Twenty-three
Through the open bedroom window of the seaside cottage came the pleasantly cool breath of the sea, but I sweated in twisted sheets. Perspiration streamed from me also in my turbulent nightmare, as the Happy Monster, Blossom Rosedale, led me toward what would prove to be the amaranth.
No sounds existed now except those that I made, as if the outer world had ceased to exist, as though I had become the world entire, isolated and adrift in a void. The furious knocking of my heart, the gasping for breath, each inhalation inadequate to my need, and a hard chattering sound, something rattling, that I could not identify.
There were light and shadow but no longer faces or mysterious shapes, only currents of color washing across my eyes, color and at times a rippling darkness, and I was very afraid. Sometimes Blossom seemed to manifest beside me, like a spirit, but at other times I was not aware of her.
Moving, moving forward, moving with great effort, moving, but to what, to where?
As the physicists tell us, time was created in the big bang, a necessary condition for the expansion and maturation of the universe. All that exists outside the universe exists also outside of time, where no experience is measured in minutes. In dreams, time exists, though not as we know it in the waking world, strangely distorted and unreliable, as if on a subconscious level we’re aware that time isn’t enduring, that it is not a required condition of our existence, that there comes a point when we will have no need of it.
With or without Blossom, I seemed to travel for hours, crossing a considerable distance, though it might also have been mere seconds before again I heard a sound not made by me. A voice cried out, and again a face appeared on which I could concentrate.
The face was Wyatt Porter’s, and the voice was his, too, and he shouted my name: “Oddie!”
Blossom was with me again, supporting me. I struggled forward, gripping the urn of ashes with both hands. When the chief called my name again, my vision cleared further, and I stared down the muzzle of his pistol, which swelled in dimension until it was the diameter of a cannon barrel. He fired.