Another One Bites the Dust

by Chris Marie Green

  “Having said that,” he said, motioning to Tim, “I think you should give the dreams another try. I’ll stay out here to watch over you two and pull you out if I see him getting agitated. He’s holding up under our dream-digging and hallucinations better than any human I’ve heard of, but we still don’t want to overdo it.”

  “We just can’t push him too far.”

  But I was definitely juiced for dream-digging since I’d been in some . . . well, let’s just say heavy-duty contact with fake Dean recently. I was beyond strong right now and, bless Louis, he’d been kind enough not to mention my super-fantastic ghost coloring so far. Yet I’d have to wait until Tim started his rapid eye movement, so I stood back, still cautious about going in.

  But I could see my paranoia reflected in the way Louis was looking at me.

  As we waited for Tim’s REM, Louis said, “So . . . about Cassie.”

  “Yeah. Cassie.” I tried to gauge him to see what his feelings were on her wrangling. “I know she came over here to talk to you before she . . .”

  “Yes, she did.” From the way he said it, there was no doubting that he was fine with her choice. I wouldn’t put it past Louis to have advised her to do what made her happy in the end.

  On the other side of the bed, Nichelle stirred, putting her hands under her chin, like she was cocooning herself in her own light dreams.

  That brought us back to current events, and Louis said, “Just so you know, you’ve become a key player in Tim’s psyche. Not you you—but he’s dwelling on the image he saw of your hallucinatory face today. I would even say that he’s using it.”

  “Using?”

  “You’ll see what I mean.” Louis was paying close attention to Tim’s sleeping pattern, and the guy wasn’t quite where we needed him to be yet. “When I was in him, he was back in that basement of his, with the furnace, the toys. He wasn’t looking out a window, though. There was just that big TV, but with a ghostly face on it this time. He screamed and raged and ripped that TV apart until he got to your face, and . . .”

  “Let me guess. Was there blood on the walls again when he got to my face?”

  Louis nodded. “Worst of all, there’s another fine detail I haven’t mentioned yet. . . .”

  When Tim’s eyes began shifting quickly underneath his lids, Louis didn’t waste time.

  “If there’s a way for you to implant placid images in him without him detecting you, that’s the way to go, Jensen. You ready?”

  I didn’t ask him what might happen if Tim spotted me in his subconscious. We didn’t know what damage dream-Tim could inflict if he got ahold of a figment in his nightmare—namely, one of us. Could he keep us in the dream? Or, if he had an iron poker—poison to a ghost—in the dream, could he use it on me and make me dissipate? Surely that was possible because my essence was actually in there, right?

  I reached out to Tim, but Louis had one last thing to say.

  “Careful, sugar.”

  I smiled at him with a confidence I didn’t necessarily feel, but then I pressed my essence to Tim’s face, investing myself with everything I had.

  A hard touch, a fast rush, under the skin, whooshing into him with electric speed—

  My dream-body—so much like the one fake Dean had given me earlier—spun into his psyche. I whirled and whirled until I forced myself to stop.

  Inches from the edge of a cliff.

  I froze in place as a mournful wind moaned around me, slow and monstrous, draggy and sad. It smelled like peppermint and something else I couldn’t identify, but I wasn’t going to analyze it when, below me, complete darkness reigned in a fathomless, yawning black canyon.

  With my back arched and arms out to balance, I gradually shifted my weight backward until I could crouch on the ground, getting my bearings.

  Peppermint, I thought as an unhurried gush of the wind covered me again. The mints Tim sucked on. But what was that other smell?

  When I identified blood, I gagged, holding my hand over my mouth, ponderously turning around, taking in my surroundings.

  Not a basement this time . . . not even close.

  I couldn’t process what I was seeing in front of me at first, because it was even more surreal than Tim’s original dream: black-and-white squares everywhere, like I was in a checkered tube. Squares up above, on the sides, on the floor.

  And huge chess pieces . . .

  My hand lowered from my mouth as I opened it in wonder. On the left of this circular tube of a board I saw that an army of white pieces waited, but there were bleeding claw marks on their casings, like nails had gouged the wood. And . . . my God . . .

