December Park(101)

It was my grandfather, eye-to-eye with me now. I could smell the war on him, the way butchers smell of the abattoir, and it singed the hairs in my nose and caused my eyes to fill with water.

—Are you some kind of coward? my grandfather barked. Take a look there. See what we done. That’s how you get ’em, Poindexter.

I looked. As the smog cleared, I saw the ruined hamburger meat of the man’s face wedged in that hole, the shattered splotches of blood where his fingers had been. Those wet, blazing eyes were gone, leaving behind fleshly pockets filled with squid ink. Blood, thick as syrup and the color of motor oil, drooled out of the opening and saturated the earth.

—There could be two dozen of ’em in that hole, my grandfather informed me, but you only need to do the one up front. The rest of them slope-headed bastards are stuck back there for good and will die there.

A thunderous noise somewhere behind me caused the trees to shudder. I could smell death on the air, and it was even stronger than the gunpowder.

—Something’s coming, I said. Something big.

—Come on, boy, said my grandfather, and he grabbed my hand.

A second later, we were flying through the jungle at a clip so fast my feet weren’t touching the ground. Literally flying. We’d left the bloody mess in the hole behind us, along with that platoon of faceless soldiers. Whatever giant monster was pursuing us through the jungle was still on our heels, though; I felt each of its footfalls reverberating in the earth and in my bones. For some reason, I knew that if it caught us it would turn us to— (statues)

—stone.

The man that was my grandfather only younger snatched a fistful of my shirt and thrust me toward a path that wound through the wet, dripping trees.

My feet crashed through puddles and swampy pools of mud. Each foot felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. In my fury, I glanced down and saw I was clad in military boots that looked many sizes too big.

We came onto a clearing studded with fragile-looking straw huts. A village. Embers smoldered in pits formed of white stone, and scraps of muddy clothing lay strewn around in the dirt. Upon closer scrutiny, I saw that those clothes weren’t caked in mud at all but blood and flecks of whitish tissue, and the white stones around the smoldering pits had eye sockets and teeth. Even in the dream, I felt my gorge rise.

Behind us, the giant creature crashed through the trees in pursuit of us.

—In there, said my grandfather, pointing to the nearest hut.

I realized he wasn’t my grandfather but my dad. That explained why he looked like a younger version of my grandfather . . .

My dad thumped me hard on the back. Go, he shouted.

I ran across the clearing and ditched into the triangular cutout at the front of the nearest hut. Darkness engulfed me. I crouched in the stuffy, enclosed little space and stared out the opening before me. The camouflaged figure that had been my father/grandfather was nowhere to be seen.

Beside me in the darkness: breathing.

A vague silhouette of a human form, outlined in a shimmering nacreous light, hunched down beside me in the straw hut. I heard the figure’s respiration wheezing up through the narrow smokestack of his throat (for I knew this figure was male), smelled the fetid, almost fecal, pungency of the man’s unwashed flesh, the sour griminess of his breath. A hand much like the talon of a giant bird gripped me high up on the arm; fingernails like the hooked beak of a squid punctured my flesh, drawing blood.

He was the Piper, the Harting Farms child killer. Panic bubbled up my throat, and I wanted to scream—to pull free of that talon-like claw and run the hell out of that hut. Yet outside, the enormous unseen creature had finally broached the clearing, its massive nostrils flaring as it attempted to sniff me out among the massacre of the villagers.

—You will open a door, said the Piper. His voice sounded like gravel sliding around inside a cardboard box. You will open a door.

I felt my skin tighten. In the dim light that spilled through the hut’s doorway, I watched the flesh of my exposed arms pucker and brown like paper in a fire. Sores appeared on the backs of my hands, oozing a yellowish, snot-like fluid. My fingernails thickened and turned opaque. When I examined my palms, they looked like the hands of an old wizard, a mummified Egyptian king.

—You will crawl through, said the Piper, his grip on my upper arm tightening. I felt my own blood soaking down my arm and my ribs, plastering my tunic to my torso. You will find a tunnel, he said, and you will crawl through.

An enormous shadow fell across the hut’s pyramid-shaped doorway. I heard the creature’s respiration, a sound like air being let out of tractor tires, and I could smell it just like I could smell the Piper, though it was a rotten fruity smell.

As I peeked out the doorway, I saw a massive tri-toed foot plant itself into the blood-drenched soil, each toe roughly the size of a skateboard, each claw a hooked blade crested with spade-shaped growths that reminded me of the bony plates running along the back of a stegosaurus. In fact, had the foot been covered in scales I would have imagined it to be a dinosaur’s. As it was, the flesh of the tri-toed appendage looked like human skin, and I could discern the fat blue veins and arteries just beneath the skin’s surface.

And I thought, There are no smells in dreams.

The talon crushed the bone in my arm.

There is no pain in— I shot upright in bed, my flesh burning up and nearly boiling the sweat on my body to steam. The filaments of the nightmare still clung to me. Clumsily, I pawed at my left arm, holding my breath until I was confident no one was gripping me there and drawing blood.