The Summer Man

Chapter FIVE





Amanda Young woke up from the worst nightmare of her life very early on Saturday morning, the day of Port Isley’s annual town picnic. Gasping, clutching at her sheets, she was sure she had screamed—but the apartment was still, not a sound anywhere but the watery tick of the refrigerator in the next room and her own fluttering heart. If she’d screamed, no one had heard.

“Jesus,” she whispered, rubbed at her eyes, and found they were wet. She’d cried in the dream, early on, and again at the end. When she’d seen what had happened to that woman. God.

Nightmare, that’s all, that’s all. It was a knee-jerk thought, and it didn’t ring true. The dream still made sense, in a creepy, surreal way, as though sleep reality had leaked through the veil, into her conscious mind. Generally she made it back to real life as soon as she woke up, but every now and then it took a bit longer. She hated that feeling, that lingering, a sense that real life had become subject to the laws of the dream universe, where unexplained things were common knowledge and time was all f*cked up; days passed in a blink, seconds stretched to hours. She felt that now, staring around at the edges and shapes of her small room, what little she could see by the parking lot light that filtered through the ancient, dusty curtain. She could still vividly feel the fear, the sadness…it had all seemed normal, even inevitable, and it still did.

Because it wasn’t a dream. Not all of it, at least. And you know it.

“Jesus,” she said again, drawing in a deep, shaking breath as she fumbled for her bedside lamp. The light crashed on, making her blink, the hyperbright banality of her room a welcome and wonderful sight. The click of the switch seemed overly loud, the light overly harsh, but it was otherwise safe and sane. Her cheap digital clock glowed a quarter after three, what seemed to her the absolute dead of night.

She’d dreamed that she’d been away for a time and had returned to the apartment tired, ready to sleep. As she’d walked through the living room, she’d seen some small, dark shape moving, something, out of the corner of her eye, but hadn’t paid attention, eager to get to bed. The carpeting, a sad, dull-blue shag that ran the length of the apartment, had been teeming with lice, with bugs, with what appeared to be tiny snakes or worms, but that hadn’t seemed weird; she’d made a note of it, is all, and gone to bed. She’d slept, and woken to streaks of sunshine laying across her bed. She was wearing her mother’s warm, ragged terry robe, although she couldn’t remember borrowing it or putting it on, and she’d headed out of her room, down the short hall, thinking that the carpet must have been cleaned, there were no bugs, no tiny snakes or worms—and she’d seen her mother lying on the floor of the living room, dressed in a thin nightgown. Her face was turned away, and Amanda approached her slowly, pulling the robe tight, starting to feel a terrible dread.

Her mother wasn’t asleep, or dead; she was staring at the far wall, a distant, dreamy smile on her face, her eyes open and unblinking. A sleek rat sat next to her face, cleaning its whiskers with tiny, skeletal paws, its dark fur greasy and thick, and the dread was spinning up into something worse, something bigger; her mother hated rats—

Grace Young sat up abruptly, holding her arms out to her daughter. “Give us a kiss, baby,” she said, and Amanda felt an incredible darkness wash through her. Terror, but also an aching recognition that her mother was lost to her, now and forever. She covered her eyes and started to cry, because she knew that she would have to kiss her mother, she had to, and it would be the death of her…and when she dropped her shaking fingers a beat later, was in the dark, outside at night. Not alone, though.

There were trees, and what looked like part of a building—Amanda thought vaguely that it was the restroom block up at the fairgrounds—and very little light but enough to see. From nearby, a couple of hundred yards behind her, maybe, she heard music and people, a background thing. She could smell the sea and trees and wood smoke—and in a clearing not twenty feet in front of her, two, three dark figures were bent over a fourth, down on the ground and draped in shadow. The fourth was on her back on the ground, struggling.

I was dreaming about my mother, she thought, confused.

“Hold her!” Low but perfectly audible, a shouted whisper from one of the group.

“F*ck, she’s strong—”

“Shut the f*ck up! Do it!”

She knew that voice, that angry, whispered shout. It was Brian Glover, linebacker for the Isley High Cougars and the biggest a*shole in the universe. And two of the Dicks, his toadies, probably Todd and Ryan. The three of them had been on probation together since beating the crap out of an eighthgrader last fall. The kid had been hospitalized, and they hung tight. It was obvious what they were about to do, what they had already begun, and Amanda felt sick. She was dreaming, but this wasn’t hers, this hadn’t existed in her mind before. It was as alien as her vision of Lisa Meyer had been, like having someone else’s memory, their nightmare.

