Dreamthorp Page 3

  When most of it was uncovered, he dug his fingers beneath it to lift it out. But as his fingertips plunged into the soft earth beneath, they came into contact with something else, something smooth and cool, something that inexplicably made him freeze where he knelt.

  "Sam!" The sound of Esther's voice made him realize that he had been kneeling there far longer than he had thought, and he looked up at her stupidly. "What's wrong?"

  Sam simply shrugged and brought his hand up, taking the piece of wheel rim with it. Esther laughed when she saw it and turned her attention back to her machine. "There's something else," Sam said. "Something else down there."

  He pressed into the dirt carefully with the trowel, and was at first disappointed when what he found seemed to be nothing but a piece of white quartz. But when he drew it wholly from the earth and saw that it was a crude but definite piece of carving, he ran over to Esther, clutching it like a trophy.

  "Look!" he said.

  She took off her earphones and examined it. "What is it, like a little statue?"

  "Yeah. It's quartz. But it's a statue, see? It looks like a man, doesn't it?"

  "A little," Esther said, piqued at having her own cache of coins overshadowed by this chunk of dirty rock. "You sure it's not just a natural thing? You know, shaped by water or something?"

  "Are you kidding? Look at that, you can see the little marks there. Probably a stone tool, maybe even prehistoric."

  "It could just be something one of the lumbermen made."

  But it was impossible to puncture Sam's balloon. "No, no, this is a sculpture, Esther! Primitive art! I can't wait to show this to Charlie Lewis. Maybe it's Indian—do you think it looks Indian? Sort of like those Eskimo carvings, you know?"

  Sam brushed the quartz tenderly, wrapped it in a piece of canvas, and put it in his knapsack, then picked up his digging tools and shoved them into his utility belt. "You're quitting?" Esther said.

  "Yeah, sure." He unplugged his earphones.

  "But the coins—I mean, I've found dozens of coins. . . ."

  "Coins, shmoins, this thing could be worth hundreds of coins. Come on, I want to show Charlie." And he picked up his machine and headed for the path. Esther, annoyed beyond endurance, gathered up her things and followed her husband.

  In this way was the vigil of One-Who-Makes-Spirits-Lie-Still broken, so that nothing kept watch over the grave of the Alligewi, who were now, if they could, free to awaken.

  This composure of criminals puzzles one. Have they looked at death so long and so closely, that familiarity has robbed it of terror?

  —Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp

  There was, the next day, a true awakening. It occurred in a room at the Wyoming State Hospital in Casper.

  Gilbert Rodman was suspected of a great many things. He had, however, never stood trial for any of them, since from the time of his capture, he had been in a coma from which doctors were unable to extricate him. His wounds had healed, and, although he had been fed intravenously for the past nine months, his physical condition was surprisingly good, something that amazed his doctors. When he was arrested, Gilbert Rodman weighed 185 pounds, most of it muscle, and stood 6 feet 1 inch. In the nine months of lying supine in bed, needles stuck in his arm, his wastes being drawn away by plastic tubing, Gilbert had lost only twenty pounds.

  Although he was under suspicion of raping, killing, and mutilating over a dozen women—with one positive eyewitness to his final crime—he had no permanent guard after the first month. There was no indication that Gilbert would come out of his coma, and, if he did, he would be so weak that a guard could be summoned before the man was able to rise from his bed. This, at least, was the consensus of opinion among the staff. The staff, however, had not reckoned on the strength, nor the mental talents, of Gilbert Rodman.

  Gilbert awoke at nine o'clock on Sunday morning. His eyes opened. His fists clenched. There was little dopiness about him when he woke. Instead, he felt rested, lean, ready. He also felt empty, as if something had been taken away from him, something that could never be replaced. He knew what it was before he put his left hand underneath the sheet. The knowledge had been with him for nine months.

