Totentanz (3 page)

"Dad!" he called out, but his voice seemed
swallowed by the wind as the bike hurtled along. He saw the glass
door to the doughnut shop open and his father walk out. There was a
paper under his arm. "Dad!" Reggie called again, but his father did
not hear him; instead, he walked to the dented car door and put his
hand on the handle to open it.

Reggie called out once more, and now his
father turned. Reggie saw that it was not his voice that had made
him turn, but another sound. The bicycle swerved into the left lane
in front of the doughnut shop. There was the desperate sound of
hard-hit brakes. Reggie looked up to see, looming over him, the
square white front of a milk truck. The driver's mouth was open,
his body arched back as his foot jammed on the brake pedal. Reggie
saw each tiny detail on the front of the truck: the yellow
inspection sticker in the corner of the window, the long tarnished
grill, the oval headlights—

The headlights went away. The morning, his
father, the red-and-white car, the doughnut shop, the milk
truck—everything went away. It was as if some gigantic unseen hands
had painted them on a rubber canvas and then pulled the canvas to
one side. In their place, behind the canvas, was only
whiteness.

This happened. I'm
dying
, Reggie thought. He knew it was a
dream; he knew he could stand up and say, "Don't worry, this is
only a dream!" but he knew that this time it would make no
difference. It was a dream, but it was really happening.
If you die in your dream, you die for
real.
He knew that he was reliving it
again, and he knew that if they did not get to him this time,
didn't pull him back—

The world was made of rubber and was being
pulled aside, and behind it, behind the world, there was nothing
but whiteness. Above it there was a round, black canopy. The canopy
dropped toward him, curving down over him, forming a tunnel. He had
a last glimpse of his father, pulling off overhead, behind the
forming tunnel, his face and body thin-stretched rubber. Reggie
tried to say good-bye; all he wanted to do was to say good-bye. But
he could say nothing, he could only watch. His father's face was
shouting something, his long rubber arms reaching, but then he was
gone. The whiteness was gone then too, and Reggie was in the dark
tunnel, and alone.

There was a whooshing sound around him. The
tunnel was like an air shaft. He stabilized, coming erect, and the
tunnel was solid now. There was silence. He turned to look behind
him, his body floating like the pictures he'd seen of astronauts in
free fall. He was able to turn with ease. Behind him the tunnel
stretched cavernously; at its end there was a dim gray light.
Someone was standing in the light, but Reggie could not make out
who it was. The figure was too far away, and too small.

He turned round again and saw that the other
end of the tunnel was closer. There was a bright light at this end,
and he was slowly drifting toward it. The light was almost
blinding. It reached out and bathed him; although it was bright, it
did not hurt his eyes but, rather, soothed them. Something marred
the brightness of the light at its center, and now, as he drifted
closer, he saw that there was a figure standing here, too. The
light surrounded it completely. Reggie shielded his eyes, but he
could not see who the figure was. It stood there silently, and
Reggie could feel the weight of its vision on him. He drifted
nearer. He could see nothing of its body, but now two eyes in its
face, two enormous eyes, became apparent. They were as big as small
plates, and they were snaring Reggie like a docking ship. He was
becoming lost in those huge orbs, in the bright, beautiful light
around them. He felt himself flowing into them, becoming part of
them

There was a cold breath behind Reggie's ear.
Sudden fear bolted through him. He turned to see that the other
end of the tunnel had collapsed toward him. The gray light was
right behind him and something filled it, something huge and dark,
bending down over him, opening its mouth, beginning to speak

I'm dying!

Reggie tried to scream. The enormous eyes
were still there in front of him, but they made no move to help
him. Why didn't they save him from this dark, cold thing'? Time was
suspended. He knew that if another tick of the clock passed, the
dark shape looming over him would speak its words. He was tottering
on a ledge, and he would fall over it. Why couldn't the eyes help
him?

If you die in your dream, you die for
real.

