Ashley Bell

Louder, louder grew the footsteps. Definitely in the living room now. Slowly approaching the door to the kitchen.

Fear found Bibi then. Fear, but not blind fright, not panic. She backed past the table, toward the balcony from which she had entered.

The portentous footsteps of a man unseen stopped at the living-room threshold. The ensuing silence shared the character of certain silences in disturbing dreams: those hushes that settle on the scene as if, after a suitable pause, the curtain will close and the sleeper arise, though in fact it always proves to be instead the quiet just prior to the final shock that wakes the dreamer, gasping.

The faintest scraping-ticking arose as the knuckles of the hinge leafs turned against pivot pins in need of oil, and the door swung ever so slowly into the kitchen, toward Bibi. It blocked her view of whoever stood on the threshold.

Remembering the blood and ghastly eyes of the November corpse, she bolted. She had no awareness of escaping, however, until she found herself crashing down the last steps into the brick courtyard.

She looked up the stairs. No one there. Above, the door to the apartment was closed. She must have thrown it shut as she departed.

For a while, as the spent sky sluggishly refilled its reservoir with laden clouds drawn off the ocean, Bibi watched the apartment’s two kitchen windows. No face appeared at either. No suggestion of movement stirred through the gloom beyond those panes.

Eventually, she retreated to the wicker sofa on the back porch of the bungalow, where she had left a paperback and the notebook in which she composed the stories about Jasper, the lonely dog.

Later, her father appeared, ready to make his weekly inspection of the garage apartment, to check for roof leaks and other problems.

“Dad.” When he looked back at her from the bottom of the porch steps, she said, “Be careful.”

He frowned. “Careful of what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I heard someone up there.”

As larky as ever, he said, “Maybe that raccoon got down through the attic again. He’s damn well gonna pay rent this time.”

When he returned ten minutes later, he had found neither the raccoon nor any other uninvited lodger.

As the sky gathered rain to spend, young Bibi retreated to her room to write a Jasper story. Two weeks passed before she dared to return to the apartment.

13 (#ulink_22c92a81-7cf5-5d1e-9446-97af1f257b4e)

Young Again in Grief (#ulink_22c92a81-7cf5-5d1e-9446-97af1f257b4e)

ON THE DRIVE HOME FROM THE HOSPITAL, through the alien night, Murph and Nancy shared an awful, solemn silence. The mutual quiet became so oppressive, so suffocating, that several times one or the other tried to slash it away with words, but both were rendered incoherent and emotionally bewildered by the loss that seemed to lie in their future. The unthinkable loss.

With greater success in retail and real estate, they had moved from the bungalow three years earlier, into a two-story pale-yellow stucco house with sleek modern lines. They still lived in that part of Corona del Mar known as the Village, no longer three blocks short of the Pacific but only one and a half. From the roof deck, from one upstairs room, and from the front terrace on the ground floor, they had an angled view of the ocean that lay beyond the end of the east-west street.

Murph had been proud that two surf rats—as he still thought of himself and Nancy—could remain in touch with their beach roots and nevertheless earn a major piece of the California dream. That night, however, the house meant nothing to him, and in fact it seemed cold and unfamiliar, as if by mistake they had let themselves into a residence owned by strangers.

He and Nancy had always been understanding of each other, always available to each other, uncannily in sync in all circumstances. He assumed they would sit together at the kitchen table, the lights low, maybe in candlelight, and together work their way through the horror and the pain of what had befallen them.

As it turned out, neither of them was ready for that. As if the shock, still building force hour by hour, had not only cast them off their moorings, but also had washed them far back in time, both chose to revert to the coping mechanisms of their youth. No doubt they would come together soon, but not yet.

Nancy went into the ground-floor powder bath, snared the box of Kleenex from the counter, dropped the lid of the toilet with a bang, and sat down as from her came the most wretched sounds of grief that Murphy had ever heard issue from anyone. When he spoke to her and tried to enter the half bath, she said, “No, not now, nooo,” and pushed the door shut in his face.

Feeling helpless, useless, he stood listening to her despairing sobs, to the thin shrill animal sounds of utter desolation that tore from her between desperate ragged breaths. She sounded like a child, racked as much by fear as by misery. Her heartbreak sharpened his own until he could not stand to listen to her a moment longer.

If Nancy reverted to childhood in her grief, Murphy fell back into the angry rebellion of adolescence. He took a six-pack of cold beer from the refrigerator and carried it up to the roof deck. He wanted to punch someone, anyone, just punch and punch until he was exhausted and his knuckles were swollen. He wanted someone to pay—to suffer and be chastened—for the unfairness of Bibi’s cancer. But there was no one to hold responsible, nor anyone to comfort him, not in a world where what will be will be. Instead, he sat in a redwood lounge chair, opened the first can of Budweiser, and chugged it as he stared over his neighbors’ roofs, over the few lights along the last width of the bluff, stared out into the vast night sea, which lay black under a moonless sky, black under a higher blackness salted with icy stars, its presence confirmed only by the rhythmic rumble of the breakers punishing the shore. Halfway through the second beer, he began to cry. Weeping only fueled his anger, and the angrier he became, the harder he wept.

