Dark Advent (6 page)

Surely they’d never ever believe the truth.

“RUN HOME TO YOUR MOTHER, KID!” the man bellowed, then shrieked with laughter.

Chuck didn’t need to be told twice. The last floodgates of his mind collapsed and nothing could hold back the tide. He ran screaming into the night, his shoes a fading slap-slap-slap down the street.

Typhoid Chuck.

7

The dream was incredibly vivid.

Erika saw herself stumbling through streets lit by a bright noonday sun, and knew that behind her, men were pursuing her, men in white. Sterile, like operating room technicians. Give them half a chance, and they’d put her away for good.

“No!” she screamed back at them. “I’m fine! FINE!”

She stooped to pluck up a rock, held it, found its sharp edges. She hacked at herself until the blood flowed freely from at least a dozen places, down her arms, her legs, her neck. “Look at this!” she cried. “I’m healthy! I’m alive!”

But they wouldn’t give up the chase. She ran blindly on, ducking into a mall or something similar. She found a restroom. Looked at herself in the mirror.

Recoiled at the vision she saw reflected back…a haggard witch of a girl with purplish blotches massing on her face and arms.

The door exploded in behind her, and in streamed the men in white. They brandished weapons, large and chunky gun-things connected with hoses to tanks strapped on the men’s backs. Flames jetted from the muzzles.

She screamed and twisted, sinking toward the floor, a writhing mass of flames whose flesh blackened and peeled away from her bones. And still she would not die.

Erika Jennings awoke in the darkness with a shudder.

“Oh shit, not again,” was the first thing she moaned to herself.

She tried to relax again, but felt a jittery tension twist up and down her limbs. Turning onto her side and forcing her head into the plush density of her pillow, she tried to force everything out of conscious thought, which, of course, rarely worked. Those last, lingering images danced and capered across the screen of her mind like a morbid vaudeville show, letting her know in no uncertain terms that they were moving in to stay for a while.

I don’t want this, I never did, I never asked for it, and damn it, it’s NOT FAIR.

Yeah, but who said life had to be fair?
asked
that rational little voice within, the one with the tendency to surface at the most annoying moments. The one that told her she’d be better off staying put here in Spanish Lake, Missouri, instead of leaving for Denver or Dallas or Orlando, anyplace that held hope and promise and the possibility of putting the last few years behind her, as if they belonged to someone else.

Leaving wouldn’t do any good,
that voice told her. Because some things can’t be run from. They follow you. Like Larry Talbot in the old Wolfman movies. The full moon was gonna get him no matter where he was.

He had his curse, and Erika had hers.

Sleep was out of the question, so she flipped the sheet back and sat on the edge of her bed. The luminous marks on her time-bomb clock read eleven-twenty. Well, at least the night was by no means a total loss. She tugged down the oversized Cardinals baseball T-shirt that hit her at mid-thigh, straightened the elastic of her panties. Then, quietly, she eased out of her room and crept barefoot down the hall, through the dining room, into the kitchen. Dim lights were inset above the bar that partitioned the kitchen from the family room, and she flicked them on. The only thing that appealed to her in the refrigerator was the orange juice. She briefly considered going to her parents’ liquor cabinet for a shot of vodka to go with it, but decided against it. Erika took a seat at the bar, propping her head on one hand while the other tuned a portable radio to KMOX, the CBS affiliate down in St. Louis.

The last time anything had hit her as hard as that last dream, the damage out there in the world had already been done.

Jeez, I’m sitting here listening for the first bulletins of some catastrophe. I feel like one of those people who goes to the Indy 500 just to see a car wreck.

The best she remembered, “the curse” (which was also what her paternal grandmother called menstruation…kind of cute, Erika thought, in an antiquated sort of way) had set itself upon her as she was embarking upon the transition from girl to woman, with her hormones in screaming imbalance, with one breast growing at a faster rate than the other. The first major episode had come when she was nearing the end of her fourteenth year, not quite eight years ago.

An especially nasty series of nightly dreams had plagued her, showing her a setting not much different from pictures she’d seen of Nazi death camps, except the setting was more like a jungle. Only coincidence (or was it more than that?) led her to figure it out before the fact. She learned from a
Newsweek
magazine that a disturbed man named Jim Jones had led a bunch of followers to a place called Guyana, and that a particular Congressman was planning a visit.

