Dark Dreams, Pale Horses Read online

  She leaned over the table and peered out the window. “I see that pretty pink car you pulled up in.”

  “Right. Anything else. Anybody?”

  “Just lots of cars, and not one as pretty as yours.” She straightened and smiled. “You want your coffee warmed, sweetie?”

  The poor boy pointed at Jonathan. His gray face appeared to stretch into a wide, vaporous scream.

  Jonathan shook his head, chilled from the inside out.

  “You okay?” the waitress asked. “You look awful pale.”

  As he watched, the poor boy disappeared. One second there, the next gone. He evaporated like steam. Jonathan covered his eyes with one trembling hand and sighed. The waitress touched his shoulder, and it felt good—real.

  “Those prawns disagree with you, sugarpie?”

  He looked at her concerned face and a nervous smile touched the edges of his lips. “I’m—” He stopped. I’m going crazy, he was about to say. I’m seeing things…hallucinating. I think I might be losing my mind. The weight of her fingers reassured him. He took a deep breath and nodded.

  “I’m just tired,” he said. “More coffee would be great.”

  It was with trepidation that he left the café. He walked toward the Cadillac, flinching at every small movement, like a spooked child in a dark alleyway. He fully expected the poor boy to materialize from thin air and swoop down on him, but he made it to the Cadillac without incident and threw himself behind the wheel. Gooseflesh splashed across his arms and the back of his neck. A cloud of frosty breath puffed from between his lips. So cold—impossibly cold, given that the outside temperature had to be ninety-something. He stuttered the key into the ignition with a trembling hand, cranked it, and the engine roared faithfully into life. The radio, which had been playing jazz standards when he pulled into the lot, drilled dark sound into his ears.

  His mind warped. The poor boy flickered there. He saw a thicket of trees, too, with diamonds of sunlight sloping through the branches.

  “What’s going on?” His breath misted and crackled in the cold air. It felt as though a fat, fleshy string had been looped around his brain and was tugging it…trying to pull him east, back to Alabama.

  Forget. The. Dream.

  He lifted his leg and kicked the radio, several times, until it fell silent. A kittenish sound escaped him, hovered in the air in freezing particles, and gradually dispersed. He jerked the shift-lever into drive and screeched out of the parking lot. A tail of dust wagged from the Cadillac’s rear end.

  He didn’t touch the radio, or look into the rearview mirror, until he crossed the Texas state line an hour and a half later.

  Houston, Texas. The fifth city on the “Promised Land” Itinerary.

  The drive had not been enjoyable. The car was deathly cold. He had all the windows down to get as much warm air flowing through the interior as possible.

  Damn Stan Lannett.

  Damn this dented, freezing Cadillac.

  He wanted to go home, where Julie’s arms were warm and open. He wanted to slide behind the counter at the post office and sell first-class stamps, weigh parcels, and cash pension checks. He wanted to drive his own car, a five-year-old Renault Clio with an annoying rattle somewhere in the back, but at least the heater worked. The radio, too.

  Damn the poor boy.

  Damn this dream.

  The Interstate jammed as soon as he hit the city limits. Bumper to bumper for over an hour, which did nothing for his mood. It was almost seven o’clock by the time he checked into his hotel. He had planned to hit a bar called the Firehouse Saloon, where the music was all-Texas. The day’s events had brought about a change of heart. He didn’t need steel guitars, ten gallon hats, and line dancing. He needed Julie…her voice and reassurances.

  “Darling, I was sleeping. Do you know what time it is?”

  “I’m sorry. I needed to hear your voice.”

  “It’s one-eighteen.”

  “Yes.” His heart blazed with love for her. He could imagine her rushing/stumbling for the phone (nobody likes to hear the phone ringing in the small hours), fearing the worst. She would be standing in the hallway in her nightgown, the phone clasped to her left ear, blinking sleep from her eyes.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked.

  “I think I’m being followed,” he said.

