by Anna Durand
Yet somehow she ended up barely scraping by as a book designer. Her dreams of becoming a teacher were dashed by budget crises at schools across the country, so her teaching certificate hung in the bathroom as a piece of abstract art. Thereafter, she retrained herself in book design and — after discovering no established firms would hire an inexperienced, unknown designer — she set out into the desert of self-employment. Oases were few and far between.
The point was, she understood how people wound up in jobs that bore no resemblance to their schoolyard dreams. So she ought not think less of Reilly because his plans didn't pan out either.
Reilly rose and clomped around the sofa to the front door. Grace followed, opening the door for him. As he pushed past her, Reilly shoved a business card into her palm.
"Anything happens," he said, "call me."
She noticed he didn't say if anything else happened. Clearly, the man assumed nothing really happened tonight. A weirdo accosted her. By Reilly's logic, the guy was probably a homeless man who meant no harm. Nothing worth fretting over. Although Reilly might not have said those precise words, Grace felt them bobbing just below the surface of their conversation tonight.
She took the business card. "Thanks."
With a curt nod, Reilly strode out the door. As Grace lingered in the doorway, watching him cross the lawn, a breeze kissed her face. The warmth of the breeze hinted at the summer heat that would set in shortly. This was April in Texas, after all.
Reilly climbed into his cruiser and drove away. The taillights of his cruiser receded until they vanished altogether. Grace shut the door, snapping the dead bolt into place. She yawned. The action seemed to breach the dam that held back a deep reservoir of exhaustion. The fatigue flooded through her, carrying with it a chill that penetrated her to the core.
Today had really, really sucked. Strangely, though, the events of this evening served to extinguish her migraine. She couldn't recall exactly when the symptoms dissipated, but she thanked heaven they had. She could do without another brain-crushing, nausea-inducing headache.
On her way to the bedroom, she stopped off in the kitchen to double check that the overhead light was off and that the back door was locked. Once inside the bedroom, she eased the door shut and engaged the lock. Hiding behind a closed door alleviated the tension in her gut, though she had no idea what she was hiding from or how a door might protect her from an intruder who apparently wielded magical powers. Sometime between calling 911 and seeing Reilly's cruiser pull into the driveway, she realized that something important — and indeed magical — had happened to her. Not sweet, fairy-tale magical. Demonic, terrifying magical. The idea was ridiculous. Still, in her gut she felt the truth of her revelation.
She'd experienced a life-altering event. She glimpsed the Other World that existed within this reality, the world of ghosts and demons and supernatural forces.
Maybe she ascribed too much value to the incident. She might have, as Reilly suggested, suffered a stress-induced hallucination or a bizarre kind of mirage. The stranger she confronted inside the house never spoke or touched her. Maybe she did imagine it.
Sure, and maybe she suffered a narcoleptic seizure, dreaming the whole thing while remaining upright through some quirk of gravity.
Grace flopped onto the bed. All the windows were locked, the back door too. The intruder snuck into the house, and out of it again, without using doors or windows. Maybe he teleported himself, like in a science fiction movie. Maybe he was a ghost. She believed in neither ghosts nor teleportation.
Yet she believed the incident was magical. The intruder got inside somehow.
Unless she imagined him.
A chill shimmied up her spine. If she could imagine an event that seemed real, if she could give in to a hallucination so completely, she must have lost all sense of reality.
She must've gone insane.
Oh yeah. Today really, really, really sucked.
Chapter Three
Lying on her bed, Grace gazed up at the ceiling, not really seeing the ceiling, not really seeing anything. She replayed the events in her mind. Nothing made sense. A scarecrow accosted her. An intruder broke into the house, as if by magic. The scarecrow man she understood. The world hosted many psychos who needed no reason to torment another person. They did it for drug money. They did it for fun. They did it to satisfy the voices in their heads.
But she saw no rational explanation for the intruder.