She’d phoned the Congressman’s office a few times, deepening her voice to sound older and more authoritative. At first politely listened to, she was finally dismissed as a nut case and handled accordingly. The worst of it was that she didn’t much blame them. Perhaps it was instinct that had prompted her to give them a false name and address. When nearly everybody turned up dead, she knew they’d come looking for her with an endless list of questions they’d want answers to.

“How’d you know?” they would’ve asked her. “How did you
know
?”

“You got me,” would’ve been her answer. “It just happens when I’m asleep.”

“But
how
?”

“IT JUST HAPPENS AND I WISH TO HELL IT WOULDN’T!”

The hit parade kept coming, once a year, maybe twice. For the week prior to January 13, 1982, she’d dreamed of a plane caroming off a bridge to sink like a stone in the icy Potomac, half-frozen survivors struggling feebly in the shattered crust of the river. She’d even gotten a good look at an unknown hero who time after time helped others latch onto a rescue line before slipping under the surface, down into an obscure and lonely death.

Industrial accidents were another hot item. India, late 1984: Union Carbide. The Soviet Union, spring, 1986: the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Perhaps she was the only person in the Western World who knew just what a crock those minimized casualty reports coming out of Russia really were.

Maybe the ability itself wasn’t the curse. More likely it was the impotence to do anything that made a difference, the psychically standing by to watch while people died. And the difficulty in distinguishing between events that had yet to come from events she’d tapped into at the moment of occurrence.

She supposed she’d kept her family from a certain amount of harm, and that in itself was some comfort, but not as much as she thought it should have been. It was too easy to say, “Dad, don’t park on the fifth level of the garage at work today,” or warn her brother Cal, “Don’t run hurdles at track practice tomorrow.” Easy, no sweat. And they avoided those situations, half-believing and half-humoring her. But they never thanked her. She was no heroine, only a family member with an uncanny knack for good guesswork. Dad, Mom, Cal…they never knew what lay in the path of a different decision. And usually she didn’t either, because the little things were mere hunches inside, bad feelings lingering like a sour aftertaste.

On the radio, an open line gave way to the CBS network news at midnight. The high point was an update on the Pope’s ongoing tour of a little cluster of Communist-bloc countries. Hardly a matter for concern. Nothing out of kilter with the world at large. So far.
Maybe it’ll take a little time,
she thought.
And maybe if I turn off the radio and go to bed and refuse to think about it, it’ll go away and not bother me…ever.

If only the dreams weren’t so damned cryptic at times, if only they made more sense, if only they spelled things out more clearly. Yeah…if only, if only. You could spend a lifetime prefacing statements with those two words. A phrase of failure and regret.

purplish blotches massing on her face and arms

Where was the connection? She felt it close enough to touch, on the tip of her tongue.

The rustle of familiar feet in the hallway…Frank Jennings
walked into the kitchen, bare-chested and in pajama bottoms, his stubbly face set against the light in one giant squint. He eased into a stool next to Erika at the bar.

“What gets you up at this hour?” she asked.

“Your mom kicks in her sleep sometimes. I woke up and saw the light. Figured it was you.” He winked. “Call it father’s intuition.”

“Great, but I’ve been up for forty-five minutes.”

“So my intuition’s a little slow.” Frank massaged his high forehead, the bridge of a nose slightly flattened from his boxing days in college. “Is there, uh, anything…?”

Erika shrugged. “I woke up from a bad dream is all.”
And that’s all I’ll say because by now you ought to know the rest.

He reached over to rub her shoulder, and she closed her eyes and leaned slightly into it. Unspoken gratitude brought a little smile to her lips. Years ago, when it became impossible to deny that Erika was no longer a little girl, he’d suddenly found it difficult to touch her, even in the most innocent of expressions of affection. She figured it out, in time, because she’d always been quite good at divining the unspoken, but it remained an imposing wall between them. Until it finally, for whatever reasons, began to erode away. And things were good again…comfortable. It remained a viable lesson in the way that no real relationship ever stays static, without evolving for better or for worse or into something different.

