Black Paper Dream

By Michael Keys

Black Paper Dream is a novel approach to five short stories. 55 dreams become 5 intersecting nightmares awakening to a single modern-day horror. Featuring: The IMask Interlink. Little Gracies Pictures. The Joliet Butcher. Red Landgrave and the Waxworks. Waiting on the Brambleman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481719629

Michael Keys

Michael Keys writes in the Pacific Northwest and is the author of Anna's Trinity in 2006. He wrote Black Paper Dream as a modern adult fairy tale drawn from a series of seemingly unconnected dreams he had in 2012.

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© 2013 Michael Keys.       All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 3/4/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-1962-9 (e)

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The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

PART I

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

PART II

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

EPILOGUE

It is from the good sense for tradition that we writers share our contributions with quotes contributed from others, from those who have preceded us; to honor forebears, peers and craft. Here are a few of relevance for this quotable synopsis:

…and we are the imagination of ourselves. Bill Hicks

"And what then shall ye say if all this life be

but a black paper dream?" Dr. Redford Landgrave

That truest sense of reality is our profoundest rumor of fact. Howard Cobiskey

Welcome to the Hotel California. The Eagles

PART I

1.

And we commit Victoria Randolph-D’Angelo to this earth. May merciful God accept this soul into His blessedly eternal kingdom.

Once, Pamela would have repeated his Christ-inspired verse. And those might as well have been the sole sentiments spoken by Father Lucas McNeil. She’d heard no other.

He’d eulogized the child as well as capable at his Saint Mark’s Cathedral. What had he known of her? Perhaps, this: She’d been stricken to count her decaying days by summing her digits of ten, in their midnight multiples of seizures.

Pamela did not fault how fate had ordained her cousin for his smallness of fathoming. She believed he had tried in a priest’s sincerity to solace the seventy-five attendees; and he’d served as such for some. But Pamela knew he drew from ritual comfort, from ancient desert belief, from his God-man fastened to a burnished cruciform oak above his dull narrow pulpit for the Gospel; for his ultimate escort to His living inspiration.

And she knew he had himself; he beside He; holy water to its second basin, from which to fountain in flow.

The rain had pattered over black umbrellas for the entire public mourning. She expected the funeral would summon showers before its suitably-schemed torrent. That had not happened. There was only that tedious patter over a separated field so earthen, so given to remembrances of granite, that their pressure molded the clay beneath it.

Those chiseled epitaphs joined to names, those dated intaglios jeweling your forlorn.

Pamela’s heart ached from her poem’s dark lyrical verse. She wailed silent across that field for a while.

When she inhaled, a friend’s old presence had perfumed the gray-green rosemary part of the cemetery in the scented dyes of saffron.

And Pamela sensed decay. And that mother peered at an earth-mover covering the given from her womb in rumpled blankets stirred from the sleep of soils.

Her husband, Philip, had not left her there without his protest to linger in their feuding minds.

She shook the tiny red deaths in her pocket, glared upward for his impossible indigo sun.

Pamela considered Phil’s newfound sense for expression. For a man who hadn’t wept even during his final night with Tori, he’d paced that graveside, remarkable for his first tearful tour through too much humanity.

Pamela’s memory of his complexion was that it had smudged ashen as if a young hand had formed irritation for a chalked drawing, and had attempted to smear the face past future recognition.

Then they could all pretend they’d banished what would be borne alone.

Pamela felt the pinpricks of pride for having neither scowled nor screamed in his presence. It was a feat she would have never gambled manageable before today.

The exhaust-chuffs amid the wheel and joint squeaks from the earth-mover reminded Pamela of the transport Tori had relied upon, for the past rainstruck summers when not bedbound. A minute more and a thud of risen and fallen soil resounded in her bones not unlike that from her daughter during a midnight bucking tremor.

She had turned from that noise upon ignition.

But she did not turn from this noise now, but peered through the hanging rain of cooling mist, at the driver of that black-blanketing machine. He had a brim-backward baseball cap, Old-English White Sox S, and an unlit cigar center-clenched in his tough-ass mouth.

