Dream Walker

by Shannan Sinclair

  He turned the corner into the backyard just as F’in G was coming around the other side. He gave Mathis a shrug, looking disappointed he hadn’t discovered the crime of the century.

  Mathis moved toward the last window on his side of the house. If there was nothing here, they’d clear. There would be no bustin’ down the door to do an interior check. No need for that kind of hoopla. Just 10-8, NR this thing and everyone could go catch a nap or finish their paper for the week. It was the end of their workweek, after all. The sooner they wrapped this up, the faster they could all go home to their families and Mathis could enjoy his La-Z-Boy and maybe spend some quality time down at Sammy’s with a mic in one hand and a Coors in the other.

  The last room looked like an office. The large, mahogany desk with the computer sitting on top gave it away. The computer was in screensaver mode and family photographs faded in and out on the glowing screen. A photo of a nerdy-looking dad with his arm around a how’d-he-score-that MILF was replaced by a montage of a wholesome and sunny teenage girl. Here she was as a cheerleader. See her going to the prom. Now she is graduating from high school. This one is her in front of UCLA as she is dropped off at college. The montage ended and another set came floating across the screen.

  Ah, here was the perp now. A cute, little boy, appeared on the screen, fishing pole in hand with his first fish dangling from it. In the next shot he looked about 11, posing in his soccer uniform, arms around a brand new black and white ball. The photo caught him mid-laugh, with a dazzling smile, dimple in his right cheek, and a bright glint in his eyes.

  “Good lookin’ kid,” Mathis said to F’in G as he sidled up beside him. “That, and being privileged? No wonder he thinks he can get away with this crap.”

  The next photo swept across the screen. It was the same kid, just a little older, but damn, what a difference. His hair was longer, disheveled and falling in his eyes. He wore a black sweatshirt with white skull and crossbones splashed all over it. He looked as if someone was forcing him to take the picture, reluctant and petulant. His chin was down and he looked up through his bangs, shooting a withering glare, not at the camera, but at the person behind it. It looked as though, if he could of got away with it, he would have stuck his tongue out or flipped the photographer the bird.

  “Yikes,” was F’in G’s contribution.

  Mathis’ attention was drawn to the far side of the room. A large, flat screen television sat on a console. The screen was paused on a movie scene of an apocalyptic nature, an abandoned city, in a state of disaster. There appeared to be blood splatter caught mid-air on the screen. A little itch wiggled in his gut.

  Mathis tried to shine his flashlight at a better angle to see if the blood splatter pattern was on the camera lens as part of the movie or on the television screen itself, but he couldn’t tell. He dropped the light beam down toward the floor. A leather couch faced the television screen so he couldn’t see if anyone was sitting or lying on the couch or the floor in front of the couch. The unshaved whiskers on the back of his neck pricked up. He scanned the beam along the base of the couch until he came to the end and there he saw a pair of bare feet; the large, hairy feet, of an adult male, one foot splayed sideways, the other, toes up toward the ceiling. Whoever it was lay on his back.

  Mathis adjusted the beam up a little bit, trying to get a better view and lighted upon another pair of smaller legs. His beam jumped around the room from the jolt of surprise that rocked him. Mathis refocused his shaking hand back in that direction and there, at the base of a bookshelf, curled in a ball, rocking himself back and forth, was a boy, covered in blood.

  CHAPTER 3

  Aislen had been staring at the ceiling for hours. After the nightmare she’d had, it had been impossible to go back to sleep. She kept rewinding and replaying the reel of the surreal—the strange and shifting world she had found herself in, the disorientation of her temporary, yet complete, amnesia, and the desperation of being utterly alone. The horror of witnessing a young boy blindly following his leader’s commands and murdering what appeared to be an innocent man was juxtaposed with the haunted shock on his face when he looked at her and couldn’t pull the trigger. Did he have a sudden shift in conscience or was he devastated that his resolve failed and he couldn’t kill her?

