“Is everything alright?” Dharma asked. Even though I couldn’t see her, I could feel her eyes on me.
I shook my head, some of my dark hair falling over my shoulders.
“I know this is a lot for you to take in,” Dharma said, her voice soft and comforting. “And I’m sorry. I only wanted to warn you. To keep you from suffering the same fate I had.”
I peeked at her through my fingers. “Thanks,” I mumbled into my palms. Then I used both hands to brush my hair back. I wanted to go talk more about this with Reve, but now, after what Dharma said, I was kind of freaked out to go back to the Land of Dreams with him. If what Dharma said was true, I don’t even know if I want to go back.
Not now or ever.
Chapter 15
“Ready?” Reve asked later that night. I stood near my sleeping body that lay curled up into a tight ball on my bed, dressed in a red camisole and my Winnie the Pooh pajama shorts. He stood near my bedroom door, which glittered and sparkled in gold light, a portal leading to the Land of Dreams.
But instead of nodding and taking his hand, letting him guide me to the other side like I usually did, I sat down on the floor and leaned back, careful not to ghost through my bed like I had with my desk the first night I had this out-of-body experience. “Actually, could we stay here tonight instead?”
Reve’s face twisted into a confused frown. “Uh… sure?” He sat down on the floor across from me. The shimmering gold portal faded, and my door became just a regular door that let in some light from the hallway. “So, what do you want to do?”
“I want to talk,” I replied, staring straight into his amethyst eyes.
Reve’s frown deepened, making a little line crinkle between his brows. “About what?”
I crossed my legs pretzel-style and looked into his unnatural-colored eyes. “Does the Land of Dreams have some kind of glamour to it?”
“A glamour?” Reve chuckled but it sounded forced. He suddenly looked uneasy.
“Reve.” I was surprised by how sturdy my voice came out. It reminded me of when Dad would call my name when I was in trouble. “I’m serious.”
“No,” he said, sobering. His face was as cold as stone. “There’s no glamour. Why? Did Dharma tell you that?”
I looked away, not wanting him to see the answer displayed on my face.
“Jaqueline, I’ve already told you, the girl is mad,” Reve said telepathically.
I turned back to him. “Reve, I’ve sat and talked with her. She seemed genuinely upset. And scared.” The image of Dharma, err, Kayla, filled my head. The sadness and fear in her eyes pulled at my heartstrings.
“Well, she’s lying.” I must have been showing a look of doubt or something on my face because Reve continued, “Seriously, Jaqueline. You believe a girl you just met over your own dream?”
I nibbled down on my bottom lip and looked down at my nails. They still had a little bit of the blue polish that I had painted them for the night of the Homecoming dance.
“Fine.” Reve stood up from where he had sat on my floor, and walked over to my doorway that was now starting to glimmer with the portal again. “Stay here and believe her,” he scoffed. “When you decide to believe in the truth, I’ll be waiting.”
“Reve,” I called out, getting up to my feet. I didn’t want him to leave. I reached out a hand in a weak attempt to stop him, but it was too late. He had slipped through the portal, leaving me by myself alone in my dark room.
Chapter 16
Alec and I went out to eat Friday afternoon to get away from the dramatic scene of Lindsay’s and Graham’s breakup fight. It was the drama that had buzzed around school like an angry bumble bee today. According to everyone, Nisha Cogwell, an Asian-American girl with long, stick-straight black hair, had caught Graham with Clarissa Schoen, a peppy sophomore cheerleader with way-too-weak-of-morals, at the movie theaters the other night. When Alec and I had lunch, Lindsay and Graham were having a scene in the cafeteria, not caring that they had forty-plus people presently watching.
Instead of being spectators, Alec and I had slipped away and decided to get something from a nearby restaurant.
“Need menus?” our waitress asked shortly after our arrival.
“Sure.” Alec nodded.
