That, too.
She slept, and she dreamed. Some of the dreams were golden and fuzzy about the edges. In one of them she was naked with Tony, lying in a meadow where the grass felt like feathers, high above the world, a meadow atop a towering pillar of rock, and the warm wind was cleaner than sunshine, cleaner than the electric current of a lightning bolt, cleaner than anything in the world.
But she had nightmares, too. In one of them, she was in the old Chicago apartment, and the walls were closing in, and when she looked up she saw there was no ceiling, and Earl and Emma were staring down at her, their faces as big as God’s face, grinning down at her as the walls closed in, and when she opened the door to run out of the apartment, she collided with an enormous cockroach, a monstrous insect bigger than she was, and it obviously intended to eat her alive.
***
At three o’clock in the morning, Joshua Rhinehart woke, grunting and tussling briefly with the tangled sheets. He’d drunk a bit too much wine with dinner, which was most unusual for him. The buzz was gone, but his bladder was killing him; however, it was not merely the call of nature that had disturbed his sleep. He’d had a horrible dream about Tannerton’s workroom. In that nightmare, several dead men–all of them duplicates of Bruno Frye–had risen up from their caskets and from the porcelain and stainless steel embalming tables; he had run into the night behind Forever View, but they had come after him, had searched the shadows for him, moving jerkily, calling his name in their flat dead voices.
He lay on his back in the darkness, staring at the ceiling which he could not see. The only sound was the nearly inaudible purr of the electronic digital clock on the nightstand.
Before his wife’s death three years ago, Joshua had seldom dreamed. And he’d never had a nightmare. Not once in fifty-eight years. But after Cora passed away, all of that changed. He dreamed at least once or twice a week now, and more often than not the dream was a bad one. Many of them had to do with losing something terribly important but indescribable, and there always ensued a frantic but hopeless search for that which he had lost. He didn’t need a fifty-dollar-an-hour psychiatrist to tell him that those dreams were about Cora and her untimely death. He still had not adjusted to life without her. Perhaps he never would. The other nightmares were filled with walking dead men who often looked like him, symbols of his own mortality; but tonight they all bore a striking resemblance to Bruno Frye.
He got out of bed, stretched, yawned. He shuffled to the bathroom without turning on a lamp.
A couple of minutes later, on his way back to bed, he stopped at the window. The panes were cold to the touch. A stiff wind pressed against the glass and made mewling sounds like an animal that wanted to be let inside. The valley was still and dark except for the lights of the wineries. He could see the Shade Tree Vineyards to the north, farther up in the hills.
Suddenly, his eye was caught by a fuzzy white dot just south of the winery, a single smudge of light in the middle of a vineyard, approximately where the Frye house stood. Lights in the Frye house? There wasn’t supposed to be anyone there. Bruno had lived alone. Joshua squinted, but without his glasses, everything at a distance tended to grow hazier the harder he tried to focus on it. He couldn’t tell if the light was at the Frye place or at one of the administration buildings between the house and the main winery complex. In fact, the longer he stared the less he was sure that it was a light he was watching; it was faint, lambent; it might only be a reflection of moonlight.
He went to the nightstand and, not wanting to turn on a lamp and spoil his night vision, he felt for his glasses in the dark. Before he found them, he knocked over an empty water glass.