It was then that Judith awoke with a gasp.
As her breathing slowed, she reached out shakily for a light. At first, she half-expected to find Ian beside her. But this was her ex-husband’s bed, and the spot beside her gaped empty. Robert slept on his sofa, in the other room. He had insisted she sleep in his bed. His pillows smelled subtly of his shampoo, his aftershave. She had wept into them.
The rain had stopped, the night lay still. No sound of city traffic, no sound even of rustling trees. Judith heard only one sound, and she had no idea what it was.
A scraping? A scratching? She was reminded of their former apartment together, on the second floor of an old house in Victoria. The branches of a tree, on windy nights, would scratch against the kitchen window like nails on a blackboard. It was just like that. Only...only it seemed to be coming up from the floor. Up from the cellar she knew lay below, though she had never gone down there herself.
She sat up in bed listening to the scraping. While she did so, her distracted gaze took in a gun rack on the wall, in which a shotgun and two rifles rested, and it vaguely disturbed her, as she knew Robert abhorred hunting. She was fully awake now; it was more the nightmare than the sound that kept her from slipping back beneath the covers, but now that she was awake, the sound tugged at her. At last, giving in to it, she slipped out of bed and stole out into the living room. For some reason, the sound made her afraid...as if it were the creak of a rope from which Robert dangled, unable to bear the fear of losing her a second time...
But he lay asleep on the sofa, curled against the pain that held his jaw tense and brows knitted intensely even in sleep. Standing over him, Judith wanted to gently smooth that brow, soothe it, but she did not touch him. Instead, barefoot, she continued on past him, into the kitchen where the door to the basement stood double-bolted.
She slipped both bolts, threw a switch against the wall. A breeze so chill it made her shudder was exhaled up at her, like a kiss from dead lips. Judith began to descend rough wooden steps that creaked and sagged even under her slight weight. At their foot, the darkness branched off into two directions. On her right, she heard the hiss of a water heater, saw the shadowy hunched forms of a washer and dryer. Prosaic enough. But the high-pitched scratching came from the left, from a room of the cellar into which only the dregs of light reached.
Boxes of books, of tools, bundled newspapers and old furniture were piled against the walls, but at its center there was one thing only—a great, rounded hump covered completely by a tarp large enough to cover a car. The squealing scratches came from this mound, from under that heavy tarp...
Bricks weighed the corners of the tarp, and Judith stooped to remove several of them. For a moment she hesitated to go further. Then, curling her fingers around the tarp, she threw its edge up over the top of the mound. She didn’t know what she would find, and when she found it, didn’t know what it was.
It appeared to be a great globe of dark metal or glass, buried in the cement floor of the cellar but for its upper surface. Or was that all there was of it, a huge concave object? Whether sphere or hemisphere, the scratching came from its inner surface.
Granted, it was gloomy in the basement, but at first the glass seemed truly opaque, if not absolutely black. But as she studied it, the surface seemed to gradually lighten. Until she was certain that it was indeed growing lighter. A murky gray. At last, somehow, miraculously, almost entirely transparent. It was gloomy within the glass, also...gloomy under the cellar floor, which the glass seemed to peer into like a monstrous lens. But she could discern light in that gloom...a flickering light bleeding in from the distance. The reddish glow of a nearby fire.
And there were two other lights, closer at hand. They floated nearer, like luminous fish at the bottom of the sea, rising to investigate her. The twin smudges of light moved in unison...and were of a soft pink color.
Before Judith could back away—before she could scream – the face pressed up against the interior of the glass. Huge nails raked against the inside of the lens. The thing’s jaws gnashed vertically, so that its fangs ground across the glass as well. And the eyes of the Gug glared hungrily out at her.
“No!” Judith heard Robert shout behind her. “Don’t let it see you! Don’t let it see you!” He was suddenly pushing her out of the way, throwing himself across the lens as if to blot it out, pulling down the dreaming eyelid of the dark tarp and pinning it again with bricks.
Judith fell back against the wall, gasping for air as when she had been jolted from her nightmare. When Robert whirled to face her, they stared at each other in horror and despair.
