The Fire and the Fog by David Alloggia Page A

dress.
    He started awake for the first time,
sweating. He was hot and clammy, and couldn’t stop thinking of
Sheane and Mae. He stripped to his undergarments and lay, eyes
closed, on his bed. He tried counting sheep, he tried performing
one of Don Vole’s more boring compositions in his head, but no
matter what he tried, it seemed like he sweated and tossed and
turned for hours before he finally fell back asleep, not even
noticing when he did so.
    This time he stood alone in a deserted city,
its houses crumbling and abandoned. He did not know the city, but
the cobwebs hanging in the doors of the buildings, just in front of
the complete blackness that waited inside each house frightened
him. Walking down a suddenly familiar street, he came to a fork in
the road, and at its center stood Sheane and Mae. He raised a hand
towards them, and they both turned on a dime and walked away from
him, each taking separate paths. Neither so much as glanced at him,
or each other, as they turned, they just walked away, leaving him
standing, arm outstretched.
    ‘It’s only a dream’ he thought as he turned
to sit in the middle of the fork; he would not chase either one, or
he would lose them both. He couldn’t lose them, he loved them. If
he lost them, he’d never see them again.
    As he sat, he fell. The city was gone, and he
was falling, fast as the wind. To either side of him as he fell
flashed visions of his two friends, but he could reach out to
neither. He watched as they grew old, married, had children, and
died, all without him. Why had they left him?
    Or had he left them?
    He didn’t know who they had married, or what
their children looked like, but as he looked at them falling beside
him, they looked the same. He knew they were getting older; knew
their lives were passing by without him. But it was the dream, he
knew, and he hated it.
    As he woke for the second time, he knew that
he had chosen neither girl, and that they had both moved on without
him. He felt lost, and alone, and hot again. Gel stood and moved to
the window by his bed, but by the time he had thrown open the
shutters, the dream had already passed from his mind.
    As he lay back down in bed and fell once more
into a fitful sleep, he forgot he even had a dream, but the
feelings of sadness and loneliness stayed with him.
    This time, Gel slept a while before he
started to dream again, though the dream was worse than any
before.
    His third dream that night was fire. Fire and
pain and death. In this dream, he stood over the town, watching as
his parents died and his friends were slaughtered, and the town
caught fire and burned to ashes around him. He listened to the
screams of the women and children as they died, their pain and
terror and agony twisting in his heart like a red-hot knife.
    Other things were happening, red men moved
through the streets with flashing swords, and people screamed, and
gunfire sounded, exploding through the quiet. But it was the fire
he heard the most. He heard it, almost felt it as it cracked and
burned, as it twisted and reached and devoured. It was frightening
and beautiful, its colours reaching up into the sky; blues and reds
and greens. The fire wove the most complex song he had ever heard
as it burned, one that he could barely begin to understand.
    When he woke finally, tears streaming down
his face, he thought that no other nightmare could ever be so
frightening. If he grew old and died without ever dreaming its like
again, he would die happy.
    And then he heard them; the screams floating
in through his bedroom window, the cries of pain and suffering from
his dream. He heard the crack of fire, the pop of wood boiling and
splitting in the heat. He thought for an instant, prayed for a
second, that he was still dreaming. But he realized that the
flickering red light blanketing his wall was not that of a pale
moon on a cloudless night, but the light of his village, his home,
his life, burning. And he was afraid.
    He heard heavy footsteps