Bathing the Lion (11 page)

So it took some time for her to register and then distinguish the smell of a different kind of smoke in the air. The first smell of something burning had been winter-friendly—woodsmoke from a chimney, a nice blaze going in a fireplace, sitting in a comfy chair while chatting, reading, or staring peacefully deep into cozy tame flames.

But this new smoke smell was brutal, repellent. It was not fragrant wood burning, although wood might have been part of the mix. Mostly it was chemicals on fire—rayon curtains, carbon fiber; the bitter odor of fake things melting—plastic, linoleum, Fortrel carpet; an acrid nasty stink punched your nose. The face recoils in disgust even before the brain registers what’s going on. When you get it, when you understand what the smells probably mean, it scares the hell out of you. Because you realize something big and wrong is on fire—like a house or a car—something you know should never be burning.

Alarmed, Jane slowed and stopped. Looking around, she didn’t see anything suspicious at first. Then farther off down the road to the right there it was—the smoke—and it wasn’t far away.

She started jogging toward it, patting a side pocket to make sure her phone was there in case she needed it.

Sometimes Jane Claudius was good in emergencies, sometimes not. She was
very
good at faking things, at putting on the right composed face and attitude in a crisis so people
thought
she was in control, but frequently she wasn’t. What about now? What would she do when she got to the fire? Call the fire department? The police? What if people were hurt? She felt for the phone again. At least she had it to help her.

Down the road, she ran diagonally across someone’s front yard and then onto another smaller road that went in the direction of the smoke. Maybe she should call the fire department right now. But what if they’d already been called and trucks were on the way?

It didn’t matter. You can never be too careful about emergencies—Jane realized she was only looking for an excuse to stop moving and not go any farther, even if it meant only for a minute or two. She did not
want
to reach the fire and have to act.

Enough of this: Get going. Get
moving
. Hating herself for hesitating, for being a coward when someone near might need her help, she started running again.

She could really smell burning things now—the caustic odor owned the air, pushing away all others. Her heavy boots on the snow-covered ground made almost no noise, yet everything sounded loud—her footfalls, birdsong, the sound of her breath pumping out, a plane flying by overhead (she wondered for a second if looking down from up there in the sky the passengers could see the smoke). A motorcycle growled along on the road behind her. Could the rider smell the smoke too? How great it would be if the biker caught up and accompanied her. But to her dismay she heard the machine move off into the distance. The sound of its motor grew fainter and fainter until it was gone.

She saw this now: a small bright red house set back from the road a ways. The roof was smoking and then flames shot out from the side of the building. Two men stood in front of the house with their backs to the road. Neither of them was moving, which struck her as very strange. Why weren’t they doing anything? Why weren’t they trying to put out the fire?

At least no one was hurt. She ran toward them. If they were both just standing she assumed they were the only ones who’d been inside the burning building. She called out, “Is everyone all right?” The larger of the two men turned around. She stopped abruptly when she recognized him. “
Kaspar?
”

“Jane! What are you doing here?”

“
Jogging
. What’s going on? Have you called the fire department?” The only thing she could think to do next was point to the fire.

The other man turned around and she knew him too. He often drank at her bar. “Bill! Is this your house?”

“Hi Jane. Yes, but it’s okay. We got out safely. Everything else is okay.”

Confused and frightened she managed to ask, “You were the only ones inside?”

“Yes.”

And then without warning their world disappeared. Although Jane and the two men remained, everything else around them vanished: the landscape, sky, all smells and sounds … everything except them.

It was as if they stood now on an empty stage or in the middle of a dimly lit tunnel. There was light but nothing else around them, absolutely nothing. All three looked around in that weak light, trying to find some clue, sign, or indication of what had just happened. Where were they? Seeing nothing anywhere, they looked at each other.

“What
is
this? What happened?” Jane asked the men.

Bill Edmonds shook his head but said nothing.

“Kaspar?”

“I don’t know. Where’d everything
go
?”

“There’s no sounds either, just us. Did you notice?”

“Or smells—the air doesn’t smell of anything, nothing.”

Without a word Kaspar walked away into the shadows. The other two exchanged glances. Jane nodded—maybe it was a good idea. Maybe something out there in the gloom would explain this: something that would clear up this impossible mystery. They took off in opposite directions.

But nothing was out there. More “stage,” more emptiness and faint sad light illuminating only this bare new world so unexpectedly thrust on them.

In time Jane and Edmonds returned to where they’d been. But Kaspar stayed away. They first thought maybe he’d found something. Then they thought, what if he doesn’t come back?

“Bill, what did you mean when you said, ‘Everything is okay’? Back there when your
house
was burning? Right before this—” Jane put out a hand to indicate the emptiness around them.

Bill squinted at her. She could see he was deliberating whether to speak or not.

“
What?
What do you know?”

Instead of answering he asked quietly, “Is this yours, Jane? Is it your dream?”

The questions were so odd and out of context. She could only shake her head, not knowing what he was talking about, waiting for him to say something else to clarify things. Seconds passed before she demanded, “What do you mean? What are you asking?”

He stared at her, adding things up in his head. “It makes sense. Just as it started burning, just after we got out of the house,
you
appeared out of nowhere. Why? It’s a hell of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

Jane shook her head again. “What are you
talking
about?”

Bill stared at her, his face giving no indication of what he was thinking.

Kaspar reappeared out of the shadows and said, “My guess is they woke up. It’s why we’re here; it’s why everything disappeared. Whoever’s dreaming all this woke up and left us here. We’re still somewhere in their head, but just the basics—just us and nothing else.

