[Anthology] The Paranormal 13- now With a Bonus 14th Novel!

by Dima Zales

  It’s not like I just happened to randomly witness a crime. I’m not one of those unlucky people who sees a mafia murder or something and has to go into the Witness Protection Program for the rest of their life. They don’t sit around wondering what’s wrong with them. Well, OK, maybe in a Book of Job kind of way, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. They’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time; they just have incredibly bad luck. If they lived to be a hundred years old, it might never happen to them again.

  But these nightmares aren’t just bad luck. I’m having them because my brain can pick them up and nobody else’s can. They’re going to keep right on happening, and what the hell am I supposed to do about them?

  So there’s the second question. At least the person who sees the mob hit, they’ve got pretty clear choices about what they can do. Crappy choices, granted, but even crappy choices are better than none at all. Aren’t they?

  We can go around and around wondering exactly what the specific physical cause of the nightmares is. I can go to Dr. Ritter and he can tape electrodes to my head and do whatever else he’s going to do. He can maybe give me some technobabble explanation, and I guess I’m going to go through with that but I’m honestly not sure what good it will accomplish. Will it make me feel better about the fact that I knew that poor girl was going to get murdered and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it? No. Will it help me cope when I start seeing the next girl this guy is going to go after – because there’s no question in my mind that he’s going to? No.

  I hate this. I absolutely, completely, utterly hate this. I hate being scared all the time. I hate waking up screaming in the middle of the night. I hate having to cling to my friends to hang on to tiny little bits of sanity. I hate the things I’m seeing. And I hate the fact that it doesn’t make any sense! What purpose does it serve that I can see these things if I can’t do anything about them? That’s not how human beings work. Everything about us has a purpose, every part of our bodies, every thought process. If I’m psychic – or whatever this is – there’s a reason for it. So what’s the reason? And then if there is something I can do about what I’m seeing, something I’m supposed to do, why the hell can’t I figure out what it is, so I can go and do it already?

  We’ve all just been sitting here quietly for a while now. I don’t know for sure what Brian and Beth are thinking about, but I can guess. Probably a lot like what I’ve been thinking, maybe with a little less of the angry and scared and a little more of the “oh, poor Sara” in its place.

  Actually, I can read Beth pretty well and – yeah, right there – I can see it in her eyes. Just a second ago, it went through her mind: “How would I be coping if it was me this was happening to instead of Sara?”

  The answer just went right past, too, and I can guess what it was – no better than me, and probably a whole lot worse. Which would be pretty bad because I’m certainly not coping with it very well. I hate myself a little bit for thinking she’s right about that, but I know she is.

  So what do I do now? Call the police?

  “They wouldn’t believe you,” Beth says. “I only believe you because I know you wouldn’t lie about something like this. Besides, you aren’t imaginative enough to make it up anyway.” Which is maybe not exactly how I’d phrase it, but it is true. So forget about the police.

  “How do you know any of the details are right anyway?” Brian asks. “I mean, if you’re seeing this guy’s dream, how do you know that the way everything looks in his dream is how it really is in real life?”

  “But the girl in the newspaper looked exactly like the way I saw her in the dream,” goes through my mind, and before I can say it, I can see that Brian’s thought of that as well. “Maybe some of the things look the same. But just because he had a Cadillac in the dream doesn’t mean he has one in real life. Maybe he has a crummy old car, and maybe he’s really ugly and scrawny, but when he’s dreaming he’s this big, strong man with a really expensive car, because that’s how he imagines things should be for him.”

  He has a point. Dreams are weird; just because part of them is very literal doesn’t mean everything is. So even if I did go to the police, and even if they did somehow believe me, the things I told them might be completely wrong anyway. Great. Just great.

  So apparently there isn’t anything I can do about what’s already happened. But what do I do when it happens again? What happens when I start having the next nightmare with this guy and a different girl? “Could you find the next girl and warn her before it happens?” Beth asks. The guy might look different in real life than in the dreams, but poor Amelia looked exactly the same in the dream and in the newspaper, so why shouldn’t it be the same if – when – it happens again?

