Overheard in a Dream

by Torey Hayden

  “‘Yes, I understand that.’ Fergus leaned back in the chair again and a deep, weary silence formed. He really did look tired. I suddenly felt very sorry for him. Reaching my hand out, I took his.

  “He smiled faintly, closing his fingers over mine. ‘I’m so sick of this world, Laura,’ he murmured. ‘So fucking sick and tired of it all.’

  “Leaning over, I kissed the hand I held. ‘I’m sorry you’re feeling low.’

  “‘There’s so much shit in this world.’

  “‘Yes, but there’re good bits too.’ I kissed his fingers and smiled. ‘Yes?’

  “He leaned forward and embraced me. Within moments we were lost in one another’s arms and all the bad parts of the last two years vanished midst the kisses. I wasn’t used to being the strong one in our relationship but I liked it. I liked the warm tenderness I felt for him, the sense I could take care of all his sorrow.

  “He nuzzled his face through my hair but then stopped, pulling back to look at me. ‘Why did you cut your hair?’

  “‘I just wanted a change,’ I said.

  “‘But you knew I liked it the way it was. Why did you take that away from me?’

  “‘Take it away from you? Don’t be silly. I did it because I felt like it. It looks nicer.’

  “He studied my face carefully, smiling more fully as he did so. Lifting up one hand, he traced my features with his fingers very, very gently. ‘You are my queen, my beautiful one. We’ll be together forever now, won’t we?’

  “I smiled back.

  “‘You won’t leave me again, will you?’

  “‘I’ll try not to.’

  “‘You won’t. Will you? We’ll be together forever. For all time.’

  “I smiled.

  “‘I’d die for you,’ he said quietly. ‘Like I did before. Like I’ve always done before. I’ve always died for you, my queen. Every lifetime. I thought I would again this time when you left me.’ Only the faintest smile touched his lips. His dark eyes were fathomless. ‘Would you die for me? Would you make the sacrifice for me that I’ve made so many times for you?’”

  “In November I was doing my practical work in the university hospital’s neonatal unit when a baby boy was airlifted in from another county. He had been born with no kidneys. In the normal course of things, babies like that die within a very short time. The parents, however, had had a hard time conceiving. They felt he was their only chance at having a child, and they were just so desperate not to lose him. As a consequence, the doctors decided to try a transplant. This treatment was still highly experimental at the time. Although the procedure had been tried previously, it had never been successful. Indeed, kidney transplants in general did not work well with young infants. The doctors had agreed, however, to try keeping the baby alive long enough to find a suitable donor.

  “The little boy was so seriously ill that he required continuous medical supervision, which was how I and two fellow medical students came into the picture. Working eight-hour shifts each, it was our task to remain with the baby continuously to aid the nursing staff in providing the necessary level of care in the pre- and post-transplant period.

  “I was pleased to be part of it. It was exciting to have an opportunity to see medical research in action and to interact with the doctors on the transplant team, many of whom were as gods to us students and usually just as inaccessible. For me personally, it was also an opportunity to redeem myself in Betjeman’s eyes. He’d gone the extra mile for me by allowing me back into the program after my ‘breakdown’, as he called it.

  “I didn’t talk much about this new responsibility with Fergus. Our separation over the summer had taken its toll on him in an odd, inexplicable way. On the one hand, he always wanted to be with me and could easily become distraught when we were apart. On the other hand, however, he was more impatient and more irritable with me than before. He kept getting crazy ideas about my being unfaithful. It became easier just not to tell him too much about anything he couldn’t be part of. I still felt confident of keeping everything in balance, though.

  “When the first shift came, I was quickly caught up in the excitement of it all. It was cutting-edge stuff and when the child arrived, there was an almost palpable tension at the hospital. This still hadn’t left me by the time I came out to meet Fergus at eleven.

  “To my surprise, he wasn’t there when I came out. He was supposed to meet me, so I wasn’t happy, as I had to take several buses to get back to my apartment and it was very late when I arrived home.

  “I opened the door to the dark hallway. Immediately I heard Fergus speaking in a soft, slightly dreamy voice.

