You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
– “A Dream Within a Dream,” by Edgar Allan Poe
PART I
THEY WRESTLED in the front yard, rolling through alternating patches of mud and grass. At one moment, one had the advantage over the other, and in the next, the tables would turn. They, twins they were, looked so alike that only their parents could tell the difference between them.
The sun was orange now and fading in the west, and they knew their playtime for today was coming to an end.
As was their routine, the boys’ parents took time out just before serving supper to watch them. Their mother Eve wore a proud, contented grin, and their father Adam stood like a noble knight behind her, gently rubbing her shoulders. Eve leaned back on the broad chest of her husband and closed her eyes. Adam pressed himself against her.
“Easy now, sir,” she said, just as playful as her boys. “That’s how we ended up with those two rascals.”
He pressed her to him again, but she did not resist this time.
“They are beautiful, aren’t they?” she said, now eager for supper to be over so they could be alone. “I pray they grow up good and healthy. Like you.”
“They will be fine,” he said. “They might be a little crazy out there, but if they didn’t get dirty every now and then, how else would you get them to take a bath?”
“They are so close,” she whispered, not purposely eluding his joke. She reached back and rubbed his thigh. “Later, it’ll be our time to be close.”
“If I decide to want it.”
“You’ll want it.”
She opened her eyes and didn’t see her sons. It wasn’t out of the norm, but it did trigger a memory. A very painful memory of their first son who had died years earlier.
“Tell me they’re going to be all right,” she said.
The man sensed the breaking in his wife’s voice, and he knew what that meant. “Eve. God needed Raphael. He will not take all three.”
“I know,” she said, turning toward him. “I just miss him.”
It hurt even to say his name. Yet he still had a place set at the dinner table.
“Supper will be ready in about ten minutes,” she said, mechanically putting herself back in the here and now, away from the world of disease and death. “I’ll call the boys in five.”
The cornfield that provided the family with food and a comfortable means rustled as the evening wind did its cooling. Thick, virgin woods encased the family’s home from just off the edge of the cornfield to the south and around to the side of the house and the northeast. It was a cozy setup, one that kept the family secluded, away from the stress of the nearest city down the road to the north. Even from their home away from the city, the view was pleasant with its ridges of trees and cliffs and low-rolling hills. It all footed a bed of hills that dove up and down like sea waves, the center of it a gigantic mountain.
In the wintertime the mountain’s peak was crystalline and majestic, capped with snow, embraced with fog. In the springtime the ice softened, the melted snows providing the mountain’s lush trees and grasses a soothing bath. Soon all that was left glowed as a thick blanket of lush greens and wild whites. With the exit of winter came a gentle flow of breezes and butterflies that whispered through the clover-freckled plains.
The dirt road leading from the mountain valley south to the family’s home curved and darted among the plains like the tongue of a snake. It had certainly licked the family into its mouth six years earlier. The aforementioned son Raphael, he who still ate with them in spirit every night, fell victim to an unidentified bacterial disease that ate through his flesh, turning his skin into colors only suitable for rotten fruit. The poison leveled the boy with shaking perhaps akin to demonic possession, and his fever was hellfire.
His father’s efforts to get him treated at the city hospital proved fruitless. The doctor rushed the boy into a private room, but came out shortly after with just a sheet-covered body in his arms.
Eve couldn’t stay still while they were gone. She cried, dripping her tears onto the windowsill as she watched and waited, praying to a God she would soon think wasn’t listening. For hours and hours the only thing the window revealed was the mountain, now a monster instead of magic, because it knew what the woman would not know until her husband came back.
And when she finally did see him, a distant dot on the horizon, she knew. The dot was a period at the end of a sentence. It was over. Somehow she knew even then that she would never see her son alive again.
Months passed. Then years. But the pain never passed. The cross jutting from the grassy mound in the backyard was a thorn in their hearts, not a soothing reminder of faith. They would sometimes consider pulling it out altogether, especially as it wore down in the weather, but they kept it there for some reason they couldn’t articulate. Even the adjacent peach tree planted in Raphael’s honor stood solemnly, its limbs dripping yellow, fleshy tears. Adam worked silently in the cornfield in the mornings and spent the afternoons in the town drinking. Eve cried her eyes to a crisp while he played his pain away, and not because she was losing her marriage. She was hardly aware of her daily, mundane responsibilities around the house; much less was she concerned about him. When he did come home, he gorged his food to soak up the booze, scarcely acknowledging his wife’s presence. She didn’t care. Conversation was a duty that took too much energy, energy already lost in each new day’s helping of apathy. After supper they cleaned the kitchen, cleaned themselves, and went to bed. If they did make love, which wasn’t often, it was just another duty, practical and programmed. Their bodies were pleasing because nature made it that way, but the soul of it was gone. It was cold. It was memory. It was the act that had formed their dearest son who was now dead. A beautiful angel dead at just twelve years of age.