  For Gilbert Rodman had not been merely in a coma. He had been in a self-induced trance, a state of meditation which nothing had prepared him for and that he had not previously known he was capable of attaining. When the bullet had struck home, he had to escape, and he did, diving deep into himself, like the shamans dived into the heart of the Great Spirit in the books he had read, and refusing to come out, not even after the pain was dead. If he had come to the surface too soon, he would have gone mad.

  So his body closed down its circuits so that only his mind lived, and for all those months Gilbert played out his life on some inner screen, his body dead, but his thoughts functioning, churning inside him, coping, coming to terms with the new reality of what he had become and would remain forever.

  Even with all that time to consider it, when he woke to that understood reality and touched the place, he could not bear to let his fingers feel the flesh, not yet. Instead he pressed gently on himself through the thin hospital gown. First he felt the tube, and then let his hand follow it up until it met flesh.

  It was a remnant of what it had been. It felt like nothing more than a strip of tattered skin, and what bulk it had was due to the catheter that pierced his urethra. He forced himself to reach deeper into his body, and found only an empty pouch where his testicles had been. He could feel the ragged scar through the rough cotton of the gown. Empty. It was empty. The woman's bullet had crushed them, and the doctors had taken them away.

  Gilbert did not weep. He had already wept within himself. But he trembled and brought his hand back above the sheet. Then he waited for his shaking to subside, and touched himself again, beneath the gown, flesh to flesh this time. He familiarized himself with the feel of his sundered body, touched and touched again until he felt no revulsion. Then he lifted the sheet with his pierced right arm, drew back the gown, and looked.

  It was as ugly as his soul, and he decided that before he left he would kill a doctor for making him look like that. This, he thought, is not a surgeon's work but a butcher's. He knew about butchers.

  He put back the gown, rearranged the sheet, and laid his arms on top of it as they had been before he awoke. Then he worked his muscles, contracting them, stretching them until he grew tired and rested, after which he worked them again.

  At noon a nurse came in to change his IV bottle, and he feigned coma. She noticed nothing, performed her work quickly and methodically, and left. No one came into his room for the rest of the day.

  By eight in the evening it was nearly dark, and Gilbert Rodman withdrew the needle from his arm and let it dangle from the hanging jar. He took the tube from his anus, and painfully slid the catheter from his urethra. A mixture of blood and urine trickled out of what was left of his penis, and he looked at the blood and thought that there would be more blood to come. There would be payments people would have to make, bills he would have to collect. He was as empty as his scrotum, and only blood would fill him up again.

  Gilbert lowered his legs over the side of the bed, and slowly began to put his full weight on them. It felt strange, but his muscles responded, weakly at first, then stronger, until he stood, tottering but upright, beside the bed in which he had slept and dreamed and come to life a different Gilbert Rodman, just as insane but now with a more sharply focused insanity.

  For a half hour he stretched and squatted, expanded, reached, and closed, until every muscle was tense and alive again. Then he took the IV bottle from its hanger, listened at the door until everything was silent, and broke the bottle against the aluminum sink. One of the shards of glass was perfect for his purposes, and he picked it up, the smooth part against his palm, the thin, razor edge away from him. He thought about what he would do to the woman who had shot him and wished for a moment that it had been a man so that Gilbert could do to him what had been done to
Gilbert, maybe with something as simple as the piece of glass he now held.

  But it was a woman. And he would find other ways, worse ways than that. After all, he had already found them, already performed them. It would be nothing new. But it would be very, very special.

  First, though, it was time for the doctor. Oh, it wasn't the doctor's fault, of course. The doctor hadn't shot him. But a doctor was still going to have to pay. Any doctor would do, really. They were, after all, symbols. So what if he couldn't kill the doctor who had sewn him like some Salvation Army turkey? He would kill another one, and that would be almost as good.

  Symbols. It seemed he was always dealing with symbols. He could never kill the Great Bitch herself, could he? So he had killed all those symbols of the Great Bitch. The Great Bitch herself was dead and rotten, but that didn't stop him. It would never stop him. Not even that other bitch who had shot him had been able to stop him, had she? Because here he was, weak but alive, with the sharpness in his hand.

