“I don’t know…it’s out in the middle of nowhere,” Clay’s telling whomever he’s speaking to on the phone, feet propped on a knotted pine coffee table in the main house’s library, “the closest town? I forget, it’s like…Spinning Rock or some shit. Aren’t all the towns around here named something like that?”
“It’s called Stokely, okay?” Jeremy calls out, not wanting to hear this conversation, yet unable to help himself. “Stokely.”
Monday morning has arrived and, as they plot out their upcoming drive into town, Jeremy paces around the library. He was relieved to wake up and see the sun shining bright and clear already, at this early hour, every bit as much as the truck stop worthy dispenser of fresh coffee Jen put out for them. Still, he has a week left at his real job back in Jenson, a midshift today beginning at 2pm, and is dreading the drive home far more than the work itself. Clay’s in the same boat, in fact, currently employed with some kind of odd job carpentry team, and is calling around to see what kind of colleague he can connive into taking his shift. The difference being Clay’s due in at 10, therefore has very little time to play with.
“I can’t stop thinking about that dream I had last night,” Denise reiterates, shaking her head as if attempting to brush off cobwebs. She’s sitting crossed legged on the knotted pine table itself, never mind the scattered magazines beneath her, while Emily, on a nearby couch, flips through a book about modern mixed media techniques.
Denise has already divulged the contents of this incredibly vivid dream to them twice, but she alone gets it. They couldn’t possibly understand how real this all seems. Not real in the sense that she believes it meant anything, or was prophetic or what have you, only that this one was crisper, somehow, than any she’s had in quite some time.But dreams are impossible to convey to others with the same urgency and context as the person experiencing it, she knows.
What made this one unique, Denise supposes, are the levels. Sometimes you are a participant in a dream. Sometimes you are merely watching the action in the dream. Other occasions, of which this is one, it’s like there’s another level above that, or maybe two, where you are outside of all this, yet aware that you are watching yourself observe a dream. You are privy somehow to receiving the thoughts of the you inside the dream, the one who is watching it.
A bunch of kids are chasing this Howard kid around on their bicycles. The landscape doessomewhat resemble the artist’s retreat here, but that’s about it. This Howard kid is the only one without a bicycle, and this pack of others are chasing him around the grounds. They wind up in this single room wooden building, little more than a shack. Somehow she’s aware that there is at least a little kitchen on the backside of the one main room, and she’s kind of watching – the her inside the dream that is – while floating above the action, from a corner where the bathroom door must branch off from the main room. The her outside the dream is watching all of this from a vantage point higher still.
The entire room is illuminated in a bright red, not a fire but just the lighting they have in here. She gets the feeling that Howard considers this his sanctuary, his lone sanctuary, but isn’t one hundred percent about that. This room has nothing more in it but a large round wooden table, kitchen table size and height, but no chairs. Howard is thoroughly horrified as they continue shouting his name, pinning him against the table. They don’t manage this physically, but rather, he is pinned against the table because they are riding their bikes in a relentless circle around it, laughing with the exceptional cruelty, Denise thinks, only young boys and maybe serial killers possess. She wakes up at this juncture, with nothing technically all that bad having happened to Howard yet, though the pending menace is unmistakable. She shudders even now to recall these details.
Still, she has considered this matter over and over, and can’t think of any realistic connection between their current situation, anything she’s heard, anything she’s fretted about. Throughout, the she that is inside the dream continues to observe, while the other, the she that is outside the dream, watches all this and is wondering who is right, who is wrong in this scene. She can’t seem to get a handle on it, which is the villain, whether it’s Howard or this mob of other kids.
“Is Kay coming or what?” Emily sighs, “we’ve already wasted half an hour!”
“I don’t know. Let me text her,” Denise says, “she was trying to work up the nerve to ask Tony, so of course what that really meant was making herself look good enough first, to feel confident in asking Tony.”
Prodded into action, Kay eventually shows up a few minutes later, and they break off into a pair of vehicles. Since Clay has to drive in this direction anyway, Denise rides with him as far as Stokely. Clay will have just enough time to help her and Kay at the hardware store, picking out some locks and possibly other reinforcements for their cabin, before continuing homeward. Meanwhile, having reached nothing but Kidwell’s voicemail ever since yesterday evening, Jeremy and Emily figure they may as well descend upon the town library and see what kind of history they can dig up on the region.
