I finished my drink and rubbed my eyes. They were starting to hurt. My frantic nerves had started to calm, but now exhaustion was setting in. If I didn’t get my ass in bed, I was sure to pass out in the armchair.
I smoked one last cigarette, dipping my head as I fought sleep. Each time I slipped into unconsciousness I saw the bedroom, the bloodstained mattress and the red arc patterns running up and down the walls. Oscar’s voice boomed in the dark, “Those are from when the killer yanked the knife out and then brought it down again.”
I eventually stubbed out the cigarette and stumbled into my bedroom. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.
The air went cool around me. I could actually feel the black soil pushing in on me from all sides. I couldn’t move. Above, in the rectangular opening of the grave, the night sky swam with stars. A bulbous moon hovered out of sight.
The functional part of my body seemed to be my arms. I reached with them, groping the walls, raking away loose dirt. From beneath me came a sound—a slow, lugubrious trickling.
Blood.
I knew this dream.
I had returned again.
A shadow glided over the mouth of the grave. Dirt rained down. I saw a figure forged of black ink, blocking out part of the sky. He was stocky up top, but with skinny legs, and long hair. The man from the dead woman’s room. He’d come to see me in my resting place.
I tried to call to him. So what if he wanted to kill me: I was lying at the bottom of a grave, for Christ’s sake. I needed help. I needed out.
I waved my hands, scooping up dirt and flinging it toward him—but it only fell back in my face and eyes. I gave him the finger. But he merely looked down at me with his cold, callous detachment.
I gave up trying to enlist his assistance and lay there. I listened to the trickling sound in the earth. Two more figures emerged, one to either side of him. They appeared soundlessly, not exhibiting any movement.
They were hard for my dream consciousness to take in. Lucid dreams weren’t new to me. I had them all the time. But the art of functioning within the lucid dream, that was tricky; that one I’d yet to master. Just because I could be conscious of being in a dream did not mean I knew what the hell was going on.
The newcomers perching to either side of the man were quite alien in appearance. Something about them was off—the bulkiness of their shoulders, the oddly constructed shape of their heads and the round, almost-spherical aspect of their torsos and lower extremities.
With the man, I could not detect—not with any clarity—the configuration of his facial features. But with the newcomers I could discern a low nasal bridge, which ended in two flat nostrils above triangular jaw muscles and a mouth that housed a cache of glimmering needle teeth. A single eye and a single pupil, similar to the Cyclops, shone bright and starlike from the upper halves of their faces. These two eyes glared down at me.
Being under their scrutiny filled me with a revulsion I had never experienced. I felt my insides putrefy. My body hair withered, and bugs seemingly crawled about my arms and legs. I wanted to shake to get them off, but no matter what I did, the sensation remained, and my eyes now watered with tears, and I thought I was going to die.
Terror gripped me.
Then blood started leaking out of the earth.
The mental picture of a house and a street—a street I even recognized—appeared before my mind’s eye. The red liquid pooled about my body, gushing more and more, filling the ground, eventually filling the grave.
I started to scream.
Chapter Six
As usual, he awoke from his dream, covered in sweat. The dirty sheets were twisted through his limbs and up around his head, and he felt like he was caught in a spider’s web. He wasn’t certain if he was breathing; he checked, realizing with horror that he was not. In a panic he thrashed and commenced a writhing paroxysm. He choked up phlegm, spat and tumbled to the floor.
The room was silent but for a faint chirping of birds outside the window and the low hum of traffic on a nearby street. Although the curtains were drawn, damnable sunlight entered, penetrating his eyes, burning the retinas.
The image of the graveyard, the moon and the hovering mist remained in his head. He had never had such an intense dream before. The Dream Beings had been there with him. The private investigator had been too.
The man. The Vessel. The one lying at the bottom of the grave.
The one they wanted him to kill.
Finished with his coughing fit, he rolled onto his back. The rest of the dream slowly returned to him, as did an image, something vaguely familiar—the image of a house. He knew at once it was the PI’s house.
He sat up in the gloom and hauled himself to his feet. He froze when he saw it shifting in the corner of his bedroom. Somehow, one of them had followed him out of his dream, into reality.
He attempted to speak, but his tongue caught on the dryness of his mouth. He cleared his throat. “Why…how… What are you doing here?”
The mist in the corner swirled, beginning to take shape. Rounded body, conical head, flat face and pointed teeth. A single glowing eye.
Dream Being. Here in the room with him—in real life—actually physically here.
He shuddered. Until now, he had encountered them in dreams, or occasionally in pictures, in dreamlike images that flashed through his mind. The latter especially when he did the killing. The killings themselves were dreamlike. Yet he always felt that they were working through him.
Now one was here, in the room, in the world—in his world. He could see it, sense it, even smell it. His grogginess was quickly replaced with terror. He wanted to flee the room screaming, hands over his eyes.
“The time has come,” the being said, its voice guttural and liquidy.
