Dreamcatchers (The Dreams of Reality Book 3)

by Gareth Otton

  “Great, he’s here,” Harry said, voice dripping with sarcasm. “I guess now we just need a detective and we meet your magical quota.”

  “There’re no detectives working this afternoon,” Denise said, ignoring Harry’s attitude. “It’s why we need to fill that spot ASAP.”

  “Then I’ll go,” Stella said, and no one looked happy by that announcement. Denise wanted her here dealing with the PR guys, Harry hated her guts, and Morris was nervous about working with the boss. But Stella made the rule about needing a detective on hand for every callout for a reason.

  Harry opened his mouth to protest, but thought better of it and just turned away to shout for his team to exit their vehicles and line up.

  “Can you bring us all in one trip?” Stella asked Morris.

  He looked doubtful, but nodded.

  “I’ve been working with Tad and I’m pretty sure I can.”

  “Don’t hurt yourself,” Stella warned. “I’d rather you make multiple trips and be ready for anything than hurt yourself getting us there.”

  “Maybe two trips then,” Morris begrudgingly admitted.

  Stella nodded and turned to Denise to issue orders, but stopped when she noticed the woman’s expression. As soon as she had Stella’s attention, Denise mouthed the words, “He’s scared of you. Fix that.”

  Surprised, Stella looked back to Morris to see him standing around nervously. It was par for the course from what she’d seen, but now she wondered if it wasn’t something more. He always seemed nervous to her, but the reports she got from Tad and Trevors said he was coming out of his shell and rising to the occasion.

  Am I really that scary? She asked herself, curious when that happened, and wondered how to handle it. In the past she’d have slipped into her friendly persona, butter him up, get him interested and use that interest to push him to improve himself. Now just the thought made her feel sick.

  “Morris, I can’t tell you how happy I am with how you guys are progressing,” she said, surprising the young man.

  “You are?”

  “Definitely. Tad was killing himself on his own, and even when you guys joined he always felt he had to be there with you. The fact he’s willing to leave you guys on your own now tells me how capable you have become. I just wanted to say thanks for stepping up. You’re more help than you know.”

  Blinking, the young man blushed at the praise and nodded. “Oh… Uh… Thanks.”

  She was saved from having to reply when Harry and his team crowded in close, none looking happy to have to travel this way. Stella could sympathise a little. Even with Lizzie’s jumping trick, it was still a jarring experience.

  Better than letting people die, though.

  “Alright everyone, you know the drill, link up and jump when Morris gives the word.”

  One by one, hands fell on shoulders and everyone was connected into a single group. At Morris’ direction, that group split into three to make this easier on him with Stella being in the last. Then, at the word jump from Morris, the first group vanished.

  Despite her normally unflappable nature, Denise gasped.

  “I’ll never get used to that,” she said.

  “Nope, me neither,” Stella agreed.

  Then Morris was back, grabbing the next group and telling them to jump, before he vanished again.

  “Tell the PR guys I’m sorry and I’ll make it up to them,” Stella said. “They’ll understand.”

  Denise didn’t look convinced, but she nodded in response.

  A popping sound signalled Morris’ return. He looked disoriented but determined, and when Stella touched him, it surprised her to find he was freezing and dripping wet. Before she could ask about it, he shouted, “Jump.” Just as she reached the apex of her leap, the garage vanished and she entered a world of water.

  It was hard to credit that they were still in Wales as it was as dark as midnight. The angry clouds were so thick that almost no light filtered through. It took Stella’s eyes a second to adjust, but even then she couldn’t take in the full horror of her environment because rain pelted at her face hard enough to feel like hail stones. Wind screamed at her with enough strength to try knocking her from her feet, and in mere seconds she felt cold and miserable.

  However, she wasn’t truly scared until lightning lit up the sky, a great sheet of it that rolled through the cloud above them. It focused into points and then all at once lightning forks crashed into the ground and ocean, far too many to count. The crack of their energy made her hair stand on end and knocked the air from her lungs as an enormous peal of thunder, so loud it sounded like the earth was splitting open, assaulted her eardrums.