  “‘My Voices tell me about you,’ he said. ‘My Voices say that this isn’t a Being of Light. They’re worried, Laura. And so am I.’

  “‘Jesus, Fergus, you scared the life out of me. What are you doing here anyway? You were supposed to pick me up.’

  “‘You’re being seduced by Darkness. You are relinquishing the Light to return to the Darkness.’

  “‘Fergus …?’ I came around to stand in front of where he was sitting. I looked at him carefully. He didn’t seem drunk. I couldn’t smell anything on him. He did use recreational drugs occasionally, but the few times I’d witnessed him using them, they hadn’t done much more than make him sleepy.

  “Then he said in a more intense voice, ‘I’ve really done my best, Laura. I know I pushed you way too hard. I know I put you into a position of receiving more energy from the Voices than you could sustain, so I’ve really tried to be understanding. I’ve tried to meet you at your level. But there’s just no point carrying on, if you’re not going to channel again. I’ve had to come down to your level to meet you, and I’ve been willing to do that in order to lift you up, but you need to understand it’s not my level. I’m simply here to help you. Now you’re sinking below my reach again. You’re choosing to fall. And I’m shitting myself, seeing everything I’ve worked so hard for in this lifetime slipping away from me. Realizing it’s going to be another lifetime and more searching and …’ He put his head in his hands melodramatically. ‘I can’t see an end to it.’

  “I was confused. ‘Are you breaking up with me?’ I whispered.

  “‘These actions of your lower self … I can accept I have to pander to them, if we’re ever going to move you upward, but don’t think I’m going to wallow in them. I’ve been here thinking this over and I can’t go on like this.’

  “I was beginning to feel extremely uneasy. ‘How long have you been sitting here?’ I asked suspiciously. ‘Haven’t you been at work?’

  “‘You disgust me when you act like this,’ he replied. ‘We’re not equals, you know. You don’t actually deserve me yet.’

  “‘Fergus, I’m not sure what’s going on, but I’m not comfortable with it.’ Something just wasn’t right in the way he was acting. ‘I think you should go. Now. I mean it.’

  “He continued to sit, completely motionless.

  “I really didn’t know what to do. Finally I said, ‘Okay, if you want to sit there, sit. I’m going to go have a bath and go to bed.’ I turned and left him. Walking down the hallway to the bathroom, I shut the door firmly behind me and locked it.

  “‘Laura?’ I could hear him coming into the hallway.

  “‘It’s late. You need to go home,’ I said through the locked door. I turned the water in the tub on.

  “‘Let me in.’

  “‘No, it’s too late. I want to go to bed. Goodnight, Fergus.’

  “‘Let me in, Laura,’ he said more forcefully.

  “‘No, Fergus. Go home now.’

  “‘Let me in!’ he demanded in an irate voice. When I didn’t respond, wham! He kicked the door. Hard.

  “Terrified, I looked around the bathroom for something to jam against the door. There was nothing.

  “Fergus grabbed the door knob and rattled it roughly. ‘Let me in.’ There was less anger in his voice this time.

  “Still frightened, I didn’t answer. />
  “‘Laura? Laura?’ A panicky note came into his voice. ‘Please don’t leave me.’

  “‘I’ve not left you. I’m right here. But go away now, okay? Go home and get some sleep. Phone me tomorrow.’

  “‘I’m sorry for what I said. I don’t know what happened. I didn’t mean it. Please forgive me.’

  “I didn’t answer.

  “‘Laura?’ he cried in a truly heart-rending manner.

  “It sounded like he was crying. Confused and concerned, I cracked the bathroom door open. Fergus was on his knees.

  “‘Oh, my queen, please don’t leave me,’ he begged and reached out to grab me around the legs.

  “I bent down to hug him. ‘Fergus, what’s the matter with you tonight? Here, stand up.’

  “He rose and wrapped his arms around me so tightly that I could feel his beating heart. ‘Oh God, I need you so much,’ he whispered. ‘I need you. I can’t live without you. How can you frighten me like this?’