  He would find her. He would not accept a symbol for her. He would find her. He remembered her name, where she was from, what she looked like; and he would find her and have her and hurt her, and since she took away what he would have had her with, then he would find something else.

  Something cold. Something sharp.

  Gilbert Rodman stepped quietly into the hall. Five minutes later he found a doctor, sitting alone, smoking a cigarette in the lounge. He crept up behind him, slit his throat with the edge of glass, and castrated the man while he bled to death.

  As he sliced at the flesh, Gilbert felt a wave of hate roll through him far more intense than any orgasm he had ever known, and he saw the face of the woman who had shot him, saw her mouth open in an "O" of surprise, and, for an ecstatic instant, he believed that it was she he was working on and not this poor scapegoat of a doctor, whining through bubbles of blood; and Gilbert whispered harshly into the dying man's face, "Laura!"

  But now he was finished, and the vision passed. He washed his hands in the bathroom, then found some clothes in the closet, dressed in them, although they were a size too small, took the keys and wallet from the doctor's pocket, and went out to the parking lot.

  It took him no time to match the Volkswagen key to the new Jetta in the Reserved—Physicians space; and he unlocked the door, got in, and drove to Route 25 South. He figured he could reach Orin before the news of his recovery, escape, and crime caught up with him. He would ditch the car there, roll it back into some trees, take the money from the wallet, and get something to fill his furiously empty stomach. Then, since they would be watching the highways, he would work his way on foot down the Platte River. The weather was warm, and he could sleep on the ground, as he'd done so many times before. He planned to surface at Lyman, just over the Nebraska border, then hitch east, toward Pennsylvania. Lancaster, he remembered she had said. He had never been to Pennsylvania, but he would find her.

  It would take several days to walk down the river to Lyman, but he had the time, and it would be good for his body to move again, to get back in shape for what lay ahead. It would be all right if it took weeks, even months, to reach her. She would still be there, and he would be all the stronger for the passage of time. And of course he could always practice on the way.

  He switched on the car radio and turned the dial until he found a station that played jazz. He recognized the tune, Ornette Coleman's "Tomorrow Is the Question," and he smiled as he listened to the familiar riffs.

  "Tomorrow is the answer, Laura," he said aloud, then laughed, and continued to drive east. It felt good, like going home.

  June

  Here I can live as I please, here I can throw the reins on the neck of my whim. Here I play with my own thoughts; here I ripen for the grave.

  —Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp

  Having discoursed so long about Dreamthorp, it is but fair that I should now introduce you to her lions.

  —Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp

  Nothing in Dreamthorp's history had prepared it for the slowly developing reign of terror whose advent was the collapse of the Dreamthorp Playhouse the day after Sam Hershey found his artifact. On the contrary, the town of Dreamthorp had a history of tranquility, gentility, and cultural development that made nearby communities look like hotbeds of ignorance and animal passions.

  Dreamthorp's roots went back only as far as the 1880s, when Richard Weston, a young man whose family owned a local and highly profitable iron works for over a century, built a railroad line to connect the works with the Pennsylvania Railroad's main line near Harrisburg. When Weston was investigating the best locations at which to put stations along the way, he was favorably impressed by a hilly, wooded area at the halfway point of his new line, and felt that it would be an ideal place for a picnic ground.

  So, along with the station stop, Weston built pavilions and stone walks, installed tables and toilet facilities, and walled some of the many natural springs. By the summer of 1885, thousands of people flocked to the grounds, paying their fare to Robert Weston's conductors, and buying cold drinks and food from Robert Weston's concessions.

  The park expanded, and the following year picnickers were able to indulge in lawn bowling, billiards, and shooting at clay ducks. Boats could be rented at the nearby lake, and by that summer's end there was a "Flying Menagerie" whose organ played fifteen different tunes, while children and their parents whirled around it on hand-carved horses.

