The Sleepwalkers Part 24

The coming. But whose? Who can bring Anna back? Who can banish these thoughts, The Thought, from her mind?

She thinks she knows who.

She heads up to the trailer and reaches for the screen door. When The Thought comes, there's only one answer, and that's the bottle.

It isn't a final answer, but it is a potent magic. It has the power to derail time, even do away with it altogether sometimes. And in time is where The Thought lives.

Anna's in the dark.

The witch, all powerful, she screams, slams the screen door shut again. Curse The Thought to h.e.l.l!

Anna is dead.

She tries to think of something else. She should check the cellar.

Never go outside without checking the cellar door.

She lets the screen door go, heads back down the steps, and walks around the side of the trailer, not looking at the hoe, especially not looking at the shadow of the trailer making a sharp, black "V" at her feet as she turns the corner.

Anna is empty with dark, and I will be too, when it takes me.

The witch walks faster.

The cellar door is locked and still. Safe. It hasn't moved in a long time. Years. Good.

She spins back toward the screen door, toward home, toward safety, and in doing so almost loses her balance. She has to put one hand on the rotting side of the trailer to steady herself. She hates to step into the trailer's shadow-it makes her s.h.i.+ver to do so-but otherwise she'd have pitched forward onto the gra.s.s.

Once the vertigo subsides she walks on. It seems darker out now, but the sunlight is more biting too. The sun is a pale, burning, seeing eye-and she hurries inside, out of its unnerving gaze.

She looks around first when she comes in-to make sure it's really her living room, really her trailer.

Reality is a reflection on a pond, she's known that for a while, ever since she was young and pretty and the t.i.ts that now hang almost to her waist like empty plastic grocery sacks were ripe and plump and made men do wild things. Reality is a reflection on a pond, and you never know what might be swimming underneath.

Today, though, her living room is her living room. She looks up at the dream catchers hanging from the ceiling, and is comforted to know not a single one is out of place.

She sits down heavily, not noticing the waft of dust that rises up from the cus.h.i.+on of her chair as she whops down into its embrace.

And she picks up the bottle, so smooth and hard, so nice-feeling with the little white tatters of the torn-off label as soft as goose down against the palm of her hand. So real. She unscrews the cap slowly, teasing herself.

She glances at the window. Did a shadow move behind the blinds? Did it? Did it?

Now, an instant later, she's forgotten about the blinds, about the shadow, about everything.

She takes the magic of the bottle inside her, feeling the burn, and the burn is good, because the opposite of the burn is The Thought, is the .

First, the spinning in her head steadies, then it feels like she's doing great wide backflips-except she's still sitting in her favorite orange and brown plaid armchair, watching the bottle drain into her insatiable, drooling mouth. And the beam of sunlight coming through the window first doubles, then blurs, then becomes a cat's cradle of light, and the throbbing in her head that she didn't even realize was there slows into a brick of pleasurable pain as her eyes go slack, then shut. The Thought loses and the magic of the bottle wins out again-for now.

There's a wind in the trees, and all the birds are flying away. Caleb and Christine walk very close together along the sandy bank of the stream, in and out of light beams filtering through the boughs of the forest. They've walked out of the night and into the morning. Sometimes they would think they heard a sound behind them, a footstep or the rattle of a bush, and they'd sneak into the woods, away from the water, and watch. But their pursuers never appeared, neither the cops nor the sleepwalkers.

Christine has wanted desperately to talk, to gush all her feelings and fears and the experiences of her imprisonment to Billy, but every time she takes a breath to speak, fear seizes her jaw and thrusts it shut again. Whether it's being heard by her pursuers or being alone with Billy that scares her more, she doesn't know. But for the last hour or so, since the sun has evaporated much of the previous night's horror and sorrow, she has been marshalling her will to break the silence. Finally, she does.

"Thank you for coming. Even though I don't remember sending you that letter, I did think of you. I dreamed of you rescuing me. Even though it was completely far-fetched, part of me knew you would."

"Really? How, after you hadn't seen me in so long?"

She smiles. "I don't know, I just knew. Besides-when we would play-you, me, and Anna-you were always the hero. I guess I figured you always would be. You were always a pretty lucky knight, having two damsels in distress."

Caleb musters a small, sad laugh. "Yeah."

"Are you sorry you came?"

"No," he says. "No. When I read your letter, I knew I had to come. I didn't know what was going on, but I knew I had to do something . . . I'm just sorry Bean came."

"Don't be sorry," she says.

From the look he shoots her, she's afraid she's p.i.s.sed him off big-time. But when she takes his hand, he doesn't resist.

"How can you say that?" he says. "It's my fault he's dead."

"He's with Anna now," she says, "making her laugh. Soon, we'll be able to hear him too on the radio."

"How is that possible?"

"The clocks, I think."

"But how does it work?"

She shrugs, as if to say "it doesn't matter."

