The first depicted a stormy bay with a half-dozen ships floating in it. The ships appear ancient, with gigantic masts and wooden hulls. Every one of them is on fire. Tall creatures – maybe demons – are throwing themselves from the decks into the water.
On the next page, a little girl is standing on her bed. A grotesque monster sits next to her with its mouth wide open. The girl is reaching her hand down its throat into a cross-section of its stomach, where a crucifix necklace rests. The monster’s mouth is filled with sharp fangs that could likely bite off the girl’s arm.
The next picture showed a little boy walking toward the viewer. His arms are open as if he is approaching for a hug, but his fingers transform into razor wires that stretch across the breadth of the drawing. A cheery grin is plastered on his face.
Next was a bird in a cage, looking up at an enormous shadow looming on a nearby wall. The shadow reaches its featureless arms across the ceiling and down another wall toward a distant bed, where a man and a woman are sleeping.
Next was a snowy forest, not unlike the one visible from the cabin. A figure stands in the shadows. He appears to be facing away, pointing up to something in the trees. The entire image is framed from a window, as though the viewer is inside a house, looking out.
The last image was the same window and forest as the one before. Only this time, the figure is gone. Instead, a clawed hand is reaching up to the window from outside, scratching the number 5 into the glass.
There were more pages of writing beyond that, but a loud bang from upstairs tore my attention away from the journal. Something heavy had fallen up there. The entire ceiling above me rumbled and creaked. Then, the pitter-patter of quick footsteps resounded across the ceiling.
“Faye?” I called, heading up the stairs.
As I neared the top, my fiancée darted past me. She had been in the guest room and was now making her way toward our bedroom. The way she moved solicited a very loud “Jesus Christ!” right out of my mouth. She trotted high up on the balls of her feet as she had done once before, and staggered around awkwardly as though her legs and spine were made of cement. Her neck and arms, however, flopped around like noodles with every jerky movement. Faye stormed into the bedroom and stopped abruptly. Then, she drew in a raspy breath, whirled around, and peered at me. Her eyes were open and rolled up so that only the whites of them showed, but the subtle movements of her head told me she knew I was there, and somehow she was studying me. She flashed an eerie smile and sucked in another breath through gritted teeth, then charged down the hall, laughing as she went.
I watched this spectacle from the staircase, unable to command my legs to move. Faye ran past me four or five times before I could tear my eyes away from her. Eventually, my gaze moved from my fiancée to the hall window just in front of me. Something moved out there.
It was the man.
He flailed and jerked and staggered just at the edge of the tree line, moving parallel to it. This time, he was actually a few feet out of the woods. The moon was just a sliver now and barely illuminated him, but I could see how long and gangly his limbs were. What looked like a filthy dress shirt clung to his misshapen body, and the thick mane of hair that I’d seen in my dreams hung from his head. He began singing – only the voice that came out of his mouth was that of a small child.
Faye ran past me again. The person outside moved with her.
Their movements were synchronized.
I gasped and stumbled backward. I’d have plummeted down the stairs and snapped my neck, but Faye’s hand shot out and caught me by the shirt. She pulled me toward her with inhuman strength and held me tightly as I regained my balance. Her hands ran up my chest and neck, onto my cheeks. They moved across my features, poking and cupping, and the ominous whites of her eyes drilled into me curiously. The smile fell off her face.
“Faye,” I said, grabbing her by the shoulders, “it’s me. It’s me. Wake up.”
But she didn’t wake up. Her breathing became more rapid and heavy, until the air wheezed in and out of her between gnashing teeth. As her fingers painted a picture of my appearance in her mind, her expression changed from confused to terrified. She began shrieking at the top of her lungs, and her hands shook so violently that they rattled against my face.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?!” I shouted. “Faye!”
She backed up against the window and held out her arms defensively, trying to protect herself from whoever she thought I was. As I moved to comfort her, she slipped past me and dashed away into the bedroom. The man outside darted off too, withdrawing into the forest.
I barreled down the stairs and practically broke down the front door. The complex was dead as usual, spare the few neighbors who peeked out their windows to see what all the commotion was about. I ignored them and sprinted across the meadow toward the woods. Tall blades of grass licked my skin. The sounds of frightened little critters scurrying away rang out all around me.
It was nearly impossible to see inside the grove. Whoever was in there could surely see me, though, and I felt naked just standing there looking in. Memories of the woman who tried to coax me into the woods at the cabin popped into my head, but I drowned them out with thoughts of Faye and stepped inside.
Darkness enveloped me. A branch cracked somewhere to my left. Leaves crunched. A billowing shadow ducked behind a nearby tree; I only recognized the shape after it moved.
“Hey!” I shouted, making my way toward it. “Get back here, you son of a bitch!”
I tried to pursue the dark form, but it deftly snaked between the trees. Branches battered my head and chest as I followed, and the hard roots that jutted from the earth caught my shoes. In mere moments the figure had vanished, and I found myself wandering around in the dark alone. The streetlamps of the neighborhoods surrounding the grove whirled around me.
