He walked back into the office, went back behind the counter, picked up his book and waited for customers who didn't come.
That night, he dreamed of a world that had to be hell. Under a blazing red sky, on an endless expanse of burning sand, he was being herded with hundreds of other young men by tall black creatures on horseback. To his eye, the creatures resembled elongated Abraham Lincolns, but against the red sky they were only silhouettes, no details of their features visible. Around him, the other young men cried and wailed, gnashing their teeth, and he knew with certainty that they were all going to die.
For that, he was grateful. They all were. Anything was better than this existence, and as the fiery red sky turned black, a dark hulking mass loomed out of the nothingness behind them, and a shadow fell that was cool and welcome and familiar.
The shadow of death.
In the morning, Dennis awoke late. This was his day off, and he planned to spend it exploring Selby. He was acquainted with the town in a broad, general, touristy sort of way. He knew where the fast-food restaurants were, the grocery store, the gas stations, the major cross streets. But beyond that, Selby was a blur of indistinguishable homes to him, and he thought it would be a good idea to get to know the community in which he was living, even if he was here only temporarily.
He could have driven, but the town was small and instead he decided to walk. He followed the sidewalk, then turned off Main Street onto Crescent Avenue, where an elementary school segued into a park and then into a junior high school.
There was something familiar about this town. No, not familiar. Welcome. No, not welcome, exactly. Comfortable. No, not that either ...
He didn't know what the feeling was, couldn't describe it. His mother believed in reincarnation and probably would have said that he'd been here before in a previous life. There was some of that flavor to the experience, although he didn't really believe in reincarnation, and once again he had the feeling that he was caught up in something bigger than himself, that there was a reason for him to have embarked on this journey-and a reason he was here in Selby right now.
He followed Crescent to its end. A row of tall trees, their upper branches swaying ominously in a wind that had not made it down to the ground, lined the cross street at which Crescent terminated, and instead of turning left or right on the other street, Dennis continued walking forward. Something led him through the trees, where he found, not the forest he'd been expecting, but what appeared to be the beginnings of a new housing development. There were trees at the edges of the open space before him, but they'd been cut down and bulldozed into deadfalls, and the dusty acreage ahead had been completely sheared of all vegetation.
He paused for a moment to take it all in, then pressed on, walking through deep-tread truck tracks, past color-coded stakes, until he reached the far opposite end of the nascent subdivision. This was the line to which the wilderness had been pushed back, and he climbed over a pile of debris, then passed between trees and overgrown bushes, until he came to the purpose of his journey, the reason he had been led here.
It was a graveyard.
At least he assumed it was. But there were none of the ritual accoutrements usually associated with ceme- teries. No tombstones, no crosses, no mowed grass, no clearly delineated grave sites. There were only occasional irregular mounds within the unmarked open space, and a few intermittent boulders that could have been randomly deposited rocks but appeared to him to have been deliberately placed. Dennis stood at the periphery of the small clearing. An effort had been made to hide this burial ground, to make it appear to be nothing more than an ordinary plot of land, and he wondered why.
The nearby elms were still swaying to a wind he could not feel, and the morning sun had not yet risen over the tops of the trees, keeping the graveyard in slightly darkened semishadow. It was creepy and he wanted to leave, but he stood his ground, sure that he was supposed to learn something here, to take something from this.
What was it with all this mystical crap lately? There was absolutely no objective reason for him to think that he was meant to do anything. Yet he did. Deeply. And he had no idea why. He would have ascribed it to the fact that he'd been alone and on his own for the past few weeks, but the belief had been with him since the beginning of his trip, was, in some strange way, the reason for the trip.
He thought of that mountain monster in his dream, that giant behind the wall of smoke.
He was afraid to move forward, he realized, afraid to actually step into the graveyard. To do so would be blasphemous. He knew it instinctively. He felt it in his bones.
Bones.
Whose bones were here? Dennis wondered, looking over the untamed plot of land. And why had so much effort gone into hiding this little cemetery? He forced himself to walk into the shadowed clearing, bracing
himself for a psychic assault that never came. He stepped gingerly over one of the disguised mounds, stopped and bent down in front of a crooked rock protruding from the earth. Was there writing on the speckled gray surface? He squinted, looked closer. If there had been, the characters had long since been weathered away, because he saw nothing save the natural roughness of stone, the generic pores and cracks that made it look like every other rock around town.
He had a sudden urge to dig down under one of the mounds, to see what was under there.
He had a sneaking suspicion it would not be human.
The trees stopped moving, the high wind dying, and the sun emerged from above the elms, a crescent sliver of light like the crack of a door opening onto the shadowed ground below. Dennis stood. He had missed his chance. Whatever he was supposed to have learned or taken from this place had not been imparted to him. That window was closed.
He walked slowly back the way he had come, wondering whether the hidden graveyard was scheduled to be razed and graded. Despite all of the work going on around it, the small plot of land and its barrier of trees and bushes had remained untouched until now, and Dennis found that ominous. It was as though a protective force field had been set up around the site to keep destruction at bay.
On the other side of the bulldozed brush, workmen had arrived and were starting up tractors and Caterpillars. No one stopped or questioned him as he made his way across the cleared ground to the road, and he continued his exploration of the town, walking up and down residential streets, discovering a topless bar in Selby's industrial district, buying a Coke at a mom-and-pop grocery store located next to a boarded-up dairy. Selby was bigger than he'd expected and more varied than it appeared from the highway, but no matter where he went or what he saw, the makeshift cemetery remained on his mind, a nagging image that refused to be dislodged from his brain.
Still, he was determined to learn about his temporary home if for no other reason than to talk about it with Cathy at some later date when they could both look back on this experience and laugh. So after a quick Jack in the Box lunch, he got in his car and drove in the opposite direction of the new development and the hidden graveyard, passing a cluttered hodgepodge of thrift stores, auto dealers, beauty salons and churches.
Selby's lone radio station was an automated country channel that seemed to play the same songs in the same order on a continuous twenty-four-hour loop. The motel owner kept it on in the office all day and all night, and if Dennis had to hear Tim McGraw one more time, he was going to break that damn radio and throw it through the fucking window.