Dark Dreams, Pale Horses Read online

  The radio clicked on. Dark sound. His mind skipped like an old record.

  Birmingham.

  Jonathan pulled out of the parking lot, east on Route 66.

  “Fuck the dream, baby,” he said, curling his lip, trying to sound like Elvis. “Thank you very much.”

  He existed for the next twenty hours (although he had no concept of time) in a nightmarish state—reality like water, trickling through the sieve of his brain. He drove a feverish highway. The radio pulsed and shrieked. It tickered and mockered. He heard voices dripping through the insanity and thought at first that it was some talk station at the perimeter of its range. But the voices were slow and ruptured, uttering nothing, and he knew (insomuch as he knew anything) that he was listening to the dead speak.

  Blood. It oozed through the seams in the dashboard.

  And then it was gone.

  It washed over the display and drip-dripped to the floor. He could feel it on the steering wheel. It seeped through the cracks of his fingers.

  And then…gone.

  Where are you taking me? he asked the poor boy.

  A dead, random voice crackled over the radio: “Ladies and gentleworms, we apoptosis for this blank in our deadcast. Abnormal programming will deluge on the other side.”

  The poor boy glowed.

  Jonathan drove. He had no recollection of stopping for gas, or to rest. He glistened along the highway like a fat, pink tear, carrying the dead while his mind buckled under the weight. Town names flashed across his vision: Elk City, Checotah, Final Breath, and Pig’s Eye.

  Elvis hopped into the passenger seat in Memphis.

  Now I know I’m crazy.

  Young Elvis. The Sun Records days.

  “You’re takin’ care of business, Jonny,” he said. “You’re doing the right thing.”

  Sing to me, Jonathan said, and Elvis did.

  The Cadillac rumbled. Cold like January. Asylum on wheels. US-78, the sun like a bullet hole. Blood dripped and his mind ached. Holly Springs, Death Rattle, and Tupelo—the town that Elvis was born in.

  “Hey, mister,” Elvis said, but now it was Elvis as a boy. A poor boy, in fact, dressed in tattered pants and a thin cotton shirt. “Don’t you think it’s strange that the quickest route from Albuquerque to Birmingham takes you through Memphis and Tupelo?”

  I’ve known stranger things.

  “It’s like there’s a higher power at work, or something,” Elvis the poor boy said. “Gee, nice car, mister.”

  More blood. More dark radio sound. The final hour was the hardest. His fingers ached, curled around the wheel. His breath hung in frosty white garlands. The poor boy screamed in the back seat and Jonathan screamed with him. Icy tears curled from his eyes. His heartbeat matched the sound of the tires thrumming on the blacktop.

  How much of this is real?

  The poor boy trembled. Jonathan could see his eyes glimmering in the smoky swirl of his face.

  How much is in my mind?

  The Cadillac ripped into Birmingham. Jonathan had no idea where he was going. He was just following the feeling…the flex in his mind. He thought, perhaps, that the poor boy was taking him back to Stan’s house, but the Cadillac veered in a different direction, blustering into the rural tracks just outside the city. It thumped and groaned over unpaved road, jarring Jonathan’s frozen bones. He felt he would separate like confetti soon, and float around the interior on currents of chilly air.

  “It’s the end of the glow,” that dead voice on the radio said.

  Down a narrow track, barely wide enough for the Cadillac to squeeze through.

  “We’d sure like to shank you for bristling.”

  The Cadillac’s shocks sighed. Its pink body clattered.

  “We hope you had fun. Good night.”

  The radio switched itself off.

  Jonathan stepped on the brake.

  Scrubland to the right, pocked with rocks and strips of dead earth where nothing would ever grow, like scar tissue. A thicket of old trees to the left, branches conjoined, the spaces between their trunks sprayed with crabgrass. Jonathan stepped out of the car, the heat so sudden and powerful that it took his breath away.

  “Where am I?” he whimpered, turning in a circle, expecting to see the poor boy hovering close by—as he had been since the beginning of this nightmare. But Jonathan was alone. Tears rushed down his face. His legs sagged and he had to lean against the Cadillac to keep from falling.

