Nightmare Country

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Nightmare Country

Marlys Millhiser

For Dorothy Frances Millhiser

What the sage poets taught by th' heavenly Muse,

Storied of old in high immortal verse

Of dire chimeras and enchanted isles

And rifted rocks whose entrance leads to Hell,—

For such there be, but unbelief is blind.

—John Milton

Chimera—
1. A fire-breathing monster represented with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent. 2. A creation of the imagination; an impossible and foolish fancy. 3. Biology. An organism, especially a plant, containing tissues from at least two genetically distinct parents.

—
The American Heritage Dictionary

of the English Language

If you can see that the Emperor has no clothes, science will tell you that it's your eyesight, religion that the Emperor is not an upstanding citizen.

—Edward P. Alexander III,
The Key to Life's

Mysteries and the Disharmonies of the Planet

Prologue

Out of Time

1

Adrian careened through black, through a total absence of light.

She could feel the heating up of her skin, the too rapid shallowness of her breathing, the crush of dread against her chest, the hard prickles in her fingertips as frenzied chemicals called her body to action, rang and buzzed in her ears, threatened upheaval in her stomach.

Even though she knew she'd left that body back on Jerusha's bed.

This was not like the dreaming, the lethargic floating, sinking, surfacing.

And there were “things” in this void with her. Unknown, unseen. She could almost hear them, sensed a whisper of their touch as she hurtled past, and felt sickened at the thought of inevitable collision. Collision with something unbearable. Or something solid enough to shatter what remained of her on impact.

Adrian imagined a scream she had no mouth to utter, imagined it trailing out behind her like a comet in the thick blackness. “Jerusha, please! I don't want to do this experiment.…”

No one to hear. Hopeless. Lost. She wanted to die and she wanted to live and she could stand no more. How far she must have traveled from Iron Mountain at this breathless speed.

A wind or air current jerked her suddenly in another direction, a wind that sucked and pulled instead of pushing from behind. Perhaps her body was a waking, drawing her back. Perhaps she was headed home.

The wind turned on her, struck her. Adrian tumbled over and over and down, the wind shrieking by her like it would a diving, crashing airplane. She had only an instant to question how she could hear without ears when light exploded into the darkness. And then colors. Blues and greens shimmered, rushed up at her, blurred, separated, formed shapes, reached for her.…

No sensation on impact. Just an abrupt end to her dizzying drop.

This was not home. The blues congealed to ocean, the greens to palm trees. The familiar ingredients of too many dreams. She hovered above clumps of tortured black rock with jags and holes.

An old man knelt among a pile of browned palm fronds, staring in openmouthed astonishment. He wore a khaki-colored shirt-jacket with short sleeves and extra pockets and tabs, like people wore in ancient Tarzan movies. His beard and hair were white and stringy but neatly trimmed, his eyes the color of frost.

A movement at the edge of her consciousness, a sound of human agony or forced breath. Adrian whirled to see a giant in a lacy suit.

“You're an Atlantean,” the old man said.

The giant raised his arms. “Primitive in the funnel!”

2

The engineer walked between lines of admiring travelers and stepped into the clean room of the Northern Terminal. Another day, another problem, and all he really wanted was to keep the tiny face of his new granddaughter in mind. He prayed he'd return in time enough to make the preparations for the celebration.

His manager read his thoughts before he'd finished suiting up. “Congratulations. I hope I'm invited to the celebration. But for now,” and she reached an arm around his shoulders, “you must concentrate. You're one of the best. I don't know who else to send.” She explained the latest in a series of problems tying up the system, gave him a comradely slap on the buttocks as he entered the funnel.

Her demeanor was stern, the problem inscrutable—as most had become recently. “Your father was an implanter and is gone. Revered, honored, but gone before his time. Be careful. Do nothing foolish. You have many details to attend to on your return, with the event of your granddaughter. Just repair whatever-it-is first.”

“Just once I wish she'd go out there,” he thought in the safety of the shield.

