The Void (10 page)

“H—hey!” Rebecca stuttered, shocked at how loud her own voice sounded, bounding off streets and buildings. The girl stopped her bike and turned around. For a split second, Rebecca wondered what she would see, if the girl was really some hideous beast, a basilisk that could kill with a glance. But when she turned, it was only a little girl, bright eyes as happy as her smile.

“Hurry up, silly! You're gonna miss the festival!” 

“The festival? Honey,” she said, squatting down to the girl's level and holding out her arms, “come to me baby. It's not safe.”

The little girl giggled and when she did, it sounded like a dozen children were laughing. The sound doubled and redoubled, building and breaking on itself. Then the girl rode away.

Rebecca didn't think; she just ran after the girl. Maybe, if there had been more time, she would have wondered what a child was doing here. But there was no time. Instead she ran, stumbling over cobblestones but never falling. Chasing the girl whose laughter still echoed down the cavernous tunnel of abandoned stores and homes. She didn't even notice the whispers had returned. They called to her from the darkness. Her eyes were on the turn of the street, the one that approached her now, more slowly than it should have given the distance. When she reached it she stopped dead, as if she'd run into a wall.

She had never passed out before.  Never fainted.  But now she felt the blood flow from her head and the blackness close in. She would have let it take her, but knew that to do so was to invite horrors unimagined. She steadied herself as best she could. There was no way to stop the shaking.

She put her hand over her mouth. To stifle a scream, or perhaps just because that was what people did when they see something they couldn't believe. It wasn't that what she saw was any more frightening than what she had seen before. The street behind was merely familiar, a place she had been, even if it was only in her dreams.

The street opened into a grand plaza, so big that she couldn't see where it ended to the left or the right. In the plaza was a fairground, or it had been, many years before. Now it was a lost place, as dead and decayed as the frail brown leaves that swirled about the grounds, whipping past old carnival rides and empty booths. In the far distance, somewhere beyond the plaza, smoke was rising, and the acrid smell of burning wood invaded Rebecca's nostrils. The girl was sitting on her bike in front of the gate, grinning at her.

“Come on!” she said. “It's just on the other side of here.”

“Wait!” Rebecca cried, but it was too late. The girl had already darted through the entranceway, her bike racing through the eternal dusk, the scattering of leaves and the
click-click-click
of her bike the only sounds.

Rebecca didn't want to follow, but she couldn't go back. There was nowhere to go back to. She took a few steps toward the fairgrounds, passing through the broken turnstile. She would have sworn she heard it click even though no bar remained to count patrons.

Or maybe it was just the haunted sound of rusty metal swinging in the wind, a creaking that grew louder with every step. It was the gate of the old bandstand that stood before her, chipping paint and a broken-in roof leaving no memory of the past. Back and forth the gate swung in the wind, slowly wearing down what was left of the hinge that had held it for untold decades.

Suddenly though, the creaking was drowned out, replaced by the distant sound of music. The notes of a jazz band, so soft that she wasn't sure she really heard it. In front of her, then to her right, and finally behind, the direction changing as she circled the bandstand and then passed it.

She walked on, past broken bumper cars and a shattered house of mirrors but saw none of it. There was only the thing that lay at the center of the plaza, the entity that had haunted her dreams since long-gone childhood. Images of dead leaves and screaming, painted horses assaulted her eyes. The carousel sat before her, spinning slowly on its axis, as if the wind were strong enough to turn it. As it turned, she could almost see the children on the animals’ backs, laughing despite the beasts' crazed eyes. Their haunted, horrified gazes.

It wasn't possible, she thought to herself. It couldn't be. She considered for the first time that maybe this was a dream. But it was all too real, too solid. She had never felt more awake at any moment in her life. Then she remembered. It was a dream, just one unlike any she had ever experienced.

Flames came into view just beyond the carousel. Rebecca knew that the little girl was there too and soon she would see what else awaited her. Then she heard the scream.

*  *  *

Dr. Ridley was walking. His dream always started the same way, walking down a long drive. A tree-lined approach, their arms forming a canopy of foliage above him. Probably a tunnel of green in the spring, but it was never spring. Always cold, dead winter. Not that the trees would look any better in the spring. They had been left to go wild by whoever had once tended them, and now they looked like ancient, dead giants, frozen fast in the ground with great, long fingernails that continued to grow despite their end many years prior. Their eyes still watched Ridley as he walked down the ruined street and he felt their gazes ever upon him.

He remembered the first time he had come to this place, how he tried to discover a way not to visit the accursed structure at the road's end. How he had studied the shadow wall that lay behind him. He had considered touching it. Diving into it even. Perhaps he could reach the other side, he thought. If there was another side.

Something told him no. A voice in his head seemed to scream it. He decided that if he didn't listen, there was a good chance he would end up like many of the madmen he had treated earlier in his career. Maybe that was the solution. Maybe it wasn't the dreams that got you. It was curiosity, an unstoppable desire to know what lay beyond the wall of sleep.

He didn't stop to think on it anymore. Now he just started walking as soon as it began, even though each step was as if they were footsteps of doom. Even though every fiber in his being told him to stop. He didn't know if it was true but he had a theory that the less he fought it, the quicker the dreams would end. He had no proof of that, but who had proof of anything in a place like this?

The wind blew through the trees. They began to sway and in the crackling of their ancient limbs, Dr. Ridley heard words. He told himself he didn't but that was a lie. For words there were. Whispers. Of what did they speak? Secrets, maybe, of the mind. Things only the trees knew. There was only one word he really understood—his own name. He hoped he never had to answer it.

