He traveled on, toward the end of the road, and just before the entrance to the park, he passed a driveway with a running car parked in it. He peered into the vehicle and saw, by the light of an e-reader in her hand, a young woman. She was fast asleep behind the wheel. In the dark back seat, there was a fat-faced baby, smiling and kicking its legs. Owen surmised it was some failed attempt to get the child to sleep.
These acts he was witnessing would be seen by no one else. Night, its solitude and cover, gave a thrilling aspect to the mundane—like knowing a secret. What the secret was, he had no idea. But as he came to the end of the sidewalk at the entrance to the park, and took a step onto the gravel path, he formed a theory that people were probably most themselves after sunset. He walked along the path through the park, just east of the baseball diamond. It came to him that he didn’t want to wind up in the pine barrens in his phantom state. But a few feet on, he saw a waist-high sign that was a wooden arrow. It pointed the way to the cemetery of St. Ifritia.
That’s how he found out why he was there. He’d come to pay his respects. He was in the cemetery where the event for Helen Roan had been held. A funeral without a body. He took the path to search for the grave marker awaiting her remains. His pale blue glow lit the headstones just enough so he could read them. As he crept along, he realized he was fulfilling some inner directive to atone for missing Helen’s memorial. He also became conscious of the fact that he was walking at night in a cemetery as a kind of ghost.
He came to a gravesite near a tree bedecked with pink and white ribbons, and hung with strings tied to now-deflated balloons. The waist-high marble marker in front of the tree read IN MEMORY OF HELEN ROAN and gave her dates. At the foot of the marker was a gaping hole awaiting its cargo.
With head bowed, he stood in silence and made his peace with Helen Roan. “I wish I could have saved you,” he whispered. He expected her spirit to fly out of the tree and admonish him for being a selfish coward. He occasionally had to remind himself that it wasn’t a fantasy land he now traveled but reality. That was the strangest part. He stood there for a time, hands folded in front of him, until he got the impression someone was watching him. Turning quickly, he saw no one. Slowly and quietly, he moved away from Helen’s headstone and back toward the path that led to the park.
Moving clear of the rows of headstones, he turned and saw a figure, glowing pale blue like himself, moving toward him from a distance of five or six rows. Owen ran, but he found that running in the night world was like running on the moon. Because his spirit form was lighter, each thrust of the leg shot you way up but not necessarily very far forward. Owen leaped house high but was slowed in his escape. The other glowing figure caught up and told him to stop. When he floated slowly down from on high, the figure made to take his hand to ground him, but the hand passed right through his.
She laughed as he made contact with the ground and bounced up a foot and a half.
“Who are you?” asked Owen, finally settling and turning to see her. He could tell it was a woman through the pale blue glow. She wore a robe and a nightgown like Sleeping Beauty in the mural but with a much shorter hem and a lace collar instead of décolletage. Her hair was short, and he couldn’t tell because of its incandescence what color it would be in the waking world.
“I’m a sleeper like you,” she said. And in that instant, he was called back, seemingly yanked by the collar, all the way across the park and back up his street, into his bed.
At breakfast the next morning, instead of his usual contemplation of the rescue of Sleeping Beauty, he tried to recall the face of the woman he met in the night world. Another person having an out-of-body experience? He’d never considered the possibility. She called herself a “sleeper.” He wondered how many sleepers there were in the area, and if she might have recognized him from the library. On one hand, he found it wondrous that sleeping people could shed their corporeal selves and rise up to meet as spirits or phantoms in the real world. On the other hand, the thought carried a tinge of disappointment in that he’d treasured the quiet solitude of the night world.
He took off for work along his secret route, impatient to be at the end of the day and to experience the phenomenon again. It was his plan next time to more carefully observe and to write down what he experienced. Nothing much happened at the library. Mrs. Hultz arrived at noon to read to whatever toddlers were brought in by their mothers or fathers for story time. No takers showed, so she waylaid Owen with her tales of distant relations and medical issues. Just before she had mercy and left his office, though, she told him she’d seen in that day’s newspaper an article about the gunman from the Busy Bee. The authorities didn’t have a name for him yet, but they mentioned a small black tattoo of a cross in a circle on his wrist that they believed to be a gang affiliation sign.
“I saw it,” said Owen.
“Gangs in Westwend,” said Mrs. Hultz, and shook her head.
5
OWEN STRUGGLED AGAINST THE inertia of his body for what felt like an hour before being released to the night. Out on the street, he decided to head toward town, hoping since there were more people in that direction, there would be more sleepers. He desperately wanted answers about the dark world he roamed. A few steps along the sidewalk and he noticed something up ahead. A pale blue glow, passing through the wall of a neighbor’s house.
The man who owned the house was a forbidding fellow who never waved when Owen greeted him, yelled at the kids not to play on the sidewalk in front of his place, and had a nasty-looking pit bull. Although Owen had promised himself he wouldn’t spy on people in their homes beyond looking in the lighted windows, his curiosity got the better of him. What’s the point of this special power if not to see what is otherwise unseen?
He trod across the man’s lawn and went to the side of the house where he’d seen the other glowing figure enter through the wall next to the chimney. I’m not only a coward but now a pervert as well, he thought as he took a step forward and passed through the wall into a darkened dining room. The first thing he noticed was the light in the next room. He crept, though he didn’t have to, to the doorway and peered in. There was the man, a grimace upon his face and his hands covering his eyes.
Owen toured the downstairs—the kitchen, the bathroom, a disheveled bedroom. The place was poorly taken care of. There were dishes in the sink, and dust balls as silent as Owen rolled along the wooden floor of the hallway. He wondered why he’d decided to invade the man’s house. What he found was a life as lonely as his own, though not as neat, which he wasn’t sure counted for anything. Instead of wonder, he’d discovered a shabby reality.
There was one more room at the end of the hall. A light from inside streamed out into the dark through the sliver of door that was ajar. Inside the room he could faintly hear the sound of rhythmic, raspy breaths, or perhaps some mechanical device laboring steadily away. He was intrigued enough to pass through the door. In front of him was a bed holding an emaciated woman. She was dressed in red satin pajamas and had a green kerchief around her head. She slept peacefully, breathing in and out with the help of a machine standing next to the bed. There was a plastic mask covering her mouth and nose with a tube attaching it to the device. A small table in the corner of the room was crowded with pill bottles and a vase containing a red rose. Although Owen really couldn’t see what she looked like, he saw enough of her cheeks and forehead to see her color was ashen.