Don’t do this!
the rational part of him begged. Or was it the frightened part? He couldn’t tell (
maybe because there’s no difference right now
), but it didn’t matter. The decision was made.
He started walking rapidly, almost running. He had to
go
, had to get where he was going before he lost his nerve. He had no doubts anymore, or at least none he dared contemplate, but he thought that if he slowed down for one second, if he flinched from the task he’d set himself,
fear
would set in, wrap its crooked, clutching fingers around his brain stem and squeeze. He’d slow down, stop, and turn around without ever consciously giving his body instructions or permission—fear would do that for him.
That kind of fear had been his secret reason, the reason he’d never told anybody, for dropping out of school. That, and Danny. He remembered Danny and all his rock star dreams from high school, the fire he’d had then. Danny had practiced like hell, night and day, until their father had finally told him he’d have to soundproof the garage or knock it off entirely. Danny had taken a break for three weeks while he figured out how to do the soundproofing, and then he’d done it—roping his little brother in for assistance, naturally, helping him hold up big sheets of heavy five-eighths-inch drywall and trying to nail it in place while keeping it from slipping. Once that job had been complete, Danny had gone right back to practicing like hell.
Then Danny had gone to college. There were bands, but there were also girls and schoolwork and a part-time job, and each time John talked to him, it seemed a little of the fire had gone out. Danny still played—still
loved
to play, maybe more than anything—but all those other considerations, all those other demands on his time added up. When he graduated, he found a job and moved to Dallas with Gina, and the drums had still been in storage when John visited four months later. He’d gotten them out eventually—“I still gotta play!” he’d told John one day—but he moved from one lackluster band to another without seeming to care whether they had any prospects or not. He needed to play, he said, and play he did, but there wasn’t anything special to it.
When John had begun the slow crawl out of his introverted cocoon in college and started singing, Danny’s lesson for him couldn’t have been clearer. It would have been so easy to finish the degree, get a nice, safe, cushy day job that took care of bills (and luxuries, like hot water), and play music on the side, just like his big brother. But then, too, John had known that if he compromised even slightly, he would have flowed like water down the path of least resistance. With the rent paid and food on the table, would he have ever pushed himself to get onstage, to face down his stage fright night after night, or would he have simply gotten used to it?
It’s okay,
he would have told himself.
I’ll work on it later. No rush.
He had known the outcome of that, thanks to Danny, and so, before the fear could paralyze him and guide him back to the path of least resistance, he had swept away all other options.
His parents had screamed blue murder, of course, and even Danny had called to ask him what he was thinking. He’d tried to respond with calm assurance—“This is my calling. This is what I’m supposed to do”—and while he believed that was true, it wasn’t the whole reason. Truth was, he didn’t want to let the fear get its hooks in, let that time slip away as if it were of no real importance—that’s what made the decision for him. And no matter how much his parents yelled and protested, once the decision was made, he took the next step and the next without daring to stop and reconsider or even talk about it.
His actions now were just a logical consequence of that first decision.
Well
, he thought,
sort of a logical consequence.
If he really stopped to think about it, his destination didn’t seem all that logical at all. In fact, it seemed more likely that he was rushing toward a dream, a nightmare that had taken root more deeply than it should have instead of being flushed out by his subconscious in the usual house-cleaning process dreams were supposedly part of. It seemed
very
likely.
It didn’t matter. The decision was made. Perhaps this was a waste of time—but perhaps it was not.
This isn’t worth it!
That thought nearly got him to stop, it seemed so out of place. What had all his sacrifices been for, if this wasn’t worth it? What did his life mean? He thought of the shouting crowds of his dream. It would be madness to give that up, to walk away, to go back to a dysfunctional band where he would always be in danger of being abandoned, of being left to carve out his future by himself, talentless and afraid, of singing to empty rooms and trying like hell, breaking himself against nature and the inevitable, trying and failing and failing and
failing
to reach somebody, anybody.
