes sizzled in the air, and time stretched as she willed—no, begged—that last note to play.
Then the Music stopped.
Ice cold.
Unresolved by that single, final note.
“Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!”
The scream was ripped out of her, out of soul, torn from body and mind. She tottered on the very edge of the precipice, arms flailing. A desperate shiver shuddered through Rain’s soul. This was the point of greatest danger, the splintered fragment of time between survival and total, perpetual failure. The universal clock was poised to tick past this moment, and if it did, she would never stop falling. In a moment, the echo of that previous note would burn away and be gone forever.
So would she.
Already she began to feel insubstantial.
And then …
Then she heard the note.
That last, glorious note. Not blasting at her from the speakers but breathing gently against her face like the first breath of a golden dawn. It sighed across ruined nerves; the most soothing and healing balm possible. It flowed into her, into lungs and into veins, a musical elixir vitae.
Trembling, weeping as hands touched her sweaty and tearstained face, she sank to her knees. The floor was solid beneath her, cool, real; she bent and touched her cheek to it. A schoolkid giggle bubbled out of her chest. Then Rain threw back her head and laughed for the sheer joy of being alive. For having danced.