Chapter 6
“Mike thinks you must have been in jail,” Shelly said. “You weren’t, were you, Carl?”
“Jail? Huh?” Hadn’t Harry implied that? And then he’d made a crack about witness protection. “Jail?” She said something else, but he’d missed it. He couldn’t focus his thoughts on her, on what she was saying, no matter how hard he tried. Jail. Did she say he’d been in jail or was going to jail? A clammy chill settled over him, demanding his full attention. Not the icy tingle in his veins, not the cold clean chill of rain, but something else, something as unsettling as—
“Carl! Did you hear me?”
—as unsettling, as terrifying as his dreams, the dreams that began with Shelly and ended with the fog and vague, terrifying memories of things that inhabited it. He shivered. The feeling that overwhelmed him now was the same one that had gripped him in his wire-tense awakenings—but deeper, stronger, impossible to throw off.
“Don’t do this to me, Carl! Not again!”
Shelly’s words barely registered. At the edges of his vision, where everything was indistinct, he caught a hint of motion. Swirling gray, like a thick bank of grimy fog with something sweeping through it, stirring it into misty billows without revealing its own dark shape. His scalp tightened.
“Say something, damn it! Anything! Don’t just sit there like I don’t exist!” Softer: “Or maybe to you, I don’t anymore.” Softer: “This hasn’t been working. We’re not working. You don’t know who you are.”
She looked for a moment as if she were going to slap him. Instead, blinking back tears, she turned away abruptly, grasping the steering wheel and flooring the accelerator as she threw it into gear, her face an unreadable mask.
“Damn you, Carl! Wake up! I’m going to make you wake up!” The car rocked and sprayed gravel as she jockeyed it onto the pavement, into the swirling mist that only he could see.
I’m losing my mind, Carl thought as he stared ahead, straining to see the real world rocketing toward them, and instead seeing the odd fog. I am simply losing my mind. That’s the only answer.
He stared at the windshield, at the wipers sweeping back and forth. He tried to scream at Shelly, Be careful! But nothing came out. The sounds he desperately wanted to make were sucked into the fog, the gray swirling mist that was now a tunnel with billowing walls collapsing in on him. But he was in a car. Shelly was driving—Slow down, Shelly! Slow down!
Nothing came out. The tingle and the clamminess increased to hurtful proportions, as if somebody somewhere was turning up a dial a notch at a time and he—
Bad curve. A wall of trees rushed through the fog that wasn’t there.
“Wake up, Carl!” Shelly gasped, the car tilting as she tried to follow the curve and stay on her side of the double yellow line.
Lights swept across Carl’s eyes. Around the curve came a huge semi, hogging the middle of the road. Shelly screamed, drowning out the blare of the semi’s horn and whatever mindless tune had been playing on the radio. She jammed on the brakes. The wheels locked, and the car aimed itself at the truck.
He felt the traction break, felt the car continue to skid, felt the tingling ache become an explosion of pain as the gleaming chrome bumper of the truck rode up the hood of Shelly’s old car and he was pitched headlong into the cold gray fog, the swirling nightmare miasma of mist that was filled with shapes—dozens, hundreds of shapes moving, shifting, emerging as forlorn featureless shadows only to be swallowed again into the gray nothingness. He shrank back as one figure swept past, even as it pulled back from him. Shelly? Was that figure Shelly?
In the distance was a glow, a harsh, pulsing light that sliced through the fog like a ragged knife, shriveling each shape that it touched. Terrified, Carl—
Woke up.
Fell, and woke up. Fell—out of the fog—and was jarred to consciousness. He turned toward Shelly. But she wasn’t there.
The car wasn’t there.
He was half-sitting, half-lying on his own couch in his own darkened home, as if a child had flung down a broken toy and walked away. The blank screen of the television set faced him silently in the faint glow of the streetlights that filtered in through the curtained windows.
Had the movie never happened?
The drive to Creighton?
Shelly? Beautiful Shelly driving and angry at him, justifiably angry for his treatment of her?
Carl rubbed his icy hands together.
He glanced at his watch. Nearly eleven.
Well, that was something. Apparently he’d slept more than five hours before the nightmare got him. And this time he remembered all of it, not just the fog and the creatures that swam through it endlessly!
It had been about Shelly, the nightmare, the real Shelly, not one whose face appeared for only a moment before dissolving into that of a total stranger. In his dream she had come over, he couldn’t quite remember why, and they’d gone to a movie up in Creighton, an old musical comedy he’d seen a long time ago.
For some reason the movie had upset him, but he couldn’t imagine why. His stomach jumped as he remembered Shelly confronting him about it, and the hellish way it had all ended.
The semi—
Shaking his head and closing his eyes against the remembered image, he could only think how completely real it had all seemed. He could hear the blare of the semi’s horn, see the shadowy cab, the glistening, rain-spattered bumper as it bore down on them, crumpling the hood of Shelly’s car like so much tin foil. He quaked, rubbing his sweaty palms along his pant legs.
Damp, he realized with a start. Strange. But it was probably just sweat, from the nightmare. He’d awakened that way often enough the past few nights, but this time it felt different somehow.