She did not try to imagine what ponder of creeks purled in his mind as he covered her firstborn forever. She feared those waters muttered and bled to driest beds.

His practical commitment must have inured him to the morbid, to not care when a mother lingered.

Pamela breathed deliberately. She calmed to the level hiding beneath her shriek, dazed through the scanning for distraction.

Anything immediate.

She noticed her heels’ indentations over a balding patch of ground before a tomb door discolored from bronze to copper; it leaning like a gravedigger against his slanted shovel. Those indentations looked awaiting their tombstones themselves.

She glanced over her right shoulder at the sealed memorial that once spelled an etched name, where time had lessened its occupant to being misspelled anonymous. For an instant, she offered a sublime prayer that she’d be allowed that selfsame fate.

Anonymous.

Anonymous.

And soon.

The earth-mover’s front wheels reared up unexpectedly, the entire machine threatening an arm-thrashing sideways topple. Its searching dull spotlights found her face. More. Its violent gleams harshened her reflective grief.

From a grunting clang and a dead rattling, she twinged, and hung her head before the sight of fountaining soil.

From a shift of gears the expertise of the driver prevented the ghoulish intrusion, the clumsy desecration.

His slew of swears ended in the commonest ones.

Perhaps, it had been that unburied outcropping she’d stepped over that had stalled the jumbo wheels, stalled the internment.

Before Pamela could consider more, her cell vibrated her left hip like the simultaneous stinging from summers’ worth of wasps. She did not astound herself by hesitating in the answering of it, for she’d felt her need for pain for as long as it had been commonplace for her daughter in that ten-year-eternity of repeatedly-final moments.

Yeah, this is Pam.

Can I come and get you yet?

A bleak baritone asked it from a sigh-swept tone of apology.

I’m going to use my own two feet to get home. I have to prove to myself it can be done.

Pamela. Please. Let me drive us home. I’m just pacing alone at Green Gable Park. I’m promising you that you won’t have to talk at all. Both of us can keep quiet too. Just don’t try and get back by yourself. The moment threw static in the pause before this: Not today.

Why not, Philip? You think I might not make it back to you?

I don’t doubt you could hustle all the way to Wrigleyville from there before I’d reach Shelton. You don’t need to show me how much will you have. I already believe it.

On her husband’s side, there was a peculiar rustling of cloth that reminded Pamela of someone sleeping over bare pillow casing.

Philip, please. If you already know how much will I have then why are we still having this discussion? I’ll be back to you before dark.

Philip’s voice continued as if he spoke through a heating vent.

Pamela!

Tori’s mother ended the past-parental call. For her, the chilled rain threw ice shards that transfixed. She paused in her rime-rimmed stare at her daughter’s nearly packed grave.

She saw the driver tap ashes from the body of his cigar.

She shook the Seconals in her pocket; their lipstick-ready kisses of death.

And turned off both her cell, and herself, entirely.

2.

Receiving new signal.

Vincent Patrick Viceroy crossed Foster Avenue against the wishes of the traffic light, flipped off two checker cabs and a Confederate-flagged Durango, before flicking Winston ash at a clogged gutter grate. He was hoping one of those three drivers would have responded in even the subtlest defiance, so he could stomp the appropriate vehicle hood, kick-starring the windshield with the steel tip of his leather punk boot.

His mood was red anger today. Sadly, cowards abounded in his neighborhood of BrightonPort, and none would indulge him.

Vince cracked both sets of knuckles, limbering them up for his day’s work at his family’s waxworks: Splitting Spitting Images. Known by the signage as SS Images to spare the tongue-clumsy and still offend everyone.

He would be continuing his effort on the diva-ing Lady Gaga figure that morning and he wanted to get it precisely eerie. Eerie comparisons, especially like the keen cut of her jawline while her lustrous face grimaced a coda from her popular aria.

Though it wasn’t the type of sculpting he’d ventured to do after graduation from south-side University of Illinois, it was close enough for a man of twenty-five. In time, he trusted his talent would equal those heaven-high aspirations.