  Jonathan told her everything, and she listened without interjection, although his ear—trained over twenty-two years of marriage—detected skepticism in her silence when he explained about the shadowy figure. There was another silence when he had finished, but it was contemplative and considerate. Jonathan knew that if they were in the same room, this was when she would stroke his hand, or his face, or throw her arms around him and hold him tight.

  He wished they were in the same room.

  “I love you, Jonathan,” she said. “Very much. And I miss you terribly. My goodness, how I miss you. I would give anything to have you home with me right now—”

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” Jonathan said.

  “And what I’m about to say comes from a place of great love, and compassion, and understanding.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You said that your sleep—what little you’ve had—has been filled with terrible nightmares. And the homeless person you saw in the doorway…he’s obviously embedded in your mind. He spooked you, Jonathan.”

  “Yes,” Jonathan said. “He did.”

  “I would never doubt you, and I have never believed in anybody more than I believe in you. But this shadow that you say is following you…I think you’re seeing something that isn’t really there. You’re sleep deprived, alone, and spooked. It’s like the child who sees someone in his closet, but when he turns on the light he realizes that it’s just his jacket hanging up.”

  “But I saw him,” Jonathan said softly. “He pointed at me.”

  “It could have been anyone—a man out strolling, pointing at something in the sky. What’s the alternative?”

  “I don’t know,” Jonathan sighed. “I’m afraid to know. Oh darling, I suppose you’re right, but what about today, in the café car park? I saw him again. I saw him. He pointed at me and …” He couldn’t finish, because all of a sudden it sounded preposterous.

  Julie finished for him: “He disappeared?”

  “Yes, but …” Jonathan propped his head in his hand. He saw his reflection in one of the room’s many mirrors, and thought he looked about twenty years older than he had when he boarded the plane at Heathrow. “I don’t know, Julie. I’m so tired.”

  “You said he was sort of…vague and smoky? And then he disappeared?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the waitress didn’t see him?”

  “I know how it sounds.”

  “Darling, maybe it was smoke. Or dust.”

  Jonathan remembered the whirl of dust he had kicked up when he ripped out of the parking lot. “Yes. Maybe.”

  “Sweetheart,” Julie continued, and her voice was like softly swaying waves. “Go to the nearest pharmacy and buy something that will help you sleep—Kalms, or whatever the equivalent is. Then get an early night. I promise you’ll feel so much better in the morning.”

  He had never wanted to kiss her more than at that moment. The vast distance between them seemed suddenly like a cruel and spiteful thing.

  “Of course,” she said, “you can always come home. That’s an option, too. Save this dream for another day, when you can plan it better, and you have more time.”

  Jonathan closed his eyes. That sounded wonderful.

  “I’ll pick you up at the airport,” Julie promised.

  “There’s nothing I’d like more,” he said. “But I don’t think there will be another day. Pink Cadillacs are not easy to come by. I got lucky with this one.” Although he didn’t feel lucky. “Unless we win the lottery so that I can hire one, or even buy one, I don’t think I’ll get an opportunity like this again. This is it, sweetheart—my one shot.”


  “I understand,” Julie said.

  “I thought Elvis was looking after me,” he continued sadly. “From Heaven…rewarding one of his loyal fans, you know?”

  She said nothing. That silent skepticism again. He wanted her in his arms so that he could divine yet more understanding from her heart’s steady rhythm.

  “It all seemed so perfect, after all. The exact model car. The pick-up and drop-off locations. It was all…perfect.” He sighed. His reflection looked like something drawn with pencils. Lots of shading. “But it’s just a coincidence. Nothing to do with Elvis, at all. He’s gone, sweetheart. Elvis has left the building.”

  “Listen to me,” Julie said after a short pause. “I’ll support whatever you decide to do. If you want to come home now, that’s fine. Like I said, I’ll be waiting at the airport. But I think you should buy something to help you sleep, get an early night, and finish your dream.”

  “My dream.” Jonathan said, and added. “It’s seventeen hundred miles to L.A.”

  “And you should enjoy every one of them.”

  They talked for a little longer, but Jonathan could hear the tiredness in Julie’s voice. He told her that he loved her, and missed her so very much, and then told her to go to bed. She had given him what he wanted—what he needed: love and reassurance. He blew kisses down the phone and hung up.