He glanced around, but it was speaking directly to him, for the first time. “Time of what?” he breathed.
“You know the answer. The Vessel. The one with a power not of this world. It is time for us to take him.”
“I don’t understand. I don’t care about the fucking private investigator. All I care about is women. I want to focus on them.”
The words had escaped his mouth before he could stop them. He’d set his will against the being—which, he suddenly realized, was a bad move.
Swirling to life, mist churning like a cloak in the wind, the being darted across the room.
He screamed and toppled over backward, sprawling onto his rear.
It moved smoothly, without joint articulations, until it loomed above him.
He peered up at it, finally getting a clear look at its physiognomy. This revelatory sight sent shock waves through him, paralyzing his muscles.
“All that matters is the Vessel,” it croaked. “That is the reason we came to you.”
“But what about the women?” His neck muscles strained to get the words out. “Why did you have me kill those women if the Vessel is all that matters?”
“Preparation. Your darkness was small, weak. It needed to be opened, intensified. Now you are ready.”
He recalled, briefly, the first one, years ago. A hooker. He thought she was a redhead, but it was difficult to say. He remembered slicing her throat in a grove of trees along the side of the highway. He had first sensed the Dream Beings then. And they had terrified him. But he had also liked it—pleasurable, almost in a sexual way.
How far he’d come: He could no longer hold a job. He was a recluse, couldn’t function in society, could hardly carry on a conversation with another person. Christ, what was he? What had he become?
But he knew the answer. He was a serial killer. An agent of evil. Really, there was no him anymore.
He sighed, accepting the fact. “All right,” he said. “Fine.”
The Dream Being retreated to the corner, hiding within its misty folds. “You were given a picture,” it said.
He thought of the private investigator’s house and nodded.
“Go there,” the Dream Being said.
He nodded again.
There was silence.
Then, “Good.”
Chapter Seven
“Tell me more about your…gift.”
Oscar sat across from me on the outside patio of Starbucks, drinking a tall coffee while I smoked a stogie and chugged my double-shot Americano. It was 8:00 a.m. and the sun was still hoisting its golden head above the horizon. A stream of early-morning customers went in and out of the café.
“I’ve told you plenty,” I said.
“Yeah, I know. But to be honest I think I unconsciously blocked some of it. I think part of me doesn’t want to believe you—despite all evidence to the contrary.”
“Thought you said you were open-minded?”
“I am, goddamn it. This is something different.”
“Why do you think you block it out?”
He sighed, brows furrowing in thought. “Because I’m afraid. If I believe, fully, in that gift of yours, then what does that say about the rest of the world, and about what everyone else says is real?”
“It says it’s bullshit,” I replied.
He chuckled. “Yeah, that’s the scary part.”
“I get it,” I said, laughing to myself. “It’s, like, fear of the unknown.”
“Yes.”
“Christ, I live in the fucking unknown every day.”
“I can’t imagine how you do it, Jack.”
For some reason, this stunned me. “I don’t either,” I said, and really I didn’t.
“So you gonna tell me?”
“Yeah, I’ll tell yah. Where to start?”
“Start with what exactly is going on—I mean, where do you go to get this information?”
I blew smoke through pursed lips. “If I knew that my life wouldn’t be quite as unknown, now would it? It sort of comes unbidden. Been happening since I was a kid, but I just thought it was normal. I didn’t start realizing that it made me different until school started. Then it freaked me out and I felt different, and kids teased me when I talked about it, and so eventually I learned to keep my mouth shut.”
“What about your parents?”
“Mother.”
“Huh?”
“My dad died three months before I was born. Car crash.”
“Shit, I’m sorry.” He rubbed his wide bald head. The mounting sunlight made it gleam. “I really should know that. You know, all those times we worked together and I never thought about sitting down and interviewing you, getting to know the real Jack Evens, the person.”
“Forget about it. Anyway, my mom actually nurtured my gift. She was psychic herself, as was her sister, my Aunt Sylvia—though her gift was not quite as strong as mine. They’d pretty much kept it secret their whole lives. My mom gave me a lot of advice about how to have a secret and be different around people, without seeming to have a secret and be different. It was good advice and it worked, but sometimes I did hate her for it, blamed her for my being different, that sort of thing. Now I know I wouldn’t have survived without her. She trained me. So I’m thankful.”
Oscar finished his coffee, considered getting a refill, but then got up and tossed his cup in the trash. As he came back he said, “At what point did you start using your psychic ability for PI purposes? That’s not hiding, I might add. Quite the opposite.”
“Once I got older and Mom passed away, I found myself alone.”
“What about your aunt?”
“She was around and she helped me out still, but ultimately I think she had enough trouble managing her own life after Mom died. Mom sort of helped us both control our gift. She was like our psychic therapist. Aunt Sylvia passed away just recently too.”
“Sorry to hear that. How’d she die?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Old age. She was seventy-eight.”
“How’d your mom die?”
“That’s another story I’d rather not talk about.”