“You know how when you wake up at night to go pee after having had a strong dream? You carry it with you to the toilet. Not all of it, but enough. Look around us—maybe this is all that’s left of someone’s dream.” Kaspar grunted. “Let’s hope they’re only taking a piss and haven’t woken up for good. And let’s also hope if they
do
go back to sleep afterwards they don’t start dreaming about something else. Because then kids, we’re cooked; we might all just be about to disappear for good.”

“How do you know this, Kaspar? How can you tell?” Bill sounded like a worried child asking his father if the thunder outside would pass.

“I don’t know if I’m right. It’s all a guess, but it makes sense if it
is
a dream. Think about it—where do dreams go after we wake up? They’ve gotta go somewhere in our head. Some great big dream storage locker we all have.”

Jane stepped forward. “You’re saying everything—all this and everything before—is a
dream
? That’s what you believe—it’s all a dream?”

Kaspar nodded, looking straight at her. Yes, he was sure.

“How do you know?”

“I’ll tell you more about it if we get out of here. If we don’t, there’s no point explaining it because we’re finished anyway.”

“But whose dream
is
it?”

Kaspar smiled and shrugged. “I don’t know. You’ve asked the big question. It could be mine, yours, Bill’s … or even someone else who knows all three of us. If we knew who, it might make understanding things simpler—or not.”

As quickly as it came, it was gone. Which only made matters worse. Moments before, the Corbins had been held fast in some gray-lit twilight zone mysterious nowhere/what-the-hell-
is
-this land.

How did they get there? Not a clue.

An instant later they were standing in the middle of wide open spaces on an unfamiliar country road with a large black leather desk chair between them.

How did they get
there
? Not a clue. The air smelled heavily of newly laid asphalt, dung, and ripe plowed earth.

They had started out driving to Bill Edmonds’s house to find Kaspar through a gorgeous snow-covered winter morning. Now they were surrounded by vast flat green fields and a high-summer afternoon. They were clueless, trying to make sense of anything and everything.

Both of them wore goose down parkas and winter boots. Vanessa also had on a Russian sable fur hat with long earflaps, which made her look particularly ridiculous on such a hot sunny day.

“I don’t know,” Dean said.

“You don’t know
what
?”

“How we got here. So don’t ask.”

“Thank you, husband; thanks for being so sympathetic today.”

Dean’s voice rose. “I don’t know what else to say, Vanessa. You were going to ask if I knew what this is, right? But I don’t. I just said it because I know you were going to ask.”

“You’re wrong.” She pulled off the large hat, shook her hair, and began to wiggle-waggle out of her coat. “I was going to ask what’s with this chair.” Her voice was snooty and dismissive.

They looked at the big black chair as if it were a third person waiting alongside them for someone to explain what was going on.

A horn honked nearby. Hurrying off the road, Dean pulled the chair behind him like a parent pulling his child to safety. Luckily it was on wheels, although the back two were squirrelly. It wobbled like a wonky supermarket cart all the way. Seconds later a shiny blue Chevrolet pickup truck rushed past, the driver not even glancing at them as he powered off down the road.

“Thank you.”

“For what?” Dean asked warily. He was sure Vanessa was going to whip another nasty zinger at him.

“The chair said that, not me. I was just telling you what it said—thanks for pulling it off the road.”

Dean semi-smiled. Maybe this was his wife’s way of apologizing for being bitchy. Say the chair thanks you for saving it from being hit by a truck. It was a weird but cute enough way to reboot their conversation in a different direction. He decided to say nothing and just move on.

Taking off his coat, he dropped it on the seat of the chair. “I don’t understand any of this, Vanessa. Maybe if we find some people from around here they can tell us something. I think we should just keep walking on this road and either flag down the next car, or hope we meet up with someone along the way. What do you think?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“Remember what?”

“The talking chair—Blackwelder.”

Dean’s eyes panned from his wife to the chair and back to Vanessa again. “No.”

“
Blackwelder
—from
The House Inside the Horse
, the kids’ book? It’s the
talking chair
. Come on, Dean, of course you remember.”

He shrugged.

“You know—”

“No, I really don’t.” But then he did. Like lightning skittering across his brain, in an instant Dean remembered everything about
The House Inside the Horse
. He even saw the cover of the book—a realistic painting of five adults sitting next to each other with their legs dangling over the edge of a gigantic black leather chair that dwarfed all of them. The chair in the book looked exactly like the one he was touching now.

“Jane gave us a copy; she has a whole bunch of them in her office. She even keeps one on the bar because she likes it so much. You see customers reading the book all the time when they’re sitting by themselves. It’s like the bar’s mascot.”

“Yes, now I remember.”

“And the talking chair in the story is named Blackwelder.”

“Yes, Vanessa, I
remember
.”

“Well good, because it just said thank-you.”

“Nice,” he said sarcastically, and looked down the road to see if more cars were coming.

“No, Dean, it
really
did say thank you.”

Against his better instincts, he slowly turned and stared at his wife. “This chair spoke to you?”

“Yes. It thanked you for pulling it off the road.”

Dean looked at his big brown boots. The weather was sweltering August hot. Cicadas scritch-screeched all around them. Once upon a very short time ago, he and his wife were driving in the middle of a New England winter. Now it was summer and Vanessa said furniture spoke to her. “Is this hell? Did we die when I wasn’t looking and this is hell?”

She didn’t appear fazed by the question. “I don’t think so. Anyway, someone’s coming—look.”

Far down the road, people were walking toward them. It looked like three but Dean couldn’t be sure. “Wait here.” He started away.

Vanessa watched him. Then she sat down in Blackwelder and almost pitched over backward. The chair was perched precariously on the sloping shoulder of the road. She was a large woman. Whenever she sat down fast there was a lot of weight in the drop.

“Watch it!” the chair scolded.

She staggered back to her feet. Trying to regain some dignity, Vanessa straightened her shoulders and wouldn’t deign to look at the talking chair.