Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [84]
He came nearer, and she kept the flashlight beam on him. He unbuttoned his shirt.
The light shone on his skin. It was scarred and layered. “They set fire to me. They wanted me to burn, Julie. They stood by and watched me die. But I can show you. Just as you showed me what was inside you. I want you inside me. I want you to see this,” he said, and reached out and took her trembling hand while she kept the flashlight on his chest. He drew her hand to the middle of his chest and she felt a surge of energy, and she knew it was the Stream because she felt herself—not her body, but her true self, something in her mind—flow into him, sucked along as if she were liquid and were being poured into a dark lake.
3
The first thing she felt was that gradual warmth and a sense of safety, and then pleasure sensations ran through her. She heard his voice, with her, guiding her. “Julie, this is the Stream, I’ve brought you into it,” and she tried to resist moving along with his voice, but she didn’t feel the same fear as she had seconds before. She saw memory screens inside the darkness: his father holding his hand as he led the little boy toward the doctor who took him through several doors, into a room with a series of beds. Two boys and three girls, of varying ages, lay on the beds, their eyes closed, small wires attached to what looked like polka dots on their foreheads and just beneath their left nipples—for they were in their underwear, sheets drawn up just to their stomachs. He cried when he was told to take his clothes off and get onto one of the beds, and watched in terror as the polka dots and wires were attached to the top of his head, making a slurping sound as they suctioned his forehead.
“This one for your heart,” the doctor said as he placed his cold hand near his chest. “It’s so we can make sure you’re okay.”
The lights were kept on, and his arms were tethered to the bed so that he had a range of movement but he couldn’t get up. “I have to pee,” he said, repeatedly, but no one came to take him to the bathroom. He was in a white room with long mirrors on all the walls. He wasn’t even sure where the door was.
Eventually, he peed in his underwear, and fell asleep, exhausted and a little scared.
Another memory screen: a classroom of twenty children, with three stern-looking women at the front of the class, near the big teacher’s desk. He sat in the third row back and they were all being told to close their eyes and try to think of nothing but darkness. But he couldn’t. Every time he shut his eyes, he saw something awful, although as soon as he opened them, he couldn’t remember what it was.
“You don’t go home?” Julie asked in the Stream, shocked that she was able to speak at all.
The little boy answered her. “For some of us, our mommy and daddy never pick us up. We stay in that room with the lights and all the mirrors. They put the polka dots on us every night.”
It was night, she assumed, but the lights above never gave an indication of morning or midnight. One of the boys plucked the polka dots off his forehead, and laid them on the bed. “Mikey,” he said. “They’re stealing your dreams.”
“Are they?” he asked. “My dad wouldn’t do it.”
“Don’t lie to him,” the sad little long-haired boy said. He must’ve been about fourteen, but he looked younger than Michael, who was almost thirteen. “They’re checking for brain activity. That’s all. They want to see patterns while we dream. Don’t worry, Mike, nobody can steal your dreams.”
“They are too,” the older boy said. He was at least fifteen, but seemed older. “They’re trying to steal from us.”
The girl of eleven or so who Julie thought might be the long-haired boy’s sister, piped up, “I just want to go home.”
“There is no home,” the older boy said. “None of us have parents.”
“I do,” Michael said, and the little girl nodded, “Me, too.”
The older boy smirked. “If you call those people parents. They’d sell you if they