  Almost every piece but the queen had Tim’s leering man-boy face on it.

  The queen itself had no face, though, only a mouth that kept moving, shrieking like the wind. “Just like your father . . .”

  But the other side of the board was what made my full-bodied heart pound like it was prey running through a forest: all-red pieces, shining with a coat of fresh blood, little arms sticking out of the sides of the queen and the king and the knights and everyone else, but the arms were only deformed stumps.

  And where their faces should’ve been?

  I gagged again, because the faces reflected my own vague, misty, ghostly hallucination demeanor from this afternoon. Worst of all, Tim’s imagination had put long brunette hair on every one of me.

  That had to be the detail Louis wanted to mention before we’d run out of time in Tim’s bedroom—a morbid nuance that put anonymous me in the same category as all the other women Tim watched: the next-door cougar neighbor, Heidi, the neighbor down the street who washed her car in the driveway . . . and even Nichelle.

  It seems to me that he has a real yen for brunettes. . . .

  I had to get my head together here, because Tim’s game obviously had rules of its own: As I processed more, it seemed like the mother queen couldn’t move out of her square while his king slid from one space to the next, laughing at the red side the whole time, taunting the opposite pieces while they were mired in bases of thick blood, frozen.

  “Just like my father,” he said, his voice drowning out his mom’s. “I’m just like my father!”

  With every passing second, each white, clawed piece on his side was growing in stature, bloating, towering—all except for the queen, who stayed the same. Simultaneously, the red side was shrinking, just like I was doing in the shadows, praying that King Tim wouldn’t see me.

  How was I going to turn this dreamscape into something peaceful?

  With one long, listless slide, Tim’s king came toward my queen. Meanwhile, there was a shriek from the white side, where his mother queen was waving her arms, her mouth wiggling like she’d been drawn in a harrowing cartoon.

  “Tim . . . !” Her square had opened up beneath her, and she dropped through the floor, screaming just like that woman in the TV had screamed during his first dream.

  Begging. Pleading.

  “Noooooo!”

  Then . . . silence as the square shut itself again. There was only the wind . . . until another sound murmured in the background, rising in volume.

  Machinery?

  Gradually, the outline of a forklift blackened the middle of the board, just behind Tim as he stood in front of my queen.

  A forklift . . . Why had a reference to his warehouse job crept in here?

  Tim put on a smile for the red queen, flashing teeth so white that they gleamed like moonlight. “I saw you looking at me from across the room.”

  As she lifted her misty face to Tim, her features changed from mine to pure blankness. He was looming even larger now, dwarfing her. He touched her brown hair, rubbing the strands between his fingers.

  Now words braided through the wind, a woman’s voice.

  “I could never refuse you . . .” The older neighbor from his first dream?

  Her face appeared on the queen now, and Tim cupped her chin in a large hand. “Of course you can’t refuse.”

  When he bent down
to kiss her, I held back another gag. What the hell? And when he pulled her against him, her bloody body flowing into his until she pooled against his casing, I closed my dream-body eyes.

  I kept myself from seeing what was going on, but I heard it loudly enough: the red queen moaning, enjoying whatever he was doing to her, Tim whispering sweet nothings, the queen breathing faster, faster until she sighed loudly.

  I had to see this. That’s why I was here. Suck it up, Jen.

  I opened my eyes to witness her oozing all over the board, a crimson lake seeping over the black-and-white squares.

  “I’d like to see you again,” he said in a hopeful voice, talking to the blood. “Maybe tomorrow?”

  She didn’t answer . . . She couldn’t.

  Her unresponsiveness didn’t sit well with Tim. He began shrinking, his face going ruddy.

  As the other red chess pieces—all still with my misty hallucination face—began pulling themselves away from the board with fruitless effort and groaning with fear, Tim slid over to my knight, his hand wrapping around its neck.

  “Don’t judge me,” he said.

  The knight’s ghostly mouth opened to scream, but no sound came out as it fought Tim, slowly flailing at him with its stumps, brunette mane-hair waving back and forth behind it.

