for him to feel at home anywhere. Out in the world of the living, he
moved with the confidence of a secret master of the universe, but he
never felt as if he belonged there. Though he was not actually afraid
of anything any more, a trace current of anxiety buzzed through him
every minute that he spent beyond the stark, black corridors and
sepulchral chambers of his hideaway.
After a while he opened the lid of a sturdy plastic cooler with a
Styrofoam lining, in which he kept cans of root beer. He had always
liked root beer. It was too much trouble to keep ice in the cooler, so
he just drank the soda warm. He didn’t mind.
He also kept snack foods in the cooler: Mars bars, Reese’s peanut butter
cups, Clark Bars, a bag of potato chips, packages of peanut-butter-and
cheese crackers, Mallomars, and Oreo cookies. When he had crossed into
the borderland, something had happened to his metabolism; he seemed to
be able to eat anything he wanted and burn it off without gaining weight
or turning soft. And what he wanted to eat, for some reason he didn’t
understand, was what he had liked when he’d been a kid.
He opened a root beer and took a long, warm swallow.
He withdrew a single cookie from the bag of Oreos. He carefully
separated the two chocolate wafers without damaging them. The circle of
white icing stuck entirely to the wafer in his left hand. That meant he
was going to be rich and famous when he grew up. If it had stuck to the
one in his right hand, it would have meant that he was going to be
famous but not necessarily rich, which could mean just about anything
from being a rock-‘n’-roll star to an assassin who would take out the
President of the United States. If some of the icing stuck to both
wafers, that meant you had to eat another cookie or risk having no
future at all.
As he licked the sweet icing, letting it dissolve slowly on his tongue,
he stared up the empty elevator shaft, thinking about how interesting it
was that he had chosen the abandoned amusement park for his hideaway
when the world offered so many dark and lonely places from which to
choose.
He had been there a few times as a boy, when the park was still in
operation, most recently eight years ago, when he had been twelve,
little more than a year before the operation closed down. On that most
special evening of his childhood, he had committed his first murder
there, beginning his long romance with death. Now he was back.
He licked away the last of the icing.
He ate the first chocolate wafer. He ate the second.
He took another cookie out of the bag.
He sipped the warm root beer.
He wished he were dead. Fully dead. It was the only way to begin his
existence on the Other Side.
“If wishes were cows,” he said, “we’d eat steak every day, wouldn’t we?”
He ate the second cookie, finished the root beer, then stretched out on
his back to sleep.
Sleeping, he dreamed. They were peculiar dreams of people he had never
seen, places he had never been, events that he had never witnessed.
Water all around him, chunks of floating ice, snow sheeting through a
hard wind. A woman in a wheelchair, laughing and weeping at the same
time. A hospital bed, banded by shadows and stripes of golden sunlight.
The woman in the wheelchair, laughing and weeping. The woman in the
wheelchair, laughing. The woman in the wheelchair. The woman.
In the fields of life, a harvest sometimes comes far out of season, when
we thought the earth was old and could see no earthly reason to rise for
work at break of dawn, and put our muscles to the test.
With winter here and autumn gone, it just seems best to rest, to rest.
But under winter feels so cold, wait the dormant seeds of seasons
unborn, and so the heart does hold hope that heals all bitter lesions.
if he were an accused infidel on trial for his life during the