15.
***
Scott was very tired.
He had been driving for almost twelve hours, and still had several hours to go before reaching his new home in Meridian, Idaho. But it wasn't just the drive. The night before he packed all his things in the moving van and began the long haul toward his home town, he didn't sleep a wink. Or rather, he slept, but so fitfully that no real rest was to be had. Just quick dozes punctuated by dreams.
Nightmares.
In his dreams, Scott kept seeing the old Mr. Gray, calling to him. Only no, it wasn't him that Mr. Gray was calling, it was someone else. Someone named Kevin.
Kevin, the same name that had been written on the strange note that Scott had seen in his apartment after returning home from the hospital. "I'm still here, and I'm coming for you and Kevin."
Just as he had upon finding the note, Scott wondered who this Kevin was, and what his tie to the strange Mr. Gray could be, not to mention what his tie to Scott himself might show itself to be.
"You've hidden from me for long enough," said Mr. Gray in the dream.
And Scott spoke back. But it wasn't his voice, it was another voice, a voice that was a half-whisper, making it impossible to guess if the speaker was old or young, man or woman. All that was sure was that it was not his own voice.
"I haven't been hiding, Adrian," said the voice.
"Don't lie to me, boy," said Mr. Gray. His face contorted in anger as he said it, those aged, yellowing teeth of his showing in a snarl.
"I've never lied to you," replied the other voice - Kevin?
And then the dream ended, each time the same, with Mr. Gray pulling out a switchblade and walking toward Scott/Kevin with murder in his eyes. Each time, Scott awoke with sweat drenching his body and the bare mattress upon which he was sleeping during his last night in the apartment he had shared with Amy and Chad a million years ago in a time and place he still believed was best described as "once upon a time."
Once upon a time, Scott Cowley was alone, and frightened in the night in a way he had not been since being a very young boy who crept into his parents' room when plagued by nightmares. Only his parents were gone now. Gone, but they had left him their small house in Meridian, a mid-size town just to the southwest of Boise, Idaho's capital city. The house still stood there, and was still in Scott's name. He had put up tenants in the property during the years since his parents' deaths - both had died of natural causes within mere months of one another, as though when his father first traveled through the veil of silence that covered the otherworld of death, his mother could no longer bear to stand alone on this mortal coil, and so had shuffled off to join her spouse in the oblivion Beyond.
Only it wasn't oblivion, was it? Wasn't it Heaven? That was what his parents had both taught him from an early age, taking him to church and teaching him at home the stories of the Bible, of Cain and Able and Moses and Abraham, of Jesus and Peter and Matthew and Paul. They had been his heroes when young, easily standing alongside such other favorites as Superman and The Flash.
But no more. They had stepped down from that lofty perch on the day that God had allowed - if not commanded from on high - Amy and Chad to die. Scott had no more longing to be a part of such a Heaven made up of souls stolen before their time. He merely wished to live out the rest of his life in the comfort of his parents' home, the house he had grown up in, the only place he could have a chance of ever perceiving as his home now that Amy and Chad were gone. So just over thirty one days before, Scott had given the required notice to his tenants - a nice family that he had allowed to live at the place nearly rent free in exchange for their promise to do routine maintenance on the place and make sure that it stayed sound and sturdy - and had prepared to move back to the old homestead.
Now he was on his trip back, but so tired from the nightmares of the night before, and from the laborious work of loading all his possessions into the trailer on his own, that he could barely keep his eyes open.
He kept seeing phantom shapes in the darkness at the sides of the road. Strange, black blobs that roiled and shifted as though made of darkly dripping wax, candles melted by some otherworldly heat that burned not from without, but from within. The shapes rolled in on themselves, now disappearing into singularities, now appearing from the very Nothing from which Scott had until recently believed that God had shaped the world.
But this was the real world, the real act of creation. Not some paradisiacal garden, followed by a family being tossed out into the cruel world to fend for themselves. No, the real world was a family already split by death, and black shapes hovering at the edges of reality, ready to consume him from within.
The shapes turned more tangible, less illusory. They began to take shape and form, looking like great black dogs - like hellhounds spat up from the depths of darkness and despair, from the vast blackness of human frailty and demise. The dogs writhed in his periphery, and then began running alongside the moving truck, their too-white teeth glinting in the inky night.
Scott turned off the road several times, and as soon as he got out to stretch his legs each time, the dogs retreated back to the Nothing from which they had been spawned. But as soon as he returned to the road, as soon as the gentle whir of the tires on the highways and the monotony of driving through largely unpopulated areas began to lull him back to sleep on this long night, the dogs returned, demons in canine form, to nip at him as he passed, each dark bite stealing not flesh but energy and a sense of self from him.
Then Scott looked at the empty passenger seat beside him, and nearly drove off the side of the road. That would have been disastrous, for he was passing through a small mountain range, and there was nothing on the side of his car but a flimsy guardrail and empty air. He nearly drove off the side of the road not from fear, but from a sense of his own tenuous grip on reality as he realized that he was not alone in the dark cabin of the truck.
One of the dogs was there. Dark and bristling, it spoke to him with a voice that was gritty and dark as a chunk of charcoal about to be set alight by the very fires of hell.
"Don't go home," said the voice.
And Scott, to his amazement, answered.
I must be dreaming, he thought. I must be about to crash the truck. I should stop this dream before I'm killed.
