Keeper of Dreams (37 page)

I was taken on the tour in hopes that I might be able to do something to publicize the historical importance of the site. It was slated to be in the path of a (useless) freeway that was planned to be built as a beltway around Greensboro, a city notorious for having roads that, like this beltway, don’t actually go anywhere. Fortunately, without any help from me, the route was changed and the site was preserved.

Meanwhile, I had this place in my mind. Whom would I put there? Someone from our modern world. And what would happen to him because he was there?

This short story was the result. Acquiring the power to be a vessel of death was merely the first thought to come to mind that intrigued me enough to think about at length. It’s a fantasy—I don’t believe people can actually acquire such powers. Nor am I a believer in euthanasia—quite the contrary, I believe that allowing one person to “help” another die is a broad fast highway to murdering the old and crippled, a way to turn our society into something monstrous.

And yet there are people who are simply ready to die; what if there were someone who was ready to help them? Not only did I come up with this short story, I also had a whole novel planned out. But when it came time to write it, I simply didn’t have it in me to write it. The prospect was too bleak. How could I find any hope in the story to make it worth reading? I ended up fulfilling the contract with
Treasure Box
instead—a bleak enough book!—and the novel version of “Vessel” died.

Meanwhile, the story had been held for a long time by a friend who wanted to publish it as part of a project that never got off the ground. So, years after I’d forgotten about the whole thing, I suddenly found myself with the rights back to a story that I thought was powerful and that had never been published. Just at that time I made my first visit to Spain, to attend a convention in Mataró. There it occurred to me that it would be cool to offer the Spanish sci-fi magazine
BEM
a story of mine that had never been published
anywhere
before, so that Spanish was the language of first publication. The editors liked the story, so it was published there first.

Through the Door in Oglethorpe’s

Enoch Hunt wasn’t the first kid who got lost in the toy department of Oglethorpe’s. He wasn’t even the first kid to get lost on purpose. But he
was
the first kid to hope that he wouldn’t get found in time for Christmas.

Because on Christmas he wouldn’t be in Dowagiac, Michigan. He’d be in Tucson, Arizona. No snow on the ground, no friends to show his stuff to, his grandparents a couple of thousand miles away. And with all of that, his mother probably wouldn’t get better after all. Fifty-fifty chance, that’s all the doctor gave her.

Enoch’s dad treated him like a grown-up. “Son, you’re twelve years old, I can tell you the truth, I don’t have to pretend the way I do with the younger kids. Your mother isn’t just a little sick. The disease she has is very rare, and they don’t know a cure.”

“How long does she have?” Enoch asked. This was a realistic question. Enoch always asked realistic questions when he could think of them. It fooled people into thinking he was very adult.

“They don’t know,” his father said. “I think I’m telling you this because I’m as scared as you are. They don’t know if she’s going to get better or not, they don’t know
when
they’ll know, they can’t tell us anything except that some people who’ve had this have gotten better in Arizona. So we’re going to Arizona.”

“I don’t want to go to Arizona,” Enoch said. What he really meant
was, “I don’t want Mother to be sick,” but he knew that wouldn’t be realistic.

“If you were the sick one, Enoch, we’d go to Arizona for you, too.” His father pulled out a little key ring, just like his, with one single key on it. “We’ve already rented an apartment there, Enoch. I got a key made up for you.” It was a strange-looking key, with a hump right down the middle. They even had weird locks and keys in Arizona. “This key means we trust you,” Father said. “This key means we care about Mother.” Enoch took the key and hoped it would fall out of his pocket.

That was a few days ago. Today Enoch’s dad took him to Oglethorpe’s and let him look around in the toy department. Within a few minutes Enoch decided to get lost, hoping that they wouldn’t find him until his mom was better. Or maybe wouldn’t ever find him at all. Because Enoch didn’t want to live in a world where mothers got sick and fathers got scared. Mothers were supposed to live forever, and fathers aren’t supposed to be afraid of anything. Didn’t they
know
that?

Oglethorpe’s was in a bunch of old houses strung together with brick walls so that it was like a maze, up and down stairs, in and out of doors and corridors, and the toy department was in the basements of the buildings, so it was even more confusing. All during the summer most of these rooms were kept locked up for storage—only during the Christmas seasons did they need it all for display space. Now Enoch was in the backmost room, where the toys were years out of date and covered with dust. It was there that he saw the crazy girl.

He was sure she must be crazy, because she looked so weird. Her hair was done up in four pigtails surrounding her face, sticking straight out like the rays of the sun in a kindergarten drawing. But the back of her hair was all done up like a beauty parlor. She was wearing a pink dress, but she had jeans sticking out of the bottom of the dress. And she had this weird-looking wart just under her left eye, a big old brown one that made her look like she was crying mud.

Enoch had never seen one human being look so ugly all at once. So he began kind of following her. He wasn’t trying to
meet
her—she looked crazy enough to be dangerous, and Enoch didn’t like to take chances. He just wanted to look at her a few more times to make sure she was real.

After a few minutes, though, he realized she was trying to get away from him. She moved away from him faster and faster, and began weaving in and out of the display racks, and backtracking when he wouldn’t notice. It was like a game, and Enoch didn’t mind playing along. Enoch named the game “Keep Exactly Fifteen Feet Away From the Weird-looking Girl.”

He always named his games. He named everything. He was good at thinking up titles. He even kept a book in which he wrote down the important things that happened to him. Every page had a title. Like “The Day My Father Taught Me How to Throw a Football and Pulled His Shoulder,” or “Why I Will Never Again Eat Radishes Straight from the Garden Without Washing Them.”