  “What am I doing here?”

  Silence and emptiness.

  He moved away from the Cadillac, stumbling amongst the thicket of trees to his left. His limbs ached from being in the freezing car for so long and his heart worked with cramping, rather than pumping, motions. This is how they’ll find me, he thought. Wandering in the patchy wilds just outside Birmingham, Alabama, stark-raving mad. He wiped sweat from his brow—didn’t know if he was hot or cold anymore. The trees thickened. Sunlight sloped between the branches. Jonathan staggered, sweating, almost in tears.

  And then he stopped.

  “Dear Jesus,” he said.

  He was standing at the lip of a crevice in the earth. The light was shifting and uncertain, but when he looked down he could clearly see the thin body crammed into the narrow space, mostly covered with rocks and branches. He could see a wisp of dirty blond hair, part of one forearm—blackened and decomposing—and gold lettering on a green college T-shirt: UAB.

  Just a kid, Jonathan thought. A copperhead emerged from beneath the corpse’s decaying forearm and slithered between two rocks. That tuft of blond hair fluttered as if it were living.

  What did you do, Stan?

  Jonathan covered his eyes but it did no good.

  The world opened beneath him—a black, yawning chasm—and he fell into it. Endlessly. Gratefully.

  LOS ANGELES, CA.

  The boardwalk danced with a thousand lives and colors. It rippled in the moonlight, like a reflection on water. The ocean rolled, and beyond a few silver crests was a darkness that went on forever. Jonathan felt, suddenly, as if he were riding one of those waves. Not just him, but everybody. Everything. Life—all life—rolled across a vast body of light and dark, and spilled into the universe.

  There were no bounds. Not anymore. Nothing was impossible.

  “I did it,” he said.

  She looped her hand into his and squeezed firmly. Her closeness was like a fire in the dark, throwing all the light and warmth he would ever need.

  “Yes,” Julie said. “You did it.”

  “My dream,” he said, and looked at her…had to kiss her. Music thumped from one of the beachfront bars. Someone, close by, took a photograph, and the flash drenched them, as pale as the moon. “I’m so glad you came. I needed you.”

  “That’s why I came.” Her blue eyes glimmered—threw the boardwalk into shade.

  “From Norfolk, Virginia to Los Angeles, California. Not quite the way I had planned it, but …” He trailed off. His expression darkened.

  “What happened, baby?”

  He looked at the ocean. “I finished my dream.”

  “But you’re hurting.”

  He smiled and kissed her again. He had called her from Birmingham—told her that she was booked on a flight to L.A., and that he would meet her there. She had bellyached to begin with (but not too much, he noted) about getting the time off work, the credit card bill, feeding the cat. He told her that those things didn’t matter, that he needed her. And that was when she had asked, for the first time: What happened, baby? And he rep(lied) that nothing happened, he was fine…that he simply wanted her with him when he finished his dream.

  Julie knew, of course, that something was wrong. Something that ran deep. But he couldn’t tell her. Not yet. No way.

  UAB.

  Early morning, white sunlight sifting through the trees …

  Jonathan had stirred from unconsciousness, his eyes gradually creeping open and focusing on the letters UAB on the corpse’s T-shirt. He would later learn tha
t those letters stood for the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and that the body—the poor boy—crammed into the crevice and covered with rocks and branches belonged to a nineteen-year-old student named Travis Cady Burton.

  He sat up with a groan, his head spinning. Dew glinted on one side of his face. The drive from Albuquerque flared across his mind and he pushed it away. He didn’t want to think about it, even if it was hallucinatory, unreal. He didn’t want to go there. He’d be happy to never have to think of it again.

  A bad dream, he thought. That’s all.

  Jonathan got to his feet and stretched his aching body. The birdsong out here, in the middle of nowhere, was embracing.

  “Are you here?” he asked. He looked around, sure that he would see the gray figure shifting amongst the trees.

  Nothing; just him and the corpse.

