KARL EDWARD WAGNER has won both the British and World Fantasy Awards, and trained as a psychiatrist before becomming a full-time writer and editor.
His first book, Darkness Weaves With Many Shades, introduced readers to his offbeat heroic fantasy protagonist Kane, whose exploits he continued through three further novels and two collections.
More recently he has edited twelve volumes of The Year’s Best Horror Stories (currently being reprinted in multi-edition hardcovers as Horrorstory), Intensive Scare and three volumes of Echoes of Valor.
With artist Kent Williams he has collaborated on a major graphic novel, Tell Me, Dark, published by DC Comics, and his new novel The Fourth Seal is due from Bantam.
“Cedar Lane” could be called “psychological science fiction”, but however you want to describe it, it will leave you with a chill long after you’ve finished reading it.
Dream is a shadow of something real.
—from the Peter Weir film The Last Wave
HE WAS BACK AT CEDAR LANE again, in the big house where he had spent his childhood, growing up there until time to go away to college. He was the youngest, and his parents had sold the house then, moving into something smaller and more convenient in a newer and nicer suburban development.
A rite of passage, but for Garrett Larkin it truly reinforced the reality that he could never go home again. Except in dream. And dreams are what the world is made of.
At times it puzzled him that while he nightly dreamed of his boyhood home on Cedar Lane, he never dreamed about any of the houses he had lived in since.
Sometimes the dreams were scary.
Sometimes more so than others.
It was a big two-story house plus basement, built just before the war, the war in which he was born. It was very solid, faced with thick stones of pink-hued Tennessee marble from the local quarries. There were three dormer windows thrusting out from the roof in front, and Garrett liked to call it the House of the Three Gables because he always thought the Hawthorne book had a neat spooky title. He and his two brothers each had his private hideout in the little dormer rooms—just big enough for shelves, boxes of toys, a tiny desk for making models or working jigsaw puzzles. Homework was not to intrude here, relegated instead to the big desk in Dad’s never-used study in the den downstairs.
Cedar Lane was an old country lane laid out probably at the beginning of the previous century along dirt farm roads. Now two narrow lanes of much-repaved blacktop twisted through a narrow gap curtained between rows of massive cedar trees. Garrett’s house stood well back upon four acres of lawn, orchards, and vegetable garden—portioned off from farmland as the neighborhood shifted from rural to suburban just before the war.
It had been a wonderful house to grow up in—three boys upstairs and a sissy older sister with her own bedroom downstairs across the hall from Mom and Dad. There were two flights of stairs to run down—the other leading to the cavernous basement where Dad parked the new car and had all his shop tools and gardening equipment, and where dwelt the Molochian coal furnace named Fear and its nether realm, the monster-haunted coal cellar. The yard was bigger than any of his friends had, and until he grew old enough to have to mow the grass and cuss, it was a limitless playground to run and romp with the dogs, for ball games and playing cowboy or soldier, for climbing trees and building secret clubhouses out of boxes and scrap lumber.
Garrett loved the house on Cedar Lane. But he wished that he wouldn’t dream about it every night. Sometimes he wondered if he might be haunted by the house. His shrink told him it was purely a fantasy-longing for his vanished childhood.
Only it wasn’t. Some of the dreams disturbed him. Like the elusive fragrance of autumn leaves burning, and the fragmentary remembrance of carbonizing flesh.
Garrett Larkin was a very successful landscape architect with his own offices and partnership in Chicago. He had kept the same marvelous wife for going on thirty years, was just now putting the youngest of their three wonderful children through Antioch, was looking forward to a comfortable and placid fifth decade of life, and had not slept in his bed at Cedar Lane since he was seventeen.
Garrett Larkin awoke in his bed in the house on Cedar Lane, feeling vaguely troubled. He groped over his head for the black metal cowboy-silhouette wall lamp mounted above his bed. He found the switch, but the lamp refused to come on. He slipped out from beneath the covers, moved through familiar darkness into the bathroom, thumbed the light switch there.
He was filling the drinking glass with water when he noticed that his hands were those of an old man.
An old man’s. Not his hands. Nor his the face in the bathroom mirror. Lined with too many years, too many cares. Hair gray and thinning. Nose bulbous and flecked with red blotches. Left eyebrow missing the thin scar from when he’d totaled the Volvo. Hands heavy with calluses from manual labor. No wedding ring. None-too-clean flannel pajamas, loose over a too-thin frame.