Vince passed by a twentieth-century relic, known as a newspaper machine, and side-glanced below the gothic masthead as he considered limited hours. Second Child Pulled from Joliet River. His steps stuttered a bit beneath the indigo canopy before grabbing the brass-handled door.

Inside SS Images, a gunslinger, circa 1880, threatened Vince with an out-thrusted Colt six-shooter and a ten-inch blade. The figure, especially in the curtained light, was lifelike enough to stand at a saloon bar as a patiently-steady, albeit lunatic, extra. Vince slapped outlaw Clevis Knight across his deerskin jacket, noting he’d been his first. He caught a subdued gleam from a pair of false coppery irises belonging to the sculpture.

He leaned in, believed he’d done a fine job in shaping the wax lids over the colored glass falsities. Vince nodded to himself in private confirmation. He alternated singing and humming broken pop lyrics while traveling to the rear of the waxworks past a dozen familiar modern mugs composed of easily melted features. Vince scoffed at the last, the washed-up Madonna, patting her raised rump just the same.

He could hear his father talking to himself from the back through the heating ductwork that circled the place like a tunneling serpent. No doubt the artist-accountant had been busy playing administrator since the a.m. seven, his customary hour to return to his daily vocation. Vince parted theaterlike burgundy curtains, pushed aside a taboret stacked with mostly a few years’ honest ledgers.

On time today. Think that’s going as marginalia in the journal for my official biography. The squinting scholarly figure said without bothering a glance.

You’ll be even more shocked to know I stayed late last night, Rodney Dangerfield. I’ll have our addition displayed ahead of schedule. The fleece-bearded man darted his gray eyes at Vince in a less than humorous state. Vince added through barely moving lips: After you inspect it.

The two men then exploded in sequence in laughter-fed laughter. Vince reached into a denim pocket and removed a deerskin wallet, twin-crossed spines warding in twisted relief. He slipped out a coke-debris Jackson, laying it next to his accounting father, Joseph, after straightening it against the counter’s magnifying edge.

Joseph did not look up a second time as he worked toward the column total for recent expenditures: pouring and molding wax, specialty clay, a rheostat, four sculpting instruments, and one crimped blonde wig. The LCD screen of his Sony Vaio, a Christmas present from son Vince, reflected his minutest motion, dustily.

Pop, there’s that cash I borrowed. Vince tapped the center of a presidential profile. And by the way, when you planning on turning on that PC? Letting the machine do your grunt work for you? It ain’t futuristic since the future’s already here, Buck Rogers. Vince winked once, shook his head, smirking into a half-risen smile over his religiously Luddite father.

Without looking toward Vince, Joseph spoke staccato-slow: Every time I let one of these awful goddamn machines do another task for me, I’ve just made another part of me irrelevant. Then his speaking sped up to a hissing. Now, I’ve told you that so many times, you want to know what? I’d have to resort to using the damn thing I condemned just to tell you how many times exactly. Vince guffawed in embarrassing abandon. He wiped his forehead as Joseph momentarily picked at his teeth from a pencil lead tip.

Besides, I don’t think it works right. It’s always asking me for my goddamn credentials. Outta know me by now if it’s so goddamn smart. And that part was added in earnest.

Without setting aside the rest of the morning to explain the usage of a computer login to a man he affectionately called Daddy Gli, the Grand Lovable Idiot, Vince sauntered past his mumble-heavy father for a curtained-off area aglow under specially-precise fluorescents. Vince paled to grave-sheet white in passing them.

That’s right. Vince!

Joseph’s son stuck his head through the curtain slit. He looked cheerfully disembodied.

What? He batted lashes and flushed daintily.

That wax vendor called again. I told him anyone who’s that persistent can have half an hour of our time. Well, that’s what I told him. Guy sounded like he was talking through a vent whole time.

When’s the appointment?

Today. At one.

Shit, Popeye. That’s gonna eat deep into my spinach. Plus, I’m at my most productive in the afternoon. Why do I have to be there?