  “‘Me? How can I be frightening? It’s you who’s doing my head in. You’ve scared me witless tonight. Whatever’s brought this on?’

  “‘I’m sorry. Please forgive me.’ He was so pathetic.

  “‘Yes, of course I forgive you.’

  “‘Tell me you love me,’ he pleaded.

  “‘I love you, Fergus. Of course, I love you.’

  “‘I won’t lose you. Not again. I won’t let it happen,’ he said. ‘I’ll fight. With all my heart and strength, I’ll struggle to bring you back into the Light with me. I’ll die before I let you slip away again.’

  “‘Shhh, let’s not talk about all that right now, okay?’ I whispered. ‘Because I love you and that’s what matters, isn’t it?’

  “‘As much as you did in Atlantis?’ he asked.

  “I nodded. ‘Yeah, sure. As much as then.’

  “He kissed me tenderly. ‘As much as in Atlantis, my queen, when you sacrificed it all for me?’”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  When Morgana came into the playroom that afternoon, she said nothing, not even hello. Instead she went straight to the huge window and climbed up on the window ledge. Spreading her arms out wide, Morgana pressed her face and chest against the glass.

  James wasn’t concerned because Morgana was entirely safe. There was no way to open the windows and they were double-glazed, toughened glass. He said nothing so as not to impede whatever feelings she wished to express.

  “It’s windy outside today,” she said, her voice soft.

  “Yes,” James said. “It’s coming in off the plains, so it’s cold.”

  “I’m like a bird up here,” Morgana said, her arms still outstretched against the window. “There’s the plains out there and I’ll sail on the wind.”

  “You’re feeling like a bird today,” James reflected.

  “No,” she said, her back to him, her face against the glass. “These big windows just make me think that. I always wanted to do this. Ever since I came in here.”

  “I see.”

  “And the wind made me think about doing it today.”

  “Why’s that?” James asked.

  “Because the wind carries your dreams. That’s what my mum tells me. She says that’s what the Sioux believe. That dreams come to you on the wind.”

  When Morgana said that, James immediately thought of Laura’s first book about the Wind Dreamer, the young man caught between the real world and his world of “voices”.

  “Sometimes in my dreams I fly,” Morgana said. “Not in a plane or anything. Really fly. I just put my arms like this and off I go.”

  “Yes, those are wonderful dreams, aren’t they?” James replied.

  “Do you get that dream too?” Morgana asked and for the first time she turned around, although she remained standing on the window ledge.

  James smiled. “Yes, sometimes.”

  “I’d like to fly,” she said pensively. “I always hope that maybe on a windy day it will happen.” She hopped down from the ledge to the floor, “But I don’t think it ever will.”

  Morgana moved off across the room to the shelves. Walking slowly beside them, she trailed the fingers of one hand along the wood of the middle shelf. “I had a bad dream last night,” she said. She picked up a baby doll.

  “Would you like to tell me about it?” James asked.

  Morgana brought the doll back to the table. “No,” she said. “It was too scary.”

  “It was a nightmare?”

  “Yes. I dream it all the time. Then I wake up crying. Sometimes my mum has to come in and cuddle me.”

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to talk about it?”

  “No. I never tell anyone about it. Not even my mum.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s ’cause she might get mad. I mean, when it’s daytime and I’m okay, I know she probably wouldn’t, ’cause it’s just a dream and I’m not doing anything for real, but when I first wake up I’m never very sure.”

  “I understand,” James said. “But that must be hard, keeping such a scary thing to yourself.”

  “Mostly I try not to think about it, because it can scare me even when I’m awake.”

  “It does sound very frightening,” James replied. “Perhaps if you shared it with me, I could think of something to help.”

  Morgana bent closer to the doll and James felt the silence deepen. “I wish we hadn’t talked about that dream. I’m feeling scared now. My mum says, ‘Just don’t pay attention to it.’ But it’s in my head and it’s hard not to pay attention to what’s in your head.”

