Free If You Could See Me Now by Peter Straub Page A

you have to come back?
    —What?
    —You’re a fool.
    —I don’t understand.
    —Haven’t enough people died already?
    Then she abruptly stood up and walked out of the room onto the porch, where she sat in the rusty old swing.—Miles, you’re an innocent. She raised her fists to me and her face contorted in a way I had never seen.—Fool, fool, fool! Fool innocent!
    I sat beside her. She began to beat me around my head and shoulders, and I bent my neck to receive her blows. I wished for death.
    She said—You put it in motion and it will destroy you.
    All the life went out of me, and the setting receded until I was suspended in a blue fluid, far away. The distance was important. I was in a far blue drifting place, still weeping. Then I understood that it was death. Distant conversation, distant laughter filtered to me, as though through walls. When I became aware of other bodies floating as mine was, hundreds of them, thousands of bodies spinning as if from trees in that blue horror, I heard the sound of loud handclaps. Three of them. Three widely spaced loud claps, unutterably cynical. That was the sound of death, and it held no dignity. It was the end of a poor performance.
    Sweating, I rolled over on the bed, gasping. The dream seemed to have lasted for hours—I seemed to have been caught in it from the first moments of sleep. I lay panting under the great weight of guilt and panic. I was held responsible for many deaths; I had caused these deaths, and everybody knew.
    Only gradually, as I saw light begin to crawl through the window, did rationality appear. I had never killed anyone. My grandmother was dead; I was in the valley to get work done.
Easy
, I said out loud. Only a dream. I tried to produce alpha waves, and began to breathe deeply and evenly. It took a long time for the enormous sense of guilt to dissipate.
    I have always been a person with an enormous excess of guilt. My true vocation is that of guilt expert.
    For three-fourths of an hour I tried to fall asleep again, but my system would not permit it, my nerves felt as though doused in caffeine, and I got out of bed just past five. Through the bedroom window I could see dawn slowly beginning. Dew lay silvery over the old huge black iron pig trough in the field near the house where my grandfather had kept hogs. The field was now used for grazing a horse and a neighbor’s cows.Beside humped cows, the tall chestnut mare was still asleep, standing with its long neck drooping down. Further up began a sandstone hill, pocked with shallow caves and overgrown with small trees and intensely curling vines and weeds. It looked much as it had during my childhood. A very light gray fog, more like a stationary mist than fog, hung in the lowest parts of the field. As I stood by the window, absorbing peace from that long green landscape edged with fog, two things happened which made me momentarily and at first without realizing it hold my breath. I had let my eye travel up across the road and the fields—the colors of Duane’s corn were beautifully muted by the gray light, and the woods seemed blacker than in the sunlight. Light foglike smoke came curling out of the mass of trees. Then I unmistakably saw a figure emerge, embraced by the fog, and hover for a moment at the boundary between wood and field. I remembered my mother telling me of seeing a wolf come from those woods forty years before—of seeing a wolf pause perhaps at that exact spot and stand tense with hunger, leveling its muzzle at the house and barn. It was, I was almost certain, the same person I had seen the previous afternoon. Like the wolf, it too stood and paused and looked toward the house. My heart froze. I thought: a hunter. No. Not a hunter. I didn’t know why not, but not. In the same second I heard the bee noise of a motorcycle.
    I glanced at the empty road and then back up to the tree line. The figure had disappeared. After a moment, the motorcycle entered my frame of vision.
    She was