I trudged through the woods in defeat, entertaining crazy thoughts of leaving Faye and moving somewhere else. My hope was nearly smashed, and my fiancée was not going to get better without a miracle or some serious medical intervention. Both possibilities seemed more and more distant with each passing day. Faye was going to end up in a filthy asylum, and I would too if I corroborated anything she said. This man – this thing – wasn’t going to stop until one of us was dead.
In my mournful reveries, I had lost track of the way out of the grove. I looked up just in time to dodge a huge spider web that loomed right at face-level. I stood up to regard the thing – and realized it wasn’t a web at all.
It was a dreamcatcher.
This one had no ragged twine in its center. The material was much finer, and glimmered in the twilight. For a long moment I stared into it, nearly hypnotized by the way it gently swayed and twirled in place.
Is that hair?
I finally reached out and plucked the thing from its branch. It was ice-cold to the touch. The second I removed it, a powerful gust of wind rushed through the grove and set all the trees shivering.
I carried the object back to the house. A terrible feeling grew in the pit of my stomach with each step, weighing me down as I moved. I had to know what this thing was made of. I examined the thing under a street light.
I instantly recognized the strawberry-gold color that wove a pattern at the dreamcatcher’s center. It was Faye’s. In silent rage, I tore the thing apart and heaved it into the bushes on our lawn. There was no will left inside of me to try to make sense of it anymore. I held back tears of frustration and returned to the bedroom. Faye was sleeping peacefully.
For hours, I lay motionless in bed, but no rest came to me. All of the terrible things I’d seen haunted my mind: the images from Faye’s dream journal, the wicked way she moved, the terrible man who shrouded our every step. Something about that drawing of the window kept popping into my head, over and over. It showed the view of the woods outside the cabin, but the window frame itself was the wrong color. I recognized it from somewhere else.
Then I remembered Faye running in and out of the
guest room. She almost never went in there, for fear of messing up my workspace. All of my research materials were scattered across that room in an organized chaos that only I could navigate. Faye didn’t even bother going in there during her compulsive cleaning projects.
But the window in that room – it had a perfect view of the grove across the street, where the man always stood.
I got out of bed and walked down the dreary hall.
There was nothing to see outside. The woods I’d just stumbled through were faintly visible in the gloom, but if a strange figure lurked within them, I could not tell. The breeze had died down, and nothing moved at all. The neighbors I’d disturbed had long since gone to bed. No lights glowed in any of their windows.
I moved my face closer to the glass. My breath fogged it and obscured the view.
A finger-drawn line appeared in the wispy condensation.
Puzzled, I breathed again on the glass, illuminating more of the line.
It was the number 5, drawn backwards.
I traced over it with my finger, trying to understand what it meant. And then I realized – Faye had written a message that could be read by someone standing outside.
“What makes five?” I muttered, recalling Faye’s dream journal.
In the distance, a child began to sing.
Chapter 18
“I’m not a fucking science project, Felix.”
Faye was pissed, as I had anticipated. She threw the couch pillow to the floor and put the TV on mute. It was morning, and she was already in a bad mood because earlier I had made the mistake of trying to explain last night’s events. The words tore her up, so I stopped halfway through.
“I figured you might be, you know, open to the idea.” I pointed to the screen. Mulder and Scully were engaged in a heated argument. I was surprised to see her watching The X-Files, given our current situation.
“Why has nobody asked me what I want to do?” she said, staring daggers at me.
“Because you don’t want to do anything,” I snapped. “You want to pretend none of this shit ever happened. And each day, you get worse. You vanish, Faye. It’s like you just disappear. For hours at a time you’re gone. Do you even know where you go?”
I expected Faye to really let me have it, but she gazed up at me with a mixture of hurt and acknowledgment.
“I just want to go back to the way things were,” I said, softening my voice. “I want you to be okay. It’s like I’m slowly losing you to some other guy. But this guy wants to wear you as a fuckin’ suit.”
Faye cracked up. She flashed a glittering smile at me, then quickly buried it under a blank expression. For a moment we just looked at each other, but then she reached her arms out for me. I dropped into her and got swallowed up in a tight hug.
“I miss you,” I said, breathing her in. “What else can we do? If we go back to the hospital, this time they’ll lock you up. They’ll hook you up to a bunch of machines and diodes. Stick needles in you. Take more blood. Lots more. You’re gonna get committed. I’d rather try this first. Please work with me on this, Faye.”
She kissed me and ran her fingers through my hair. Her eyes moved over mine, studying me, seeing within me the honest desire to pull her back from the brink of whatever darkness she was slipping into.
“Come back to me, Monkeytoes,” I said. “Please. I need you back.”
Faye wiped a tear from her eye before it could fall.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll talk to her. For you.”
Angela arrived at our home by late afternoon, and was just as warm and friendly as Tíwé. Her hair was straight and black with a sprinkling of gray. It framed a lean face with two green eyes, just like Faye’s. Although my fiancée can be reserved around new people, she instantly took a liking to our guest, and within minutes they were complimenting each other’s hair.
“So how do you know Tíwé?” Faye asked. I dragged a chair into the living room while the two sat next to each other on the couch.
