His eyes flew open, and his first thought was to shake Lucky awake so he could see the magic too, but a figure in the center, blurry, wrapped in pixilated tulle, held transparent fingers to the suggestion of lips, and Scout was suddenly paralyzed. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. He could only stare at the figure bobbing gently in the center of the room.
It was gesturing for him to follow it, and without knowing quite how, he did.
He and the ghost light skimmed the ground, the sliding glass door yielding like water to his touch but leaving him dry. They bobbed down the street, the cobblestones smooth as soft concrete under his feet, no threat of twisting ankles to make him mind his step.
Down the tide wall, much as Lucky had brought him, out the thruway, and they were on the beach, heading for Tom’s bench, and he was suddenly afraid.
The last time he’d been there, he’d been there with Lucky, and they’d been okay. But this time he was alone, and it was dark, and nobody knew where he was. He hesitated, and the cold iron burn on his wrist told him that the presence, whatever it was, wanted him to come closer, and so he did, close enough to peer into the bench clearing from the outside.
Close enough to see the four separate tableaux, the grieving washerwoman, the heartbroken young man, the disconsolate young girl, the terrified couple, all of them living their same separate hells again and again and again.
But unlike last time, he was notinsidethe tableau, trapped with those in its throes. He was outside, and he saw a dark thing with many arms, like a tree, and a yawing mouth where its face, neck, and torso should have been.
Terrible and huge, it stretched those treelike arms around the clearing, hugging it close, and Scout realized thatthiswas the thing keeping everybody trapped.Thiswas the presence keeping these poor souls stuck in their worst moment, their helplessness, for time without end.
And now it was looking at him, its entire form an absence of light. Around it, stars twinkled and the moonlight bounced off the water, but inside it was simply void—no starlight, no moon, not even the memory of the sun. It was vast and empty, and its presence seemed to suck all of the warmth, all of the remembered laughter, out of Scout’s very marrow.
Its posture changed, and Scout knew it had seen him and his ghostly companion.
He turned to run, only to find that cold-iron grip around his wrist had tightened.
Free themcame the voice in his head, and as he turned back to the soul trap, his friendly light diffused itself through the clearing, and for a moment he saw….
A happy mother, who had once swung her brown-haired, brown-eyed son in a playful arc while he screamed “Again, again, again!”
An excited child, playing the same game with a boy who must have been the son grown older. The boy stopped their whirling circles, and they fell to the sandy ground, laughing while she planted kisses on his cheek and they giggled.
The little girl, grown now, turning her face up to a kiss from her first lover, which he gently delivered.
Two young men, one of them the boy with the mother and the sister, sitting on the beach in front of what was now the clearing, leaning shoulder to shoulder as they stared into a clear night sky.
Free them!came the voice, panicked now, just as the presence clamped down on the light from the visions and then turned, roaring, toward Scout.
Scout screamed and tried to run, but he was wrapped in the iciness of a capsizing winter sea.
HE WOKEup screaming and gasping on the couch, limbs flailing as he shoved the hapless Lucky off the edge.
He was soaking wet, so cold he could see the blueness of his own fingers, and the couch was awash in seawater. Seaweed fanned the ground.
“Holy fucknoodles!” Lucky shouted, scrambling to his feet. “What in the hell…?”
But Scout was shivering too hard to even speak, and as Lucky drew near, he pulled Scout’s hands into his, rubbing them furiously to bring back some warmth.
“Oh my God, Scout. What happened?”
Scout was vaguely aware that Kayleigh had rushed in and was breaking out old towels and the mop to try to control the mess, her voice rising to hypersonic levels as she demanded to know what was going on.
Scout could only shake his head, accepting Lucky’s touch gratefully, aware that every rub of Lucky’s hands helped to bring the feeling tingling back into his extremities.
“Scout,” Lucky said gently. “Scout, man, you’ve got to open your hand up, okay? Open up… relax…. Oh. Oh damn. Kayleigh, come look at this!” he called frantically.
Scout managed to focus on the object Lucky had pulled from his clenched fist.
“What in the hell…?” Kayleigh murmured. She took the ring—for that’s what it was—from Lucky and peered at it. A simple circle of gold, like a wedding ring, it saidTom’s.
“Oh wow,” Lucky said, breathing out his awe as they all stared at the thing in Kayleigh’s palm. “Scout, what did you do?”
“I had a dream,” he chattered. “And now I’ll never be warm again!”
