Dan Simmons' Banished Dreams

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Banished Dreams consists of excerpts from an early draft of my novel Summer of Night, to be published by Putnam in February of 1991. These dreams will not be a part of Summer of Night. The first editorial response to my novel was to cut Summer by 50%. I restored 95% of that 50%, arguing that if the novel were to fail, it would fail on my terms. But the dream sequences, as well as the subplots arising from these dreams, I did allow to be expurgated.

I’m sorry now that I did.

Summer of Night is about the secrets and silences of childhood. Set in the summer of 1960, the story tells of a group of kids and how they band together to fight a supernatural evil that has been festering in the belfry of the old school which dominates the center of their small Illinois town. The kids – Dale, Lawrence, Kevin, Duane, Harlen, Mike, and Cordie – are mostly sixth graders, eleven-year-olds, and the summer that has been violated by this growing evil is the last summer of their childhood. The last summer of their innocence.

In a real way, I feel that the summer of 1960 may have been the last summer of our nation’s childhood. The dreams – nightmares – that Dale and Kevin and Mike were to suffer were glimpses of the New Dark Age of violence and chaos and national decay that they were to experience in their lifetimes. In our lifetimes.

At least one of the children in the novel had no such nightmares. It was because he had no future life to dream about. At the time, the other kids thought him lucky to have no bad dreams.

But sometimes remembering the nightmares can be more important than recalling the pleasant dreams. Thus, the resurrection of these banished dreams…

-- Dan Simmons, October 1990

DALE’S DREAM

Dale’s nightmare that night was unlike anything he had ever dreamed.

A long, black car – a convertible of some sort – was moving down a street lined with people. People waved, their mouths moved as if they were cheering, but Dale could hear nothing. The image itself changed, wavered, shifted from black and white to color and then back to black and white as if he were watching a film. The car turned a corner and moved down a less crowded thoroughfare.

Dale was not in the dream; he was merely observing. It was daylight, there was nothing frightening occurring in the dream – only the heavy black car turning again, moving ahead – but Dale felt the greatest sense of dread he had ever experienced. He tried to close his eyes, but he had no eyelids. He was not there. But the dream continued.

The open car had people in it. Dale could see the back of the driver – dark hair, dark suit – a woman and a gray-haired man behind the driver, and in the rear-most seat, two others: a woman in a pink suit and a man with a full head of chestnut hair. Both the man and the woman were waving. Beyond the car, Dale could now see, were motorcycles, uniformed policemen. The motorcycles turned left and the heavy black car followed them. There were few people along the roadside now, but the man and the woman continued to wave. The woman in pink seemed to be holding flowers in her lap.

Dale’s point-of-view shifted: he saw the black car from the side now, the side the waving man was on. The background blurred into streaks of green and pastels, as if the dream film had slowed.

The woman waved in slow motion. The man waved in slow motion. In the midst of his dream, Dale heard his own thoughts: I know him. I’ve seen him …

The man jerked forward. Even in slow motion, the movement was quick and violent. He raised both arms, elbows high, hands extended rigidly toward his throat. Dale thought that the man with the chestnut hair looked like a football referee signaling some illegal procedure. His face, although slightly blurred, was visibly contorted, as if from anger. The back of the man’s head exploded in a pink and gray mist.

Dale had never seen true violence. People died in droves in his television westerns and the occasional films he saw, but the deaths were quick and sanitary. On television there was no blood, or at most a trickle of read at the corner of the mouth. In the movies the deaths were more active, but still as symbolic as a No play. Dale had never seen a TV or movie victim die with his eyes open. Movies had not evolved the technology of blood bags and exploding flesh.

It did not matter. Dale knew instantly that what he was dreaming – what he saw – was real. Real violence. Real blood. Real brains misting the air and splattering the face and dress and pillbox hat of the woman next to the murdered man. Real death.

But he was not dead yet. Dale watched, had no choice but to watch, as the man lurched forward and seemed to be driven back by some secondary impact. Red and pink and gray and white still spread like the rind and meat and juice of a watermelon which Dale had watched his Uncle Henry shoot with a .30-.06 years before.

Dale had never considered that a man’s head would explode and shatter in precisely the same way as that watermelon.

The man lurched again. Fragments of his skull were clearly visible as they arced out of sight or tumbled across the rear deck of the open car. The man’s scalp rippled and flapped like a cheap wig attached only at the front; the chestnut hair that had seemed so clean and alive an instant before looked as squashed and bloody as a roadkill squirrel now.

