David opened his mouth to speak, then his gaze caught on something over her shoulder and he gasped. Sarah whirled around.
On the television screen, a spider crawled across Michael J. Fox’s face.
Then it all rushed back to her. Years ago, she had seen a film about spiders overrunning a small town.
That
was why this living room had seemed strangely familiar — it was from that movie.
"David," she said, never taking her eyes off of the spider, "did your brothers let you watch
Arachnophobia
without telling your mommy?"
David nodded numbly.
Sarah cursed under her breath — no
wonder
the poor child was having nightmares!
In the movie, she recalled, the spider had simply been crawling across the TV screen. In David’s version, it was actually
in the image
, literally crawling over the actor’s face.
"David," she said, turning away from the sight that made even her adult flesh crawl, "this is not real. I need you to try and wake up. Wake up, David, and then you and I can talk about how we shared this..."
Her voice trailed away. More spiders were crawling from the woodwork — from the edges of the windowsill, from behind the bookcase, and pictures on the wall. This was the part in the movie when the spiders had swarmed, minutes before Jeff Daniels would fall through the floor and discover their nest. She didn’t know if dying in your dreams would make you die in real life, but if her and David’s subconscious minds allowed these little bastards even a
fraction
of the venom they had possessed in the film, she believed they could be in trouble.
Sarah rose and gathered David to her. He was whimpering uncontrollably now, and she could not count on him to move on his own. She fled the living room only to find more spiders covering the front door, and more and more pouring from the walls and ceiling. David’s subconscious fears had taken the terror of the movie and magnified it. There had been hundreds of spiders at this point in the film; David had made it
thousands
.
Following Jeff Daniels’ example, Sarah moved for the stairs. Maybe she could mimic the plot far enough to get David out onto the roof. If
she
got stuck inside like ol’ Jeff, then so be it.
Sarah did not pause at the top of the stairs, nor did she bother closing the bathroom door, knowing (remembering) that the spiders would fit through the space at the bottom and even the doorknob frame just as quick as could be. She opened the window and deposited her nephew through it.
That was when the first spider landed on her neck.
The fear permeating David’s dream spread quickly to her as she jumped up and down in place and swatted at the creature like a mad woman. She managed to knock it away, but it was replaced by another and another as they descended like rain from the ceiling. They crawled over her flesh, through her hair, into her nose and mouth. In no time at all, she was a frantic, screaming mass of little brown legs and eyes and teeth. Not a single spider had yet to bite her, but they seemed content to drive her insane with their tickling, hideous inspection.
She could barely see as she dove into the shower. She needed water, water to wash them away, water to cleanse herself even if for the briefest of moments. She somehow managed to find the knob and looked up as the faucet deposited a steady, strong stream of crawling, curious arachnids onto her face. She fell backwards into the tub, and the level of spiders soon rose over her entirely and overflowed.
Sarah heard David screaming — somehow that penetrated the moving, creeping mass of horror. A small part of her — a part not unlike the little voice that tried to stop Emmett Morris from shooting himself — spoke up.
This can’t go on, Sarah
, it said.
You’ve got to end it soon. You may
dream
that you’re a petite, fit, little nymph, but the inescapable fact is that you are actually a dangerously overweight, middle-aged woman, and how much longer do you think your heart, your
real
heart, can take this kind of stress? Now, you were on to something with the water idea. Come on and put two and two together, would you?
She did.
Reaching out, not with her (dream) body, but with her
mind
, Sarah opened the gateway. She opened it right beneath her, and she very strategically placed the other end not over the sandy beach, but about fifteen feet out from shore.
Sarah fell back through the gateway, across the dream bridge, and into the salt water of the Gulf of Mexico. With a splash that felt like a gift from God Himself, the water rushed around and over her, washing the foul little creatures off her body like so much filth — Sarah could almost have sworn she heard the little devils gasp in shock as they became so much fish food.
As much as she longed for the luxury of raking her hands over her body to assure herself that no little hang-ons remained, Sarah followed her duty first — her duty to a frightened little boy.
The gateway flickered back once again, and she reached through just long enough to snatch David from the rooftop where the spiders had surrounded him.
He continued to cry for a time, of course, and she let him, carrying him to shore and holding him tightly. Eventually his tears and fears subsided enough for him to take a look around at his radically new surroundings.
"Where
are
we?" he asked with irresistible wonder.
"We’re in
my
dream now," she said.
"I know
that
," he said as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. "I mean where’s
this
?" He pointed at the beach with one hand and the ocean with the other.
Sarah laughed. "Mexico, David. This is Mexico."
"It’s pretty."
She hugged him close.
The Adonis approached her again as if she had never left.
"Hey," his tenor voice purred, "do you mind if I join you?"
