DARK REALITY-A Horror Tale (2 page)

I couldn't find anyone. When I finally sat down in a chair at the kitchen table, my head in my hands, I knew it was all connected someway, but I didn't know how. The buildings in town had changed. The beer and the coat rack had disappeared. And now I had a cabinet with a gun and other things in it that shouldn't be there.

#

She came through the front door calling, "Baby, you ready yet? I have got on one powerful thirst."

I still sat where I had collapsed in the kitchen chair, my head now on my arms on the table top. I blinked and lifted my head. What was Millie doing here?

"Millie?"

"Oh, there you are! You've still got on your grease monkey clothes. Why haven't you changed yet?"

"What are you doing here, Millie?"

She gave me a funny smile and leaned over and kissed me full on the lips. What...?

"I live here, or did you forget? Come on now, let's get you in the shower and changed. We're going to meet Davey at the Alibi for drinks before we go to eat. You're always making us late. Hurry!" She pulled me up, and pushed me toward the stairs.

I turned and stood my ground. "Millie, what's going on?"

She saw the confusion in my eyes and let her hands drop from my arms. "What's the matter, baby? Don't you feel well?" She didn't sound very sympathetic, but when had she ever?

"I don't feel well at all and I don't think this is funny. Why are you making a joke of Davey?"

She laughed and I had to admit when Millie wasn't angry, she was a pretty woman. "Davey's a joke all by his-own-self. But he's your brother, so we just won't mention it. And you know he's got that silly temper so he's not going to take kindly to us not showing up for his birthday. Now will you go shower?"

Davey's birthday was in May. This was October with Halloween just days away. The whole town had decorations littering yards with sheet ghosts hanging from tree limbs, carved pumpkins, and GO WOLVERINE signs next to the mail boxes to encourage the game they were playing on the holiday on their home field.

And besides, Davey was dead. We had buried a coffin covered with a US flag, but it was empty. Davey was spun into the wind like particles of sand in a storm.

"Millie, Davey's dead. He's your husband. You know that."

She slapped my face so hard it turned my head on my neck and stung like hell. "Davey's at the Alibi waiting for you to get there! Davey is not dead!
Have you lost your goddamn mind
?"

And so I had. I stood with my mouth hanging open and my mind jumbled not so much from the slap, but the words--the situation. I had just stepped, surely, into the Twilight Zone, because this was not my world and Millie was not my girlfriend and Davey was dead as yesterday's news.

I went up the stairs to the bathroom and took off my clothes very slowly, my mind in a flurry of contradicting thoughts. I heard Millie outside the door telling me
to get a grip and to stop drinking so much and to get my tail in gear because this was ridiculous.
I stepped into the tub and drew the curtain. The water was hot and I didn't bother to adjust it. The stream fell like a curtain down over my hanging head with me hoping, praying it would clear it.
Please God. Clear this up for me
, I thought. Is Millie right, I've lost my mind, my goddamn mind? Or has the world gone out of sync like a ferris wheel with popped gears that sends it tumbling across a fairgrounds?

Could Davey be alive, my God, could he? It might be worth it to have some forgetful events lost in a muddied brain if Davey was still alive.

Then I knew I did have to hurry, just as Millie said. I had to get out of the shower, dry, dress, and get down to the Alibi to see for myself. Because, you see, I loved my brother. I'm not ashamed to admit it. After our parents died, he was all I had. And though he had Millie, his by-god
wife
(what was she doing here?), they didn't really get along or suit one another and me and Davey were tight as boys and tighter as men. Brothers. We were brothers and we loved one another.

In the truck Millie said, patting down her short black skirt along her thighs, "This might be the last time we get to see Davey for a while. We need to have a good time tonight. You hear me?" She turned and glared at me as I drove. "No more of this nonsense. I told you drinking in the day would lead to this kind of thing. Make you act like you don't know what you're doing. I should have drove, in fact." She kept prattling on, but I tuned her out like dialing down a TV. I never had really liked Millie much, even if she was pretty, and even though she'd married my brother. She'd made him as miserable as she was now making me.

She was also wrong, as usual. I hadn't had a drop to drink. I knew that much. And this wasn't an alcoholic stupor or a hangover or anything else I could put a name to. It was a world gone mad for me, is what it was, but I had to see Davey again if I could...if only I could. I had told him, "Davey, don't join the Marines." I had pleaded, "Davey, think about it some more. You'd make a good mechanic like me, I could teach you." I had cried in my beer the night he left for boot camp and said, "Davey, you're gonna wind up dead over there, you know that, right? Don't go."

Yet he had gone, I know he did. I saw him off on the bus that day. I handed him his ditty bag. I saluted him as a joke and he cuffed me on the head and said, "You worry too much. I may be younger than you, but that doesn't mean you have to worry about me all the time like you're some old mama hen."

Then he was on the bus, swinging up like the big Marine he was going to be, and I never saw him again.

#

He was sitting at a back table with a draft beer in his hand. He saw me come in the door and smiled like the big, goofy fool he was. It was Davey. He was alive! My heart felt like busting open and tears came into my eyes as I walked over to him. He stood and hugged me and I couldn't let go. I couldn't let this moment go because what if it was a dream and I might wake up and he wouldn't be in my arms, alive and warm and real?

Millie slapped me on the shoulder and said to Davey, "Don't mind him, he's been, well, you know, tipping the bottle back a little too far lately."

I let him go then and wiped my eyes. "Davey."

"Lane. You're late for my birthday bash, as usual. I'd have never forgiven you if you'd missed it. I have to leave tomorrow, remember? This is my last hometown hurrah. Let's get drunk, buddy." My heart lurched in my chest. He couldn't be talking about leaving for boot camp.
Could he?
He laughed the way he did when my sentimentality embarrassed him and gestured for the waitress--who was some girl I didn't know and not Millie--to come take an order.

