Chapter 57: Patti's Dream
The stone wall on the side of the church was cold against Patti's back. She leaned into it, eyes shut tight, long lashes fluttering slightly in the morning light.
The oak tree's dappled shadow moved across her face. Her breathing was still a little quick from everything that had just happened with the choir.
Henry stood a step away from her. He could see the fine detail of her expression — the slight furrow of concentration, the way her face looked like someone sorting through an old box of photographs.
"The only thing I remember is her singing to me," Patti said, her voice coming out soft and a little far away, like she was narrating something happening behind her eyes. "Her voice was warm. So I always figured she ended up in Las Vegas. The biggest stages, the brightest lights. She should be there, singing for a real audience."
"Okay," Henry said, almost immediately. His voice had a certainty to it that surprised even him. He turned and picked up the transistor radio he'd left on the narrow windowsill.
"She's in Las Vegas."
He clicked it on. Instead of searching for a station, he turned the volume all the way up.
Static hit the air — loud, continuous, the specific white noise of a radio lost between signals. It filled the narrow passage beside the church like a wave coming in.
Henry had lived with a version of this sound inside his own head for as long as he could remember. Having it outside, real and physical, helped him locate something — the same way pressing your tongue against a sore tooth told you it was still there.
The static moved in the air between them. He held the radio out, angled toward Patti, watching her face.
"Now," he said, low and steady under the noise, "tell me how you find her. Take me through it. Step by step."
Patti's brow pulled tighter. This was ridiculous. She knew it was ridiculous. She was standing outside a church in Hawkins, Indiana, on a Sunday morning, listening to radio static with her eyes closed, trying to narrate her way to Las Vegas to find a woman she'd only ever seen in a single newspaper clipping.
If anyone from school walked by right now, she'd never recover.
But Henry's voice had something in it she wasn't used to hearing from people — a complete absence of performance. He wasn't trying to sound convincing. He just was. And the strange warmth from the confessional hadn't fully worn off yet.
"...I sneak backstage," Patti said, almost reluctantly, the first sentence coming out like she was humoring him. "After a show. Late at night."
She let herself picture it: a girl from Indiana who didn't belong, slipping through a service entrance into something big and bright and entirely not hers. Like a kid who'd wandered past the velvet rope at the county fair and ended up somewhere she wasn't supposed to be.
But the moment the words left her mouth — something shifted.
Not dramatically. Not like in the movies. More like when a television set finally gets its rabbit ears adjusted right and the picture sharpens from snow into something you can actually see. The stone wall behind her back, the gravel under her feet, the distant sound of cars on the main road — it all went slightly soft around the edges. Like a photograph taken a half-second out of focus.
Patti didn't open her eyes. But she felt the change, the way you feel a change in air pressure before a storm.
The static seemed to take on shape. Light moved behind her closed eyelids in patterns that didn't feel random.
"Wait," she said, her voice uncertain. "This is just — this is silly."
She didn't know what the point was, other than proving they were both hopeless.
"No — no, keep going," Henry said quickly, and his voice had that edge of urgency again, the one that didn't sound like a trick. "It's working. I can feel it. Be more specific. Like you're really there."
Patti hesitated. Then she thought: I've already stood in a church confessional talking about being an orphan with a boy I met four days ago. What exactly am I protecting at this point?
She took a breath and let herself sink into it.
"I sneak backstage after the show," she said again, more settled this time. "It's late. The hallway lights are those bare fluorescent ones — the kind that hum. The carpet is thick and dark red. Everything smells like cigarette smoke and hairspray and — sweat, honestly. That kind of sweat that comes from performing." She paused. "You can hear music from somewhere further in. Something upbeat. But through all the walls it's just bass and rhythm."
Henry held the radio and his knuckles went white.
He wasn't looking at Patti. He was looking at a fixed point in the air between them, pupils slightly contracted, like a man staring at something three feet behind what was actually there.
In the static, very faintly — so faint it could have been imagination — syllables surfaced and sank. A voice. A chord. Gone before you could name it.
"I see dancers," Patti continued, her voice lighter now, drifting. "Coming out of a dressing room. They all look alike — same hair, same shoes, same way of walking."
"What are they doing?" Henry asked.
"They're in a rehearsal hall." She paused. "A big one. Wood floors."
"Rehearsing what?"
"My mother's show." She said it quietly. "That's what I'm telling myself, anyway."
