Read Online Ash Wednesday by Chet Williamson, Neil Jackson - Free Book Online Page A

but infrequent orgasms. They fell asleep exhausted, holding each other, and sometime in the middle of the night, after comfort had placed them on their appointed sides of the bed, Brad had his first bad dream.
    He did not normally dream, at least not so that he would remember when he awoke. But the dream he had that night was so real, so crystalline, that it seemed for months afterward that it had actually happened. Déjà vu was not a primary factor, for although memory was a part of what formed the deep scenario, it was only a small part. The dream was born of wishes as well, and desires and fears and possibilities.
    It began as a sexual encounter. The girl was young, younger than Bonnie. Her skin was smooth as a child's, her body fully formed, and though she seemed anxious and willing for each variation he imposed upon her, still there was a hesitancy, as though all this were new, done to please him, as though she feared his displeasure. At the last he was in her mouth, pounding away as savagely as at the true coin of a vagina, hardier, made to accommodate power, built to accept the force of seed. And as his pleasure and intensity grew until he was within a wisp of coming, she drew back from him and turned into darkness, a monolithic blackness that engulfed him only momentarily, then brightened to become a green vastness of overhanging limbs lit by orange flame. He looked down at himself. He was still naked, his erection failing, shrinking before the mystery of his situation. Then suddenly he knew.
    Flames lit the whole sky in a canopy of fire, and he began to notice the bodies around him. Most of them lay face down, and he could see the black hair charred even blacker, and he knelt beside one and touched it. As he had expected, the hair turned to powder in his hand, exposing blackened skin the texture of moldy oranges that parted like scum on pudding as his fingers pressed down on it.
    He felt horror in the dream, but felt too that he had known what his hands would encounter, that he was somehow meant to press and probe at these burned, dead things, and though he knew there was no reason, though he knew that sane minds would recoil in revulsion at what he did, he touched the bodies scattered about him, rigid fingers piercing flaking skin, hands sinking into hollow stomachs, drumhead-thin barriers of flesh parting like tissue paper at his caress.
    I'm bathing in it. I'm washing. Why am I doing this? How will I be clean?
    He could not answer himself. He could only move from corpse to corpse, now walking, now crawling, anointing his hands over and over again, a supplicant washing in the blood of the lambs.
    Here were two together, a father and son perhaps, the man lying face upward, charred coal eyes staring out of blackness through blackness into blackness, lips that smiled and kissed now only twin red-black sponges crisped and curled, brow that wrinkled in concern or smoothed with joy now fissured in basaltic ridges, once-living lava hardened by the passage of fire. It was a face sculpted in a furnace.
    What he had worn for clothes was forgotten, no more than a thin layer, clumped in spots, that clung to his body like a second skin. His fingers were black twigs.
    The boy lay across him face down, small head pressed into the man's stomach. His bare arms and legs were smooth and light brown, not black, and Brad knew that fire had not touched him. But something else had, for where his head lay on the father's stomach was a great puddle of blood that ran over the edges of the man's rib cage like water over a birdbath onto the dark ground below.
    There had been no sound in the dream to this point, only the thin, high keening that comes at times of absolute silence, heard by the brain and not the ear. But now there was something else—a wet bubbling, slow and methodical, like the gurglings of a pot carefully tended. He looked down again where the boy's head nestled in the cavity of his father's bowels, and saw fat bubbles