Steven James - Opening Moves

As I lay down in bed, I took a few minutes to try and clear my head.

I’ve never been good at shutting out the images of the crime scenes I see, turning off that part of myself, and all too often the memories plague me in my dreams where I can’t fight them off. Tonight, even though I hadn’t seen her yet and didn’t even know if she was injured, I was afraid I would have nightmares about a dead Colleen Hayes.

But I didn’t.

I had nightmares about someone else.

In my dream, I’m standing in a forest, bristling pines surround me. Mist whispers through the trees, through the dusk. Ethereal and surreal. Images of past crime scenes are passing before me, layering and overlapping. Blood and broken bodies, the tears of survivors, heartache and terror sketched across their faces.

It isn’t like I’m seeing with my eyes; more like a slightly blurred reality sliding slowly across itself somewhere beyond, but also somehow within, my field of vision.

Then the images fade and a cocoon appears, hanging from a branch just a few feet away. The skin is rich and translucent and something inside the cocoon is moving, but as it pushes against the skin, I see that it’s not a butterfly, not a moth, but rather a worm encircled with wide black veins. The worm is grayish pink, like a sad November twilight.

I’m aware of reaching for the cocoon, but as I do, it falls to the ground.

However, time moves at a different speed here in my dream and the cocoon drops slowly, slow enough for me to take two long breaths as I watch it descend.

Finally, it lands, moist and alive at my feet, where it suddenly grows to the size of a bloated python and becomes something terrifying, with bristling teeth and bulging eyes. I back up, but it writhes toward me.

Gray, but veined in black.

As I retreat, sharp branches scratch my back, forcing me to stop, but the grisly creature does not. I kick at its head, but at the last moment it dives into the soft earth.

I realize that the snake, or worm, or whatever it was, might emerge again, might encircle my legs, so I hurry away from that part of the forest. The bare tree branches reach for my arms as I pass and sharp twigs like skeleton fingers claw at me from inside the curtain of evening mist. As I bump into the branches, droplets of water fall from above me onto my neck like teardrops in the mist.

A cocoon.

Birthing a monster.

Burrowing into the earth.

Even in my dream I’m somehow aware that the cocoon and the disturbing creature have some greater significance, some meaning beyond themselves, but I have no idea what that might be.

As I pass through the cool, dewy evening, I sense that I am not alone.

I reach the edge of the forest. A field stretches out of sight before me, open and wild, cleared of the ghostlike fog by a steady prairie wind.

Where I am, I cannot say.

The sun is low.

Dusk is near.

The air deepens to a chill. Something is happening. Something bad.

I want to wake up, but I cannot. Even when I pinch myself, even when I bite down hard on my cheek, I cannot.

Fifty meters away a man appears, stepping out of the bleary mists. He’s carrying a shovel and dragging something. A sack. No-

A sleeping bag.

It is not empty.

My heart thumps heavily, unmanageably, inside my chest.

It’s a little girl’s sleeping bag, pink and embroidered on top with large yellow flowers, but now encircled with duct tape in three careful places.

A tragic, terrible cocoon.

Like the one that gave oozing birth to the worm.

I cannot see the man’s face.

The sun pauses on its way to the edge of the world and the man stares long and hard at the earth. For a moment everything in my dream wavers, as if time itself were catching its breath, and then the man takes a few steps farther into the meadow. Stops.

Though I want to approach him, my desire doesn’t affect how things play out in my dream and I remain standing there, watching, deeply unsettled because of the sleeping bag and its contents, which I fear I know.

Heartbeat quickening, I watch the man dig, and when the hole is complete, he drives the shovel into the earth beside him and reaches for the sleeping bag.

It sags heavy and sad in his arms. Then he lowers the bag, the tender-child-shaped bundle, into the shallow grave he just dug.

I want desperately to do something, to stop him, but it’s a dream and I can only watch.

Only-

He rises again, considers the hole, and then, as the day grows thin and the shadows grow long, he retrieves the shovel and begins to fill in the grave.

I’m aware of a profound sadness because I know it’s too late. The child is dead. There’s nothing more to be done.

Despite that, a banshee voice screams in my head, telling me to stop him.

And this time I’m able to move.

I run into the field.

The man continues to shovel, and as he does, I race toward him. I know it’s a dream, but I sense that still, somehow, he will see, or at least hear me coming.

But he doesn’t seem to notice, doesn’t look my way.

I wish I could see his face.

He drives the shovel into the pile of dark earth beside the hole and brings the blade up with its mouthful of dirt, tips it onto the pink cocoon. And I hear him singing softly, in a voice surprisingly gentle and loving, a father’s voice. Words falling like soft petals to the ground:

“Hush, little baby, don’t say a word…”

Shoveling in time with the words.

“Daddy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.”

Emptying the shovel, driving it into the ground again as I approach.

“And if that mockingbird don’t sing…”

I’m close now, almost ready to stop him.

But another voice urges me to see what’s in the bag. The dying daylight lands on my face and it feels like the coming night is seeping into me. The cop in me insists on stopping him, but the dream world directs me to the hole instead.

“Daddy’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.”

I arrive. Look into the hole.

And see the bag move.

Whatever is wrapped inside it is not dead.

“No!” I can hear myself scream.

I go for my SIG but find no gun by my side. I leap at the man to tackle him, but my arms pass through him. He’s a ghost to me, even though he’s shoveling real dirt onto a living child. He continues his work, oblivious to me. I jump into the hole and reach for the duct tape, to undo it, to free the child.

Dirt is landing on my back. Real dirt. He keeps shoveling. The gentle singing doesn’t stop.

“And if that diamond ring turns brass…”

I struggle with the tape, but can’t find its end, can’t get the crying child out.

The girl inside the bag is calling for her mommy to help her. The man doesn’t stop his terrible work. More dirt falls on my back, spilling over me and into the hole, onto the girl.

“Daddy’s gonna buy you a looking glass…”

No!

Frantically, I brush the dirt aside, but suddenly I’m being drawn backward as if a great hand has grasped my neck and is lifting me, dragging me from the scene. I struggle, but it does no good. As the image shrinks, the man shoveling the dirt appears smaller and fainter, his song fading as darkness and distance swallow him. Then the fog around me deepens and the sound of the little girl crying becomes nothing but an echoed memory lost in time.

She was not dead.

No, she was not.

And then I’m awake, my blankets wound around my legs, a tight, tangled cocoon.

A terrible, terrible cocoon.

Sickly light seeps through the curtains. Reluctant sunlight from a day that does not want to be born.

I wrestle free of the blankets and stand, my breathing harsh and heavy.