Well, one explanation did fit. The last tether between her mind and reality might've snapped. She might've begun to hallucinate. Maybe the stress of her medical situation affected her more than she wanted to admit. Self-employment brought its own stresses, as she struggled to stay afloat in a sinking economy. Working as a freelance book designer gave her freedom, but it also meant she never knew how much money she'd make in a given month. Her inconstant stream of income meant she couldn't afford health insurance. She paid for her doctor visits and prescriptions out of her own pocket. Those doctor visits had become more frequent in the past few months. Three times in as many weeks, she found herself squirming in an uncomfortable chair waiting for a nurse to call her name.
Yeah, she had some stress.
In retrospect, calling the cops tonight was a bad idea. She had no one else to call. Her parents and grandfather, the only family she knew in her whole life, were gone. She'd lived away from them for six years, but to lose them completely, to have them ripped from her life forever …
She was alone.
So when a weirdo assaulted her and a shadow man invaded her home, she had no one to call but the authorities. It was still a bad idea. Now someone she sort of knew from years ago, someone who currently worked in law enforcement, thought she was a total whackjob. Other people's opinions meant little to her. The opinion of a sheriff's deputy might matter, however, if she ever needed real help. Worse, she recalled that back in high school Reilly liked to gossip. Thanks to her failure to think ahead, soon every cop in North Texas might know about the crazy girl in Lassiter Falls who imagined intruders. At least the footprints out front proved a real person assaulted her. Of course, as Reilly pointed out, the footprints didn't prove the man actually attacked her. They showed simply that a person other than Grace approached the house.
She was on her way to becoming the Lassiter Falls loon. One more check mark in the screw-up column.
Tears welled in her eyes. She touched the corner of one eye, feeling the warm tears dribble down her finger. Crying signified weakness, self-pity, all the things she loathed. Crying flashed her back to her school days — standing in front of the class, afraid to speak, the teacher ordering her to read aloud, tears spilling down her cheeks. Crying led swiftly to humiliation. Squeezing her eyes shut, she willed the tears away. Her eyes burned as the tears overflowed, faster now.
The curtains billowed. The door rattled against the jamb. A breeze tousled her hair. She glanced at the window. Closed. Locked. Down the hall, the air conditioner clicked off and silence pervaded the house.
The curtains rippled. The breeze whispered in her ear.
I'm not alone. The thought exploded in her mind. The tingling she'd experienced earlier resurfaced, stronger and sharper this time.
The air grew heavy and dense around her, as if she sat on the bottom of a deep swimming pool. She gulped in breaths, her chest aching from the effort. Air, she needed air. Leaning forward, she struggled to unlock the window. Her fingers slipped. The latch scraped her knuckles. She fought to breathe. The pressure of a hundred hands pressed against her chest, while the air congealed in her lungs. Darkness flickered at the edges of her vision.
The door burst inward.
Air rushed into the room. She collapsed on the bed, sucking in the air, her entire body shaking.
In an instant, the air felt normal again. She pushed up off the bed. Her muscles quivered as she scuffled to the door. The jamb had
splintered where the lock fit into its slot. Fragments of wood littered the carpet. The door itself had warped inward at the center. She touched the distorted wood. The damage proved something happened in the bedroom. She didn't hallucinate this time.
Unless she was still in the grips of a delusion.
No, she could not be that far-gone.
When she tried to shut the door, it refused to latch. The bulge at the door's center distorted the whole thing so much that the door would not fit in its frame anymore. Replacing the door meant incurring another expense. Terrific.
Grace shambled to the bed and crawled under the sheets, rolling onto her side as she pulled the sheet up to her chin. Sleep wouldn't come, she accepted that fact. She thanked God for it actually. Sleep meant dreams, and so she prayed for insomnia.
Sleep came for her anyway.
A corridor. Beige walls. Twilight. Red pinpoints of light line the corridor at floor level. A bland voice speaks from nowhere and everywhere.
