The Book of Dreams
His reaction was involuntary. He leaned forward and vomited before he could help himself, the yellowy gunge splattering his trouser legs and the skull itself. His heart pounded, his cheeks burned, and his eyes almost rolled in his head. He’d come here for this, but nothing could have prepared him.
It took a few minutes for the pain in his stomach to subside, and for his hands to steady enough to investigate further. With tears pouring in floods down his cheeks and sobs bouncing up from his chest, he reach down and scrabbled in the dirt around the base of the skull.
The soil felt woody and flaky, and his fingers found pieces of what were once the man’s clothes. He found a button, the plastic insert of a turned over collar. Trembling fingers pushed past them, scrabbling at the body’s neck.
And then he found it. A chain.
He had to break the head from the neck bone to get it off, and that was the worst. It made a sharp cracking sound, and lolled in his hands. There was some soft stuff inside that oozed out, and he pushed it away, yanking at the chain.
He climbed out of the grave as soon as he could, the chain clutched in his hands. As he felt along it, at first he feared it was just that – a chain – nothing more. Then his fingers closed over something small and crusted with mud.
In the torchlight he cleaned it off, and there it was: the key.
“Oh, God!’ he moaned up at the sky, lying back on the grass, seeing the girl’s smiling face in his mind. ‘What have you made me do for this?’
He slipped the key chain into his safest coat pocket, and began to refill in the grave. He had the key now; the book could wait that long.
Half an hour later he was finished, and he sat down on the grass as the grey dawn began to ascend the sky. He was soaked with dew, vomit and sweat, and covered in mud. He looked exactly what he was: a grave robber. Tears flooded down his cheeks, cutting river channels through the soil and the puke on his face.
He went back the car, cleaned the spade off as best he could, and dumped it along with the torch into the boot.
As he drove away, he glanced across at the passenger side.
The book lay on the seat beside him. He could almost feel it watching him.
&&&
He never saw the girl again. She never returned to the school, and there were never an official reason why. He told his friends she’d cancelled the date, and surprisingly they believed him. There were rumours, of course, that the girl had gotten pregnant and been taken away for a quiet abortion, but nothing from the teachers at all.
And soon, as the brief appearance of the new girl became old news, she was forgotten by the general school populace.
He never forgot her, though, and shame fumigated everything that he did. But, as time passed, even that began to fade. When it became clear that no one was going to come looking for him, no policemen were going to knock on his parents’ door, he started to forget about her too.
She had become a regrettable and unfortunate memory up to the day when he found her standing at the bottom of his drive.
&&&
He got within a mile or so of his parents’ house before his curiosity and greed got the better of him. Spying a rest stop up ahead, he swerved the car in, parked up close to the hedge, and switched on the small interior light.
Around him the day was beginning to break, purple light brightening to orange. A truck roared by, a few birds sang in the trees, and on the other side of the hedge a cow mooed and stamped about in the grass.
He took the book in his dirty hands, the book that made wishes come true.
What secrets would it reveal?
He scraped a little more dirt off the key, and inserted it into the lock. It had started to rust during its time underground, and at first there was no give as he turned it sideways. Despair rose in him and his hands trembled like a choking starter motor, eyes blurring as all his efforts threatened to disappoint him.
Click.
The key turned sharply and the little padlock bounced up. The whole book seemed to relax in his lap, pages pressing outwards as though just waiting to be opened.
Greedy hands ripped the book open, searching out the secrets it held. He found himself panting like a marathon runner as he turned page after page, unsure what would happen but knowing he was about to experience something universal, something special.
But he quickly realised something was going badly wrong.