Moonlight Mist: A Limited Edition Collection of Fantasy & Paranormal)

by Nicole Morgan

  I inherited his coloring because my DNA is woven out of nightmares and restless sleep. There is almost no trace of my mother in my features and for that reason alone, it’s easy for me to remain anonymous and fade into the background.

  Because I can dream awake, unlike my sisters, I often wonder if I really exist or if all I am is some dream construct who believes she is alive.

  I also wonder, sometimes, if I am a monster.

  I have seen my father’s real shape and it is horrifying—a winged, gargoyle body that seems to be made out of a molten, greenish metal. If I did not know who and what he was, I would have died of fright the first time I encountered him.

  “Is that what I really look like?” I used to ask him, confused about how he could look so different at times and still be the same person.

  “No,” he would say. “I am the nightmare, you are the dream.”

  Which was exactly the right thing to say to me.

  I never felt special when I was around my sisters. I loved them, but they were so shiny and beautiful that I felt like I could never be as…as anything…as they were.

  I pestered my father in our midnight meetings to give me more details on what it meant to be the Dreamer’s Daughter. He laughed when I brought up the conundrums that plagued me.

  Even when I was four, he treated me like an adult, communicating with me mind to mind in a way I could not converse with mother or my sisters.

  He taught me how to build a construct that would allow me to transition from the real world into the dream world without having to fall asleep. And once I could do that, I could travel anywhere in the dream realm I wanted and not have to worry if my body was safe because I didn’t have to split myself into the dreamer and the person who lived in the waking world.

  “Imagine a room,” he said, “a room where you feel safe.”

  “My bedroom,” I said happily, because I loved my bedroom. It was on the top floor of what would one day be the main building of the Alviva Sleep Clinic and it looked out on a forest of oak and beech and mountain ash. It was glorious in September and October when the leaves turned colors.

  Mira used to tell me it was an enchanted forest and made up stories about a girl just like me who lived in the tallest tree and used to look down on the forest every night to make sure the little animals were safe while they slept. Her name was EVER, which is my name spelled backwards, and for some reason I loved that detail the most.

  “Imagine your bedroom,” my father said. “And focus on it.”

  I wasn’t certain what “focus” meant, and so he explained that I needed to picture it in my mind so clearly that I believed I could see it.

  I practiced and I practiced—I very much wanted to please him—and eventually one night, I achieved my goal. “I see it Morpheus,” I said, wishing I could call him papa like Mira and Kitta did when they talked to their father.

  “Clever girl,” Morpheus said. And then he showed me how to take hold of the doorknob and open the door into the dream world.

  At first, I could only visit my own dream world, which looked mostly like my grandmother’s garden, which was one of my favorite places. But Morpheus encouraged me to “build” my own specific place and eventually, I found it easy to populate it with features I’d seen in books and movies—a fountain here, a talking fish there, framed artwork that changed according to my mood.

  Then he showed me how to dreamwalk into another’s dream world and that’s when all the trouble started.

  Though the clinic was still under construction, Mother was seeing patients nearly every day. One of them was an artist named Felipe Cruz-Navarro.

  Felipe created paintings in his dreams.

  Not “while he was dreaming,” but actually inside his dreams.

  And I overheard him telling my mother that no matter how he tried, he could not get the paintings inside his head onto canvas in the waking world.

  He seemed really sad about that.

  And mother was sad because she’d tried all of her techniques on him and nothing seemed to work.

  One night I slipped into the room where Felipe was staying and found him sleeping feverishly, tossing from side to side.

  And without really thinking about it, I’d brought up my construct, walked through the door and stepped into Felipe’s dream world.

  He was standing on a hillside under a sky filled with stars and swirling colors I didn’t have a name for then, but now know was the Crab Nebula, impossibly close and incredibly bright.

  He was standing before an easel painting furiously, somehow surrounded by light though it was pitch black.

  He saw me approach and ignored me, though seemingly unsurprised to see me there in his dream.

  I watched him for a while and then I got bored, so I wandered off to look at the bizarre flowers that were sprouting in the gritty purple soil where the nebula’s colored light fell on them.

  Eventually, I realized Felipe was gone and that he’d left his canvas behind.

  It was beautiful, abstract but not without meaning. It was as if he’d painted a portion of his soul onto the canvas. And I thought, no wonder he is sad.

  So, being very careful not to smear the paint, which was still wet, I carried the painting back through the door into my bedroom and then back into the real world.

  I left the painting leaning against a wall in his bedroom and went back to my own bedroom where I went to sleep.

  Normally it was Kitta who woke me up and helped me dress but that morning it was my mother who came into my room before breakfast.

  There was a strange expression on her face as she asked, “Did you go see Felipe last night?”

  “Yes,” I said, wondering if she was angry.

  “I’m not angry,” she said, almost as if we could communicate mind to mind as Morpheus and I did.

  “I just want to know how his painting ended up in his room.”

  “I brought it out,” I said.

  “Out of his dream?”