“And how about Jean? Did she know of your gift?”
“She did, but there’s a buttload of painful memories down that road, so I’d rather not go into it.”
Oscar huffed and puffed like he wanted to press me further.
“Look, I’m vulnerable when it comes to this stuff,” I said. “Mom and Aunt Sylvia were the only two people I’ve ever known who had powers like mine. And Jean was the only person I could ever fall in love with. Now that they’re all gone, I feel estranged from humanity.”
The fatalism of my statement shocked him into easing up, and once he had sunk back into his listening posture, I continued with what I’d been saying before.
“Following Mom’s death, I entered a period of deep inner darkness. I decided I didn’t want to hide anymore. I was a strong person and I didn’t care what people thought of me. I was going to be myself—without compromise. Around that time I met Jean, and we got married.
“Then I basically got into the private investigator business by accident. A friend of mine named Dennis Ellison was a private dick—at the time I was driving taxicabs for a living—and we used to get drunk at the bars after my late shifts and he’d tell me all the crazy-ass shit going on in his world. He probably exaggerated most of it, but, still, drunk and eager as I was, I ate it all up.
“I started looking up to him, and eventually he took me on as a junior assistant, and eventually as a business associate, then finally as a partner. When he retired and moved off to Cancún, I took over for him, and now here I am—minus Jean, of course.”
“Dennis is a great guy and a great PI. Worked with him many a time before you came along. That’s how old I am. But did Dennis know about your gift?”
“Not at first. It sort of revealed itself here and there, especially when we got drunk together. Soon he was so intrigued by it that he damned near coerced it out of me. He’s the one who suggested I use it to ‘catch crooks’. Those were his exact words. He helped me develop the proper methodology. And, again, here I am.”
“Okay, so I got the backstory. But I still don’t understand where this ability comes from.”
“I don’t have an easy answer for that, Oscar; all I know are my own personal experiences. As for their origin…man, your guess is as good as mine.”
He nodded, but I could tell he wasn’t satisfied. He was searching for something, something concrete, to set his mind at ease. But this stuff wasn’t concrete; it was liquid, fluid, discontinuous. Which was scary to some people. People like Oscar.
“Tell me what you learned from your personal experiences,” he said.
I lit another cigarette and started talking, “I’ve learned that there are other worlds than this one. Countless other worlds. Some lower, some higher.”
“What do you mean, ‘lower’ and ‘higher’?”
“I mean all sorts of things. Higher in terms of refinement, moral rectitude and spirituality, and lower in terms of base desires, crudely constructed organisms and stunted thought processes. Make sense?”
He nodded.
“Another thing. Some of these worlds are good and some are evil. And some are neither, but at the same time both. And some…well…have no concept of good or evil.”
“And just where are these worlds?”
“Everywhere. All around you. You just can’t see them with your physical senses; they’re invisible.” I gave him a moment to digest this, then added, “Some of them exist out in space—in distant galaxies.”
“Like aliens?”
I nodded this time. Oscar frowned.
“The information I receive—as you call it—is really more of a feeling, an impression I get way down in my soul that bubbles up to the surface and enters my conscious mind. It goes like this. You know how sometimes you’re positive you’ve been dre
aming, and yet when you wake up you can’t remember anything about the dream, aside from a slight impression and the knowledge that you know you were dreaming? Where do those memories and pictures go when you can’t recall them?”
He gave me bewilderment.
“It’s from there—in the place where they go, from which you cannot recall them—that I receive my impressions about events concerning the physical world. I know that sounds complicated, but it’s really simple. That place is where all worlds coexist and commingle, like one big incorporeal stew, in which one can dip their mental ladle and scoop out all sorts of higher knowledge.
“This method I have just described is actually how the laws of science were attained. The laws of science are all laws of a higher essence and a higher realm of thought. Copernicus, Galileo, Pythagoras, even Einstein—these men plunged their mental ladles into this little-known place where all worlds commingle.”
Oscar was still frowning; he almost looked offended. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said. “Simplify this for me.”
I thought a moment. “You understand what I said about different worlds existing, right?”
“I do.”
I thought more, then snapped my fingers. “Got it. In all these worlds, other beings exist, all sorts and all manner of beings with whom we come into contact only while we are dreaming, and the rest of the time they are invisible to us. Some of these beings are good, some bad. The good ones are more advanced in their thinking and development—including technologically and physically and spiritually—than human beings. Now, humans will one day reach these same higher states of evolution, but for the moment we’re lower down on the rungs of existence. Got all that?”
“I think so. Like aliens?”
“Sort of… These beings can communicate with us, through that secret place I mentioned, in our thoughts and feelings. They exist outside of time, for time is a manmade invention, like a car, and so they are not bound by time and can move freely through it. They know everything that has happened and will happen on our plane of existence. And they can communicate this higher knowledge to us, usually in dreams, but more uncommonly through thoughts and feelings in our waking life.
The Dream Beings Page 3