The Meridians(32)

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.