Maggie Shayne - Sleep with the Lights On

I understood that. Being in a new place without being able to see it, you liked some kind of touch. I usually inspected new places by staying close to the walls to get the layout, so I did that with her, circling each room, letting her feel all the boundaries and locate all the doorways.

When we finished our tour of the house, which seemed to meet with the dog’s approval, we went outside and walked around the wrought-iron-fenced yard. Five acres of it, with woods, a stream, lush green grass. I knew the dog must be tired, but she never slowed, never complained, just plodded along beside me, tongue lolling.

When the sun started to set over the reservoir I sat down in the grass and just watched it. Myrtle plopped down, too, and without even asking first, she lowered her big head onto my lap, her sightless brown eyes falling closed.

The sun was a giant orange-yellow ball, and as it sank, I saw a bald eagle soar right in front of it. “Wow,” I whispered.

I realized I was stroking the dog’s head when she released an enormous sigh. I think she was smiling. It was a perfectly serene moment. It was my last serene moment, now that I think back on it.

* * *

Five hours later, give or take, the first nightmare came. I was standing in a dark room, and there was something sticky all over my face, and I felt...alive. More alive than I had ever felt. My pulse was pounding, and every cell, every nerve ending, seemed to tingle with delicious sensations of arousal and pleasure. Like a full body orgasm. I was breathing fast and couldn’t seem to stop smiling.

But that stickiness...

I wiped at my cheek with one hand, pulled it away to look. Red. Blood.

The pleasure tingles started to change into shivers of fear as I looked down at my body and saw more of it. I was covered in it.

I staggered backward, trying to wipe the stuff off and realizing there was a hammer in my other hand. And it, too, wore a sticky red coating. I dropped it, but it took its time pulling free from my palm, then landing on the floor with a clear, heavy thud.

Turning in a slow circle, I tried to figure out where I was, what was happening to me. There was just enough light in the room to let me see the dead man on the floor. His head was broken like a melon dropped from a roof, his hair so matted with blood and bone and brain that I couldn’t even tell what color it was. His face was more hamburger than human.

I opened my mouth to scream, but instead of screaming I spoke, and I don’t even know who I was talking to. “I don’t want to see this, I don’t want to. Make it go away, make it go, make it go! I’d rather be blind!”

And then I was awake.

I sat up in bed, blinking, but everything was dark. For one horrifying moment I thought my terrified wish had been granted and I’d gone blind again.

No. I didn’t mean it. With all my heart, I didn’t mean it!

A sob got stuck in my throat, and I pressed a hand to my chest to try to catch the panic that was trying to gallop away with me.

And then a wet nose touched my cheek. It had the same effect as when the hero slapped the hysterical heroine in one those old movies from back when that was a good enough excuse to hit a woman. I snapped out of it.

I wasn’t blind.

I could sort of see Myrtle, standing beside the bed, hind legs on the floor, front ones on the mattress as she stretched to reach me. The gleam of her eyes and the shape of her head were clear in my darkened bedroom. I stroked her and leaned over to fumble for the lamp, snapped it on and went limp with relief when light filled the room and the room filled my eyes.

“Okay, good. Good. It’s all good. It was just a dream.”

My bedroom was just the way I’d left it. Soothing green walls—keep. Ivory curtains and woodwork—keep. Not a single picture on a single wall—big change needed. The circular dog bed lay on the plush green carpet to my left. One of Myrtle’s toys, a yellow teddy bear with one arm missing and white fluff sticking out of its shoulder socket, was lying in it.

But Myrtle was still standing with her paws on my mattress.

“Yeah, okay. Why not?” I got up, moved around behind her, linked my arms around her middle and picked her up, grunting as I did. “Not a lightweight, are you, Myrt?”

Snarf, said Myrtle.

I got her into the bed, then climbed back in myself. She padded around until she found a spot she liked—as close to me as possible—and dropped. Myrtle didn’t lay down. Myrtle collapsed.

I sighed. “So what the hell was that about, do you think?” I asked her.

She opened her sightless eyes and looked back at me as if to say, You’re asking me? I’m just a dog.

I’d never had a nightmare like that in my life. It had been vivid. Real. And the feelings running through me in that dream had been majorly fucked up. Way out of line with anything I would ever have felt. I had never equated blood and sex. Not even in fantasy. Sadism was not my thing. I didn’t have a dominatrix bone in my body. So what the hell was up with the sensations of sexual pleasure and all that blood?

“All right, well, I’ve been through a lot this week. Hit by a car, got my eyesight back and Tommy’s still missing and—”

I flashed back to the man on the floor in my dream, the obvious question popping into my head. Could it have been my brother? Was I having some kind of psychic vision about what had happened to Tommy?

I sat up again, my eyes shifting rapidly side to side as I searched my brain for the memory, for any clue. What clothes was the guy wearing? What did he look like?

Blood and hamburger.

What the hell was wrong with me?

“Simple, stupid. Stress, a major physical change, every sense in my body undergoing a radical new state of being, and I’m still worried to hell and gone about Tommy. Maybe even feeling guilty that we were celebrating tonight while he was—”

Blood and hamburger.

“What do you say we leave the light on for the rest of the night, huh, Myrt?”

She closed her eyes and sighed.

But even then, I didn’t go back to sleep.

* * *

Mason stood between his two nephews at Glenwood Cemetery. Joshua had tugged and pulled at his necktie so much it was hanging loose and crooked, and kept shifting from one foot to the other, pausing in between to tug at the seat of his pants. He’d already taken off his jacket, and Mason thought if his mother hadn’t been standing there, he would have shucked the tie, the pants and the shoes, too, and gone running off in his shorts.

He intended to see to it the kid did just that once this part was over.

This part, frankly, sucked.

At least Josh seemed...normal. If there was a normal after a kid lost his dad. Mason had been twenty-nine when he’d lost his own, three years ago, and he still felt off his game.

That had been different, though. His dad had been sick for over a year. Pancreatic cancer was a bitch of a way to go. Had he known ahead of time, Mason would have stockpiled the morphine himself for his father. But no one had warned them how bad it would be. Those hospice nurses—they’d been so good in so many ways. Let Dad die at home where he wanted to be. But still, why don’t they tell the family to stockpile the morphine? To play the pain up before it got too bad and keep asking for more? They could have gotten it at that point. No one worries about addiction when you’re dying. It’s not like you’re going to have to get clean later on and suffer through withdrawal. All anyone wants is for you to be comfortable. Until it gets to the point where no amount of morphine can make you comfortable and instead it makes you crazy, with the nightmares and the hallucinations and the notion that the drugs are poison and everyone’s trying to get rid of you, maybe because that’s what they should be doing.