  That flash of light revealed not a picturesque costal town and seven miles of unbroken beach. Instead, there was just a roiling, black sea, impossibly huge waves, and destruction of the like Stella had never seen.

  It was like the ocean was angry with the town and had decided to claim it.

  As Stella looked at the wreckage of broken buildings, the massive waves trying to claim another and the impossible act of nature destroying the world around her, she wondered what the hell she could do. Meanwhile, her hand acted on instinct. By the time she realised it was moving, her phone was already out and dialling. For all her talk of trusting Morris, she didn’t want just any old dreamwalker beside her, she wanted the Dreamwalker.

  “Hi, this is Tad. If you’re a telemarketer or a reporter looking for a story, then my answer is still—”

  Stella hung up and swore. Straight to voicemail.

  She’d have to handle this on her own.

  As she looked at the stunned faces of the tactical team and the terrified face of her backup dreamwalker, she was left with a very real question of just where on Earth to start.

  She was still wondering when the wave crashed over them and dragged them out to sea.

  3

  Sunday, 03rd July 2016

  17:55

  “Aren’t rabbits quicker than that?”

  Tad looked at the puppy eagerly chasing a terrified rabbit over the grassland beneath his paws. True to Jacob’s question, the rabbit moved slowly. Not obviously so, just enough that an eager puppy who hadn’t got his hunting legs yet could easily catch it.

  The white rabbit glanced back in terror as the puppy pounced, first crushing the rabbit beneath his paws, then overbalancing into a forward roll that left him on his back, tongue lolling. All was not lost though, as the moment his attention shifted from the rabbit, the white-furred creature vanished, and a new, plumper, even more terrified rabbit hopped over the prone puppy. Rolling to its feet again, tail wagging so fast it was a blur, the puppy barked once and was off chasing new prey.

  Jacob burst out laughing, a rich sound that was surprisingly deep to come from his diminutive frame. To call Jacob bookish would drastically undersell just how much Tad’s friend fit the nerd stereotype. Complete with thick-framed glasses that doubled the size of his eyes, a sweater-vest over a checked shirt and actual corduroy trousers, Jacob leaned so heavily into the geek stereotype that Tad would be forgiven for thinking his friend was going to a fancy dress party. Having known him for the better part of three months, Tad accepted that this was just who Jacob was; a nerd with the voice of a radio DJ.

  The slightly overweight black man was like Tad in more ways than either cared to admit. Both had spent most of their adult lives teaching, and had a history of ghosts, bullies and all things Proxy related. In fact, were Jacob English instead of American, and had grown up with Tony as a ghost to never let him embrace his inner geek, they could very well be the same person.

  This similar past created a similar thought pattern, which led to Jacob being Tad’s first new dreamwalker friend. So much of the last three months could not have happened without him.

  “And you’re not creating them?” Jacob asked as his laughing subsided.

  “The rabbits? No. That’s the puppy.”

  “A dreamwalking puppy. I never would have thought it,” Jacob admi
tted. “Though I don’t know why not. Why should humans have a sole right to this power?”

  “I don’t know about right,” Tad said. “But I thought intellect might come into it. I didn’t think animals had the imagination for it.”

  Jacob laughed and pointed at the puppy who caught its rabbit before being distracted again, this time by giant butterflies the size of kites. A trio of them glittered in the Dreamscape's sunlight, each fantastically shaped but curiously lacking colour. They flittered about as the puppy pounced after them, always just shy of a successful hunt.

  “Strange that they don’t have much colour on them,” Tad noted.

  “Probably because they’re from a dog’s imagination,” Jacob answered. “You know dogs can’t see as many colours as we do. It makes sense they wouldn’t be able to imagine anything more vibrant. It reminds me of our talk about the limits of imagination and thought processes.”