His foot hit the ground, and the other one after it. As he walked, the dissonance coalesced into a terrible, gut-scraping sort of harmony. There was a slight rise ahead, and he pounded up it without slowing or looking back.
The strange tension got worse as he crested the rise, more dissonant and wrong, and yet . . . it
pulled
, too.
He reached the top of the rise, and he saw it.
“There,” he said, and his breath went out of him in a rush.
***
The crossroads were ahead, marked by an old, dead tree, gnarled and crooked. It hung over the smudge of road, black on grey, a lone sentinel watching over this haunted place, shielding itself from harsh moonlight with outflung limbs. The tree looked ancient, and the bark had fallen away, leaving only smooth wood that gleamed like bone in the moonlight. Hadn’t they executed criminals at crossroads? Or had they buried them there? He couldn’t recall, but the stout branches of the tree stretching over the road looked plenty strong enough to support a hangman’s noose. How long had that tree grown there? He didn’t want to think about it.
The awful tension fell off as John got closer, but it resolved itself into an even greater sense of wrongness. It was, he thought, as though the notes were now tuned correctly, but they made the ugliest chord imaginable.
He walked on, and the strange chord screamed and wept, weird harmonies humming somewhere not above or below his normal hearing but just
outside
it somehow. He’d never experienced anything like it, and as he stood in the moonlight at the center of the crossroads, he understood that there was power here—strange and unearthly power, something that transcended normal human experience. Something that demanded not just respect but awe.
The wind gusted, and the branches in the old tree clattered together like a handful of teeth. John turned. He didn’t like having his back to that tree. Anywhere else he looked, he could see as far as the moon would let him, but anything could be hiding behind that tree. He stared at it. It was only fifteen feet from the edge of the road opposite where he stood, but the thick crosshatched shadows thrown by the moon through the branches shrouded much of the tree in darkness. Was that a humped figure pressed up against the trunk, dark in the deep shadows, or was it simply a burl or a sawn-off branch that had long since healed over? It couldn’t be a person. Surely he’d have seen them when he walked over. Surely, he thought, surely, but his heart pounded harder all the same.
“Hello?” he asked. His voice sounded small and flat out here, out in this open space with nothing to reflect it back at him. He took a hesitant step toward the tree, never taking his eyes from the hump. Another step, and the wind picked up again. “Is someone there?” He chided himself for asking such a stupid question—if someone
was
there, they’d already shown that they weren’t going to answer. He suddenly found the presence of mind to wonder that if someone was there, and they weren’t the type to answer, then what possible good could they be up to? Why the hell was he approaching? If someone was lurking there, he ought to be running back to the car as fast as his skinny legs could carry him.
Nonetheless, he took a few steps closer. Now he stood at the edge of the road near the tree. That was as far as he would go. He felt a strong reluctance not to step off the road. He was tempted to laugh at himself—this wasn’t a fairy story, for God’s sake!—but he couldn’t find it funny at all.
“Hello?” he said again, stupidly. He didn’t speak loudly, though, and he couldn’t hear his voice over the pounding in his ears, the hammering of his heart.
The wind gusted again, harder. It pushed some of the branches aside, and for one split second, the moon shone on the sawn-off branch that came off the tree’s main trunk, the branch that John had gotten all worked up over.
He let out all the air in his lungs in one rush and almost started laughing. Then he heard a sound, faint over his own pounding heart, and he froze.
A footstep.
That’s your imagination, John. You worked it a little too hard in the last few minutes, and now it’s fucking with you.
Another footstep from behind him, sand crunching on the asphalt. Closer this time.
Don’t turn around
, part of him begged.
Please don’t turn around.
John turned around. There was somebody standing there, not ten feet away. John tried to scream, but terror had frozen his throat. He stared, eyes bulging and mouth open.