  “Shut up,” Tim said between clenched teeth. “I don’t want to hear it!”

  From the other side of the board, voices rose in volume. “What’re you doing back there?” all of his white pieces said. Now they were all mouths, no faces.

  All accusing him.

  Tim let out a heavy yell of such rage that the room rocked. He tore the knight off the board, bloody roots coming from its base, then he spiked it to the ground.

  All of the red pieces’ heads tumbled off as one, rolling over the bloodied squares, wobbling into their own spaces, their faces growing mouths that echoed what the other pieces were still saying.

  “What’re you doing back there?”

  I huddled as far in the shadows as I could, but I felt Tim’s gaze finally discover me, just as surely as I felt the eyes in Elfin Forest every time I went there.

  He spoke to me. “What’re you doing back there?”

  No. Don’t see me.

  He deliberately slithered over the board, until he was in front of me. I had nowhere to go . . . unless I wanted to jump off the cliff behind me.

  His presence was so oppressive that I could feel him shuddering quietly, like every cell in him was screeching with silent fury.

  “You,” he said. “You came to play, didn’t you?”

  I hauled my gaze up to his own, wishing, for once, that I didn’t have a dream-body. Wishing I were a ghost again so I could fly over the darkness, finding a way out.

  “I want to help you, Tim,” I said in a last-ditch effort to keep the peace. Don’t be a victim. Not again. Never again.

  He laughed. “Help me?” Then he turned the words over in his mouth. “Help. Me. Why do I need help?”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to hurt someone someday. You’re so full of anger.” I thought about getting up from my crouching position, but I didn’t want to provoke him. “It doesn’t have to be that way, Tim.”

  When his gaze went teary for an instant, I thought he might break down, admit that he needed help.

  But the only reason his eyes had filled up was because of the emerging blood. It pooled in his gaze, slipping down his face like jagged tears or . . . No. Those weren’t tears.

  It was war paint. And suddenly Tim wasn’t a chess piece. He was a death god with those long teeth he’d had before, pointed and yellowed daggers that stuck out of his mouth with lethal arrogance.

  Before I could move, one of those teeth zinged out at me, impaling me through the arm.

  I screamed, shocked, because it hurt.

  As he retracted the tooth, blood embraced it, a red trophy in his mouth. He laughed again, then licked at the color.

  “Yum,” he said. “Your pain is delicious.”

  This time, when two teeth came at me, I didn’t hesitate—I jumped backward, into the abyss, yelling, wondering if I would ever hit bottom as I fell . . . fell . . .

  Tim’s voice surrounded me. “But I want to play some more!”

  Out of the darkness, one of Tim’s broken toy piles swooped after me, and I spun out of the way. Then I saw a giant hand swinging down from the top of the cliff, coming at me to wrap around my throat and—

  With a slam, I went busting out of Tim and back into the world, crashing through Louis on my way with a barrage of sparks.

  Louis yelled with shock as I tumbled to the floor and scrambled to gain my ground . . . only to find my friend manipulating the energy in the air, throwing a lamp at Tim as he—

  Good God—Tim was on the other side of the bed, reaching for Nichelle’s throat with that crazed look on his face I’d seen before.

  He somehow ducked the lamp as he continued reaching for Nichelle, and even though I was weak, I joined Louis in focusing on a fairy figurine from a dresser and slamming it toward Tim.

  He was just starting to clutch Nichelle’s neck, waking her up with a jerk as the figurine bashed into his head, hitting him with enough force to make him back off, holding his hand to his temple, moaning.

  Nichelle scrambled off the mattress, crawling over the floor. Her voice was scratchy. “What the fuck, Tim?”

  He was rubbing his head, discombobulated.

  Louis was hovering over him, ready to throw down again. “He’d just woken up—he was conscious while he was doing it. What happened in there, Jensen?”

  “I have no idea!”

  As Nichelle got to her feet, grabbing a handful of clothes from the closet and stumbling to the hallway, I looked at my arm.

