Somewhere ahead of him, in the gathering darkness, a hoarse voice called out, "Muster at the road, boys! Muster at the road or we're finished!"
He heard a rattling that sounded like rifle shots, and a man screaming. How could he muster at the road when he didn't even know where the road was? He couldn't see anything but densely tangled undergrowth and thornbushes.
He tried to go faster by leaping over the bushes in awkward galumphing bounds, but his face was ripped by the branches and he was terrified of having an eye torn out. He lifted one arm in front of his face to protect himself. His woolen mittens were snared by briars, and his fingers were scratched, but it was preferable to being blinded.
The fires were coming closer, and he felt gusts of furnace-like heat. Another man was screaming, and then another. Then he heard something else: a thick rustling noise, very
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close behind him, very close. Somebody was catching up with him fast.
He turned around, and a huge figure in a dark cloak was almost on top of him. It came rushing toward him and it didn't stop, so that it collided with him. He found himself struggling in a cage of bones, trapped, unable to get free. The cloak closed around him and he was imprisoned in airless darkness, desperately trying to disentangle himself from ribs and shoulder blades and knobbly vertebrae.
"Can't breathe!" he screamed. "Can't breathe!"
He twisted around and realized that he was lying on his bed with his sheet over his face, thrashing his arms and kicking his legs.
Panting, sweating, he sat up. He switched on the bedside light and he could see himself in the mirror that faced the end of the bed, pale-faced, with his hair sticking up like a cockerel. His throat was dry—almost as dry as if he really had been running away from a brushfire. He reached for the glass of water that he usually left on his nightstand, but tonight he had forgotten it. He said, "Shit," and swung his legs out of bed. It was then that he realized that his feet were lacerated. They were covered in dozens of small scratches, all the way up to his calves, and his sheets were spotted with blood.
More than that, there were several briars still sticking in his ankles.
Whoa, he thought. This is getting dangerously close to insanity. You can't catch briars in your feet from running through underbrush in a nightmare, no matter how vivid that nightmare might have been.
He put on his glasses and went through to the bathroom, hobbling a little. He switched on the light over the bathroom mirror. His face was scratched, too. There was a nasty
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little cut on the side of his nose, and the skin on his right cheek had been torn in three diagonal stripes.
Pulling out a Kleenex, he carefully dabbed the scratches on his face. Then he sat down on the toilet seat and plucked the briars from out of his feet. He sprayed aftershave on the wounds because he didn't have any antiseptic, sucking in his breath when it stung.
He stayed in the bathroom for almost five minutes, wondering if he ought to go back to bed. Like, what if he went back into the same nightmare and the brushfire caught up with him? He could be burned to death in his own bed. He had read about religious fanatics who had identified so strongly with the suffering of Christ that stigmata had opened in their feet and the palms of their hands, and their foreheads had appeared to be scratched by a crown of thorns. Maybe this was a similar kind of phenomenon.
At last he stood up and went back into the bedroom. He had to take control of this situation. He desperately needed to sleep, and he couldn't let his subconscious fears start riling his life. "I'm not going crazy," he announced. "I'm probably suffering from delayed grief and work-related stress, but I am definitely not going crazy." He paused, and then he said, "Shit, I'm talking to myself. How crazy is that?"
He eased himself back into bed, but this time he left the light on. It made him feel as if he were a child again, terrified of what might be hiding in the dark. When he was five or six, he had imagined that the parchment-colored lining. of his bedroom drapes was the skin of a tall, thin, mummified man, and that as soon as the light was switched off, the mummy would unfold itself and stalk across the room, stilt-legged, to take out his eyes.
At about 3:30, he fell asleep again. He dreamed that he and Cathy were walking together through the Hollywood Cemetery. It was late evening and the sky was a grainy crim‑
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son color. The crosses and urns and headstones looked like chess pieces in a complicated board game, and Decker was sure that when his back was turned they kept shifting their position. He kept trying to look at Cathy, but for some reason her face was always blurred and out of focus.
"What were you doing in the kitchen?" he asked her. His voice sounded oddly muffled.
"I was protecting you," she replied.
"Protecting me? Protecting me from what?"
"From Saint Barbara. Saint Barbara wants her revenge." "Saint Barbara? What the hell are you talking about? What I have ever done to upset Saint Barbara?"
"I don't want you to know. I don't want you to find out."
"Cathy, listen to me. Tell me that I'm not going crazy."
She said nothing, but turned away from him. He reached out to take hold of her shoulder, but she collapsed, like an empty bedsheet, and when he opened his eyes, that was all he had in his hand.
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CHAPTER SIX
The next morning was sweltering and off to the east the sky was a dark coppery color, as if an electric storm were brewing off to the east, over the Richmond Battlefield. Decker went to Sausalito's Café on East Grace Street for coffee and scrambled eggs and sat facing the window, watching the passersby. For some reason that he couldn't explain, the world seemed to be altered, as if the streets downtown had been hurriedly dismantled and reconstructed during the night and some of the details hadn't been put back exactly as they should be. He had always thought that mailbox was on the opposite side of the intersection, yet here it was, right in front of the window. Even the passersby looked unnatural, walking in a hurried, self-conscious way like extras on a movie set. Decker could have believed that he was still in a nightmare.
"More coffee, Decker?" Amy called, from behind the counter. As she did so, a young woman in an oddly shaped black beret looked in through the window and gave him a
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knowing smile. He gave her a questioning look in return and mouthed, What?—but she turned away and disappeared into the crowds, as quickly and completely as if she had been made of nothing more than jigsaw pieces.
Jesus, Decker, you're definitely losing it.
Mayzie was waiting for him at headquarters.
"You rat, you didn't show," she complained, bustling after him into the elevator. "I waited for over a half hour and you didn't show. Ha! As if I believed that you really would."
"I told you, sweetheart, I'm all tied up with the Maitland case. We had witnesses to interview, evidence to look at. Things dragged on much later than I thought they would."
"You could at least have called me."
"I'm sorry. I'm truly sorry."
"Oh, you're sorry. Look at your face, all scratches. Who gave you those?"
"I tripped over. I fell in a bush."
"Really? Whose bush? I'd like to know."
"Mayzie, I'm sorry-sorry-sorry. How about lunch? I'll meet you right here in the lobby at twelve."
"You're a rat, do you know that? I don't even know if I want a child if it's going to have you as a father."
"Well, that makes two of us."
"Rat."
"I'll meet you here at twelve, okay? Don't be late, will you?"