Lis Atcheson suffered from insomnia. She might go twenty-four hours without sleep. Sometimes thirty, thirty-six hours, spent wholly alert, completely awake. The malady had been with her for years but had grown severe not long after the Indian Leap incident last May. The nightmares would start fifteen or twenty minutes after she’d slipped under-dreams filled with black caverns, blood, eyes that were dead, eyes that begged for mercy, eyes that were cruelly alive…
Like a whipcrack, she’d be awake.
Eventually her heart would slow, the sweat on her temples and neck would evaporate. And she’d lie in bed, a prisoner of consciousness, growing ill with fatigue and teased by hallucinations. Hour after hour after hour. Gazing at the blue-green digital numerals that flicked ever onward. These numbers took on crazy meanings-1:39 seemed snide, the shape of 2:58 was comforting, 4:45 was a barricade; if she didn’t cross it asleep she knew she’d lost the battle for that night.
She could recite all sorts of facts about sleep. Einstein needed ten hours a day, Napoleon only five. The record holder for not sleeping is a Californian who was awake for 453 hours. The average person sleeps between seven and a half and eight hours, a tomcat sixteen. There was a fatal type of insomnia, a type of prion disease that destroyed the thalamus region of the brain. Lis owned exactly twenty-two books on sleep disorders and insomnia; sometimes she recited their titles in lieu of counting sheep.
“It’s just a way to avoid the nightmares,” Lis’s doctor had told her. “You have to tell yourself they’re just dreams. Try repeating that. ‘They’re just dreams; they can’t hurt me. They’re just dreams; they can’t hurt me.’ ”
She did as instructed but the awkwardness of this tongue-twisting mantra tended to waken her even further.
Yet tonight, Lis Atcheson-lying outside, bare-breasted and skirt to her thigh-felt sleep closing in fast. She grew more and more relaxed as she gazed at the greenhouse, the lights glowing ultramarine blue. She heard Owen slam the shovel onto a sandbag with a ring. She saw Portia’s shadow in an upstairs bedroom.
Odd images began to dance in her mind. She recognized this as lucid dreaming. She saw faces melting, people becoming dark shapes, vaporous forms, flowers mutating.
Lis pictured a dark-red, a blood-red Victorian John Armstrong rose and that was the last image in her mind before she slipped under.
It was perhaps no more than ten seconds later that a branch snapped, loud as a gunshot. Lis, her ruddy hands folded scrupulously on her chest like the effigy of a long-dead saint, sat up, instantly and irrevocably awake, drawing closed her blouse and pulling down her skirt, as she stared at the dark form of the man who appeared from a row of hemlocks and trod forward.
Easing the ’79 Chevy pickup off the back road onto Route 236 he goosed the lazy ticking engine until the truck climbed to seventy. He heard what he diagnosed as an ornery bearing and chose not to think about it further.
Trenton Heck sat nearly reclining, his left foot on the accelerator and his right straight out, resting on the bench under the saggy flesh of a four-year-old male dog, whose face was full of lamentation. This was the way Heck drove-with his leg stretched out, not necessarily with a hound atop it-and he’d bought a vehicle with an automatic transmission and bench seat solely because of this practice.
Exactly thirty-two years older than the dog, Trenton Heck was sometimes referred to as “that skinny guy from Hammond Creek” though if people saw him with his shirt off, revealing muscles formed from a life of hunting, fishing, and odd jobs in rural towns, they’d decide that he wasn’t skinny at all. He was lean, he was sinewy. Only in the past month had his belly started to roll past his waistband. This was due mostly to inactivity though some of it could be traced to chain-drinking Budweisers and to single suppers of twin TV dinners.
Heck tonight massaged a spot on his faded blue jeans under which was a glossy mess of old bullet wound dead center in his right thigh. Four years old (coming up on the anniversary, he reflected), the wound still pulled his muscles taut as cold rubber bands. Heck passed a slow-moving sedan and eased back into his lane. A big plastic Milk Bone swung from the truck’s rearview mirror. It looked real and Heck had bought it to perplex the dog though of course it didn’t; Emil was a purebred blood.
Heck drove along the highway at a good clip, whistling a tuneless tune between uneven teeth. A roadside sign flashed past and he lifted his foot off the accelerator and braked quickly, causing the hound to slide forward on the vinyl seat, grimacing. Heck eased into the turnoff and drove a quarter mile down a country lane of bad asphalt. He saw lights in the far distance and a few shy stars but mostly felt an overwhelming sense of solitude. He found the deserted roadside stand-a shack from which a farmer had years ago sold cheese and honey. Heck climbed out of the truck, leaving the engine running and the dog antsy on the seat.
Heck’s outfit tonight was what he always wore unless the temperature was crackling cold: a black T-shirt under a workshirt under a blue-jean jacket. Covering the curly brown hair that dipped over his ears was a cap emblazoned with the logo of the New York Mets. The cap had been a present from a woman who could recite all the vital statistics of the Flushing Meadow sluggers going back fifteen years (Jill had a great knuckleball herself) but he didn’t care for the team and wore the tattered hat only because it was a present from her.
He looked around uneasily and wandered in a slow circle through the dusty parking area. He glanced at the idling truck and concluded that it was too much of a beacon. He shut off the engine and lights. Enveloped in darkness, he resumed his pacing. Rustling sounded nearby. Heck immediately recognized the sound of a raccoon’s footfalls. Moments later he identified a residue of musk on a skunk’s ass fur as the animal passed silently behind him. These creatures weren’t a threat, yet as he paced he kept his hand on the black Bakelite ribbed grip of his old automatic pistol, dangling from an even older cowboy holster, complete with rawhide leg thongs.
Clouds filled the sky. The storm was overdue. Rain if you’ve gotta, he spoke silently though not heavenward, but keep that wind away for another few hours, Lord. I could use some help here and I could use it bad.
A twig snapped behind him, loud, and he turned fast, coming close to drawing down on a conspicuous birch tree. He knew of few animals in the wild that would snap twigs this way; he recalled only a towering moose lumbering along with her calves, and a seven-foot grizzly bear, gazing at Heck hungrily from the amiable haze of his protected-species status.
Maybe it’s a drunk deer, he thought, to cheer himself up.
Heck continued to pace. Then lights filled the parking lot and the car arrived. It parked with a leisurely squeal of brakes. Upright as a boot-camp sergeant, the gray-suited officer walked over the damp ground to where Heck stood.
“Don.” Heck offered a limp salute.
“ Trent. Glad you were free. Good to see you.”
“That storm’s on its way,” Heck said.
“That Emil of yours could scent through a hurricane, I thought.”
That may be, he told Haversham, but he wasn’t inclined to get himself lightning-struck. “Now, who’s the escapee?”
“That psycho they got at Indian Leap last spring. You remember it?”
“Who don’t, round here?”
“Snuck off in somebody’s body bag tonight.” Haversham explained about the escape.
“Crazy maybe but that shows some smarts.”
“He’s over near Stinson.”
“So he drove a ways, this nutzo?”