by Leena Maria
"Watch where you're going!" I snapped anyway, a bit taken aback by his ice blue, honest gaze.
"I am sorry," he repeated, looking embarrassed. Oh, and did I mention handsome? Blond hair, blue eyes and a pale skin to match it.
Rather too pale for the midst of summer. His skin was nearly... translucent? It certainly had a glow that looked almost airbrushed. Maybe he was a fashion model I had seen on a magazine cover? Or the net?
He calmly observed me observing him. In fact he seemed to be looking at me with such intense curiosity I began to think there was something wrong with my face. Had my mascara run? The pain had momentarily brought tears to my eyes, and I did that thing that you do, where you're trying to see a smudge on your face without letting on that you're doing anything apart from concentrate on the other person in the conversation. He certainly deserved my full attention. Wow, he was pale though.
"No, I am not an albino, if that's what you're thinking. Nor a vampire. I'd be in fashion though, if these books are anything to judge by, don't you think?" He had clearly noticed me looking at his skin, and smiled and waved his hand at the young adult books on the shelves. "I've been traveling for a while and only just came back to the sunny side of the world."
He sounded very educated for his age. Also his smile was.... captivating. I found myself staring at his beautiful lips. He seemed amused, and that of course made his smile widen. His face was heart-stoppingly gorgeous when he did that. Then it occurred to me I was ogling him, and that he had realized it too. I blushed.
Bending down to hide my embarrassment, I began to dust the knees of my jeans even though the bookshelves I'd crashed into - had been knocked into - were clean and completely dust-free. When I looked up again, he had vanished. I glanced around, and quickly even stood on my toes to see over the taller shelving, but he was nowhere to be seen. Surely he couldn't have ducked behind one of the shelves and be hiding there? He was real enough - I had the pain in my knee to prove it.
I picked up my old duffel bag. I'd brought the one I used at school, because I usually ended up buying soooo many books. I had also put a light jacket in the bag in case it became chilly ("Chilly this time of the year? We do get summer in England, you know. Well, some years anyway." I could almost hear Kitty laughing. "You are just like your mother - prepared for every conceivable catastrophe.").
"So, did you find anything you'd like?" Grandma's voice asked me.
I jumped. She had marched right next to me without my noticing. She moved as silently as a hunter in the movies.
"Nnn...no, not yet!" I stammered.
"Want to look some more?" Grandma was already carrying a few books herself. "There are some books I could still go over for a while."
"Sure, maybe a while longer."
I did not admit even to myself, that the reason I wanted to stay was to see if the young man was somewhere in the store. He really was a sight for sore eyes...Kitty's laughter seemed to sound again in my head. "A sight for sore eyes? You sound middle-aged sometimes. Eye candy, Dana, eye candy!"
But I did not see him again, which I found a bit strange, considering that I had a direct view to the store door over the shelves, and I was absolutely certain he had not gone out. Surely no one would use the back exit to a store. Unless he was staff?
In the end, I did buy two books - one about cat breeds, as I'd planned, and another about the pyramids of Egypt. It was one of my dreams to travel to Egypt. My father had promised he would take me there, when I graduated. But the turmoil of late, after the unrest of the Arab spring, was making my father reconsider his agreement.
Carrying her heavy bag of books with considerable ease Grandma then dragged me across the street to a clothes store, to "supplement your wardrobe" as she put it.
"You look as though you're wearing someone's grandmother's hand-me-downs, my girl!" She shook her head. "And I am not talking about myself!"
Obviously not. She was always so casually elegant. One of those ladies who looked good in everything she wore - though it was mostly jeans and some exciting blouse or jacket. Her trimmed body of course played a big role in that. I had long had the suspicion that she lived in a combined gym and beauty parlor. No one should be so fit at her age. She looked like a long distance runner.
After buying me a new pair of jeans ("Oh forget the baggy ones!") and three shirts ("Don't even think cowboy-style!") she yanked me off to a shoe store.
