Slippin' into Darkness

9:45 A.M.

The dust cloud hung in the wake of the Jaguar, a severed shadow drifting slowly toward the dead pines.

Steve watched it go. He hadn’t meant to come to the old drive-in. Leaving the cemetery, he had only wanted to find a quiet place where he could think things through. He had seen the pines from the other side of the road. They had reminded him of the trees in his dream, of the meadow where Homer Price romped with the girl who had once painted his portrait.

Those memories drew him to this lonely place. He drove up the gravel road and found the gates to the abandoned drive-in standing open. After checking the bashed gates and the broken chain that had secured them-stray paint chips on the gates and a sprinkling of broken glass on the ground told him that the gates had been damaged by a blue vehicle which lost a headlight in the process-he investigated the drive-in grounds.

Near the playground, he found several crushed beer cans. Most of the cans contained a final swallow of Bud Dry. Someone had visited the drive-in as recently as last night. In addition to the beer cans, Steve found a broken 16mm projector and a spool of film. He raised the film to the light, and he didn’t need to see more than a few frames to know that he was looking at April Destino’s nightmare.

Right there. In his hands. On film.

April’s nightmare.

Steve shivered, recalling his initial shock, the reel still gripped in his hand. The film ensnared his fingers, a series of coils that were as dark and slick the scales of a Black Mamba. But he didn’t concentrate on that image. Instead, he watched the morning breeze worry the dust cloud that looked so much like a Jaguar’s severed shadow, forcing it against the dead pines. The cloud was speared by a thousand rust needles, and then it was gone.

The needles remained, blanketing the trees, thrusting at the blue sky above. Whispering coos spilled from the shadows, and Steve recognized the music of doves.

He looped the film onto the reel. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Doves were nesting in the tree just as they nested in his dream. Across the road Homer Price ran wild in a dark Hansel and Gretel forest. He wasn’t supposed to be here, standing alone with a nightmare in his hands.

He was supposed to be with April, with the doves, and Homer Price, in dreams.

The last time they talked, Steve didn’t even realize that April was saying goodbye.

“We should have been the all-American couple,” she said, “but other people got in our way.”

He tried to apologize for the hundredth time. “I might have changed that. I never believed the things they said about you, but I couldn’t bring myself do anything about it. I was afraid that I might make things worse, but I was just plain afraid, too. Bat and Derwin and Griz, even Todd, they were king shit back then. I was scared to go up against them alone. But we could have stood up to them together. When you quit school, I should have gone after you. I should have done something to let you know how I felt. But I didn’t. I guess, deep down, I was more afraid of you than I was of them.”

“Maybe it would have worked,” she said. “But maybe it would have made things worse. Facing them… I just don’t know. I couldn’t give them another shot at me. The knives were out. I was terrified. It was my word against theirs. They were good boys from good families.” She smiled. “Except for Derwin, that is, but everyone thought he was some Horatio Alger character, the way those sportswriters wrote about him in the newspaper. I was the poor girl who’d gotten a little too big-headed for my own good, the girl following in the footsteps of a divorced mother, if you believed the stories. A little too ambitious and a little too certain about my future. Everyone wanted to believe that I was really what those guys tried to make me. Just because I got wasted at that party. Just because I did that, they were willing to buy the rest of it. I wasn’t a good girl anymore.” She ruffled the stack of tabloids lying on the table, smiling wryly. “It’s all very American-we love to build people up, and we love to tear them down. There were lots of people in that school who enjoyed tearing me down.”

Tears welled in April’s eyes, like rain on a slate sky. “That was the worst thing. It was bad enough, the things people said, the way they spread the lies once word got out. Bad enough that I was too scared to talk to anyone.” She wiped her tears. “But I couldn’t get away from that night. I was stuck in that nightmare. Every night I’d wake up in a cold sweat, sure that I was sleeping on a pool table instead of in my own bed. Every night I’d see the faces of those assholes. And some nights, when it was really bad, I’d wake up and find welts on my body. It was so bad…you understand, my nightmare was so bad and so real that I was pinching myself, doing that asshole’s dirty work for him.

“And I couldn’t escape it. I’d set my alarm clock, wake up every hour and set it again so I wouldn’t sink into a deep sleep. But it didn’t work. Sooner or later I always slept. And sooner or later I always found my way into the nightmare. I didn’t know anyone who could help me find my way out. After a while, I figured out why-it was because everyone thought I belonged there. Even my own mother…the way she looked at me…I knew she believed it, too.” She shook her head, refusing to cry anymore. “Like I’d ever done anything to any of them. Some of those people will have to settle up.”

“Who? What are you going to do, April?”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll handle it.” The iron caste melted from her eyes as she turned to the soft light that spilled through the trailer window. “Things haven’t worked out for us. We’ve learned some things. With the Halcion, you’ve learned how to find your dream, and I’ve learned how to hide from my nightmare. But there are things we haven’t learned. I haven’t learned how to enter your dream and find that girl I used to be, and you haven’t learned how to enter my nightmare and put an end to it. Maybe we can’t learn those things. Maybe it’s impossible.”