“Here.” Our waitress, Etta (according to her nametag), said. She place our menus down on the table in front of us. “I’ll give you two some time to look over the menu before I come back.” She flashed a tired smile before she scurried off.
“So, what are you going to get?” I asked Alec, opening my menu, which had a sticky spot on the picture of a bacon cheeseburger. I frowned as I looked at my sticky fingers before grabbing a napkin from the dispenser, dabbing it in some of my drinking water, then cleaned off my fingers.
“I don’t know.” Alec shrugged as his eyes quickly scanned over his menu. “Probably just a cheeseburger and fries.”
“I think I’m going to have–”
The little bell above the door dinged with an incoming customer. Out of curiosity, I peeked up and nearly gasped. The woman that walked in was chalky pale with long white hair and faded blue eyes. But she wasn’t sick nor was she old. Or, at least, not that old. She looked to be fifty-five give or take a year or two. She came in with a man following close behind.
I instantly thought of Dharma. I mean, how many albino’s in the world were there? My guess; not many.
But Dharma’s body should be dead, a voice inside my head said, even though my mind mentally calculated to what the Dharma I knew, would look like today. My conclusion was pretty dang close to the woman in front of me. And if she died when she was fifteen, she would be close to the same age as the woman that stood in front of me too.
“We have a reservation,” the woman said, eyes flicking toward the waitress in an arrogant type of manner.
“And may I ask the name?” the hostess behind the podium asked.
“Esquire,” the woman said lazily. “Dharma Esquire.”
Holy crap! How many albino people have the name Dharma? This couldn’t be some freaky coincidence. But what’s with the name Esquire? I thought Dharma’s last name was Trouster?
The sudden urge to jump out of my booth and find Dharma made me grab the edge of my table with such a grip that my knuckles started to turn white. Alec glanced over the top of his menu to look at my hands then to my face. “Uh, J.J.? Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” But I blinked twice, my telltale sign that I was lying.
“Liar.” Alec raised his head and looked at me, then over in the direction I was looking, seeing Dharma’s body and the man she was with, follow the hostess through the restaurant. When they were out of sight, he turned back to me with a quizzical look on his face. “Do you know them?”
“No.” And honestly, I didn’t. I had met Dharma’s spirit, or whatever it was called, back in the Land of Dreams. And sure, that woman looked exactly what Dharma would look like if she would have lived, and shared the same first name, but that would have to be a pretty big coincidence, wouldn’t it?
Alec looked at me for a moment, as if he was waiting for me to do my tell. When I didn’t, he shook his head and took a sip of his water.
When the waitress came back, we ordered our food, which we ate quickly once we got it, then headed back to school, with the image of the albino woman who called herself Dharma Esquire, still on my mind.
* * *
The first thing I did when I got home was yank out the heavy phone book and searched for the surname “Berg,” needing to talk to Dharma about what I saw today. There were three of them. I groaned inwardly as I picked up the house phone and dialed the first number. When the person answered, it was some older man who sounded to be on the verge of croaking. I quickly apologized for dialing the wrong number, then hung up, before dialing the second number.
No one answered the second number, so when I got to the recording to leave a message, I just hung up and moved to the third number. After the third ring, someone picked up.
“Uh… hi?” I leaned back in my chair, suddenly feeling nervous. Was this the right number? It had to be, it was the only number left under the surname “Berg.” “Can I talk to Kayla?”
“Kayla!” the boy shouted on the other end. His voice was so loud that I had to take the phone away from my ear. “There’s someone on the phone that wants to talk to you!”
A few seconds later, Kayla’s/Dharma’s voice filled the other end. “Hello?”
“Hey, Dharma. It’s J.J.,” I said, relieved that I had finally found her. “We have to talk.”
“Jaqueline, are you okay? You sound really nervous.”
That’s because I was. I didn’t know if I would be able to tell her that there was someone who looks exactly like her if she would have continued to live in the World of Reality.
“Can we meet somewhere? I have to talk to you.”