He wished they had gotten another dog after Olaf died. Dogs needed no words to console you. Dogs were the ultimate practitioners of the therapy of touch. Dogs knew and accepted the hard realities of life that human beings could not acknowledge until those obvious truths were exhaustively described with words, and even then there was often more bitter acknowledgment than humble acceptance.

Dogless, perhaps soon to be childless, after only two beers, Murphy felt lost. If he had tried to go downstairs to his wife at that moment, he would not have been surprised if he’d been unable to find his way off the roof deck.

With a crisp metallic sound, the ring-pull peeled open the third can.

14 (#ulink_2c285ebd-e06e-5f39-946f-a873def51b9a)

She Sat Up, Sat Up, Sat Up in Bed (#ulink_2c285ebd-e06e-5f39-946f-a873def51b9a)

THE DREAM THAT CAME TO BIBI THE FIRST NIGHT in the hospital was one that she’d been having on and off for more than twelve years, since before Olaf, the dog, had found his way to her:

She is ten years old, asleep in her bedroom at the rear of the bungalow in Corona del Mar. She does not thrash or whimper, but across her softly illumined young face pass tormented expressions.

Abruptly she sits up in bed, though this awakening is part of the dream in which she still resides. In response to three shrieks of a night bird, she throws back the covers and steps to the window.

In the courtyard, lit by only the grin of a Cheshire moon, two mysterious robed and hooded figures, tall and shambling, carry a rolled rug, moving toward the garage apartment. Visibility is poor, but Bibi intuits deformities in their limbs and spines.

When she realizes that the rug is in fact a corpse wrapped in a shroud, she knows they must be returning the dead man to the place of his demise. As though it feels the weight of her stare, one of the bearers of the body turns its head to look at Bibi where she stands at the window. She expects a dimly visible skull within the hood, the classic countenance of Death, but a worse revelation awaits her. The night brightens somewhat, as if an immense solar flare has bloomed on the farther side of the planet, reflecting fiercely off the crescent moon. The hood keeps more secrets than the better light reveals. But before the intruder turns away from her, she sees something that she cannot abide; the glimpse so terrifies her that she does not—cannot, will not—carry the image with her into the waking world, but instead confines it to the world of sleep, forgotten or at least repressed.

For the second time in the dream, young Bibi sits up in bed, breathless, trembling, chilled to the marrow. When she switches on the lamp, she discovers the shrouded burden that the hooded creatures had been carrying. The wrapped figure sits in a corner chair, for the moment still. Then it squirms in the confining shroud—and speaks.

The third time Bibi sat up in bed, she was awake and no longer a child. By repetition, the nightmare had lost much of its power years earlier. She no longer cried out on waking or trembled. But the skin creped on the back of her neck, and a thin sweat cooled her brow.

As on other such occasions, a rough voice followed Bibi from the dream, speaking words out of context: “… is everything.”

The voice was always the same one, but it did not repeat the same words every time. Sometimes he said, “supreme master” or “so sadly to seek,” or “the word was,” or scraps even more mystifying.

The other hospital bed remained empty. She was alone.

The ambient glow of the suburban sprawl laid a yellow faux frost on the window. Above her headboard, the lamp by which she’d written her impressions of the day was at its lowest setting, bright enough only to allow proper care when the nurse looked in on the patient.

The dream, which had been frequent when Bibi was ten, occurred less often as the decade passed. Now it came once or twice a year.

In the early days, she’d thought it might be predictive. But it was a dark fantasy that could never unfold in the real world.

Entering adolescence, she sometimes brooded about the persistent dream’s possible symbolic content. Because it recurred so often back then, she also wondered if she might be disturbed, psychologically unbalanced, as in crazy-waiting-to-happen. But no. No, that was the worst kind of young-adult-novel hokum: tragic young girl hiding her tri-polar psycho-paranoid true-werewolf nature from the world and from herself until she has a breakdown the very day before she would have been voted the Most Popular Girl in Ninth Grade and would have been kissed by the cutest bad-boy rebel in school. Even at that young age, she was remarkably self-possessed, confident of her right to be in the world and her ability to make her way on her own terms.

Now she dismissed the dream for what it surely always had been: nothing more than proof that finding the body by the dinette table had been traumatic—the abundance of blood, the blind and drooling eyes, the mouth gaping in a silent cry.

The bedside clock read 3:49 A.M. In little more than six hours, she would receive a diagnosis from her physician. She had no reason to fear Dr. Sanjay Chandra, just as she had no reason to fear the bearers of the dead in a dream. There were no boogeymen. She would be well, all would be well, all manner of things would be well.

Reclining once more, her head upon her pillow, she closed her eyes. She told herself where she would be a day from now, a week from now, a year. Soon she slept again, and this time her sleep was not sullied by a nightmare.

When the seizure struck Bibi, her body spasmed on the bed, and from her throat issued thick wordless grunts. The episode was mild and brief, however, and it did not wake her.

15 (#ulink_d844c16f-3c9a-5c69-8026-4d0867b6f1cd)

One Moment of Truth Among Many (#ulink_d844c16f-3c9a-5c69-8026-4d0867b6f1cd)