  He walked back to where he had left the Cadillac, stumbling through the trees, needing their support. And there she was: a ‘55 Fleetwood Series 60, little-girl-pink, just like Elvis’s. The door was unlocked, the keys hanging from the ignition. Someone could have found it and driven away, easily. But that didn’t happen, of course, because no one ever came out here.

  Stan knew that. It was why he had buried the kid here.

  Jonathan looked at the damaged front end, then turned and gazed through the thicket of trees. He remembered Stan saying, I haven’t driven her since…and then faltering, his strange eyes shifting. Since I sold her, was how he finished. But Stan was a no-good liar. A killer, too.

  “Had you been drinking, Stan?” Jonathan caressed the rippled hood. “Were you scared?”

  He had a vision—too clear to be imagination—of Stan twisting the Cadillac through the narrow back roads, too drunk and too fast…hitting the kid…dragging his body out here and burying it in the woods…selling the car as quickly as possible …

  —Shit, I was hoping you’d come tomorrow—

  … and putting the whole dirty mess behind him.

  Convenient, but Stan hadn’t counted on the unexplainable—the out-and-out paranormal: Travis Burton’s deathless energy; his furious ghost.

  Jonathan got in the Cadillac. It was warm and comfortable. It felt like an old car. A classic. He looked in the rearview. Nothing but blue sky and a few blanched trees creaking in the breeze. He gunned the ignition and the engine purred, then he flicked on the radio: WVOK, crystal clear, just as Stan Lannett—the murdering son of a bitch—had promised.

  The Cadillac was heavenly. There was no sign of the poor boy.

  “It’s over,” Jonathan said.

  Sammy Masters was on the radio singing “Pink Cadillac” and Jonathan managed a fragile smile. Maybe there really is a higher power at work, he thought. He rolled the mighty car back onto the freeway, toward Stan Lannett’s house on the outskirts of the city. He didn’t know what he was going to do, but a number of scenarios bounced through his furious mind. He liked the idea of slapping the shit out of Stan, then tossing him into the Cadillac’s trunk and turning him over to Birmingham’s Finest. He also liked the idea of bombing the Cadillac right through his front door—leaping out at the last second, action-hero-style—and watching the whole craphouse come down on top of him.

  As it turned out, he didn’t get the opportunity to do anything.

  There was another car in Stan’s driveway—a Ford with Georgia plates. Jonathan parked on the road, and as he stepped onto Stan’s junk-dirty scratch of land, the front door opened and a man came out carrying a cardboard box. He descended the porch steps, but stopped when he saw Jonathan standing at the top of the driveway. He adjusted the box in his arms and gestured with a flick of his head toward the Cadillac.

  “Ain’t no returns,” he said.

  Jonathan frowned. He was about to ask the man who he was when he noticed his eyes: one green, one blue.

  “You must be Stan’s son,” he said.

  “Stan Junior,” he said. “Most folks call me Junior. Sometimes just Joon.”

  “Right, well …” Jonathan nodded toward the front door. “I’m here to see your father.”

  “That so?”

  “Yes it is.”

  “Well ain’t you shit out of luck?” Joon said, sneering. “That old fucka died two days ago. Choked on chicken bits, be damned. Eatin’ piss-drunk again.”

  “He what?”

  “He dead.” Joon drew out the word, turning one syllable into three: deee-yaaah-edd. “Guess you’s the one bought that old Caddy, huh? Well, if you want your money back, you’s gonna hafta to keep wantin’. Ain’t no returns, dammit.”

  Jonathan exhaled. All the nervous energy rushed from his body, although his legs kept trembling. He sagged, as if a couple of his interior supports had crumbled under the weight of the ordeal.

  “Bad enough I have to take care of his shit.” Joon shook the box. “IRS tight up his cornhole. The mortgage company, too, God and be damned. Now if you’d excuse me, I got me a long toot back to Macon.”

  He brushed past Jonathan, tossed the box through the Ford’s open rear window, and got behind the wheel. Jonathan looked at him, wanting to ask if the old man had suffered…if he had died alone…if he’d always been miserable. In the end, confused and emotional, all he could say was:

  “Chicken bits?”