  There’s just one little problem with that: how do I go about finding her? There are several hundred thousand people in this city. Other than blind luck how do you find someone with just a mental image of them? I wouldn’t have a photo, and I can’t draw worth anything. It sounds good in theory, but in practice I don’t see any way to do it.

  If telling the authorities won’t work, and finding the girls won’t work, there is a third possibility. Neither Brian nor Beth are willing to suggest it, and I’m not prepared to think about it myself.

  Thankfully, something else, totally unrelated, pops into my head, and it’s as good an excuse as any to change the subject. “I almost forgot – I bumped into your old advisor today,” I tell Beth. “When I was going to see Dr. Ritter? I literally ran into Dr. Walters, he was just leaving the department office.”

  Beth gives me a puzzled look in return. “I thought he was out of the country. He was supposed to be doing research somewhere in England. He was going to be gone until next summer.”

  “Yeah. That’s right. You told me that,” I remember. “Well, maybe he’s just back to visit family for the holidays or something,” I say.

  “He hasn’t got any family,” Beth says doubtfully. “Not around here, anyway. He lives in that big house all by himself,” she goes on. “Remember, he had all of us over, everyone he was advising? He had a cookout for us at his house last spring.”

  Now she says it, I remember that as well. “Well, whyever he was there, I saw him.”

  “Too bad I missed him. I’d like to have seen him.”

  “Maybe you still will. He might be here until after Christmas for all we know,” I say, and then, sadly, we drift back onto the topic of my nightmares.

  We talk about the whole situation for a while longer, but nothing comes of it. We go around and around with the same questions, and keep coming up with the same lack of good answers. At least I’m pretty calm and rational the whole time. No crying, no screaming, no hysterics. Good for me, right?

  So we’re all tired of asking the same unanswerable questions over and over, when Beth happens to glance at the clock and see that it’s almost six. All three of us realize at the same moment that we’re very hungry, so off we run to Lardner to partake of the daily offerings.

  When we’re finished, Brian has to go study, for real, since finals are now only four days away, and Beth and I have to get back to the dorm because at seven o’clock we do our drawings for Secret Santa. It’s a nice little distraction, if nothing else. Something fun and cheerful to think about for a little while. God knows I need all the help I can get on that front.

  We do this every year. You pick somebody’s name out of a hat, then you buy gifts for them for five days. At our big Christmas party next Wednesday we all find out who was giving what to whom.

  So here I am sitting in the lounge waiting to pick my name. Last year I let Beth do it for me. She drew Joe Karver, who wasn’t yet an RA then, and with whom I’d just broken up after a few unsuccessful weeks of sort-of dating. I was not thrilled by her pick, which I’m still not convinced was totally random. I thought it over a bit, though, and decided to try and be mature about the whole thing, and also have some fun with it.

  The first gift I gave him was a can of tomat
o soup, which is what I spilled on him on one especially unsuccessful date. The next three gifts were all along the same lines, and the final one was a video of the old movie, “The African Queen.” We were going to go see it together at the campus movie theater one Saturday night, until we officially broke up that afternoon. He didn’t figure out what the early gifts meant, but he finally realized when he saw the movie. He got all upset. He was ready to make a big scene in front of everyone and I had to yell at him: “Read the card, dummy!”

  I had put quite a bit of thought into what to write, which probably you can’t tell from the words I ended up putting down: “So what if we’re not boyfriend and girlfriend? I hope we can still be good friends! Love, Sara.” Okay, it’s not exactly poetry, but it did get the point across, and everything was right again with the world.

  Even though that ended up turning out fine, I’d rather get someone I don’t have quite as much of a history with. It finally gets around to my turn, I go up and pick out of the hat with the men’s names – you’re supposed to get someone of the opposite sex, at least until we run out of girls and then the remaining men get other men. Written on the little paper is “George.” There’s only one George in the dorm, and I got my wish – other than a few games of Monopoly, I don’t have any history with him at all.