  I nodded, uncertain how this information was going to be received. I knew Kitta and Mira couldn’t do it.

  “Clever girl,” she said, just as Morpheus did, and smiled. “Felipe is very happy this morning.”

  She contemplated me for another minute. “Let’s you and I have breakfast all by ourselves and you can tell me about your adventure.”

  This thrilled me. One on one time with Dr. Lauren Alviva was rare by that time and I felt like I hardly ever got to see my mother by herself.

  Over cinnamon toast and a boiled egg, I told my mother everything—about the visits from Morpheus, about the way I could dreamwalk without going to sleep or using any of the fancy equipment she and my sisters needed to do it.

  She told me I’d done a good thing but that I shouldn’t have just trespassed on Felipe’s dream without his permission.

  “You wouldn’t want Mira or Kitta coming into your room and taking one of your toys, would you?” she asked.

  “But Felipe wanted his paintings in the waking world,’ I said.

  “Yes,” she’d said patiently, “he did. And what you did made him happy. But imagine if those paintings had been very private and secret things that he didn’t really want anyone to know about.”

  “You mean like the dreams Mr. Floria has?”

  She went pale and very still. Augustan Floria was a new patient who’d been brought in suffering from a personality disorder complicated by PTSD. His dreams were dark and violent. He thought a lot about killing people with big, shiny knives. My mother was afraid she wouldn’t be able to help him.

  “Yes,” she finally said, “like that. Not everyone wants people to know what they dream in their hearts.”

  “Okay,” I said and ate the rest of my cinnamon toast, which was just the way I liked it, all crisp and sugary on the edges but buttery and cinnamony near the middle of the slice of bread.

  And that would have been it except that Felipe couldn’t keep things to himself. And eventually Dr. Elbaz, who Kitta c
alled “Dr. Faustus,” heard about what I could do. He was not only an investor but one of the specialists Mother had invited into the clinic, so he had his own office in the under-construction complex and no one thought it odd that he’d taken an interest in me.

  No one but Kitta, who told me bluntly to stay away from him in an “I’m the big sister, you need to listen to me” voice that left no room for argument. Even at sixteen, Kitta was a force to be reckoned with and since I adored her, I didn’t want to do anything that might upset her.

  Still, “Dr. Faustus” was crafty. And patient. And one day when mother and my sisters weren’t looking, he knocked on my bedroom door and asked if I wanted to go to the zoo.

  It didn’t occur to me to wonder how he had gotten into our apartment.

  It didn’t cross my mind that if there was a nearby zoo, mother would have taken me there already because I was crazy about zebras and panda bears.

  I was four and I heard “zoo” and I was all in.

  And that’s how I’d ended up his prisoner.

  Until the night my father came for me. Being away from my mother and sisters had been hard, but I understood that their abilities were limited and machine-augmented. But I hadn’t understood why Morpheus had suddenly stopped visiting me. If I was in a dream world, then I was in his world, and he should have been able to retrieve me any time he wanted.

  I asked him why it had taken him so long to come get me.

  “I stay away from mortal dreams for the most part,” he said, “I prefer to walk in the dreams of gods.”

  But once Morpheus and my mother had talked, and my father knew who’d taken me, it took only one night for him to locate us.

  You know that old saying, “Wait until your father gets home?”

  That.

  Morpheus showed Dr. Elbaz what a “night terror” really was.

  Before my father was through, the man who had taken me from my bedroom was reduced to a gibbering pool of fear. He had just enough sense left to bargain for his life with the only thing he had—the sleep technology he’d built in his lab to use on me.

  He offered it to my mother in return for a reprieve and she accepted. His machines and research became the base she built upon to turn the clinic into a success.

  His sleeping body was kept at ASC and put into a suite where he could be monitored and fed and tended to while his consciousness remained trapped in a very special dreamland Morpheus crafted for him before he returned to his own realm.

  He’s been in that state for twenty years.

  I don’t know how many more years his body can live, but I suspect that hell would be a relief at this point.

  As for my midnight visits with my father, they grew less frequent after my return and eventually ceased altogether. The lure of the god dreams was too strong to resist, I guess. I’d asked him once what it was like to dream those dreams, but he told me only that it would be like trying to describe a color to someone who’d been blind since birth.

  That only made me more curious and I have spent a fair amount of time trying to cross the divide from my dream world into that other realm.

  I have stood so temptingly close to the borders that I can smell the supernatural flowers growing just across the invisible barrier. I have no name for the gorgeous scents reminiscent of blood-red roses and wine distilled from a midnight sky.

  One day I will pluck one of those flowers and bring it back into the waking world.

  Chapter Two

  “All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.—T.E. Lawrence

  ACS is open all year long, which means that at least one of us is always on site no matter what the season. Since all the family members live on the property as well, it can sometimes feel as if we’re on call 24/7. It’s not so bad for me because my services are still offered by referral only, but it wears on both Mira and Kitta whose work is emotionally draining.