"Where you going?" I asked it in as normal a voice as I could manage, which sounded to me like a high whine of a bad engine.

"Going? You know where I'm going, it's all your damn idea, big brother! I am going in the Marines and I'm going to be the baddest badass Marine they've ever seen."

My idea? No, this wasn't happening. None of this was right, the world and reality had sidestepped and twirled everything around and upside down and this could not be happening.

In the real world, the one that began to change the night before with my missing beer in the Alibi, my brother was dead and buried for eight months and I had begged him, really begged him to not sign up.

In this world I evidently was hooked up, if not married, to his bitch of a wife Millie, Davey was alive--for now--and I had talked him into going into the military.

Wrong. So wrong that it made my head hurt. It made the room spin. Millie grabbed my arm and whispered in my ear, "You snap out of it. Don't go ruining Davey's birthday. A man doesn't turn twenty-one every day."

But Davey wasn't just twenty-one; he'd been twenty-three and unemployable because he had no trade and few skills or education. That's why he felt joining the Marines was his only choice. And his birthday was in May, not October. Was this even the real Davey? Was this even the world? Was I asleep?

I slapped my own face and Millie saw it. She ground her teeth and shook her head at me. Davey had his back turned, talking to the barmaid I didn't recognize. I couldn't wake up. But just in case this wasn't a dream, just in case I was experiencing some kind of slip in time where relationships were different, where people were the wrong age, where coat racks and beers disappeared and cabinets appeared--and where dead men walk--I had to do something to stop my brother from leaving the next day.

Keeping my mind as calm as I could, I toasted Davey, hugged Millie to my side, and we all went to Big Boy Steaks--that impossible restaurant I had never entered before--and had dinner. When the cake was brought out, I smiled as my brother blew out the candles, but my insides were churning. I had to figure things out quick. I couldn't keep panicking because my reality had turned into a funhouse hall of mirrors. The important thing was to prevent Davey from ever boarding the bus tomorrow for boot camp. If I could get nothing else right, I'd have to find a way to get this one thing right. His life depended on it. The life he'd lost once already.

I made him stay that night at my house, insisted until he relented. It had been his house, but he didn't remember it that way, and Millie, who was undressing in the upstairs bedroom had been his wife, but he didn't know that either. And neither of them knew Iraq was going to be the place Davey died. I was all he had. I was the only one who could stop it this time.

Hauling out some beers, we sat in the living room with the TV off. Millie had waved sleepily at us and trundled off to bed wearing a long gown and yellow bunny slippers. Davey said, "You know if I'd been a couple of years older, I'd have stolen Millie from you before you could do squa-deuce."

I bit the inside of my lip and said nothing. Finally I cleared my throat and said, "I was wrong, I don't think you should go."

"To boot? I have to, are you nuts? I already signed up."

"Tell them...tell them you have a bad back or...that you have to go pee every five minutes...or..."

He laughed, his hair fell over his eyes and I loved him more than I ever had before because I had him back, back from the dead, and I wasn't letting him go there again. If this was a reprieve, I was taking it for both of us.

"You can't fake out the Marines, man. What happened to your gung-ho? I thought you said it would be good for me, that there was nothing for me here, that if I joined up, I would end up with some veteran's benefits and maybe a job skill..."

"I was wrong, all right!"

He sat back on the sofa, the beer in his hands. "What's going on with you, Lane? I'm having a hard time tonight understanding you."

I looked down and saw I was wringing my hands. Hands that were calloused and hard from laborious work. "Davey, you can't go. I won't let you."

"Why? What's changed in you?"

"It's not me that's changed. It's...well, I have a bad feeling. They'll send you to the war. If they end in the war in Iraq, they'll send you to Afghanistan. It's too dangerous. A lot of boys have died. I don't want to lose you, Davey." I almost added
again
.

"Nothing's gonna happen to me. You're always worrying."

I heard a clatter of footsteps on the stairs. Davey and I turned to see Millie burst into the living room, hair disheveled, eyes wild. "Someone's out back creeping around!"

"What?" A greater feeling of disorientation came over me.

Davey leaped to his feet. "What?"

"I heard something and looked out the upstairs bedroom window. There's someone out there, in the back yard."

"I'll take care of it." Davey set down his bottle of beer and walked directly to the cabinet in the hall. He opened it and leaning down came up with the .38.

Now I was on my feet and trying to cross the distance between us. "Davey, no. Let me call the police."

"No way, big brother. I'm a Marine now." He was down the hall leading to the back door before I could reach him.

"Get out of my way!" I pushed Millie aside and hurried after Davey. Now I understood two things. The gun, which I loathed, was not mine. It was Davey's and being stored here. And whoever or whatever was prowling in the dark in the back yard was Davey's killer. Because Davey didn't really
belong
anymore, not in
any
reality. If I couldn't stop him from going out the back door, Davey wasn't coming back.

I slipped near the stairs on one of Millie's slippers. She must have lost them on her rush down the stairs. My left foot went out from under me on the slick wooden floor and I tried to grab for the stair bannister, but I missed. I came down hard on my ass with a yell. I screamed for Davey, who was moving purposefully toward the back of the house and beyond my reach. "Davey!"

Millie tried to help me up. I rushed away through the shadowy hallway, breathing heavy, my heart not just pounding, but throbbing like an iron fist opening and closing in my chest. This wasn't fair. This was not fair. If I had in some way slipped over into an alternate reality where things were changed and I had a chance to keep my brother safe, then these precious minutes were a joke on me. Because I felt it, the reality behind the reality. The truth of it. If a person has died, and you enter some strange other world or reality where they are alive, they're not going to stay alive.