Walker in the Trees - Chapter 1 The Dream

This is the first chapter of my novel "Walker in the Trees"

Chapter 1

The Dream

 

“Dreaming men are haunted men.”

from the narrative poem ‘John Brown’s Body’ by Stephen Vincent Benet.

 

“They distinguished between true and valuable dreams, sent to the dreamer to warn him or to foretell the future, and vain, fraudulent, and empty dreams, the object of which was to misguide or lead him to destruction.”

The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud

 

Karl wondered how anyone in the world could sleep knowing what had happened. So many things happen every day that made it impossible to sleep, and yet the world could always drop off once the sun went down. The world and not him, no, he couldn't sleep. Sleep was something he knew he needed, like food, like water. Sleep was something he had to have in order to get the justice that he needed to have before he lived again.

He looked over at the map on his wall and imagined what the wall had looked like before, it wasn't hard. There had been nothing on that wall but a vent before he had made the map that marked where they had found his sister's body.

It had been a white wall. It had been a wall full of nothingness. It was like the morning of a holiday: so open to possibilities that it was blindingly bright.

Karl had added black to that dawn. The black of county lines and broken black of roadways moved like roots across the background. Black squares for important buildings and black exes for places that things had happened. It was the black of ink from news paper clippings and photocopies.

Black and white swatches that each represented a body touched the wall like growths of mold on bone. So many bodies had been added to that map, so many souls trapped, and so many voices called out to him for help from an unjust prison. It wasn’t hell they were in, but something else, something worse because they were not guilty.

Then he had added red. Red was the places they had last been. Their last known moment of life before their body was found ruined and torn stood out like stains of blood. His sister had last been seen at a strip mall when her friends had stopped at some hippie store to see if they could get grass. Red pins for last seen and yellow ones found. Red for the string that connected them and then he saw a pattern.

The pattern was a circle, a circle made of lines. It was a ring around a place like a danger zone. That place had to be near the center of the map. It had to be there waiting for him to come, and break the seal, and let them free. Not now, soon, soon, but now he had to sleep. Sleep to be strong for the fight, because he knew it would happen.

Karl stripped down to his briefs and tee shirt. The white crew neck once fit perfectly when he bought it, but now it clung to his neck line and choked him. The cuffs were ragged, the fabric holed and stretched, the shirt barely fit over the hard muscle that had once been flabby flesh. Karl knew he should have got a new shirt, but what would it matter soon?

Karl got into bed. He focused his eyes just past his feet and saw there a photograph in a leather frame. He couldn't really see it in the dim, but the four figures that stood out on the photo stock were so deeply cut into his mind that it didn’t matter. Four smiling faces frozen in time, a breath, an instant captured forever from the time before they brought his sister's body to the morgue in little plastic bags.

Some part of him remembered that the leather frame had been part of a set of two. He had given the second frame to someone, or was that a dream? The world had been so different before, before his mother’s tears stabbed so deeply into his heart, before his sister’s soul haunted him, before his father turned pale and thin. This dark cloud fell over his family like a curse, and he had no choice but to fight.

Karl closed his eyes knowing that the photograph would be there when he opened them. It would remind him of the truth as if he could forget. Four smiling faces that would never smile again watched over him. He needed to sleep for them. Sleep, that untidy chore, sleep, the thief of time, sleep that necessary evil. For so long after it happened he could not sleep, but then he had found the thing that kept his body in check.

The doctors called it self-hypnosis, Karl called it the shift. In the world that lived only in his head he was smothered in red light. Red like blood in a drain mixed with water. There were trees in this red world as black as coal and twisted as roots. Karl stood fully dressed in his work clothes. The olive drab was worn and shabby, and covered him from wrist to ankle. On his feet were true military boots, navy steel toes, boots to kick a man’s head in. Karl looked around this world for a moment then looked at the red sky. He imagined blue filtering into that red sky turning it purple.

Karl’s red world cooled. He lay down on the hot ground and looked up into the darkening sky watching the purple filter to blue. Karl let plants and shrubs grow around his body in his dream world as if the green of his clothes sprouted and flourished. The plants grew, and the sky darkened until the blue turned to black. From the darkness stars winked on.