The man slumped against the woman to his left. The woman opened her mouth as if to scream, glanced behind her, screamed again – still without noise – and clambered over the corpse of the man to crawl out on the trunk of the car. Even in the blur of slow motion, Dale could tell that the vehicle was accelerating. The woman in pink crawled on all fours toward the spare-tire-shaped ridge at the rear of the trunk.

She’s trying to grab a piece of his brain before it falls off, whispered a cold, flat voice in Dale’s mind. The voice made Dale cringe in the night as if someone had suddenly whispered from under his bed in the dark. She wants a piece of his brain as a souvenir. She doesn’t want it to get dirty.

Another man, running in agonizing slow motion on the street behind the car, made a desperate leap, caught a handhold on the trunk, pulled himself up, and shoved the woman to safety an instant before she tumbled off.

Something white, something lodged on the spare-tire molding, slid out of sight.

The black car accelerated to the right, out of Dale’s dream vision. Pastel blurs in the green field behind became faces, began to scream.

Dale screamed.

#

His mother pulled the cord that turned on the light. Lawrence sat up, mouth open, staring at his eleven-year-old brother.

Dale sat up panting, gasping, not believing in the light or the Roy Rogers blanket wrapped in knots around his knees, or in the bedside table or the comics still lying there. Dale stared at the south window, at the darkness pressing to get in there – pushing at the fragile panes like the blackest, coldest water at terrible depths, only an instant from flooding the room with its coldness, drowning them all, suffocating them in cold …

Half-awake, Dale screamed again.

Lawrence clutched the tattered panda bear he called Teddy. Dale’s mother stepped forward, wrapping her bathrobe tighter as if the room was already flooded with cold. She sat next to Dale on the bed, put her arms around him.

“Dale, Baby. It’s all right.” She looked down at the same instant Dale did. “Oh, honey.”

Dale did not scream again but he closed his eyes. He had wet himself. The sheets and blanket were soaked.

For an instant, just for an instant before he had clenched his eyes shut and turned his face tightly to his mother’s shoulder, for that instant the wet sheets had been pink, and red, and splattered with a moist-grayness and shards of white bone sharper than lost teeth.

KEVIN’S DREAM

Dale and Lawrence were playing wiffle ball with their dad in the backyard when Kevin came over.

“Hey,” called Kevin, “playing a real game?”

“Uh-huh,” said Dale from his place in right field near where the grass grew green and deep over the septic tank, “home run derby.”

Dale’s dad grinned. “Come take my place, Kevin. I want to go in and listen to the real game, and these guys are clobbering me. They’re hitting more homers than Ernie Banks did on the show.”

“Awww, Dad,” whined Lawrence. “You promised to keep pitching.”

“You’ve had five outs, Tiger,” said his dad.

“Uh-uh,” said Lawrence. “I only swung and missed once.”

Dale pounded his mitt. The leather was dark and well oiled, but the laces were coming loose for about the dozenth time since his dad had given him the mitt he had used as a kid. “This is home run derby, pea brain,” he called in to his brother. “You’re out everytime you hit something that’s not a homer. You’ve had about ten.”

“Have not!” yelled Lawrence.

“One more,” said their dad. “Then Kev steps in to relieve me and I head for the shower.”

Lawrence dropped into batter’s stance and wiggled the wiffle ball bat.

Their dad wound up and pitched a creampuff over the plate.

He was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his weekend chinos. That morning they had gone to services at First Pres and then taken their obligatory Sunday ride in the country – this despite the fact that their dad had gotten in late the night before after driving eleven hundred miles through three states on his sales route the previous five days – and then they had come home to play their usual Sunday game of wiffle ball.

Their diamond was the plot of grass closest to the house in the long backyard. Lawrence stood at the plate near the juncture of the flagstone walk and the imaginary line running in from the clothesline. The left field wall was the Henderson’s fence; the right field fence was their own house. Dale imagined that the different levels of roof were the various decks at Yankee Stadium. So far Lawrence hadn’t hit one into the upper deck.

The ball arced in, Lawrence clobbered it, and Dale drifted back toward the dining room windows and caught it easily with his bare hand.

“That’s eleven, runt,” he said. “Get your little BB behind into the field.”

“Dale,” warned his dad, but he was smiling. He tossed the ball to Kevin. “Take over, Kev. I’ve got a beer and a shower waiting in there somewhere.”

They played for another round of batters. Dale got six runs, Lawrence insisted on another bat and got zero, and Kevin hit two homers. Then they called it quits. Home Run Derby was fun for a while, but it got old quick. Dale’s dad predicted that the Home Run Derby TV show would be on when Dale and Lawrence’s kids were middle-aged, but Dale had his doubts.

