Free Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron by The Book of Cthulhu Page B

about it when you were older,” he told his father. “Your father was involved.”
    “No,” his father said. “He was not.”
    “He was in the paper.”
    “His name was,” his father said, facing Ingels with a blank stare in his eyes. “It was another man. Your grandfather took years to live that down. The newspapers wouldn’t publish an apology or say it wasn’t him. And you wonder why we didn’t want you to work for a paper. You wouldn’t be a decent shopkeeper, you let our shop go out of the family, and now here you are, raking up old dirt and lies. That’s what you chose for yourself.”
    “I didn’t mean to be offensive,” Ingels said, holding himself down. “But it was an interesting case, that’s all. I’m going to follow it up tomorrow, at the theatre.”
    “If you go there you’ll be rubbing our name in the dirt. Don’t bother coming here again.”
    “Now hold on,” Ingels said. “If your father wasn’t involved you can’t very well mean that. My God,” he cried, flooded with a memory, “you do know something! You told me about it once, when I was a child! I’d just started dreaming and you told it to me so I wouldn’t be frightened, to show me you had these dreams too. You were in a room with a telescope, waiting to see something. You told me because I’d dreamed it too! That’s the second time I’ve had that dream! It’s the room at the Variety, it has to be!”
    “I don’t know what you mean,” his father said. “I never dreamed that.”
    “You told me you had.”
    “I must have told you that to calm you down. Go on, say I shouldn’t have lied to you. It must have been for your own good.”
    He’d blanked out his eyes with an unblinking stare. Ingels gazed at him and knew at once there was more behind the blank than the lie about his childhood. “You’ve been dreaming again,” he said. “You’ve been having the dream I had last night, I know you have. And I think you know what it means.”
    The stare shifted almost imperceptibly, then returned strengthened. “What do you know?” his father said. “You live in the same town as us and visit us once a week, if that. Yet you know I’ve been dreaming? Sometimes we wonder if you even know we’re here!”
    “I know. I’m sorry,” Ingels said. “But these dreams—you used to have them. The ones we used to share, remember?”
    “We shared everything when you were a little boy. But that’s over,” his father said. “Dreams and all.”
    “That’s nothing to do with it!” Ingels shouted. “You still have the ability! I know you must have been having these dreams! It’s been in your eyes for months!” He trailed off, trying to remember whether that was true. He turned to his mother, pleading. “Hasn’t he been dreaming?”
    “What do I know about it?” she said. “It’s nothing to do with me.” She was clearing the table in the dim rationed light beyond the fire, not looking at either of them. Suddenly Ingels saw her as he never had before: bewildered by her husband’s dreams and intuitions, further excluded from the disturbingly incomprehensible bond between him and her son. All at once Ingels knew why he’d always felt she had been happy to see him leave home: it was only then that she’d been able to start reclaiming her husband. He took his coat from the hall and looked into the dining-room. They hadn’t moved: his father was staring at the fire, his mother at the table. “I’ll see you,” he said, but the only sound was the crinkling of the fire as it crumbled, breaking open pinkish embers.
    IV
    He watched television. Movement of light and colours, forming shapes. Outside the window the sky drew his gaze, stretched taut, heavily imminent as thunder. He wrote words.
    Later, he was sailing through enormous darkness; glinting globes turned slowly around him, one wearing an attenuated band of light; ahead, the darkness was scattered with dust and chunks of rock. A piece of metal was circling him