One

When Dan had opened his eyes, his world had stopped spinning- but he did not feel it.

“What the…”

          He stopped abruptly as the words he spoke seemed to weigh heavier than the thick ambiance of the sky.  Looking up, he sought movement in the trees scattered in tall groups along the flowing rows of sloping hillside and saw none. Neither leaf nor branch shifted so much as a quiver.  The vast silence was unnerving. The world seemed bereft of all sound. The emptiness was rippled only by the seeping pulsation of his own existence as it drifted from even the most obscured of his pores.

“Why am I in Hillside?”

          Dan stood between two sentinel willow trees with muscled branches that hunched over the wrought iron entrance of Hilltop Memorial Park like gargoyles. His large farmed frame shadowed the single gated entrance like the willows as he peered through the coal black bars. He saw a narrow dirt way that appeared inside a tunnel of dense fog and could faintly see the shapes of the headstones pressed into the gray, like faces into a bed sheet.  The fog would whisper through the gate and evaporate, as if its existence was only allowed to be within the confinement of the wrought iron. With a touch he wasn’t sure he made, the gate swung wide in freshly oiled silence despite its centurion age.

          The filmy vapor become more lucid as walked, so he began to read the headstones. Some of the stones were simple, with a single name and date. Others were slightly more elaborate with inscriptions and dedications, while the wealthier held intricate sculptures of angels and beautifully gothic symbols engraved into the stone.

          Condensed layers of colorless haze, 20 feet in places, crowned the tops of the headstones, obscuring even the most towering of monuments. Only the roofs of the mausoleums and the tallest trees jutted through the dark gray that blanketed the steamy cemetery. Every hair on his body tried to pull away from him at once when the twig snapped under him, snatching a breath from his chest and double timed his heart.  He inhaled with a gasp, and paused to gather himself.

          Before he moved on, he tried to recall how he got here in the first place. “ I was sleeping next Stacey, I remember that. I remember waking up and having to take back some of the covers.” She would always, without fail, cocoon herself in the blankets, leaving his skin open to the cooler evening air.

He smiled at this memory because after the first of their five-year marriage, he opened every day with “Good morning, Butterfly”, and leaned into her face to rub his eyelashes against hers. The endearing term for this was called “Butterfly Kisses”, and used by his mother to show affection. It really should have died with her, but it was so hard for Dan to deal with her death that he had decided to keep her alive in as many ways as possible. And with Stacey wrapping herself as she does, it just seemed too perfect. In retrospect, he giggled to himself, and said aloud “Now how tacky it that?”

          But his sense of ease and smile quickly disappeared when a gust of dank air bellowed through the fog and leaves, stirring up the fear that he was trying to calm, and seemed to urge him to proceed. He could feel his eyes opening wider and was able to pinpoint the exact moment his pupils were expanded fully. Sucking in the musky scent of the graveyard through clenched teeth, his pilgrimage to…“To where? Where am I going? Why ain't I in bed, asleep with my wife? Am I supposed to be looking for something in particular, or what, ” he remarked, using a sarcastic gesturing with his arms outstretched, palms up as if he were trying to catch the answer when it falls from the sky.  “Maybe,” he answered himself, “you’re just dreaming.”

          Dan suddenly had a thought that lifted his eyes from the path, and strolled over to the nearest tombstone. “I can find out if I am dreaming or not easy enough,” as he reached out to touch one of the headstones. He ran his fingers along the chilled, callused surface of granite, feeling each pore of the rock, each imperfect crevice. “It feels so damn real. It’s so vivid; I just can’t believe I am dreaming this.” He was mesmerized instantly, tracing the name with his finger, Richard W. Payne, 1824-1861.

         “Wait a minute,” Dan said as he ran an open hand up the face of Richard Payne’s tombstone. “Pain.”

          When his hand reached the top of the headstone, he took in a deep breath, curled his fingers into a claw, and then forcefully raked his flesh down its length, pressing his fingertips hard into the graveled cavities. He screamed as three of his fingernails bent back, two of which broke off and bled immediately and he dropped to his knees.  Clutching his bent legs for support, he rocked back and forth as the throbs of electrified light shot through his nerves, exiting through his eyes.

          “Oh, s**t. Oh, f**k, that hurt like hell,” he grumbled, holding his wounded hand lightly against his chest. “Of course it would, dumb a*s,” he sneered back. He tried to rationalize the pain as a simplistic thought, that he knew it would hurt so his brain made him think it hurt. He suckled the wounded hand, tasting copper, noticing that there was a dull aching that expanded and surged with each beat of his pulse. It was a sensation so thick that he felt it beating inside his ears. “If this was a dream, how could I really be in this much pain?” He tried to remember when the last time was that he had felt actual pain during a dream.  “Never,” he murmured. Grimacing, he stood up and instantly the pounding in his hand increased with his heart rate.

And then, from out of nowhere, the air began to move. The wind purposefully howled toward him, swirling around him – through him- as if it meant to seize him up in an angry gust and pulverize him. It vanished into its self before he could face it, leaving a sound behind that chilled and pimpled his flesh.

Thwump. Thwump. Thwump.

          The tone resonated deeply with a throaty bass that slowly dissipated into the twilight as the silence and sedation abruptly swept back under the mist. He forgot about his grisly hand.

“Well, dream or no dream, I know I can’t leave until I… I….do whatever it is I am supposed to be doing here.” But for as large a man as he was, he was scared. No, not just scared – terrified. Standing 6’5 and carrying 235 pounds of potato farming muscle, he felt as vulnerable as a child when he looked around into murkiness of the cemetery. With a shudder strong enough to twist an audible crack from his spine, he gathered his courage and set out to walk the footpath toward the center of Hillside.