Eventually I looked like a born again shopper with all the bags I was carrying, and I got approving and slightly envious glances from my classmates who happened to walk past us when we headed for a cafe.
"Hi, Dana!" Elaine waved a tanned hand so that the gold bracelets on her slender wrist clinked together. "Nice jeans!"
I managed what I hoped was a laid-back smile, while I tried to stay erect in my high-heels and make out I wore them every day. ("Don't you ever be ashamed of being tall! And keep your knees locked - nothing looks worse than someone in high heels with their knees bent," I remembered Grandma's advice). High-heels, for heaven's sake! What was Grandma thinking! But obviously I had done something to get the approval of the Blonde Section - Elaine and her giggling court. All in different shades of blond hair color: ash blonde, strawberry blonde, bombshell blonde and golden blonde.
We weren't exactly on the same page, even though superficially I looked the part that day. I was a bookworm, for one thing. They called me "a nerd" and also English terms that I hadn't understood at first, because I never knew the latest singers or make-up trends, and wasn't interested in movie stars or the latest sighting of whoever happened to be Hot in their books. They mimicked my American accent and made fun of me, but they avidly tried to dress and act like the American High School teenagers that they saw in TV programs. Knowledge of history didn't rate very highly on their list of "what's hot". When I'd once told them that I wanted to study Egyptology, they had looked back at me with blank eyes. Finally one of them had said "Egyptology? What the hell's that?" emphasising her words in a way that indicated I was a freak, in their own terms. Still, I wasn't considered an enemy, because I posed no obvious threat to them on the dating scene, being so tall and not wearing much makeup, and with my mind being off on other things a lot of the time.
I managed a relaxed wave and walked past the Blond Section, feeling their eyes on my back. Their combined perfumes hit us like a wall as we passed.
"You do need some nice high heel shoes, now that you are turning into a gorgeous young woman, Dana," Grandma commented, as though she'd been reading my thoughts on the Blonde Section and dating. "At home you can loll around in whatever you want, but when you go out on a date..." she made some appropriate noises in imitation of a man's approval. I was waiting for her to give one of her loud, shrill wolf-whistles - that was another one of Grandma's skills - but thankfully on this occasion, she didn't burst my eardrums.
I sighed and rolled my eyes.
"Not you too! Mom is always trying to find out if I've got a guy hidden away somewhere!"
Grandma laughed out loud and voiced her doubts as to what my mother would do if she actually found a boyfriend hidden in my room. While the scene of such an event played vividly in my mind, Grandma opened the door to a little coffee shop. She rushed to meet and greet her old friend, who ran the shop, and as that would likely take a few moments, I went ahead and sat down to a table next to the window. I reached for my cell phone in my bag and felt something that should not have been there.
A book. Well, of course there were the two books Grandma had bought for me, but this one was definitely neither of those By the feel of it, it was an old book. I took it out of the bag.
"What's in a Dream – a Scientific and Practical Interpretation of Dreams" the cover said.
I had always been interested in dream interpretation so I opened the cover to have a better look.
The book was old – it said it had been printed by the G.W.Dillingham company, NY in 1901. There was something written inside the cover – in old fashioned han
dwriting, the words written with real ink. It seemed to be someone's dream, written down in the book because the dreamer had thought it important.
"I dreamt of angels and ghosts in the sky, fighting for the throne hidden in the mists. There was a war going on in the mountains, in the seas, over the lakes, rivers, fields, cities and villages. Castles and towers fell into the fire. Waves of the ocean threw ships on dry land. Lightning struck from thunder clouds and death was walking the streets. I took shelter in a house in the hills, deep in the forest, where I was safe. I traveled through a gate to a land of sleep, and suddenly I awoke, surrounded by friends and there was great joy and light and laughing and hugging. But we knew we would have to draw our swords, take the key, open the door to the garden of Adam and Eve, and of the apple tree of wisdom, the seed of which was sown by the guardians of the orchard. But the snake, the dangerous adder was spying on us with its soldiers, under their flag and black banner and flames were devouring their hearts. We escaped them to our strongholds of stone where their jaws could not bite, but they stole our children and turned them into monsters who attacked their parents, their brothers, and their family. And tears rained in the midst of ruins where once beauty resided. So we went running to a library of books and ancient letters, to gain victory over our enemy and end this battle. And in the library there grew a beautiful flower, a lovely rose which I took. And when I woke up, I still held it in my hand."
