In the nightmare Grove is standing at the foot of Geisel’s gurney, gazing upon the pale remains of his mentor and boss, when Geisel sits up like he’s on a spring, like he’s a puppet, and smiles. His teeth are as black as onyx, and a reverse-sound pours out of him like a yowling cat; Grove tries to run away, tries to escape that horrible room, and realizes he cannot move. He looks down. He is ankle-deep in dirty white sand, beach sand, as damp and heavy as wet cement. The sand is riddled with hash marks, symbols, coded messages, phone numbers, bar codes, puzzles, clock faces, lengths, widths, distances, and more; a seemingly endless array of cryptic data. A slimy gray wave licks across the sand, washing away the symbols, enveloping Grove’s ankles in greasy salt water. Grove sinks deeper. He struggles and struggles. He sinks into the mire up to his knees; he cries out, but no sound comes out of him as he continues sinking to his waist. The waves curl around him. He looks at the bed and sees Geisel sitting there like a porcelain doll—on his face a weird mixture of utter desolation and horror and something urgent to communicate—and now he’s convulsing as though electricity is bolting through him. Grove sinks deeper and deeper until he’s up to his chin and can’t move his arms or legs anymore. He arches his neck so he can breathe, but soon the soupy sand covers his face like a sticky blanket. He gasps. But somehow—this is a dream, after all—he can still breathe under the sand. He notices light above him and cranes his neck to look up at the hole through which he just sank, and then something very strange and unexpected occurs. The hole is freezing, icing over. Grove shivers. He can see a thin rind of frost forming across the opening, which is barely a foot in diameter, as though an invisible arctic wind is rushing over the hole. Soon the membrane of ice is nearly an inch thick, transparent, milky white. It looks like a window. Grove stares at it for some time, until finally a face appears behind the ice, and Grove screams. He screams and screams. The sound that registers in the dream is more like a delicate tinkling-glass noise, like a chandelier in the wind. The face is very familiar—it is Maura’s face—but horrible wounds scourge her flesh, gouges and lacerations, blood speckles dried as black as India ink, the precise wounds discussed in Grove’s textbook, in his class, in the MO of the Archetype. She’s writing something with her bloody index finger, scratching it into the frost. It makes no sense—in the dream, that is—but Grove stares and stares and stares at the nonsensical words:
CILBUP Q NHOJ
Grove came awake with a start. It took a few moments for him to catch his breath and realize where he was: alone, on the living-room sofa in his Pelican Bay home, most of the lights still on. It took him another few moments to realize it was the middle of the afternoon, and he had apparently passed out from exhaustion on the littered couch hours ago. His skin glistened with sweat, his T-shirt and slacks soaked through. His heart still palpitated with alarming irregularity, as prominent in his ears as a shoe banging around the inside of a clothes dryer. His bladder was about to burst, but there was something he had to do before dealing with that.
He managed to sit up and quickly shuffle through a pile of documents on the coffee table next to the sofa. He found a yellow legal pad and a pen, and frantically scrawled the words he had just seen in his dream.
Cilbup Q Nhoj?
“You see, the problem is, I’m dying, honey.”
The old Kenyan woman sat on a wrought-iron chair in the far corner of the airport cafeteria, shaded by a giant rubber plant, her baobab cane canted against the table, her proud, wrinkled face like parchment in the bright, diffuse light. Her burnished ebony eyes shimmered with deep sadness.
Drinkwater, seated across the round table, wasn’t sure she had heard the woman correctly. “You’re what? I’m sorry, say again?”
“I’m dying, sweetheart. Lung cancer.”
“Oh God, I’m sorry.”
“I’ve done what I set out to do in this life.”
Drinkwater let this amazing statement sink in. “Does Ulysses—?”
“He won’t accept it.” The woman spoke tenderly. “Bless his foolish heart, he thinks it’s all in my mind. Sends me articles on green tea. Relaxation techniques.”
“I understand.” Drinkwater was having second thoughts about this whole insane detour, about bothering this poor, poor woman, maybe even about the entire surreal scavenger hunt she was on—chasing folk legends and bogeymen, for Christ’s sake. “Mrs. Grove, can I ask you something a little personal?”
“Vida, please.” The old woman smiled.
“Vida…do you mind if I ask you…about Ulysses’ birth?”
The woman’s smile flickered for a moment. “His birth? What about his birth?”
Drinkwater felt her face flush. This was ridiculous. But she had to ask it. “I understand Ulysses was your only son?”
Just the slightest pause here. “That’s right.”
“And his father…”
“Yes?”
“Ulysses never knew his father, is that right?”
“That’s true.”
“May I ask if you and he were—?”
“If we were divorced? Is that what you’re wondering?”
Drinkwater looked down for a moment. “Well, yeah.” Then she looked up at the old woman. “I guess what I’m really wondering is whether—God, I know this is real personal—but I’m wondering whether your son was planned?”
Now there was a long pause.
Vida Grove leaned forward then, the light catching the side of her lined brown face. She looked like a ghost. Tears had gathered in her eyes. “I never told a soul about this,” she said softly, her liquid gaze holding Drinkwater rapt. “Only a few people ever knew about it, and they are long in the ground. I’ve waited all these years for this secret to come back and haunt me. I knew that it would. They always do. They always, always come back.”
The old woman paused. Drinkwater waited, the hairs on her neck standing up.
That night, Grove furiously paced the cluttered periphery of his living room, his heart chugging, the residue of his nightmare—and that jumbled anagram of a word at the end—still clinging to his racing thoughts. At last he reached down to the coffee table and snatched up the yellow notepaper on which he had jotted the nonsense syllables in large block letters.
He stared at the garbled dream-words. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Something clicked in the back of his brain.
The room spun.
He staggered across the living room and into the front foyer. Next to the big oak door stood a coatrack, a little pedestal on which Grove and Maura often tossed their keys, and a Warren Kimball mirror. One of Maura’s beloved pieces of folk art, the mirror was framed in tiny American flags and cobs of corn.
Grove held the yellow pad up to the mirror, then cocked his head to give his good eye a clean view of the reverse reflection of CILBUP Q NHOJ:
JOHN Q PUBLIC