  “Bone, or sumthin’.” Joon started the car. It backfired and rattled. “He wasn’t exactly what you’d call a picture of health, anyways. All that booze. Just a matter of time before he kicked the oxygen habit.”

  He dropped into reverse, backed out of the driveway, and rattled off into the distance. Jonathan gazed at the point at which he had disappeared (another backfire, resounding in the still afternoon air), thinking that Stan couldn’t have lived a particularly fulfilling life if all he had left behind was a son like Joon and a boxful of debt. It seemed to Jonathan that, at the end of the day, Stan Lannett got what he deserved.

  He looked at the empty house and whispered something he’d heard on the radio when cruising down to New Orleans. That stentorian, colorful voice sermonizing through the Cadillac’s speakers:

  Take the devil’s hand and …

  “Be sure your sins will follow you through the gates of hell.” A chill touched Jonathan’s spine. He turned his back on the house, got into the Cadillac, and drove away.

  He found an Internet Café, surfed the local news’ pages, and discovered the following: Travis Cady Burton was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham—a history major making strides toward his B.A. and a member of the Delta Sigma Phi fraternity. He had been missing since June 5th (the day before Stan had e-mailed Jonathan). Police were questioning students and teachers, and had searched Travis’s computer. So far, they had no solid information concerning his whereabouts and appealed for anyone with information to come forward.

  A photo showed Travis to be a beautiful, all-American boy with blond hair and a perfect smile. He was last seen wearing blue jeans and a green college T-shirt with the letters UAB printed across the front.

  Another photograph: Travis’s parents—his mother in tears.

  Using the bland, almost robotic font of the computer’s notepad, Jonathan wrote an anonymous letter to Birmingham’s Police Department, telling them where they would find Travis Burton’s body. He kept the letter simple, used no names, and offered no detail other than location. He printed it off and looked at the photo of Travis’s parents again. They would never know, exactly, what had happened to their son, or who was responsible. Jonathan’s heart ached for them, but there was nothing he could do, given that his own part in all of this was complicated, to say the least. Details and implications (not to mention lunatic explanations) would only end up being more traumatic for them. So Jonathan mailed the anonymous letter, knowing it would allow them to put Travis to rest, and hoping it would go some way toward helping them find peace.

  It was the best he could do.

  He booked two tickets to Los Angeles. One for Julie, leaving from Heathr
ow in two days (he was hurting and confused, and he needed her more than ever—needed her healing), and one for him—Delta Air Lines out of Norfolk, Virginia.

  Hurting or not, he was going to Los Angeles.

  He was going to finish his dream.

  “It’s beautiful,” Julie said. Her hand was small and soft, but he had never felt anything so strong.

  Starlight sprayed over Los Angeles, undaunted by the city’s reckless glow. The moon, barefaced and exquisite, made it look like a movie shot. Lights flickered in the Hollywood hills and the strips bustled with invented color.

  “It was a long road here,” Jonathan said. “And right now…I think it was worth every mile.”

  They had taken a cab back to the city and were walking, hand in hand, along Hollywood Boulevard, the stars beneath their feet.

  “Maybe you’ll tell me about it,” Julie said. “One day.”

  He thought about his journey—the dream—and wondered if it would stay with him forever, or if it would fade, the way dreams do. Reality is only real while you’re living it, and memory is less powerful than imagination. Perhaps allowing the lines to blur, and the dream to fade, would be the only way for him to move forward.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “And I was hoping for a ride in that pink Cadillac.”

  Jonathan raised his eyebrows and squeezed her hand. “Yeah, well…the pink Cadillac is with its new owner.”

  “The buyer?” Julie asked. “She liked it, then?”

  “No, a different owner,” Jonathan said. “I called the original buyer and gave her a more honest history of the car. I felt she needed to know. So she didn’t buy it, even though …” He stopped himself. He was about to say, even though it’s no longer haunted.

  “What?” Julie looked at him.

  “Even though she paid a deposit,” he said coolly. “So I found someone else.”

  “You found someone else?”