  There was a drugstore around the corner from the hotel. He walked there quickly, casting nervous glances over his shoulder, and bought a jumbo box of (promisingly named) Nighttime Sleep Aid. Yet more nervous glances as he hurried back to his room, but there was no sign of the poor boy. Still, he locked and secured his door, drew the curtains tight, and crawled into bed. The directions on the Sleep Aid box recommended taking two caplets before bedtime. Jonathan took four, swallowing them dry. He flicked on the TV and watched ten minutes of Desperate Housewives before falling to sleep.

  The TV played through the night, and Jonathan awoke at seven-fifteen the next morning to the weather report.

  It was, apparently, going to be a beautiful day.

  ALBUQUERQUE, NM.

  “What do you WANT from me?” Jonathan cried.

  The poor boy was outside his motel room, hovering at the window. Jonathan had seen his hands, curled and black, like strips of burnt paper. He had seen his face. A haunted, terrible scream.

  “Go away…please…please …”

  He had caught several glimpses of his shadowy form since leaving Houston yesterday. Nothing definite: a whisper of something dark seen over his shoulder when checking blind spots, or a sense of his long shape flickering in the rearview mirror, trailing the Cadillac as it rumbled northwest through the Lone Star State. You’re not really there, Jonathan thought over and over. You’re just smoke and dust. You’re tiredness. He had stayed last night at a hotel in Quanah, a small town in north Texas. He left his room just once, to buy a large bottle of water from a nearby gas station (the Cadillac may have been like the inside of a cooler, but everywhere else the heat was stifling). He thought he’d seen the poor boy on his return, wavering beside the Cadillac like the shimmer from a candle. “Fuck you!” Jonathan shouted across the lot at him. He opened the bottle and splashed water onto his face. It ran down the front of his shirt in icy, breath-sucking streams. “You’re not …” he spluttered and gasped. “… there!” He wiped water from his eyes. “You’re smoke.” And when he looked again there was no sign of the poor boy. No smoke or dust. He returned to his room, drew the curtains, crunched six Sleep Aid caplets, and crawled beneath the bed sheets.

  The Cadillac’s radio started switching itself on west of Amarillo. To begin with he was able to switch it off, but a few minutes later it would spark back into life and blare that terrible sound.

  He felt his soul freeze…his mind split down the middle.

  After a while, nothing worked, not the on/off button, not the volume control, no matter how hard he whacked the radio. He swerved onto the shoulder, brakes locked, plumes of dust frothing around the Cadillac’s baby-pink frame. He dug his iPod from his suitcase and drove to Albuquerque with his headphones on.

  It felt as if he were driving with cold hands clasped around his throat.

  He arrived in the early afternoon and checked into a motel in Old Town—on Route 66, in fact, adding another generous slice of American Pie. Determined not to spend another night cowering in his room, Jonathan took a swim in the motel pool and then walked downtown. His uneasiness started to subside and he went some way to convincing himself that the poor boy wasn’t—couldn’t be—real. He had no idea why the radio kept screaming that mind-bending noise, or why the car was so damn cold, other than it had rolled off the production line when “Rock Around the Clock” was the biggest hit record in the land, and was therefore susceptible to faults…like anything after it reaches a certain age. But the poor boy, he felt sure, was mental residue. Nothing more and nothing less.

  Ahhn gohnah awwwn oooo.

  A ghost of the mind.

  Jonathan took photographs of the Rio Grande, the scorched auburn peaks of the Sandia Mountains, and a few of the Route 66 signs posted along Central Avenue. His enthusiasm partially restored, he bought Julie a Native American necklace, then ate Mexican food and cooled down with a couple of iced cocktails.

  No shadows. No ghosts. Albuquerque seemed like a blessed place…until he got back to his motel. And then it all turned to hell.

  “What do you WANT from me?”

