The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams (11 page)

Wooly was looking at the
gun like he suddenly didn’t know what it was. “What’re you doing?”
he said, lowering his arm—though I kept the Glock next to his head.
“How’re you doing this?”

“I’m not doing anything,”
said Georgiana. “I just see… I see what’s going to happen, that’s
all. I see it. I just see.”

“I’ve
never seen anything like this,” said Nickie. “What the hell’s
going on?”

Georgiana’s mouth was
still moving, but with no words now. Either she was trying to say
something or she was mumbling to himself. She was staring out ahead
but not at us or anything in the room. She seemed to be looking at
something 400 miles away.

“I see why you’re here,”
she said. “I see it now… I know it now.”

Wooly dropped the gun back
in his pants pocket. It was like he didn’t want it exposed to any
more of Georgiana Copely. I lowered the Glock.

“You have to pass the
dragon,” Georgiana said. “Watch out for the dragon. You have to
pass the dragon in the road.”

“More of this prophecy
shit,” said Wooly.

“Which all came true,” I
said, “didn’t it?”

“When you leave the gate,”
said Georgiana, “the dragon will stop you. Not on the side of the
road… In the middle. The dragon will stop you in the
middle.”

“The fuck’re you talking
about?” Wooly looked at us. “The fuck’s she talking
about?”

“Time will stop for you,”
said Georgiana. “Time will stop. When the offering of the fish is
consumed, time will stop.”

She was completely
tranced, hands constantly burnishing the wood like they belonged to
somebody else’s body.

“The world will bleed… The
world will stream red. Blood will run across the earth.”

“This is gruesome crap,”
said Wooly. “This is just some heebie-jeebie
mumbo-jumbo.”

Yeah, but we all kept
looking at Georgiana like we were magnetized. And I thought I’d
seen Wooly shiver at the word
blood
.

“The threat will come from
the east. It will come with stalks…with solid lines and broken
ones. The threat will come from the east, but it will be
everywhere. What is here is everywhere.”

My body, I noticed, felt
weightless and hollow, just like the time before. If I wanted to, I
thought, I could actually levitate, I could float away right
now.

“When the thunder comes,
it will bring you great turmoil, it will bring you great strife.
When the thunder comes…thunder and diamonds…when the thunder comes,
the empress will try to abandon her throne. The number seven will
decide.”

Wooly was staring at
Georgiana’s hands. “Make her stop doing that. That shit with her
hands, it’s creeping me out.”

Georgiana turned her head
and slowly looked at Wooly, slowly breaking off the distant gaze.
She looked at Wooly like she was noticing him for the first
time.

“Death will come to your
house,” she said.

“My
what
? My
house?”

“Death will visit your
house. Someone will die in your house… Someone will be killed…by
someone who’s killed before.”

“Shut the fuck up,” said
Wooly, saying it without breathing.

The rubbing stopped.
Georgiana’s hands were finally still now. I thought for a moment it
was ending. But then her expression changed. The blank, far away
look gave way to a deep sadness. When saints get sad, I thought,
this is what they look like.

“It’s you,” she said to
Wooly, saying it straight at him. “You’re the one. Death is coming
to you.”

“Yeah, you already said.
Remember?”

“You’ll know the moment by
the eyes…by the eyes of the one who looks down. By the sphinx, the
lion…by the eagle. When each eye’s two rays are at their most
powerful, when they’re…at their strongest, when the rays are at
their strongest, that’s when you’ll die.”

Then it was over. She let
go of the desk and leaned back in the chair while her body seemed
to collapse in on itself. She just sat there like a burned out
house, suddenly empty and exhausted.

It was so quiet. We were
surrounded by silence, floating and lost in it.

“You can’t say that to me
again,” said Wooly. “You can’t keep threatening me like
that.”

“I’m not threatening you,”
said Georgiana. “I’m just telling you what I see.”

“You’re trying to
scare
me, you fucking
extraterrestrial. You’re trying to scare me, but you’re not.” The
sag in his body said otherwise. He looked like he was feeling the
full weight of what was to come.

“I’m sorry,” said
Georgiana, shaking her head. “It’s just one of those
things.”

“What
things?”

“Let’s get out of here,”
said Nickie, her voice shaky. “Let’s leave.”

“Good thought,” I said. “I
think we’re done.”

“Yeah I’m leaving,” said
Wooly, staring like stone at Georgiana. “I’m walking outta here.
But I’ll tell you one thing Georgiana and you listen to me.
No
one can talk to me
like that, and I mean
NO
ONE. You just remember one thing.
No
one has possession
over judgment day. Not even you.”

>>>>>>

The day outside was still
beautiful, but not so restful or peaceful anymore. “It’s bullshit,”
Wooly said as we walked down the porch steps. “It’s bullshit in its
purest form.” He was in one of those states where you’re angry but
your body is so stunned it can’t sustain rage. “I don’t care what
she said the last time—the fire in the woods, the fight with my
wife, the two guys quitting on me. Fuck all that. I’m not gonna
believe what she says. I’m not gonna believe even
part
of what she
says.”

Nobody had an answer to
that one. We just headed for the car, really wanting to get the
hell out of here. I circled the Jag XKE, remembering that the GPS
transmitter was still jammed under the rear bumper. I was debating
whether I should leave it there when an exploding
crack
filled my head and
almost blew my skull apart.

Wooly had the purple
Berretta out and was firing it at the sky. Two more times he yanked
the trigger and fractured the air. “I
told
you it works.”

