Excerpt of Quiet as the Grave by Kathleen O'Brien

EVEN AS THE DREAM played out, the man knew he was dreaming. Except...how could dream be the right word for anything so real? It was more like time travel. While his body lay there, helpless on the bed, twitching and whimpering and trying to wake up, his mind flew back to the cave and lived it all again.

Lived the stink. The air in the cave was wet. It had rained all day, and moisture clung to the slimy, pitted walls. Now and then a pocket of algae grew too heavy and popped from its secret pore. It slid across the gray rock slowly, an insect leaving behind a shining trail of ooze.

Everyone had come tonight, which was rare — but they must have heard that this would be special. Too many men crowded into the space, so the wet, stinking air was hot. He felt light-headed, as if the oxygen levels were too low. He wondered if they'd all die here, breathing foul air until they collapsed where they stood. How long would their bodies lie in their black robes before anyone discovered them?

Maybe they'd never be found, and they'd rot here. Poetic justice, surely. They were already rotted on the inside.

His mask was too tight. He couldn't breathe. He adjusted the cloth so that the eye and mouth holes lined up better.

When the girl was brought in, it was obvious she'd been drugged. The man practically had to drag her through the opening. Her head kept dropping. She made small sounds that weren't quite human, more like a puppy whining in a cage.

From there the dream went black. No sight. All sounds. The sound of metal against metal. Metal against rock. Metal against skin.

And always the puppy sound, begging. Struggling to find its way out of the cage. Sometimes the noises escalated a little, but they never got very loud. The cage held. The puppy had almost given up hope.

The cave seemed to come alive then, as if it was being sucked into an auditory whirlwind. Weeping and low moans. Wet noises, as if someone gargled fear. Heavy breathing that rode the naked back of animal grunts. Babbling, strangely religious, from the blind trance of terror.

And then, finally, at the very end, one heartbreaking human word. The word to which everyone, even the dreamer, could be reduced, if things got bad enough.

"Mommy," the girl cried, though God only knew where her mother was. Not here, not in this wet stone room full of infected air and sweating men. The girl hadn't been more than a child when she came in, but she was a baby now. They had peeled fifteen years from her in fifteen minutes.

"Mommy, help me!"

And it was at that moment — every time, no matter how hard he prayed it wouldn't happen — that the dreamer felt his body jerk and release, spreading shame all over his pajamas, his sheets, his soul.

THE TUXEDO LAKE Country Day School Open House was the highlight of the elementary school season, and the Tuxedo Lake mothers knew it. They spent the entire morning getting ready. Manicures, pedicures, facials, eyebrow waxing and a hundred other little rituals Mike Frome had never known existed until he married Justine Millner.

Though he and Justine had been divorced two years now, he would never forget what an eye-opener the six years of their marriage had been. Her sunshine-colored hair, which used to mesmerize him the way a shiny bell on a string mesmerizes a cat, apparently was really an ordinary brown. Without its makeup, her face seemed to have different contours entirely. At home, he rarely saw that ivory skin. It was almost always buried beneath green cream and hot towels. Sometimes, when he turned to her at night — in the early days, when he still bothered to — he found her hands encased in gel-filled gloves that slid and squished when he touched them.

He would have been able to live with all that. It was called growing up, he supposed. Like discovering there's no such thing as Santa Claus. He could have coped, if only she hadn't been such a sick bitch. If he lived to be a million years old, he'd never understand why he hadn't seen sooner what a bitch she was.

Still, he'd put up with it for Gavin's sake. Gavin, who had been conceived when Mike and Justine were only teenagers — and who had been seven months old before his parents made things legal — loved his mother. So Mike had tried to love her, too.

He'd tried for six whole years that felt more like six hundred. Then he just couldn't pretend anymore. He had to get out, or he'd die. He figured Gavin was better off with a part-time dad than a dead one.

Since then, he'd worked hard to make this split-parenting thing a partnership. For the past two years, he and Justine had attended every single one of Gavin's Little League games together, and the kiddy birthday parties and, of course, the deadly dull PTA functions.

To attend this one, he'd stopped right in the most critical stage of a job. The Proctors' boathouse was almost finished, and he should be there. But he'd told the carpenters to take the afternoon off — which surprised the hell out of them, since ordinarily at the end of a job he was hyperfocused.

The Open House was more important. The fourth-graders were staging a musical play to welcome the parents to a new school year. Learning Is Fun featured historical characters who had demonstrated a love for education. Apparently Gavin's role was as the teacher in a one-room country school — a fact Justine had only this minute discovered.

"This must be a mistake," she was saying to Cicely Tillman, the mother of one of Gavin's friends. Cicely wore a small name tag shaped like a bow tie that read Cicely — Volunteer Mommy.

"No," Cicely, the Volunteer Mommy, said. "It's not a mistake."

"It must be," Justine said again, and Mike recognized that tone. Volunteer Mommy would be smart to back off. "Gavin was supposed to be the narrator. He was supposed to be Abraham Lincoln."