  He’d parked directly outside his room, with the Cadillac’s headlights—one slightly out of true because of the damaged front end—facing his window. He pulled the keycard from his back pocket, and was swiping it through the lock when the headlights suddenly flicked on. His shadow splashed against the door at a bizarre angle, like something thrown down in a hurry. Not only his shadow, but another: an elongated, too-dark thing that appeared to be reaching for him. Jonathan dropped the keycard, shrieked, and whirled on his feet.

  The poor boy was there—right there. Jonathan caught a glimpse of his twisted face, his yawning scream. Gray, scarecrow arms stretched toward him. His hands were too close. Frigid air slapped him, rippled his clothes. The strength deserted Jonathan’s legs and he slid down the door. The shadow loomed above him, as tall as a tree, it seemed.

  He could hear the Cadillac’s radio: loud, maddening sound. His mind tumbled, like a boxful of images down a steep gradient. Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis whirled like kites caught in disastrous cross-winds, looping and diving, trailing tails that flapped in bright colors. The cold stole the breath from his body—left him ransacked and bereft. He could feel the Cadillac’s headlights staring at him without pity, and could suddenly see the appeal in taking a baseball bat or tire iron to it, only he wouldn’t just dent the grille and the hood. No, he would reduce it to broken pink pieces: trembling panels and glass; dented chrome and scattered engine parts; fluids leaking like tears.

  I have to go back, he thought. I have to …

  His other hand slapped wildly at the ground and by chance happened upon the keycard. He snatched it up and sprang to his feet, turning away from the poor boy and the Cadillac. He swiped and waited an eternity for the little light to blink green. The poor boy’s shadow expanded. Jonathan felt his closeness, his coldness, and then the door unlocked with a little snick! and he threw it open, slammed it behind him, and screamed:

  “LEAVE ME ALONE!”

  Now, three hours later, Jonathan huddled in the far corner of his room with a bed sheet drawn up to his trembling eyes. Everything was bright; the Cadillac’s headlights were still shining. Shadows stretched across the walls and ceiling.

  “What do you want from me?” he whimpered.

  The poor boy’s silhouette floated in the window, clearly visible through the gauzy curtains. Countless times he had thrown the sheet over his head, closed his eyes, and counted to ten, hoping the poor boy would have disappeared the next time he looked. But this didn’t happen. His shape lurked in the window, as real—seemingly—as the
USS Wisconsin or the Mississippi River, or anything else he had seen on this hellish trip.

  He had tried the phone half a dozen times, thinking he could call the motel office, or even the police, but interference distorted the line: a swishing, gurgling sound, not dissimilar to the madness on the radio. Jonathan slammed the handset down every time, petrified that his mind would shatter.

  He shook his head.

  You can’t be real.

  The poor boy swayed in the window, magnified by the Cadillac’s headlights.

  “What do you WANT?” Jonathan could feel his mind flexing…twisting. It was all too much. Just…too much. Something inside him cracked. He stood up, dropped the sheet, and took two shaky steps toward the window.

  “I’ll do anything you want,” he whined. “Just leave me alone.”

  The poor boy appeared to lift his head. His silhouette was rimmed with gold.

  “Anything,” Jonathan repeated.

  He was back in Birmingham twenty hours later.

  UNPLUGGED (AN INTERLUDE).

  “Fuck the dream,” Jonathan said. His mind had come unplugged. Non compos mentis, baby. Mens sana no more. He wondered how Julie would react when she learned that his sanity had gone bye-bye. We’ll find you some help, she would say. Therapy. Psychiatry. Whatever it takes. And he would tell her to bypass the little guys, to dress him in one of those delightful jackets with the buckles in the back, and check him into the Laughing Academy.

  He shuffled on zombie legs from his motel room. The Cadillac growled and the poor boy shimmered. He didn’t check out—didn’t even close the door behind him. Birmingham, he thought, looking east, where the lights tracked along Route 66 like angels’ footprints. He climbed behind the wheel and the car closed around him. Icy and tight. His eyes shifted to the rearview and there was the poor boy, sitting in the back seat. This close, Jonathan could just see, through the haze of madness—the miasma between worlds—the letters UAB on his chest.