The Eyes of Darkness

had been drawn was sixteen pages long. In letters that were supposed to look as if they had been formed from rotting shroud cloth, the artist had emblazoned the title across the top of the first page, above a somber, well-detailed scene of a rain-swept graveyard. Tina stared at those words in shocked disbelief.
     
    THE BOY WHO WAS NOT DEAD
     
    She thought of the words on the chalkboard and on the computer printout: Not dead, not dead, not dead. . . .
    Her hands shook. She had trouble holding the magazine steady enough to read.
    The story was set in the mid-nineteenth century, when a physician's perception of the thin line between life and death was often cloudy. It was the tale of a boy, Kevin, who fell off a roof and took a bad knock on the head, thereafter slipping into a deep coma. The boy's vital signs were undetectable to the medical technology of that era. The doctor pronounced him dead, and his grieving parents committed Kevin to the grave. In those days the corpse was not embalmed; therefore, the boy was buried while still alive. Kevin's parents went away from the city immediately after the funeral, intending to spend a month at their summer house in the country, where they could be free from the press of business and social duties, the better to mourn their lost child. But the first night in the country, the mother received a vision in which Kevin was buried alive and calling for her. The vision was so vivid, so disturbing, that she and her husband raced back to the city that very night to have the grave reopened at dawn. But Death decided that Kevin belonged to him, because the funeral had been held already and because the grave had been closed. Death was determined that the parents would not reach the cemetery in time to save their son. Most of the story dealt with Death's attempts to stop the mother and father on their desperate night journey; they were assaulted by every form of the walking dead, every manner of living corpse and vampire and ghoul and zombie and ghost, but they triumphed. They arrived at the grave by dawn, had it opened, and found their son alive, released from his coma. The last panel of the illustrated story showed the parents and the boy walking out of the graveyard while Death watched them leave. Death was saying, "Only a temporary victory. You'll all be mine sooner or later. You'll be back some day. I'll be waiting for you."
    Tina was dry-mouthed, weak.
    She didn't know what to make of the damned thing.
    This was just a silly comic book, an absurd horror story. Yet . . . strange parallels existed between this gruesome tale and the recent ugliness in her own life.
    She put the magazine aside, cover-down, so she wouldn't have to meet Death's wormy, red-eyed gaze.
    The Boy Who Was Not Dead.
    It was weird.
    She had dreamed that Danny was buried alive. Into her dream she incorporated a grisly character from an old issue of a horror-comics magazine that was in Danny's collection. The lead story in this issue was about a boy, approximately Danny's age, mistakenly pronounced dead, then buried alive, and then exhumed.
    Coincidence?
    Yeah, sure, just about as coincidental as sunrise following sunset.
    Crazily, Tina felt as if her nightmare had not come from within her, but from without, as if some person or force had projected the dream into her mind in an effort to—
    To what?
    To tell her that Danny had been buried alive?
    Impossible. He could not have been buried alive. The boy had been battered, burned, frozen, horribly mutilated in the crash, dead beyond any shadow of a doubt. That's what both the authorities and the mortician had told her. Furthermore, this was not the mid-nineteenth century; these days, doctors could detect even the vaguest heartbeat, the shallowest respiration, the dimmest traces of brain-wave activity.
    Danny certainly had been dead when they had buried him.
    And if, by some million-to-one chance, the boy had been alive when he'd been buried, why would it take an entire year for her to receive a vision from the spirit world?
    This last thought profoundly shocked her. The spirit world? Visions? Clairvoyant experiences? She didn't believe in any of that psychic, supernatural stuff. At least she'd always thought she didn't believe in it. Yet now she was seriously considering the possibility that her dreams had some otherworldly significance. This was sheer claptrap. Utter nonsense. The roots of all dreams were to be found in the store of experiences in the psyche;