  Tad remembered that talk which had bored Stella, Tony and Jen half to death, but fascinated the two dreamwalkers for hours. They discussed how strange it was that no dreamwalker could reproduce Tad’s ability to read auras. It was Jacob’s theory that dreamwalking was a power of the mind and because no two people thought the same, they couldn’t use their powers the same.

  “You’re probably right,” Tad said. “It would be interesting to bring the other puppies here and see if they could produce similar results.”

  “There’s two more you say?” Jacob asked.

  “Yeah, they’re at home with Jen and Tony. Don’t ask me why, but this little guy has latched onto me and has been following me around.”

  “So what are you going to call him?”

  Tad turned from the puppy and shook his head. “No names because I can’t keep him. My life is too crazy for a puppy. I left a message with the golf club for their owner to call me, so I doubt I’ll have this little guy more than a day or so.”

  Jacob huffed and shook his head.

  “What?” Tad asked.

  “Nothing. I’ll just keep that thought to myself and wait for you to catch up on your own.” Making a show of rolling up his sleeves he asked, “So, we doing this or what?”

  Try as he might, Tad couldn’t hide his grin.

  “Bring it,” he said in a tone that would make anyone other than Jacob cringe so hard they’d pull a muscle.

  Jacob just grinned and said, “Watch this.”

  He turned his attention away from Tad and the puppy, and he raised his arms like a wizard casting a spell. In this place of imagination, that was exactly what he was.

  A great crystalline wall rose up in a circle around them, refracting the sunlight into a myriad of rainbows that danced over the ground like the greatest disco lights ever created, distracting the puppy from his imagined butterflies. The walls closed in as they grew until meeting hundreds of feet above their heads to create an impossible crystal dome. The crystal replaced even the grass under their feet.

  Jacob turned to Tad with a smug grin. “Well, what do you think?”

  “Impressive,” Tad said. “For starters, anyway.”

  “For starters? Come off it Holcroft, even you have to be impressed with this.”

  The truth was, Tad was impressed. Jacob had come a long way since he first met the man. For all that Tad was like him, they differed in one clear way; Jacob didn’t have much imagination.

  Shortly after they first met, they planned a weekly event hosted in Dream where dreamwalkers could meet each other. It was a way to get to know other dreamwalkers and also a way to share problems, knowledge, and ideas. When Tad came to the first meeting, he found that Jacob had set up a space that looked like a stereotypical run-down basketball gym complete with fold out chairs like you might find in a TV support group. Considering the limitless nature of Dream, Tad mocked his friend’s lack of imagination and replaced the dreary gym with a new, fantastical environment that was considerably more exciting.

  Not to be outdone, Jacob set the next meeting in the courtyard of a fantasy castle complete with high walls, towers, and even a moat. As big a step up as it was for Jacob, it was still familiar. The designs were like castles in the real world, the fantasy elements lifted straight from movies, cartoons and comic books.

  So the next meeting Tad created the setting, a glass platform set atop the shell of a giant turtle swimming through a version of space that was more lively than their reality considering the number of shooting stars and multitude of colours.

  Then their game truly began as each week they tried to outdo the other.

  “I’m impressed, but we could liven it up a bit,” Tad said. “You mind?”

  “Oh do your best,” Jacob said with a mocking bow.

  Tad grinned and turned his attention to the dome.

  He liked the crystal and refracted light, but was more fascinated when the light was moving. With a thought he set the glass to shifting again, nothing sudden or jarring, just a subtle sliding of segments that kept the light in motion.

  “Oh, I see. You prefer movies to photos,” Jacob teased. “A little clumsy though, don’t you think.”

  Suddenly the shifting panels melted into one another, the already smooth movements like segments on the worlds hardest Rubik’s Cube becoming fluid as the crystals combined into a single liquid mass. The segments continued to move in straight lines, keeping the crystalline aesthetic, but they flowed like water which created a myriad of subtle changes to the light that was driving the poor puppy mad. The little dog had no idea what to look at first.