He swallowed the water slowly, studying the reflection. It could have been him. Just another disturbing dream. He waited for the awakening.
He walked down the hall to his brothers’ room. There were two young boys asleep there. Neither one was his brother. They were probably between nine and thirteen years in age, and somehow they minded him of his brothers—long ago, when they were all young together on Cedar Lane.
One of them stirred suddenly and opened his eyes. He looked up at the old man silhouetted by the distant bathroom light. He said sleepily, “What’s wrong, Uncle Gary?”
“Nothing. I thought I heard one of you cry out. Go back to sleep now, Josh.”
The voice was his, and the response came automatically. Garrett Larkin returned to his room and sat there on the edge of his bed, awaiting daylight.
Daylight came, and with the smell of coffee and frying bacon, and still the dream remained. Larkin found his clothes in the dimness, dragged on the familiar overalls, and made his way downstairs.
The carpet was new and much of the furniture was strange, but it was still the house on Cedar Lane. Only older.
His niece was bustling about the kitchen. She was pushing the limits of thirty and the seams of her housedress, and he had never seen her before in his life.
“Morning, Uncle Gary.” She poured coffee into his cup. “Boys up yet?”
Garrett sat down in his chair at the kitchen table, blew cautiously over the coffee. “Dead to the world.”
Lucille left the bacon for a moment and went around to the stairway. He could hear her voice echoing up the stairwell. “Dwayne! Josh! Rise and shine! Don’t forget to bring down your dirty clothes when you come! Shake a leg now!”
Martin, his niece’s husband, joined them in the kitchen, gave his wife a hug, and poured himself a cup of coffee. He stole a slice of bacon. “Morning, Gary. Sleep well?”
“I must have.” Garrett stared at his cup.
Martin munched overcrisp bacon. “Need to get those boys working on the leaves after school.”
Garrett thought of the smell of burning leaves and remembered the pain of vaporizing skin, and the coffee seared his throat like a rush of boiling blood, and he awoke.
Garrett Larkin gasped at the darkness and sat up in bed. He fumbled behind him for the cowboy-silhouette wall lamp, couldn’t find it. Then there was light. A lamp on the night-stand from the opposite side of the king-size bed. His wife was staring at him in concern.
“Gar, are you okay?”
Garrett tried to compose his memory. “It’s all right . . . Rachel. Just another bad dream is all.”
“Another bad dream? Yet another bad dream, you mean. You sure you’re telling your shrink about these?”
“He says it’s just a nostalgic longing for childhood as I cope with advancing maturity.”
“Must have been some happy childhood. Okay if I turn out the light now?”
And he was dreaming again, dreaming of Cedar Lane.
He was safe and snug in his own bed in his own room, burrowed beneath Mom’s heirloom quilts against the October chill that penetrated the unheated upper storey. Something pressed hard into his ribs, and he awoke to discover his Boy Scout flashlight was trapped beneath the covers—along with the forbidden E.C. horror comic books he’d been secretly reading after bedtime.
Gary thumbed on the light, turning it about his room. Its beam was sickly yellow because he needed fresh batteries, but it zigzagged reassuringly across the bedroom walls—made familiar by their airplane posters, blotchy paint-by-numbers oil paintings, and (a seasonal addition) cutout Halloween decorations of jack-o’-lanterns and black cats, broom-riding witches, and dancing skeletons. The beam probed into the dormer, picking out the shelved books and treasures, the half-completed B-36 “Flying Cigar” nuclear bomber rising above a desk strewn with plastic parts and tubes of glue.
The flashlight’s fading beam shifted to the other side of his room and paused upon the face that looked down upon him from beside his bed. It was a grown-up’s face, someone he’d never seen before, ghastly in the yellow light. At first Gary thought it must be one of his brothers in a Halloween mask, and then he knew it was really a demented killer with a butcher knife like he’d read about in the comics, and then the flesh began to peel away in blackened strips from the spotlit face, and bare bone and teeth charred and cracked apart into evaporating dust, and Gary’s bladder exploded with a rush of steam.
Larkin muttered and stirred from drunken stupor, groping beneath the layers of tattered plastic for his crotch, thinking he had pissed himself in his sleep. He hadn’t, but it really wouldn’t have mattered to him if he had. Something was poking him in the ribs, and he retrieved the half-empty bottle of Thunderbird. He took a pull. The wine was warm with the heat of his body, and its fumes trickled up his nose.