"Night mode on."
Further down the corridor, on her right, she spots a familiar door. Her heart skips a beat. Her stomach flutters. A force seems to draw her toward the door. One scuffling step at a time, she crosses the corridor.
Voices approach from somewhere beyond sight. Footsteps clap. She freezes. Her gaze lands on the shape reflected in the mirror-like floor. She stares at her own reflection, entranced by the shimmering image of her face, pale and indistinct.
Footfalls draw her attention to the corridor ahead of her. Two men are advancing toward her. She glances around for a place to hide, but she knows the doors are locked.
The men walk past, oblivious of her, chattering to each other.
"That's right, man, crazy."
"Think he'll do it?"
"No way."
"Escapees should get the harsh stuff."
"I agree, but … "
Their voices diminish as they disappear into the twilight of the corridor's depths.
She waits. Listens. He is calling to her, not with his voice, but rather with his soul. She inches closer to the familiar door. Why does she sneak when they can't see her? Shaking off the question, she settles her hand on the door knob.
The corridor vanishes. Now she floats in empty space, surrounded by stars. With one hand she reaches out to the stars, stretching a fingertip toward one in particular. The one that calls to her. His star.
The light explodes, engulfing her in blinding brightness and scorching heat.
Sand. Cold. Noises. Darkness blankets her. Nearby but out of sight, a snake hisses. Coyotes howl from far away. Dirt invades her mouth and nostrils. Grit burns in her eyes. She lies facedown on the ground.
Raising onto her knees, she gazes up at the sky. Stars glimmer there. The moon smiles down at her. She senses its presence drawing nearer and watches its mottled face swell. The light glows pure white, infusing her with a sense of familiarity.
The night spins around her. She grabs a bush, fighting to keep her balance. Thorns slice across her palm. She feels a warm liquid oozing across her flesh. Blood.
A figure rises out of the sand. A hand reaches out for her. Green eyes gleam.
"There you are," says the figure, though not in words, in thoughts.
Hot fingers clutch her arm. Sear skin. Tear at flesh.
Pain rips through her.
Grace woke with a jerk. For a minute, maybe longer, she held still and listened to the metronome of her heartbeat. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Quick, but slowing with each exhalation. A powerful ache throbbed behind her temples. The darkness around her seemed alien. She squinted as she struggled to discern shades and contours. Where was she?
In bed. Of course.
Her left palm burned. She explored the flesh with one finger, gently prodding at the sore spot. A warm wetness coated her fingertip.
Blood.
She floundered for the lamp on the bedside table. Her finger bumped the switch and she twisted it. Light cascaded over her. She winced at the sudden brilliance, at the pain that stabbed through her eyes into her brain. The throbbing worsened into a pressure that spread from her temples to her forehead, into her jaw joints, and behind her eyes. Nausea welled up in her gut as a wave of dizziness overtook her.
She clutched at the sheets and stared at a small stain on the ceiling until the dizziness abated.
The migraine had returned, stronger than before. Though she let go of the sheets, she lay motionless for several minutes, until the nausea subsided too. Then, slowly, she pushed up onto her elbows. When that seemed all right, she dared to sit up. The light hurt her eyes, and she winced yet again. With her eyes half closed, she slid off the bed and stumbled across the room to her dresser. In the top drawer, she found a scarf made of thin fabric. Back at the bed, she draped the scarf over the lampshade to dim the light. Only then did she settle onto the bed again, flat on her back.
Even if she hadn't suffered a migraine earlier today, she would've experienced one now. Every time she had the dream about the strange twilight corridor, she woke up with a migraine. In the dream, a certain doorway always beckoned her to enter, or at least it felt that way. This time, her dream self left the corridor before entering the room. Most often, she did enter the room. After awakening, she never could recall what happened inside the room.
