Running, running. Don’t know where, don’t know why. Just free and running, running, running.
Trees. Shade. Stop in shade. Drop to your knees. Kneel panting in shade. Sweating and panting.
Wound in your hand not bleeding much. Lick carefully.
Warmth between your legs reminds you of male. Shiver with thrill of his agony, how he broke, how he bled.
Thirst. Mouth dry. Throat raw. No smell of water here.
Find water. Food. But where?
Overhead, things unseen flutter in trees, alive and fluttering, sheltering from heat.
Your thirst and hunger breed fear. Fear makes thirst greater, hunger sharper. Fear feeds fear. Fluttering in trees suddenly seems sinister.
No more voice in your head. But something crawling inside your head. Crawling, crawling. Flickers of lightning inside your head, bright lines of tattered webbing.
Fear of things unseen, fear of aloneness, fear of being alone with things unseen.
Running again. Urgently, urgently. Out of trees. Harder earth. Grass whipping your legs, pricking, stinging.
Hot light falling burns now. Burns the skin, stings the eyes. Earth hurts underfoot. Pain. Pain sharpens fear, breeds desperation.
Shapes ahead. Shapes blue like the blue above where light falls from. Different trees, shade but less shade from different trees. A blue place in the shade.
Alone. Thirst. Hunger. Confusion. Who am I, what am I, where am I, why? Danger, danger, danger. Alone. Hide.
In the big blue shape, a tall white shape with clear shapes. Words come and go, familiar but only half understood—door and windows. You look through.
A place beyond. Shaded place out of falling, burning light.
Water place? Food place? Safe place for hiding? Something there that needs killing?
Crawling inside your head. Crawling things seeking one another.
Stone. Means what? Stone. Means nothing, nothing.
Again into hot falling light. Urgent, urgent. Looking for something. What? Rock. Yes, this. This rock.
Clear-shape window breaks. Reach through. Find thing that turns. Door thing opens, closes.
Hot inside but shade everywhere.
Listen, listen. Any sound a threat. Silence a threat. Sound and silence both feed fear. Fear fuels more fear.
Smell water. A drop falls from shiny curve, falls into white hollow space. Another drop. Another.
Fumble with shiny things. One turns. Water comes. You drink. Cool, wet, good. Make water stop.
Moving through shaded spaces, threat at every turn, unbearable threat, unbearable.
Sit in a corner, back to the corner, shaded spaces in front, listening, wondering, fearing. Threatened and alone.
Fear breeds fear, breeds anger, breeds rage.
Bright broken web threads glimmering inside your head.
Crawling things seeking inside your head. Crawling and faintly whispering far away. Many threatening whispers far away.
Icy fear, blistering rage. You shake with both. No cure for fear except rage, and rage seething into fury.
Threatening whispers beget enraged whispering of your own. You whisper a challenge, an invitation to come here, come find you, come be killed, kill or be killed, come to the different trees, the blue place. Kill, kill, kill.
20
CORNELL JASPERSON KNOWS MORE about dogs now than he did a few days earlier, and one thing he knows is that they don’t necessarily pee a lot, but they pee to a pretty rigid schedule.
The last time Cornell took Duke and Queenie out to pee, first thing that morning, the sound of a low-flying twin-engine airplane in this usually quiet valley had for some reason triggered an intense anxiety attack from which he had needed hours to fully recover.
He didn’t want to take the dogs out again, because maybe the plane was still up there. If he had another anxiety attack, it might be even worse than the first one. Maybe he would collapse outside and be unable to get back into his library, leaving the boy alone and frightened. When he collapsed, maybe he would lose control of the dogs and never see them again and have to tell the heartbroken boy that the dogs had run away, and the boy would hate him and would never eat sandwiches with him again and would never ask him to read aloud again, so then Cornell would have to live alone like before, which was what he had always thought he preferred until recently.
Although he didn’t want to risk walking the dogs, the dogs insisted on being walked. There was no getting out of it.
He wouldn’t take them without leashes, as he had done before, just in case the unusual airplane was passing inexplicably low and the imaginary ants started crawling all over him and he had to get inside quickly.
The boy clipped the leashes to their collars, so that Cornell wouldn’t have to chance the dogs touching his bare skin.
“I could take them out,” the boy said.
“No. You’re a lot safer here. I’ll be back soon. I’ll make a new kind of sandwich. Little bags of potato chips. Good muffins for dessert.”
“Sandwiches with sweet pickles on the side?” the boy asked.
“Yes. Precisely. And cola ‘canned under the authority of the Coca-Cola Company, Atlanta, Georgia, 30313, by a member of the Coca-Cola Bottlers Association, Atlanta, George, 30327.’ ”
The boy laughed softly. “I like you.”
“I like me, too, though I’m a walking nutbar. Umm. Umm. And I like you, Travis Hawk.”
Cornell let the dogs take him outside, and he held the leashes tightly while they smelled the ground and the weeds and each other and then more ground and weeds before taking turns peeing.
The day was too hot and too bright, everything flat in the hard light. Quiet. At the moment no airplane was growling through the sky immediately overhead.
But then the scream shrilled through the day. He had never heard anything like it. Maybe the dogs hadn’t heard anything like it, either, because they raised their heads and pricked their ears and stood very still.
The scream came again, a little muffled, half like a person screaming and half like an animal. The first time, the screamer had sounded miserable and frightened. But the second time there was rage in the cry, too, a scary ferocity.
It seemed to come from the little blue house in which Cornell had lived while building his library for the end of the world.
The dogs were focused on the house, and they started to pull Cornell toward it. He struggled to hold them back. When the third scream cleaved the day, it was so chilling that the dogs changed their minds about wanting to investigate the source.
Cornell wasn’t seized by anxiety. He cautioned himself not to be his worst self, to be his better and calmer self. Not that he always listened to himself at times like this, though sometimes he did. He turned the dogs away from the house and walked them back to the barn that wasn’t a barn.
No further screams issued from the little blue house during the time that Cornell took to get into his library and out of the too-hot too-bright day, which had suddenly become also too strange.
Cornell had been expecting the boy’s mother to come today, and he had been hoping she would not get here until late, until after lunch and reading-aloud time, maybe not until after dinner. But now he wished she were here already.
21
TORRENTIAL WIND-DRIVEN RAIN rushes in from the Gulf of Mexico as if that entire body of water will be drawn into the thunderheads and purified of its salt and thrown down onto the lowlands of Texas in some dire judgment that will require an enormous ark and animals boarded two by two.