Larkin scooted farther into his cardboard box, to where its back propped against the alley wall. It was cold this autumn night—another bad winter, for sure—and he wondered if he maybe ought to crawl out and join the others around the trash fire. He had another gulp of wine, letting it warm his throat and his guts.
When he could afford it, Larkin liked to drink Thunderbird. It was a link to his boyhood. “I learned to drive in my old man’s brand-new 1961 Thunderbird,” he often told whoever was crouched beside him. “White 1961 Thunderbird with turquoise-blue upholstery. Power everything and fast as shit. Girls back in high school would line up to date me for a ride in that brand-new Thunderbird. I was ass-deep in pussy!”
All of that was a lie, because his father had never trusted him to drive the Thunderbird, and Larkin instead had spent his teenage years burning out three clutches on the family hand-me-down Volkswagen Beetle. But none of that really mattered in the long run, because Larkin had been drafted right after college, and the best part of him never came back from Nam.
V.A. hospitals, treatment centers, halfway houses, too many jails to count. Why bother counting? Nobody else gave a damn. Larkin remembered that he had been dreaming about Cedar Lane again. Not even rotgut wine could kill those memories. Larkin shivered and wondered if he had anything left to eat. There’d been some spoiled produce from a dumpster, but that was gone now.
He decided to try his luck over at the trash fire. Crawling out of his cardboard box, he pocketed his wine bottle and tried to remember if he’d left anything worth stealing. Probably not. He remembered instead how he once had camped out in the huge box from their new refrigerator on Cedar Lane, before the rains melted the cardboard into mush.
There were half a dozen or so of them still up, silhouetted by the blaze flaring from the oil drum on the demolition site. They weren’t supposed to be here, but then the site was supposed to have been cleared off two years ago. Larkin shuffled over toward them—an identical blob of tattered refuse at one with the urban wasteland.
“Wuz happnin’, bro?” Pointman asked him.
“Too cold to sleep. Had dreams. Had bad dreams.”
The black nodded understandingly and used his good arm to poke a stick into the fire. Sparks flew upward and vanished into the night. “About Nam?”
“Worse.” Larkin dug out his bottle. “Dreamed I was a kid again. Back home. Cedar Lane.”
Pointman took a long swallow and backed the bottle back. “Thought you told me you had a happy childhood.”
“I did. As best I can remember.” Larkin killed the bottle.
“That’s it,” Pointman advised. “Sometimes it’s best to forget.”
“Sometimes I can’t remember who I am,” Larkin told him.
“Sometimes that’s the best thing, too.”
Pointman hooked his fingers into an old shipping crate and heaved it into the oil drum. A rat had made a nest inside the packing material and it all went up in a mushroom of bright sparks and thick black smoke.
Larkin listened to their frightened squeals and agonized thrashing. It only lasted for a minute or two. Then he could smell the burning flesh, could hear the soft popping of exploding bodies. And he thought of autumn leaves burning at the curbside, and he remembered the soft popping of his eyeballs exploding.
Gary Blaze sucked in a lungful of crack fumes and fought to hold back a cough. He handed the pipe to Dr Syn and exhaled. “It’s like I keep having these dreams about back when I was a kid,” he told his drummer. “And a lot of other shit. It gets really heavy some of the time, man.”
Dr Syn was the fourth drummer during the two-decades up-and-down career of Gary Blaze and the Craze. He had been with the band just over a year, and he hadn’t heard Gary repeat his same old stories quite so many times as had the older survivors. Just now they were on a very hot worldwide tour, and Dr Syn didn’t want to go back to playing gigs in bars in Minnesota. He finished what was left of the pipe and said with sympathy, “Heavy shit.”
“It’s like some of the time I can’t remember who I am,” Gary Blaze confided, watching a groupie recharge the glass pipe. They had the air conditioner on full blast, and the hotel room felt cold.
“It’s just all the years of being on the road,” Dr Syn reassured him. He was a tall kid half Gary’s age, with the obligatory long blond hair and heavy-metal gear, and getting a big start with a fading rock superstar couldn’t hurt his own rising career.
“You know”—Gary swallowed a lude with a vodka chaser— “you know, sometimes I get up onstage, and I can’t really remember whether I can play this thing.” He patted his vintage Strat. “And I’ve been playing ever since I bought my first Elvis forty-five.”