  “You know I wouldn’t get mad,” James reassured her. “I never get mad at children who come to the playroom, because I understand that sometimes strong feelings make us do things we shouldn’t. To get problems sorted out, it’s important that children can show their feelings in here.”

  Morgana raised her eyes to him without raising her head. There was a long pensive moment and then she looked back at the doll. She rocked it tenderly.

  “The dream’s about me and my horse. I got a horse called Shaggy that Daddy got me last year. He’s got brown fur and that’s why we call him that. In the dream, him and me are out riding. We are going down on the road. On the highway. Actually, I’m not riding Shaggy. I’m walking him; I have him by the reins.”

  “I see,” James said.

  “I’m not supposed to be down on the road. It’s too far away and it’s dangerous. But in the dream I am. And this car comes up behind me. I can’t see who’s in it. I think it’s a man. And he’s driving real slow. I start to get scared.”

  “What do you think is going to happen?” James asked.

  “I don’t know. That’s why it’s hard to talk about, because I don’t know what’s going to happen, but it makes me feel really scared. I want to turn around and look at him to see who it is, but for some reason, I can’t do it. I just know he’s there. Anyway, he drives real, real slow. I’m scared he’s going to stop. I think he’s going to do something.”

  Morgana stopped. Her eyes were fixed on the doll. She cuddled it close against her. “There’s something else in the dream too. It sort of happens before. I never actually dream the before part, but I always know it happened. And what it is, is that I’ve gone into my mum’s study. See, me and Conor, we’re not supposed to go in there by ourselves because Mum doesn’t want us messing up her stuff.”

  Morgana paused to caress the doll’s hair. “She’s got this itty, bitty little cat statue in there. Made of stone, I think. It’s only this big.” She measured out about two inches with her fingers. “It’s grey-coloured and it’s sitting down on its bottom, you know, like cats do. And my mum keeps it set up on the tower part of her computer. She showed it to me once. She let me hold it. But she said if she wasn’t in the room, I mustn’t ever, ever touch it.”

  “The cat statue sounds very special to your mum,” James reflected.

  “She thinks maybe I’ll lose it or something, if I play with it. Or maybe drop it.
See, it costed a lot of money because it came from Egypt. That’s a place they talk about in the Bible and it’s a long, long way away from here. And this little cat’s as old as the Bible. My mum says. She told me the person who made this little stone cat statue lived in Bible times and when he was done carving it, he put it in the coffin of a king.”

  James raised his eyebrows. “Wow. That’s amazing.”

  “A coffin is where you put a dead body. The king’s dead body, before he gets buried,” Morgana said. “And then it goes in his grave. And that’s where this little cat statue was until an arkologist dug it up. And then this friend of my mum’s gave it to her. And she put it on her computer. And she told me never, never to touch it without her knowing about it, because it’s really valuable.”

  “I can understand now why it’s so special to your mum,” James said.

  Morgana leaned down and tended to the doll a moment.

  “So how does this little cat statue figure in your nightmare?” James asked.

  “Well, because in the dream when I’m walking along the road with Shaggy and this car starts driving along real slow behind me, I get scared and want to go find my mum. But then I put my hand in my pocket and the cat statue is there.” A quick, rather guilty glance to James followed. “I don’t know how it got there but I know I must have gone in her study and tooken it. In the dream I don’t remember taking it, but I know she’s going to be really, really mad at me when she finds out. First I think maybe I should throw the cat statue away and then my mum won’t know I have it. But then I know it’s so valuable and she loves it so much and, really, I don’t want to throw it away. But I don’t know what to do. So, I get really scared that the man’s going to get me, but I’m scared that if I call out for help, people will find out I have the cat statue. I’m scared I’m going to be in so much trouble and I didn’t even know I’d tooken it.”

  “Yes, it sounds very scary,” James said.

  “The dream’s a little different each time. Sometimes it’s not always the same car. It was a white car last night. Once it was a red car. And one time I remember it being a white station wagon. But there’s always this driver guy who makes me feel scared and I can’t turn around and see who he is. And every time I want to get help, I put my hand in my pocket and find out I got the cat statue in there.”