Waking Nightmares (13 page)

Read Waking Nightmares Online

Authors: Christopher Golden

First, though, he needed to take care of other needs.
Careful not to tangle up his IV tube, he climbed out of bed and shuffled to the bathroom, wheeling the stand that held the IV bag along beside him. When he hit the switch, the bathroom light flickered on, and he caught sight of himself in the mirror and shuddered. Damn, he looked like death warmed over.
“Hello, handsome,” he sneered at himself. “Shit, you’re an old man.”
Still weak, but breathing without the same ache that had been in his chest earlier in the day, he shut the door and lifted the toilet seat. He sighed with pleasure as he let out a stream of urine, and shivered a bit as a chill went through him.
As he stepped out of the bathroom, hands still wet from washing, he went to click off the light and then changed his mind. He’d leave the bathroom light on to guide him if he should need to get up again, and shut off the other lights in the room instead. He wheeled the IV stand along with him as he closed the door, leaving it only slightly ajar, and then switched the lights off. Enough illumination leaked in from the corridor and from the half-open bathroom door to light his way back to bed.
Weak but content to be alive—feeling as though he had been given the gift of second chances—he made his way back toward the bed. The lights on the dormant monitor glowed steadily, and he wondered why no one had taken it away yet. He supposed they would remove it when they needed it for someone else.
As he reached the bed, he thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye and turned toward the window. In the darkened room, his eyes had adjusted enough that he could see a figure silhouetted against the darkness, framed by the rain that pelted the glass. Something twitched, flicking side to side like an eel moving through water, but above it, set into an oil-black patch of nothing, a quartet of sickly golden eyes peered in at him.
“Jesus Christ,” Norm whispered, staring.
The thing unfurled from the fourth-floor window like a flag and took the wind, vanishing with a flutter. Muttering under his breath, Norm hurried across the room. Part of him believed it must have been an owl—maybe two owls. Or bats. A voice at the back of his mind was already telling him to forget it, trying to persuade him that he had hallucinated, that there had been nothing there at all.
“What the hell was that?” he whispered.
And what if it bites your face off?
The thought almost made him laugh. As he approached the window, he managed an uneasy chuckle. He should go back to bed, maybe call someone to have a look. But he had never been a coward, not even as a boy, and he wouldn’t start being afraid of things outside his window in the dark now that he was a grown man. Mortality might have come knocking on his door today, but Norm Dunne wasn’t going to let that turn him into some kind of pussy.
He pressed his forehead to the glass and looked out into the dark. He could see the edge of the parking lot off to the right, its lampposts partially dimmed by rain and a fog that had begun to rise. The rest of his view consisted of the rocky hill behind the hospital and the woods at the high edge of the property.
“You’re off your nut,” he muttered to himself.
Norm moved around, looking left and right, and then tilted his head to peer up at the stormy night sky.
Black figures darted back and forth in the churning clouds. They were hard to discern through the rain, but he counted at least four black silhouettes moving high up in the dark. They seemed to ride the wind, undulating as though draped in robes, circling like carrion birds in search of a feast.
Norm staggered away from the window. He wanted to fall back into bed and hide himself, but instead he wheeled his IV stand back across the room and snapped on the lights. His heart hammered in his chest, racing too fast, and a fresh ripple of fear went through him. He held a hand over the spot as he trudged back toward the bed and lay down.
His son, Tommy, had gone home for the night. The urge to call him and ask him to come back, to spend the night in the hospital room with his old man, was almost overwhelming. But Norm would not give in to that temptation. How could he admit to his boy that he was frightened—that something, maybe Death come calling, ready to collect him—had scared him so badly that he didn’t want to be alone? He couldn’t.
Just birds,
he told himself.
Too big to be bats. They were crows, you stupid son of a bitch.
Norman Dunne lay in bed and stared at the window, feeling smaller than he had in his whole adult life.
There’s nothing in the dark that isn’t there in the light,
his mother had always told him, back when he was a boy.
He wondered if she had lied.
CHAPTER 5
 
