Dream Weaver (Dream Weaver #1)

by Su Williams

  “You, what?”

  “It’s nothing.” Nick huffed a quiet, humorless laugh.

  “So, you don’t think it’s some sort of saviour—complex—thing?” I asked.

  “I’m not out to save the world, Emari, just you.”

  “But how can you know so much about me?” I felt the canyons form between my brows.

  “I’ve been in your head enough. I know you better than you realize.” He sat for a long, quiet moment, his elbows on his knees, his fingers spread. His fingertips tapped together in a nervous twitch.

  “And I know virtually nothing about you.”

  “I can show you.” His blue-black eyes penetrated my soul. My heart raced, a fearful creature skittering for safety.

  “Show me?” My voice quivered with anxiety.

  “It’s how the memories are transferred. Physical contact.”

  I thought for several long moments, contemplated my fear of touching him. Finally, I reached for his hand.

  “Emari?” His hand hovered above mine, his voice barely a whisper. “There’s something else. That day, at the creek, that wasn’t the first time we met.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Show me.”

  His fingers brushed across the palm of my hand with a series of tiny erratic electrical impulses. His skin was warm and smooth, but did little to assuage the tension inside me. “Relax,” he whispered, so soft and gentle it stroked my heart. I leaned back on the couch, closed my eyes, and opened myself to him.

  I saw myself at the old cemetery down by the football stadium overlooking the fire-thinned forest and the rolling Spokane River. A morbid favorite of my early teen haunts. Ancient towering pines shaded the narrow undulating lanes that wound through aging headstones. The sun hung low over the horizon casting elongated shadows of pine trees and monuments. White contrails and wispy clouds littered the arcing blue sky. Nimbus clouds piled up along the northwestern horizon, nearly as blue as the early evening sky. Only the sun reflecting off the uppermost billows stood out, glowing silver, in contrast against the celestial blue.

  A squirrel chattered his annoyance at my presence. Ravens cackled, and cawed, their voices echoing across the hallowed grounds as the winged shadows bounded from limb to sepulcher to lawn in search of shiny treasures left by mourners. The sparrows and swallows chirruped and chattered in the trees; the starlings added a chorus of vibrant tattoo.

  The ‘old’ section of the cemetery was adorned with an array of tombstones, from the simple wooden cross so weathered that its hand-carved inscription was no longer legible, to towering angels with wings and hands outstretched, welcoming the lost into the arms of God. Grey mosses and lichen grew into the carved names. It filled in the remembrances, much as time fills in the memories of the progeny of the dead. Pine needles and pinecones littered the lawn that rolled in lush green waves from the up-growth of roots.

  One tombstone had mesmerized me from the first moment I saw it; Felicia Morrow. She had enthralled me, as though drawn by some unknown force. Thoughts of her had obsessed me, invaded my waking and sleeping dreams. So I’d haunted her grave in return; gone back, again and again to sit by her upright headstone that was etched with a leaning cross on its face; its inscription read ‘Our Beloved Felicia’.

  I would sit by her grave, braid pine needles, and talk to her as though she were my closest confidante. I’m sure the other cemetery visitors thought me strange, being so young and visiting the grave of someone who had died nearly eighty years before my birth. My obsession even drove me to the cemetery office to check the microfiche and giant archaic funeral tomes to discover as much about her as I could.

  “We met there, first,” Nick’s voice broke into the vision, and he brought to my remembrance the cold wind that had angrily whipped around my body, driving me to the warmth of my car. “Sorry for that,” he whispered to my soul.

  “The wind? That was you?”

  He murmured apologetically. “I was a bit—protective.” The wind became a gentle breeze on my next visit, and vanished altogether my next—though the air still pressed against me, warm and safe. Perhaps it was one of the reasons why I returned time and time again.

  I opened my eyes to find pain etched on his beautiful face and it broke something inside me to see. “Who was she?” I asked.

  “She was my wife.” He plunged ahead as if he paused too long he might not be able to continue at all. “She and our first child, my son, Samuel, died from complications during his birth.” We were both silent for several long moments. There was nothing for me to say and I could tell his throat had constricted around his memories before he could give them a voice. I didn’t press, I just sat there holding his hand in mine, caressing his knuckles with my thumb. Perhaps a little compassion on my part would be okay.

  When he finally continued, his voice was strained and unsteady. “She contracted typhoid fever during the 1917 outbreak when she was seven months pregnant. The illness caused her to go into premature labor, as well as hemorrhaging in her womb. She bled to death and our son was not able to survive on his own.” Flickers of gruesome and bloody images of his lovely bride and tiny, helpless, frail baby etched themselves indelibly into his memory, but they were not images he wanted me to witness. Grief he did not want me to share. I felt a palisade erected around those memories to dissuade intruders.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  His head dropped slightly and he was silent again. “Thank you,” he whispered. “No one has ever said that to me.”

  I squeezed his hand. “No one? Ever?” I wanted so badly to take away his pain, to ease the torment as much as he had done for me. His loss was as great as my own and despite the passage of time the memories were still serrated enough to wound him.

  He just shrugged and continued. “I became distraught. She was my life….” His voice quavered. “We’d only been married about a year. Her parents never approved of me,” he confessed, but now there was a hint of anger mixed with his grief. “They blamed me for her death.” I wondered if Nick blamed himself for her death.

  Images of Spokane in 1917 unfolded before me. Scenes that were familiar to me as still-life sepia or black and white photographs were full color and alive in Nick’s memory. He stumbled blindly through the brick paved downtown streets, lost in his grief. Despite, perhaps because of, the vastness of his sorrow, I had no doubt he edited its intensity for my benefit.

  Nick stood slumped in an unfamiliar room, wearing tweed breeches with suspenders and a rumpled button down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the tail untucked on one side. Two more-elegantly dressed people that I presumed were his in-laws, hovered tempestuously opposite him. The mother was dressed in a full-length skirt with billowing layers, her shoulders wrapped in a fur stole, and donning a tailored hat with a sheer black veil. She cleaved to the man’s arm, sobbed great racking sobs and blotted her eyes with a handkerchief. The father, dressed in a sharp three-piece suit with a bowler hat, was berating Nick over the death of his daughter. Nick focused inward on his own pain, heartbroken and refusing to respond or even defend himself. His face was gaunt and pale, emotionless despite the tirade. Finally, he silently turned and walked out of the house, the father still hurling daggers of accusations and animus at his back as he went.

  “I became ill within hours of Felicia’s death. In my delirium, I prayed that I might die too, to go to heaven to be with her, for surely she was there. But I wasn’t entirely sure of my own eternal destination.” The formality of a by-gone era rang in Nick’s speech.

  His despondence at the loss of his beloved Felicia was a dark, cruel, and grievous mantle enshrouding his heart. My body felt the pangs of hunger that he ignored as he starved himself. I tasted the fever that burned on his lips and felt the fire as it raged through his body. The agony of the sickness, the absolute feeling of drowning in his own body were cogent entities transferred between us. He remembered welcoming death, even begging for its mercy and hasty salvation. Yet, the question still lingered in his mind
if God would consider his surrender a form of suicide and not receive him. Finally, his breath came in slow, jerky rasps, then faded to shallow swells, and extinguished completely. In his weakness and misery, he allowed the sickness to take him without resistance. Death had been merciful. Nick’s world became darkness and nothing.

  “Her family had the funeral while I was still incoherent with the fever,” he explained quietly, his voice barely audible.

  “The name on her headstone,” I mused aloud. “It’s Morrow. Not Benedetti.”

  “That was her parent’s doing, their last effort at erasing me from her existence. The marker doesn’t even indicate that they buried Samuel in the casket with her. The only hint that he existed at all are the letters ‘I-n-f’ in the cemetery ledger.”

  “I assumed that meant she’d died of the influenza, ‘Inf’, since it was epidemic at that time.” I remembered the giant tome at the cemetery office, with thick, yellowed pages that smelled of old leather and musty parchment, inscribed with vague mortality information and misspelled decedent names.

  “Spanish Flu was epidemic in the East and in the military camps. Though typhoid was not epidemic here in the Northwest it was certainly causing an abundance of corpses,” Nick explained. “Watch.”

  Nick’s body lay on a low canvas cot in an overcrowded morgue. His body was cold and rigid, a deathly pale grey-blue. A trail of dried blood stained his nose and mouth. His toe tag stated Nickolas Anton Benedetti, Deceased Oct. 30, 1917.

  “Oh, God!” I gasped, and clutched Nick’s hand. “Is that you?”

  “Yes. It’s not very pretty, is it?” He rumbled with morose humor.

  “I don’t understand. You’re dead.” I knew. I had watched him die, but it still wasn’t computing how he could actually be dead when he was right there with me.

  “In this way, we are very much like your vampires. It is very difficult to kill Caphar.”

  A lean, angular man, his close-cut chestnut hair mostly hidden under a tweed cap, leaned over the cot. Nick’s body lay, diminished, cold and empty.

  “Sabre,” Nick explained. “It was nothing short of destiny that Sabre alone found me. He had been an assistant to the mortician, aiding in body prep and disposal during the typhoid outbreak.”

  I watched as Sabre wrung out a rag into a basin beside the cot and wiped the blood from Nick’s ashen face. His hands were gentle and compassionate, as though Nick was a living patient. He proceeded with the rest of the body, lifting Nick’s rigor-stiff arm to reveal the purple bruises of lividity. Sabre’s hands moved skillfully as he worked the fingers, the wrist, the elbow to break the hardening effects of death, and prepare the body for the injections of embalming fluid, just as he had done with countless others. He held intimate knowledge of death and its companions. Sabre’s hands did not pause as he initiated the all-too-familiar embalming procedure by inserting the needle into Nick’s jugular vein.

  A bolt of light slashed through Nick, searing every nerve in his body. My body jolted at the electrical current that surged through him, but he held tight to my hand. Nick’s eyes flashed open, his mouth gaped, and ravenously sucked in air. He was alive. Sabre jerked the needle from Nick’s neck and stumbled backward. In his shock, he toppled over the corpse on the cot behind him.

  Recovering himself, Sabre crept back to Nick whose body lay motionless on the cot, all but his eyes that were wide with confusion, and franticly scanning his surroundings. Sabre slapped a wad of gauze over the puncture wound to stave off the flow of blood that was already pooling on the cot under Nick’s head as his heart pumped life back through his body. He continued to work Nick’s joints to help re-circulate the blood.

  “Sabre perceived immediately what I had become,” Nick explained. “He’d been Caphar long enough to know a newborn Dream Weaver when he saw one.”

  Sabre continued to loosen Nick’s body from death’s grip by breaking up the natural chemicals that locked his joints and muscles. As he manipulated Nick’s leg, he discovered the toe tag, removed it, and shoved it in his pocket. Occasionally, he would stop and stroke Nick’s hair away from his face and look into his eyes with joyous disbelief, like a father finding his long-lost son.

  When Nick was finally able to move, Sabre helped him to sit up. He strained, halting and shaky, to speak.

  “It will come, friend,” Sabre comforted Nick, and squeezed his shoulder with affection. He pulled out the toe tag, “Nickolas?” Nick nodded stiffly. “Nick for short?” He nodded again. Sabre continued speaking, encouraging. He wrapped a wool blanket around Nick’s shoulders. “Your body has been through much.”

  Nick tried again to speak, with no better result, his vocal chords still locked in death’s grip.

  “Patience. Give yourself some time. It is not every day one returns from the dead,” he said as he patted Nick’s cheek, and grinned like a child on Christmas morning.

  Nick sat bleary-eyed, clutching the blanket around him. His body rocked with spasms.

  “That won’t last long, a few hours at the most. Your body is in shock.”

  Sabre removed the toe tag from his pocket and searched the other cots for a nameless corpse. There was always one; a body found in the train yard or in an alley where the victim succumbed to their illness, falling where their bodies lost the strength to go on. He wrapped the strings around the poor soul’s toe, and returned to Nick’s side.

  Sabre was finally able to get Nick to his feet, and he slung Nick’s arm over his own shoulders for support. Nick paused and nodded at the renamed dead. “You are dead to all who knew you. It is easier this way,” Sabre explained brusquely. Nick nodded in resignation and Sabre spirited him away into the dark of the night.

  “Thus I emerged into my new existence, as much ghost as living being, dwelling in both the natural and ethereal world.”

  Decades of loneliness unfolded in my mind. I could feel every solitary moment of his existence spanning from the moment of his rebirth. Quick, penetrating glances of his desolation flashed through my mind. Sabre mentored and molded him. The memories of his beautiful wife and the tiny son he never even held were a sorrow that engraved itself upon his soul.

  “I changed my name, dropped out of sight and traveled the country with Sabre. I learned as I went.” Nick shattered the memory and brought us back to the present.

  My head swam with the abruptness. “Whoa,” I breathed, and squeezed his hand to steady myself. Nick brushed his thumb across my knuckles.

  “I’m sorry. I forgot who was in the weave with me. Sabre’s an old hat at this so I don’t have to be careful with him.” His eyes focused on something beyond the walls of my home, farther than the hollow depths of darkness that seemed to haunt him. His heart remained elsewhere, somewhere very dark, very lonely and far away.

  I had seen within him more than a memory, more than the past. A shroud encompassed his physical heart, his heart that beat as humanly as my own. I saw a heart within a heart, vines of gold entwined around it, golden fetters constricting, confining, and crushing. His memories were indelibly strong and eternal. I witnessed his soul, damaged but whole and completely true.

  I slid my other hand around his. “Nick, are you okay?”

  His eyes dropped to mine and his mind drifted closer to the present. “Yes. Fine.” However, his succinct answers belied themselves. Nick was not ‘fine.’ “So, now you know,” he murmured, and gazed away into the past.

  “Yes,” I whispered. “So now I know.” I waited in silence, watched his tortured, distant expression, gently caressed his hand, aching and afraid to console him and deliver him from his pain.

  I studied the lines of his face, the face of a nineteen year old man, yet dim shadows betrayed the years of grief he silently endured, alone. His gaze finally fell to mine and we assayed the depths within each other eyes, both trying to find an anchor to keep us from drifting all alone in this world.

  Suddenly, his breath caught and he gently pulled away, releasing my hand and my heart. He stood and walked
toward the door as if he were leaving. I sat dumbstruck, watching him go, unsure what I had done, wondering what memory he’d pulled out of my head that upset him. He paused before reaching for the knob and said sorrowfully, “You know more than you ought, Emari Jewel.”

  My own name spoken in that way pierced me, a dagger to my heart. “My dad used to call me that when I was in trouble.” I huffed a soft, rueful laugh. “I knew it was really bad when he said ‘Emari Jewel Sweet!’” I knew my smile was sad but it seemed like the only kind I had these days. God, how I missed my parents.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have…I knew…I just didn’t think…” The thought that he caused me pain only compounded the ancient grief that tormented him. Maybe there was some saviour complex thing going on, but I felt a growing need to save him from his pain, as he was saving me from mine.

  The floorboards creaked quietly as I crossed the living room to him, the soft homey sound stirred a recent foggy memory, but his grief distracted me from making a connection. I took his hand, and looked up into his face for several long moments before his eyes were brave enough to meet mine. “Nick, you have nothing to apologize for.”

  “Emari, I…” but the stern shake of my head silenced him.

  “Nick, you have done more than enough to help me. I’m always going to feel pain for them, it will never go away.” I studied his face, remembering the golden bonds on his soul, and placed my other hand on his chest. His heart hammered nervously against my palm. “But you know that. Don’t you?” I didn’t wait for his answer because we both knew I was right. I liked that he was willing to admit that I was right. “I can’t let every memory crush me.”