  Which, I now realize, maybe isn’t so good after all. I don’t actually know much about him or what he liked or dislikes, other than that he’s from Florida and he enjoys playing Monopoly. At least the first gift isn’t until Saturday, so I have some time to try and figure out what he might like, or at least what would embarrass him.

  Now that’s done, it’s back to studying for me. I’ve spent far too much time dwelling on the stupid nightmares; I’ve got a lot of catching up to do if I’m going to be ready for my finals.

  Tuesday night. The last official day of classes went by, and I couldn’t honestly describe anything I did today. I do have a few pages of notes that I took, so I assume that I not only went to my classes but paid at least some attention in them. Things get clearer around dinnertime; I had Captain Crunch instead of the fried-whatever-it-was in brown gravy, I’m sure about that. And then I spent two hours finishing up my last lab report for advanced Organic Chemistry lab, getting it ready to print out so I can hand it in along with the rest of my work and have that class out of the way.

  And right now I’m supposed to be on my way to University Hospital to be monitored. I’m still not completely clear on exactly what that’s going to involve. I think it’s just a few unobtrusive electrodes taped to my head while I try to sleep, but I don’t really know for sure so I’m a little nervous.

  “Are you sure about this?” Beth asks me. “You can cancel if you want to, I’m sure Dr. Ritter will understand.”

  I’m sure he will too, but I have to do this, I think. If only I could get the image of myself as a lab rat out of my head. I’ve got this picture of me with a little rat face and little rat legs and a cute pink bow on the little rat tail. Beth laughs at me when I tell her about it

  “Oh, grow up. I’m sure it’ll all be harmless and easy. And no mazes or anything either.”

  I hope not. “Fine, but if it is weird and creepy, I’m going to blame you and never ever let you forget it.”

  “OK, OK. That’s fine by me, just go already!”

  So I do.

  It’s just starting to snow as I walk over to the hospital. I’m really cold, and I wish Brian was walking with me so I could cuddle with him and he could keep me warm. But he’s studying, and I think that it’s probably better in some ways that I do this myself. It builds character or something, right?

  Cold or not, I make it over there and I find the sleep monitoring lab without any trouble. Dr. Ritter is waiting for me. He goes over everything again, how this will be perfectly safe and harmless. It’s pretty much what I expected, although it’s not just “a few” electrodes, it’s quite a lot of them, with wires going all over the place.

  Dr. Ritter is very reassuring about the whole process, and I almost do feel reassured. The electrodes are applied to my forehead, and I’m lying here in the very comfortable bed trying to fall asleep. The EEG monitor is beeping every so often…beep, beep, beep.

  Beep, beep, beep. Just like counting sheep. Beep, beep, beep, sheep, sheep, sheep…

  …Sara is arguing with her brother. He sits at her desk in her dorm room while she paces around the room yelling at him. It makes perfect sense to Sara that Bob is here, even though he really ought to be back home, a few hundred miles away. It makes perfect sense that he knows all about the nightmares she’s been having, even though she hasn’t said a word about it to him.

  It even makes sense that they’re screaming at one another at the top of their lungs, though their arguing is usually low level guerilla warfare, with metaphorical sniper attacks and the occasional bomb to liven things up. Comparatively speaking, this is nuclear war.

  Still, it all makes perfect sense…

  …And then, for a moment it doesn’t; Sara is somewhere else, someone else’s bedroom. And then it all makes sense to her again. She’s been here before. This isn’t just any bedroom, this is the bedroom, his bedroom.