On he walked and the house—the prison—at the other end grew larger. He had seen places like this before, if for the most part, only in his studies. Those books of history that chronicled the long trek out of darkness that his profession had endured. Books that told of a time when men and women with broken minds were locked away from the rest of the world and forgotten till they died and were buried, often with nothing but a number to mark their final resting place. For him it was more than just history. He had experienced it first-hand.  

And that was what sat brooding in the distance ahead of him. A jailhouse with the face of a plantation. All antebellum columns and white, shining walls. Or that was what it had once been, back when the trees weren't wild and the road wasn't deformed. The paint had long since faded and chipped, the windows shattered. The building's façade now mirrored the horrors of what had gone on inside.

Ridley stepped from the boney cover of the trees into the pale sunlight of a darkened red sky. The brick drive that he had followed now formed a circle, in the center of which stood a fountain. He looked up at the statue that rose from its midst. He shivered, but not from the cold.

There was a great stone figure, hooded and cloaked, though within the shroud one could still see the face of a woman. Her eyes were cold and bitter, locked on the trembling boy who stood before her. Her face was angry, but the boy's was terrified. The reason why was in the woman’s outstretched hand.   

It was a small piece of metal, incongruous with the marble hand that held it. What looked to be a small stone, shining like burnished bronze in the dying light. He could almost see the smoke rising off its surface, as it hovered, an inch in space and a second in time, from touching the lips of the quivering boy. Ridley reached up and touched his mouth. He could still feel the scar, even if it had faded with time.

“Then flew one of the seraphim unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.” It was the only verse of the Bible he knew by heart.

His mother had not always been insane. There had been a time when she had been a good and gentle woman. It had begun, they suspected, the day he was born. She had lost more blood than she should have, and something in her brain had gone wrong. His father had tried not to blame him for it, but every now and then, Ridley saw the creeping resentment in his eyes.

Whatever the cause, there was nothing that could be done to stop her slow spiral into madness. His father had tried to ignore it at first, passing off her increasing periods of delirium as the product of an overly emotional mind. Then came the day when he could ignore it no more.

Before her mind slipped, his mother had been a devoted Christian woman. After his birth, her religion became her obsession. She was drawn, as the mad often are, to the more esoteric and apocalyptic writings of the Bible. Her favorite was Isaiah.

What had he done that day? What crime had he committed that needed to be expunged? He could not say. For years he had obsessed over it, thought it through again and again. Perhaps he had spilled something. Broken something. Made noise when he should have been quiet. Been quiet when he should have made noise. It didn't matter.

All that mattered was when she dragged him into the front room where the fire burned wild and hot in the hearth. She reached in, removing a red-hot coal from its midst. In her religious fervor, she didn't even feel the pain. But he could smell the burning of human flesh, and the stench of it made him scream all the louder when she placed the coal to his lips.

The next day, his mother was committed to an insane asylum on the other side of the country. He never saw her again, not until her body lay in a casket.

He looked up at the face behind the shroud, the perfect image of his mother. He wept for her and he wept for himself. He wished that it could all be forgiven, because that was what the statue represented.

The cleansing of sin. His sin. Yes, it was built for him.
They
had built it. Not so he would never forget. He needed no memorial to spark his memory. The evidence was still on his skin. No, it stood here so that he would know that they knew. That they knew everything.

It had been years since water had come forth from that stone. Indeed, years since rain had touched the barren soil that surrounded the antebellum structure, stretching forth to the thick, dead forest that bordered it on three sides and probably lay beyond the shadow wall as well. He spat into the bone-dry depths of the fountain. Some people ran from the dreams in fear. He faced them in anger.

He walked around the statue and looked up at the broken windows of the abandoned edifice. He could feel their eyes upon him. He had never seen them but his patients had. And he knew they had eyes. Great pools of emptiness where their faces should be. The whispers began again, calling him.

“Show yourselves!” he shouted to the nothingness. The laughter of a woman answered him. He looked through the open door, all the way across the main hallway to a large courtyard through yet another open portal. She stepped from the shadows and into the light only for a moment, passing through the shard of the dying sun that poured through the open door.

Even from that singular moment, he saw she was beautiful, just as she had been before he had known her. He was able to draw that conclusion from so little because he had lived this moment a hundred times, every time he had the dream.

He walked through the broken door of the asylum. The wind blew the leaves in behind him and he jumped as a crystal from the chandelier above fell to the ground and shattered. He cursed himself under his breath. No matter how many times it happened, he was always surprised.

He stepped gingerly across the broken tile and listened to the
bang
.
.
.

bang
.
.
.

bang
of a door somewhere in the distance.

There were two long hallways, one on either side. The woman had walked from his right to left, not that he really had to think about it. He turned down the hallway on his left. He could see all the way to the end. Rows of rooms, cells really, lined the corridor on either side. He waited. She appeared again, walking from one empty room into another. Ridley snorted out a laugh.

“It's always the same game, isn't it? Well, Mother, let's finish this.”

He took a step into the corridor but that's when he heard the scream.

Chapter 8

Caroline Gravely stood in the center of a plain of golden grain. Fields that went on forever in all directions, as far as her eyes could see. Down into valleys and up hillsides. All the way to the horizon. An undulating sea of amber that made the wind look like a thing itself dancing among the stalks.

There was no black wall of shadow, as she had heard so many others describe it. There was no need. She knew, through some preternatural sense, that nothing lay beyond the planted field of waist-high wheat. If she walked forever, she would never reach its end.

There was more than just a carpet of gold, though, and the bright blue sky above it. More than the thick, white, puffy clouds that cast moving shadows upon the field. There was a cabin several hundred feet in front of her. A rickety, worn-down shack of hewed logs and unplaned wood. She wondered sometimes, stupidly, she thought, where the wood had come from. As if anything here had to make sense.