He closed his eyes and began to dream.
This time, the dream came without preamble.
In the dream he stood up from the sofa, went to the window and raised the sash.
The moon was low, but it cast a clear fluorescence over the back yard. In the dream, it seemed at first as if nothing had changed; there was the starry sky, the deep shadow of the forest, the bleached cedar fence obscure under ivy. Then he saw the grass moving in the wind, a curious sinewy motion— but there was no wind; and Tom understood that it wasn’t the grass moving, it was something in the grass—something like insects, a hundred or more, moving in a snakelike column from the house into the woods. His heart gave a startled jump and he was suddenly afraid, but he couldn’t look away or leave the window … somehow, that choice had been taken from him. He watched as the line of insect-things slowed to a stop and each one—and there were more of them than he had guessed—turned simultaneously to look at him with tiny saucer-shaped eyes, and they pronounced his name —Tom Winter—somehow inside his head, a voiceless chorus. He woke in a drenching sweat.
The TV was showing fuzz. He stood and switched it off. His watch said 3:45.
In the kitchen, the dishes were flawlessly clean.
He slept four more hours in his bedroom with the door closed, and in the morning he showered and phoned Doug Archer—the number on the back of his business card. “You wanted me to get in touch if I noticed anything strange.”
“That’s right … is it getting weird out there?”
“Just a little weird. You could say that.”
“Well, you called at the right time. I’m on vacation. The beeper gets switched off at noon. I was planning to drive up into the Cascades, but I can put it off a little while. How about if I drop by after lunch?”
“Good,” Tom said, but he was troubled by the note of happy anticipation in Archer’s voice.
If you talk about this, he thought, you’re opening one more door that maybe ought to stay closed—taking one step closer to ratifying your own insanity.
But was silence any better? There were times (last night, for instance) when he felt himself stewing in the sour juice of his own isolation. No: he needed to talk about this, and he needed to talk about it to somebody who wasn’t family— obviously not Tony or Loreen. Archer would do.
Dreams aside, nothing threatening had happened. Some inexpensive dinnerware had been surreptitiously cleaned: not quite Ghostbusters material. But it was the dream that stayed in his mind.
He told Archer he’d expect him soon and replaced the phone in its cradle. The silence of the morning house rang out around him. He walked to the kitchen door, opened it and took a tentative step outside.
The air was bracing; the sky was bright.
Tom had brought home a power mower from Sears on Wednesday but he hadn’t used it yet; the grass was ankle high. He was briefly afraid to put his foot down off the back step—a vagrant image of metallic insects with brightly focused eyes ran through his mind. (They might be there still. They might bite.)
He took a breath and stepped down.
His ankles itched with anticipation … but there was nothing sinister among these weeds, only a few ants and aphids.
He walked to the northern quadrant of the yard where the dream-insects had moved between the house and the woods.
He understood that by looking for their trail he was violating the commonsense assumption that dreams are necessarily separate from the daylight world. But he was past fighting the impulse. Yet another prop kicked from under the edifice of his sanity. (Tom had begun to envision his sanity as one of those southern California hillside houses erected on stilts— the ones that wash into the ocean in a heavy rain.) He examined the deep, seeded grass where the insects had seemed to be, but there was nothing unusual among the dewy grass blades and feathered dandelion heads.
He should have been reassured. Instead, he felt oddly disappointed. Disappointed because on some fundamental level he was convinced last night’s dream had been no ordinary dream. (No—but he couldn’t say exactly how it was different.)
He walked to the verge of the woods. In his dream this was where the broad trail of bright-eyed insects had passed into the moon-shadow of the trees.
The sun, this time of morning, did not much penetrate the deep Pacific Northwest pinewoods. There was a trail leading back through this tangle, but it began at the opposite end of the yard. Here there were only these old trees and this fern-tangle undergrowth, the smell of rotting pine needles and the drip of hoarded rainwater. The barrier between the forest and the sunlit yard could not have been more distinct. He braced his hands on a tree trunk. Leaning forward, he felt the cool, mushroom dampness of the forest on his face.
He turned back to the house.
In his dream, the insects had moved to the forest from the house. Tom paced back to the nearest wall. It was an ordinary frame wall sided with cedar, well preserved—the paint hadn’t blistered or peeled—but hardly unusual. This was the wall at the back of the master bedroom, windowless at this corner.
But if his dream had not been a dream, there must be some sort of opening here.
He sat on his haunches and pulled away handfuls of high, seeded grass from the concrete foundation where it rose some few inches above the soil.
He held his breath, gazing at what he found there.
The concrete was riddled with small, precisely round holes. The holes were all alike, all approximately as wide as the ball of his thumb.
His foot slipped in the wet grass and he sat back with a thump on his tailbone.
They must be bolt holes, he thought. Something must have been attached here. A deck, maybe.
But the holes in the chalky, water-stained concrete were smooth as glass.
“Be damned,” he said.
He plucked a stem of the tall grass and held it to one of the openings.
Like shoving a stick into a hornet’s nest, Tom. Real dumb. You don’t know what might be in there.
But when he pushed the long grass stem inside there was no resistance … no response.
He bent down and peered into the opening. He didn’t put his cheek hard up against the concrete foundation, because he couldn’t shake the belief that one of those tiny saucer-eyed creatures from his dream might be inside—that it might possess claws, teeth, a poison sac, a hostile intent. But he bent close enough to smell the rooty earth odor rising from the damp lawn … close enough to watch a sow bug trundling up the latticework of a thistle. No light radiated from the many holes in the foundation. He thought he felt a breath of air sigh out, oily and faintly metallic.
He stood up and backed off a pace.
What now? Do we call Exterminex? Dynamite the foundation?
Tell Archer?
No, Tom thought. None of the above. Not yet.
He explained everything else—the dishes, the dream—meticulously to Archer, who sat at the kitchen table drinking instant coffee and running his fingernail along the grain of the wood.
The telling of it made Tom feel foolish. Archer was sanity incarnate in his checkerboard cotton shirt and Levi’s: rooted to the earth right through the soles of his high-top sneakers. Archer listened patiently, then grinned. “This has to be the most interesting thing to happen around here since Chuck Nixon saw a UFO over the waste treatment plant.”
He would say that, Tom thought. Archer had been a legend at Sea View Elementary—“a world-class shit disturber,” as the gym teacher had declared on one memorable occasion. Maybe that’s why I called him, Tom thought: I still think of him as fearless.