  Here he is, with another girl, another teenager, another victim. She looks familiar, Sara knows she’s seen her face somewhere – the newspaper, maybe? Or on TV? Yes! Now she remembers. It was on the news a couple of nights before: a runaway girl, frantic parents, fears that the worst had happened. And here the worst is happening right in front of Sara, and just like all the other times she can’t do anything except watch, and scream…

  …Someone’s talking to me. Trying to reassure me. “It’s OK, it’s OK.” As if saying that over and over makes it true. When my eyes finally start focusing again, I can see who it is. Dr. Ritter. He’s standing over me, and he keeps looking back and forth between me and some papers he’s holding.

  “Hi. So much for your experiment, I guess.” I try very hard to keep my voice calm and casual. I really don’t want to lose it in front of him. Again.

  Strangely, he doesn’t look as though this was a complete disaster; what he does look is puzzled. “I take it you had another nightmare, Sara?” He helps me sit up, hands me a glass of water.

  Oh, God. I take several deep breaths, drink the water in one swallow, then several more deep breaths. I tell myself over and over: relax. Be calm. Dr. Ritter is waiting expectantly, and after a minute, or ten, I’m finally able to speak in a relatively even tone. “Yeah. It was different – a different girl, I think I saw her on the news, she ran away from home or something – and the same guy, and he…”

  “Yes, I can imagine what you saw. I’m sorry.” He has the decency not to look me in the eye as he says it. “But you have to see this,” he goes on, giving me the papers he was looking at, printouts of – I assume – my EEG readings. I force myself to focus on it. Anything to keep those images out of my head. Calm. Relax. I can do that. I have to.

  “Right there. Something happened. Your delta waves just changed – it’s as though the monitor was switched on to someone else right in the middle of the session.” He’s pointing at a spot on the reading where it goes all of a sudden from nice straight lines to jagged up-and-down.

  That’s it, that’s exactly it. I don’t know much about brainwaves or what they’re supposed to look like, but a sudden change like that has to mean something. For whatever it’s worth, this is proof. I’m seeing what he’s dreaming about. Somehow. “It’s not me. Not my dream. It’s his dream.”

  “This can’t be right. This doesn’t happen. The only possible way you would ever see something even remotely like this,” Dr. Ritter says, more to himself than to me, “is if there was a sudden traumatic event, a seizure or something similar. And even then it wouldn’t be this extreme.”

  I agree completely. “OK, so I’m not crazy, it’s really happening. Tell me what I’m supposed to do about it.”

  He remembers I’m sitting right here. He frowns. “Don’t
jump to conclusions, Miss Barnes. I’m going to have all the equipment checked over. That has to be the explanation. There has to have been some sort of malfunction, some kind of error with the computer. Otherwise, this,” he waves the printout, “is simply impossible.”

  He’s wrong. Well, it is impossible, that’s true, but it’s happening just the same. And his printout proves it. There’s something real, something physical going on here. It’s not just my imagination, it’s not just my subconscious. I’m actually seeing what other people are dreaming. And honestly, there is some comfort in knowing that it is real, that I’m not losing my mind. Not a lot of comfort, but some.

  Of course it still doesn’t explain why it’s happening to me, or how it’s happening, or what I should do about it. The only thing I’m sure about at this moment is that there’s no point in sticking around the lab for the rest of the night. Dr. Ritter tries to talk me into it, into staying here until he can recalibrate his monitors and reboot the computer and re-whatever some other thing that needs re-whatevering. All I want is to go back to my own bed and try to get a couple of hours sleep without anything stuck to my head.

  And so off I go.

  6

  (December 5-8, 1989)

  I make it as far as the hospital lobby. I step out of the elevator and Brian’s there. What’s he doing here? I run straight to him, hug him. “You’re not sick, are you? You’re OK?”

  He’s confused; he has no idea what I’m talking about. “I came to see you, I thought you would want someone to be with you.” Oh my God, that’s so sweet of him! I can’t think of anything to say, so I kiss him instead, and I keep right on kissing him. People are staring at us, but I couldn't care less. I’m just so glad he’s here. I finally back off a little and let him breathe. “I can’t believe you came here for me. That’s the nicest thing…”