Olivia finished and pulled her hands away. She'd left strange white pucker marks on Bron's temples, but they'd fade soon enough, when the blood returned.
Chapter 8
The Dreamer Awakes
"Ignorance lets a child sleep in peace. Wisdom is what keeps the elderly up at night."
Bron dreamed a troubling dream: he rode with Olivia through red-rock country. Out the window, hoodoos of stone marched shoulder to shoulder. They reminded him of the pieces from one of his foster father's old chess sets—red knights in armor, with tall shields, looking grim as they stood ready for combat. The stones had slabs for bodies and shields, with smaller rocks forming battered faces, smashed by wind and eroded by the tides of time, until they were almost no longer recognizable as human.
Bron studied the figures. It looked as if giants must have carved them, long ago, back before people roamed the earth.
Maybe even dinosaurs carved those rocks, Bron thought, and a smile came to his face. He held his guitar. He remembered Olivia forcing him to play, and in the dream, he recalled that he had been dreaming of playing all night, over and over.
He decided to sing about the stone warriors, so he closed his eyes and began:
"In days of yore when dinosaurs roared,
Beside a wine-dark sea,
Guardians of stone,
Grown from earth's bones,
Swore to keep watch
For eternity..."
Bron knew it wasn't finished, but he kind of liked it. He smiled and asked Olivia, "Will you get off my back now?"
But when he glanced to his left, it wasn't Olivia driving at all. It was the old man from the electronics store—with his killer's eyes and a mouth drawn in contempt. Bron had never seen such hate in a face, and never felt so alone or frightened.
"When the serpent bites," the old man growled, "the flies shall soon gather!"
Bron sat bolt upright in bed, heart hammering so hard that his chest hurt. He gasped for breath, and glanced around.
The only radiance in the room came from a bit of starlight filtering through the open window. The air still felt stuffy, as if the room hadn't been aired in years. A sheen covered Bron's forehead and made his skin stick to the sheets.
He wiped his face, and the calluses on his fingers felt surprisingly hard, larger than normal.
Bron climbed from bed, still in his clothes, and stood for a moment, gasping.
Who is that old man? Bron wondered. Why is Olivia hiding from him?
The dream had felt so vivid—more like a memory than a dream.
He focused on the red sandstone cliffs. In the dream, they'd seemed... so familiar.
Could I have been born around here? he wondered.
No one had ever claimed him. The police had made a fuss about him, and the news had plastered his face on television, with anchors pleading, "Does anyone know this child?"
Mr. Bell had told Bron that the investigators had gotten hundreds of leads, placing his parents everywhere from Austin, Texas to Ontario, Canada. But all the leads evaporated into nothing. It seemed that no one had ever known him. No mother, father, grandparent. No neighbors or friends.
No one reported him missing, and no one had ever been able to put a name to him. It was as if he'd appeared out of thin air.
He shook his head, trying to clear it of dreams that were far too lucid.
Bron went to the window, looked out. Here so far from the city lights, the stars blazed. There seemed to be a hundred thousand, twinkling and throbbing. No sooner had he glanced out the window than a shooting star barreled across the horizon. Tonight was the second night of the Perseid Meteor Shower, a moment later he saw a spray of light as three stars fell at once.
A rooster crowed in the distance. Back at the Stillmans, Bron used to like to run at dawn. He didn't have a clock, but he figured that it was close enough to morning.
He pulled on his new shoes, went outside.
The air was cooler than he thought it would be. The temperature really dropped up here in the mountains at night, but it wasn't bad for running. In fact, he'd always found a cool day to be invigorating, and he'd once heard a farmer claim that in the autumn, even the horses and dogs like to go running for no reason.
He stood gazing up into the bowl of heaven, where the River of Stars wound along, powdering the sky, and for long minutes he craned his neck and watched for shooting stars.
So high up in the mountains, he was able to spot some fast-moving satellites among the countless stars, dull reddish orbs. Things that would have been too dim to see at his old house in Alpine showed up vividly here.
There was no noise from cars. Down by the creek, perhaps a quarter of a mile out in the pasture, he heard frogs croaking, and after a few moments he heard an eerie howl up in the mountains, above the campgrounds. It was high in pitch, too high to be a wolf, he decided. Besides, there weren't supposed to be any wolves so far south in Utah. It had to be a coyote.
It had hardly begun to howl when a dozen others joined in, creating an unnerving chorus.
Bron felt wide awake now. He realized that it was fall night, still at least a couple of hours before dawn. There wasn't the slightest crescent of light limning the hills to the east.
He remembered the old man, the attack—his friend Riley slamming his fist through the window to break into the car. The memory left him with jitters.
He recalled seeing how the car had rolled, and he wondered if anyone had been hurt. He hadn't listened to the news that night, but figured that nothing had happened. The wreck hadn't seemed spectacular. It almost seemed to happen in slow motion.
He thought about Mike's cool reception, and suspected that they were going to have problems.
He thought about the warm way that Olivia had spoken earlier. He could still smell the faint scent of her perfume on him. It was ... strangely intoxicating.
He tried to clear his mind, to stop thinking about her, to get her bright eyes out of his mind, and he decided that he was too wound up.
The stars lit the long driveway, reflecting off the ash-colored dirt and crushed rock, almost as if it were a river.
He decided to follow it. He hadn't had a good run in two days, and he started out at an even pace, falling into rhythm as he reached Main Street, and then picked up his pace down the long road into town. The houses were few and far apart, and half didn't seem occupied.
He raced through town, and twice he had dogs bark at him—big guard dogs that woofed so loud that he worried they might waken their masters.
He reached the T-intersection leading to the highway to Saint George. There weren't any houses along that road, at least none to speak of, so he turned and ran for another mile, heading across the valley and up a sloping hill.
By the time he reached the top, he was sweating and winded, so he turned and jogged slowly, enjoying the rhythms of his breath, the way that his legs felt strong and powerful, like the pistons of an engine that worked by will alone.
The endorphin rush was on him, and he let his mind go to that place where there was no thought, only the pounding of feet on the gravel, the distant wail of coyotes, and the occasional buzz of a cicada.
It was in this place that he always found peace. In this place, Bron thought, a man can touch eternity.
He became aware that a car was coming up behind, easing down the road toward town. He got well onto the shoulder of the road. He kept up his pace until the car pulled up beside him.