As the birds began to sing—meaning sunrise was no more than an hour away—he thought that at any moment, he’d be snatched back to himself. He strode along, wrapped in thought about this supposed gang his imagination had given life to. He wondered why they would settle in Westwend. The stakes were so meager, and considering the potential danger, one would think a gang would have better plans. Crenshaw might be loaded, but the Busy Bee was a bad move, all for a weekday-morning cash drawer. There couldn’t have been more than a couple of hundred dollars, most in change and small bills. Something was off. Either that or this was the laziest, dumbest gang that ever existed. Owen heard movement behind him.
When he turned, there was the old man from the corner of the first house he’d gone into on Margrave. The man approached swiftly and his hands came up in front of him. Owen detected the blank affect in the old creep’s eyes. He realized this was a cord-cutter. The pale hand came toward him, aiming for his chest. Owen, surprised, spun to flee, forgetting to jump, and put one leg in front of the other. He tumbled to the ground. The cutter hovered above him and descended. Owen was on his feet in a flash, but before he could take two steps, there was another cutter directly in front of him and one coming in from the side. As the pack closed in, they made a noise like the hissing of snakes. He heard Melody’s voice in the back of his mind yell, “Jump.”
As his three attackers converged, he flew up and away, and at the height of his ascent, he was yanked back to his earthbound body with a whooshing sound he’d never noticed before. He woke to the birdsong and the red sunrise coming through the blinds of his bedroom. A chill ran through him when the thought sank in that he almost didn’t make it back. What Melody told him was true. Once you noticed the cord-cutters weren’t sleepers, and you registered that frozen look in their eyes, all their actions, dictated by the screwy natural selection of the night world, elicited a sense of nausea.
Monday morning, in the children’s section, he was looking for a book a mother requested. The woman followed him up and down the stacks, and her little girl, maybe three years old, followed behind her. Eventually, the book in question was found out of place in the low bookshelf that ran beneath the painting of Sleeping Beauty.
“One of the kids must have reshelved it,” said Owen, and gave the book to the blond young woman who, while waiting, had lifted her daughter into her arms.
“Here’s the ABCs, Jenny,” the woman said to the child.
“ABCs,” repeated Jenny, but paid no attention to the book. Instead, she was pointing at the mural.
“Sleeping Beauty,” said Owen.
“Beard,” said the child, and he laughed. The paint curling on the neck and lower chin of the fairy tale princess did resemble the shaggy beard of Aaron Feit. Upon looking at the mural, he noticed how similar the style was to the paintings in the big old house the night before. He absentmindedly handed the ABC book to the young mother, and although she thanked him, he was too preoccupied to answer. He was focused on the right-hand corner of the mural. He might have noticed before that there was a name scrawled there in tiny script, but he’d never bothered to try to decipher it. Today was different. He went to his desk and retrieved the magnifying glass he kept in the top drawer for patrons with bad sight.
Back at the mural, he leaned over and trained the glass on the signature. The name instantly became clearer. Val Crenshaw was how he read it, although it could have started with a sloppy H and been Hal Crenshaw. With this revelation, he wondered if outlandish coincidence was part of the ecosystem of the night world. His forays as a sleeper were beginning to blend with his waking life, and every evening’s journey as well as every day’s felt more and more like a concocted dream. The position of Sleeping Beauty in the mural matched that of the image of the man in the chamber below the marble statue, hanging in the painter’s dining room. He broke from his trance and checked the book out for mother and daughter, then retired to his office and computer where he began a search for Val Crenshaw.
Along his walk home from work, Owen pondered what he’d found out. The painter was fairly well known, and had done illustration work throughout the years. When he clicked on the images associated with Crenshaw, he saw a lot of the paintings he’d run into in the old house. He also found a newspaper article someone had posted online about the mural. Valentine Crenshaw, new to Westwend, volunteered to create a picture on the wall of the children’s library, which was due to open in a few months. It said in the article his one stipulation was he would have to paint it at night after his day’s work. The town was thrilled with his offer. And all agreed the finished product, the Sleeping Beauty, was sublime, attracting the admiration of both children and adults.
The only problem was it stated in the article Crenshaw was twenty-eight when he did the mural in 1948. If that was accurate, it meant he was nearly one hundred years old. No doubt, Crenshaw looked old, but certainly not a century—he got around well enough to live on his own. Owen would have pegged him in his seventies. Another article listed some of the painter’s more famous pieces and what they’d gone for at auction. Each painting was worth at least ten to twenty thousand dollars, and a few were a lot more. The same article mentioned museums that had bought and displayed his work. On more than one site, he was said to be an adherent of the Brandywine School of painting, centered around the artist Howard Pyle. Owen could see the influence—Crenshaw’s work had the same effect of no hard lines, of obvious dry-brushing, a technique that gave a scene the look of memory.
Back home, at bedtime, he went to sleep revisiting all the coincidences and vague synchronicities of the night world, trying to sort out the actual from his own fanciful speculation. There were elusive interludes of near-solution and long whirling storms of incidents and numbers until finally, perched on the verge of an answer, he woke to the paralysis and began, again, his struggle for freedom. Equally as tantalizing as the dream, escape from the loathed state of live burial harried him for hours. At one point, he even began praying, certainly not his usual practice. And, finally, he found himself rising away from his bed and body.
As Melody approached the picnic table, Owen called to her from the other side of the hedge. She passed through and asked, “What are you doing over here?”
“A little girl who lives in the house over there saw me last night.”
“Saw you? How do you mean?”
“I heard her crying to her parents there was a ghost in the backyard.”
“Very rare,” said Melody. “We’ll have to steer clear of her.”
They made their way toward the side fence and passage to the road. “What happened last night? I had to go it alone,” said Owen.
“My kid was sick. He had a fever and was puking. It’s going around the junior high like the Black Plague. My apologies.”
Down the street, there was a house with a fake wishing well on the front lawn. It was wrapped with silk flowers. In the waking world, every day Owen passed it on the way to work, the sight made him giddy with disdain for its creepy niceness. He led Melody there and they used it as a place to sit as he filled her in on what he’d discovered the previous night. While she swung her legs, her calves disappearing through the brick work of the well top, he caught her up on the solar cross, Aaron Feit, Crenshaw, the old house, and his theory as to the caper Feit and the young mother, Kiara, had planned. He paused and added, “I think the baby’s name is William.”