She nodded her approval.
“I just need a couple hours of sleep,” Kat said. “Then we’ll dive into the dream training.”
- Chapter Thirty -
Save the little girl!
Lopez awoke in a cold sweat with Alfonso staring at him.
“Where are we?” Lopez asked.
“You weren’t asleep that long. We’re somewhere over the Midwest.”
Without looking out the window, Lopez shook his head. “Oh, no, we’re certainly not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”
The old man uttered a “Hmmm,” from behind his Bible.
Apparently, to keep himself awake, he’d been studying it for clues. He looked like a death burrito twice reheated.
Feeling more than a little guilty, Lopez removed the medallion from around his neck and handed it to Alfonso. “Get some shut eye.”
“Thanks, don’t mind if I do.” He put his head through the loop of the chain and tucked it under his shirt. “Hector, I want to tell you something to mull over while I nap.”
“If it has to do with a career change, I’m listening.”
Alfonso laughed heartily.
“Anyway, Hector, those calls I made on the way to the airport were to notify some key people who had trained under Padre Gennaro.”
Lopez assumed there was more and waited.
“He believed that while civilization had always addressed the earthly evils as well as the ‘agents’ of Luzveyn Dred, we never had attacked the problem at the core. In other words, the Romans fought Spartacus, and then, eventually, humanity ended the practice of slavery. We defeated Hitler with military power, and then tried to attack the problem of racism, the cause of World War II. But all this was done in the earthly realm.”
“Meanwhile, Luzveyn Dred continues unabated to work his magic in the Spatium Quartus,” Lopez finished.
“Yes.”
“So, there is a team of fighters loyal to Padre Gennaro?”
Alfonso laughed loud enough that people across the aisle looked over.
“Padre was more of a lover than a fighter. He believed that violence begat more violence.”
Lopez felt a pang of guilt. Since the massacre of OIA, Lopez had run from conflict. He’d tried to save as many from the Spatium Quartus as he could, but he had no plan to defeat Luzveyn Dred. Fear had prevented him from developing more warriors to fight—fear of leadership, and fear of having to watch it again unravel.
“So what kind of team did he assemble?”
“He established a prayer group.”
At first the information didn’t even register. Lopez had pictured an army of white knights marching against the beasts of Luzveyn Dred.
“A prayer group? Great. So, at least we have that going for us.”
“Yes, once he became comfortable with someone’s spirituality, Padre Gennaro would explain and then take them to the Spatium Quartus. He put together an elaborate system to notify all members in case of a potential emergency.”
“An emergency like this?”
Alfonso nodded emphatically.
“And your calls touched that off?”
“Yes.”
“All these years,” Lopez said shaking his head, “I should have done more—recruited more to help us.”
Alfonso appeared surprised.
“Whatever regrets you have, you’re overlooking the bigger picture.”
“Okay, Sensei, please tell me what you mean.” His hands pressed together at his chest, he bowed in his seat.
The old man was silent while light turbulence rocked the aircraft.
“Well, Spartacus was a soldier turned gladiator-general, and Hitler was a soldier turned dictator. Did you ever consider that, as a soldier turned dream-link expert, Luzveyn Dred had targeted you to be his next antichrist?”
“Me?” Lopez felt lightheaded.
Think of the benefits you can bring your people, especially the Mexican people.
Alfonso continued, “A soldier turned dream warrior? A minority in your own country, and, from what Kat told me, a professional passed up for a well-deserved promotion? The seeds had been planted, and you were a perfect target for him to manipulate. You could have become Luzveyn Dred’s greatest asset. Instead, you became an arch adversary.”
“Alfonso,” Lopez leaned in closer. “You said ‘antichrist.’ Are you sure Luzveyn Dred is the Devil?”
Alfonso returned his Bible to the seat pocket and then leaned back against the headrest. “‘Is all that we see or seem, but a dream within a dream?’ Do you know who wrote that?” Alfonso said, his eyelids beginning to droop.
