Dust to Dust Read Free

terrible rasping whisper hissed through the broken and toothless jaw. “The Oracle is calling.”
    Broken bits of finger bone began to join together, and the skeletal hand at his side was suddenly whole and pointing toward the light. “Go,” the voice commanded in a tone of strange desperation.
    I was torn by fear. I might have turned back then, because of that desperate need we have to survive, even in our dreams. But the wind that had come with his voice was behind me. I had no choice but to moveforward. Suddenly it seemed that all the dead were awakening, urging me forward. Heads lifted, arms pointed, and a massive call went up. “Go. The Oracle is calling. Salvation can come only from those who are called. Hurry. Hurry!”
    I shouldn’t have been so terrified; the skeletons were trying to help me. But they were terrifying, as they stared with their empty eye sockets and spoke in voices that were papery, coarse and part of the wind.
    Finally I reached the place where the light began: a wall of burning sconces with a massive tomb in front of it. An ancient oil lamp sat upon that pagan sarcophagus, which had clearly seen use as an altar, and nearby, shrouded in a black hood and cloak, a presence stood. I started forward, and then I saw…
    From another corridor in the maze of catacombs, someone else was arriving. As tall as I was, and as imaginary as I myself was in that place. He had no substance. He walked as I did, he came from my world. He, too, was headed for the light, and he stopped, startled, as he suddenly became aware of me.
    He turned, and I saw that he was a bit older than I was.
    As we stared at one another, the cloaked figure lifted a hand and began to speak, and I realized that it was a woman. “Come to me. Those who are not called must hasten those who are.” As her hand fell, I heard a horrendous commotion and turned to look back down the corridor. The skeletons were rising, rebuilding themselves. Then…
    Perhaps the terror woke me. That thing in a dreamwhere we won’t let ourselves fall, lest we die in real life. Whatever it was, I was awake, sitting up in my bed, sweat pouring down my chest. I was in my motel room in Los Angeles, and the multihued neon sign outside my window was blinking madly.
    I threw off my covers, stood and turned on the bedside lamp. Not good enough. I needed the dirt and grit and cacophony of the city, the noises, the action, the good and the bad. I threw on some pants and stepped outside into the courtyard. And then I realized I was still smelling the hard-packed dirt and death from the catacombs of my dreams. I shook my head to dispel the cloying scent. The smell of grease from a nearby diner started to replace it, followed by a hint of night-blooming jasmine. Much better. I turned to go back in, and then I noticed my feet.
    They were filthy. And not just with the normal dirt of a big city. This dirt was an odd color, a strange pasty gray.
    As if…
    As if I had walked through miles of catacombs.
    Miles and miles of the dead.

1
    â€œW hat on earth is that, Mel?” Maggie Canady asked, leaning over to stare at the cocktail napkin on which Melanie Regan had been doodling.
    â€œWhat is what?” Melanie asked.
    She hadn’t paid the least attention to what she had been doing, and now she stared down at the napkin. She had flipped it over, so there was no logo to deter the free movement of her pen or mar the pictures she created.
    Pictures. Real pictures. Recognizable.
    Detailed.
    There were four of them, and they were so well situated on the napkin, she might have marked off the corners with a ruler.
    The top left corner was very evidently a sketch of a fire, so detailed that the flames almost seemed to move. Even more hypnotic was the sketch on the opposite corner.
    It was of a waterfall, forceful, filling the air with spray as it fell to the pool below. There was something wild and even violent about it.
    The bottom right