Because you might be working with this new molding material. He praises that it’ll restore our dying waxworks industry. Joseph short-scowled from beside his desk lamp and his teeth appeared to float in his mouth as they did in a bedside glass every night past ten.

Vince rubbed at his Adam’s apple, pondered the idiot gene each man inherits from a previous one.

What’s wrong with the wax we’ve been using for the past four years? Why replace it when we’ve had success? Plus, if it’s new? It’s more expensive. Vince glared. That’s just friggin’ economics."

Joseph sighed over having to educate yet another of that net-generation about improving the first product, and not settling for patches. He couldn’t comprehend why his cyber-savvy son saw the necessity in embracing the latest tech-toy, yet didn’t see the value in flipping on the current for their livelihood.

Look. With all the distractions out on your Internet, fewer people are coming in even to ask for directions to Edgewater Hospital. In case you didn’t notice, we had ten visitors in the past five days. Ten. Joseph held up the required number of digits to punctuate the smallness of the number, collectively compared to the potential patrons of Chicago. That means we have to supplement this week’s earnings from our cash reserves. Pinching from the Till, your grandfather called it.

A slow week. Vince hmphed. We’ll detour the traffic back here. Won’t take long either. Vince, still his face exposed, could have been a prescient white genie who poked his face from some red veil of the future to reassure Joseph that patience was restorative.

Don’t assume it, son. Our figures are realistic. More than most museums I’ve visited over the past thirty years. He swiftly preened his beard’s length. Just doesn’t impress people like it once did. He paused. Joseph adopted an overdone shrewd expression, saying: They’ve got to be as lifelike as you and me. Vendor coming to see says they can.

That’ll take some doing. I’m practically a bleached corpse, white as I am.

Just be ready for Mr. Landgrave.

Landgrave?

Uh-ha. Mr. Red Landgrave. He’s our visiting salesman for our afternoon appointment.

Vince rolled his eyes and slipped suspiciously into the slit, the curtains rustling back to conformity. In his workspace, the talented sculptor resumed constructing a songstress’s snapshot expression from J.F. McCaughin molding wax. The instruments laid out over a stretch of coarse cloth appeared to be a cross between facelift scalpels and dental tray tools. Vince lifted what could have been mistaken for a plaque-pick and evened out the eyeless face’s philtral ridge. Deftly, he shaped the wax with the chrome tool until near-satisfaction laid the tool to rest. Then he moved on to the mentolabial sulcus above the chin. His senior year anatomy class had been a gainful supplement to the first three years worth of artful ones.

Vince stopped whatever he intended for the refined shape. He felt suddenly unnerved by a sense slightly above him. There. The vacancy in the sockets. The present image of the barren holes came to him in the span of a breath. Unexpected, lasting and disorienting. The head had begun to look too lifelike, and with the round glass unfitted, he could envision a decapitation wounded post-mortem-further in the form of jointly scooped-out eyes by a playful coroner. Vince laid his wax-tipped tool on the supplies-cluttered table. He trundled his chair, feet of casters, backward by measurable inches.

He found himself dwelling unthinkingly on Shannon. It was the type of unpleasantness that he likened to a sick unabating throb in a broken shell of spine. She’d given herself to a rush-hour interstate from the arched height of a bunting-bedecked overpass the July prior. She lay interred since in the rear of Shelton Cemetery, along its easternmost mortar, where were the few remaining lots left. Repeated unshuttered flashes of Shannon’s eyeless face transposed themselves over the wailing waxen head of transfixed Gaga. Vince had to leave the sculpting studio for the adjacent room before the sickness consumed him.

3.

Signal changes phase.

