Читать книгу The Changeling - Victor LaValle - Страница 11

RIGHT AFTER BRIAN went missing, the boy began having a recurring dream. Since he was only four, Lillian couldn’t make much sense of the details. Most of it came in the long hurried babble of a scared child in the night, but she pieced it together. There was a man knocking at the front door. When Apollo unlocked it, the man pushed his way in. He knelt down in front of Apollo. He had a face, but he took off that face. The face underneath was the face of his daddy. Brian West opened his mouth, and a cloud spilled from his mouth. Apollo watched the fog roll out from his father’s throat and began to cry. The mist filled the apartment until the boy could hardly see. His daddy picked him up. Now the sound of rushing water, loud as a waterfall, filled the apartment. Apollo’s father carried him through the fog. His father finally spoke to him. Right about then Apollo would wake up screaming.

This nightmare came to the kid night after night for weeks. Apollo no longer wanted to sleep, and Lillian couldn’t shut her eyes because she knew, at some point, her four-year-old boy would be in terror.

You’re coming with me.

That’s what Brian told Apollo in the dream.

While trying to console him, Lillian asked why those words made him wake with such fear. His answer cut her down through flesh and bone. It wasn’t fear that made him cry out. It was longing.

“Why didn’t he take me with him?” Apollo said.

Eventually the nightmare passed, or at least, Apollo stopped talking about it. This let life reset to its new normal: Lillian, a single mother who worked full time, taking classes on Saturdays to become a legal secretary, and raising her child alone, a life both grueling and rewarding. Apollo, a bookish child, growing up to be self-contained and watchful.

They stumbled along like this for eight more years. By the time Apollo turned twelve, they never spoke of Brian West and neither expected to make him a topic of conversation for the rest of their days, but then one afternoon Apollo received a message from the man. A gift.