Pascow came closer and then spoke.

“The door must not be opened,” Pascow said. He was looking down at Louis because Louis had fallen to his knees. There was a look on his face which Louis at first mistook for compassion. It wasn’t really compassion at all; only a dreadful kind of patience. Still he pointed at the moving pile of bones. “Don’t go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to, Doctor. The barrier was not made to be broken. Remember this: there is more power here than you know. It is old and always restless. Remember.”

Louis tried again to scream. He could not.

“I come as a friend,” Pascow said-but was friend actually the word Pascow had used? Louis thought not. It was as if Pascow had spoken in a foreign language which Louis could understand through some dream magic… and “friend” was as close to whatever word Pascow had actually used that Louis’s struggling mind could come. “Your destruction and the destruction of all you love is very near, Doctor.” He was close enough for Louis to be able to smell death on him.

Pascow, reaching for him.

The soft, maddening click of the bones.

Louis began to overbalance in his effort to get away from that hand. His own hand struck a monument and tilted it into the earth. Pascow’s face, leaning down, filled the sky.

“Doctor-remember.”

Louis tried to scream, and the world whirled away-but still he heard the click of moving bones in the moonlit crypt of the night.

17

It takes the average human seven minutes to go to sleep, but according to Hand’s Human Physiology, it takes the same average human fifteen to twenty minutes to wake up. It is as if sleep is a pool from which emerging is more difficult than entering. When the sleeper wakes, he or she comes up by degrees, from deep sleep to light sleep to what is sometimes called “waking sleep,” a state in which the sleeper can hear sounds and will even respond to questions without being aware of it later… except perhaps as fragments of dream.

Louis heard the click and rattle of bones, but gradually this sound became sharper, more metallic. There was a bang. A yell. More metallic sounds…

something rolling? Sure, his drifting mind agreed. Roll dem bones.

He heard his daughter calling “Get it, Cage! Go get it!”

This was followed by Gage’s crow of delight, the sound to which Louis opened his eyes and saw the ceiling of his own bedroom.

He held himself perfectly still, waiting for the reality, the good reality, the blessed reality, to come home all the way.

All a dream. No matter how terrible, how real, it had all been dream. Only a fossil in the mind under his mind.

The metallic sound came again. It was one of Gage’s toy cars being rolled along the upstairs hail.

“Get it, Gage!”

“Get it!” Gage yelled. “Get it-get it-get it!”

Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. Gage’s small bare feet thundering along the hallway runner. He and Ellie were giggling.

Louis looked to his right. Rachel’s side of the bed was empty, the covers thrown back. The sun was well up. He glanced at his watch and saw it was nearly eight o’clock. Rachel had let him oversleep… probably on purpose.

Ordinarily this would have irritated him, but this morning it did not. He drew in a deep breath and let it out, content for the moment to lie here with a bar of sunlight slanting in through the window, feeling the unmistakable texture of the real world. Dust-motes danced in the sunlight.

Rachel called upstairs: “Better come down and get your snack and go out for the bus, El!”

“Okay!” The louder clack-clack of her feet. “Here’s your car, Gage. I got to go to school.”

Gage began to yell indignantly. Although it was garbled-the only clear words being Gage, car, geddit, and Ellie-bus, his text seemed clear enough: Ellie should stay. Public education could go hang for the day.

Rachel’s voice again, “Give your dad a shake before you come clown, El.”

Ellie came in, her hair done up in a ponytail, wearing her red dress.

“I’m awake, babe,” he said. “Go on and get your bus.”

“Okay, Daddy.” She came over, kissed his slightly scruffy cheek, and bolted for the stairs.

The dream was beginning to fade, to lose its coherence. A ‘damn good thing too.

“Gage!” he yelled. “Come give your dad a kiss!”

Gage ignored this. He was following Ellie downstairs as rapidly as he could, yelling “Get it! Get-it-get-it-GET-IT!” at the top of his lungs. Louis caught just a glimpse of his sturdy little kid’s body, clad only in diapers and rubber pants.

Rachel called up again, “Louis, was that you? You awake?”

“Yeah,” he said, sitting up.

“Told you he was!” Ellie called. “I’m goin. Bye!” The slam of the front door and Gage’s outraged bellow punctuated this.

“One egg or two?” Rachel called.

Louis pushed back the blankets and swung his feet out onto the nubs of the hooked rug, ready to tell her he’d skip the eggs, just a bowl of cereal and he’d run… and the words died in his throat.

His feet were filthy with dirt and pine needles.

His heart leaped up in his throat like a crazy jack-in-the-box. Moving fast, eyes bulging, teeth clamped unfeelingly on his tongue, he kicked the covers all the way back. The foot of the bed was littered with needles. The sheets were mucky and dirty.

“Louis?”

He saw a few errant pine needles on his knees, and suddenly he looked at his right arm. There was a scratch there on the bicep, a fresh scratch, exactly where the dead branch had poked him.

in the dream.

I’m going to scream. I can feel it.

And he could too; it was roaring up from inside, nothing but a big cold bullet of fear. Reality shimmered. Reality-the real reality, he thought-was those needles, the filth on the sheets, the bloody scratch on his bare arm.

I’m going to scream and then I’ll go crazy and I won’t have to worry about it anymore-“Louis?” Rachel was coming up the stairs. “Louis, did you go back to sleep?”

He grappled for himself in those two or three seconds; he fought grimly for himself just as he had done in those moments of roaring confusion after Pascow had been brought into the Medical Center, dying in a blanket. He won. The thought which tipped the scales was that she must not see him this way, his feet muddy and coated with needles, the blankets tossed back onto the floor to reveal the muck-splashed ground sheet.

“I’m awake,” he called cheerfully. His tongue was bleeding from the sudden, involuntary bite he had given it. His mind swirled, and somewhere deep inside, away from the action, he wondered if he had always been within touching distance of such mad irrationalities; if everyone was.

“One egg or two?” She had stopped on the second or third riser. Thank God.

“Two,” he said, barely aware of what he was saying. “Scrambled.”

“Good for you,” she said, and went back downstairs again.

He closed his eyes briefly in relief, but in the darkness he saw Pascow’s silver eyes. His eyes flew open again. Louis began to move rapidly, putting off any further thought. He jerked the bedclothes off the bed. The blankets were okay.

He separated out the two sheets, balled them up, took them into the hallway, and dumped them down the laundry chute.

Almost running, he entered the bathroom, jerked the shower handle on, and stepped under water so hot it was nearly scalding, unmindful. He washed the dirt from his feet and legs.

He began to feel better, more in control. Drying off, it struck him that this was how murderers must feel when they believe they have gotten rid of all the evidence. He began to laugh. He went on drying himself, but he also went on laughing. He couldn’t seem to stop.

“Hey, up there!” Rachel called. “What’s so funny?”

“Private joke,” Louis called back, still laughing. He was frightened, but the fright didn’t stop the laughter. The laughter came, rising from a belly that was as hard as stones mortared into a wall. It occurred to him that shoving the sheets down the laundry chute was absolutely the best thing he could have done.