They sprawled in the shade of the young tree between the clothesline and the vegetable garden, and Dale’s mom came out with three glasses of lemonade on a metal tray.

They drank in silence for a minute and then Kevin said, “Go to the Free Show last night?”

Lawrence answered. “Yeah. It was really neat. All about some guy who invents a time machine and goes into the future and kills warlocks and stuff.”

“Morlocks,” said Dale.

Kevin nodded. “H.G. Wells.” Kevin didn’t read much outside of school, but he and Dale shared a love of science fiction: Kevin for the science, Dale for the fiction. “Of course, actual time travel isn’t possible,” Kevin said.

“Grandfather paradox,” said Dale. They’d talked about this stuff before.

Lawrence flopped on his back and started blowing into a leaf he’d found.

“I had a dream last night,” said Kevin. “A really weird one.”

Dale froze with his glass half-raised. “A dream?” They never talked about dreams.

“Yeah. A really weird one. It was like it really happened.”

Dale leaned forward. “Was it about some guy getting shot. In the head? A real guy?”

Kevin looked up from contemplating his lemonade. “Some guy getting shot? Who said anything about somebody getting shot? It was about a spaceship blowing up.”

Dale let out a breath. He wasn’t surprised that Kevin dreamed about spaceships -- he must have about six dozen models of them in his basement: imaginary rocket ships -- including one that looked like it was from Destination Moon, Kev’s favorite movie and Dale’s third favorite, and another stage-three job straight out of the Willey Ley books that Kev loved so much, and stream-lined spaceship cruisers that Kevin’s dad had collected back in the days of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials, each ship made of metal and weighing about ten pounds. Besides all of these, Kev had models of real rockets: Redstones and Nikes and the Bomarcs that looked like V-1’s, Deltas and Thors and even a fancy Atlas-ISBM made of silver-painted wood that Kev’s dad had bought from some engineering display company.

No wonder Kev dreamed about spaceships, thought Dale.

“It was ... weird,” Kevin said again in a voice that sounded odd to Dale. “It was like I was there.”

“Where? In the spaceship?”

Kevin shook his head and took a sip of lemonade. His adam’s apple seemed more prominent than ever as it bobbed up and down. “No, not in it. Watching it. It was sort of like Cape Canaveral looks in the LIFE photos, only the gantries were bigger ... a lot bigger ... and the spaceship was, well, weird.”

“How, weird?”

“Weird like it was sort of part plane and part rocket.”

“Oh,” said Dale, “like Man Into Space?” The Wednesday-night show starring William Lundigan was his favorite. Kevin’s favorite, too.

Kev shook his head. “Uh-uh, nothing like that. This thing was like a big jet plane or something strapped to the back of a big rusty tank. Like a water tower tank.”

“A big rusty water tower ...” began Dale, but Kevin wasn’t listening.

“Rusty. The plane part had engines, but I couldn’t see any flame coming from them when it blasted off. And there were two booster rockets on either side of the rusty tank. They were sort of like the Redstone, only bigger. Lots bigger. I’m not sure how big this spaceship was, but it seemed huge. I got the feeling that the plane part was about as big as a constellation...”

Dale tried to imagine the three-tailed commercial airliner strapped to a rocketship. He couldn’t. “You mean it had propellers?”

Kevin didn’t look up. He was staring at the grass, his gaze unfocused, and he continued staring as he spoke. “No, stupid, it didn’t have propellers. I think even the jet plane part was a rocket. Anyway, I was sitting in a big room full of ... sort of like computers in the movies, only with televisions ... and there was a big screen. Three or four of them. And if I turned, I could see the real rocket out these big windows, even while it was on the TV in front of me. I was grown-up, and this sort of plaque near my place at the long table full of computers said FIDO.”

“Fido?” said Dale. “Like a dog’s name?”

“I don’t know. I think it may have stood for something.” Kevin’s lower lip was quivering. For a crazy second, Dale was afraid that his friend was going to start crying.

“Anyway,” continued Kevin, “I was sitting there, and suddenly this rocket thing blasted off. I could hear words in these earphones I had on, but I could feel the noise from the blast-off it was so loud.

“And then I’m standing up ... I’m still attached to this computer stuff with a cord ... and I’m shaking my fist and saying something like, Go, baby, go! And there’s this voice coming over loudspeakers like? This voice is real calm, and it’s saying -- We have main engine start ... four, three, two, one, and lift-off, lift-off of the twenty-fifth space shuttle mission, and it has cleared the tower.

