the cowboy-silhouette wall lamp, couldn’t find it. Then there was light. A lamp on the nightstand from the opposite side of the king-size bed. His wife was staring at him in concern.
“Gar, are you okay?”
Garrett tried to compose his memory. “It’s all right... Rachel. Just another bad dream is all.”
“Another bad dream? Yet another bad dream, you mean. You sure you’re telling your shrink about these?”
“He says it’s just nostalgic longing for childhood as I cope with advancing maturity.”
“Must have been some happy childhood. Okay if I turn out the light now?”
And he was dreaming again, dreaming of Cedar Lane.
He was safe and snug in his own bed in his own room, burrowed beneath Mom’s heirloom quilts against the October chill that penetrated the unheated upper story. Something pressed hard into his ribs, and he awoke to discover his Boy Scout flashlight was trapped beneath the covers—along with the forbidden E.C. horror comic books he’d been secretly reading after bedtime.
Gary thumbed on the light, turning it about his room. Its beam was sickly yellow because he needed fresh batteries, but it zigzagged reassuringly across the bedroom walls—made familiar by their airplane posters, blotchy paint-by-numbers oil paintings, and (a seasonal addition) cutout Halloween decorations of jack-o’-lanterns and black cats, broom-riding witches, and dancing skeletons. The beam probed into the dormer, picking out the shelved books and treasures, the half-completed B-36 “Flying Cigar” nuclear bomber rising above a desk strewn with plastic parts and tubes of glue.
The flashlight’s fading beam shifted to the other side of his room and paused upon the face that looked down upon him from beside his bed. It was a grown-up’s face, someone he’d never seen before, ghastly in the yellow light. At first Gary thought it must be one of his brothers in a Halloween mask, and then he knew it was really a demented killer with a butcher knife like he’d read about in the comics, and then the flesh began to peel away in blackened strips from the spotlit face, and bare bone and teeth charred and cracked apart into evaporating dust, and Gary’s bladder exploded with a rush of steam.
Larkin muttered and stirred from drunken stupor, groping beneath the layers of tattered plastic for his crotch, thinking he had pissed himself in his sleep. He hadn’t, but it really wouldn’t have mattered to him if he had. Something was poking him in the ribs, and he retrieved the half-empty bottle of Thunderbird. He took a pull. The wine was warm with the heat of his body, and its fumes trickled up his nose.
Larkin scooted further into his cardboard box to where its back propped against the alley wall. It was cold this autumn night—another bad winter, for sure—and he wondered if he maybe ought to crawl out and join the others around the trash fire. He had another gulp of wine, letting it warm his throat and his guts.
When he could afford it, Larkin liked to drink Thunderbird. It was a link to his boyhood. “I learned to drive in my old man’s brand-new 1961 Thunderbird,” he often told whoever was crouched beside him. “White 1961 Thunderbird with turquoise-blue upholstery. Power everything and fast as shit. Girls back in high school would line up to date me for a ride in that brand-new Thunderbird. I was ass-deep in pussy!”
All of that was a lie, because his father had never trusted him to drive the Thunderbird, and Larkin instead had spent his teenage years burning out three clutches on the family hand-me-down Volkswagen Beetle. But none of that really mattered in the long run, because Larkin had been drafted right after college, and the best part of him never came back from Nam.
V.A. hospitals, treatment centers, halfway houses, too many jails to count. Why bother counting? Nobody else gave a damn. Larkin remembered that he had been dreaming about Cedar Lane again. Not even rotgut wine could kill those memories. Larkin shivered and wondered if he had anything left to eat. There’d been some spoiled produce from a dumpster, but that was gone now.
He decided to try his luck over at the trash fire. Crawling out of his cardboard box, he pocketed his wine bottle and tried to remember if he’d left anything worth stealing. Probably not. He remembered instead how he once had camped out in the huge box from their new refrigerator on Cedar Lane, before the rains melted the cardboard into mush.
There were half a dozen or so of them still