He felt the tick of time. The dark mouth
began to speak: "K—"

There was a blankness, and then hands were on
him, human hands, and he looked up to see the tunnel peeling back,
disintegrating around him. The dark shape disappeared, the eyes
faded away, but he felt that something, something he couldn't
remember, had passed between them and through him—some bond of
that ticking moment of time that had begun—and then they were gone
and the white-rubber canvas was there, wrapping down around him as
the hands pulled him up, and he cried out.

He was on his stomach in his bed, his hands
clutching the sides of the mattress. For a moment he could not
move. The dream had come again—the dream that repeated what had
really happened to him. And once again he had almost come too close
to return. Once again that tick of time had almost lengthened to
eternity.

From the brink of
death
, they had said. Reggie knew it was
true. Those eyes and that light and the tunnel had been
real
, and then he had
been yanked back. He had been dead, and then he had been alive
again. He had been there on the very edge, on the lip of some other
place; the eyes had been drawing him into it, and then the doctors
had reached into the tunnel and put their cold gloved hands on him
and pulled him back. Each time the dream repeated exactly what had
happened, and each time he came to the very moment of knowing who
and what.

They say that if you die in your dream—

But he always came back.

He turned over slowly and
sat up. The front of his pajamas was soaked in chilled sweat. He
sat still for a moment, head down and eyes closed.
What was there? What happened when you fell over
that ledge?
The fear of that huge dark
shadow and the warmth of those enormous eyes haunted
him.

What was beyond that moment of time?

His mother eased the door open and stuck her
head into the room. "Reggie?" she called sleepily. "You okay?"

He opened his eyes and looked at her, and she
came into the room and sat down on the bed. "Reggie, are you ever
going to stop having that dream?" she asked softly.

"I don't know, Mom."

His mother was silent. Reggie studied her
face: almost old at thirty-nine, the creamy black features
beginning to wrinkle slightly, the soft brown eyes beginning to
tire just a bit. His mother was a beautiful woman.

"Reggie," she began, and then hesitated,
slapping one hand on the other in frustration. "Reggie, it's been
six years. Don't you think it's time to forget?" Again she slapped
her hand, and her voice became almost angry. "You're thirteen years
old."

She rose, walked a few
steps and then turned. "All these
things
you've got. All these things
that have to do with death." She pointed to a poster over Reggie's
bed, a faded reproduction of Breughel's "The Triumph of Death," and
waved a hand at the death totems scattered around the room: monster
heads that glowed in the dark; a grinning-skull mask made of
rubber, hanging on one post of the bed; rows of wax fangs and claws
on the bookshelves; a plastic model of a working guillotine, its
basket containing a small, chopped-off head that looked up with a
startled, open-mouthed expression, the eyes wide. The only other
object in the room was a framed photograph of a handsome young man
in a uniform, smiling. "And the rest of it—all over the house. The
horror-movie cassettes, the handmade mummy in the cellar, the
rubber spiders and bats hanging in the bathroom. Skulls
everywhere—not to mention all the other things you have in that
clubhouse you keep with your friends. Don't you think you've gone
far enough with this stuff?"

"It's just what I'm interested in," he said
slowly.

"I worry about you," his mother said, coming
to the bed and pulling him to her. "I really do worry."

"There's nothing to worry about," Reggie
said. "It's . . . just something I'm interested in."

She held him closer. "If I ever lost you, I
don't know what I'd do. I just don't know."

She began to tremble, and then she was
sobbing. Reggie didn't know what to say. "Nothing's going to happen
to me, Mom," he muttered.

She finally let him go and wiped her eyes.
For a moment there was silence, and when she spoke, her voice was
low.

