Charles L. Grant - In a Dark Dream.pdf - Charles L. Grant - margozap

In a Dark Dream

Charles L. Grant

"[In a Dark Dream is a] nifty little exercise in surreal spookiness [by]

one of the genre's more literate practitioners."

- Kirkus Reviews

"Grant's style of horror takes hold of your spinal cord and plays it

like a violin. His books are addictive."

- Charles de Lint in Mystery Scene

"There are few pleasures as delightful or rare as an exciting and

well-written horror novel. Charles L. Grant always provides that pleasure."

- Whitley Strieber

ii From Tor books by Charles L. Grant

After Midnight (editor)

For Fear of the Night

In a Dark Dream

Midnight (editor)

The Pet

Oxrun Station

The Bloodwind

Dialing the Wind

The Grave

The Hour of the Oxrun Dead

The Last Call of Mourning

Nightmare Seasons

The Orchard

The Sound of Midnight

The Chronicles of Greystone Bay (editor)

Greystone Bay

Doom City

The SeaHarp Hotel

forthcoming

iii

TOR

A torn DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK

iv This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in

this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events

is purely coincidental.

IN A DARK DREAM

portions thereof in any form.

A TOR Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

49 West 24 Street

New York, NY 10010

Cover art by Lee MacLeod

ISBN: 0-812-51844-6

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 88-29167

First edition: February 1989

First mass market edition: April 1990

Printed in the United States of America

0987654321

v This is for Jill,

Through the Looking-Glass,

With love

There was sunlight and laughter

And moonlight and shadow;

While Sleep crooned with Screaming,

Love waltzed with the Dead.

vii Charles L. Grant

viii Charles L. Grant

The dream when it comes ...

... the spectered shadow of a cloud crawling westward off the summit of

a dark forested hill, sliding down the slope where it deepens the

shadows and stains the bark and swings the leaves to a deep deathly

gray, causes birds to stir and huddle, a raccoon to hiss and snap, then

slips across the road and through trembling bushes to the surface of a

lake where ripples abruptly calm and reflections no longer matter; it

bulges; it shrinks; it moves to the opposite shore and through the trees

again, and the road, and up the blunt wedge of a high rock, pausing at

the edge, shifting slightly to one side, shifting again and sliding on,

filling the cracks with black, covering a hunched man with winter, and

taking the upward slope, leaving the black behind ...

the shadow of a cloud in a cloudless blue sky.

2 Charles L. Grant

ONE

The outcropping was massive on the side of the hill, and rose a straight

and full hundred feet above the road that followed the contours of the

lake. Even in the clear light, the morning's soft and warming light, the

rock was deep black, the leading edge of a prow, a petrified galleon

forever trapped in escape. And a squint of an eye caused the striations

and cracks to reform into timbers, the moss and clumps of grass into

seawater stains, while embedded strips of ore reddened and ran into

strips of dried blood. Its top was flat and angled slightly lakeward,

its sides thrusting from the forest floor to bull the trees aside. But

not the trees behind it.

They rose thickly and darkly to the top of the uneven ridge that formed

a semicircle rim around the lake's deep basin; and when the foliage was

thick, the summer wind

still, the water calm and empty, it was easy to imagine that no one

lived there on the slopes, and no one lived along the shore, and there

was no town to the south, beyond the sagging stone bridge that spanned

the creek the lake fed. There were too many leaves and too many gullies

and too many dips where a house could be hidden and lie unseen from the

road.

From the rock.

The black rock where Glenn held his breath and concentrated on a stone

loosely cupped in his left hand. He blinked against the water's glare

that only moments before had made him think there'd been a cloud, then

dropped the stone and watched it wobble away. His right hand snatched at

it. And missed. And he lost it over the edge and groaned.

A mild gust pushed him gently.

He shifted.

Slow; he was getting slow.

In days past he would have grabbed it without looking, tossed it once,

and grabbed it again. Big ones. Small ones.