"I know, I know, it's a shame, but he said he didn't want the part," Cicely explained, her voice brimming with the fakest sympathy Mike had ever heard, even from Cicely. "He wanted something smaller."

Justine scanned her program. "But this...this farmer isn't even a named part. What about Socrates? Or even Joseph Campbell?"

"We're five minutes from opening curtain, Justine." Judy Stott, who was the principal of Tuxedo Lake Country Day School, and also Justine's next-door neighbor, had noticed the fracas and joined the two ladies.

"But Judy —"

Judy reached out and patted Justine's arm. "Some children just aren't comfortable in the spotlight," she said. "I'm sure Gavin shines in other areas."

Oh, brother. Well, even if Cicely and Judy didn't have the sense to get away, Mike did. He found a folding chair fifth row center and claimed it. While the ladies' drama continued, he watched the stage. Someone new must be running the spotlight. The glowing circle lurched all over the blue curtain, leaped to the side and hit the American flag, then slid down the stairs, only to pop up again on the curtain.

When the overhead lights flickered, warning that the show was about to begin, Justine finally arranged herself next to him with a waft of Chanel. She hummed with fury.

"Did you hear that? Not comfortable in the limelight! Did you hear that? Can you believe how rude?"

Mike rolled his paper program into a cylinder and kept his eyes on the stage, where the curtains were now undulating with restless lumps. The kids, no doubt, trying to find their places.

"No, I didn't hear it." He didn't want to get into this.

"I was too busy wondering what exactly it means to be a 'volunteer mommy." Do you think they're implying that —"

But he should have known Justine wouldn't respond to any satirical attempt to change the subject. Justine didn't have a sense of humor at the best of times. And this was definitely not the best of times. She could really be like a dog with a bone, if she thought she'd been slighted.

"That self-important little pencil pusher," she whispered sharply, leaning her head toward his. "Just because she's the principal, she thinks she's God around here. She's a glorified babysitter. And her fool of a husband sells thumbtacks, for God's sake."

Mike set his jaw. He liked Phil Stott, who was kind of a wuss, but a damn nice guy.

"And she has the nerve to say Gavin isn't comfortable in the limelight. Right to my face."

Mike sighed and looked at his ex-wife. She was gorgeous, of course. She never ventured out of the house without looking perfect. But someone really should tell her that if she didn't stop disapproving of everything, her lousy temper was going to gouge furrows between those carefully waxed-and-dyed eyebrows before her thirtieth birthday.

"Gavin isn't comfortable in the limelight," he said, deciding to ignore the non sequitur about the thumb- tacks. "Why would it be rude to say so?"

Justine glared at him a minute, then, flaring her elegant nostrils, turned her head toward the stage and tapped her program on the palm of her hand.

"For God's sake, Mike," she said under her breath.

"Don't play stupid. Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about."

"I don't know what you're talking about. Frankly, that's the case about ninety percent of the time. No, make that ninety-nine."

She whipped her head around, but he got lucky. Taped music filled the air, the curtains began to open, two jerky feet at a time, and a pint-size Abraham Lincoln, complete with beard and top hat, stepped forward. It took the spotlight a few seconds to find him, and when it did Justine growled quietly.

"See? See what I mean? That's Hugh. Cecily took the part away from Gavin so she could give it to her own son. And Judy let her.You can't tell me it's not deliberate."

He didn't answer. He had spotted Gavin in the background, on the small risers that had been set up on either side of the stage. Mike had been to enough of these performances to know that, one at a time, the students would climb down and take center stage for their two or three lines. Ms. Hadley, the music teacher, was careful never to leave anyone out entirely. She knew all about Volunteer Mommy Syndrome.

Gavin looked nervous as hell. Mike stared at him, sending it'll-be-okay vibes. He hadn't liked this kind of thing much, either, when he'd been in school. He'd been tons happier on the football field, and he had a feeling his son was going to take after him. Which would, of course, piss Justine off in a big way.

About halfway through the play, her cell phone began to vibrate. These folding chairs were close enough together that, for a minute, he thought the rumbling against his thigh was his own phone. But he'd turned his off completely. He gave Justine a frown. Why hadn't she done the same?

To his surprise, she had stood up and was getting ready to edge her way down the aisle. She glanced back at him, holding her phone up as explanation.

God, she was absolutely unbelievable. Gavin was due up any minute — he was one of only about two or three kids who hadn't performed yet. He reached out and grabbed her arm. He must have squeezed too hard, because she let out a cry loud enough to be heard up on stage.

"Sit down," he whispered. He jerked his head toward the stage. "Gavin."

He ought to let go of her forearm. He knew that. She was obviously strung out. She was humiliated because her son had a piddly part in the school play. She was mad at Mike for not caring. Plus, she'd had to repress all that resentment against Cicely Tillman, and self-control wasn't her strong suit.

She was probably as hot and high-pressure as a volcano ready to blow.

But he didn't let go. He was pretty damn angry, too. He knew who was on the other end of that cell phone. Her new boyfriend. The one she was going to be spending a month in Europe with, starting tonight. The guy was welcome to her, but, goddamn it, couldn't she at least pretend to put her son first, for once in her life?