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.“You flew to the clouds but your ghost’s in my bedThe scent of you bringing back words we both saidIn the dark, in the dark o’ my love…”I leaned forward in my chair, watching her sing, drinking her in.The lilt of a violin caressed the air, notes flowing on a breeze of hopeful melancholy.“Every life that collides, every scar left behindOf long memories and longer goodbyesYou’re gone but you linger, my love…”I thought about Roxy and the night she left, throwing her things into a suitcase like she was trying to stone it to death while I paced the room and railed against the inevitable.“Roxy, will you—stop.Will you at least talk to me?”The nightclub suddenly gone, I stood in the memory of my own apartment and watched myself on the other side of the bed, torn between misery and rage.“We did talk,” Roxy said, not looking at me, rummaging through the drawers and throwing clothes in the suitcase as fast as she could pull them out.“We’ve been doing nothing but talking.You don’t listen.”“So that’s it.After all we’ve been through together, just like that, we’re through?”She paused, frozen over the suitcase, then nodded as she slammed it shut and reached for the zipper.“Yeah.We’re through.”“She broke your heart,” Caitlin said, standing beside me.I shook my head as the voices of the memories faded, silently acting out their desperate pantomime.“I broke hers,” I said, “or we both did.It gets hazier the more I think about it.It’s easy to tell stories about the people we leave behind, turn them into monsters in our heads, you know, so the loss doesn’t hurt so much.Truth is, we both said some things we shouldn’t have, we dug the knives in deep, and she packed a bag and got on the next bus for Reno.”“Something to be said for a clean break,” Caitlin mused, watching the silent argument.“Nothing clean about it.People go, but they stay,” I said, tapping my forehead, “up here.The hard part’s learning to move on, to let it all go instead of wallowing in regrets.I’ve imagined a thousand different ways this night could have played out, a thousand ways I could have kept her from walking out that door, but you know what? It doesn’t matter.This is what happened.This is what’s real.The more I accept it, the less it hurts.”“You can’t live in your dreams,” Caitlin said, “though it is a fascinating way to learn about people.”Dream-Roxy stomped out the door, lugging her suitcase behind her.Dream-Me sat on the edge of his bed, face buried in his hands.I looked at Caitlin with dawning horror.“You’re really here,” I said.“I’m not making this up.You’re here.In my dream.In my head.”“Problem?” she asked with a smile.The world caved in.A brutal weight squeezed the breath from my lungs, raw panic overtaking me like a knife in my heart, like an arachnophobe dropped into a vat of spiders.“No,” I gasped, shaking my head, “you can’t be here—”“Daniel,” she said, taking hold of my shoulders.“Daniel, I did not come here to hurt you.You don’t need to be afraid.Daniel!”A swirling vortex engulfed us, the dream dissolving in raw chaos.I couldn’t hear, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but shake my head and struggle in her arms.“Show me,” she said sharply in my ear, “show me what you’re afraid of.”So I did.SeventeenI knew the room in a heartbeat.The cheap clapboard walls, the dingy garage-sale furniture, and the teenager tied to a chair with a burlap sack over his head.A sea of upturned and unwashed faces watched with reverent awe, sitting cross-legged on the floor or sprawled out on beanbag chairs.Someone in the back strummed a Peter, Paul and Mary song on an acoustic guitar.A strange calmness washed over me.Standing in the echo of my past, I could almost pretend it was a show or a movie I was watching, instead of something that happened to me.A tall man stood beside the chair.His hand rested on the boy’s shoulder.He dressed like a seventies folk musician, with a string vest, a fuzzy goatee and a lazy, bloodshot smile that never left his lips.“The angels are with us, children,” he said.“The angels will guide us and ease our path to spiritual ascension.Come now, angel.Come and speak unto us, that we may hear your wisdom.”The sound that erupted from under the burlap hood was anything but human.The bound figure twisted and squirmed, joints popping and body contorting as he struggled to escape the ropes.“Chilkat gamun!” the boy howled, his words distorted and leaping in pitch.“Chilkat gamun rabadai!”Onlookers gasped as the chair lifted from the ground, slowly spinning, hovering an inch over the pea-green rug as the torrent of arcane words grew louder, more furious.“Be at peace!” the man said, holding up his hands to calm them.“The angel greets us, but he bears a message of warning.Some of you have not been doing all you can for the family.Some of you have not been sharing freely of your hearts, your minds, and your labor.He says to look inside yourselves, to question if your devotion is true!”Caitlin leaned against the wall and folded her arms, one eyebrow raised.“That ‘angel’,” she said pointedly, “is a fledgling demon of the Choir of Wrath.It’s speaking in gutter flensetongue, and it’s promising that man a number of sexual mutilations involving battery acid.”I felt tired.Old hurts and old angers helped to smother my panic, leaving me numb in the balance.“We called him the Shepherd,” I said.“The Up With People reject?” she asked.“I was seventeen and on the run.Hungry and desperate [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]