“Nice night,” the man said. His voice was deep and warm, good-humored and somehow calming. John’s scream dissipated, turned into regular, if somewhat rapid, breathing. The man waited patiently. He stood with an easy slouch, his black shirt open to the third or fourth button. In his left hand, he carried a battered guitar case, and silver rings glittered on his fingers. Dark hair spilled from beneath a cowboy hat and curled across his cheek. The brim of the hat cast his eyes into deep shadow.
“Uh. Yeah. Beautiful.” John’s voice was hoarse, his mouth dry. He seemed to have recently swallowed a pound of ash. He coughed.
“You okay?” the man asked, grinning.
John nodded.
“Didn’t mean to startle you,” the man continued. “You looked like someone I used to know.” Had John thought his voice pleasant? Maybe it was, on the surface, but something oily churned and slithered underneath it.
“I, ah, I get that a lot.”
The man just grinned again. He was closer now, close enough for John to see the neatly trimmed, pencil-thin line of beard edging his jaw, flowing into a tidy, short goatee. The man put down his guitar case. John’s eyes darted to it, then flicked away.
“You play?” the man asked.
“No. Not really. Uh, no.” That was the best John could do for an answer. Terror had split his brain into a dozen fragments, each handling a different problem badly. One fragment was gauging the distance to the car and screaming
RUNRUNRUNRUN!
over and over again. Another was warning him that his bladder was dangerously full and telling him it would be best to dump it
right now
. Still another was frantically supplying rational explanations for the apparition before him.
That last was easy to ignore. He knew what—
who—
was in front of him, whether he wanted to fully come to grips with it or not.
“Too bad,” the man said, disappointed. “Music is good for the soul. I gotta admit, I’m surprised. You
look
like a player.”
“I don’t—I mean, I sing,” John said.
The man’s grin widened, showing teeth unnaturally white in the moonlight. “Ah. There you go. Best instrument of all, the voice.” He took on a conspiratorial tone. “How’s that working out for you?”
John didn’t answer.
“I might be able to help you out.” The man’s teeth parted slightly, and his tongue glistened. “But I don’t get the feeling you’re all that serious. I look at you and I see a skinny kid, kind of goofy-looking, a little awkward. I bet you haven’t gotten laid in a long time. Be honest with me, Johnny—this has nothing to do with music. It’s really about pussy, isn’t it?”
John flinched. “No. Uh, no sir.”
The man showed his teeth again. “Oh, Johnny. I have seen your dreams, Johnny. You can’t lie to me.”
How had the man gotten so close? He was only an arm’s length away, close enough that John could have reached out and touched the collar of his shirt, if he’d wanted to do something so utterly insane as that.
“No,” John whispered.
“I have seen your dreams, Johnny. I’ve seen the women you dream about, flesh sweat-slick and soaking wet, writhing in ecstasy beneath you, legs wrapped around your body, nails gouging furrows into your skin.”
John was sweating now. As the man spoke, John saw images in his mind’s eye—his own fantasies paraded before him, furtive, frantic fantasies that lasted only a few minutes and left him feeling guilty and dirty and spent afterward. He saw a woman’s body laid bare, impossibly perfect, his mouth pressed to her breast. He saw her straddling him, his hands grasping her narrow waist, her back arched and mouth open, every muscle quivering. He saw her on all fours, kneeling on a bed covered in red satin, cords standing out on her forearms as she clutched the sheets in her fists and screamed. He screamed too as he bucked and thrust behind her. In the darkness around the bed, vague figures shifted and laughed and watched, and he did not care. He saw her turn, push him onto his back, and take him in her mouth. The images were
too
clear, more detailed than any dream or recollection he’d ever had. He could see the fine hairs along the back of her neck, sweat droplets on the side of her face. He could almost feel her—no, he
could
feel her! He could feel her hand wrapped around him, feel the skin of her fingertips. She climbed on top of him again, and he could feel the touch of naked flesh along his body, pliant yet firm. He could smell her now, too, as he could taste the sweat on his upper lip.