The last rider to board the Ravenswood train on this Thursday in April wore a Fedora, a London Fog and buffed ostrich oxfords. In his tight right grip was an antique portmanteau. It could have been an accessory straight out of 19th century America, or an expensive prop out of the current one. Several train patrons fixed intrigued stares at the strapped and buckled bag; a few perhaps harboring the intention of fleeing with its unknown weight in their cash-hugging arms. The gentleman looked moneyed as sure as his intelligently-European footwear was not purchased at the local Footsmart as many of theirs had been. But he did not claim the demeanor of the clueless affluent; clueless about the safety of these Chicago streets over which the Ravenswood line rumbled from its metal-sparking elevation. He sat wisely guarded, and it was not desperately so.

He patted his chest-holstered 0.38.

The gentleman gazed up at an advertisement for cremation services offered by a company calling themselves The Juniper Society. It spoke of the sensible choice, the responsible decision, and the economically practical. He laughed silently about the eco-favorable disposal methods the new century had adopted, all conjured by the nimble hands of Good Father Capitalism. His philosophy was far older, more enduring. Older than the crudest concept of country. Of tribe.

He removed a blue-silk handkerchief, monogrammed RVL, dry-dabbed one temple then another. The silk barely brushed against his carrot sideburns before he neatly form-folded it to triangle. His strong yet gaunt hand entered the confines of his London Fog and came back empty. Something uncannily seamless about the action though. More than being concealed, the handkerchief appeared to vanish how a magician might make happen to awe the unready.

Three stops dumped and loaded clumps of new passengers. Soon the option for standing became the sole one. Separate knots of riders clogged the train car, and for the claustrophobic-sensitive, distress came closer. After leaving the station, the train communications system alerted that the Ravenswood would be skipping the next two stops for the reason of shortness of hour.

Amid the groans, muttered vulgarities and outright threats, Mr. Landgrave considered the concept of being short of hours. Many of his clients had been just that until they had been made privy to his specialized and guaranteed services. He much hoped that his coarse client at SS Images could be added to the list. There was one last item he desired to gift before returning home to his condemned museum.

Transformers and guy lines zoomed past smudged windows of graffiti glyphs and warning placards. Mr. Landgrave responded to the sensed electricity from the fascinated face across the aisle.

It’s a portmanteau, Madam.

Quite a fancy bag. Looks foreign. Is it from -

I assure you, Madam, it is quite domestic.

The chubby woman, nodding and sending her jowls in a waggle, pretended her understanding. She laid stumpy fingers over her discounted Wal-Mart purse, feeling pitifully tawdry. Mr. Landgrave picking up on this, turned more gracious.

I should compliment you on your own choice of baggage. The snaps on that purse of yours enhance the available light. And that design, not a stranger to lovely damask. He grinned to present a mouth crammed by numerous extra teeth. The overweight woman reciprocated, but so nervelessly that the grin came as a grimace. Mr. Landgrave added: Of course, I needn’t mention your taste in accessories extends to your clothing, to your coiffure. I haven’t seen such an exquisite muumuu in too long.

Was a present from my son, Chuckie. She said in an ill-founded snooty pride learned at one of the Midwest parks for long-term trailers.

Refined taste must be preserved genetically then. Let’s thank our Great Designer for the blueprint we carry in us all. Red Landgrave licked the cleft above his crimson lip.

The conversation dissipated then and there. The chubby woman coughed into a fist and opted for surveying the sailing Chicago skyline; bafflingly bemused about the stranger’s eccentric mien. Or as she would describe it later: Crazy queer try to come on to me, Jack.

Mr. Landgrave returned to his private musing. He reminded himself Chicago was not London and although both cities were cursed by rich population, citizens could have passed as separate species each time they wiggled their respective chins. Landgrave had seldom seen such an utter piece of human refuse in his sixteen decades as the woman across the aisle. And in this flesh-appraisal, he was also considering the squalor prevalent in the poorest parts of nineteenth century London, where even the whores reeked like perfumed pig carcass. His extended time on Earth had allowed him to cultivate pleasantries even when the recipient’s station did not warrant it. He never mistreated anyone rudely no matter the deserving of otherwise.

Six stops later, Mr. Red Landgrave detrained. In a regal posture, so exaggerated it might have evoked the suspicion of formal thespian from it, he passed through a grimy gummy turnstile. In learned poise, he stepped down metal-masked stairs, passed an employee-slumbering kiosk and strode north to SS Images.