“He and I go way back,” Angela said with an ill-concealed grin. I suspected that they were more than friends, once upon a time. “When we were kids, we lived next to each other on the reservation. His grandfather was a tribal elder, and he gave lessons on our people’s language to me and my mother. There’s a big effort to preserve Native languages now, you know.”
“That’s amazing,” Faye said. “Can you speak it?”
Angela hesitated.
“It’s been years since I’ve practiced,” she replied. “After my mom passed, I came out to California. Some members of my family are still upset with my decision, so I never had anyone to speak it with.”
“Faye left Colorado to come here as well,” I offered. “You’ve got something in common, then.”
Angela put her hand on Faye’s and smiled.
“Na’hepa,” she said. “It can mean friend, or sister, depending on how you use it.”
“When we visited Pale Peak, we bought a magazine at the airport,” I said. “It mentioned something about how Indian – er, uh, Native – languages are dying.”
Faye glared at me. Angela noticed and laughed.
“It’s alright,” she said, patting Faye’s hand. “Most people don’t read a damn thing about us. There’s been some debate over how we should identify ourselves. Until recently it was considered taboo to call us ‘Indians,’ since the Europeans who called us that thought they were in India. But some communities embrace this name. Others prefer the term ‘Native,’ for obvious reasons. I’m fine with either. The term ‘Indigenous’ is used in universities because it describes people who first inhabited the land in any place, not just the United States. Heck, the Natives of Canada are sometimes called ‘First People.’
“And yes – my ancestral language is spoken by fewer and fewer people. This has been happening for hundreds of years. For a long time, people like me were taken from our nations and forced into schools where we’d learn English or Spanish and adopt European ways of life. The settlers wanted us to forget our cultures and spiritual traditions. Wanted us to be more like them, you see. So whole generations of Natives grew up without ever hearing their own languages, and now very few of us speak them anymore. In fact, there are many languages that have been totally lost.”
Faye and I exchanged sad looks. The words “I’m sorry” welled up in my mouth, but it would have been a paltry thing to say. I regretted bringing up the subject. Angela noted our silence and rescued us.
“I came out here to study these issues at the university, rather than remain with my community. And that’s why I’m at odds with some members of my family. Thankfully, Tíwé has always been there for me, that old goat.”
“He’s quite a guy,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make you sit here and explain all this to us. I hope—”
“Don’t even,” she replied, silencing me with a hand. “Some don’t like talking about it. I do. That’s my choice.”
We nodded.
“But here I am droning on,” she continued, “when really I came to listen. Faye, do you mind telling me a little about yourself?”
Faye glanced at me again, then cleared her throat. She likely wanted to gauge how honest she should be about our situation.
“Well,” she said, taking a nervous breath, “I’m twenty-six, I’ve got a degree in biology, and uh…I’ve got one sister.”
Angela seemed disappointed with Faye’s response. She turned to me. Faye flashed me an I don’t know shrug.
“Felix, tell me about her.”
I figured Angela wanted to learn about who my fiancée was beneath the surface. Faye was a complicated universe of great and terrible wonders, and always tried to hide her real personality from the world.
“She’s a remorseless chocolate addict,” I said, scowling
playfully at Faye. “Stubborn as a damn mule. Occasionally homicidal. Especially when she sleepwalks. But she’s hilarious, always knows how to cheer me up. She’s the only person who’s ever really appreciated me,
so I keep her around.”
Both of them laughed and glanced at each other. Faye rolled her eyes.
“She doesn’t forgive easily,” I added. “Especially when it comes to forgiving herself. She pushes herself in everything she does. Such a perfectionist. She doesn’t even realize that she’s already perfect.”
Angela smiled a knowing smile, and nodded.
“Guess I should have asked you first,” she said.
We talked for an hour or so. The conversation meandered around our relationship, but eventually it focused on Faye’s tendency to sleepwalk in times of stress. Angela was fascinated, so we gave her the rundown of all the funny things Faye did at night when we first started dating.
Finally, we arrived at the story of our vacation to Pale Peak. Faye hesitated. Angela sensed that we were reluctant to talk, for fear that she’d not believe us.
“Look,” she said, “Tíwé already told me a little bit about this. You can share whatever you’re comfortable sharing, and I promise to keep an open mind. Sometimes I come off as a bit stuffy, but that’s just from years of teaching.” She patted Faye’s hand again. “I have a spiritual side too, you know.”
“He doesn’t,” Faye said, motioning at me.
“He will,” Angela replied. I took it as a light-hearted joke, but her voice was so flat it almost sounded like a threat.
Faye remained silent a few moments, no doubt collecting all the fragments of our trip that she’d scattered and buried in her memory. She told the story in its entirety, from our arrival at the cabin all the way up until this very moment. I jumped in occasionally to corroborate her claims or to offer my own interpretation of an event, and I filled in the gaps of what happened when she was sleepwalking. The one element I left out was the new dreamcatcher just outside our home. I just couldn’t burden Faye with any more bad news. But I did admit that I’d rummaged through her dream journal, and that she had drawn a backwards ‘5’ on the window.
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