“Why don’t you just go on back to bed, Rikki.” His all-purpose cure. “It won’t do you any good to sit here and wonder and worry.”

“Probably not,” she said, rolling the empty juice glass between her palms.

Frank smiled gently and shook his head. “I know you’ve got a little something extra upstairs.” He tapped his temple for emphasis. “I don’t understand it, but I know it’s there. But don’t get to the place where you depend on it.”

Depend on it?
she
thought.
I’d lock it in a steel box and drop it in the Mississippi if I could.
She felt compelled to shout that out to him, set his thinking straight once and for all. But no, she wouldn’t raise her voice to him. Her mother, likely, but not him. Not Frank Jennings, all-time great Rational Man, champion of truth and logic, holder of the almighty CPA license. Because he, at least, wouldn’t deny the facts and refuse to speak of it. Picture her mom in here at a quarter past
twelve, checking up on her and what had driven her from her bed. Oh, what a laugh
that
was.

“Go to bed,” Frank said after standing up, and then he kissed her atop the head. He disappeared toward the bedrooms, swallowed by the shadows in the hallway.

Go to bed? Maybe later.

For now, she was content to sit in the sparsely lit kitchen, staring at the tiny crescent of juice that clung stubbornly in the bottom of her glass.
Wondering if she’d ever have a normal life. If she’d ever meet a man who could understand her strange knack (curse) and its sometimes awful implications. Understand it? Why, she’d be overjoyed at running across someone who might even go so far as to merely accept it. Forget understanding. But so far the track record had
been a poor one. Not that she’d ever sat down and spilled out the story…a sure way to send a guy backing out the door in retreat.
No, they all seemed to have
a sixth sense of their own, sometimes kicking in before they’d bedded her, sometimes after. Sometimes they bedded her anyway, another pubic scalp to dangle from
their belts, before dropping the bomb on her. That somehow things just weren’t right between them. The reasons varied, but the common denominator was always the same: that wary look in their eyes. You get to recognize it right away after a while.

It had probably been the better part of a year since she’d last accepted a date.

Erika wondered when, if ever, she would muster up enough courage to forge ahead into life on her own, instead of hiding where she’d grown up, safe and protected. She had the brains, she knew that. But good old-fashioned guts were something else entirely.
And if you’re so smart, Erika dear, why don’t you at least start by picking up some vibes about a better job in the classifieds?

She rinsed her glass in the sink sometime around twelve-thirty (mustn’t leave a sticky glass for Mom in the morning, oh no) and returned to her bedroom long enough to slip into some clothes…jeans and sandals and a denim shirt, faded all the way back in her days of trying to earn a psychology degree. It was the most comfortable shirt she owned, and whenever she wore it she knew that children never truly abandon those snuggly blankets and quilts that bring them so much comfort when they’re little…they just trade them in for favorite clothes when they get older.

She relaxed more when she was out in her car, rolling south on Bellefontaine out of Spanish Lake and into St. Louis, the nonstop talk on KMOX forgone in favor of some jazz on a station she didn’t know. But that music was just what the doctor ordered. Immersion in the city, which, like New York, never truly slept, made her feel anonymous. Fine by her. Now she was just like everybody else.

Normal.

She cruised until she found a theater playing an all-night string of horror films. At this time of night, it seemed that the only marathon showings were of horror flicks or triple-X epics. She had no objection to the latter, but alone and at this hour, she’d probably be better off with the gore.

The theater held a sparse population of other insomniacs, mostly solo or paired off with one other fellow zombie. Erika’s sandals met with faint resistance every time she tried to pull them from the tacky floor, until she settled in a seat that had seen better days before it had seen the business end of someone’s knife. She came in on the beginning of a gruesome little movie called
The Hills Have Eyes,
mean-spirited but engrossing nonetheless. The next movie followed shortly after three…one of those old Roger Corman adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe, this one
The Masque of the Red Death.

To a girl who had seen as many movies as Erika, the old sets of this film seemed so contrived, so out of date. So tacky. But she found it fascinating the way Vincent Price and the rest of his partying fools had decked themselves out in their gaudiest clothes, spitting in the face of Fate, until…