“And in the dream, this guy next to me ... his name was Richard Covey and he was a CAPCOM, but I don’t know that that means either ... he says, Houston, you have it ... and I’m standing there watching, out the windows now, and this rocket’s rising and sort of turning, tilting over sort of like a gyroscope is controlling it, but still going up, and I hear the pilot’s voice in my earphone say, Houston, roll program.”

“Pilot?” said Dale. Kevin did not hear him.

“And then this rocketship is climbing higher and higher, until it’s just a ... you know ... a contrail. But I can see a big picture of it on one of the big screens in the front of the room, and the rockets are burning strong and I can see the exhaust from the three engines on the plane part now, and then I look at my screen and I see they’re getting to something I know is called Max-Q, and I say in the microphone I have hooked to my earphone -- Throttle down to ninety-four, and somehow ... somehow I see from the TV screen full of numbers in front of me that they’ve done it!”

Dale watched Kevin’s face. He was frowning, with the distracted, slightly troubled look that Dale has seen when Kevin is doing an especially hard math problem his father had given him. Behind them, Lawrence had lost interest in the conversation and crawled off toward the garden, making tommy gun noises as he went.

“Then this guy near me says something like T-del confirms throttles, thank you,” continued Kevin, his voice a monotone,” and then I said, Throttle up. Three at one-oh-four. And then the CAPCOM guy next to me said, Challenger, go at throttle up ... and then ...”

There's more... I'll get to it.

Kevin stopped. Dale was horrified to see tears in his friend’s eyes. Kevin never cried. Never. Not even the time he’d got his hand caught in the spokes of Mike’s bike and lost three fingernails.

“Then what?” whispered Dale.

Kevin looked at him. He made no attempt to brush away the tears. “Then it blew up,” he whispered back. “I saw the smoke trail change to a huge cloud ... like a mushroom cloud almost ... and the two rockets I’d seen on the sides, they went flying off on their own, leaving their own contrails, and the ship just blew to bits. In the dream ... in the dream, I remember saying The filter has discreting sources ...”

Dale felt close to crying himself. “What does that mean? Dis ... whatever?”

Kevin rubbed his lower lip as if that would stop the quivering there. “It meant that radar saw all the bits and pieces of the ship. And the seven people on board. They were falling into the ocean in bits and I was the only one who knew for sure.”

Dale frowned. “Seven people. How’d you know there were seven people?”

Kevin shook his head, started to take a drink, and noticed for the first time that his lemonade was gone. He set the glass on the tray. “I dunno. But there were. And I knew that someone I’d helped kill them. And you want to know the weirdest part?” He tried to smile.

“What?”

Kevin sat up, brushed grass from his starched T-shirt. “One of them was a teacher,” he said. He tried to say it lightly, almost laughingly, but the laugh was phony.

Dale rolled over onto his back and looked up through leaves at the blue sky. “A teacher? Going up in a rocketship?” He threw an acorn at Kev. “That is weird.”

MIKE’S DREAM

That night, Mike had his dream.

I agree. Any thoughts on what Mike might dream of?

And, damn the editing thing being turned off ... "someone" needs to be changed to "somehow" in the above segment...

He is crouching in ferns and mud and high grass. It is daytime but almost dark here so far beneath the jungle canopy. The air is hot and as moist as a wet blanket against his skin. Others are moving around him in the half-light, he can hear their voices, and somehow he is able to put names to the voices: Kellerman, Zip-top, Bazella, AfroMan, Geller, Pud, Dinkbait, and others.

“They’re fucking spiders,” Geller is saying. “Goddamn motherfucking trapdoor spiders, y’know.”

Mike feels himself nod. Oddly, the profanity does not upset him the way it normally does. It is mere noise; he is used to it.

He is aware that he is dreaming, even while he is aware that it is not a dream. His dream consciousness is tired -- more tired than Mike has ever been -- and he wonders if he’s been dipping into Pud’s cache of uppers and downers. Even as he thinks this, Mike dreamily wonders what uppers and downers are.

“Should we get the fucking L-T up here?” Zip-top asks. Mike looks up and can see him in the greenish, acquarium-thick dream light. Zip-top is a soldier -- although more ragged and unkempt than any soldier Mike has ever seen in a book: the man is wearing a ragged green T-shirt under a soiled camouflage shirt with the sleeves rolled up; his helmet is scrawled on and there are cigarettes stuck in some sort of elastic band -- one of the visible pieces of graffiti says FUCK FOR PEACE -- and the soldier is not clean shaven like John Wayne and the guys in the movies; Zip-top’s stubble is orangish in the green light. He is crouching and holding some kind of rifle that Mike can’t recognize. Mike realizes that he is also crouching and also holding such a rifle.