  More land was cleared every spring, until by 1895 the park's estate, now known quite logically as Weston Park, comprised five thousand acres, most of which was woodland. Despite the genteel commercialization, there were still sequestered paths and lovers' walks in abundance; and the primitive character of the park, scrupulously maintained by Richard Weston, far outweighed its proto-Disneyland qualities.

  Eighteen ninety-five was also the year in which the true and lasting personality of Dreamthorp was set, for that was the year in which the first Eastern Pennsylvania Chautauqua was held, established for "the advancement of scientific and literary achievement among the populace, and the promotion of culture in the name of Christianity," as it was proclaimed in the charter. The resultant hamlet, Dreamthorp, was named by Dr. Hiram Marcus, the first president of the Chautauqua, after an idealized village created by a Scottish author, Alexander Smith, whose book, Dreamthorp: Essays written in the Country, appeared in 1863. At the time Dr. Marcus named the village, its derivation was already obscure, even to the well-read attendees of the chautaqua.

  The grounds were laid out, with north-south streets named for writers (New England transcendentalists had the edge) and west-east for trees indigenous to the area, and cabins and meeting houses were built. Much of the wood came from the forests around Dreamthorp, and most of the structures were still standing a hundred years later.

  And a hundred years later the town retained its chautauqua-like respectability as well. Dreamthorp was as crime-free, drug-free, adultery-free, in short, as vice-free as any community in America. It was also, as many young people or older Bohemians living there could attest to, as Victorian as the wooden gingerbread that graced its gables. Any variation from the norm or infraction of the unspoken rules met with swift disapproval. It was not so much the disapproval of the rich as that of a priestly class whose frontier temples had crumbled, and who now, prisoners within their own home tabernacle, guarded a dying way of life from the sensual encroachments of a new and pagan religion. This disapproval most often took the form of being ignored at the tiny and ancient post office, or the general store that served the function of a 7-11. It was a subtle disapproval that Tom Brewer most definitely thought he felt, as he handed Mrs. Purviance the card he had found in his mailbox.

  It was Mrs. Purviance's habit, when given a card that indicated a package was behind the counter, to say to the lucky recipient, "Package, well, that's nice," and place it on the counter with a benign grin, as though delivering smallpox vaccine to a dying village. But today she only took the card, nodded, and s
et Tom's package on the counter without a word.

  He thanked her, received no acknowledgment of his good manners, and walked out the door. The package was the set of German tools for which he had been waiting six weeks, and he unwrapped them as he walked up Elm Road, taking care not to drop them and so ruin their beautifully tooled edges.

  He had needed new tools desperately. His grandfather's had been sharpened and resharpened so many times that he felt as though he was carving wood with scalpels rather than chisels. It was time to retire the old set while they still had some bite left. At first he didn't look forward to using new tools after working for so many years with the old ones, knowing that his grandfather's hands had held them as well, his sweat polishing and smoothing the wooden handles to that deep burnished tone only years and hands can give to wood. But now, as he gazed down at the German tools nestled in their case, he thought it fitting that he should have new tools for the new direction he wanted to take.

  The old tools had never seemed to want to bend to his will when he strayed too far from the work they had done for so many years. They responded wonderfully when he carved four-foot eagles and four-inch chickadees, when he did panels for boxes in which people could keep old photographs, when he took commissions to carve golfers or bowlers or doctors, and, oh Christ, he did a lot of doctors. But when it came to the larger pieces, Tom's attempt to bring wood, a living thing, to represent life more fluidly than the predetermined, commercial work he did, the tools failed.

  Or at least he told himself it was the tools. Inside, he knew what it really was. But maybe these tools would work for him. Maybe they would.

  He wrapped the new tools up again, and turned right on Emerson, wondering now about Mrs. Purviance and why she had treated him, if not rudely, then with none of her usual warmth. How many people knew about him and Karen anyway? And was that what had gotten Mrs. Purviance's bowels in an uproar?