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A novel by
Thomas Burchfield

PROLOGUE
JUST AN OLD MAN

As the Potter family drove over the Sierra pass, the bars on Jeff Potter’s iPhone dropped to zero, taking with it the heart of the sullen, homesick boy who was only trying to text the girl he’d left behind. “No Service,” the phone coldly stated.

Jeff felt like he’d fallen off the edge of the world. Like someone had ripped a lifeline out of his hand and left him to tumble down the east side of the Sierras. He shot a desperate angry glance out the van window. A pretty road sign swept by.

“WELCOME TO MONITOR COUNTY! LAND OF DREAMS!” it read, indifferent to his lonely anger.

Beyond the sign, a sharp-toothed mountain peak thrust into deep blue sky. The sight of it hurt as much as staring directly into the sun. Its image bit into his skull.

“Let’s go home!” Jeff wanted to cry out to mom and dad. Right now. As fast as they could. But he kept quiet. It would sound like whining. It was so hard to say anything. Every time Jeff opened his mouth, every word stumbled out stupidly. He’d said too many stupid things already. Why say anything more? Silence was safer.

But with each passing hour, with each winding mile down into the dark blue valley spreading below, Jeff more and more regretted his silence.

Late afternoon found Jeff sitting with his parents in a small touristy pinewood restaurant waiting to order dinner. “It’s so beautiful here!” Jeff’s mother Marsha suddenly blurted. “I think we’ll like it. It’s like living inside a storybook!”

Jeff’s heart turned to lead. He’d been hoping she’d see the monstrousness of this place. But no. She’d all but committed them to staying. He hid his disappointment by staring at his lap, concealed his horror struck eyes behind his black curtain wings of long hair. Moms always knew what you were thinking, somehow.

He closed his eyes. The fang mountain appeared on his eyelids. It’d been on his mind the whole trip down. And as he saw it, it saw him. Its shadow turned the meadow they drove across into a black sheet. A sharp headache stove through his head as they passed through the tip of its shadow. Its image burned into his eye like a camera flash. He suddenly feared he would never sleep again. They could have Monitor County and all its dreams.

Finally, the server came. Andrew Potter, Jeff’s dad, ordered a rib-eye steak. “Well done,” he emphasized in a strangled voice that had once bullied the whole world and now only whined at it. Mom shook her head and pursed her lips disapproving. Dad shrugged her off as he shoved the menu at the server. He’d once been addicted to alcohol and power. Now he was addicted to food and unhappiness and people laughed at him behind his back, at this tremendously fat and silly man.

Jeff hated being seen with Dad. As an act of rebellion, he’d starved himself, became so skinny that people whispered jokes about how the pair of them looked like a piccolo next to a tuba. It felt to Jeff as though his every word and deed came back to bite him somehow.

The server was a rope-muscled redheaded hippie whose tee-shirt bragged “I’D RATHER BE CLIMBING.” (His distracted manner revealed he really meant it, too.) The shirt was illustrated with another toothy snowy mountain, but not a mean one like that weird sentinel to the west.

Then, just as he turned to take Mom’s order, the server looked across the dining room. His freckly face opened into a big smile.

“Mr. Bartok!” he cried. Then he took off, rudely abandoning the Potters to take care of another customer.

Wha the fuck . . . ? Dad’s eyes once stared at the world with an eager ferocity that made the air shiver. Now they looked confused and helpless from within their fatty slits. Gone were the days when Dad was always seated and served first before everyone.

Jeff looked to where the server had disappeared. There was nothing there. No. Wait. There is . . .

A large white pair of hands seemed to be tearing open a black slit in space. And then someone stepped through. The space snapped shut like crackling humming electricity.

No. Nothing but a trick of the light. Actually, it was just an old man. An old man sitting at the table by the window, watching the day fade.

An ugly sucker too, the skankiest old coot Jeff had ever laid eyes on with a face like a clear plastic pouch of crumpled dirty white rags, millions of wrinkles, as though time had slashed its razor blade in a frenzy. Wiry hairs sprouted from his ears, bristled out his nose and lined his wattles. Thank God, he wore shades. Old people had ugly eyes, like red, veined pits. Hope he keeps his glasses on.

The server wasn’t bugged by the old guy’s ugliness, not one bit. He fussed over him like he was his rich grandpa. “Mr. Bartok! How are ya? Good seein’ you! How was winter up in Alpine Canyon? Will Annie be joining you?”

The weird part about their conversation was that the old man didn’t say boo,
just smiled and nodded as the server yattered on, like they were talking psychically: “What’ll you have? Hungry? Just green tea? Comin’ right up, sir!”