“Robert,” Judith began to sob, “what is it? What are they? What’s down there?”
“It’s the Dreamlands, Jude. It’s why you shouldn’t have come. It’s what you shouldn’t have seen, and what my family has been chosen to guard against since my grandfather’s father built this house around the Dream Lens.”
“I don’t understand!”
He continued on as if in a trance, as if a terrible numbing calm had fallen over him. “The Dreamlands are on another plane, Jude. But Sesqua is a special place. The veils are very thin here. Extremely thin in a spot like this. It should not have been seen. Especially not by an outsider. Now you know why I can never leave again, and why I can’t have you here...even if I wanted.”
The scratching continued, frantic, desperate, hungry. Judith shook, hugging herself, eyes fixed on the shroud of the tarpaulin. The mound was like a belly pregnant with a monster anxious to be born. Who knew how many monstrosities, waiting to be born into this world?
“I’m afraid now that it saw you, and you saw into its world,” Robert went on, “that...that things will be bad. The two worlds mustn’t see into each other. It starts a door to open. My father looked too long in the lens, once...” He let the story trail off. “But it’s too late, now. You didn’t know; it isn’t your fault. It’s...too late to change anything now.”
* * *
Robert had to support Judith as he walked her back up the stairs, and down the hall back to her bed. He sat on its edge as he covered her. As he rose, she looked up at him imploringly, her large eyes like those of a frightened child, and lay a hand lightly on his arm.
“Please,” she whispered. “Don’t leave me.”
He sat beside her again, and held her hand. Held it until mercifully dreamless sleep clouded her stunned mind. Continued holding it. Long minutes after she was asleep, at last he whispered back, “I won’t.”
* * *
Was it a nightmare?
Robert was at the bedroom window, his body tense as a deer’s...or a cougar’s, ready to spring on the deer. He was staring out into the night, and Judith heard him whisper, “No...God, no...”
He whirled from the window, lurched toward the door. Judith caught a glimpse of his eyes, wide and flashing silver, and then he was at the gun rack. And then out through the door. She swung her legs out of bed. “Robert!” she called after him.
As she rose, Judith turned to glance out the window, and the curtains were still spread, as if some ethereal veil had been parted so that she might see what lay behind her former reality.
A translucent mist lay over the pasture like a milky membrane, a caul, a burial shroud, and the moon had come out from behind the dispersing rain clouds. It made the mist glow.
In the center of the wild meadow, the standing stone was gone. In its place towered a ghost, seemingly made of that same glowing fog.
“Robert!” Judith cried again, and then she too was darting from the room...barefoot, in her nightgown, like a sleepwalker running from her nightmare—or running deeper into her dream.
He had already left the house ahead of her...was already racing through the tangled field. As she burst through the door into the night air, Judith saw again that figure of mist where the standing stone had been. It was not a ghost, but a ghostly outline of the megalith’s former essence. The mist sparkled in that smoky pillar, and then she felt she knew why. The stone had not turned to mist...but its substance had come unwoven, unmeshed, so that the tiny granite crystals swirled and glittered like powder.
As Judith waded into the meadow, the weeds and tall grass grabbed at her bare ankles like myriad living limbs of one vast, malignant creature. She thrashed wildly along, and at one point she fell. As she struggled back to her feet and lifted her head, she saw two things—that Robert had very nearly reached the center of the pasture...and that a pair of glowing pink eyes had appeared within the ghostly megalith.
Robert planted himself in a stance, worked the shotgun’s slide, and a crashing report like thunder rumbled across the meadow as he fired into the mist...and then again...and then again. Judith flinched at each blast...and saw the pink eyes quickly withdraw.
She resumed her wading into the field, and Robert saw her coming. He called to her, “A sacrifice will appease them. Blood will close the door again. I think I got it.” But he returned his attention to the unwoven obelisk, and added, “It’s not closing...Jude, go back to the house!”
Pink eyes rushing...and then the Gug was through...
