Chapter 16 sixteen

Then something woke him up, so loud that he sat up in bed and wondered if Ellie had fallen on the floor or if Gage's crib had collapsed.Then he noticed the moon peeking out from behind the clouds, flooding the room with a cool white light.Then he saw Victor Pascoe standing in the doorway.The sound came when Pascoe opened the door. Pascoe was standing there, the cap on the left side of his head was sunken, and the blood had already coagulated on his face, like the facial masks painted by Indians when they fought.The collarbone protruded sharply, and he was smiling with his teeth showing. "Come on, doctor, we've got several places to go."

Louis looked around and saw his wife was sleeping soundly under a yellow quilt.He looked back at Pascoe, the dead man, but he didn't seem to be dead.Louis didn't feel scared, and he immediately realized why.This is a dream, he thought.It was only when Louis relaxed that he realized he had been afraid.There is no resurrection of the dead, which is physically impossible.The young man was in a dissection room in Bangor where pathologists may have sampled his brain and packed him away.Rachel would be terrified to hear the news of death, and she has a phobia of death, and she can't scream at the sight of Pascoe?My dear, Pascoe won't be here, can't be here.He was in a freezer with tags on his toes.And he certainly wasn't wearing red sweatpants there.

However, Louis had a strong desire to force himself to get up.Pascoe's eyes were on him the whole time.Louis lifted the quilt and got out of bed, stepping on the carpet with a horrible feeling.The dream was strangely real.Pascoe turned and walked towards the stairs. Louis couldn't keep up. He wanted to follow Pascoo very much, but he didn't want Pascoe to touch him. Even in his dream, it would be uncomfortable to be touched by a walking corpse. Louis does keep up, though, with Pascoe's track shorts looming ahead.They pass through the living room, dining room and kitchen.Louis thought Pascoe would unlatch the door and walk out when he got to the door, but Pascoe didn't do that, he didn't open the door, he walked through it.Louis looked in shock and thought: Just pass through like this?Amazing!Everyone can do this?Louis tried to do the same for himself, only to find, amusedly, that he only encountered solid wood.Apparently, even in his dreams, he was an uncompromising realist.Louis unlatched the door and went to the garage next to the door. Pascoe wasn't there.Louis thought for a moment to see if Pascoe had vanished. People in dreams usually disappear quickly, as do places in dreams.Maybe at first you dreamed that you were by the pool, but in the blink of an eye, you were climbing a volcano in Hawaii again.Louis was wondering if he couldn't find Pascoe, but when he came out of the garage, he saw Pascoe standing at the entrance of the path leading to the mountain from the lawn behind the house under the faint moonlight .

Louis was a little scared, he didn't want to go there, so he stopped.Pascoe looked back at Louis, his eyes gleaming in the moonlight.Louis felt his heart tighten with fear, and Pascoe's protruding collarbone and clotted blood appeared in front of his eyes again.Louis found it irresistible to those eyes, as if he had been hypnotized, controlled, unable to change anything, maybe Pascoe's death.A man may have studied medicine in school for 20 years and there is nothing he can do about a wounded man who hit his head against a tree and left a big hole.Louis was thinking about this, but his feet still walked towards the path, closely following the red sports shorts.Louis didn't like the dream, not at all, it was too real.He could feel the cool dew on his bare feet, and he could feel the night wind blowing on his body in shorts.Once, in a pine forest, he felt the pine needles on the ground prick his heels.

It's okay, don't be afraid.I'm at home, in my own bed.No matter how real it is, it's just a dream, and like any other dream, when you wake up in the morning, it will feel absurd.Upon waking, my consciousness would find that the dream was incoherent. A dead branch pinched the bicep in Louis's right arm, and he grinned in pain.Pascoe swayed ahead like a moving shadow, and Louis' fear became clearer in his mind, like a shiny sculpture: I'm following a dead man through the woods to a pet cemetery, and this isn't a dream.God, help me, this is not a dream, this is reality.

They walked down the wooded hillside, the path forming a gentle S-shape among the trees.Without boots, Louis felt the mud sticky under his feet, and his toes were stuck together.Louis tried his best to think he was dreaming, but it didn't feel like a dream at all.When they reached the open space in the cemetery, Pascoe stopped in front of the headstone of Smudge the docile kitten and turned to face Louis.Luis felt more and more horrified, and Pascoe grinned, baring his teeth, twisting his bloodstained lips.He raised an arm and stretched it forward. Louis looked in the direction he pointed, his eyes widened, his hand covered his mouth, and he hummed in pain.He felt his cheeks wet, and it turned out that he was crying from extreme fear.

Louis saw the pile of dead wood that Chad had reminded Ellie to leave the other day turned into a pile of bones, bones moving, some human skulls, some animal skulls, twisted together, finger bones, oh, the whole pile of bones moving, crawling— Pascoe came towards him, his bloody face in the moonlight, and Louis' last thought was to scream: wake up screaming, even if you wake up your wife, your daughter, your son.The whole house and neighbors are irrelevant.Scream scream scream, wake up wake up wake up— But Louis heard only the sound of the wind blowing, as if a child were sitting somewhere, practicing how to whistle.

Pascoe came closer and said, "Don't open the door." Louis fell to his knees in fright, and Pascoe looked down at Louis with a patient look on his face. At first, Louis thought it was a sympathetic expression Woolen cloth.Pascoe continued pointing to the pile of bones and said, "Don't go there, Doctor, don't go there no matter how much you feel you must. That barrier is insurmountable. Remember this: There is a supernatural power here, It's hard for you to understand. It's an ancient restless force. Remember." Louis tried to scream again, but he couldn't.

Pascoe said, "I'm here as a friend, doc." Louis wondered if Pascoe really used the word friend, as if Pascoe spoke a foreign language, but, thinking about it, Louis felt that That's the word he used.As Pascoe drew closer, he continued: "The end is near for you and your loved ones." Pascoe was so close to Luis that he could smell death in him. Pascoe reached out to pull Louis. There was that soft, maddening sound of bones clashing again. Luis struggled to avoid Pascoe's hand, lost his balance, and hit a tombstone with his hand, which fell sideways to the ground.Pascoe's face tilted up too, filling the sky.

"Doctor, you must remember." Louis tried to scream, and the world slowly spun away—but he could still hear the clink of bones in the moonlight.