Occasionally when she had the dream, she sleepwalked. She might wake in the morning to find her lamp on when she knew she turned it off before going to sleep. Once, she awakened to find her handgun lying on her stomach. For a terrified moment, she imagined that in her sleepwalking state she'd killed someone. Quickly, though, she realized the illogic of that idea. If she killed someone, surely the police would've caught her. At least that was what she told herself. She kept the gun in her dresser, which meant she need not sleepwalk very far to retrieve it. The dream that night had been frightening, though the details of it quickly blurred upon waking.
She lifted her hand to study her palm in the muted lamplight. Dried blood outlined a cut two inches long.
A cut. Like in the dream.
Ridiculous.
She made her way to the bathroom, homing in on the glow of the night-light plugged into an outlet above the sink. Leaving the overhead light off, she searched the medicine cabinet for a box of adhesive bandages. Once she found the box, she applied a dab of antibiotic ointment to the cut and covered it with a small bandage.
Back in the bedroom, she changed into a cotton nightshirt and crawled under the sheets. The haze of sleep clouded her mind. In the morning, she might find the cut had been a dream too, vivid as hell, but just a dream. Maybe she was still dreaming.
Her mind drifted into slumber.
Just a dream …
Chapter Four
When her clock radio buzzed at 7:45 the next morning, Grace hit the snooze button. Twice. Dreams, not exactly nightmares but disturbing anyhow, fractured her sleep. She fought to stay awake, yet always succumbed to slumber. And the dreams. They couldn't have been weirder or more disturbing if Salvador Dali designed them.
Her jaw felt tight, her eyes grainy. Post-nausea hunger growled in her gut. She'd forgotten about the migraine. By a miracle or a quirk of biology, she fell asleep again while the headache raged. She wanted to stay in bed, wrapped in her cocoon of blankets, free from thoughts of last night. If she could just escape the dreams. She had to get up, of course, and face life. Face the scarecrow man, and the ghost man, and the Vincent Price movie her life had become.
Her eyelids grew heavy. She drifted back into sleep.
A sharp knock at the door jolted her awake.
Grace rolled out of bed and onto her feet before she realized the knock came from the bedroom door, not the front door of the house. What the hell? As she blinked the sleep out of her eyes, she stumbled to the bedroom door which, warped from the previous night's weirdness, couldn't latch properly.
; The door crept open a few inches.
Grace froze. Her pulse quickened. She glanced at the dresser, trying to gauge whether she might reach the gun in the top drawer before an attacker surged through the door at her.
Silence reigned, save for the thudding of her heart. The door did not move.
She leaned sideways to peer through the gap between the door and the jamb. The hallway looked empty. Grace tiptoed to the door, grasped the knob, and thrust the door wide open.
Empty space greeted her.
The warped door had probably drifted open on its own. She let paranoia get the best of her, a bad habit she seemed to have developed lately.
She retreated into the bedroom. After changing into jeans and a T-shirt, she wandered into the bathroom. Fatigue hung over her like a heavy cloak. When she examined herself in the bathroom mirror, her malaise mutated into disgust. Her hazel eyes were bloodshot. Her dark auburn hair, foregoing its usual curls, hung in greasy strands around her face. She slid her hands through her hair but the action served only to exacerbate the problem. A shower would help with the hair, but as for the rest of her body and mind, it would take bathing in bleach to cleanse the mildew.
She had transmuted into walking mold. Algae with a skeleton. So long had she languished in financial and emotional limbo that her soul moldered and became encrusted with gook. Now the yuck inside was showing on the surface — in the tangles her hair had woven itself into, in the pallor of her skin, in the frown that nestled into a permanent home on her lips. She looked like hell, which seemed appropriate, since she felt like she'd moved into a basement apartment in the nether regions.
Twisting the faucet on, she grabbed her toothbrush. Though she couldn't eradicate the spiritual mold in five minutes, she might at least look clean. Gazing into the sink drain, she scrubbed at her teeth.
A shape flashed in the mirror. She lifted her head to look.