“Well, let me cover all four bases,” Lopez said. “Shelley, Byron, Keats, or Shakespeare?”
“No.”
“Was I close?”
“No. It was Edgar Allen Poe.”
“Nice attempt on evading my question. Is Luzveyn Dred the Devil?”
Alfonso sighed. “I find it interesting how the human mind needs to classify and label. Is Luzveyn Dred the Devil? Was Jesus the Son of God? Was Mohammed, Buddha, or Gandhi more enlightened than the other? Rather than accept a person, place, or thing for its essence, we feel that we need to understand it in relation to everything it is not. Luzveyn Dred is the embodiment of evil, and thus needs to be defeated.”
“So, basically, you don’t know, or you aren’t answering the question?” Lopez was past the point of accepting half-answers.
Alfonso reached again for his Bible. “Hector, I believe that our theoretical concept of the Devil, the Beast, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, may all be based off of the very real existence of Luzveyn Dred.”
He opened to where the page was bookmarked and read. “‘Revelation 12: 7-9: And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not: neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’”
Lopez didn’t like the implications of the answer.
“So, then Dred, the horsemen, the beasts, they’re all fallen angels? Why is God letting him do this to us?”
“I don’t know, Hector. Free will? I wish I had simple answers for you. Maybe God built the Spatium Quartus, maybe Michael did. Maybe it’s a vacuum of sorts, as hard for God to get into as it is for Dred to get out of. He seems to spend an inordinate amount of energy trying to pull us in there, maybe God is waiting for Dred to break out. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. All I know is that the fate of our world rests on defeating Luzveyn Dred in his world. Padre Gennaro believed that man alone, even mankind united, is not strong enough. We’ll need God’s help to accomplish it.”
Lopez said nothing.
After a moment, Alfonso must have realized the conversation was over. His head tilted to the side, and he closed his eyes.
- Chapter Thirty One—
After tucking Alexis in for an early-afternoon nap, Drew familiarized himself with Lopez’s electronics. To his surprise, much of what Lopez had installed turned out to be high-end audio gadgets rather than just surveillance equipment. After several, unsuccessful tries to tune into a radio station, he popped in one of his favorite CDs.
As Turksen Tet’s raspy baritone voice sang of his girlfriend, Drew began taking inventory of the stocked food and drink.
We’re livin’ in cities, mirror’d glass reflects the past
takin’ in promises we know will never last
When every one is broken, when all have lost their way
The last thing left upstanding is your pretty baby’s pain
Drew felt guilty about Nadia’s death. There had to have been more he could have done, and yet he also blamed Lopez. Lopez should have protected her.
Can you stomach—can you live with it?
Can you stomach her pain?
Nothing would change the fact that Nadia was dead. Life seemed as meanin
gless as the dried meats and canned vegetables that Drew found himself sorting through. Then, a liquid oasis, Drew spied a bottle of Absolut vodka. It was the brand that Nadia liked. Sometimes, she had even kept a bottle of it in the refrigerator. It never ceased to amaze him how long it would sit in there, and how easy it was for him to ignore it.
Then when she’s gone, every moment swept away
Your fingertips remember the skin that bled in vain
He felt the old urge return, the craving. One for Nadia. For old time’s sake. Just one shot. He’d eat a sandwich first, so it wouldn’t affect him. Vodka left no odor on the breath, so Alexis and Kat would never know. If he drank just this one time, he could justify the slip at his next AA meeting. After all, Nadia had died. They’d have to understand.
When you’re lookin’ in the mirror
When you’re takin’ out the trash
Ask yourself this question, or your love will never last
Can you stomach—can you live with it?
Can you stomach her… pain?
“These thoughts,” he mumbled, “are crazy.”
I need help. I should call my sponsor.
