Oh, God . . .
“Just a dream,” she muttered to herself. At least she knew that. “It’s just a dream, so I don’t have to worry about it.”
“That’s right,” Dr. Sallee agreed. But why did he look dead all of a sudden? Face drawn and pallid as old wax? The dark suit he wore was dust-tinged, its fabric frayed.
. As though he’d just climbed out of a coffin after being buried for a long, long time.
“The death of Freudian dynamics, I suppose,” he said, disheartened. “Psychological thesis is dead in this day and age, I’m afraid. I’m dead.”
For whatever reason, then, Patricia laughed.
“But you’re right,” he repeated. Why had his voice reduced to a dark gurgle? “This is a dream, so you don’t have to worry about it.”
Patricia peered at him through smoke.
“And you don’t have to worry about what you do.”
The smoke engulfed him. The fire blazed behind her, so she ran, though she still felt no fear. Her feet crunched twigs and leaves, the earth warm beneath them. Her sexual urgency—her feminine heat—rose with the flames. At one point she broke through the trees, the smoke hanging behind her, and realized she was wandering along the edge of a lake—no. . .
A pond.
The realization seized her then.
This is the pond at Bowen’s Field. . . .
Moonlight blared in her face. Even this late at night she could clearly make out her reflection on the pond’s glass-flat surface.
The vision gave her a mild shock.
She stood pantiless in a sheer nightshirt made even more sheer by profuse perspiration. She seemed a caricature of female sexuality, her parts exaggerated by some aspect of the craft of the dream. Her breasts were ample in life; in the dream, though, they were even larger, higher, so swollen she could’ve been pregnant. The damp nightshirt clung to them, making no secret of nipples just as magnified, with fleshy ends prominent as olives. The dream had deepened her curves and widened her hips, and when (with no volition whatsoever) she raised the hem of the nightshirt, she saw that she was not only missing her panties, but missing pubic hair as well.
Her desires squirmed with her nerves. The night’s heat drew more sweat from her skin, leaving her in a veneer of indeterminable lust.
It was Ernie who rose from the water: naked, his smile sweet and eyes reaching. Patricia’s eyes yearned back, but her own smile was clearly one of wantonness, the greed to slake her own needs moistening her. She simply stood there, lifting her hem again up past her navel.
Why should she feel guilty now? It was a dream, and even Dr. Sallee—evidently a doctor whose professional philosophies were dead—had affirmed that she could do what she wanted. And when she’d talked to the real Dr. Sallee on the phone, he essentially told her that she had defeated the trauma of her past.
This dream proved that, didn’t it? Here she was at the very site of her rape, but she stood now as a normal and very untraumatized sexual being.
Her sensibilities corroded. She felt lewd, trampish. Was this her real self coming out? Was this the real Patricia? Or was the dream just giving her the luxury of cutting loose in a way she couldn’t in real life?
“It’s only your sexual socialization evolving,” Dr.
Sallee’s unseen voice guaranteed. “Superego versus id. The societal verisimilitudes of modem man reinforce the self-maintenance of our regrettable sexual repression.”
She tried to make sense of it, but couldn’t.
“We’re all animals, Patricia. We just act like we’re not. Hence the repression and its debilitating effect. Ultimately, it’s what? Unnatural.”
What am I doing? This is a dream. Am I waiting for my doctor’s permission to have sex? She nearly laughed at the absurdity—in a dream no less. The idea behind his comment hawked down on her. We’re animals but we pretend that we’re not.
“Cavemen didn’t repress themselves,” the doctor’s voice assured her next. “Neither did cavewomen.”
Well . . .
Her eyes hooked on Ernie. He was naked in the Water, on his knees. The dream, too, had augmented him into a puppet of male sexual features all optimized. A broadened back, shoulders, and neck. Chest and biceps like pumped bands of meat. The surreally large genitals rising at the vision of her.
“Come here,” she said, a slut now. “And bring your mouth. You’re going to need it.”
Ernie obeyed without pause, a slave to her summons: He crawled to her on hands and knees: every woman’s perfect man. Patricia remained standing, the dream enforcing her need to be higher than him, to reduce him to subservience. She gave her plumpened breasts a shameless caress through the top and felt their gorge of nervous desire gust to her loins. She parted her legs some more, closing her eyes with a commariding smile, waiting for his mouth to give her succor. . . .
But nothing happened.
She looked down again and saw that he was gone without a trace.
Unless the gentle ripple in the water could be called a trace.
What crawled out next wasn’t Ernie. It was something thin, gray, and very dead.
A woman. She couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds. Gray skin seemed stretched over a struggling framework of bones, and Patricia could see those bones moving as the woman crawled hence. Hollow eyes looked up from the skull-like face showing through the open vee of straggly, waterlogged hair. Patricia wasn’t sure—not that details mattered in a dream—but it seemed that the corpse woman possessed crude stitches about her waist, as though she’d been cut in half and later reconnected by slipshod surgeons. A pendant with a stone of some kind swung about the starved neck as she continued to crawl.
“Flee this evil place, child,” rumbled some semblance of a voice. Was that a Squatter accent leaking through the corrosion that death had brought to her larynx? “Run outta here now, and beg God’s grace to go with ya. Run. Run.”
“Run from what?” Patricia asked.
The cadaver collapsed as though all of her joints at once had lost their connective tissue.
Patricia’s query wasn’t answered, and when she heard stomping behind her—something coming out of the woods—she didn’t need an answer to run just the same.
Her feet kicked up splotches of mud when she dashed along the edge of the pond. Before she could turn off in another direction . . . were there things in the pond, close to the surface, looking at her or addressing her in some way?
She didn’t want to know. She plunged back into the woods and their moonlit darkness, the fire still blazing deeper within. Smoke stung her eyes, and when she felt small, fragile things crunching under her bare soles, she realized what they were: cicadas, having been cooked to crisps while trying to fly away
The stomping still pounded behind her.
She thrashed farther into the woods, hoping she was heading away from the fires. Who’s following me? But was it even a who? This was a dream, and that fact, now, she had to keep reminding herself of.
“It’s something you’re never meant to see.” Dr. Sallee’s voice somehow suffused her head. He was nowhere to be seen, of course. “Sometimes we chase ourselves. We’re our own worst predators. Could it be that the person or thing that’s chasing you is actually an aspect of yourself?”
I don’t care! she thought at this point. Now she truly felt fear, and she expected more Freudian backlash when it became apparent that her previous sexual arousal had increased tenfold. I don’t believe that I subconsciously want to be raped again! She felt absolutely sure. Freud can kiss my ass! Her dream-enhanced breasts - swayed vigorously beneath the tight fabric of the nightshirt. Her nipples buzzed. Then—