The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams Read Online Free Page B

Wooly,
Wooly Cornell. And I’m not hearing her in my head. She’s coming from out
there. Definitely from the woods.
    “I say, Who the fuck’re
you? She says, ‘Do you want to keep going on like this? Do you want
to keep doing it this way?’ I don’t know what the hell is going on.
All of a sudden, these ghost lights, these clouds of fire, start
rising up over the trees.”
    “Ghost lights?”
    “That’s what we call ‘em.
People see ‘em out here all the time. Strange lights in the woods.
Everything around you goes quiet. Bugs, crickets, animals—there’s
no sound whatsoever. Far back as the 1600s there’s reports of
lights in the woods.”
    “Swamp gas.”
    “Possibly, yeah—I know
that. You got your plant life, animal matter decomposing in the
marshes, it produces methane. And methane can ignite as it rises.
But there could be more to it than that. The Algonquins, a lot of
their burial grounds are still out here. That’s what some people
think it is. They think the spirits of the dead are still in these
woods.”
    “Anyway.”
    “Okay, I see these ghost
lights, they’re rising from where this woman’s voice seems to be.
So I start following her. What the hell. I go into the woods, I
want to find out what this is all about. The woman keeps calling
me, only slowly moving away from me. And the lights keep following
her, deeper in to the woods. I keep following, I follow, I follow.
I have to know what’s going on. How long this all took I have no
idea, but eventually the lights brought me pretty much where we are
right now. Incredible, right?”
    “It’s still just swamp
gas.”
    “Maybe. But how do you
explain the woman’s voice?”
    “I’ll be polite and say I
can’t.”
    “And how do you explain
what happened next? I’m wandering blind out here, scared out of my
mind, but I want to know what this is. I’m walking just where we’re
walking now, it all stops. The voice stops. The lights stop. It all
just disappears. I’m standing here all by myself, lost who the fuck
knows where, with no light but the moon. I figured this was it. I’d
be lost out here forever. I was sure I was going to die.
    “Then I see this light,
right over there, through those bushes. It’s like a glowing, a
fire. But it’s not a ghost light. It’s too close to the ground,
it’s not up in the sky. So I head that way. C’mon.”
    We left the trail and
stumbled through a patch of thick brush.
    “It was that tree,” he
said, “that oak. You see that oak?”
    He was pointing to an
unpretentious, medium size oak maybe 20 feet tall.
    “That oak was glowing like
a Christmas tree. It was pulsing with lights, every square inch of
it. I get a little closer, I see that thousands of fireflies are
all over the thing. They were swarming on every branch, every
frigging leaf. It was just amazing to see. And the silence.
Complete, total silence. No crickets, no cicadas, no nothing. I
thought I’d finally lost my mind.
    “ Then I take a step closer
and, I don’t know, I guess I came too close. Whoosh. Like
that”—snap—“the fireflies take off. The Christmas tree goes out.
The whole thing goes black. All I can see now is something out
there, past those bushes. Something shining in the moonlight,
something big and round. I was right here, exactly right here when
I saw it. It looked, I swear, like a giant bald head lit by the
moon. So I make my way over there and—“
    He grabbed my arm and
pulled me through the rest of the brush.
    “I make my way over here,”
he said, parting the branches with his other hand, “and this is
what I see.”
     
     
    I couldn’t believe what I
was looking at. A huge, big ass boulder was sitting squat in the
middle of a clearing. It was maybe 25 feet long, 15 feet high, and
had to weigh close to 100 tons. And it was resting not on the
ground but on about a dozen smaller stones. The boulder was
perfectly balanced—shit, impossibly balanced—on a ring of tiny, two-foot-high stones.
I’d