And for years, that’s how it was. A bear in hibernation, posing as a marriage.
Fittingly, nature took its course, the freeze thawing one hot summer night when love so often finds its fire. Maybe it was a miracle from a deity the couple had forsaken a long time before. Whatever it was, the ice of fear and silence melted when they found themselves in each other’s arms that night. In an instant the pain just went away. For the first time in two years the act was not primordial but pure and passionate, a perfect night of love that conceived the two baby boys they were raising now.
This was a special night. It was Thursday before Easter, the Last Supper in their now resurrected faith, and they were ready to call the boys in for the roasted lamb and corn.
And then life had its way with them yet again. One final time.
When Eve heard the door open and saw what was walking through it, she dropped the lamb on the table and screamed for her husband.
The boys outside froze with the scream. A single gust of wind rippled through like an invisible rug, and their heads turned impulsively with the sound of their mother crashing through the screen door. She was soaked in blood and clutching her stomach. She crawled and slipped in a fit, the door whipping back, striking her in the head. Their father’s body suddenly burst through the open doorway and crashed down onto his wife. He was dead already.
Eve could not move from the muscular weight of her husband. What had been a charm of his manhood would now seal her fate.
She screamed at her boys to run. They didn’t move. She screamed again. The tall man dressed in black emerged from the shadows of the doorway and looked at her for a moment and smiled beneath his black hood. He grabbed her hair and lifted her head just as she was screaming again. The knife silenced her.
Then he looked up at the boys.
The boy who had been losing to his brother in their play suddenly found new life. He moved to run, but his brother held him fast, mashing his wrists into the ground. The boy kicked and thrashed about, but his brother’s nails only bit deeper into his wrists. Seeing the horror show on the porch had momentarily stunted his voice, but now coming death forced his mouth open to every pitch of screaming he knew. And some he didn’t.
But his brother wouldn’t move. He was spellbound into an odd calm, a strange, devilish fold in his face. His white eyes seared a hole right into his brother’s soul, a burn he would never forget, not even when he would face him again there on that very ground many years later.
He closed his eyes and knew it was over.
In an instant though, there was no brother holding him down anymore, no monster coming to kill him. He opened his eyes and looked to the right, and still glaring coldly at him was his twin brother. He wasn’t the same. Something had happened. And he was being carried away forever.
The boy slowly rose, and there he stood, watching with hazy eyes his brother bouncing away into nothingness. Momentary joy that he hadn’t been hurt was replaced with confusion and sadness. Come back, he thought simply, as children do. Let’s go in. Mama has supper ready.
His eyes were bubbling with tears and he thought he saw his brother wave goodbye to him before he faded into a black speck in the distance.
It was another period at the end of a sentence.
The boy fell back to the ground on his knees, still staring with pleading eyes at the spot on the horizon where he’d last seen his brother. He stared at nothing for a long time, not wanting to face the porch behind him.
He felt a presence to the side of him. He looked. It was clear that this person was not the scary man. There were no black coats or hats or swords, but everything, even the understood movements of Earth, seemed to move in a slow, hypnotizing blue swirl. The man was smiling down at him, sincere and compassionate. He smelled familiar to the boy, as if he’d lived there all along.
“You’ll come with me,” the stranger said. “I’ll take care of you.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“There is nothing here for you now.”
The boy nodded. He watched a tear drop fall and slide down a blade of grass. Crisp detail had returned. Gone was the momentary comfort of the swirl.
He turned his head to the porch, and yes, it was true. There was nothing for him here now. He felt nothing, like a five-year-old should, and he felt everything, like a grown man introduced too soon to life’s suffering often does. Brimming with sorrow, he dragged his feet to the nightmare. The slow-rolling gazes of wonder and life, of white sheets of mist and fluttering wings he had felt when he first beheld the stranger were now gone, his world again a black mud wall splashed with blood. He fought the tears and the truth. This couldn’t be real. Couldn’t be. But it was. There was no truer nightmare. On the wooden porch lay his dead father and mother, a fork wedged between her fingers.
***Dream Chase is the wholly reimagined version of The Final Chase (out of print, but used ones still circulating) and the author’s preferred version of the story. It is better, and frankly, more readable. Please consider this as you make your purchasing decision.
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