Dreaming Dead Things

Chapter 2

Chapter 2Room B 23 was nothing more than an empty concrete storage room off a concrete corridor, in the basement of the lab building. When I created my dream research group I had convinced Jett Crowell in lab supplies to assign us the space, and let us use the EEG machine for our group, even though it was an independent project without a faculty sponsor. Mr. Crowell must be at least fifty, but he was interested in what our group was doing so he became a sort of unofficial sponsor. As far as his records were concerned the EEG machine was being stored in B 23, nothing more.

I took comfort in the solid gray concrete walls and in Pam's presence. If she hadn't come in when she did, how long would I have been trapped? Just sleep paralysis, it must have been, but I couldn't shake the feeling of evil. Or the tenderness in my arm.

I shivered. It was cold in the room.

I made myself get up out of the corner, acutely aware of Pam watching me. “I'm fine, really, Pam. Where are the guys?”

As I went over to the desk Pam answered. “I don't know. I gave them the slip and skipped the lecture today. Daryl records it all anyway, I'll listen to it later.”

I dropped the diary and pen on the desk, then picked my sweatshirt up off the chair and slipped it on over my thin t-shirt. I already had on the sweat pants I wore as pajamas. I pulled out the chair and sat down to pull on my shoes. After that I took a hairbrush out of my backpack and started brushing out the tangles. Pam went back over to the EEG machine and tore off the sheets from last night's session. I wished we had a modern computerized machine, but I was happy that Jett had given us the use of this old machine anyway.

Pam took the sheets out of the bin and brought them over to the desk. She put the stack of paper in front of me. “What are you going to do with these?”

I put away the brush and pulled my hair back, slipping on a rubber band. “I wanted to do a test run before our next meeting. I figured that I'd do a trial run and then we could all go over the tracings. We need to get used to understanding what it is showing us. For the real experiment we'll need the cameras running to capture the eye movements. We need to show a conscious pattern of eye movements while the dreamer is asleep.”

“But that still won't show what was happening in the dream. We can't tell from outside which dream figure is signaling.”

I nodded. We'd been wrestling with the problem since I first proposed the experiment. “I know. We'll work on it.” I ran my fingers across the moleskin diary. “I'd better write down the dream. What are you going to do?”

Pam grinned. “The real reason I came down here and skipped the lecture? I wanted to go some place to get some sleep without my hellish roommates keeping me up all night.”

“That's still going on?”

“Yep. And I'd put in for a transfer but next quarter I'm going to France, so it seems a shame to move now.”

I scooped up the print outs and slid them into my bag, followed by the diary and my pen. “Look, I'll get out of here. I could use some coffee anyway. I'll go over to the Cab and write up my notes. You can have the lab.”

Pam shook her head. “Nah, I'm awake now anyway. I should have known that the walk over would wake me up. If you don't mind I'll tag along. Coffee sounds really good.”

“Great!”

We both headed out of the room, Pam leading the way. As I stopped to make sure that the door locked behind us, I noticed a couple flies crawling out from beneath the door. I skipped back, jerking my hand away from the door handle as if it had burned me. Pam touched my arm and I barely managed to keep in the scream that threatened to burst out.

“Ravyn, are you okay?”

I looked back and watched one of the flies tip over, stumbling as it tried moving forward with a couple legs missing on one side. One wing was bent and twisted. The back of the other fly looked squashed.

Dead flies. Or at least they were at one time. I breathed deeply and reached out with that inner sense and found the energy of the flies. I calmed myself and whatever animated the flies dimmed and drew back. Without my emotions to feed on, the forces behind the flies couldn't keep them going. The flies crumpled to the ground, motionless and dead once again.

“Ravyn?”

I shook my head. “Sorry, I saw the flies there.” I pointed at the two corpses lying in front of the door. “It startled me after that dream.”

Pam stepped up and nudged one with her shoe. It slid didn't respond. “They're old, dried up. Must have gotten trapped down here.”

I grabbed her arm. “They're still gross. Let's go.”

The farther we got from B 23, the better I felt. I felt silly for letting a dream bother me so much but I almost wanted to start running down the corridor. Instead I breathed deeply and held onto a sense of calm. For me, more than most people, remaining calm was vitally important. Thanks to my grandmother I'm cursed with the ability to wake the dead, as I'd done with the flies back at the lab. My fear from the dream, that surge of emotion, must have woken the dead flies. Maybe I had felt them crawling on me before the sleep paralysis broke. Dead things feed on emotion after all.

Even though I knew all of that, I felt better getting away from the lab.

At the far end of the corridor we took the elevator up to the first floor and turned right, heading out the entrance at the end of the building. As we stepped out I blinked in the bright morning light. The sunlight made everything brighter, sparkling from the rain that had fallen overnight. The dream felt more distant, but still clear in my mind. I doubted I'd ever forget it. Pam skipped down the concrete steps that cut through the ivy on either side of the sidewalk, to the red brick lane leading to the square. Across the lane, past a green strip planted with trees, stood the massive library building, all concrete and metal like most of the buildings on campus. Dark floor-to-ceiling windows only added to the grim design of the buildings. On the frequently rainy days the campus buildings stood like bunkers against the watery onslaught. We headed out into the square, busy with other students heading to the library, over to the lecture halls or the lab buildings. Up at the entrance to the square one of the transit buses pulled up, the doors opened and a stream of students poured out. Despite the rain last night almost no one carried umbrellas, those that did would probably stop carrying them before long. Sometimes you got rained on a bit, but you didn’t really worry about it.