Jeff’s Dad waved as the server zoomed past. The server snapped a look at them. “Oh! Sorry!” Not. “Be right with you!” Wouldn’t. Got my own priorities! Dad’s eyes sparked with some of that old temper, the anger that had once made the world snap to.
Mom’s happy eyes turned anxious as she grabbed Dad’s arm. He was one beat away from stopping his overtaxed heart for good: “Andy, he might be the resort owner!”

Dad glared at the old man who was gazing serenely out the window, across the road and the meadow beyond to fir-covered hills brushed with thick milky gold. The blue sky turned almost violet (another thing Jeff didn’t like: the colors around here were too strong, thick and runny, almost tropical, like syrup or bright melting crayons; or like the insides of a freshly opened cadaver).

The old man wore a perfectly black feathery suit from neck to toe. Long silver hair frothed from his large head down to his shoulders. A hooked nose with flaring nostrils loomed over a sweeping mustache. An old tree stick leaned against the lacquered pine wall nearby.

Dad sniffed, tapped Jeff on the knee and winked: “Now that’s a face that wore out two bodies!”

At that very second the server rushed by. He heard Dad’s snarky whisper. The old man turned his head. He’d heard it too.

Daaaaaad! Jeff gaped in silent horror. Jeeez! What a thing to say!

Jeff’s dad went on sincerely: “Don’t ever get old like that.” He patted his huge belly. “All this BS about staying in shape and living to a hundred is just the diet industry picking your pocket. Live fat! Die young! Eat life! That’s my motto!” Dad shook with laughter. His face turned jolly red. “‛Live fat! Die young! Eat life!’ That’s rich! If I was still in TV, I could sell that!” Then his face fell sad again because he was not in TV or much of anyplace anymore but here, in this grim nowhere.

The server returned, unfriendly and unapologetic for his poor service. He finished taking their orders: Mom, chicken salad; Jeff, tofu salad; Dad ordered another bottle of non-alcoholic Clausthaler. “This beer and wine list wouldn’t get a cat drunk,” He told the server. “Dog piss and grape juice,” he added when the server had gone.

The Potters waited. Mom tried to break the strained silence with lame comments: “I’m sure we’ll be fine once we move into the house Mr. Garner’s got for us.” Her eyes danced feverish with a future only she could see. “You’ve never lived in the country before, Jeff. Give it a chance! You might like it!”

Dad checked his i-Phone. No service. Not here, at the end and bottom of the world. He looked out the window at the darkening hills and said, “I bet they’ll put some cell towers up there.” He was referring to his new employer. “Garner says they own most of the county now.”

Jeff looked over at the old man again. Twilight was near. And the old guy did the thing Jeff hoped he wouldn’t do: take off his sunglasses. He calmly turned his attention to the Potters, as though he had something to say.

His eyes seemed to do all the talking. Twin points of ice-cold blue glittered from their depths, an unearthly blue Jeff had never seen anywhere, not in jewels, not on the sunlit sea, the cloudless sky or even the power suits Dad had once so proudly worn. Then Jeff realized he had seen that icy blue somewhere before: in the eyes of wolves.

They were staring at Jeff’s dad, probing inside—

A sudden vision flooded Jeff’s mind: the old man standing over Dad, pounding open a trench in Dad’s head with his ugly stick thunk thunk crunch until skin and skull broke through Dad’s thick gray hair; blood and brain oozing out gray and chunky; Dad staring up at the old man with slack dumb amazement, mouth open; the sour odor of blood; the old man’s look of calm brutality—

Jeff slapped his hand over his eyes to make the vision disappear. When he looked again, Dad was staring at the floor with that same slack look. Their eyes met. Dad’s look confirmed Jeff’s fear.

Dad's mind had been flooded with the same dream.

They both stared at the old man. But he seemed to have lost interest, his grave attention now returned to the deepening violet sky as if he had no more to say. At least for now.

“What’s with you two?” Mom’s smiled nervously. She hadn’t seen it. The world was still wonderful and beautiful to her.

Dad shook his head: “It’s been a long drive.” He must have seen the fear in Jeff’s eyes because he leaned over and whispered a secret just for the two them:

“It’s just an old man.”

Then the server swept down with three plates balanced across his arms; Dad’s steak lay half-drowned in a pool of watery blood.

“Hey!” Dad jabbed his finger at the plate. “What’s this? When I said well done, I meant well done! What, do I look like a vampire?”