With the quick acceptance of dream-logic, Mike notices his own legs and forearms and realizes that he is a man. At least a young man. He hears his own voice:

“Don’t bother the L-T. I’ll check it out.”

“Fuck, O’Rourke,” says Bazella from the shadows. “You think you got to personally check all these fucking dink tunnels?”

Mike shrugs. “I’m used to it.” He hands Zip-top his rifle and begins peeling out of his gear. The pack on his back is very heavy. He gives it to waiting hands. Mike pulls off his shirt -- realizing as he does so that he is wearing no undershirt, nor underpants he thinks as he feels the scrape of moist fabric against his own bare thighs. Crotch rot, he thinks tiredly to himself as if answering a question. Even as he wonders what the words mean, he feels himself thinking: Goddamn fucking sense of someone here with me again. Got to concentrate. Got to wake up. Nobody here but us boonierats, Michael. No spooks but Charlie. Time to wake up and go to work.

He pulls a pistol from his waistband. Mike looks at it and realizes it looks a lot like Dale Stewart’s toy .45 automatic, except this one is heavy and real. His hands expertly slide out the magazine, check to make sure its fully loaded, slap it back in, and pull back the slide to bring a round into the chamber.

Geller hands him an olive-green flashlight that looks like the right-angle Boy Scout flash that Mike’s wanted to buy for two years but can’t afford. Someone else hands him two heavy stones that he realizes aren’t stones at all. He looks down and watches himself clipping two hand grenades to a leather strap running over his bare chest. The grenades have smooth surfaces and don’t look anything like the ones in the John Wayne movies.

“Fuckin’ Bazella already dropped in fuckin’ concussion and frags when you were on your fuckin’ way up, Sarge,” AfroMan’s voice informs him.

“Kick ass,” Pud says behind him.

“Get’s tight,” says Dinkbait, “back you fucking ass out of there.”

“Yeah,” Mike hears himself say, and he leans forward and goes headfirst into a hole.

The hole is barely wide enough for his shoulders, and Mike feels his own panic growing and cresting alongside his dream-self’s controlled panic. He wiggles deeper, arms ahead of him, flashlight and pistol extended but no light on yet. The hold smells of earth and decay and Mike wonders if he has crawled into a grave. He wiggles, feels roots and something slick and slimy against his face, bites his lip rather than call out, and slithers forward another meter or two, feeling rocks grating against the sores on his back and sides, feeling something sharp scrape him down the length of his spine.

It’ll open out in a few meters. Always does. The thoughts are his and not his.

Instead of opening out, the hole grows steeper and narrower. Mike feels his strangely enlarged body filling the narrow gap and claustrophobia closes over him like a rag over his mouth, stopping his breathing, making his heart accelerate with panic. He controls the panic and concentrates on moving forward, the blood rushing to his head as he hangs almost vertically here, his arms extended into blackness, no light from above now -- either his body has blocked it or he’s already taken both of the curves the dinks build into their tunnels to save them from the frag grenades.

Suddenly his shoulders force their way through and he is sliding, falling forward, no walls to the tunnel to slow his descent.

Mike wants to scream and flail for handholds, but his dreamself keeps him quiet, keeps his hands gripping the flash and the pistol.

The fall seems to go on forever but it can’t be more than two or three seconds, five or six feet. He hits hard, scraping his chin and biting his tongue, his elbows slamming into mud and stone. Mike keeps his grip on the two items in his hands, glad that his finger is on the trigger guard rather than the trigger. He switches on the light.

A small burrow, no more than three or four feet tall. Three smaller tunnels disappear between tree roots. Mike’s in a sort of tunnel foyer, a junction.

Dinks like the left one for some reason. More booby traps on the right, usually. He takes the left tunnel even as he thinks What are dinks?

Concentrate. Fucking concentrate, man. There’s a shout from above, but it is muffled by the turns in the tunnel and sounds klicks away.

He crawls along the tunnel -- five meters, eight meters -- following every twist and turn, rise and fall, seeing scrape marks where someone has crawled this way before but otherwise no sign of anything. No cast-off gear. None of the usual littered propaganda leaflets that they like to use as toilet paper. No NVA web belts or any of the rice cups. Mike squeezes and wiggles, shining his light around bends before putting his head there, waiting for noises that do not come.

Wrong motherfucking tunnel probably. Mike had never said that word before in his life and rarely thought it. He’d have to go to confession just for using it in his dream.