"Reggie, I'm going to tell
you something I've never told you before. I was with you in the
hospital, holding your hand, when you went away. I
felt
you leave. Right at
that moment, I felt it. Your hand was warm, and then it got so cold
for a second that I thought I was imagining it. That's when the
doctors started to yell. They pushed me out of the way. One of them
said, `He's gone,' but I already knew you were dead." She paused,
and then went on with difficulty. “At that moment I promised that
if you came back, I'd give up anything in the world." She looked
deep into his eyes. "Anything, Reggie. And you came back. They
brought you back. And then . . . . Her eyes filled with tears; she
covered her face with her hands. "And then when your father died in
Lebanon, when he never came home again, I felt so guilty." She was
unable to go on for a moment. "I loved your father so much. But I
promised to give up anything!"

"Mom."

She held him again, and quickly composed
herself.

"I just don't want to ever lose you," she
said. "I don't want anything bad to ever happen to you."

"I know, Mom."

She hugged him and then let him go, easing
him back against his pillow. "You sleep well now," she said,
straightening up. "No more dreams, okay?"

She left, turning the silent switch to darken
the room again. Reggie stared at the closed door. He thought about
her and his father together, remembering fragments: the three of
them at a pond feeding the ducks, the ripples of the warm water
lapping toward them; a Christmas tree, his father laughing as it
lay in the stand at a crooked angle, his mother coming into the
room and her eyes lighting up like the Christmas lights; his father
mowing the lawn, stopping as Reggie went by, letting the lawnmower
idle while he picked Reggie up, throwing him high into the air and
catching him tight as he fell. "Sky boy!" he shouted, tossing him
up again. And he remembered one more thing: a birthday. He
remembered hearing his father in the garage below his bedroom the
night before. The July heat had bathed him as he lay comfortably in
bed listening to his father labor away at the bicycle he had asked
for, singing while he put it together, the bicycle he had found in
the garage, complete, early the next morning as his father was
called away to his base to leave for Lebanon, even before he had
eaten breakfast, the bicycle Reggie had tried to catch up with him
on, seeing the car where his father had stopped to grab a cup of
coffee, only wanting to say thanks and good-bye, and then the milk
truck—

He turned over in bed,
knelt by the headboard, and switched on the reading light to study
the poster of "The Triumph of Death." It was a huge canvas, a vast
panorama with a thousand bony skeletons and screaming bodies. There
was nowhere those people could run; the skeletons formed phalanxes
and patrols and were hunting them down. Only one figure in the
entire picture seemed to be resisting: A foot soldier in the lower
right-hand corner was drawing his sword against the advancing bone
men. Reggie's gaze roamed over the field of bodies.
Is this what death is?
To him it had been a shocked thud, blackness, and the mystery
of the tunnel.

What was over that ledge?

He was growing tired. His lids began to get
heavy. For a moment the poster became like that white elastic
canvas he had seen after the truck hit him. And there, superimposed
on it, was another vision: all of Montvale turned into a vast
landscape of death. Across it strode a tall figure, a man and yet
not a man, his face so white as to be no color at all, his tall,
sharp frame moving like a sickle through the world. His eyes were
the absence of eyes, his mouth a cruel, thin, red slit, his black
suit a form of nothingness. He looked to the left and right, and
then his eyes turned to Reggie with horrible power—and suddenly
Reggie was in the poster, in the lower right-hand corner, the lone
soldier drawing a weak blade made merely of metal. . . .

Reggie blinked awake. His hands were resting
on the headboard, his body hunched up in a half-kneel. The poster
over the bed was the same as always. Slowly, almost too tired to
move, he slipped down and turned over, sliding under the covers.
The bed was warm. He tried to open his eyes, to stare at the
ceiling, to think. His lids closed.

He dreamed again that he heard his mother say
good-bye. . . .

In another place, someone else dreamed.

It wasn't dreaming, exactly. He did not close
his eyes because when he did, there was nothing but silence. When
he closed his eyes he went away somewhere, and when he opened them
he came back to this place. He never remembered what happened in
between.

His dreams were of another kind. He lay with
his hands behind his head, one foot braced on the side of the bunk
and the other on the wall of the truck, and he let his memories
wash over him. This was as close to dreaming as he came.