The memory of that spectacular storm hurt worse than the bandaged bulletgroove in her side. She thought she understood what Dex was saying.
“Things like the dawn don’t care how messy and painful and scary it gets when people break,” he said, directing his words toward his lighter. “I remember thinking, while I was floatin’ in the blue, half-drowned and losing blood and dumb-lucky to’ve grabbed hold of a liferaft myself, that that old sun comin’ up on the far horizon there wouldn’t mind if I bucked convention and did something a little bit different that morning, like saving one little life. Hell, why not, I figured. As if it could matter anyway, one life, when so many others were comin’ to bad ends all around me, but Davey Normoyle was the closest body still twitching in the water, so he got hauled aboard. And then I don’t remember so much after that, for a time.”
When Graves chanced a look up at Hannah she was rapt, her eyes full of gentle sympathy. Almost more than he could bear. He turned away again, looking out over the view, although he barely registered it by now. The eye of memory was doing all his seeing for him.
“Wasn’t till a few years after that he finally tracked me down,” Graves said. “I didn’t really know the kid. I was in the intelligence service, moving all around the Pacific theater during the war, so he wasn’t on my ship or anything like that. But I guess I must’ve told him my name at some point, ’cause he found me later on through a buddy of mine. Charlie Lurp, up here in Los Angeles. Just a couple of months before I, y’know, died. Davey by then had a missus and a baby girl and a life he was glad to be living, which I guess he thought he owed to me instead of to a shellshocked whim that happened to hit me one weird morning. But he was serious about it. Said an angel or some such shit came in a dream and told him that really, he’d been slated to buy it in the surf that day, and his life had been returned to him for the sole purpose of giving this particular lighter to me, Dex Graves.”
Graves shrugged, examining the thing. It looked old, but otherwise unremarkable.
“He came up from San Diego to do it, even. Begged me to take the damn thing. Said the angel told him that if I didn’t then he would have died that day. That he would’ve gone under before I ever found him and his happy life would be erased, nothing more than a dream before drowning. Crazy, sure, but hey, war is. Guess I don’t mind telling you I wasn’t always the world’s cheeriest fella after I came back myself. So of course I took it. I was glad for the gift. I let it remind me that something I did one time, whatever my reasons, made a difference for somebody. And I needed that.” He fixed Hannah with his empty sockets. “Like you needed to help out Miss Lia, I suspect.”
“Yeah,” Hannah said. “Just like, I’d think.”
She took and squeezed Graves’ bony hand. He squeezed back, kind of hard, but she held on.
She felt sure that she could trust this man (or whatever he was), this Dexter Graves, to watch out for her Lia, come what may.
He knew the true value of things.
“So, there’s the tale, anyhow,” Graves said, feeling a little awkward by the time he was ready to let Miss Hannah take her hand back. “What it means to me. Wouldn’t have guessed it’d be enough to drag a dead man outta the dirt, but hey, like the poet once said: I guess there’s more between heaven’n earth.”
“Hey, uh… guys?” Riley said from behind them.
They both looked over, their moment gone. Graves put the lighter away.
“Not to interrupt the sharing, which I think is really sweet, but-”
Graves stood up. “Is she awake?”
“No, not yet,” Riley said. “But her cellphone keeps ringing.”
Chapter Thirty
Lia had a sense of something happening nearby, something her friends were concerned with, something that probably could’ve used her attention, but the pull of deep sleep was too strong for her to keep an eye on it properly. She drifted off instead, despite her efforts, sinking away from conscious awareness and down into the deep psychic blackness where the eternal currents churn. There could be other things besides herself moving through this sort of darkness. Shapes ancient and vast, leviathans of the imaginal sea that might, for an instant that would seem to contain the entirety of time within it, turn their alien-yet-familiar brand of awareness toward her.
Lia never liked it when that happened. It inspired as much dread as it did awe. At least she knew the things she needed to say to keep herself safe out here. She pitied the poor bastards who found themselves lost in these nether spaces due to madness, coma, or sheer unpreparedness for the experience before they intentionally set out to visit-all conditions that left them with little hope of escape or reprieve. One of those shapes that was too large to really comprehend would gobble up such cases sooner or later, but Lia had no way of knowing whether or not that ended their torment.
Danger, however, was not the only thing to be found down here. This ocean-between-minds was the font of individual consciousness, a primal headwater, older by far than human form itself. The currents here ran pure and strong and could be aligned with in the name of healing and growth, or to aid in the acquisition of knowledge. This was Lia’s own territory, in a way. Black Tom had long ago taught her to use these confusing, often disturbing, yet meaning-saturated dreams as an opportunity to better understand herself, if and when she found herself having them.
They were important. They always meant something.
Lia quit resisting, letting the unconscious show her what it would, and almost that quick the featureless blackness around her transformed into rain-whipped foliage that shivered and danced in a cold, gusting wind.
There was nothing Lia loved better than a rainy night, but the pajamas she found herself wearing-her standard t-shirt and soft, loose pants-were insufficient against the weather, which felt as real as anything. Her bare arms pebbled up with gooseflesh as she hugged herself against the cold and hurried for shelter. She was also wearing a pair of her favorite dainty, soft-soled Chinese slippers, but she ran on the balls of her feet anyway, in a vain attempt to keep her cuffs up out of the mud and damp.
There were prefab gazebos and patio tents on display on the west side of Potter’s Yard, and Lia found herself in the shelter of her favorite example, a large pavilion with mosquito-net sides that could be zipped closed, without really having run the full distance. She was just sort of there, more or less as soon as she decided where she wanted to be.
Her sleeping bag was waiting for her, already unfurled across the old futon she kept for nights like this, when the turbulent weather most made her feel like sleeping outdoors, where she could feel close to its wild energy.
Lia was shivering badly, her shoulders quaking, the point between her shoulderblades that always got sore after too much heavy lifting tightening up into a painful knot. She kicked off her sodden slippers and shimmied out of the pants that had gotten pretty well soaked despite her efforts to keep them dry. Clad in just the t-shirt and her underwear, Lia dove into the sleeping bag and huddled up with her head inside it, waiting until enough warm breath and body heat had accumulated to make her comfortable. Then she poked her head back out, so that she might listen to the rain drumming on the tent’s canvas roof.
It woke something in her, the rain did. It always had. She found it soothing and nourishing and deeply sensual, and she imagined that the plants around her responded to it in just the same way. She could feel their delight and sense of release, and she longed to experience more of the latter for herself.