Wry amusement. Confession. Jesus, fuck. I’m tireder than I thought.

The tunnel widens, rises vertically tree feet, and opens onto a small cave. Mike comes up with pistol extended, flashlight swiveling.

Empty hammocks. Bloody gauze littering the dirt floor, empty boxes, ration bowls. Nothing moving.

Infirmary. Pretty fucking crude. Usually they try to get wood floors in if they’re here a while. Fucking moles. Fucking spiders.

There are two tunnel entrances on the near wall, only one on the far wall. But the soil looks harder packed there. Mike checks for maps or other intelligence, finds nothing but more bloody gauze and some discarded hypodermic ampules, and goes into the far tunnel.

This one goes deep. Twice it widens out, once into a cave with five-foot ceilings and another row of hammocks. He finds some papers there -- printed material, probably the usual propaganda stuff, but one of them has some sort of printed map on it so he stuffs that into the big pocket above his knee and crawls on.

He is thinking about finding a way out now, but the panic is gone and the excitement is waning. Dry hole he hears himself think. He moves slowly, still wary of triplines and booby traps, still shining the light around every curve, but not expecting anything now. The whole tunnel complex has a sense of having been abandoned some time before, of emptiness.

The tunnel widens again as he comes around a bend and Mike’s flashlight and extended hand brush against a man’s face.

“Jesus fuck!” Mike’s finger almost closes on the trigger, exerts enough pressure to raise the hammer, stops there.

The face is less than two feet from his own. One eye stares at him; the other is invisible beneath the writhing mass of maggots there. All the man’s teeth are visible since the lips are gone, the flesh around the mouth pulled back tightly, and for a second Mike thinks that the face is trying to say something, that the features and muscles there are working, but then he shifts the flashlight and sees the roil of movement below and through the tattered skin and realizes that it is merely more worms at work.

The corpse has one arm raised against the tunnel ceiling, wrist splayed, fingers poking stiffly against the man’s forehead just where an open wound shows bits of splintered skull and a mushy grayness between ridges of crusted blood looking like the lips of a second smile. Dark things are moving in the opened vault of cranium. The position of the hand makes the corpse look like it’s saluting, and Mike wonders if some dink with a weird sense of humor left him there like that or if Charlie crawled in here on his own to die.

Mike gasps for air, trying to breathe through his mouth. The corpse is swollen to twice normal size, the extended chest and bloated belly almost blocking the tunnel. The thing’s shirt pockets are open and empty. It carries no courier pack or belt pouches, and nothing in the world would make Mike rummage through the bloody mess below the waist where the pockets should be.

Mike shifts back half a meter, his lower body wiggling back around the curve. Then he stops to think. This tunnel has been rising for some time. To find another way out, he’d have to backtrack all the way to the hospital and take one of the other routes. Mike feels that this is an exit tunnel; experience suggests that this is the way out, that the dink did crawl in here to die.

The other tunnels might open into a maze, maybe run to bunkers Alpha Company’d overrun the day before, but if Mike went exploring through all that he’d be underground for another four or five hours and come out half a klick from where the guys were waiting for him. This tunnel would probably come out the usual twenty meters or so from the bolthole he’d come down.

Mike takes a breath and starts to squeeze by the corpse.

No! No! Don’t! He’s trying to shout to his dreamself.

Shut the fuck up. Jesus, I’m tired. Arguing with my fucking self. Just shut up. You don’t have ambush duty tonight. You can get a couple of hours sleep. Just shut the fuck up and keep crawling.

The dreaming Mike shuts up and watches with growing horror as the other Mike ... as [i[]he[/i] begins crawling by the corpse.

He uses the flashlight to try to move the head, push back the swollen chest, but there is no room. The thing’s faces gives like cheese wrapped over wood, and the chest and belly sound liquid -- just waiting to slosh their contents on him.

Mike wedges his back against the dirt and rock wall and begins shinnying past, angling the light back to make sure he’s leaving some room.

There’s no room. Mike tries to hold his breath, but the stench of the corpse fills his nostrils, slides down into his lungs, seems to soak into his skin. Been here a couple of days, he thinks. No longer. Things rot fast in the jungle. The dink is wearing a black ring on his third finger; just behind the dark stone, white bone shows through.

Mike slides past the head, seeing the teeth gleam less than two inches from his eyes. A noxious odor -- worse even than the terrible stench -- suddenly emanates from the open mouth. Mike resists the impulse to flail and crawl, there is no room for that, and holds back a giggle that might be the beginnings of hysteria. Halitosis. The smell is charnel house and cesspool mixed with sulfur.