  Then there was the lead soldier, merciless as he stepped in to kill Aislen without any hesitation. Aislen’s heart hammered in her chest now as she remembered him. He was a chiseled masterpiece, defined muscles taut and flexed, barely containing themselves within the confines of his uniform. His eyes were the glacier blue of ice, and the steely determination that radiated from them pierced straight through her core. He was so exquisite it was frightening. She had felt powerless before him, helpless and frozen. She felt ashamed of herself now for feeling so weak. He had only looked at her for a moment, yet it felt like an eternity passed between them.

  Then he shot her, plain and simple.

  Aislen shuddered. A chill scampered across her arms and wiggled up the nape of her neck. Heaviness lingered in the air around her. The dream still felt present in her mind and palpable on her flesh.

  She’d heard somewhere that if you died in a dream, you died in your real life. Well, obviously, that wasn’t true. Thankfully, she was alive and breathing, but even when she woke up it took her several minutes to figure out where she was, to put the puzzle pieces together, to form her bedroom, to weave the story together of who she was. It was like being newly born and placed back into her life.

  Disturbing. Discombobulating.

  To have a dream as vivid as this was unusual for Aislen and it scared the crap out of her. Aislen was not much of a dreamer, asleep or awake. She rarely remembered any of them. Most of the time she went to sleep, then woke up out of blackness only knowing that time had passed because the numbers on her clock had changed. When she did remember a dream, it was in vague fragments, a mash-up of the previous day’s conflicts mixed with whatever she happened to catch on television before she’d gone to bed. One could wrap a rationale around that.

  Aislen wasn’t prone to daydreaming, either; silly flights of fancy were a waste of valuable time. She had school and work and goals to achieve. Girls satisfied with whatever life brought to them on a platter could afford to wile away the hours wandering in la-la land. One day, they would wake up and realize life only brought you Mac and Cheese and powdered milk if you let it—the stuff of food stamps.

  No, Aislen was as realistic and practical as they came. She had partaken enough from that menu and was determined to create a future in which she could choose what was going on her platter. Her preference was having her cake and eating it too, thank you very much.

  Aislen heard rustling in the kitchen downstairs, and the aromas of coffee and bacon began drifting through the cracks of the old ranch house. This was the beginning of the daily grind: Mom making some breakfast, packing Aislen a lunch, and brewing a strong pot of java to get their blood pumping.

  At 24, Aislen felt too old to still be living at home, but her mom wasn’t exactly pushing her out the door. Quite the contrary, Sabine was insistent that Aislen finish her nursing degree before she had to start worrying about paying rent and feeding herself. She refused to allow Aislen to contribute anything to the household, wanting her to pay for school and save money instead. Aislen’s guilt over her mother’s generosity mounted daily.

  Her mother had worked long, hard hours for years, waitressing at a breakfast joint in town to support the two of them. One wouldn’t expect that it would provide them with much, but her mom had managed to buy a house and a couple of decent, although very used, cars, all on her meager waitress salary and the generous tips of her patrons.

  Their house wasn’t a showplace by any stretch of the imagination. Squatting just outside the city limits of Modesto, in the little town of Empire, the two-bedroom ranchette literally sat right next to the tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad. The constant roil and wail of the locomotives barreling past the house rattled the clapboa
rds, swayed the cheap dining room chandelier, and made the lights flicker, but Aislen actually liked having the massive hunks of steel patrol their backyard every couple of hours. It brought her peace of mind knowing that someone else was awake in the wee hours of the night. She never felt completely alone in the dark.

  While most college students would be chomping at the bit to get out from under the parental authority, it wasn’t hard living with her mom. As soon as Aislen became an adult, her mother treated her as such, imposing no rules and allowing her the freedom to do as she pleased.

  Then again, Aislen really wasn’t the kind of person who went bat-shit crazy as soon as she turned 18. She didn’t lead a lifestyle that could be crimped by the constant presence of her mother. With school, homework, and working almost full-time at the residential care facility, she didn’t have a whole lot of free time to play.