Jeremy is leading the way, behind the wheel of his own car. They’ve reached the end of the half gravel, half mud drive, and are about to turn right, when Emily instead points in the other direction.
“Wait a second. I just thought of something. Didn’t we come from that direction, the first time? And didn’t we leave that way as well? Because this road was a dead end or something?”
“Well, yeah, I mean that’s what Kidwell said,” Jeremy shrugs, turning right onto the road anyhow, “he said it wasn’t finished or it was longer this way or something. But who knows if he even knew what he was talking about. He could’ve been full of shit, or maybe they’ve even finished it since then.”
“Yeah…,” Emily trails off, uncertain, and flips all the way around in her front passenger seat, belt be damned, to peer at the woods receding behind them. “I don’t know, I would like to see a map. Remind me to check at the library. Something about the layout around here isn’t making sense to me. We must have driven in circles or taken a really long route to get here that first time.”
“You’re starting to sound like your sister,” Jeremy scoffs.
“No, I mean, I really love it here. I already feel like I never want to leave! But I’m just kinda curious…”
“I know what you’re saying,” Kay pipes in from the back, “we made it to that same cemetery on foot yesterday in, what, twenty minutes? There must be some shortcut in between that we missed that day, driving here.”
“You guys keep saying that, but I’m telling you, it’s just not possible. That had to be a different cemetery. Had to be,” Jeremy counters.
“How do you figure?”
“Well, okay, let’s think about this. Exhibit A: did you cross a gigantic lake at all in your travels?”
“No,” Kay admits.
“Well okay then. If you recall, there was this huge ass lake spreading out on both sides of the road. Stokely Farm Road. We drove over it on that, like, S shaped bridge, and passed some marina right after that. That lake was so huge you couldn’t see the end of it in either direction.”
“Mmm, I’m not convinced. This terrain could be laid out a little different than you think. If Otherwise somehow sits east of the lake, then so could that graveyard,” Emily counters.
Stumped and agitated, Jeremy raises one from the wheel and declares, “okay, fuck it, then. Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna look up some maps at the library, and then we’re gonna come out here and run a couple different tests, too. Actually, couldn’t one of you just pull up a map right now, on your phone?”
“That’s what I’m doing right now…,” Kay mutters, “but, ah…that’s weird. It doesn’t show a lake on either side. Not that I can see, anyway…”
“What?” Jeremy wearily intones, “get outta here. Emily, why don’t you look it up? We all know Kay sucks with maps.”
Emily looks him straight on with a mischievous little smile and waits a few measures before speaking. “I already did, actually. It doesn’t show the lake. But I figure, who knows, maybe it’s man-made and the phone map gadget dealio is outdated or whatever. That’s why I was saying let’s look it up at the library. Or maybe we’ll luck out with a gas station that hasn’t switched out its inventory in a couple of decades or something, still has some paper maps lying around…”
“Oh my god…,” Jeremy groans, shakes his head.
“What? I’m serious. You’ll notice the map app doesn’t show much anything for that plot of land with Otherwise, either. So it must have been seriously overgrown before Harry went to work on it. But, I don’t know…you ask me, it makes this neater, in a way. A little more mysterious, more of an adventure.”
Though buckled up by now, Emily turns around enough to fix her best friend with a radiant smile. But Kay doesn’t exactly share this same level of lighthearted enthusiasm. On the contrary, all this talk, in particular this notion Jeremy’s proposed about running some tests and charting their terrain, has filled her with a body consuming dread. She flashes from Noah, to that comment about the doom statues, to their nonsensical or at least deceptive surroundings, and her stomach feels as though it’s dropped a good foot or so in a split second, like cresting a giant drop on a roller coaster at Six Flags.
“What, you’re over your little midnight caller episode, now?” is all she can think to respond.
“I don’t know. I guess so,” Emily merrily declares, facing forward once more, with an indifferent shrug. “It probably was some prankster. We’ll figure it out.”
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