And in the dream — because that was what it was becoming, something between imagination and dream — a figure separated from the other dancers. A woman, older, hair pinned up, wearing the expression of someone whose job was managing chaos. She moved toward Patti with the energy of a person who had seen everything twice.
"Who are you?" the woman asked.
Patti answered without thinking, the words coming up from somewhere lower than her throat. "I'm Patti. I'm looking for my mom."
The woman looked her over. Her expression did the specific thing that adults' expressions did when they were going to be unkind and had decided to frame it as helpfulness. "Honey, if I had a nickel for every girl who came through that door looking for her mother, I could retire to Florida."
The words landed like a hand pressing down on something tender.
Patti's shoulders dropped, just slightly. In reality and in the dream both.
Henry saw it. He couldn't let her stop here — couldn't let an imaginary gatekeeper be the thing that ended this.
"What about the other dancers?" he said, quickly. "Why not join them?"
Patti's brow furrowed in the dream. The dancers were professionals. Their movements were practiced and precise, the result of years of classes and rehearsal. She shook her head. "I don't know those steps. I can't even make myself go to a school dance."
"So?" Henry's voice shifted — lighter, almost teasing. "This is a dream, Patti. The rules are different. There's no one watching. It's just you."
She was quiet.
Then, slowly, she took a step toward the rehearsal hall floor.
Then another.
Her body began to find the music, tentative at first — just her shoulders, just the shift of her weight. Then her arms. Then her feet, lifting and settling against the beat.
She wasn't doing it right. She knew she wasn't doing it right. But she was doing it.
In reality, Henry watched her fingers start to tap lightly against the church wall, her heel rising and falling in the smallest possible movement.
The static around them changed. Still noise — but somewhere in it, like finding a station at the very edge of its range, there were fragments. A brass section. The echo of a crowd. The tail end of a laugh.
Henry pressed his arms tighter around the radio and pushed more of himself into it — more attention, more will, more of whatever it was that lived in the place between his thoughts and the outside world.
Patti danced in the dream for a while, and something loosened in her. No one comparing her posture. No choir director's corrections. No awareness of how she looked from the outside. Just movement and the feeling of her own body finding a rhythm.
She stopped mid-turn.
The rehearsal hall was empty except for the blurry-faced dancers who were still going, automated and cheerful, entirely undisturbed.
She looked around at the grand, impersonal space.
"No," she said, her voice dropping. "I can't dance. I need to find her. That's why I'm here."
Henry felt the dream's focus shift, felt Patti's attention pull toward something deeper and further than he could reliably follow right now.
"I bet you haven't checked the other side of the hall," he said.
It was the first thing he thought of. A distraction, yes — but also, impulsively, he pushed at the edge of the dream space, and on the far side of the rehearsal hall, a door appeared. Through it came the sound of a different band playing something with more kick to it, something that moved.
And in the doorway, leaning against the frame with the easy confidence of guys who practiced looking that way — a handful of boys about their age, watching the hall.
Patti saw them and laughed. She couldn't help it. It was such a blatant, Hollywood-musical thing to do. The kind of thing you rolled your eyes at in movies and then ended up humming on the walk home.
"Then why don't you dance?" she asked, turning to where Henry was in the dream. There was color in her face now, the laughter still working in her expression.
Henry, in reality, froze.
He hadn't expected the invitation. He opened his mouth to refuse — and in the dream, a version of him made a very clear, very emphatic no gesture, hands up, head shaking.
Every boy in the doorway mirrored it exactly. In perfect unison. Like backup dancers who had been specifically rehearsed to copy the most awkward person in the room.
Patti nearly doubled over.
Henry felt the dream through whatever thin connection existed between them, caught the comical echo of it, and despite everything — despite the nosebleed starting, despite the static fraying at the edges — he laughed a little too.
"Unless," he said carefully, watching her smiling face, "you actually want to see me dance."
Before she could answer, he started moving.
He had no idea what he was doing. He had zero natural aptitude for this and he knew it immediately. He shifted from foot to foot, raised his arms at wrong angles, moved his elbows in a way that made no physical sense. The radio swayed in his grip. The static swayed with it.
In the dream, his image joined the boys in the doorway — and whatever awkward, determined, entirely-off-beat thing he was doing in reality came through in full.
Patti was laughing for real now. Not performing it. Just laughing, the kind that happened when something was genuinely funny and your face couldn't do anything else about it.
"You're right," she said, still grinning. "You really can't dance."