“Sorry Mr. Potty. I’ll take care of it right away . . . .”

Jeff shoveled his salad into his mouth. He didn't care what the server said. He ate as fast as he could. So did Mom and Dad. They didn’t say another word. They ate. They ran. Out of there. As fast as they could. Out of reach of the shadow stretching toward them.

A few hours later, after dark, Jeff had had enough of sitting with his parents in their tiny cabin. There wasn’t even a TV in this dump. No, not like the old days, Dad had sighed. Back then, he’d rent the whole goddamn resort. Hell, he’d own the place, fire that server, 86 that creepy old black bird and put some real booze on the menu!

Mom kept trying to paint a pretty future. Everyone they met seemed to love Monitor County. They would too! Jeff could make friends at the school down in the valley. It was a new start!

“New start for what?” Dad sipped his Clausthaler and belched. “They brought me up here for shit work. Me! The guy Variety called ‘Captain Entertainment!’ Is this what I went through recovery for? The guy who created the Interpol International franchise! Five top-rated separate series, bigger than CSI . . . .”

He’d go on all night like this, scratching at his failure until he bled tears. It was so much more fun when Dad was bellowing from the top of the world. That Jeff could respect, even when Dad was on a binge. Now. . . .

Jeff blurted out he wanted to explore around the resort. Dad knew he was lying and tried to hide his hurt feelings. Mom nagged Jeff to wear a jacket and take the flashlight with him. “And watch out for bears!”

Watch out for bears? Shit. I hope get eaten by one.

Even with the flashlight lighting the way, Jeff’s feet managed to find every rock and root as he hiked up the trail behind the resort. L.A. had soft blue sky and few stars at night. Here, zillions of icy stars glittered, embedded in a coal black sky above black treetops swaying and moaning in a wind-driven chorus. Everything was too much here: the mountains too high and jagged, the valleys too deep and blue.

The trail ended at a wooden gazebo at the bottom of a rocky slope. Jeff went inside and looked back down the hill. Cabin lights dotted the darkness, flickering through the windblown branches.

Jeff zipped up his jacket tight around his throat against the late spring cold. He didn’t want to think about being stuck here, so he sought memories of his old junior high and the girl he left behind, the impossibly beautiful blond hottie Karen Hale, the only thing that made fourth-hour American History not-boring. On his last day, he gave her a poem he’d half-stolen from a rap song that told her he loved her, that she was beautiful and that it broke his heart that he’d never see her ever again, but he’d be there for her always. (“Forever!” it ended with triumphant tragedy.)

Stooooopid! Instead of jumping into his arms like she jumped in his dreams, Karen got all red and giggly. Jeff nearly fainted with embarrassment as though his fly had split open and sent his junk falling out. Then she turned around and passed Jeff’s poem down the lunch table. Soon all he heard was merciless laughter and giggling. Now, all he had was a memory that would ruthlessly sting him all his life.

Still, there were other memories, memories of fantasies. His hand slipped into the roomy pocket of his low-riders and found his cock. He stroked it back and forth against his thigh and aroused a favorite pillow dream: Karen ripping her blouse open, her full tits leaping out into his face while words poured honey-like out of her mouth—

Just as he felt himself surging toward the great brink, he heard a big hum rising underneath and from behind. At first he thought it was Karen’s voice humming—

Something hit him in the back of his head, something liquid and very cold, like a water balloon. It blew through his skull, soaked into his brain. There came a flash of arctic blue and a feeling like seeing across the universe. His skull buzzed and his eardrums swelled. The balloon blasted out through his forehead, taking Karen’s image, leaving behind creamy pools of chill that floated in his brain.

Jeff’s hard on shrank and his balls rolled up as he grabbed onto the gazebo. Stunned, he watched the watery blue balloon, shaped like a blood cell, float away down the hill. It split into two shimmering orbs as it weaved among the pines. The orbs drifted back and forth in tandem. One of them blinked off and on, once. Like a winking eye.

Holy God shit, they are eyes! They had no head, no body, but they were eyes alright, flying by themselves, gaily sweeping back and forth down the hill, among the trees before vanishing into the back of one of the cabins . . . his cabin.

Jeff heard branches snap behind him. More shadows came from the rocky hill above toward him, for him, hungry shadows—a bear? Get me outta here!

Jeff tore out of the gazebo, back down the hill. The flashlight slipped from his grasp. His low-riders fell down and so did he. He clutched his belt as he bumped from tree to tree, nearly impaling himself on sharp points of broken branches.