A strange dream to be sure...
There was something more scribbled under the dream. 1-1, 2-2, 3-3, 1-1...
"What's that you are reading?" Grandma had managed to sneak right up behind me without making a noise. How did she do that?
"Oh, this? It seems to be an old dream book. I found it in my bag but I have no idea how it got in there."
"Hmm... maybe it had been there for a while and you'd just forgotten you had it. That's happened to me in the past. Here, I bought us cappuccinos. Don't let yours get cold."
She placed the tray on the table and bent closer to have a look at the handwritten dream.
"What a strange dream!" she echoed my sentiments. "Maybe you should try to interpret that!"
"That might be fun," I admitted, closing the book and putting it back in my bag, managing to get my finger caught in the bag's zipper in the process. When I sucked the blood from my finger, something bumped against the window next to my face. I almost screamed.
A little girl without front teeth was smiling back at me, her ice-creamy hands leaving palm prints on the glass. She had a Hello Kitty balloon tied to her shirt button and the wind was bouncing it against the window right at my eye level.
On the other side of the street I saw the blonde young man. He just stood there, looked at me directly, his eyes piercing the space between us. I felt a sudden shortness of breath - the beauty of his ice blue eyes was out of this world, even at this distance.
For a fleeting moment I almost remembered him. Then a truck drove between us, and when it had gone, so was he. Vanished into thin air.
After the initial shock of his sudden disappearance, I felt a surprising surge of disappointment.
CHAPTER EIGHT
8. The Hidden Message
When I look back, I wish I could have had the option of just throwing the book away, so that nothing would have changed. But how could I not be curious? Also, throwing the book away would not have stopped the change. What was going to happen would have happened nevertheless, and I would have been in much greater danger, unprepared.
I really thought at first that it was a book about dream interpretation.
I had no idea how the book had ended up in my duffel bag. It could have dropped into the open bag from the shelf when I fell against it, I supposed. The only flaw in this scenario was that the bookstore only sold new books. There was no second hand stock at all. Anything this old wasn't available there.
But somewhere, someone had placed it in my bag. I had a bad habit of not closing my bag securely, because where I lived felt safe. Our little town was so old fashioned that anyone caught pick-pocketing would have been dragged off to the local church, where he (or she) would have been put on the gallows, or made to write a thousand times "Thou shalt not steal" on a blackboard in front of the whole congregation. Or possibly both. Something along those lines, anyway. It was hard to tell, because it was the kind of thing that never, ever happened. If you dropped a penny in the street, someone would be sure to point it out to you and hand it back.
I suspected the young man at the bookstore had a hand in it. Of course he might have dropped the book in my bag by accident. Or even deliberately. If I ever saw him again, I would ask straight out, I decided, not admitting I was hoping I might actually see him again. Whatever it was in this case, I had no way of knowing to whom the book belonged, and as it was, I could not return it to its rightful owner.
So, when the evening came and everyone went to bed, I propped my pillows comfortably against the headboard, put on the reading light, took my notebook and pencil, and started interpreting the dream written inside the cover, all snug under my lightweight summer blanket. I thought I'd probably fall asleep pretty soon,
I didn't. I had no idea that this dream book would change my whole life, and nothing in my world was going to be normal ever again.
I took a chocolate (yes, I confess that I'd actually placed a box of strawberry chocolates on the bed to truly enjoy the book, which I still thought was about dreams).