The brilliance of a country sky, unpolluted by the lights of the city, blossomed as a garden of black earth and silver flowers. The moon came into view and smiled down on the sleeping Karl. There was tranquility here, a peace. In this world Karl could sleep, and to sleep was to dream, but for Karl to dream was to have nightmares. His body made the shift into sleep, and in time the dreams began. Even in sleep the expression of cold determination took shape on Karl’s face as his dreams became nightmares.

Nightmare, it was a word that had once meant 'the Mara, the goblin that takes your breath at night.' The Mara was said to ride the chests of sleepers and sicken them. It was said to prey on humans and horses, all manner of beast, and even trees. The evidence of its passage was the tangled of branch or the knotted hair of a living but weakened thing. To live visited by the Mara was to live a life of misery.

In his dream world Karl awoke. He stood up as tall as the trees and bumped his head on the moon. His eyes fixed on the glowing orb above him no bigger than his own head. He reached up and touched the dream moon running his fingers along its dusty surface.

“I know it’s a dream, but I do this anyway,” he said to himself and pushed the moon back into the heavens. Dogs barked at the rising moon in Karl’s dream. In the distance a twig snapped.

Karl found himself standing behind a tree holding a knife. His hair ran raggedly down his back knotted and tangled. He moved slowly through the undergrowth. He was hunting, hunting monsters in the universe of his mind.

Somehow he felt the monsters were as real as anything else in his world. The real world had monsters all right, but the monsters of the real world put on clothes every morning and walked among the human race.

Karl passed into a clearing where an old newspaper clipping hung in mid-air. It was a story of two young women who had gone missing on a hiking trip. All of their gear had vanished without a trace. Nothing but the trail of footprints leading to a road to show that they had passed. No sign of a struggle. Karl moved passed with his clothes sprouting tufts of hair. His face was rimmed with the tangles of unruly locks.

“A strange creature was spotted in the woods last night,” a voice played over a distant radio telling the story of the glimpse. “The witness said that it was about seven feet tall and walked in a crouch. The thing had a narrow head with a long snout,” the radio man said telling of a night beast that walked on two legs. It was not like a man or a Sasquatch. The news went on as Karl walked into the darkening trees.

Another news clipping sprang up from the ground growing like a tree. This one was more tragic than the first. It was about a family morning for a dead daughter. A little girl found just as his sister had been found, her body was chewed by dogs. How did people believe that no one had seen that body for seven days just off a main road? Why didn’t they see that her death was no accident?

In the roots of that dismal tree the ghost of the little girl was caught. She looked up at him mournfully with her hair turned to wood and her face partly overgrown. The child's hands reached out from among the roots. They were hands of mist. The girl's flesh looked like thin white paper. Her fingernails thin creases that couldn’t be smoothed. She should have been invisible in the darkness, but light filtered from within her. Karl lifted his knife to cut her free.

“It’s no use,” the little girl said. “You have to stop them. You can’t cut me free unless you break the seal.”

“I’ll break the seal,” Karl said in a whisper, “I’ll come, I have to come. I can't stay away.” Karl let the knife fall to his side once more. It dangled there as if his arm had no life without intention. It was as if his arm was a limp airline from the factory where he worked hanging without will until it came to task.

What could have been a smile passed over the girl’s transparent face. “I know,” she said, “we all know.” The sound of crying came floating through the night like a fog. “Follow it,” said the little girl, “it will lead you to us.”

The girl turned to knotted tree roots, as Karl turned and headed in the direction of the sound. Mist filtered in through the trees, and the moon turned the yellow of early night. The craggy orb was like a sneering jack-o-lantern. It gave an evil grin to Karl as he walked.

Lightning struck the ground a few feet away and Karl could see a black and white movie playing across the smoke. A woman cried in the darkness as the colorlessness spread across his dream.

“Jessica,” he said knowing his sister without needing to look. The image in front of him panned out. He could see now two figures, covered in hair, closing in on her. There was a distorted laughter, an evil laugh making his skin crawl. Karl touched the playing screen with his knife, and it fell away breaking into pieces and falling into the weeds.

Beyond the dissipating spirit five beasts shaped like men dined on carrion. Lightning crashed and Karl saw an evidence photo of his sister's body chewed by dogs. The smell of rancid meat burnt in his nostrils. He could see one of the creatures had a wolf head. It was different than the others. This beast was bigger, for one, and it had claws instead of hands like its four fellows.

