in Tad’s closet—old pines and spruces, ancient hardwoods. The closet floor was covered with fragrant needles and leafy mulch. He had scraped at it, wanting to see if the floor of painted boards was beneath. It wasn’t; his foot scraped up rich black forest earth instead.
He stepped into the closet and the door closed behind him. That was all right. There was enough light to see by. He found a trail and began to hike along it. All at once he realized there was a pack on his back and a canteen slung over one shoulder. He could hear the mysterious sound of the wind, soughing through the firs, and faint birdsong. Seven years ago, long before Ad Worx, they had all gone hiking on part of the Appalachian Trail during one of their vacations, and that land had looked a good deal like the geography of his dream. They had done it only that once, sticking to the seacoast after that. Vic, Donna, and Roger had had a wonderful time, but Althea Breakstone loathed hiking and had come down with a good, itchy case of poison oak on top of that.
The first part of the dream had been rather pleasant. The thought that all this had been right inside Tad’s closet was, in its own strange way, wonderful. Then he had come into a clearing and he had seen . . . but it was already beginning to tatter, the way dreams do when they are exposed to waking thought.
The other side of the clearing had been a sheer gray wall rising maybe a thousand feet into the sky. About twenty feet up there was a cave—no, not really deep enough to be a cave. It was more of a niche, just a depression in the rock that happened to have a flat floor. Donna and Tad were cowering inside. Cowering from some sort of monster that was trying to reach up, trying to reach up and then reach in. Get them. Eat them.
It had been like that scene in the original King Kong after the great ape has shaken Fay Wray’s would-be rescuers from the log and is trying to get the lone survivor. But the guy has gotten into a hole, and Kong isn’t quite able to get him.
The monster in his dream hadn’t been a giant ape, though. It had been a . . . what? Dragon? No, nothing like that. Not a dragon, not a dinosaur, not a troll. He couldn’t get it. Whatever it was, it couldn’t quite get in and get Donna and Tad, so it was merely waiting outside their bolthole, like a cat waiting with dreadful patience for a mouse.
He began to run, but no matter how fast he went, he never got any closer to the other side of the clearing. He could bear Donna screaming for help, but when he called back his words seemed to die two feet out of his mouth. It was Tad who had finally spotted him.
“They don’t work!” Tad had screamed in a hopeless, despairing voice that had hollowed out Vic’s guts with fear. “Daddy, the Monster Words don’t work! Oh, Daddy, they don’t work, they never worked! You lied, Daddy! You lied!”
He ran on, but it was as if he were on a treadmill. And he had looked at the base of that high gray wall and had seen a heaped drift of old bones and grinning skulls, some of them furred with green moss.
That was when he woke up.
What had that monster been, anyway?
He just couldn’t remember. Already the dream seemed like a scene observed through the wrong end of a telescope. He dropped the cigarette into the john, flushed it, and ran water into the sink as well to swirl the ashes down the drain.
He urinated, shut off the light, and went back to bed. As he lay down he glanced at the telephone and felt a sudden, irrational urge to call home. Irrational? That was putting it mildly. It was ten minutes to two in the morning. He would not only wake her up, he would probably scare the living hell out of her in the bargain. You didn’t interpret dreams literally; everyone knew that. When both your marriage and your business seemed in danger of running off the rails at the same time, it wasn’t really surprising that your mind pulled a few unsettling head games, was it?
Still, just to hear her voice and know she’s okay—