Getting to his feet, he was momentarily unsteady, probably the result of lying sprawled uncomfortably on the couch for hours. Switching on the floor lamp, he made his way to the kitchen, where the refrigerator reminded him he should be hungry. He hadn’t eaten when Shelly had come by.
She had come by, hadn’t she? Returned his key?
Or was that part of the nightmare, too?
Must be. One of those dreams that starts out perfectly plain and simple and then gradually slides into insanity. The others had likely been the same, the dreams and nightmares, but he just couldn’t remember them the way he could this one. But if she hadn’t actually come over, how far back did the dream go? The whole day?
He grinned suddenly. Wouldn’t that be something! Harry and his “you-don’t-exist” business just a dream. The take some time off, just his imagination.
But no, that “felt” real. Though so did Shelly and the car and the glistening, rain-slick pavement—and the crash, which he knew was a nightmare. He was here, he was alive, case closed.
But still …
Shivering, he picked up the phone. Shelly wouldn’t be in bed yet, not for another half hour or so according to her routine. Just say hello, hear her voice, apologize for … everything—
Her machine answered. Her voice, but at the same time not her voice. He left a message telling her to call him no matter what time she got in.
Ten minutes later he tried again. Same result. And ten minutes after that.
He’d keep trying until he got through, until her voice, her living voice, not the damn recorded one, confirmed that it had all been a nightmare. Or was she listening to his voice on the machine right now, thinking, Go to hell, Carl? Most likely, considering how he had treated her last Sunday and since. Still, by the tenth try he was getting scared.
Where the hell was she?
Maybe he should drive by her place, see if her car was there.
As he reached for his car keys, he saw Shelly’s key to his place, still hooked to the plastic Rolls Royce. It lay exactly where she had dropped it when—in his dream!—she had walked in and given it back.
Before he softened the mood and asked her to the movies.
Before—
A car door slammed in front of the house.
Carl reached toward the key ring.
Touched it. It really was there.
The house shuddered under the impact of fists pounding on the front door. He turned the knob and staggered backward as the door burst open.
“You bastard!” Mike Fowler charged through the door, hands clenched, elbows tight to his sides, his forearms a pair of battering rams.
His fists caught Carl at the edge of his ribcage. Already off balance, Carl reeled, stumbling over the corner of the couch. Another blow backed him up against the far wall. Carl threw his arms up in clumsy defense, but Mike landed a hard punch to his side.
“Mike,” he gasped. “What—”
“She’s dead, freak!” Two fists thudded against Carl’s chest. “Shelly’s dead!” Tears streamed into Mike’s beard. “You killed her! God damn you!”
Carl’s stomach knotted. He no longer felt the blows. “Dead?” he wheezed. “Shelly? How?”
“Head on with a semi, that’s how!”
The rain, the curve, the scream, the roaring engine shrieking across the hood, crumpling it into the windshield—
All of it memory, not nightmare.
Shelly’s final words to him: Wake up, Carl!
No, it had been a nightmare! It had to have been nightmare! And this—red-faced, sputtering-mad Mike Fowler, was part of it.
“Murdering bastard!” Mike chopped at Carl’s neck with the side of a fist.
“No,” Carl moaned, sliding away from the blow with his shoulder raised to deflect it. “Not me. How could it be me? I never left the house—”
Mike stepped back. His chest heaved unevenly. “You weren’t there, freak, but you might as well have been! The cop said she was on the wrong side of the road. Shelly, on the wrong side of the road! You think she did that by accident?”
“Accident,” Carl repeated fuzzily.
“No way. She was too good a driver for that. She wanted to die, freak. Maybe not consciously, but she wanted it, and you’re the one that made her want it.”
“Mike, no, I lo—”
“Shut up!” Unclenching his fist at the last instant, Mike shoved the heel of his hand against Carl’s chin. His head bounced against the wall. “She’s been going through hell all this week, all because of you!” He yanked on Carl’s shirt, as if to bring his face down and look at it to see what his sister might have seen. “We all told her getting dumped by you would be the best thing that could ever happen to her, but would she listen? From the moment she met you she was a different person. I hardly recognized her. You had her so screwed up—”
“Mike, please, I—”
“I said shut up!” One fist pulled back, trembling, then fell. “Damn you! It should’ve been you smeared on the highway, not her!” Mike stepped back and stood staring at Carl for a moment, rubbing his grazed knuckles, his chest heaving. “Stay away from us,” he said, still short of breath. “Don’t come to the funeral, don’t send flowers, don’t let me set eyes on you again. Ever!”
Mike turned, reeling against the couch and almost falling. Catching himself, he shoved through the screen door so hard it slammed against the outside wall.
“Ever!” he shouted over his shoulder, half sobbing. “Ever!”
The engine of Mike’s TransAm roared. The tires shrieked against the pavement. Carl felt his legs go weak. His back still against the wall by the kitchen door, he slid slowly down the wall until he was sitting sprawled on the floor, his ribs aching.
Wake up, Carl!
Shelly’s words kept repeating as the sound of the TransAm faded into the distance. Wake up, Carl! over and over, sometimes in Shelly’s voice, sometimes in his own, sometimes in Mike’s.
At last the phrase turned almost soothing, like a mantra. Something softened the words, something began to seal them off, to build a muffling barrier around the pain. Finally, still slumped against the wall, the front door open to the coming dawn, Carl slept.
***