Lightning crashed again, and Karl could see a close-up of his sister’s skull lying on the ground. He knew the evidence photo well. It was if the image had been cut into the tissues of his brain. That was the photograph that had fallen from the policeman’s file.

His mother had seen it and she had broken down crying. Karl remembered watching as she crumbled to the floor. He had been weak then, unable to act, helpless.

Now he was strong, and the anger he felt at his mother’s pain reverberated through him. It was a frequency of grief, an energy of anger that compelled his limbs like the pressure in the airlines compelled his tools at work.

One of the beasts stood up holding and old gnarled baseball bat. The beast had an almost human face. A long yellow beard hung from its chin far too clean for the hair of a wild animal. The bearded beast brought the bat down crushing bone.

Anger tore through Karl’s body like an electric current. His form swelled in the strange fabric of dreams as if he were pulling in the energy around him. Karl readied his knife as the creatures began to laugh.

‘The knife is a tool,’ Karl quoted ‘The Deadly Edge and You’ his book on knife fighting. ‘It doesn’t run out of bullets like a gun, but it can kill game. With the knife traps can be made and maintained. The knife is the most useful tool for any prolonged stay in the wilderness. The knife is a deadly edge without which life is impossible.’

Karl sprang into the clearing. It was the stupidest thing he could have done, but he knew this was a dream. In dreams one could die and live again. He drove his knife into the bearded beast with the club.

The gnarled worm-eaten wood bat rose over his head, but Karl jumped back. ‘Never assume something is dead, and remember that some things are still dangerous even after they have been killed. When you move within striking distance you make yourself open to attack.’

The bearded beast swung the bat missing Karl, but Karl sprang at it again, bringing his knife into the bearded thing’s side. The beast looked back at him with eyes that were so very human. The beast fell to the mossy ground but still looked up with those eyes. They were human enough to be evil.

Life drained from the bearded creature, and it turned to ash on the ground. Another of the creatures took its place, the wolf. It brandished claws against its human enemy. Karl’s internal rage was only fueled by the presence of the wolf beast. He took the beast with a flying tackle bringing the knife into the creature’s spine. He came to earth knife handle first using the momentum of his fall to drive the blade deep into the wolf's body.

Karl came up leaving his knife, but he didn't need it anymore. His hands had the claws of the wolf beast. He came at the next of the monsters with a fury slashing at it with the wolf paws. The claws tore wounds in the monster that bled streams of light. Karl swung again. His hand cut through the creature as it dissolved into a blue smoke that glowed in the moonlight.

Karl looked around knowing even with his sleeping mind that two more of the creatures lurked in the dream. He turned on the suddenly rocky plane. Laughter came from all around him, and his eyes scanned the expanse of shale rock. This world was darker now. There was no moonlight to puncture the dim. Karl turned again to see a dark creature unlike the others he had seen.

It was a cloud of shadows taking on the substance of the night. From this thing's mouth and eyes came a faint red glow that illuminated black teeth. The shape seemed to grow rather than draw near. It was getting stronger and more fierce. The thing had a smell to it like isopropyl alcohol, and in the manner of its shape there were cylinders. In each cylinder was a human heart, each heart held a spirit trapped. Karl could see the spirits and he knew that to set them free he had to break the jars.

He swung his fist to strike the dark being. There was a sudden coldness. For a shocking moment Karl was under water. It was water cold as ice and black as ink. The darkness all around made him feel as if he was weightless, and then the world came creeping back in.

In his head, Karl heard a humming of human voices as his room slowly came back into view. He had sat up in bed and punched the wall again. He could see that once again the board was split. He looked around him in the light of early morning, as the humming in his head finally became audible speech.

“Early this morning what is believed to be the body of Jessica Gabe was found by a jogger,” the voice said reminding Karl of the day it all changed. “The body was so badly chewed by dogs that no cause of death could be determined,” it went on with the reason he could have no justice. “There is no evidence to support brother’s claim that this was a homicide.” No, they hadn’t believed him, but he knew.

It was time for Karl to wake up. He had a long day ahead. He had to find justice out in the woods.