Mike crawls. The thing’s teeth scrape against his bare chest. His grenades move the head and the one eye follows Mike’s progress. He can feel slickness against his lower chest and belly and wonders if the maggots are coming off on him. He doesn’t look down.

There’s not enough room to get by the bloated lower half of the thing without touching it. Mike shoves the belly back in with his forearm, feeling the stiff, thin muscle wall there and the liquid heaviness behind it. Please, God, don’t let it give way on me. Dear Jesus and Holy Mother, don’t let this thing shit its guts out on me here. Don’t let me drown in worms and offal, please, God. I’m sorry for all the nasty things I’ve said and done. Just don’t let this thing come apart on me.

Mike’s face is against the taut, black fabric of the thing’s shirt and flesh. Too late, he realizes that he should have turned his back to the corpse and let the roots and rocks scrape him as he crawled by. He can’t turn now. The tunnel is too narrow.

Another half a meter. I think I may see daylight when I’m past.

It is like being trapped in a narrow pipe with a huge balloon filled with water. Only it’s not water gurgling behind the rotting flesh Mike’s struggling past. The corpse seems to shift as he crawls by it; his boots find leverage on the thing’s jaw and he gains another few inches. The flashlight is revealing things Mike doesn’t want to see now: besides the terrible head wound, this guy looks like somebody has machine-gunned him in the crotch. The lower legs are all right, but from the knees up it’s a jellied mass of rags and torn flesh and bone.

Mike averts his face as far as he can as he wiggles by something he’d thought was a torn and tuberous root, but what may be the man’s dislocated penis and balls. The worms are very busy down here. Besides the smaller, backyard variety, Mike can see the big red worms they’re always unearthing when digging foxholes, and some bright yellow things that look like small snakes. He tries not to think about the in-country bloodsucker variety that crawl up the opening of a man’s penis and eat their way up your urethra.

He’s almost past. His boots kick at the corpse’s head as Mike’s chest squeezes by the thing’s knees. The worst is past. Even the smell is better here. He’s sure he can sense a breeze.

His arm encounters something narrow and taut. Mike glances up and sees the shoelace extended stiffly as if caught on something, he thinks Poor shit didn’t tie his shoues, and then he pushes the flashlight against the final obstruction, even while another part of his mind -- a part left behind by terrible fatigue, and terror, and the presence of this strange second person in his brain -- this part is screaming No! Wait! Goddammit don’t ...

The explosion is very loud in the narrow tunnel, and very bright.

Mike wonders if he’s back in a vertical section of the tunnel again as he slides three or four meters backward, tumbles around the bend, slams up against a wall. He feels nothing, sees nothing. He eyes are filled with retinal echoes, but the light is gone: flashlight gone. He tries to reach for it but there is no feeling in that hand ... that arm. No feeling anywhere on the right side of his upper body.

Stupid asshole.

The thought is distant.

With his left hand, tingling, already beginning to hurt with a pain that Mike knows will defy even morphine, he feels his body, feels for his right arm.

There is a disembodied hand lying on his chest. Wet ribbons, ropes against his face. Entrails. His guts are wrapped around him like Christmas tree garlands. Mike feels a foot in a boot lying above his head at an impossible angle. I’m in fucking pieces. Fucking gook claymore blew me in fucking pieces. He fumbles at his severed hand with tingling fingers, trying to fit it back on at a wrist he can’t locate.

Oh, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, shit.

He’s weeping in the darkness. Then he remembers the corpse. Realizes that some of the bleeding, sinking pieces of anatomy he feels and senses around him could be -- have to be -- the dink’s. Some are probably his though.

Mike uses his tingling left hand to feel for the separated hand he’d held a second before. He’d dropped it on his chest but it wasn’t there. Had it been a right hand or left hand?

Oh, Jesus.

The pain is starting now. Worlds of pain, promises of an entire universe of pain. He’s never known such pain, and this is only a little taste of what’s coming. His left hand finds his right shoulder, upper arm -- So far so good -- and a sudden, ball-numbing end to the arm just below the elbow. Something sharp there. Root maybe. Bone stub maybe.

Mike weeps and tries to move. He doesn’t know which way is up. There’s dirt behind him, dirt below the one leg he can feel curled up beneath his ass.

Tunnel’s caved in. I’m buried. Guys don’t have any idea where I am.

Mike weeps. There’s a scrabbling on his chest. Something, maybe the severed hand, closes fingers around his throat.

#

Both Mr. and Mrs. O’Roarke responded to Mike’s screams. His sister Peggy peered in from the narrow hall, clutching her bathrobe closed and staring with wide eyes.