“Sorry about your role in life,” his wife would have smugly answered that thought. He tried to concentrate on the problem as the cylinder whirled, but a half-formed dread that all would not go well this trip intruded, and he lifted from the funnel with that mixture of doom and excitement he'd known before. It was the half-knowledge of all whose occupations woo disaster once they are committed to a dangerous mission. The squirmy sensation of regret that it was too late to join the ranks of the safe and the ordinary.

Still, his shock was genuine when the impression of tumbling ceased and he found himself confronted by the old man on the craggy coral beach. And it was some moments before the truth of the situation penetrated his anger, the knowledge that what he'd always known could happen, had.

Visions of loved ones vied with those of colleagues similarly lost to the half-death of time. Now he would discover their fate firsthand, never know his family again. Visions of the Northern Terminal, the respectful glances of those who helped him step into danger when there was a need … he'd be only another martyr now to the convenience of others.

“You're an Atlantean.” The old man spoke with an unpleasant rasping of voice and movements of mouth showing yellowed teeth, while a foolish jumble of thoughts circled his words.

The prospect of spending eternity with this simple-witted, hairy man-beast overwhelmed the engineer, and a hope that it wasn't too late, that the funnel hadn't closed him out, dissolved even as it formed. He raised his arms and pleaded, “Primitive in the funnel!”

3

The old man's son stood on another beach, and another time, in a cemetery in the sand. Broken pieces of rough-hewn concrete, scattered remnants of plastic flowers, footprints of the living, a salt-scoured picket fence that leaned over the grave of a child.

Thad Alexander had come to Mayan Cay to find his father and had stayed to dream.

REPORTED MISSING:
Edward P. Alexander III, noted adventurer and author, has been reported missing by authorities in the tiny Central American country of Belize, formerly British Honduras. Alexander, the author of many controversial books and articles on …

It was one of those “People in the News” things from a wire service and in a newspaper Thad was wadding up to start a fire when the picture of his father caught his eye. An old one off a book jacket. The rest of the article was smeared with animal blood, and he couldn't read it. He hadn't seen the elder Alexander in fourteen years.

Thad squinted against the glitter of sun on sea, had the foolish notion the cemetery was cooking like his brain was cooking, basted in alcohol, stirred by dream. Aromatic spices released in the heat of conch chowder and frying plantain drifted from his father's house to blend with the slimy scent of ocean-born decay.

A man-o'-war bird floated above him on steamy air, wings almost motionless. Its shadow crossed the features of the Virgin Mary on the statue at the head of the grave of Maria Elena Esquivel. The bird's rapier shadow glided over a jagged hole in a sarcophagus, rippled out on the water, where a cross had been cut away in the seaweed.

A dog dug to damp sand in the shade of a tombstone, curled her tawny body into the hole. She stared at him mournfully. He tried to ignore her.

But she felt his pain. It swept over her as he turned toward the house. They almost made contact. She closed her eyes, curled into a tighter ball. She'd never touched thoughts with a human. They were the most guarded of all creatures. The sharp scent of cooking fish cut through her as he slammed the door.

When moonlight softened the sun's heat on the sand and humans slept or laughed and talked in creamy light pools behind windows, the cemetery dog stretched away stiffness and prepared to join others to scavenge fish heads and entrails along the water's edge, tidbits that sea gulls had not already snatched. And scraps left unprotected in backyards and outside hotel kitchens. She shook sand from her coat, perked pointed ears at the yips and snarls of a fight in progress somewhere in the village.

And in the house behind the cemetery, Thad Alexander sank from a fitful sleep into a deep well of dreams. He lay still as death and dreamed of a place he'd never seen when awake—of a ruined mountain pierced by railroad tracks.

I

The Dream Connection

1

The occupants of the Toyota station wagon thought they were never to reach the mountain of Thad Alexander's dream. But Tamara Whelan could see it on the horizon now. She loosened her grip on the wheel and tried to relax the cramp in her back. They'd not met a car since turning off the interstate near Cheyenne. Just treeless hills and telephone wires and fenceposts and power poles rubbed white where cattle had scratched rough hides against them. A windmill, etched against unending sky, blades stilled in the torpor of an August afternoon.