  I worry about Kitta the most because she often gets really depressed and there’s not much any of us can do for her.

  She exercises a lot, trying to get her endorphins flowing, and her diet is heavy on salmon and walnuts and all those other foods that are supposed to help regulate mood.

  She took antidepressants for a while but she found the medicine interfered with her work, so she stopped.

  Mother has encouraged her to go on sabbaticals when things grind her down but instead she’ll jet off to a week-long yoga retreat in Mexico and come back with a tan and a new attitude.

  These short respites work for a while. Until the next time.

  Mira paints. She took her first lessons from Felipe and then, between college and grad school, she took off a year to work at the Museum of Modern Art.

  Now whenever she feels overwhelmed, she retreats to her studio in the woods and creates these enormous canvases with images that make Francis Bacon’s work look light and cheery.

  She sells them for five and six figures almost as soon as the paint is dry and she’s got one buyer in Dubai who puts in a standing order for three paintings a year. Mira visited his gallery once and told me she could hardly stand seeing so much painted pain in one place.

  “Promise you’ll never take a meeting alone with him,” our mother said to her when she first heard about the Dubai commissions. “Because anyone who wants to surround himself with so many nightmare images is probably not terribly sane.”

  Mira had just laughed because after all, what did any of us do except deal in nightmares all day long—and most of the night?

  But as I said, it wasn’t so hard for me for the most part until Ebenezer Quarles was brought in for treatment.

  I’m not really involved in the day-to-day running of the clinic. Unlike my older sisters, I don’t have any medical training. My skills rank somewhere between “naturopath” and “psychic healer” and when the clinic hosts seminars, a lot of the sleep scientists who attend deal with me in a way that’s painfully patronizing.

  They don’t know what I really do, of course, but they have such a sense of entitlement—such an aura of privilege—that they assume I’m defective in some way because I don’t have a string of letters after my name.

  To explain my presence, mother gave me the title of marketing director and I float around and help out with administrative tasks as needed. Only a few of the staff know the real role I play. My “legend” was built into the corporate narrative of ACS after the kidnapping and has never been altered.

  And who would be interested in me when they could be dealing with my sisters or our mother, the fabulous Dr. Lauren Alviva?

  She was already famous before she met my father—the researcher/clinician with the techno-holistic approach to sleep disorders and the near one hundred percent cure rate—but after she met Morpheus? Her reputation skyrocketed.

  My mother has never really explained how she ended up pregnant with a god’s child. She says it’s irrelevant, that I am her child and that is all that matters.

  I’ve never really felt like her child, though. If anything, I’m closer to Kitta, who was twelve years old when I was born and from the first treated me like her own very special doll.

  After I was rescued from “Dr. Faustus,” it was Kitta who was in charge of my treatment. She worked with me every day for almost a year to make sure that I wouldn’t be damaged for the rest of my life.

  I owe my sanity to my big sister. It makes me sad that she’s never let me dreamwalk in her subconscious to see if I can help her. “You have your own nightmares to deal with,” she’d told me, “you don’t need to take on mine.”

  Because all three of us spend so much time in other people’s dreams, Kitta was the one who came up with the idea that each of us should build a framework that would allow us to organize the dream environments when we were with patients. For most people, dreaming is
like playing a computer game run by a quantum machine that’s been hacked. There’s always a meaning behind the symbols, but whatever logic is there, is dream logic and so, often irrational.

  She wanted us to figure out a mental metaphor we could use to keep order in our dreamlands, like those people who build “memory palaces” in order to remember vast quantities of information.

  Kitta’s dreamscape was a huge multiplex movie theater with a comfortable lobby and different screening rooms leading away to either side. With that construct she could monitor multiple patient’s dreamlands if she needed to, but she always had a way to exit when things got too intense.

  Mira’s world was a huge Gothic mansion surrounded by an ornate cast iron fence that enclosed a garden where stone angels stood guard. Each room inside the mansion housed a different dream or nightmare and unlike Kitta’s dream multiplex, where the “movies” are swapped out with each patient, Mira houses all the dreams she’s ever entered, just keeps adding more rooms like she’s Sarah Winchester and thinks something bad will happen if she stops building.

  I only know about Kitta’s dreamland because she’s described it to me. I’ve visited Mira’s dreamland and walked around in it dozens of times. It’s beautiful and sincerely creepy, with golden spiders and silver snakes that slither among the stone angels.

  Because I dream awake and because I can enter all the dreamlands from the construct of my bedroom, I don’t need an “anteroom” as a buffer so I don’t really use Kitta’s technique.

  And oddly, when I have sleeping dreams, I don’t remember them.

  And then I heard Ebenezer Quarles was being brought to the clinic.

  I knew who he was. Of course I did. Once Prince Harry was off the market, Ebenezer “Ben” Quarles became the new face of millennial masculinity. He was handsome. He was rich. He had a private pilot’s license and flew his own twin-engine Beechcraft Baron in and out of international playgrounds, usually with a supermodel or world-class athlete in tow.