"Maybe later," Sarah told the epitome of Mel Gibson and Brad Pitt wrapped up in one. "I’ve got company right now."
The Adonis went away.
"Now, David," Sarah said, "when we wake up, Aunt Sarah will have some things she’ll need to work out. And we’ll have to discuss the rules about what we can and cannot watch on TV," David looked away at this, "but for now ... isn’t this a
much
better dream to have?"
"Yeah!" he agreed, grabbing a handful of sand.
"Well, as far as I’m concerned, you’ll never have a nightmare, ever again. Not as long as Aunt Sarah is here. Now, I’ll race you to the water!"
And back on the loveseat, where David slept on Sarah’s girthy lap, both aunt and nephew shared the same, peaceful smile.
THE CHILD
The child — whose name would have been
Tran Nguyen
— was inside her mother’s womb on the Night of the White Flash.
The child was entering her third trimester of existence, and the rudimentary higher brain functions that could be construed as
thoughts
— a relative term, granted, for an entity with virtually no intellectual understanding of her own self, let alone existence beyond her five budding senses — were slow in formation. The child’s mother was violently addicted to heroin, and she had not allowed anything so incidental as a pregnancy to curb her habit. The child had been conceived in error, but her mother had not wanted to risk her still deceptively-clean legal record to subject herself to doctors with their tests for an abortion. She had considered trying some self-induced home version until the thought had occurred to her that a good deal of money might be made off of selling the baby, money that would keep her well supplied with
hits
for the foreseeable future ... after she dealt with the baby’s birth.
So the child who would have been Tran Nguyen, regardless of entering her third trimester or third
decade
of life, would never develop the mental capacity to equal a dull-witted lower primate, much less a homosapian.
Straight intelligence was one thing.
Emotions
and
sensations
were something else.
The child might not have understood her surroundings or herself, or the sounds that perpetually filtered through her mother’s flesh and muscle and embryotic fluid. She did
feel
, however, and a vast majority of the time, she felt uncomfortably
hot
.
Through the miraculous tragedy of chemical interactions, the mother’s narcotic habits left herself and the child with an incessant fever. The mother’s body temperature rarely dropped below 100, and spent a fair percentage of its time hugging just over 101. The mother paid no heed to the flushed constant — so long as she had her special stash, she paid heed to very little.
The
child
, on the other hand, with her limited capacity of sensation, found the excessive warmth quite unpleasant. The periods of increased temperature had threatened to stop her developing heart more than once, but what was a fetus to do?
So the child merely suffered the existence of physical discomfort, never comprehending that there was any other
kind
of existence to be had.
And that was all she
could
comprehend, until the Night of the White Flash.
The child’s mother currently resided in Garden Grove, California, so the Seven Stars appeared a little further to the east and the White Flash took a bit longer to cross over the horizon than it did for Emmett Morris and Sarah Baxter’s parts of the country. The child’s mother was oblivious to this, of course, and would have given it only the briefest attention if she had bothered to notice. She was sealed up in her tiny studio apartment, enjoying her latest
hit
and wondering if a woman roughly seven months pregnant could still manage to sell her body for a few more dollars. The White Flash did not affect her as it was a growing handful around the world.
It did, however, affect the child.
As Emmett Morris suddenly witnessed what he would never have asked to witness, and as Sarah Baxter somehow developed both the ability to cross-dream and the gut instincts to use it, the child who would have been Tran Nguyen had a revelation on her own, limited level of comprehension.
It suddenly "occurred" to the child that perhaps she did not
have
to be so hot all the time. This was the worst it had been in a while and her heart was fluttering in response, but maybe there was something ...
else
. How could a brain-damaged, unborn child understand the possibility of another, as yet unknown condition of life? She did not. She simply
felt
, much as Sarah Baxter did, and acted on those feelings.
Invisible waves of power flowed outward from the child’s underdeveloped mind, and almost instantly the surrounding heat began to abate. The child knew a
relief
unlike anything she had ever experienced. And when she found something that she enjoyed and gave her pleasure, as children of any age are prone, she wanted
more.
She reached out with her new power, more fiercely this time.
The child’s mother was suddenly overcome with a terrible chill. The elevated warmth she had known almost constantly since she was twelve suddenly left her, and if she hadn’t known better, she would have sworn the temperature in the apartment had suddenly dropped ten degrees. She stumbled to her feet and stole a glance at the thermostat, but it insisted that nothing of the sort was transpiring. The child’s mother cursed loudly, throwing around accusations of cheap equipment to no one and nothing in particular, and clutched at herself, shivering. Her teeth chattered, and her belly felt as though a bucket of ice had been poured into her bowels. She wandered back to her familiar paraphernalia and managed to deliver herself a tremendous
hit
. If the chill wouldn’t go away by itself, she would simply
numb
it away ...