“Hound Dog and Don’t Be Cruel, back in 1956,” Dr Syn reminded him. “You were just a kid growing up in East Tennessee.”
“And I keep dreaming about that. About the old family house on Cedar Lane.”
Dr Syn helped himself to another hit of Gary’s crack. “It’s all the years on the road,” he coughed. “You keep thinking back to your roots.”
“Maybe I ought to go back. Just once. You know—see the old place again. Wonder if it’s still there?”
“Make it sort of a bad-rocker-comes-home gig?”
“Shit!” Gary shook his head. “I don’t ever want to see the place again.”
He inhaled forcefully, dragging the crack fumes deep into his lungs, and he remembered how his chest exploded in a great blast of superheated steam.
Garrett Larkin was dreaming again, dreaming of Cedar Lane.
His mother’s voice awoke him, and that wasn’t fair, because he knew before he fell asleep that today was Saturday.
“Gary! Rise and shine! Remember, you promised your father you’d have the leaves all raked before you watched that football game! Shake a leg now!”
“All right,” he murmured down the stairs, and he whispered a couple swear words to himself. He threw his long legs over the side of his bed, yawned and stretched, struggled into blue jeans and high school sweatshirt, made it into the bathroom to wash up. A teenager’s face looked back at him from the mirror. Gary explored a few incipient zits before brushing his teeth and applying fresh Butch Wax to his flattop.
He could smell the sausage frying and the pancakes turning golden-brown as he thumped down the stairs. Mom was in the kitchen, all business in her apron and housedress, already serving up his plate. Gary sat down at the table and chugged his orange juice.
“Your father gets back from Washington tomorrow after church.” Mom reminded him. “He’ll expect to see that lawn all raked clean.”
“I’ll get the front finished.” Gary poured Karo syrup over each pancake in the stack.
“You said you’d do it all.”
“But, Mom! The leaves are still falling down. It’s only under those maples where they really need raking.” Gary bolted a link of sausage.
“Chew your food,” Mom nagged.
But it was a beautiful October morning, with the air cool and crisp, and the sky cloudless blue. His stomach comfortably full, Gary attacked the golden leaves, sweeping them up in swirling bunches with the rattling leafrake. Blackie, his aged white mutt, swayed over to a warm spot in the sun to oversee his work. She soon grew bored and fell asleep.
He started at the base of the pink marble front of the house, pulling leaves from under the shrubs and rolling them in windrows beneath the tall sugar maples and then onto the curb. Traffic was light this morning on Cedar Lane, and cars’ occasional whizzing passages sent spirals of leaves briefly skyward from the pile. It was going faster than Gary had expected it to, and he might have time to start on the rest of the yard before lunch.
“There’s really no point in this, Blackie,” he told his dog. “There’s just a lot more to come down.”
Blackie thumped her tail in sympathy, and he paused to pat her head. He wondered how many years she had left in her, hoped it wouldn’t happen until after he left for college.
Gary applied matches to the long row of leaves at the curbside. In a few minutes the pile was well ablaze, and the sweet smell of burning leaves filled the October day. Gary crossed to the front of the house and hooked up the garden hose to the faucet at the base of the wall, just in case. Already he’d worked up a good sweat, and he paused to drink from the rush of water.
Standing there before the pink marble wall, hose to his mouth, Gary suddenly looked up into the blue sky.
Of course, he never really saw the flash.
There are no cedars now on Cedar Lane, only rows of shattered and blackened stumps. No leaves to rake, only a sodden mush of dead ash. No blue October skies, only the dead gray of a long nuclear winter.
Although the house is only a memory preserved in charcoal, a section of the marble front wall still stands, and fused into the pink stone is the black silhouette of a teenaged boy, looking confidently upward.
The gray wind blows fitfully across the dead wasteland, and the burned-out skeleton of the house on Cedar Lane still mourns the loss of those who loved it and those whom it loved.
Sleep well, Gary Larkin, and dream your dreams. Dream of all the men you might have become, dream of the world that might have been, dream of all the people who might have lived—had there never been that October day in 1962.
In life I could not spare you. In death I will shelter your soul and your dreams for as long as my wall shall stand.
What we see.
And what we seem.
Are but a dream.
A dream within a dream.
—From the Peter Weir film of Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock