Nightmare

by Robin Parrish

  "NO!" roared Jordin with a shocking level of anger in her voice. "I have to do this! If you won't help me, I'll do it by myself!"

  "Wait!" I tried to say, though it felt like there was an obstruction in my throat. I was holding my chest with both hands and seeing spots in front of my eyes. `Jordin!"

  She never answered.

  I fell into an abyss.

  Something had its rock-hard fingers clenched around my heart and dragged my whole body down into the void with it.

  Not literally, but that's what my mind pictured while I felt these strange sensations surge through my body, rendering me all but powerless.

  It was what drowning in a stormy sea must be like. Fighting an endless battle against nature, trying to keep my head above the water only for another massive wave to crash down on me, all while the entire ocean spun around me like a waterspout. And the worst part was knowing that every time I might catch a moment of rest, that hope would vanish with the next wave of nausea and fear. The terror seemed as if it would never stop coming, and knowing I was defenseless to keep it from happening immobilized me completely.

  Where had Jordin gone? How could she just leave me?

  I suppose it was partly my fault for not outright telling her about my heart problem, particularly now when I was having this ... attack, or whatever it was.

  I tried calling out to her a few times, but I was so weak that I couldn't raise my voice.

  I focused on breathing. IfI could just get some deep breaths into my lungs, maybe I could relax enough to get a handle on this and drag myself back up topside for some fresh air.

  Slowly, the dizziness came to an end, but not until after I threw up. Afterward, my skin felt clammy and tingly, and I knew my face had to be ashen white.

  I thought of my pragmatic father, and tried to imagine what he would do in a similar situation. It didn't take long to come up with the answer-he would never have allowed himself to get into a situation like this. He would have prepared better than I did, packing walkie-talkies for Jordin and me in case we got separated. It had never occurred to me to bring corns of any kind, because Jordin and I had always investigated together.

  I thought then of my strong-willed mother and her take-noprisoners attitude. Her feisty, quirky demeanor had endeared her to legions of TV fans everywhere. She would never let a little thing like a weak heart slow her up.

  Okay, Mom, this is for you.

  I shined my light around the dark hallway, searching. I crawled in a circle to the door to the post office and grabbed the handle that opened it, hoisting myself slowly up.

  Getting on my legs again seemed to help the blood flow, and the world quickly righted itself. I was still sweating, but my heart was resuming normal operation, as well.

  Cautiously and with exhausting effort, I worked my way back down the hall the way we'd come, and ascended the stairs. It took a good ten minutes, and by the time I reached the next set of stairs, my strength was spent. I caught the slightest whiff of the glorious North Carolina coastal sea air, drifting through the upper decks of the ship. I thought I heard the sound of rain tapping against metal. But I was powerless to reach it.

  Just as the darkness was taking me again, I thought I saw a tiny bright light shining in my face and a familiar voice saying, "Now what have you gone and done to yourself, young lady?"

  Never had I been so happy to smell dead fish.

  That was my first sensation when I awoke in a bright room where a man was sitting next to me.

  "Carl?" I rasped.

  I blinked and noted the tiny cot I lay on, and the stark surroundings of the small metal room I was in. It was bright from several lights that were shining in the room, and I could hear the rain coming down just a short distance away. I was inside on the main deck.

  My crusty old friend was staring me in the eye, his expression unreadable.

  "Thirsty," I croaked, my tongue and throat dry. "How did you find me?"

  Carl held up a single hand, and inside it was my phone. "Almost had to get the jaws a' life to pry it out of your hand."

  I understood. Before Jordin ran off, my finger had been right on the phone's Send button, with his number already input. I must've mashed it sometime during the chaos that followed.

  "Where's Jordin?" I said, still having a hard time getting my voice. But I noted with relief that my heart was beating normally, and the sweats and pains I'd felt earlier were gone.

  "Your friend?" Carl shrugged. "Must still be belowdecks somewhere."

  "I better go find her-"

  I tried to sit up, but Carl gently forced me back down, and I was surprised at how much strength the old seaman still possessed. "You ain't going nowhere till you tell me what happened."

  My mind scrambled, trying to think of an excuse. I didn't dare tell Carl what was really wrong with me; as much as I appreciated his care and concern, I knew he'd take the information straight to my parents. And I wasn't ready for them to know.

  "I forgot how hot it can get down there," I lied. "Must've gotten dehydrated."

  His eyes narrowed, and he stared me down. "Then why did you call me?" he asked, producing the phone again, and this time handing it over to me.

  I sighed. "I thought someone was on the ship-a real, live person-other than us. I thought somebody had snuck onboard and was pranking us. But then I saw the thing we were chasing, and it definitely wasn't alive."

  Carl seemed to sense the truth in this part of my story, at least. "I run a tight ship. Nobody gets onboard without my knowledge, you know that, Maia. Why were you all by yourself when I found you?"

  I shook my head in frustration, or almost anger. "Jordin ran off after the apparition. I tried telling her I didn't feel well, but she was already gone. I should've brought some walkies.... Just didn't think about it."

  Carl seemed to deflate a bit. I read this to mean that all of his questions had been answered to his satisfaction.

  "Something's happening, Carl. Something's wrong," I said, at last vocalizing a dawning comprehension that had been bugging me all week. It had nothing to do with my little heart problem. That was just my own personal stuff, and one way or another, I would handle that myself. There was something else going on here that was much bigger than me.

  He sat back in his seat and looked at me.

  I took a deep breath. "Every single time I've gone investigating with Jordin, we've encountered paranormal phenomena. Every time. One hundred percent success rate. That ... that's impossible. It just doesn't happen."

  Carl crossed his arms in front of his chest and frowned. "Honey, you know I don't know much about the ghost business. I'm just an old sailor who never lost his sea legs. Why are you talking to me about this, instead of what's-her-name?"

  I smiled, with a hint of desperation on my face. "Because you're here." And because he was my friend. Though that went without saying.

  His eyebrows rose as he resigned himself to being my sounding board. "Well, when you're at sea and you wind up somewhere you didn't expect to, there's only two possible explanations. There's a problem with the weather or there's a problem with the boat."

  I pondered this. "So ... either the paranormal itself is ... I don't know, changing, like the weather, which doesn't make any sense. Or there's something wrong with me? Am I the boat?"

  He stared me down. "You're driving the boat, Maia. But you're not the only passenger on it, are you?"

  It was over an hour from the time I passed out until Jordin emerged from belowdecks. Carl had left me to get some rest twenty or thirty minutes ago. He made up some excuse about needing to check the ship's moorings because of the weather.

  In that time, I'd left his quarters and returned to the crew bunk Jordin and I had selected, curling up in my sleeping bag. My strength had improved tremendously, but I was beginning to fear the worst about Jordin. What if she had fallen and hurt herself? Maybe she'd been impaled on some metal spike. Or, more likely but no less troubling, the batteries in her flashlight had drained
thanks to all the paranormal activity, and she was lost down there in the dark, amid the ship's endless, mazelike corridors.

  I was working up the resolve to go look for her when she ran into the room, breathless and grinning ear to ear. I wanted to beat the living snot out of her.

  Instead, I played it cool.

  "It went well?" I asked, yawning as if she'd woken me up.

  Jordin nodded vigorously, plopping down on top of her sleeping bag and pulling out her laptop. "I think I got it on video! Can't wait to get this to a bigger screen.... Man, that thing could move."

  She was hooking up her video camera to her computer when she noticed that I was buried in my sleeping bag. "Hey, you okay? I saw where you threw up back in that hallway. Did you get food poisoning or something?"

  "Or something," I replied, turning over to indicate that I was going to sleep.

  "Do you need to get out of here? Want me to drive you to the emergency room?"

  "I'm fine," I said, thinking only about Carl's boat metaphor, and wondering if he could be right about Jordin. "Don't worry about me."

  There was a knock at the door at 7:30 a.m., and I knew it was Derek. Had to be.

  I decided I wasn't going to hold back from him this time. I would tell him about my nightmare, and what it probably meant.

  Jill was an exercise freak who got up early to run and do yoga, so I had to get out of my nice, warm sleeping bag to answer the door. I shivered and rubbed my arms.

  "I saw Jordin last night!" Derek blurted. His face was pale and his eyes were bloodshot. "She was a ghost."

  "You-she-what?! "

  He walked into the room and shut the door, probably worried that someone outside would hear the pastor-in-training claiming to have seen a ghost.

  "I was asleep ... in my room," he explained, "and she called out my name. It woke me up, and I saw her! She was right there, beside my bed. I think she was kneeling. I was so startled, I didn't get a good look at her body-"

  "There was no mist?" I asked.

  He shook his head. "No, but she was definitely there. Only I could kind of... see through her. She was only there for about twenty seconds, and then-" Derek bit his lip and swallowed back an emotion that threatened to overtake him. "These three dark figures-I couldn't see any details, they were just like, shadows-they grabbed her and dragged her away! They dragged her through the walls of my room...."

  He couldn't hold back the tears anymore, but he let them sting his eyes as just two spilled out and ran down his cheeks. "It's real. Somebody's out there turning living people into disembodied souls!"

  Derek's story was unnerving. I could see why it would upset him so, but it struck me as consistent with the scenario I was already imagining. She had found a way to reach him, but whoever was behind all of this caught up with her and put a stop to her efforts to communicate.

  "Did she say anything?" I asked, already knowing what the answer would be.

  "She said `the nightmare is coming,' and she said something I couldn't quite make out about Howell Durham," Derek replied. "Then she just vanished."

  Howell Durham, I thought. President and CEO of Durham Holdings International, the company funding Ghost Town, and very likely the conspirators behind all this.

  Derek was so beside himself, I had to ask. "Are you sure you weren't dreaming?"

  "I'm sure!"

  I let out a long breath. "Okay, all right.... There's something you should know. I had a nightmare last night."

  "So?"

  "A nightmare, Derek."

  His eyes popped. "Oh! Wow! Are you okay? Do you have-?"

  I shook my head. "No, I don't have a mark on my neck. Not yet. But both reports we've heard suggest that there's roughly a week between when the nightmares start and when the mark appears. And then ..." I didn't finish the thought.

  "And then," he agreed, looking at me with worry. "I guess Durham Holdings is making good on its threat to target you next. Assuming they're the ones that threatened you."

  "That's what we have to find out," I said, turning to business. "And Jordin's journal may hold the key."

  "The Vineyard, then?"

  "You're driving."

  An hour later, we were on I-95 heading north in Derek's pickup truck.

  "So, uh, when you saw Jordin last night..." I said, trying to sound as innocent as possible, "was she wearing clothes?"

  I was expecting a dirty look to be shot my way, but Derek maintained his expression of caffeinated anxiety, though there was a knowing gleam in his eye. "I don't know," he said without a trace of deception. "It happened really fast.... She was there and then she wasn't. She might have been."

  "I'm surprised to hear you admit that," I offered in a friendly tone.

  "It's what happened," he said with a shrug. "I'm not going to lie about it because it doesn't fit with my theology."

  I didn't reply, but I valued his commitment to the truth.

  We drove for a while in silence and then he said, "Try this one. When I was about seven or eight years old, my parents and I were living in this small apartment. This was back when Dad had gotten his first church, which was in Kansas. I remember one day at the apartment that I looked out the back door and saw a man standing there on the other side of the screen door. He smiled warmly at me through the screen, but he never knocked on the door or even waved at me. He had curly white hair and a beard and wore old-fashioned overalls and muddy work boots. He kept his hands in his pockets the whole time.

  "I went to tell my mom about the man at the back door, but even though I was gone less than ten seconds, when I brought Mom back to the door, the man was gone.

  "That afternoon, I told a neighbor kid about what I'd seen, and he said that it was `old Mr. Andrews,' a farmer who had owned all of the land for miles around, about a hundred years ago, before the land had been zoned by the city for development. I thought my friend was nuts, of course, but he described the man I'd seen down to every last detail.

  "He asked if the man I saw had kept his hands in his pockets the whole time. I said that he did. My friend explained that that was because Mr. Andrews died after an accident where his hands were cut off, and he bled to death in his cornfield."

  Derek finished his story and we drove again in silence until he added, "I haven't thought about that in years. I told my parents once and they just sort of ignored me."

  "My dad says everyone has a ghost story," I replied.

  "I don't know what it was," Derek insisted. "But it was different than seeing Jordin last night. She was terrified. Something is wrong."

  We were both quiet for a while, contemplating the world of ghosts and spirits and what parts of it were real and what parts were the products of overactive imaginations.

  "What I don't get is the why," Derek said, breaking the silence twenty minutes later. "DHI or whoever's behind all this ... what would they get out of creating a disembodied soul?"

  I shook my head. The question had already occurred to me, and I was bothered that I couldn't come up with an answer. It made no logical sense. I couldn't imagine anything to be gained from such a scheme. "I have no idea."

  "Equally troubling to me is the idea that technology to do something like that could even exist," Derek continued. "I mean, you'd need to have developed brand-new tech in a number of different fields. For starters, you'd have to pinpoint the exact physical location of the human soul. If there even is a physical location where it resides."

  "Maybe they just found an access point," I suggested. "Like a port on a computer that they could plug into to get at what's inside."

  Derek kept his eyes on the road but kind of shrugged. "Then you'd have to find a way to separate the soul from the body. To literally reach inside-maybe through that access point you mentioned, which apparently is at the back of the neck-and extract the soul. The thought that something like that could be possible I find profoundly disturbing, because it's not in keeping with my understanding of how God made us. And if it is possible, what becomes of
the body? Can it live without a soul to inhabit it? Is Jordin dead?"

  I had to agree, it was a troubling thought. In my mind, the thought of rending a soul from a human body was something that had to be a violent procedure.

  "Then there's the whole `binding' thing," I said, picking up the conversation. "A soul freed from its body, its mortal coil, would be, in a word, free. Doing this runs the risk of not producing a bona fide ghost if the spirit they free has the ability to move on to the next life. They would need to have a means of keeping a spirit tethered to mortal soil."

  Derek agreed. "Exerting control over a spirit this way should be impossible. It's simply not how the universe works. If it's true, if someone has found a way to do these things ... then they're perverting God's creation in ways that are so profoundly wrong, the word `sin' is not big enough to describe it."

  I fell silent, thinking.

  "A few decades ago," I said after a few minutes, "things like genetic engineering and cloning were impossible. Until technology caught up with science fiction and made them possible. We live in a universe governed by science and scientific laws. I happen to believe that science and religion are pursuing the same goal: understanding the nature of the universe and our existence in it. Science looks for the mechanics of it, while religion seeks the meaning. But they're both looking at the same universe for the same answers. Everything we can't explain about this life-including ghosts and spirits-has a rational, scientific explanation. We just haven't found it yet. The soul is no different. If it exists, then there have to be mechanical functions behind it that make it work."

  For the first time, Derek looked away from the road to glance at me. He had a stern expression on his face, as if considering my words but finding them hard to swallow. "Can't a miracle ever be just a miracle? Does it always have to have a scientific explanation or cause? The miraculous power of God himself requires no scientific basis. I don't accept that everything that happens, and has ever happened, occurs only for scientific reasons. It's like those people that try to explain away the ten plagues God sent down on Egypt for refusing to free the Hebrews, or the theory that a `land bridge' exists under the Red Sea, and that with just enough hurricane-force winds, the Israelites may have been able to walk across that `bridge' without it ever actually parting. Why can't it just be a miracle? What is God, if not miraculous and omnipotent?