His most recent entry was titled, “The Day My Father Told Me That My Mother Was Going to Die.” But the title was all he could think of on that one. It just sat there in his book, a title and a blank page, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

While he was thinking of that, the crazy girl got away. He had her trapped back in the corner of the oldest, dustiest room of all, and now she was gone. It made him angry. He didn’t like failing at things.

He looked, but he couldn’t find her anywhere. Had she given up and gone home? He didn’t think so. She had been playing the game as much as he was—why would she suddenly quit?—so he went to the corner where she was when she disappeared.

Her footprints in the dust went right where he had seen her go—and then they just stopped, right in front of a pile of ancient Fort Apache sets. It was like she had got this far and then decided to fly the rest of the way. He wondered if maybe she was a witch. But that was impossible. There weren’t any witches. But then—the crazy girl would look just right sitting on a broom.

If Enoch was going to be realistic, he had to stop thinking of things like ghosts or witches. Like his father always said, if something seems to be unexplainable, keep looking until you find the explanation.

He found it in the dust on the floor in front of the Fort Apache sets. One stack of boxes had been pulled out and then pushed back. The crazy girl was hiding behind the boxes.

Enoch had already pulled the boxes out before he realized he hadn’t
the faintest idea of what he’d say to her if he found her. “Gotcha”? “Olly olly oxen free”?

It didn’t matter. She wasn’t hiding behind the boxes. Instead there was a little door about four feet tall, with a sign on it that said “Employees Only.” The sign was peeling away, and something was written on the door behind it in pencil. Enoch got close and read it. It said, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

Enoch was not the sort of boy who went through doors that he wasn’t supposed to go through. But if this was a place for those who had abandoned hope, then the door was made for him. And so he pushed it open, stepped through, and pulled the boxes back into place.

With the door still open, Enoch looked around. All he could see was a sort of janitor’s closet, with rolls of toilet paper and packages of paper towels. But there were footprints and scuffs on the floor, leading to one of the piles. And sure enough there were footprints up a sort of stairway made of paper-towel packages, leading to a gap between the ceiling and the top of the wall.

Enoch inspected the door to make sure it wouldn’t lock behind him. Then he closed it. There was a dim light seeping around the edges of the door. It was enough for Enoch to make his way to the top of the paper-towel stairway. But when he tried to look over the top of the wall, he could see nothing but darkness.

Enoch was not the sort of kid who went into dark places where he had never been before. But Enoch was here to get lost, and it would be a lot easier to get lost in a dark passageway than in the back rooms of the basement toy department. Besides, the crazy girl had come through here. It must be safe—she wasn’t screaming, was she?

So he clambered over the wall, and hung his right leg down the other side, trying to find something to stand on. It occurred to him, while he was swinging his leg around, that the crazy girl might be standing below, watching him make an idiot of himself.

“Don’t just stand there,” he said. “Tell me how far down the ground is.”

No answer. She wasn’t there, of course.

He toyed with the idea of just dropping down. But what if the ground was farther away than he thought? What if he got stuck and
couldn’t get back? So he kept swinging his leg until his heel bashed into another wall.

Another wall. What he had almost dropped into wasn’t a room, it was a space between walls. He really might have been stuck.

Carefully he straddled the space, which was only about two feet wide. The far wall was stone—part of the old foundation. And instead of a drop-off on the other side, there was a dirt floor in a kind of cave. Enoch knew it was a cave because he kept bumping his head in the darkness.

I am a complete idiot to be crawling around in a cave in the darkness, he decided. There could be side paths going off in any direction, and he’d never find his way back. But that was the idea, wasn’t it? To get lost. And then he saw a light ahead of him.

Too bad. The cave didn’t go on forever. It would let him out somewhere outside in Dowagiac, Michigan, and he would be recognized by somebody, and they would take him home, and he would have to go to Arizona.

Oh well. At least he could tell his friends about this cave. That was something. He didn’t have to tell them he was following a crazy girl with four pigtails and a wart.

When he got out of the cave he spent a few minutes trying to figure out where he was. There weren’t any buildings close by, which meant the cave was longer than he thought, going all the way from Oglethorpe’s to the nearest woods.

But he couldn’t see the end of this forest. Just trees and leaves and birds and grass and bushes and flowers and sunshine trickling down in little splashes—not a sign of a cornfield anywhere nearby. To be near Dowagiac and not see a cornfield
or
a building was almost incredible. That’s why it took him so long to notice the
really
incredible thing.

In Dowagiac, Michigan, there were no leaves at all on the trees and a foot of snow on the ground. Here, wherever he was, it could be May 25th.

A small rock hit him in the head. He turned around, ready to yell at whoever threw it. But the crazy girl was standing there with a slingshot, and it was loaded, and it was aimed at his face.

“I found you,” Enoch said.

“Did not,” she said. “I found
you
.”

“I was chasing you, wasn’t I?”

“Around here, if I didn’t want you to find me, you wouldn’t have found me.”

Enoch pointed at the slingshot. “What are you going to do, kill a giant?”

She shook her head. “He’s already dead. Died last week. You should see the grave.”

She was definitely crazy. Still, she had been here before, apparently—that was a brand-new-looking slingshot, all metal, and she hadn’t been carrying it with her in the store. “Where is this place?” he asked.

“It’s through the short door in Oglethorpe’s,” she said. “Didn’t you watch how you got here?”

“Where is it on the
map
?”

“It isn’t.”

“It isn’t what?”

“On the map. Look, what do you
think
? It’s dead winter in Michigan.”

“I know.”

“The kind of places where it’s spring in the middle of winter don’t get
put
on maps.”

“What about Australia? It’s spring
there
.”