“I can’t,” she said. “The family and I are going out to eat soon.”
“How long are you going to use Kayla’s body?” I asked. I was thankful that Dad was working late tonight so that I would be able to have this conversation freely without having to go to my room or talk in a hushed voice.
“I don’t know. I find her every night and try to convince her to leave, but she constantly refuses. And I can’t just leave her body. It would be like she fell back into another coma. And her family is so groovy–well, her brother can be kind of a twerp once in a while–I don’t want to hurt them by having their only daughter fall back into deep unconsciousness.”
I sighed and rubbed my eyes with my free hand. I was so confused on what was going on with Dharma’s body and the Land of Dreams. “Well, is there a time that we can talk? It’s important.”
“What is it about?” she asked.
For some reason, even though I didn’t have to, I said in a low voice, “I… I think I saw your body today.”
“What?!”
“Shhh!” I hissed, hearing how loud her voice rose. “You don’t want the Bergs to hear you.”
“I… I know.” I could hear her quickened breathing coming through the line. “Look, I’ll try to get out of supper early. We really need to talk.”
“I know. That’s why I called you.”
“Okay, I’ll call you back when we get done with supper.”
I nodded, even though I knew she couldn’t see me. “Okay.”
“Talk to you later.”
“Yup.” I pulled my phone away from my ear and ended the call. I really needed to talk to Dharma and find out what the hell was going on.
* * *
“So, tell me exactly what you saw,” Dharma said later that night. Around five o’clock, she had called and asked if we could meet at her house. She gave me her address, and since Dad was home, I got to use the car. Now it was almost five-thirty, and Dharma and I sat in Kayla’s room, which consisted of way to much of lavender. Lavender walls, lavender bed set, lavender sparkles on the ceiling… I sat on the edge of the bed while Dharma/Kayla sat on her desk chair.
“My friend, Alec, and I were at a restaurant for lunch and we saw an…” I paused before I said albino. “We saw a woman who looked exactly what you would look like if you hadn’t made the decision of staying in the Land of Dreams. Plus, her first name was also Dharma. The only thing that was different was her last name.”
“What was it?” Dharma asked. She looked unsure. Fear filled her eyes.
“I think it was Esquire,” I replied, trying to remember back to the restaurant.
“Esquire?” Dharma’s eyes widened and her mouth fell open with shock.
“What? What’s so important about the name Esquire?” I felt like I was missing something.
She frowned. “That… that was Bryan’s last name,” she replied.
“Who’s Bryan?” I asked, matching her frown with a frown of my own. She had never told me about a guy named Bryan from her previous life.
“Bryan Esquire. He was the mayor’s son when I was alive,” she replied, her eyes fogging up as she recovered a memory from her past. “Rich, popular, powerful.” She tilted her head a little to the side, her face twisting into a frown. “He was such a spoiled snob. I remember all the things he got away with by pointing a finger at someone else.”
“Wait, the governor of California, Bryan Esquire?” I asked, suddenly remembering something I had briefly heard on the news a little over a year ago. “The one who embezzled the state’s fund, but got out of prison on bail?”
Dharma shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t been around to see what had become of him.”
Oh, right.
For a moment, Dharma and I were both quiet before I spoke up: “So, what does that mean?”
“It means I’m married to the mayor’s snobby son, who I guess, went to prison until someone released him on bail.” Her face was still twisted into a look of disgust.
“No, I got that. I meant, what does this mean with your body? How is it still here when you’re not in it?” Doesn’t a body need a soul to live?
“I don’t know.” Dharma shrugged her shoulders. Suddenly, her face filled with life again, as if she had a sudden jolt of energy. Her eyes were wide again. “Oh. My. Gosh.”
“What? What is it?” I scooted to the edge of the bed. I leaned forward, my heart thumping in a mix of excitement and fear. How is there a body of a dead girl walking, breathing, living…?