He reached the rear of the cabin and looked behind him. Nothing following him now. He looked nervously around for the blue-eyed whatz-it, but it was gone and the cold night was very quiet. Jeff began to doubt what he'd seen. Maybe just his imagination. No more real than the dream that Karen Hale loved him as he loved her.

Exhausted, Jeff stepped around the rear corner of the cabin and saw something that stopped him dead.

On the porch leading into the cabin, stood a boy. A boy who looked just like Jeff.

No, a boy almost like Jeff.

Jeff almost didn’t recognize this mirror-reverse image of himself. His watch was on his right wrist instead of his left, like his reflection in the three-way mirror at Macy’s. But he wasn’t in Macy’s and there were no mirrors here.

And Jeff’s eyes were brown. The boy’s were blue. Wolf blue. The same blue as the thing that had flown through his head up on the hill. It’d sucked out everything Jeff knew about himself. Everything. From his mirror image to his dreams of Karen. No wonder he felt so weak—

The Jeff Potter on the porch grinned at the Jeff Potter who fearfully watched from the shadows like a terrified orphan. Jeff Potter on the porch wore a bully’s confident grin: Go on! Stop me! Dare ya! Dare ya double! Dare ya triple!

“Jeff!” Mom’s voice called from inside. “Don’t stand out there—”

No! Don’t ask it to come in!

“— in the cold! Get in here! Now!”

The hologram Jeff standing on the porch winked, waved an impudent bye-bye with his fingers and strode through the cabin door as though going home.

Second later, the real Jeff stumbled inside gasping. But the only monsters he found were his parents smiling wanly from the kitchen table. Dad waved. “What’s wrong, Jeff?” Mom asked.

“Oh . . . nothin’.” At least nothing seemed wrong. They hadn’t seen the Other Jeff, that impossible, blue-eyed Jeff . . . never tell your dreams, man. Asleep or awake, never tell your dreams.

“Why doncha sit with us?” Dad asked. “Huh,” Jeff grunted as he tried to hide his fear while realizing that anything that could fly through his head and so easily disguise itself could hide in any dark damned place it pleased.

And so he frantically searched for the Other Jeff in the little bedroom—nothing there. The closet—nothing there. Under the bed—nothing there.

In the itty-bitty bathroom, he ripped back the shower curtain and jumped, half-remembering Vince Vaughn in Psycho. Nothing there but a bar of soap that Mom would steal. Even peeing felt dangerous. As the water funneled away, he wondered . . . was that a blue light shining from the bottoms of the toilet?

He joined Mom and Dad in the kitchen just long enough to be polite. As he pretended to listen to Mom’s happy talk and Dad’s grumping, it slowly dawned on Jeff what had really happened out there, in the woods, in the dark.

The realization was a double-triple punch to the gut. There was no flying thing in the forest! There was no Other Jeff Potter standing on the porch! It was all stuff happening inside his brain! Hallucinations!

That could mean only one of two things, both of them dreadful: First, he might be going crazy. His brain was frying and popping with weirdness as it roared into schizophrenic overdrive. The same thing happened to his Mom’s cousin Teddy. They put him in the hospital to sit and stare all day, every day, for the rest of his life while his brain circuits melted into a white buzz.

Or maybe it was . . . a brain tumor! A fiendish cancer monster that would drain his life away until he was a hallucinating, helpless husk! He would die slowly, young and all alone, never to know a girl’s touch . . . oh, Karen!

Either way, it was doom, it was shit, it was bad. Tortured by those two possibilities, Jeff said goodnight to Mom and Dad with zombie kisses. Already it felt like saying goodbye. Fighting off tears, he stripped and slid into his sleeping bag in his little corner (dying of cancer . . . and still he had to sleep on the floor! Life was so unfair!)
His feet pushed into something soft at the bottom of the bag. Probably old smelly socks he’d peeled off with his feet during a long-ago camping trip. Fuck it. Jeff pulled the bag over his head, alone with his aching heart, and swooned between fantasies of impending insanity and implacable death, all melting into that awful doom.

Finally, Jeff’s parents went to bed. Jeff pretended to be asleep. His parents’ shuffling, their bathroom business, Dad’s muttering at the burden of his body, his Mom’s humming: the world carelessly going while he lay there, suffering.

Just wait ‘til I’m dead, then . . . .

