Cathedral of Dreams (5 page)

When the clock spoke his name, Keith took a deep breath and opened his eyes. He remembered the boy blinking up at him. The shadows blurred the edges of the boy's clothing so that he couldn't tell how large or small the boy was. Keith remembered only the face, the blinking. He closed his eyes and the image didn't return as he had hoped.

The ceiling's pale white color stared back at Keith while he lay on his back. The alarm spoke again, soothing the air in the room, reminding him how peaceful most of his life has been. He rolled to one side and placed his feet on the warm carpet, then reached over and pushed the alarm off. For some reason, he didn't want to hear the voice again. Every time it spoke, it brought him closer to the present and he had more trouble remembering the image. He couldn't really call it a dream, for it wasn't that. It was merely an image, a small movement, and a feeling.

Recalling the feeling, he noticed that it was not as dreadful as it had been yesterday, but something more curious that reminded him of Nellie. But it wasn't her exactly. It was how she made him feel. Wary? Apprehensive? Anxious without the knowledge of what he was anxious about. So, he had traded dread for apprehension.

He shook his head and stood. His saliva was pasty. And he felt more fatigued than usual.

He went through his bathroom routine hardly noticing the room or the items he used. His thoughts shifted back and forth between the boy in the stairwell and Nellie. The emotions attached to each appeared to be opposites, yet similar. He couldn't be sure which intrigued him more, or which was the most pleasant.

Time pushed together in such a way that Keith unconsciously went through his morning without noticing many details until he found that he stood in front of the terminal flipping through the Companion site. His fingers perched over the keyboard when panic hit. What if it was illegal to ask for a companion two days in a row? He did not know the rules, but he did know that everything was monitored. Such an unusual event would surely be noted. It would prove that he was not like others in Newcity. Is that what he wanted to happen? He already felt watched, monitored.

Keith stepped back from the terminal, his eyes wide. He rubbed the back of his neck, then turned away and walked into the living room. It was almost time to leave, but he sat on the sofa for just a moment. Closing his eyes, he drew in a deep breath and blew it out slowly and long, almost to the point where he felt dizzy. Afterwards, he stood to go.

In the hall, as he turned right toward the elevators, he spotted the police. As they rushed toward him, his reaction was to run. But where could he go? He turned down another hallway and collided with someone. The physical contact sent shock waves through his body. The man's head had hit Keith's head hard and they both teetered for a moment, the physical contact sending shock waves through Keith's body. The man stumbled backward. Dressed casually in a gray and white dress shirt and tan slacks, the man looked as though he wasn't going to work at all. Keith glanced around. The police were still advancing, so he turned toward a doorway.

“Wait a minute. Where do you think you're going? You ran into me.”

The man yelled much too loudly for Keith, who held up a hand to stop the angry onslaught, to stop the man from drawing attention to them. But it was too late. Two of the five police coming down the hall peeled off and headed directly for them. The others were rushing past. So he didn't have to be concerned? Keith felt stupid for trying to get away. He'd never done such a thing before. And now he'd actually caused them to advance. His ears were ringing, and he felt a burst of adrenaline as though it were injected into his neck. The police. Two days in a row. What would this mean in the system?

The yelling man, too, was coming at him. Keith just backed farther into the doorway until his back bumped flat against the door.

“Come in,” he heard inside the apartment. Keith reached back for the doorknob.

“I'm talking to you, Mister,” the yelling man said, as he stepped up to Keith and pushed a finger into his chest. Again, unrequested physical contact.

Then, abruptly, the police were on the yelling man, one at each arm, pulling him back and away from Keith. “We are very sorry for the interruption, sir.” They addressed Keith, but he didn't know how to answer. He had expected the officers to take both of them. What was happening?

The policeman to Keith's right said, “You may carry on.”

Keith stared at him.

“Sir,” the policeman asserted, “you may go to work now. There is nothing here that you need to be concerned about. We'll handle it.” He was smiling at Keith the whole time he talked to him.

The yelling man tried to pull loose. “It's him,” the man said. “He attacked me. I did nothing wrong.”

Keith saw one of the policemen reach for his gun.

He drew his hands over his eyes and turned away. The policeman spoke to Keith sternly, “Please sir, we have this under control. Move along.” No one else in the hall had even stopped to see what was going on.

Keith rushed from the three of them, passing other people as he darted away, practically falling into a jog. When the noise behind him seemed to subside, Keith slowed. He was the last to enter an elevator. A breeze of air came from the outside as the doors closed. He realized how heavily he was sweating when the air brushed the sweat across his forehead, momentarily chilling his scalp. What had just happened? Were they coming for him and then the angry man drew them away? Confused their sensors? He hadn't seen where the other police were headed and whether or not they went to his apartment, but he could imagine that happening. He had lived through such an unusual evening and night and then morning, that he would not have been surprised if they were headed for his apartment.

The doors opened and Keith stepped out and began to walk away, until he realized he was on the wrong floor. Many of them looked so similar and he had been wrapped in thought, not thinking about where he was going, not focused on getting to work. He looked around and turned back just as the doors were closing again. A burst of nervousness helped him to thrust his arm into the small gap between the closing doors. They hit his arm and bounced open. “Sorry,” he said as he stepped back inside.

He focused this time and when the doors opened on his floor, he strolled out as though nothing had happened, although his body tingled with the morning's events.