  “Okay, I’m impressed,” Tad finally admitted. “You think it’ll get a bit much after a while?”

  Jacob shrugged. “If it does, we’ll dial it back or change it to something else. You think you can top this next week?”

  Tad grinned. “Watch me,” he said, and was about to say more when suddenly there was a pop followed by a cute little growl from the puppy that sounded more curious than threatening.

  Tad turned to find a teenage girl dressed in a school uniform looking around the dome with wide eyes and a slack jaw.

  “Whoa, I never know what to expect when I come here,” she said before tearing her eyes away from the spectacle so she could look at Tad and Jacob. She opened her mouth to speak when the growling finally registered, and she looked for the source. With a gasp of delight the first member of their meeting said in a tone almost identical to Jen, “Aww. A puppy!”

  Instantly the growling stopped, and the puppy’s tail started wagging again.

  Tad sat on a chair fashioned from the same crystal as the dome while looking around the circle and stroking the sleeping puppy on his lap. Thirty-six other chairs formed the circle, six more than last week and so many more than Tad thought he’d ever see in one place. When he and the Prime Minister concocted the idea to reach out to dreamwalkers who survived Joshua King, he never expected to find many. Yet here he was in a room full of them, and there were even faces missing who had attended earlier meetings.

  I’m not as alone as I thought.

  “That boy would have died if I wasn’t there,” a moustachioed man from Texas said. “We had nothing to get him from that well and with the rain… He’d have drowned for sure. But I did what we always talk about, used what was there rather than creating something from nothing. He was splashing around as he was mighty panicked and all it took was me giving one of those splashes a bit more force… Well… A lot more force, and suddenly he shoots out like he’s riding a geyser.”

  The man laughed so hard it was impossible not to smile with him.

  “I’m telling ya’ll, you should’a seen their faces. They were so shocked they almost forgot to grab the boy as he came back down.”

  “Did they know it was you who helped him?” asked an older man from the other side of the circle, his thick Indian accent tainting his words enough that the Texan struggled to answer immediately. It was a miracle he could understand the question at all considering it wasn't asked in English. Learning to use Dream to interpret other lang
uages was one of the first tricks they learned for these meetings.

  The big Texan shook his head. “Nah, I didn’t tell them. They don’t need to know it was me.”

  “Why not?” asked Sandra, the sixteen-year-old in the school uniform. “You’d be the town hero.”

  “I don’t need no attention. You think I want to end up like him?” he asked, pointing to Tad and earning a chuckle from the room. They knew how much he hated his fame, even if he was learning to deal with it.

  “Well, we know you’re a hero, Brad. Hopefully that’s enough,” Jacob said from the chair next to Tad, making the big Texan blush and sit back. “It’s a good to hear these meetings are already helping. Who knows what might have happened to that boy had we not come together and shared our knowledge. I’m grateful every week to hear stories like that.”

  As always, Jacob’s DJ voice worked its magic and he commanded everyone’s attention. He was much more suited to this than Tad was.

  “Alright, it’s getting late. We’ve got time for one more speaker before we finish up. Anyone got anything to share?” Jacob asked, then quickly added, “And no more requests to take the puppy home. We all want a dreamwalking dog, but I think he’s chosen where he wants to be.”

  There was another chuckle that ran around the circle before an old man who’d been silent through most of the meeting raised his hand. Tad stifled a groan. This was the one man he could do without at these meetings.

  The Londoner had a bad attitude and always stank of booze. Tad suspected the only reason King hadn’t scooped him up was because his aroma kept even ghosts away. He only left his barstool to come to these meetings and bring everyone down.

  “Peter. Go ahead,” Jacob said, his tight expression mirroring Tad’s feelings on the man.

  “Thanks Jacob. I’m assuming you seen the news?” he asked the group. “You know, the protests… The Children of ADaM. You heard of those? Know who they are?”

  He looked almost gleeful when no one answered.