Fourteen
Some dreams matter. Most don’t. Often it can be hard to know which might be which. The dream that afflicted me in the bedroom of the Bullock house was more intensely real than a 3-D movie; and if it had needed a movie title, I would have called it The Swimmer. Both during the unfolding of the dream and after I woke from it, I had no doubt that it mattered.
I swam underwater without effort, hardly kicking my feet, never stroking with my arms, as if drawn along by a current, and either I had no need to breathe or I breathed in water and took oxygen from it as efficiently as a fish. I drifted through the flooded central historic district of Pico Mundo, which was genuinely quaint in some places and artificially quaint in others, the latter buildings having been added after downtown had become a tourist destination because it was so picturesque. Numerous specialty shops and restaurants and bakeries and art galleries lined these streets. Light from their windows and from the antique cast-iron streetlamps, each crowned with three frosted globes, radiated through the water. The jacaranda trees that lined these avenues were laden with purple flowers that stirred in the water as they might in a mild breeze. Initially the mood was magical, full of wonder, so that I glided along in a kind of ecstasy, as I had during dreams of flying when I was a boy.
Soon, however, the mood changed. I came to feel that this was not a pleasant fantasy of life underwater, that Pico Mundo would not reveal to me a population of mermaids and mermen, that instead it was drowned. Drowned and dead and lost forever. The quality of the light changed subtly at first, the warm and welcoming glow of shop windows turning cold and off-putting. Beyond those display windows, dark shapes now floated, no doubt ruined merchandise adrift in flooded rooms.
I did not yet feel suffocated, continued to breathe water for air, but felt the urgent need to know how deeply submerged the town might be, whether under lake or ocean. I worked my arms, fluttered my feet, seeking the surface, but I could not ascend, only continue to drift forward through the streets. The longer I struggled to rise but failed to gain a fraction of a fathom, the more fearful I became, until upon me settled the conviction that this submerged world was a graveyard, the home of Death himself, and that life existed only at the surface, which I must reach in order to survive.
The light grew not merely cold and uninviting but also eerie, as if the shops were not shops after all, as if they were the dwellings of sorcerers and necromancers and voodooists, as though beyond their windows much witchery and diabolism were under way. In my peripheral vision, I became aware of something floating beside me, and when I looked more directly, I met the fixed stare of a corpse. A young woman, perhaps twenty, floated past, arms limp and moved only by the feeble currents, head turned toward me. She might have been lovely in life, with raven hair and celadon eyes, but she was not lovely now. Her bloodshot eyes bulged in their sockets, and her face was clenched in an expression of stark terror, as though, in the last instant of her life, such a frenzied state of fear had overcome her that even death could not relax her features.
When she sailed past me, the currents somehow conveying her at greater speed than they moved me, I sensed a looming horror more blood-freezing than a corpse. I eeled about and discovered behind me a flotilla of dead bodies, men and women and children, hundreds and perhaps thousands of them drifting through the weirdly lit flood, none of them bloated with gas and rising toward the surface as a corpse would in the waking world.
As they came past me, to both sides and above and below, I saw that in every case the eyes were protuberant, the face frozen open-mouthed in an expression of extreme fright. A little girl of about seven, her long blond hair billowing around her like the seeking tentacles of a sea anemone, bumped against me, and I shuddered in revulsion. Her protruding eyes rolled with sudden life, and from her open mouth issued a froth of gas bubbles that broke against my lips and carried with them one word: “Contumax.”
I thrust up from the bed, flailing at the sheets as if I were a drowning man trying desperately to throw off the arms of the sea that would drag him down. I needed a moment to understand that I’d been dreaming, that I had come awake, and another moment to remember where I had gone to bed.
Although I occasionally indulged in a beer or a glass of red wine, I wasn’t much of a drinker. I had no taste for hard liquor. Nevertheless, I fished a few cubes of ice from the insulated carafe, dropped them into the glass, and poured more Scotch than I needed.
At one of the windows, I drew open the draperies with the pull cord and pushed aside the lace sheers. Drinking the Scotch, I stood looking out at the colonnades of velvet ash, the dry land, the distant purple mountains. With its fire, the whiskey gradually warmed away the chill with which the dream had left me.
A couple of months earlier, in Nevada, I had rescued children who had been kidnapped to be used as human sacrifices. The satanists who abducted them, who now planned some torment for Pico Mundo, were fond of elaborate ceremonies, rituals, secret passwords. They had a formalized greeting, the equivalent of Heil Hitler, which consisted of the first cultist declaring contumax, Latin for “defiant” or “disobedient,” to which the second cultist replied potestas, Latin for “power.” They were declaring that their power came from defying all that was good.
What did it mean—the whole town under deep water?
Malo Suerte Lake, a mecca for boating enthusiasts from all over the Southwest, covered a few thousand acres. Not far offshore, it quickly grew deep. The lake lay upland from Pico Mundo; and the town had been built in a shallow bowl in the parched terrain.
I didn’t know the average depth of Malo Suerte or its exact acreage, or how to calculate the volume of water held back by the breast of the dam. But I couldn’t believe a sudden failure of that structure would result in all of Pico Mundo submerged like some modern-day Atlantis.
Nearly forty thousand people lived in our town, which was a place of many neighborhoods, from rich to poor, where humanity in its infinite variety dwelt in expectation of no greater catastrophe than perhaps a major earthquake. We anticipated a temblor that one day would cast off the cornices and crack the walls of some of the oldest structures that hadn’t been reinforced to meet new building codes.
Flash floods happened, sure. But they were nuisances quickly flushed away through both the municipal storm drains and the network of natural arroyos that cut through town and that were bridged by our streets.
I didn’t realize that I had finished all of the Scotch in my glass until I tasted only ice melt.
When, as an aspect of my sixth sense, I had a dream that struck me as predictive, its meaning was sometimes clear, sometimes more difficult to interpret. For that reason, among others, my paranormal abilities seemed to be both a gift and a curse.
A flood caused by the purposeful destruction of the dam would cause serious destruction, and dozens—perhaps scores—might die. But I couldn’t conceive of any circumstances in which the drowning deaths could mount into the hundreds and thousands.
Consequently, perhaps the nightmare had been in part symbolic, its full meaning accessible only after some analysis. A flood, yes, but something else, too, a second and simultaneous catastrophic event that multiplied the effect of a dam failure.
Such as?
Such as …
More Scotch would not inspire an answer. I needed more time to think. And a better brain with which to do the thinking.