But Drew did not call his sponsor. He reached to the rack that held the purple-tinted glasses and set one of them on the counter. He opened the bottle. He poured a couple of ounces of the Russian elixir with one hand, and raised the glass to his mouth with the other. He gulped. It burned his throat as it went down. He liked the feeling; he loved the feeling.
I’m invincible!
Drew felt as though he could accomplish anything. He decided to take the medallion and exact his revenge on Luzveyn Dred. He picked up the bottle and threw it out of the pantry toward the far kitchen wall. The still-open bottle didn’t spill a drop during its entire flight. Instead of hitting the white plaster and shattering, the Absolut bottle vanished on impact.
He walked out and closed the pantry door, nearly falling over as the alcohol poisoned his system.
“Oh, God, I’ve relapsed,” he said, the last word igniting feelings of guilt and shame.
He panicked. The feeling of dread returned. This time, he might be conquered by The Booze. His conscience reminded him that, after the first drink, he was defenseless against alcohol’s perils. He turned to flee the kitchen, but standing in his path, was Alexis.
“Why, Drew?” she asked, sounding eerily like Nadia.
“Why did you do this to me?” This time, it wasn’t Alexis’s voice at all. The voice was clearly Nadia’s.
She looked up at him, her face blanketed with hate. She lifted her arms, palms up, and revealed slashes from her wrists to her elbows.
*****
Drew screamed and sat up, wiping thick spider webs away from his face. Kat was at his side and helped remove the sensors from his temples and chest.
“It’s okay, Drew,” she said softly. “You’re fine. Alexis is fine.”
“Alexis!”
Kat hushed him, reminding that they had been dream linked.
“Don’t you remember, yet?” she asked.
Still trying to suck air into his lungs, Drew shook his head. The realizations sank in—Alexis was all right, and he had not actually drunk any liquor. His heart rate slowly began to slow.
He’d experienced relapse dreams in the past, but none had been this intense—this vivid. He could still taste the vodka on his lips. He felt the burn in his throat and the shame in his gut.
“Do you remember putting Alexis down for her nap?” Kat quizzed.
Again, he shook his head, and then surveyed his surroundings. He sat on a black leather chair, similar to the one in Lopez’s condo. There was an empty, identical chair beside his. The walls of the room bore a deep green color, and scattered throughout the make-shift laboratory were metal instrumentation panels covered in lights and switches. He felt no familiarity of having been in this room before, and began to question if this too was not part of some dream.
“Relax. This is a normal reaction. It’s a form of sleep inertia. Sometimes afterwards, you don’t recall linking. It’ll usually come back.”
Drew remembered worrying about the implications of Nadia’s disappearance and wondering what would happen when the authorities found out. Then, he’d contemplated the scene when informing Nadia’s mom of her daughter’s death; all hell was bound to break loose. Those thoughts had been put on hold by the need to put Alexis down for her nap, but he still had no memory of them starting the dream link.
“What in the heck happened in there?” he asked.
“You tell me. Dude, you’ve got some serious demons inside you,” Kat said staring at him.
Drew tried to get his bearings. “Yeah, was that your doing or did I bring that on myself?”
“I only observed that dream.” She organized the various drugs she had used to plunge him into a sleep-like state. “We did some training before you zoned out.”
He vaguely recollected fighting gray beasts with swords.
“What do we do next?”
“You’ll link to my mind. It’ll be even harder to manipulate your surroundings. Of course, even that’s child’s play compared to the S.Q.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
Her gray-blue eyes flared, and then narrowed. “Drew, me linking to your dreams, you linking to my dreams is nothing in comparison to doing battle in the S.Q.”
“What I just went through in there was not easy to deal with, Kat.”
“Don’t get me wrong, lucid dreaming is a tough skill to master, but let me think of an example, in terms of difficulty.” she said, “Okay, there was an anti-drug commercial when I was a little kid. Remember the one with the egg cracked into the sizzling frying pan? This is your brain; this is your brain on drugs?”
“Of course.”