Henry stopped, caught between embarrassment and the specific, unfamiliar feeling of having made someone laugh because of something he actually did rather than something he accidentally was.
"I could practice," he said. "In the attic. I have time."
"No — I'm sorry," Patti said quickly, still smiling. "I didn't mean it like that. It's just — distinctive. It's a very distinctive style."
Henry looked at her.
"So you want more?" he said.
"No." Her voice settled back into something quieter. "I want to find my mom."
He nodded. He pulled himself back together, pulled the fraying edges of his concentration back toward center, and made the promise. "We'll find her."
The radio cut out.
The static was gone and in its place — a voice.
A woman's voice, clear and warm, singing. Not a fragment. Not a trick of the static. A real melody, moving and slightly heartbroken in the specific way that certain songs carried sadness without explaining it.
Patti's whole body went rigid.
Her eyes snapped open — then closed again, fast, like she was afraid to break the surface. Her face was lit up with something that looked almost like pain.
She moved through the dream without thinking now. Not dancing, not wandering — walking with purpose. Following the voice.
She pushed through a side door in the rehearsal hall into a back corridor. Props stacked against the walls. Costume racks. Bare bulbs overhead. The voice was louder here. Close.
At the end of the corridor, a door stood slightly open. Warm light pooled through the gap. The voice was coming from right behind it.
Patti reached for the handle —
The singing stopped.
The radio crashed back into static.
Patti's eyes opened. Stone wall. Church. Henry in front of her, pale and sweating, a thin line of blood running from his left nostril. The transistor radio in his hands, full of noise again.
The backstage corridor was gone. The door was gone. The voice was gone.
The loss hit her like stepping off a curb that was taller than you expected.
"Henry." She reached out and grabbed the edge of the radio. "Don't stop. Keep going."
"I can't." He took a small step back, holding it. His face had the look of someone who had just seen the edge of something and didn't want to go back. "I can't do it anymore."
"Why not?"
"What if it turns into a nightmare?" His voice was quiet. He wasn't looking at her; he was looking at the gravel path. "I can't control what it becomes. When it goes wrong, it—"
He stopped.
He was thinking about the cat. She could tell, somehow, even without knowing what he meant.
Patti looked at his face — the paleness, the blood, the slight tremor in his hands. He wasn't making an excuse. He was genuinely scared.
She took a step toward him.
"I trust you," she said. It came out simple and direct. "You wouldn't let it go bad. I know you wouldn't." She paused. "And she was right there, Henry. Right behind that door. That's worth the risk. For me, it is."
Henry looked up.
Her eyes were steady and clear and had none of the things in them he was used to seeing — no suspicion, no calculation, no the particular wariness of someone deciding whether he was safe to be near.
He made a decision he probably shouldn't have made.
"Okay," he said.
He closed his eyes — not to enter the dream, just to find the thread again, the connection he'd let drop. He pushed past the warm pulse in his sinuses, past the exhaustion pooling behind his eyes, and found it.
The static shifted. It didn't become singing immediately. It gathered — fragments of music drifting up from nowhere, the ambient sound of a crowd, the faint tidal sweep of applause. Like the radio was pulling in every station that had ever carried a voice worth hearing.
Patti closed her eyes.
The corridor came back. Dim. Props and costume racks. Bare bulbs.
The door at the end, slightly open, warm light through the crack.
Behind her, the rehearsal hall was full now — the blurry-faced dancers moving in something closer to Broadway than reality, big and theatrical and entirely dream-logical, the kind of performance that didn't happen anywhere except in this in-between place. The noise of the radio had become their soundtrack, full and impossible.
Patti didn't look at them. She walked.
The door.
The light.
She reached out —
On the rear-projection screen above the stage, slowly brightening through the gathered light and sound — a silhouette. A woman, standing center stage, elegant and still. The applause from the static-crowd swelled.
"Is that her?" Patti whispered, breathless.
Henry didn't answer.
He was using everything he had to hold it there, to keep it stable, to stop himself from collapsing the image into something concrete that came from his imagination instead of hers. He could feel the shape of what wanted to happen — his mind trying to fill in the silhouette with something specific, something his own understanding of "a mother on a Las Vegas stage" would produce — and he kept refusing, kept holding the outline open.
His nosebleed had gone from a trickle to something that required attention.
The sound peaked.
The dream shattered.
Patti opened her eyes. Church wall. Gravel. Henry, blood on his upper lip and chin now, looking like he might need to sit down.
The silence afterward was large.