Slow; he was getting slow.

He shifted again, wondering what it was that made him sit on his heels

instead of his rump, as if his legs wouldn't protest and his knees pop

when he moved. The perversely tempting feeling, perhaps, of falling,

nearly falling, because of the angle, and because of the trees that

poked their way up from the narrow shoulder below, tops straining, boles

twisting, leaves hissing at him to come on, come on, it won't hurt if

you jump.

Hypnotic; it was hypnotic, and sounded perfectly

reasonable-like standing on the edge of an impossibly high cliff and

thinking you had wings unflexed but ready.

Come on, Glenn, come on; it won't hurt; you can fly.

From the rock.

To the ground.

He shivered and sank back until his buttocks touched the ground; he

stretched his legs out and his arms out behind him. His hat, a western

hat battered and grey and long without form, prevented the sun's water

ricochet from blinding him directly; his jacket, dark denim, was zipped

to his neck, collar snapped up, the too-long sleeves rolled back at the

cuffs; and his jeans almost too snug, flaring to slip over the tops of

black boots.

"You know," his wife had said the night before, for at least the

hundredth time since the beginning of the year, "you really ought to

live in Montana or something."

It wasn't the way he dressed, clearly not an affectation; it was, he was

told, the attitude he no longer had the patience to hide-too damn many

people and too damn little land and too damn much government and too

damn little time.

"Right," he'd answered. "And would you come with me?"

"Are you kidding?" Marjory said, one hand waving his attention to the

mess in the kitchen. "And leave all this?"

They had laughed, and had made love, and when he woke up this morning

his hat was on the bedpost and his boots were on his chest.

He lowered his chin and stared at his lap. Then he yawned and laughed

aloud, and suggested he best get on

his horse and ride into town before someone got the idea the bad guys

had nabbed him and had chained him in a cave.

Or onto the rock.

The laugh drifted away with the breeze when he rose and dusted off his

legs, his smile replaced by a slight puzzled frown as he slipped one

hand into a hip pocket and stared out over the water. The shadow of the

hill to his left slipped back toward its shoreline as the sun rose

toward nine, letting loose the green and the blotches of flower color.

Hunter Lake was a surprise for most visitors to the county. Most of the

others were blobs and circles and ovals and blots, half of them manmade.

This one resembled nothing more than a bloated horseshore, the black

rock dead center on its upper rim and visible all year round. From where

he stood it was almost exactly two miles down to West Point on his

right, and another two miles to East Point by the twisting road. The

land that split the water into its uneven arms came to a virtual point

and rose two dozen feet above the surface, poor land for a lawn unless

you wanted to mow straight down.

Despite its length, Point to Point, the lake was only a few hundred

yards across at its widest-from the shore below the rock to the land

that he faced.

And beyond, due south, was the village.

Once, it had been only a few houses, a general store for the local

farmers, and an inn that had provided rooms for travelers who'd gotten

lost and were too weary to complain and move on; the houses along the

shoreline had been merely cabins and cottages for fishermen and

hunters and a handful of the wealthy who didn't want company.

But that, he thought sourly, was then; unfortunately this was now, and

the village of his childhood was a village no longer. There were streets

and sewers and reservoir water, a high school, a junior high, and a

grade school that was demanding either a twin or a huge addition.

And on the lake ...

He couldn't help grinning again-too damn many people and too damn little

land and too damn little time left to stop the place from exploding.

You, he told himself, are getting too damn cranky for this job.

A shrug. It was a fact, unfortunately, that some of those people living

down there, hidden under the trees and hiding in town, would just as

soon see him vanish into the woods, or wander into a desert, if such a

thing could be found in this part of New Jersey. They didn't care about

the way he dressed; they just wanted to replace him with someone who

liked the way the community was growing.

Glenn Erskine, he was positive they said in quiet corners and whispers,

was a reactionary, not a progressive; he couldn't handle the job anymore.

Charles L. Grant - In a Dark Dream.pdf

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