  A chunk of it was missing where dream-Tim had stabbed me with his tooth, and as I bled energy, I heard the front door slam.

  • • •

  I’d gotten to a power outlet before I was drained enough to go into a time loop. I’d been losing energy that fast, but the infusion patched me up.

  Still, there was a dull red throb where the gaping wound had been. How long would the healing injury stay? Could it open up again? And what if I wasn’t around an energy source when it happened?

  “How is it?” Louis asked.

  “Still bleeding . . . if that’s what you call it.”

  He glanced at Tim pacing the room, which he’d been doing since Nichelle had left. He was like a coke fiend, extra energized.

  Was it because he’d grabbed some of my power inside the dream by taking a bite out of me?

  Damn, it really did look like we were susceptible in dreams after all. Not the news flash I’d been hoping for. But at least Nichelle had gotten away, driving off in a squeal of tires, no doubt to Heidi’s. I needed to have Amanda Lee call her and explain the situation before Nichelle could, because maybe Heidi could be prepared enough to talk some sense into her friend for good this time.

  Meanwhile, Tim paced to his phone again, dialing it, getting Nichelle’s voice mail.

  “Baby, I’m so sorry. You know I am. I was having a dream—it felt so real—and I didn’t mean to hurt you. Please, please, just give me another chance. . . .”

  “This is my fault,” I said to Louis as we hovered by a window.

  “Not merely yours.”

  Louis was being just as hard on himself, but I wasn’t about to shift blame to anyone else. I’d turned all my new friends in this direction, bringing them into my and Amanda Lee’s world.

  “Why couldn’t that figurine have smashed his head when we threw it at him?” I asked. “Then our problems would be over.”

  “Or just beginning,” he said, referring to our earlier talk about killing humans.

  Then something hit me. Something I’d read during my dabbling crime research.

  “Oh, God, Louis, I’m such an idiot. Violent people have stressors. A situation that makes them snap. It can be a breakup in a relationship, losing a job . . . Di
d I give Tim one with this dream?”

  Louis looked me straight in the eye. “That’s the victim in you talking, Jensen—a victim who makes excuses for the bad guys and takes the blame for what happened to her. She asks herself why she wandered into the woods alone and what she could’ve done to stay alive. She wonders how she could’ve saved a man from himself when he’s prone to violence and on the fast track to destruction. Why’re you falling into that trap again?”

  Speechless. Nothing to say to that. I thought about how I’d been blaming myself for a lot of things, and realized Louis was dead right.

  Don’t be a victim, I’d told myself in Tim’s dream. But I’d sure come out of it that way.

  Louis softened his voice. “If there’s a stressor, it’s all those fights he has with Nichelle. Think of the good, Jensen. She might have seen the truth about the little bastard this time.”

  That did make me feel better. Part of what we’d wanted was for Nichelle to wake up, and she had. I hoped permanently.

  Tim went to the refrigerator, jarred it open, looking for . . . Of course. Beer. He popped one open and downed it.

  “Just playing devil’s advocate here,” I said. “But could Nichelle’s leaving piss Tim off more, make him think that she’s declared a kind of war?”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  No more victim, I told myself. But maybe I could be a hero? “I’ll ask Randy to come here and help with watching him. If he tries to go somewhere on his motorcycle, we can make sure it doesn’t work. We can block his progress to Nichelle with everything we’ve got. I can even have Amanda Lee ask Ruben if he can go to his cop buddies for advice.”

  “And they would do something more effective than we can? You know as well as I do that there are thousands of people like Tim out there who skirt the law, and the only time they can be brought in is when they actually cross the line.”

  “Maybe he crossed it tonight.”

  We watched Tim drinking his beer and getting another from the fridge, a time bomb on a countdown.

  18

  By the time I got to Amanda Lee’s Mediterranean-style house, gray murk had grasped the morning sky. Heidi’s compact car was parked behind a tall hedge of oleanders in the driveway, but even more unexpectedly, there were several lookiloo ghosts hovering near the rose-strewn fence by the herb-and-flower garden and pool.