"It wasn't real," Patti said. Her voice came out flat, the way voices did when they were trying not to show how much something cost.
"I told you it was a dream," Henry said. His voice was rough.
She looked at him, and the feelings were complicated enough that she didn't try to sort them out immediately. That had been real. The corridor, the door, the voice, the silhouette — none of it had felt like a daydream. It had felt like a place she'd been inside of.
And it had ended one door short.
"I thought you could make things real," she said.
Henry gave a smile that didn't reach anywhere it was supposed to reach. "It's not that simple."
"Why not?" She meant it as a genuine question.
A voice intervened before he could answer.
"The Miller family is holding a memorial service for Pranson this afternoon, Patricia."
Principal Newby had materialized a few feet away, hands clasped behind his back, face set in the expression he used to communicate disappointment without raising his voice. He had clearly been there long enough to have seen most of it — Henry's state, their proximity, the radio, whatever conclusion he'd drawn from all of it.
His gaze moved across Henry's face like someone noting damage, and then returned to Patti.
"Come join us for coffee and cake. Your mother is inside waiting."
The word mother landed oddly in the air after everything.
Patti drew back slightly, pulled by the particular gravity of her father's presence. She opened her mouth, closed it.
Across the path, Victor Creel had also materialized. He took one look at his son's face — the blood, the pallor — and something moved behind his eyes that wasn't quite surprise. He adjusted his expression quickly and moved toward Principal Newby with a hand extended.
"Victor Creel." His voice carried the easy authority of someone who'd learned how to enter a room. "I understand you were a military man, sir."
Newby accepted the handshake, his manner cooling slightly toward the formal. "Robert Newby. Major. What division?"
"98th. Second wave at Normandy."
The temperature between the two men shifted a degree. Not warmth exactly, but the specific recognition of shared weight. Newby nodded once, slow.
"Not many came back from the second wave."
"No sir." Victor's voice went quiet and genuine. "I still have nights about it."
It was the most honest thing Henry had ever heard his father say, and it was said to a stranger.
Virginia had moved to Henry's side while the men talked. She took one look at his face and her expression went straight to terrified.
"Henry." Low, sharp, the voice she used when something had happened and she needed to know how bad. "Were you with that girl?"
"No," he said, automatically, looking at the ground.
"Is that blood?" Her voice climbed. Her hand came up, pointing at his face. "Did you hurt yourself?"
"I'm fine."
"Did you hurt her?" Her voice had dropped again, but the fear in it was worse at low volume. She grabbed his arm.
Henry shook her off, harder than he meant to. "No! We were talking!"
His voice came out loud. Heads turned. Victor and Newby both looked over.
Virginia stared at him with the expression he hated most — the one that looked at him the way you looked at weather you were trying to predict. Trying to decide if the storm was coming.
"You're lying," she said. "Henry. You can tell me."
He looked at her and felt the specific exhaustion of being known partially, and incorrectly, for his entire life.
"What exactly did you think I was going to do?" he said.
She didn't answer. She didn't have to. The answer lived in Lincoln County, in the priest, in every conversation they'd had in rooms with the doors closed.
"Victor." Her voice went high and final. "Get Alice. We're leaving."
"We haven't had cake yet," Alice said, from where she'd been quietly waiting, apparently unaware that anything unusual was happening.
Victor looked at his wife, at his son, at Principal Newby's unreadable expression, at the small crowd of churchgoers who had slowed down to observe the Creel family conducting its business in public. He made the particular face of a man adding up a social situation and finding the total unacceptable.
"I apologize, sir." He turned back to Newby, the performance back in place. "Small family matter. We'll head out."
Newby nodded once. "Of course."
Virginia turned back to Henry, and her voice came out with the full weight of a command she expected to be obeyed. "You are not to see that girl again. Do you understand me?"
Henry stood there.
He watched his parents and Alice move toward the parking lot. Virginia looked back once, the full complicated disaster of her love and her fear concentrated in that single glance, and then she looked away.
Henry stood in the passage alone.
The church steeple was very bright against the morning sky. From inside, the smell of coffee was drifting out, mixed with the faint sweetness of something baked. The radio was still in his hands, turned down now to a thin hiss.
For the next several days, time moved slowly and without purpose for Henry Creel.
He kept to the attic. He kept to the radio.
And on the frequency Bob's channel used — the one Claudia Miller had announced her reward on, the one that connected the basements and bedrooms of half of Hawkins — the reports came in steadily.
Five animals, in nine days.
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