“I just remembered something,” Dharma said, perking up. She locked her clear hazel eyes on mine.
“Dharma, what is it?”
She blinked. “I remember that, when I opened my eyes after I jumped off the cliff and found myself back on top of the cliff, I saw Dusk back in a shadow form. He was there only for a moment, and then he was gone. He just disappeared as if he was never really there. I haven’t seen him since. I just figured he moved on to some other victim.”
“So, what are you saying?” I asked with a small frown.
“I’m saying, what if Dusk didn’t go and lure someone else to the same fate as me? What if he took that chance to take over my body like how I’m borrowing Kayla’s?” She looked at me, the urgency for me to understand in her eyes.
“So your saying he took over your body when you couldn’t claim it anymore?”
She nodded.
“Do you think that’s what Reve and all the other Shadow Creatures like him are trying to do?” I asked. An emotion rolled around in my chest at the thought of Reve trying to take over my body. Maybe it was fear or anger or hurt. Or maybe it was all three of them combined and that was why I suddenly felt sick.
Dharma shrugged Kayla’s shoulders. “I don’t know. Probably. He’s doing the same thing to you that Dusk did to me.”
I looked away, feeling tears sting my eyes. Was Reve really messing with me to take over my body? That seemed a little… heinous.
“I’m going to do some research,” Dharma said, turning in her chair to face her computer, and pressed the on button. The computer hummed to life as the screen went from black to blue. “You know, out of everything in this timeframe, I think this thing is my favorite. I mean, you can look up anything you want on it, and they’ll have hundreds of facts about it.”
“You mean the computer?” I forced my emotions down and turned to Dharma.
“Is that what it’s called? We didn’t have them in the sixties and seventies. I mean, we did, but they were huge and were used for science and top-secret government stuff.” When the main screen came up, she went to the Internet and typed in something in the search bar. After a moment, I heard her suck in a deep breath.
“What? What is it?” I moved over and kneeled by her chair. Turning to face the computer, I sucked in my own deep breath. On the screen, she had typed something like “Shadow Creatures in People’s Dreams,” and the result came up as a shocker.
“A dream demon?” I asked, flabbergasted. “Like Freddy Krueger?”
Dharma shrugged. “I gue
ss so.” She clicked on a link, taking her to a new page. She was silent for a moment before she said, “There’s a demon named Nybbas. It says that he’s the demon of dreams and that he has spawns that go out into people’s dream, trying to connect the dream world with reality.” She scrolled the page down. “It also says that they lure people to the dream world, in an attempt to coax them into giving up their body so that they may slip into them and wreak havoc on the world.” She turned to look at me. “It sounds like Dusk and Reve.”
I shook my head. Reve? A demon? The thought of him being a big, mean demon nearly made me laugh. But then Dharma clicked on a picture and I swallowed the laughter that had started to bubble up inside my throat. There were different images of what dream demons looked like, but there was one picture that stood out from the rest. It was a shadow figure that looked very similar to what Reve had looked like before I had given him a physical appearance. The only difference were the eyes. Unlike Reve’s amethyst-colored eyes, this Shadow Creature had bright red eyes that reminded me of sparkling rubies.
Dharma turned in her chair to look at me. “I guess we found out what has now taken over my body.”
“Yeah.” I swallowed back my emotion. “I guess we did.” I turned back to look at the screen, my throat burning with emotions. “So, what do we do now?”
Dharma turned back to the computer and stared at the picture of the creepy dream demon with the ruby eyes. “Now we have to find a way to kill them.”
Chapter 17
“Why didn’t you tell me that you were a demon?” I asked Reve later that night when he appeared in my room, his eyebrow raised as if to ask, “Do you trust me or Dharma?” I didn’t answer him of course. I feared if I did, he would disappear on me and I wouldn’t get any answers on whether or not he was a demon.
“What?” he spluttered, flabbergasted. “Why on earth would you think that?”
The Land of Dreams Page 8