The woman was mostly silent as she fought, either because one of them had a hand over her mouth or because she was saving her breath for the struggle, Amanda couldn’t see—but one of the boys pulled his arm back and hit her, hard, and after that the struggle was mostly over. Amanda saw one of the boys stand up, heard a zipper, heard a laugh—not an evil chuckle but a happy, drunken laugh. They were enjoying themselves; she could feel it, like the frenetic, joyful energy of a party. That was when Amanda started to cry again, because although she opened her mouth wide and screamed as loud as she could, there was no sound. She could hear people, was close enough to them that she saw by the light their revelry cast, but she was a ghost, ineffectual, a voyeur and nothing more. She had kissed her mother after all, and had not survived, and it was the saddest thing she’d ever known. With her new reality just taking hold, she drew in another breath to scream, to force the sound into the world—and woke up.

She scruffed at her hair and made a small sound of aggravation and despair. The frustration she felt was huge. She wanted to reject the dream, of course; it was crazy and…well, crazy. F*cking psycho nutbag, but it had also been like the vision she’d had about Lisa Meyer and Mr. Billings. The one that had turned out to be true, that had kept her sticking close to the apartment for the last week. The rape dream had come with the feeling of personal knowledge, of awareness of fact as it related to her—subjective, like Devon had said. Whatever she had experienced before, this was the same.

Brian Glover and the Dicks—Devon had bestowed the title on the local bully asshead and his pals years before, and the name had stuck, like a band name—they were going to rape someone at the fairgrounds. In the dark.

What about the rest of it? The part about her mother, that had to be some kind of regular dream thing, symbolic, or whatever. She didn’t want to turn into her mother. Peter was probably the rat, who f*cking knew. What Amanda knew, what she believed, was that the rape was going to happen.

“Town picnic,” she muttered, sitting up straighter in bed. The big annual picnic was today at the fairgrounds. Everyone went. They did lunch, a big, usually lame-ass show in the afternoon—high school band, a presentation from the drama fags, some acoustic hippie from the artist colony—and then dinner. And drinks, big-time; the Trumans usually sponsored a couple/five kegs, although they only gave out drink tickets to the summer people and their own snotty clientele; everyone else got ridiculously overcharged. Anyone in town with a good or service to sell showed up to schmooze…and for the disaffected youth of the small community, it was a chance to meet new blood, to seek out others of their own kind. To create some summer memories, stories that could be retold throughout the long, boring winter. The picnic ran until eleven, wrapping with a moldy-oldie rock show. Well after dark.

Shit. She had to tell someone; she had to do something. She looked at the clock again. She couldn’t call anyone, not now. Except for Devon, she couldn’t think of anyone to call. And waking up her mother…even if Grace wasn’t dead-to-the-world drunk—which was extremely unlikely—what could she do about anything? Believe her daughter? Call the cops? Provide comfort? Fat f*cking chance times three.

Amanda had been thinking that she’d bag the picnic this year, after what had happened at Pam’s house. A couple of the kids who’d been there had tried to reach her—Ally Fergus had called twice—but she’d dodged the calls, determined to avoid the whole thing. Even Devon had mostly dropped it; there was nothing else to say, nothing to figure out, and once the initial shock had worn off, she hadn’t been able to come to any conclusions about anything. She’d foreseen a death, and that person had died, and after most of a dull, reality-based week in her mother’s crappy apartment, she’d kind of given up on revelation.

Plus, Brooks might show. Her ex-boyfriend. Her only real boyfriend. Brooks lived in Port Angeles. They’d met at last year’s picnic and dated for almost five months before she’d realized he was pretty much a moron. Plenty of good reasons to skip the picnic this year.

But that woman…

She would go. She and Devon would figure out something, some way to tell somebody…they’d stop it from happening.

Amanda eased back against the pillow and took a few deep breaths. OK. OK, she was going to do something. They could tell Chief Vincent that Brian stole something, or assaulted somebody. The truth was obviously not an option, but—

—but yeah, it is, she thought. There had been witnesses to her freak-out at the party. She didn’t particularly relish the thought of trying to explain what had happened—or how seeing the future was even possible, since she had exactly no clue—but they’d have to take her seriously if she could prove she’d done it before. Wouldn’t they? Or was that hopelessly naive?

It wouldn’t come to that. She’d think of something, or Devon would. They had to.

Amanda closed her eyes to think, sure she wouldn’t sleep again, and spent a solid fifteen minutes coming up with plans and discarding them before drifting off again. She slept deeply and without dreams until late in the morning, until people were already gathering at the fairgrounds for the town picnic.