Our destination was straight across the square. The blocky C.A.B. Or Campus Activities Building, Cab to the students, that housed some offices, plenty of places to hang out, the campus bookstore and, downstairs, the cafeteria. But it was the Kool Koffee on the first floor that sold fair trade coffee, which was my objective. Hot coffee, then I'd force myself to write down the nightmare and then I'd head back to my dorm to soak in a shower while my roommates were out. Maybe then I could put the dream out of my mind. I couldn't risk waking dead things, not now when I'd just had my birthday yesterday. Any day now I expected a visit from the Inquisition, every four years around my birthday they showed up to check on me in case I started showing the same talent that my Nana had with the dead. The last time, when I turned sixteen, was right when I woke dead things for the first time. It had started with my poor cat, Perky, and went downhill from there. But I learned to control my ability and keep it hidden from the Inquisition. And until the flies this morning I hadn't had any slip ups.

We reached the Cab and went inside. Right away I could smell the roasted coffee beans from the Kool Koffee store and inhaled deeply. That was so much better.

“Suddenly I'm dying for coffee,” Pam said.

“I know, right?” We joined the line.

The line moved forward with agonizing slowness. I remembered looking up at myself, the nightmare version, and the zombies surrounding me with decaying faces. I was a witch, a necromancer capable of waking the dead. If Pam knew the truth would she stay my friend or immediately call 9-1-1? Very few people knew the truth about me. Trisha, my best friend from high school had known, but she died in a car accident last year. Other than her the only people that knew had lived in a Wiccan coven just outside of town, but they'd packed up and moved down to Oregon after the incidents when I was sixteen. Even though the Inquisition had caught Logan, the people in town didn't tolerate Gavin and Maggie and the others any more. And I guess Nana knew but she hardly said a word anymore.

“Ravyn?”

I blinked and realized that the girl behind the counter was waiting for me to order. “Sorry. Sixteen ounce mocha latte, please. And a chocolate muffin.”

Pam grinned.

“What?”

The girl put the chocolate muffin on the counter. I noticed she had multiple piercings in her eyebrow, nose, lip and tongue. Ouch.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the muffin and handing her my student ID card. She swiped it and handed it back before going to make our drinks.

I peeled back the paper a bit and took a big bite of the moist, chocolaty chunky muffin. The chocolate melted on my tongue, dark and not too sweet. Perfection.

“I don't see how you stay so skinny eating those things,” Pam said.

“I really shouldn't but after that nightmare I need the chocolate.”

“My nightmares are never that scary. Just the usual stuff.”

“You're still stuck in your dorm?”

Pam grinned and shrugged. “It's my greatest fear, I guess. Getting stuck in there with those guys.”

“You've got to find a way to get out.”

The girl came back with our coffees. We took them, thanked her and headed over to the nearby stairs. I hurried up the stairs two at a time, muffin in one hand and coffee in the other, my bag over my shoulder. Pam kept pace beside me. Halfway up we reached the landing where there were several chairs, occupied, by the windows. We went on up the next flight to the second floor and headed down to the big common area at the far end where floor to ceiling windows looked out over the square. Collections of chairs, couches and tables dotted the area. Over by one of the smaller side windows was a table for two and a couple padded chairs. Pam and I took those, settling down gratefully into the big chairs.

Pam sipped at her coffee and sighed. “That's good.”

I put my food down on the table and dragged the dream journal and the EEG readouts from my bag. It took some more digging to get a pen out of the bottom. I tapped the pen on my journal. “Do you mind if I write down the nightmare?”

Pam shook her head and closed her eyes, inhaling deeply from the steam rising out of her coffee. “Go right ahead. I'm good.”

I balanced the journal on top of the papers and started writing. It all came back. The feeling of flying freely through the air in my astral body. I hadn't done that again since that night when Mrs. Kane had forced me out of my body. I had flown over the town, trying to figure out what to do. And eventually I found myself above my own body standing by the graveyard pretending to wake the dead when it was actually Logan behind it all. The nightmare brought it all back to me and I wrote it down in my journal but I left out a few points when I wrote down the nightmare. I didn't mention that I could wake the dead. I trusted the people in my dream group but we shared most of our dreams and I didn't want to put them into a difficult spot by publicly admitting my ability.

When I got to the point when I was on the ground looking up at my own face, transformed into something dark and terrifying I realized that I'd seen something similar in a dream before, years ago. Not quite the same, but I'd had a nightmare that ended up with me falling out of Trisha's bedroom window during a sleepover. In that nightmare I'd been attacked by a vision of myself, except dead with pale bluish skin and clouded eyes. At the time I worried that the nightmare had been something more. A night hag.

My phone rang in my bag, several short sharp bells, and I yelped, the pen making a large scratch across the page. Pam lowered her coffee, eyebrows raised.

The phone rang again. I put down the pen and dug the phone out, tapping the answer icon.

“Yes?”

A voice I knew, one I hadn't heard in four years, answered. “Ravyn, this is Inquisitor Lockwood.”

He actually sounded cheerful, even pleased. I shivered and honestly didn't know if I was excited or terrified to hear from him.