The arm holding her felt like a bar of iron. Selena tilted her head down, very slowly. She caught a glimpse of mottled gray, as if the man was wearing a tweed suit, and then, with an inarticulate screech, he shoved her, hard.
She hit the floor with one shoulder, legs still tangled in the sheets, and let out a yelp. Copper bolted upright at the foot of the bed, woofing in panic. Selena tried to roll, got one elbow under her, and faced ...
Empty sheets.
There was no one in the bed, unless you counted Copper. The dog came off the bed and began snuffling Selena’s face with deep concern. Selena pushed her muzzle away and sat up, staring at the bed.
There was no one there. Morning light streamed through the window, across the pillows. She stared at the one against the wall, trying to see if there was an impression from someone else’s head.That could be one? Maybe?
Yes, and where exactly did he go then? Flew over your head? Turned invisible?
“I dreamed it,” she said aloud, and laughed with sudden relief.It must have been one of the ones where you’re almost asleep or awake, something quick and super vivid, then you jerk violently and wake up. Instead of falling, I just thought someone was in bed with me.
It had felt incredibly real, but dreams always did when you were having them, didn’t they?
Copper was still looking around to see what the problem was. Had Selena spotted a jackrabbit in the bedroom? Copper would deal with it if she had, no questions asked.
Selena reached out and ruffled the Lab’s ears. “It’s okay,” she said. Her voice didn’t sound quite certain of that, so she said it again, with a little more conviction this time. “It’s okay. I just had a weird dream, that’s all.”
Copper considered this for a bit, then apparently decided that if her person was awake, that meant her person could take her outside to pee on something, and Selena resigned herself to not getting that extra hour of sleep after all.
Chapter 7
She made coffee, such as it was, and fried a few eggs, then took her breakfast out onto the back porch. It was still cool enough to be bearable, though the sky was already turning into a hard turquoise bowl. She sat down, letting the coffee chase away the last dregs of the dream, and that was when she saw the man in green at the far end of the garden.
Selena blinked a few times, but he didn’t go away. He was wearing skintight green clothing, or perhaps body paint. There was some strange hat or mask on his head, all green stripes, and he wore a golden collar around his neck.
He had been crouching down over the seedlings, but now he stood up. He was short and compact, and there was something strange about his forearms, as if something green grew on them. The mask turned toward Selena.
She glanced quickly down at Copper. The dog was stretched out on her side, a picture of unconcern. She noticed Selena looking at her and thudded her tail against the boards.
When she looked up again, the man was gone.
He would have had to move quickly to get out of the garden and into the brush. The gate was still closed.
Don’t be silly. Nobody could open the gate without the hinges screaming bloody murder.
It occurred to Selena that she might be hallucinating.First the dream, now this?
It had been five days since she took possession of the house. She had been living largely on eggs, cornbread, and leftover tamales, in various combinations. It did not seem likely that cornbread and eggs could make you hallucinate, but perhaps there was something in the water.
Is it a mirage? Do mirages look like that?
She looked down at her chicory coffee, then back up again, hoping to catch the green man in the act of reappearing.
He still wasn’t there. The air over the garden was sharp and clear, with no trace of heat haze. Even the cicadas hadn’t started up yet.
A cold prickly chill settled over her.
Selena knew that she was crazy. Walter had made that abundantly clear. He was a jerk, but that didn’t make himwrong.
It was the simple kind of crazy, though, the can’t-cope-anymore crazy, the kind that has you bursting into tears at small setbacks and contemplating your own mortality with sneaking relief. You could fake your way through life with that kind of crazy.
The kind of crazy where you saw people who weren’t there, where you hallucinated green men at the bottom of the garden—that was the major leagues. If she was going really trulyinsane...
I can’t be expected to deal with being insane. Nobody should be required to put up with that.
The notion that this was really too much for anyone to deal with was strangely appealing. She wasn’t doing it wrong. She was just insane, that was all. No wonder she had such a hard time making conversation right.
