What the Night Knows

44

FOR A WHILE, EVERYTHING MOTORED ALONG ON CRUISE CONTROL, not exactly normal but not in-your-face bizarre, and then Zach began to dream about Ugly Al again—though with a difference. These new mind movies were megatons worse than nightmares. They were so radically real that Zach woke up to throw up more than once, barely making it to the bathroom in time.

The dumb-ass cliché carnival wasn’t a locale anymore. These dreams were set in their house or outside on their property, and though they were horror-movie stuff, they didn’t have a bonehead horror-movie feel. They felt like documentaries.

In the first of them, Zach climbed into the stupid playhouse high in the stupid cedar, where he never went in real life because it was a girl’s kind of place. Snow was falling, rungs on the ladder jacketed with ice, and he was bare-chested and barefoot in jeans. He could feel the snow spitting against his face, the slippery ice under his feet, feel it cracking and hear brittle chunks of it clinking and rattling down through the dark branches. Never before had he felt things so intensely in dreams: the texture of everything, the cold, his feet numb yet stinging from prolonged contact with the ice.

He could smell everything too, which never happened in other dreams. He smelled the cedar as he ascended through its boughs. He smelled the wet wood of the playhouse—and the blood when he went inside.

In throbbing lantern light, Naomi’s severed head stood in a puddle on the playhouse table. Stepping out of shadows, Ugly Al said, “I have lots of uses for her fine little body, but I didn’t need her head. You can have the little slut’s head.” Zach tried to back away, couldn’t. Ugly Al shoved the head into his hands. Zach could feel the slickness and fading warmth of the blood, her hair tickling his wrists. All this did worse than terrify him. He was grief-stricken, such anguish, he was sobbing, his throat felt raw from sobbing. His sister was dead. Maybe it wouldn’t have been as bad if it was only terrifying, but Naomi was dead, and a stake through Zach’s chest couldn’t have hurt as much as this loss. He wanted to put the precious head somewhere safe and cover it so that no one could see brilliant Naomi like this, beautiful Naomi reduced to this, but Ugly Al gripped Zach’s hands and forced him to bring the head closer to his face, closer, saying, “Give her a nice wet kiss.”

The dreams got a lot worse after that.

Zach knew that he should tell his parents, because the dreams were so godawful intense and so strange that maybe he had a freaking brain tumor the size of an orange or something. He intended to tell them, but then the dreams got sick in a different way from how they had been, still violent but also way perverse. Disgusting, demented syphilitic-monkey things happened in these supercharged nightmares, things Zach could never in a million years tell anyone about because they would think that he must be a walking pus bag, that he must be rabid-bat deranged if he could even imagine such grotesque stuff. In fact, he didn’t think he was imagining any of it, he felt like he was receiving this filth, as if it were being downloaded into his brain like a movie from the Internet, but he knew he’d never sell that idea to the psychiatrists.

On the night of October eighteenth, any lingering thought he had of sharing his nightmares with his father and mother was vaporized like a teaspoon of water at ground zero in a nuclear blast. Something happened that so shamed him, he had no option but silently to endure this torment until it either stopped or he went into full brain melt.

In the dream, Ugly Al tried to force Zach to do something so evil and repulsive that even Hell wouldn’t let him in if he did it. When he refused, Ugly Al produced a meat cleaver and chopped once, twice, three times at Zach’s crotch.

Screaming in a dry breathless whisper, he sat up in bed with a lap full of warm blood. After desperately, interminably fumbling for the lamp switch, he discovered that of course he wasn’t emasculated for real, only symbolically: He had wet the stupid bed. He had never been a sleep piddler as a little kid. Now nearly fourteen, he had turned his bed into a freaking lake.

Leaping out of bed as if it were a skillet full of sizzling-hot oil, he peeled out of his saturated underwear and threw them on the bedclothes. He stripped the bed fast, before the mattress sustained damage, and piled everything on his desk after sweeping the blotter and his drawing tablet to the floor. He would have preferred to heap the reeking bundle on his desk chair; but because he had become a godawful paranoid dumb-ass, the chair was bracing shut the closet door.

At 2:20 A.M., in fresh underwear and jeans, operating in super-stealth mode, not daring to turn on the hallway or stairwell lights, he carried the soiled sheets and clothes to the laundry room on the ground floor. There he had to turn on the lights to figure out how to load the stupid washer and get it going.

This being the totally wired twenty-first century when every third-world hellhole had nuclear weapons and your cell phone was able to do everything but read minds, you would think a load of laundry could be washed in a minute and tumbled dry in two, but no. He had to sit on the laundry-room floor forever, waiting to be discovered and humiliated—a thirteen-year-old, would-be-marine bed-wetter.