"Now let's see what the book says about angels..." I took the first word from the hand-written dream and started leafing through the pages. "Amputation... anchor...andirons... anecdote... angels!"
I expected to read something about divine intervention or some such thing, considering when the book had been printed. But what I read was all gibberish, at least the first part.
"To You dream of hold in angels is prophetic your hands a of book disturbing influences about the in the soul gates between our It human brings a world and changed condition of the Unseen Worlds the person's lot. If the dream is unusually pleasing, you will hear of the health of friends, and receive a legacy from unknown relatives.
"If the dream comes as a token of warning, the dreamer may expect threats of scandal about love or money matters. To wicked people, it is a demand to repent; to good people it should be a consolation."
"What on earth are they trying to say?" I said out loud, making Nugget lift his sleepy head and glance at me.
I decided to try a random word. Nugget. Cats. I would see what the book said about cats.
"To dream of a cat, denotes ill luck, if you do not succeed in killing it or driving it from your sight. If the cat attacks you, you will have enemies who will go to any extreme to blacken your reputation and to cause you loss of property. But if you succeed in banishing it, you will overcome great obstacles and rise in fortune and fame..." I read to Nugget. "Hmm, someone did not like cats, it seems... but at least that is coherent. Something must have gone wrong at the printing company when it came to angels... Oh well, maybe I should just go to sleep and see if I have a dream I could try and interpret with this book."
I placed the book on my bedside table and switched the light off. Instead of sleeping, my mind started nagging about something. One two three, one two three... I was repeating the numbers in my mind over and over again. And then I realized, why. 1-1, 2-2, 3-3, 1-1... The numbers written in the cover of the book. They had to be meaningful. What if...
I reached for the bedside lamp and put the light back on. Then I took the book, opened its worn pages and searched for the "angel" again.
"Ok, now what is this 1-1... Probably it means words. So the first word is 'To'," I reached for my notebook and wrote the word on top of a page, "but why the second number one..."
I stared at the interpretation of angel but did not get it.
"Could it mean the word is a pair with some other word...?" I asked Nugget who instead of looking at me tucked his nose under his paw in a silent protest at being disturbed by the l
ight again.
"OK, let's give that a try then. If it is a pair of words, then logically the next word is the other half of the pair," I announced and wrote the word "You" on the right side of the word ""To". I noticed both words were written with a capital letter. Another mistake by the printing press, it seemed.
Or was it...?
"2-2..."
I wrote the next two words on the left side of the notebook page, and the two words after that on their right side. Now I had three words on the left "To dream of" and three on the right: "You hold in". Both beginning with capital letters, both... the beginnings of a sentence!
Quickly I wrote the words 3-3, to the left came "angels is prophetic" and to the right "your hands a".
"To dream of angels is prophetic' and 'You hold in your hands a'," I mumbled out loud, excited I had cracked the code, "and now it seems it is back to 1-1 again... 'of' goes to the left and 'book' to the right... Then 2-2..."
When I had finished, on the left it said, "To dream of angels is prophetic of disturbing influences in the soul. It brings a changed condition of the person's lot." And on the right I had written "You hold in your hands a book about the gates between our human world and the Unseen Worlds".
Before Kitty's death I would have stopped reading right there, following Mom's advice that such subjects were not safe to study. But did I? Have a guess. Instead of closing the book, I searched for the next word in the dream on the cover.
"Ghosts," I whispered to Nugget whose whiskers twitched in his sleep and whispered the words of explanation to ghosts the dream book: "To The dream of legends have the ghost of always told of either another one of level of your parents, denotes existence, or parallel that worlds. you are exposed to danger, and you should be careful in forming partnerships with strangers."
I wrote fast now, and to the left of my notebook page appreared a sentence telling me that "The dream of the ghost of either one of your parents, denotes that you are exposed to danger, and you should be careful in forming partnerships with strangers." And to its right I had written "The legends have always told of another level of existence, or parallel worlds".