AMBER
lay stretched out on the sofa in the TV room, cell phone clutched in her hand as if it were some talisman she thought would protect her from the storm. The floor lamp behind the sofa cast a wan golden light that did not do much to relieve the gloom that seemed to seep into the house from the stormy night outside. Her Gran lay asleep in her chair in the corner—which was where she could be found nearly all of the time that she wasn’t in bed—and a tiny trickle of drool wetted the corner of the old woman’s mouth. She might as well have been alone, and it wasn’t a night for being on her own.
She could have gone into the basement and visited her father, who was trying to get some exercise on the treadmill down there, or into the kitchen, where her middle-schoolteacher mom was correcting science tests, but laziness beat out loneliness tonight. She just wanted to stay there on the sofa, huddled away from the storm, trying not to think about the bizarre mass bird suicide from earlier in the day, or the vision she’d had during her seizure in Professor Varick’s class. Besides, as long as she could text, she wouldn’t be completely lonely.
The volume on the TV was turned up too high. Normally it would have bothered her, but tonight it canceled out some of the noise of the storm—the punishing rain that pounded on the roof and windows, and the occasional drumroll of thunder. But though she watched the television, she wasn’t really paying attention. Her great-grandmother had a love of idiot comedy, everything from the Three Stooges to Will Ferrell and beyond, and could often be heard chuckling to herself as she watched them, even though Amber was sure she understood very little of the English-language dialogue. Tonight she had flipped channels until she’d found a moderately amusing and truly idiotic Jim Carrey movie from years ago, and then promptly fallen asleep.
What is the Jim Carrey movie where he has stupid hair?
she texted to her best friend, Tami.
Her eyelids fluttered sleepily and the TV screen began to blur, but then her phone vibrated with the incoming text.
Isn’t that all of them?
Tami had replied.
Amber sent back a ☺ and a moment later, the phone vibrated again. The message was from Ben.
You seemed pretty shaken up earlier. You okay now?
An image of Ben swam into her mind, the way he’d looked when she had first had her seizure that morning, and she felt the urge to kiss him. If he had been there beside her on the sofa, she would have done that and more. Her attraction to him seemed to come and go, but at the moment, it was very much present.
You’re sweet,
she texted.
I’m good. Bored, which must mean I’m okay.
I have a cure for boredom,
he wrote.
Scrabble?
she asked.
Not the game I had in mind.
Amber hesitated before replying. How much did she want to encourage him? Knowing how fickle she was when it came to Ben, shouldn’t she draw a line? Probably, she should.
She grinned as she typed.
Hmm. Something to ponder. Rain check for tonight, though. It’s late and nasty out and I’m already under the covers.
Cute. In your jammies?
Who said anything about jammies?
A long pause before the reply came.
Tease.
Girls are evil. Didn’t anyone ever tell you?
Now she was grinning so broadly it hurt her face, and the flirtation had stirred something deep inside her. Maybe she wasn’t just teasing Ben after all.
Some lessons I prefer to learn on my own,
Ben replied.
Maybe I’ll let you buy me coffee tomorrow.
☺
Great. Let’s just pray for no kamikaze crows.
Amber shuddered, a ripple of unease passing through her. Her smile faded. Flirting had ceased to be fun.
Talk to you in the a. m.,
she texted.
OK. Night.
With her Gran snoring softly in her chair, Amber settled deeper into the sofa and let her brain drift into autopilot as she watched television. God, what a stupid movie. She clutched her cell phone to her chest the way she had seen some old ladies hold their rosary beads and let her mind empty of all of the tension of the day. But it didn’t stay empty for long. Memories and images kept slipping back in, and her brow furrowed with thoughts of her collapse in Professor Varick’s classroom, and then the creepy insanity at Starbucks, what Ben called the “kamikaze crows,” though it had been more than just crows.
She had a flash of memory from the hospital—she hated lying on those gurney beds; they were so damned uncomfortable—and then an image of Tommy Dunne rose in her mind.
Poor guy,
she thought. They weren’t exactly close, not these days, but she had always been fond of Tommy, and she felt badly that she hadn’t spared him another thought after she had run into him earlier and learned that his father had had a heart attack. Norm Dunne usually looked in need of sleep or a drink or both, but he had also had a pleasant wave and a smile for Amber, and not in a creepy, ogling way.
Scanning through her cell phone contacts list, she found that she didn’t have Tommy’s number. That didn’t surprise her, considering how long it had been since they’d talked. But then she remembered they were friends on Facebook and quickly used her phone to get online and access his page, where she found the number easily, and sent him a text.
Hey. I hope your dad’s doing better. Let me know if you need anything.
Jim Carrey’s antics unraveled on screen as she waited for a reply, but she received none. Soon her eyelids began to droop again, the yearning for sleep making her thoughts muzzy and slow, and she felt her head begin to fall forward. She bobbed several times, her breathing matching the cadence of her great-grandmother’s snores, and then she closed her eyes, phone still held tightly to her chest.
 
. . .
AND
she is standing in the hot rain again, Hawthorne burning with green fire all around her. The flames do not char. Instead the glass in the windows melts and runs and the brick crumbles and the wood warps and begins to grow sprigs and then branches, roots pushing down into the ground. Thorns appear. From inside those now windowless, malleable structures, people scream in the voices of birds. She sees a middle-aged couple and their young daughter through a second-story window, their mouths open, emitting the shrieks of murdered gulls.
The hot rain sears her flesh, but she does not try to find a place to hide. Her skin blisters and peels and the fat underneath runs like candle wax, but she is moving, searching. Running. Around a corner she staggers to a halt. Hundreds of people are in Melville Park, up to their waists in the floodwaters, in hot rain. Chaos has erupted. They are drowning one another. They are murdering one another. They are fucking one another. Some are trying to drown themselves, even as others look toward the bell tower of the abandoned Methodist church, reaching into the sky as though a lifeline will be thrown that will hoist them out of the anarchy, out of the blood and death and bestial rutting.
Amber walks among them like a ghost, untouched in the flesh but wounded in the heart. She looks up to see what has caused them to reach toward the sky with such hope, such elation, and a wave of sickness passes through her. She retches and falls to her knees, the floodwaters sucking at her. The water up to her shoulders, scouring her naked flesh until it is raw and pitted and bone has begun to show through, she stares at the clock tower.

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