Mike was sitting in the center of the bed, gasping loudly, fingers clenched in sheets pulled free, the rest of the bedclothes on the floor. Mike’s dad stood by the bed, his body seeming to fill the small room, while Mike’s mom sat on the bed and set a palm against the boy’s forehead. “It’s all right,” she said softly. Mrs. O’Rourke was not a soft-spoken or sentimental person -- Mike had once heard her called shrewish by ladies leaving the A&P where she worked -- but when someone was sick, she had the gentle touch and pleasant no-nonsense manner of a good nurse. Now she calmed Mike with her touch while simultaneously feeling for fever.

“What in heaven is going on?” asked his dad. Mr. O’Rourke owned no bathrobe and his cotton pajama tops ballooned far out over his huge belly. Mike shivered and resisted the urge to scream again or to start crying.

“Nightmare?” asked his mother.

Mike nodded, trying to focus on the bed, and on the light from the kerosene lamp they’d carried in, and on the presence of his family around him. He heard Peggy talking to one of his other sisters, telling her to go back to bed, saying that Mike had just had a bad dream. He tried to smile.

“Do you remember it?” asked his mother. She was not a superstitious woman -- even many of the tenets of the Church were too mystical for her tastes -- but she put some stock in dreams.

Mike shook his head. The movement was a lie; he remembered every aspect of the nightmare, if nightmare it was. He would never tell his parents. He would never tell anyone.

His father ruffled his hair. “You’re getting too old to scream in the night ‘cause of a little nightmare, Tiger. Go back to sleep.” He ambled back down the stairs to his room. The small house seemed to quake from his weight.

Mike’s mother stayed for a minute, shooing Kathleen back to bed when the younger girl peered in sleepily. “Michael’s just had a bad dream. Off to bed with you now, Little One.” Kathleen padded back to the room she shared.

Mike was shivering. His mother had him stand while she tucked the sheets back in and remade the bed, pulling the spread taut, but she’d pulled a blanket from the chest at the foot of the bed and draped it around him. He continued shivering despite the blanket and the warm air coming through the screen.

His mother tucked him in, murmuring about him coming down with a summer cold. She could call the back-up paper boy so that he didn’t have to do his route in the morning.

“That’s OK, Ma,” he said, noticing that his voice sounded hoarse and strange. “I’ll be able to do it.”

His mother looked doubtful. “It’s almost three A.M., Michael. You need your sleep.”

Mike forced a smile. “It’s OK. It was just a dream. Can’t even remember it now. I’m not sick ... see, I’ve stopped shivering ...” He was able to stop the quaking long enough to show her. “I’ll do the papers.”

“We’ll see,” said his mother, tucking him in again and giving him a quick goodnight kiss -- something she’d not done for a couple of years. “No more bad dreams now, understand?”

Mike nodded and watched the light recede down the stairs with her. Through the thin wall, his sister Mary said, “What’s next, Mikey? Gonna wet the bed?”

He said nothing and in a few minutes the upstairs was again filled with the absent density of sleep. But Mike did not want to sleep. He sat up, found the blanket his mother had set back in the chest, and wrapped it around himself, and went to kneel by the window set low, just above the floor.

It was very dark out. No stars, no moon. The nearest streetlight was two blocks away. Across First Avenue, the corn rustled softly although the big linden leaves on the branches below his window were not moving to a breeze. Mike lay on his stomach and looked out the window, breathing in the cool air and trying to regulate his heartbeat.

It was just a nightmare.

He blinked back tears. Whatever else it had been, it wasn’t just another nightmare. He was tired -- achingly tired, as if the fatigue his dreamself had carried with him had been given to the real Mike -- but he had no intention of going back to sleep. Just two hours until he could get up and dressed and go off to do his paper route.

Sleep was like a tunnel, and Mike had no intention of going back in.

Something moved on the front lawn, under the linden tree. Mike leaned forward, set his nose against the screen, and tried to see between the leaves and the eaves on the small front porch.

Someone had moved out of the deep shadows under the tree near Memo’s window and stepped out onto the road. Mike listened for footsteps on asphalt or the crunch of the gravel on the roadside, but there was no sound except for the silken rub of corn tassels.

He had only caught a glimpse, but Mike had seen the round shadow of the top of a hat. Too perfectly round to be a cowboy hat. More like a Boy Scout hat.

Or the campaign hat Duane had described on the soldier he’d called a doughboy.

Mike lay by the window, heart still pounding, holding sleep off like an enemy that had to be kept at bay.

printed by Roadkill Press