Steve reached across the bed and took April’s hand. His heart was literally heavy; it pumped guilt instead of blood. April believed in psychic phenomenon. She had read somewhere about people sharing dreams. Something about people who were tuned in to the same psychic frequency gaining the ability to enter each other’s dreams. She was convinced that she shared such a bond with him. He wanted to believe in it more than anything else. He wanted to enter her nightmare and save her from her demons, but he’d never found a way.

And he knew, deep down, that his damned mechanical brain was to blame for his failure. It was missing a little something. A component called faith.

If only he could find some faith. He rubbed her hands- cold hands, warm heart – and he looked into her eyes and saw the dream April hiding there.

“We’ll find a way,” he said.

But she didn’t smile. “And if we do, what will happen then? You’ll have her. That seventeen-year-old who shares your dreams. You won’t want me anymore. I might not even exist. That scares me more than anything else.”

“But you’ll have your Six Million Dollar Man,” Steve said. “Your knight in shining armor. What will you need with a guy like me?”

That made April laugh. “It’s never as easy as it should be, is it?”

They made love. Steve closed his eyes and tried to imagine his dream, but he couldn’t quite get there. He felt guilty, even looking for it.

April gasped and dug her nails into his back, but he didn’t feel it the way another man would. He pictured her at seventeen, and the image brought him to climax and made him feel miserable.

He left without a word.

He returned late that night, because he needed her.

But April was gone. She lay on the bed with the dead springs, cold and dead, her eyes open but colorless, pill bottles scattered on the floor. A note scrawled on pink paper lay on his pillow:

I’ll see you in your dreams.

“Don’t go.” Steve said it over and over, standing all alone in April’s bedroom, but he knew that it too late. Pleading, begging-none of it would make a difference. April was gone, and he had been left behind. This moment together was going to end. Maybe they would never share another. Not in dreams, not in nightmares.

He hoped that he was wrong. He just didn’t know. April wasn’t there to tell him.

There was only one way to find an answer. In the living room, he sorted through April’s books and tossed several into a paper bag. All he needed was enough time to think things through. That was all. The books would tell him what he needed to know.

In the bedroom, he set the alarm on April’s clock radio. He opened the bedroom window and dangled the Sony outside by its cord, which easily bore the radio’s weight without coming unplugged. He eased the window closed and left as he always did-quickly, quietly, without drawing attention to himself. Just another John leaving a whore’s trailer.

The radio blared alive at six-thirty the following morning, tuned to a station specializing in soft sounds from the seventies. Elton John sang “The Crocodile Rock.”

At six-fifty, one of April’s neighbors turned on his hearing aid, heard some woman singing about muskrat love, and immediately called the lot manager, who contacted the authorities a few minutes later.

Fortunately, the call was well beyond Steve’s beat, well beyond the city limits. The county sheriff’s department responded quickly, performing their duties with businesslike efficiency. No fuss, no bother. The entire procedure was as simple as shoveling a dead dog off the highway.

To them, April Louise Destino was nothing more than a dead whore.

But April wasn’t dead. Not really. Steve knew that now. She was locked in his basement.

He clutched the reel of 16mm film. He kicked the mashed beer cans into a stand of skunk cabbage. And then he picked up the projector with the broken lens and heaved the big hunk of metal as far as he could.

It crashed, kicked up gravel, and tumbled against a twisted speaker-pole. Something was happening. It had started here last night. Steve could feel it. And it was something that he hadn’t caused, something that April hadn’t caused.

He didn’t know the cause, but he recognized the effect. Even his imagination-impoverished brain could process the clues he’d been given. His dream was becoming real. Doves nested in the dead pines that surrounded the drive-in. April’s dog, Homer Price, had been hiding in a eucalyptus grove near the cemetery, a cartoon eye trained on his mistress’s grave. And April Destino had stepped alive and whole from Steve’s dream into his fortress of solitude.

A sliver of film hung from the plastic reel, fluttering in the warm breeze. Some people said that movies were like dreams. Steve had never quite seen the analogy. Dreams, to him, were a rare commodity. Movies were a dime a dozen. But the 16mm loop was something different. It was the nightmare that April had suffered night after night in the dungeon of sleep.

Steve coiled the film and slipped the reel into his pocket. He tapped it; he felt the slight weight suspended in his pocket; it was very real.

And suddenly everything was very clear, and he realized how wrong he had been. Oh, he was in a dream all right. Slipping into a dream, one image at a time. His mechanical brain was correct in making that assumption.

But where was April?

April had stepped into Steve’s basement.

Doug Douglas had followed her.

But Doug wasn’t part of Steve’s dream.

Doug was part of April’s nightmare.

When April saw Doug, she started screaming.

Even a mechanical brain could sort it out.

April hadn’t stepped into Steve’s dream…

She had stumbled into her own nightmare.