"It just does," she says.

"And you listened to the clocks too?"

"Yes."

"When? Why?"

"The director made me listen to them at the Dream Center. But I could hear them-the voices-before that. I always could, but only really faintly. Since the clocks and the surgery, I hear them everywhere. But I hear them most clearly on the radio, especially 535 AM"

"Wait, you mean you can hear them right now?"

"Yes, but . . . " she hesitates.

"What do they say?"

"It's hard to hear. They all talk at once."

"How many are there?"

She spreads her hands, looking up at the emerald treetops.

"Many," she whispers.

"And what are they saying right now?"

"Nothing, just . . . "

"What?"

"One is saying 'time to reap the field.' They're happy because their work is almost done. And the end is near. And they're happy because . . . "

"Because of what?"

She looks at him hard, then just shakes her head. "It's hard to hear," she mumbles.

"What are they talking about?"

"Who knows?" she says. "Something's been going on here for a long time. Anna was one of the first to disappear, I think, but there've been a lot more. Some folks even called a meeting at town hall when it started. Mom and I were there, and she spoke. She was a lot more 'together' back then."

"What happened?"

She looks down at her feet, then at the swirling water of the river, and sighs to her core.

"Some wanted to fight, but n.o.body knew who the enemy was. The kids just disappeared. Other people wanted to call in the authorities.

They made the mistake of expecting the mayor and the sheriff to take care of that. Others, just . . . "

"What?"

"Said nothing." She smiles sadly.

"So what happened?"

"The mayor didn't go for any outside help for a long time. When he did, it was too late."

"What do you mean, too late?"

"The people who he went to for help betrayed him, as far as we could guess. Then he disappeared. He's in the dark now. The rest of those who still had the will to fight formed a militia. Some of them had seen who took their children, and they didn't think they were human-not really, anyway-but they were willing to stand and fight all the same. The militia would patrol, even had a phone line for emergencies. But they couldn't hold guns all the time. They had to sleep and eat, and one by one they disappeared. The few folks left who had a mind to fight changed their tune fast. They shut their mouths and locked their doors at night, and there were no more town meetings."

"What about the sheriff?"

"He played everyone along for quite a while, but now everyone- or the few of us left, anyway-know he's part of it, whatever it is. He never lifted a finger to find one missing child."

"And what about the Dream Center?"

"That came along not long after it all started. I guess the only way the problems 'round here showed up anyplace on official records was in the suicide rate or something, because pretty soon trucks just appeared out of nowhere, rattling up the driveway to the old asylum, and in no time the place was rebuilt. Doc Rodgers knew the director, he said, and he referred almost all his patients over there because they pretty much all had sleeping problems of one kind or another- all of us did with everything going on: babies stolen out of their cribs, kids grabbed off their bikes and never seen again . . ."

"And my father?"

"Just disappeared. I'm sorry, Billy. Around the same time I went into the Dream Center. Some people said he had something to do with what was going on. I think they didn't trust him because he was educated or something. Other people said he tried to fight it. Either way, he just vanished."

"So it wasn't just Anna . . . "

"She was only the beginning. The tip of the iceberg."

"And your mother? I met her. She wasn't doing too well."

"She was sure magic was the answer. She mixed all kinds of potions and started learning all sorts of crazy spells. She got so far out there people started thinking she had something to do with all the stuff going on. She just missed Anna, I guess, and that was her way of doing something. It was sad. People stopped talking to her. Then they stopped talking to me too. She really wanted to believe that the magic would work, but it was too late: Anna was gone. I knew it, and the more I tried to explain it to her, the more she started to hate me. And then I think she started to believe me because that's when she started really drinking."

"I'm sorry I wasn't here."

"It's okay. You didn't know."

"I should have been here anyway."

"You weren't supposed to be, Billy. But you're supposed to be here now."

"To do what?" Caleb asks. "What can we do?"

Christine grins strangely. "The ghosts know," she says, "but all they'll say about it is 'charku, charku,' over and over."

"What does that mean?"

"It's in a tongue that the living no longer speak. It means 'bringer of death.'"

Caleb stares off to the horizon, toward the spot where the river disappears, taking in Christine's words.

"What-or who-is the 'charku'?" He finally asks.

"Billy," she says, giving him a surprised look, "it's you."

Chapter Sixteen.

THESE ARE THE DREAMS OF THE WITCH:.

They are fraught with the unsettling faces of strangers. All are watching her. All are judging. She grasps them, claws at them, screams in their ears: "Where is my daughter? Where is she?"

But every face she sees turns to stone.

These are the dreams of the witch: The earth is made of sliding sand, with each grain falling, falling as if through an hourgla.s.s. It gives way under her feet. She knows she mustn't be caught, mustn't go down because down is dark and in the dark she isn't alone. The dark is filled with invisible stone faces that watch and judge and laugh, hands that take and take, and quiet that smothers.