He stepped into the offices and went up to Maria's desk. “I'd like to deliver the reports again today, if you don't mind.” He had no idea why he suggested it, but just as he did, he could visualize the boy in the stairwell. He had to see if that boy looked like the boy in his dream image. And if he did, then Keith wanted to get the image clearly embedded into his memory in case the dream occurred again. For reasons he couldn't put a finger on, he thought that another encounter would help him receive more images, and perhaps even provide an entire dream.

“Of course you can. I'll call when they are ready,” Maria said.

Keith did not compliment her on her attire today, but instead walked around her counter and down the hall directly to his office. Sitting in front of the terminal, he didn't move. He wanted to know what was happening in his life. Why were things so different than just a few days before? Was this still part of his feelings of dread? And if so, how could he stop it from happening?

His terminal booted as he sat down and said, “Good morning, Keith.” He nodded and sighed. Perhaps a solid day of work would relax him. He lifted his hands toward the terminal and began to run through the day's reports. Everything looked fairly normal until he saw several security reports in a row. Normally, he would have scanned through them, made sure that the materials had passed through the right channels, that the items used were reordered, that the job had been completed and properly notated. But this time he stopped to read the reports.

He didn't get far when Maria buzzed in. “Delivery time,” she said in a pleasant voice.

“Be right there.” Keith got up from his desk and went out to deliver the reports. Something inside him shifted, a sense of urgency, a compelling drive, and took over. He rushed toward the stairwell as though he were going to miss something. He was suddenly aware of the cameras staring at him. He could see them through his peripheral vision. The shifted focus caused him to walk funny, at least for it to feel different while he walked, and he wondered if the cameras could pick up on such a thing and record it. He closed his eyes just before shoving against the metal door to enter the stairwell.

He entered and stopped.

The door closed behind him. After he heard the clunk of the latch, Keith backed into the alcove. A slight shadow shaded his eyes. A sense of security washed over him, and a moment later he became fearful of what he might find. Hiking the reports under his arm, he stepped onto the broad expanse of the landing and trudged over to the stairs. He descended with purpose and care. At the second landing, he saw the boy tucked into a ball near the back of the alcove to the right. Over the doorway, it said EXIT. But Keith knew there was no real exit unless you were on one of the ground floors where he had never ventured in his life, and had no plans to.

Although his blood ran hot and his nerves tingled with excitement, Keith advanced. His internal monolog was that he was curious, eager to find out why the boy was there. Was he sleeping, resting, hiding?

“Hello,” Keith said while standing a few feet away.

Just as in the encounter earlier that day, the boy stirred in slow motion and turned his head toward Keith, whose eyes widened as the boy moved. What he saw took a moment to register, but when it did, Keith jumped back and stumbled onto the floor. The reports fell, but remained fairly organized. “What happened? What's that?” he pointed to a round dot of blood on the boy's forehead. And as Keith's eyes adjusted to the darker space, it looked to him as though the blood seeped from a hole as big around as his little finger.

It was as though the boy let Keith stare and become uncomfortable before he spoke. “Have you ever wanted to leave here?” The boy's voice was a whisper, fragile, like he was too weak to have the energy to speak louder.

“Newcity?”

The boy glanced up at the EXIT sign. He nodded. “I know how to get in and I know how to get out,” the boy said.

“No. I don't think so,” Keith said, his voice edging into the hysterical. He continued to stare at the wound in the boy's forehead.

“A bullet hole,” the boy whispered. “You know.”

Panic shot through Keith. “I don't know. I don't know anything about it. I don't even know who you are. What are you saying? Why are you saying that?” Keith scrambled to his feet, grappling with the reports, which now hung unevenly from their folders. “Go away,” he said.

And with that, the boy with the bullet hole in his forehead stood and opened the door, with some effort, just far enough to slip out.

A strange smell swirled into the stairwell.

Keith bit his lower lip. He was almost in tears. He had never seen anything like that before. How could the boy be alive with a bullet hole in his forehead? Keith was scared, then worried that the Newcity system would detect his widely swinging emotions. How horrible. What he had seen wasn't possible.

The face—was it the one from the image?—He couldn't remember. The bullet hole had taken all his attention. He could see it clearly, could imagine putting his little finger in the hole and rubbing against the blood-damp sides. As Keith's memory reviewed and magnified details of the image, black crust grew in places along the edges of the hole, clotted into a scab. But the wound seeped still.

Bile climbed into Keith's throat and he forced his thoughts in another direction.

He had to calm down. He breathed evenly. He tried to relax his shoulders where the stress had settled, as he walked down the steps. But his movements were jerky and unsure, as when he shifted into peripheral vision earlier. His body didn't belong to him anymore. It wasn't totally in his control. Leaving the stairwell to make his first delivery, Keith noticed that he was sweating again. He decided to take the elevator.

When he returned to his office, Carl, his supervisor was leaning over Keith's desk.

“Carl, can I help you?” Keith said, almost strangling on the words that squeezed through his throat.

The man was built like Keith but had light brown hair and lighter colored eyes. He wore a blue shirt with cuff links that matched his wrist-phone. His pants were nicely creased down the front, and barely touched his shoe-tops, causing the slightest wrinkle.

“Why did you stop on this page? Is there something wrong with the report?” Carl asked.