Eventually he smirked into a croon.

4.

Philip Randolph paced between a stone bench and an overflowing trash bin, single-wheel deprived. He counted the steps, seventeen, if for no other reason than to convince his mind it was capable of concerning itself with a matter other than an aggrieved wife, their deceased daughter, their mourning younger. He was doubting it was survivable.

His initial instinct to the abrupt disconnection of their cell line was to speed his cherry-red SUV back to Shelton Cemetery and fireman-carry her to its backseat. His impulse fizzled when he framed the laughable image in reality. There was no chance Pamela would permit anyone forcing her away from her earned sufferance.

Philip broke from his counted paces toward a proud stand of Poplars. He surveyed. The pattering rain had ceased and clouds scoured sky until they exposed the luminous undercoat. Starlings tweeted from tiered branches and a solitary robin beak-bound a wiggling caterpillar, green like a Granny Smith apple. Life continued as promised. That was one truth that wouldn’t be escaped no matter who ended their soul-sharing with him. It was Philip’s inability to self-deceive that deprived him his kneeling before the simplest altar of peace.

Philip?

A young woman, shoulder-length free-flowing brunette, sculpted jaw, and a skin tone that belied her heritage approached the quiet man in a tale-telling caution.

Rona?

Thought you’d be serving as the world’s best distraction for Pam and Gracie about now.

Gracie’s in safer hands with Francina. As for Pam, well, she thinks she’s in safer hands by being left alone to hold her own.

She’s not still -

At Shelton? A beat while Philip reacted as if in a sighing release of guilty admission. She’s there still. Philip gestured toward a near-north neighborhood. She’s still out that way. His outreaching hand dwarfed a skyscraper. Thought about gearing the SUV straight into the entrance, hopping out and lugging her out of there. For a moment it seemed vivid enough to touch. Philip stared at the scuffmarks he’d created on his path to Green Gable Park. Image went black and white after that. Fuzzy. Felt hot.

Rona’s I-Phone vibrated. Her saved messages spontaneously spoke on speaker. That’s weird. She said, dismissing its power. Now we can’t be interrupted.

Rona laid a sun-touched grip over Philip’s forearm. She stepped into it, then rocked slightly on a back pump, as if she intended for more balance to counter emotion. Overhead, a sated to be heavier robin flighted far beyond the park.

Why are you here alone? I mean I came here to cop coke from my homeless pals. You? You, shouldn’t be left here to linger. And neither should you be letting Pamela. Rona stared at a twin-antennae hi-rise, eyed with triple-panes. She elbowed him. "The Shelton bugs are as big as skyscrapers over there.’

I wanted to thank you and your family for that bouquet, Rona. Means an awful lot that you bothered to pick out the summer snowflake Tori loved the most. He gritted beneath his sorrow, wiping each eye swiftly. Most people never consider details that mean nothing to them. They just go for what they’d want themselves. Claim they knew the person after doing that. Philip motioned with a head tilt, slight eye-rounding, toward the stone bench. The pair proceeded to match the morning’s funereal pace.

Philip slouched into his elbow-over-knees position while Rona unshouldered her satchel-like purse, placing it behind her as a backrest. She foresaw she’d be needed there for a while. Her scoliosis forbade her from leaning against anything so unyielding as metamorphosed sandstone; as the geologist identified it based on her credentialed associate professorship from University of Illinois. An irregular pocket of orange light between their shoes made its painful movement closer and closer to the darkness that dwelled beneath all places overhearing secret human miseries.

Pamela will survive for the sake of Gracie. Philip, don’t doubt that. And her silk blouse rustled his silk sleeve.

Couple days ago before Tori left - Philip choked over her name; a rasped slurring from the unease of knowing past tense had attached itself to it like granite to grave. He inhaled, held it in tremble; hoped the park he breathed could somehow refuse to leave; stay to suffocate him; end him while he still retained numbness from shock. Eventually, he