“If that’s the level of difficulty of lucid dreaming, then the S.Q. is the equivalent of throwing that frying pan into a forest fire.”
“Alright, I get it already. So, how long should I expect the whole process to take?”
“Drew, it’s not a matter of time. It’s a matter of will. It’s developing your subconscious mind to take control. I know that might be difficult for you to conceptualize, but it’s true.”
“How long did it take you to go through it?” he pressed.
Kat suggested getting something to eat. As they made their way through the halls, she explained that she’d spent years developing lucid dream skills on her own prior to joining Lopez. Once they teamed up, she began linking to his dreams, and within days entered the Spatium Quartus.
“That doesn’t mean we’ll be able to get you to that level that quickly,” she added. “It might take days, weeks or months, but this is a crash course. We at least need to get you ready to defend in the S.Q. in case things move really fast.”
As they entered the kitchen, Drew paused. He had an irrational feeling that he needed to be careful of stepping on broken fragments of a vodka bottle.
Kat chuckled. “Don’t worry about it. There’s no vodka in this house. But be careful, I think Lopez may have stashed a bottle or two of Jose Cuervo somewhere.”
Drew had never been a tequila man per se. However, in the grips of his disease, it didn’t matter much what he poured down his throat, as long as it numbed him emotionally.
“Luzveyn Dred watches your dreams and nightmares.” She opened the refrigerator and pulled out lunchmeat and condiments to make a sandwich. “In the S.Q., the sky is blanketed with our nightmares. We believe it’s how Luzveyn Dred sees our world.”
Drew leaned against the granite-covered island in the middle of the kitchen. He looked out the window where a light snow was falling—slowly covering the ground. It was hard to believe they were still in California.
“He will come at you Drew with every fear that you’ve—”
She gazed past him. Alexis was standing in the same place in the kitchen that Kat, disguised as the little girl, had stood in Drew’s dream.
Drew squatted in front of her.
>
“You all right, Angel?”
Alexis’s eyes may as well have been marbles.
“He’s coming.”
“Who, baby?” He put his arm around her.
She turned toward him, her eyes finally focusing on his face.
“Drew, the bad man is coming tonight,” she said. “That angel came back to my dreams and told me.”
- Chapter Thirty Two—
The day prior to Night of Nights – Rome, Italy
It was just after 4 PM when Bernard Hyde entered Tabatha Wellington’s office at La Sapienza University. In the hallway outside, students passed discussing topics from literature to science. Hyde’s office was less than 40 feet away so the careless, old man made frequent stops to visit her.
“You’ll never guess who I just spoke to,” he said, sitting down. “It was our old friend, Hector Lopez.”
“I’ve not seen Hector in years,” Tabatha said. “Where has he been hiding?”
“I guess, these days, he’s back in southern California. He asked me for a favor.”
Hyde stared at her, smiling, but she couldn’t read him. On the desk between them sat a mountain of student reports that had not, and for that matter, would never be graded.
“What does he need?” she asked, hoping to sound innocent.
She grabbed her purse from the desk. She did not think Hyde was armed, but having her Walther PPK close during conversations of this sort seemed prudent.
“Well, there’s someone he wants me to follow from the airport.” He stuck out his chest in a transparent attempt at self-importance.
“If you like, I can give you a ride to the airport,” she said.
She knew Hyde detested driving in Rome so much that he did not own a car.
“I am worried that it may be dangerous, Tabatha.”
“If it were that dangerous, Bernard, no offense, he would not have sent an old man.”
She smiled. There was so much else she wanted to say, but she held her tongue. Over the years, in addition to teaching in the Neurological Sciences at La Sapienza, Dr. Tabatha Wellington had become the Dean of the Science department. Dr. Hyde had helped to swing things in her favor. He had been a useful, albeit at times unwitting, ally.
“No offense taken.” He sighed and shrugged. “I suppose I would enjoy the company. We will need to be extremely careful.”
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