But he didn't stop the dream; made no attempt to wake from the nightmare that held him in its pincer-like grip. Instead, he merely spoke to the form that sat on its haunches in the seat beside him. "I have no home," he said.
The dog licked its dark fur with a tongue that was yellow and oozing, its breath reeking of sulfur and other, less pleasant smells - decay, rot, desiccation...mortality.
"Oh, but home is where the heart is, Scott. Home is where you make your life."
Scott turned his eyes back to the road, and saw that the black dogs that had been running at the edges of his vision now were running in the road directly ahead of him, their black haunches illuminated by the brightness of his headlights. They looked back at him, and in their eyes he saw the lives of the people he had failed to save as a cop. He saw the victims of domestic violence he had seen during his time in Homicide; saw the drug hits gone terribly awry; saw the bodies of the small children, innocent victims in a deadly cross-fire between rival gangs, that he had found at one crime scene, curled in on one another as though hugging would somehow stop the bullets that had been ricocheting all around them.
He saw Amy and Chad.
Scott returned his gaze to the black demon-dog beside him, preferring its unholy presence to the reminders of his past failures.
Only the dog was gone.
Mr. Gray was now sitting there. He smiled, and had the same gnarled teeth as the dog had possessed, the same rotten tongue and acrid breath the hellhound had brought into the truck with it.
"You'd be better off not going to Meridian," said Mr. Gray. Not the Mr. Gray from the alley and the shootout, this was again the old Mr. Gray that had plagued Scott since that date. The Mr. Gray of the ruined face and aged body. Only he didn't seem quite so old this time, and his voice was a shade stronger than it had been, as though the passing of time was for him a healing balm that would lend him greater strength and youth.
"Eat shit," said Scott. Hardly eloquent, but it was the nearest thing he could think of that conveyed his depth of disgust at the man's presence.
"Now, now," said Mr. Gray. "I've come here peacefully, with your best intentions at heart, my boy."
Scott repeated his invitation that Mr. Gray partake of his own bowel movements, then said nothing.
"Fine," said Mr. Gray, and suddenly he was in the form of a dog again, the black canine dark and massive in the passenger seat, staring at Scott with eyes that were as gray as slate, and twice as brittle. "Have it your way, little man, little boy."
And with a bark, the dog threw itself at Scott. Scott threw his arms up to ward off the attack, and felt the truck slide and skid below him as his hands left the wheel.
But the expected attack never came. Scott looked beside him.
Nothing. The cab was empty, save only a few packing boxes with articles he had deemed too fragile to travel in the back with the rest of his possessions.
Dreaming, he thought again. I was dreaming.
He looked forward quickly as he realized he must have been asleep on the road, and wondered if he was about to find himself going over the edge of a cliff or veering into the lane of an oncoming semi.
Neither was the case. He was still firmly on his side of the road, his position as centered as it could have been under the best circumstances. But that did not mean that he was out of danger.
Because Mr. Gray was standing in the road right in front of him.
Scott had no time to crank the wheel to the side, only a split-second in which to decide whether or not to even try to brake.
Bastard killed my family, he thought, and instead of stamping on the brake his foot came heavily down on the accelerator.
Mr. Gray's face, illuminated in the bright lights of the oncoming truck, smiled. Actually, he leered, as though he could see into the darkest portions of Scott's heart...and liked what he saw.
"No!" Scott screamed, and in that single word he packed all the longing and despair that he had felt these long months and years since he had lost his family, his job, his life. "No!" he shrieked again, and his foot was an anvil resting on the accelerator, an immovable object pressing the van to its top speed limit.
"Been seeing you," said the old gray man.
And in the instant before Scott's truck plowed into him, in the fraction of a second before which he should have been converted to nothing more than a smear across Scott's windshield, he once again did what he had done on every encounter before.
The gray man smiled, and disappeared.
Scott was alone, not even the black dogs on the side of the road deigning to accompany him in his travels any more.
Meridian, he thought. The middle, the center, the halfway point. And with the thoughts he shuddered. Because he could not bear the thought of the events of the past months and years continuing on for months and years in the future. He prayed - no, hoped; prayer was a pastime he no longer engaged in - that the name of his destination was not a harbinger of things to come. He did not know what was going on, whether he was going mad or instead suffering from some other malady, at once darker and far harder to explain than mere insanity, or whether perhaps he had in fact died on the day that Mr. Gray had put a gun to his forehead and pulled the trigger.
Perhaps that's it, he thought. Maybe I'm in Hell.
The thought had a certain appeal, mostly because certainly if Hell existed, its very definition would be to cut him off from the people and things he loved most in the world.
But no. Hell had no more meaning to Scott now than did Heaven. There was only madness, and the interminable sanity of what was left of his life.
Perhaps he was going mad.
If he was lucky.
But until then, he kept the truck in gear, and sped down the dark road toward the small town of Meridian. The small town that marked the center of things past and things to come, the middle of all things that had and would happen, the confluence of past and future in a permanent present.
Scott shuddered. The present was something he dreaded. Only in the past could he find solace from the wounds he had suffered. Only in the past could he be with his family again.
Not in the present. Not in Meridian.
But he had nowhere else to go, so he continued on the long stretch of road, making good time, and seeing no more black dogs, no more Mr. Gray. And if he did see the beasts again, he intended to pull out the gun he had kept after leaving the LAPD from its place in the moving truck's glove compartment, to put it under his chin, and to pull the trigger.
And Hell be damned.
***