Dad started snoring like a cartoony file. His every snore sent a puff of near-beery breath wafting across the room. Jeff fantasized what it would be like—to die so young in a hospital bed, while Dad, who really did love him, would insist on sleeping next to him. Pathetic! Poor Jeff dying surrounded by the odor of Clausthaler and the sound of—

—suddenly, the wad of socks under Jeff’s feet moved, as though they’d come to life. They had, in fact, done just that--come to eager, rippling life. They wiggled like a pair of entwined cold worms across his feet and crawled up his legs, pulled themselves along his naked legs with tiny claws.

Jeff poked his head out into darkness darker than the one under the covers.

What the fuck? Holy shit! He remembered the animals who’d chased him down the hill. They got in here, too! A mouse? A rat? They were everywhere, carried fleas, spread the plague! This new immediate fear crowded out the other two. Jeff rose up on his elbows. Tiny claws gripped his tender skin as the mouse-thing crawled over his groin, made its way up his stomach.

He lifted the mouth of the sleeping bag. Two tiny points of wolf-eye blue light stared out at him and winked. Jeff fell flat on his back. The weird creature crawled out onto his chest. It sprouted wings, grew bigger, launched itself into the air inches above his face and hovered there.

“Always in the last place you look,” a smiling voice spoke inside his head.

“Dad!”

“SQOOONK!” said Dad.

It looked like an insect, but no insect Jeff had ever seen in biology class. Something like a mosquito or a moth, but big as a bird with two large wings that spun and hummed in the air. A long proboscis stuck out from its mouth like a hypodermic needle that could puncture steel. It had to be a—

“No. I’m not a dream!” the Insect laughed, its clear voice a cheerful echo.

It hovered in front of the boy’s face as though trying to kill him with its ugliness. Jeff
couldn’t even scream. But he could think thoughts: What are—what do you—

“I am hungry,” the Insect announced matter-of-factly, like a man sitting down to dinner.

Then it buzzed away. Over to where Dad slept. Jeff could sit up and watch now, but that was all. The Insect’s eyes cast a blue light on Dad’s sleeping face and bathed the inside of his open mouth. Dad awoke with a snort and saw what Jeff saw. And, like Jeff, he couldn’t believe it. This had to be a dream!

The Dream dove down into Dad’s mouth. The blue light briefly glowed from within then vanished. Dad choked, pawing at his throat. He tore loose the glittering crucifix grandma had given him. The blue light vanished. Perfect night fell again.

Jeff could see nothing, but heard everything. He tried to scream, but his throat was frozen. Mom slept away like a rock—or, she was being kept asleep, like Jeff was being forced to listen alone to the horror. The Dream was strong. It could multi-task: control their minds while it viciously rummaged around inside Dad’s body.

“Wake up! Wake up!” Jeff’s mind screamed. But he was awake. Awake in a malevolence where he could do nothing but listen to Dad’s death struggles, to bedsprings creaking, to the mattress jumping in its frame. The bed slats snapped. The mattress crashed to the floor while Mom slept on. The whole world slept on.

“STOP IT! STOP IT! LEAVE MY DAD ALONE! PLEASE!”

But the Insect perversely, defiantly, doubled down on its torture:

“The less you want, the more I give,” it laughed.

Suddenly, finally, the gurgling and thrashing stopped, so suddenly, Jeff believed for a brief second it had been only a nightmare after all. He’d wake up to a bright morning and there’d be Dad and, this time, Jeff would hug him and fearlessly say “I love you!” And that was more true than anything.

But that second passed. The blue light appeared again, a beacon from Dad’s mouth that lit the room. The Insect crawled out the way it went in, struggled like a butterfly from a cocoon. It hovered in the air, admired its handiwork: Dad’s flat face, his open but empty eyes. The Insect looked full and bright. Hungry no more.

It flew back over to the boy. Jeff knew he was next so he lay down, closed his eyes and gritted his teeth shut, so it couldn’t get in. (But it would. It would drill its needle through his teeth, if it had to. It was a powerful thing and did what it pleased.)

Jeff waited to die. But death didn’t come, so he opened his eyes.

The Insect still hovered a foot above, its mothy wings spinning and humming, its grinning blue eyes ringed by a pulsating red circle.

The boy could keep his life. The boy could keep his blood. It only wanted to show its strength and power. It wanted the boy to know how clever it was:

Look at me. Know that I am real. Whenever you close your eyes, whenever you sleep, whenever you dream, you will find me there. You will know that I am real.

“Who are you!?”

It laughed again, a light, airy chuckle. What looked like two long fingers slowly rose up and pressed down on Jeff’s eyelids, pulling them down like window shades.

“Just an old man,” the Insect whispered.

(Photo and text copyright 2009 for the world by Thomas Burchfield . . . and I'm not the only one watching. . . .)