It stooped to pass through the portal of fog, but quickly raised itself to its full height. A tower of shaggy blackness with those orbs blazing near its summit. In one motion, as it came through, it swung one heavy forelimb—and Judith saw Robert go flying back as if struck by a car, the shotgun spinning end over end through the air.
She heard the weapon thud somewhere ahead of her. She beat her way toward it, trying not to look upon the great beast or being that shambled toward Robert. It took its time in reaching him. It did not expect him to escape it. No sound came from its jaws, which worked vertically like a giant clam fused into what passed for its face.
The Gug stood over Robert, and then turned its head abruptly to see Judith there, bringing the shotgun up and squeezing the trigger.
A small dry click like a twig snapping. The Gug took a step, now, toward her...reaching out...great clawed fingers spreading...fingers dripping dark drops of human blood...
Judith pumped the slide and squeezed the trigger again and the recoil kicked her back a few steps. She saw one of the twin pink suns above her suddenly go black.
It made no cry, but the Gug whirled away—in agony, now a cyclops—and stooped again into the portal. Was gone...
Judith turned to see that Robert had risen to his feet. He hugged himself tightly as if against the cold, but from the dark ribbons flowing over both arms, Judith knew he was holding himself together. Their eyes met.
“Robert!” Judith sobbed, her whole body quaking. “Robert...I’m so sorry. Oh Robert...my love...I’m so sorry...”
He smiled, and turned his back on her as if afraid she would see how badly he was wounded. He trudged painfully toward the misty pillar, and just short of reaching it he faced her again.
“Sacrifice will appease them,” he repeated. “Blood...will close the door...”
“Robert!” Judith cried, but she didn’t try to stop him as he began to back into that glittering, swirling mist.
He smiled again. “I forgive you,” he told her, and then was gone, as if it were his own essence that resolidified into that dark, leaning standing stone.
* * *
It was a crisp, early autumn morning, the sky so blue and the bleached double peaks of Mt. Selta—looming over the valley—so bright that they nearly hurt the eyes. And morning found a small, lovely woman with dark hair and eyes walking up the road to the combination general store/gas station, where the infrequent buses stopped.
His eyes hidden by dark glasses, an elderly man hovered in the doorway, watching the woman approach. When she was near enough, he asked her, “Are you returning now, my dear?”
But Judith didn’t stop at the spot where buses came. She continued approaching the old man, until she stood before him. “Is your store open?” she asked him in a calm, quiet voice.
“Yes,” the old man replied, a bit confused.
“There will be things I need to buy. For the house.”
“For the house?”
“Yes—there’s a task that needs to be seen to,” Judith told him. “I’ll be staying.”
JOHN SADNESS
Jane Thistle was wrenched with sobs as the tiny raft was carried by the holy men to the water’s edge. She walked in the procession, though she was still weak from the long labor that had delivered the blighted infant. Her husband John Thistle helped support her. Others, deemed more important in the ritual, walked ahead of them, even though they were the parents. There was the mayor of the village, John Stout, and the village surgeon, John Copper, their black top hats severe like parading towers. The four religious men in their cowled robes and sandaled feet, bearing along the flower-decorated raft, took the lead.
The nameless lake spread out before them, vast and black, misted gray where it blended with a distant horizon, lapping the shore with an insidious calm. Violent storms never blew in off this lake, and the oily waves never much varied their steady, somnambulant rhythm. Fish were not caught from this lake, and boats were never sailed upon it. Even travelers from the villages on its far side would rather spend months skirting around it than weeks sailing across it. Too many had been lost in the attempt. Too many had died eating the fish. It was said that these waters were tainted with the fluids from the machinery of those ancient people who had once populated this land, but had died out many ages ago, extinguishing themselves so thoroughly that they took most of their artifacts along with them.
But there was an island at the center of the lake, Jane Thistle had been assured by the surgeon who examined her newborn, and the mayor who had given the Word, in accordance with the laws of their religion. No one alive had ever set foot upon this island, but it had been sighted before travel on the lake had finally been entirely outlawed. Though never visible from the shore, it was a large island, thick with black fir trees choked in swirling mist. It was the island to which the waters would either literally—or only symbolically—carry away her child.