“Put that
away!”
Nickie screamed.
“Don’t ever pull that shit like that again. You pull that out in
front of me one more time I’ll—“

“Okay, okay, don’t bark my
head off.” The gun slipped back in his pocket. “I’m just saying,
the thing works.”

“But it didn’t work
inside, did it?” said Nickie, getting in the car.

Wooly took the driver’s
side. “I’m gonna get it checked out, the mechanism or whatever. I
mean, I don’t know what kind of mind games she was playing in
there, and I don’t even
want
to know, fucking freak of nature.”

Seconds later we passed
through the camouflage of Georgiana’s concealed driveway and were
back in the real world. “It’s obvious,” said Wooly, “she’s trying
to trap me. She’s setting some trap up on me. But, thing is,
I
know
it now.
I
know
what she’s
up to.”

Halfway back to his house
he was still on his rant. “I’m asking myself, what’s her problem?
She’s deranged? She’s sick? She’s bitter? I think you could go any
of those ways with her and still be right. What I think her—“ He
hit the brakes and came to a stop. “What the fuck is
that?”

It was a huge lizard in
the middle of the road, nearly three feet long. The thing evidently
had crawled out of the woods and had gotten run over while it was
trying to cross.

I got out. Somebody had to
move the carcass, drag it off to the side. Nickie and Wooly
approached it with me.

It was
ugly
. The slick, scaly body was
crushed flat in the middle by a tire track. Its eyes were closed in
death and its long tongue was still flapped out of its
mouth.

“Holy shit,” Nickie said
slowly, not with disgust but with realization. “Holy shit. The
dragon will stop you in the middle of the road.”

“What?” Said
Wooly.

“The dragon will stop you.
It’s what she said. It’s
just
what she said.”

“Wait,” said Wooly. “What
did she say? What did she exactly say?”

“Watch out for the dragon
in the road. When you leave the gate, the dragon will stop
you.”

Wooly’s head moved with a
dull nod. “Not on the side of the road. In the middle.”

Nitrogen ice is one of the
coldest substances in the core of the earth. I felt like I had 18
pounds of it flowing through my blood stream.

For once Wooly had nothing
to say. He didn’t have to say anything—the meaning of this thing
was pretty damn clear. We kept staring down at the ghost-creature.
A lizard, a dragon, a half-curled reptilian tongue. I could almost
say I was starting to slide into a dream, but that wasn’t it. Just
the opposite, in fact. I felt like I was sliding into a moment of
revelation. I felt like all the questions were about to be
answered, like all the secrets were about to be told.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

CHAPTER 5

WORD FOR FUCKING
WORD

>>MONDAY JUNE 18 (3
days to go)

MONDAY JUNE 18, 10:00
a.m.

YOU CAN LOOK IT
UP

Here’s a prediction even I
could’ve made: Wooly was in
some
mood after the slain-dragon encounter. Soon as he
got home he stomped into the living room and pulled Georgiana’s
photo off the wall. “Fuck this thing. I don’t care what I paid for
it.” Only the intercession of Genevieve, saying she’d put it in
storage, prevented him from trash-smashing the thing to pieces. His
bad case of the jitters stayed with him through the rest of the
day. “I always knew something like this was going to happen,” he
said over dinner. “I didn’t know what it was, what it would be, not
exactly, but I always knew it would be like this.”

Next morning we found him
slumped at the kitchen table, Genevieve flitting around him like a
worried moth. Not only was he slit-eyed tired but shadows seemed to
have grown into his face. The shadows weren’t just from exhaustion.
You can see coloring like that if you peek inside a closed
casket.

An empty glass filmed with
orange juice residue sat in front of him. Eggs, milk and cereal
stood on the counter but he didn’t want anything. Something about
him suggested he’d been sitting in the same spot for a long time,
maybe for hours.

Genevieve was biting her
lip so hard it looked like she was about to bleed. “I’m
tired
of all this
fortune telling shit, all this occult spitunia. You think she can
tell the future?
Anybody
can tell the future.”

“Really,” said
Wooly.

“You want to know what the
future’s going to bring? The sun will die and the earth will
perish. You can look it up.”

“Yeah, but how about a
little
before
that? How about like three days from now, cause that’s when
she says I’m going to die.”

Wooly told us he’d made an
emergency appointment with his doctor, 1:30. “What if it’s
in
me?” he said. “What
if the death is coming from
inside
? I want to make sure it
isn’t. I have to take every precaution.”

Genevieve was pacing along
the counter now, picking things up—the milk, the cereal—and putting
them down again. “Maybe she said some things that maybe
seemed
to come true,
that could be. But that doesn’t mean
everything
she said’s going to come
true.”

“Yeah?” said Wooly. “Can
you guarantee it? Can you get it in writing?”

“No, but I can tell you to
take it down some, stop torturing yourself. I’m here—you know that.
I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

She came over to him,
stroked his head, moved her hands through his hair.

He tried to drink from his
empty glass. “I can’t stand this.”

“You’ve got to stop
obsessing like this.”

“How
? You tell me how, I’ll do it.”

“I don’t know. All I know
is you can’t go on like this.”

“Exactly
.” He threw up his hands in
complete despair. “That’s the whole fucking
point
.”

>>>>>>

MONDAY JUNE 18, 1:15
p.m.

THE COLOR OF THE
UNIVERSE

Nickie patted him down for
his Beretta before we left. He was clean, but now he had something
to talk about as he drove us to town. “Remember that time I tried
to snuff myself? I told you about it. Put the Beretta in my mouth,
hit a bad tooth?”