  Even if she did, Empire was the furthest thing from a hub of social activity. The Mexican cantina at the corner had a pretty hopping nightlife, but it was too rough a crowd for the likes of Aislen. Going into Modesto was a futile endeavor, too. Once a charming little agricultural town, Modesto had grown too big, too fast, and had become the epitome of urban sprawl whose main attraction was a shopping mall.

  No, it was a good thing she wasn’t much of a social animal and that she was happy at home. There would be time for traveling and living the high life later, when she was finished with school and gainfully employed. Then she would take her mom on a real vacation, somewhere exotic and far away as a thank you for all her mom had done.

  Aislen had already started planning. She had a shoebox stuffed with brochures from the local travel agency stashed under her bed and lying on top were two passports, one for her and one for her mom. She had filled out the applications, taken a snapshot of her mom under the guise of a college homework assignment, saved her money, and sent away for them. Aislen couldn’t wait to start filling the small book with colorful stamps from around the world.

  She glanced at the clock. Six-thirty. She needed to drag her ass out of bed. Today was going to be a long day with three classes this morning and a full shift later on only four hours of sleep. She was screwed. She shuffled down the stairs to get some coffee and spend a bit of time with her mom before they both had to get their hustle and bustle on.

  Sabine was sitting at the kitchen dinette by the large picture window overlooking the pruned skeletons of their rose garden staring off into the horizon. A diaphanous fog clung low to the ground, diffusing the morning light and softening the crooked landscape. She cradled her morning cup of coffee in her hand.

  Aislen smiled. Mom always drank her coffee from an antique teacup. She kept a whole collection of them—twenty-two, each with a matching saucer—carefully arranged in custom-built shelves on the kitchen wall. That none of them had ever toppled off with the passing of a train defied the laws of physics.

  When she was young, Aislen spent hours gazing at each of the fine porcelain and bone china cups, losing herself in the vivid, intricate patterns. Each year Sabine would add a new cup to the collection, but had stopped a couple of years ago. Aislen assumed that her mother had again sacrificed something special for herself in order to help Aislen through college. It was yet another source of guilt and another thing she planned to remedy when she finished her RN program.

  Her mom was drinking her coffee from Aislen’s favorite, a royal blue and white lotus cup that sat on a saucer shaped like an open blossom. Sabine was adamant about drinking her coffee from these cups. The thick rim of a regular coffee mug reminded her too much of the diner. These cups brought an air of refinement to her morning ritual. There was also another house rule; don’t talk to Mom until she finished her first cup of coffee, but Aislen knew she was probably on her third cup by now, so it was safe for a conversation.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Mornin’, hon.” Sabine looked away from the window. “How’d you sleep?”

  “Not that good, actually.” Aislen didn’t really want to go into the details of her nightmare. No one ever really liked hearing people recount their dreams—good or bad. Dreams always seemed interesting to the dreamer, but to the listener? Not so much. “I tossed and turned all night. I must have too much on my mind.”

  “You? No way. Shocking!”

  “Yeah, I know.” It was the one thing her mother did nag her about—her all work and no play philosophy. Sabine never had an opportunity to play at Aislen’s age. Being a single mother, she couldn’t, and she didn’t want Aislen to follow in her footsteps by not enjoying some of the freedoms of youth. Aislen sat down at the table across from her mom, preparing herself for the latest.

  “You know, Aislen. I am really proud of you,” she began on cue. “Of how hard you work and how well you are doing in school...I am constantly amazed at how easily you are able to balance everything.”

  “But...” Aislen continued for her.

  “Yes, but—I really wish you would take an evening off every once in a while. Relax, for crying out loud! You know I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to have a little fun in your life. Why don’t you call Gen and have a girl’s night out?”

  Aislen sighed, feeling more than a little guilty. Genesis had been her best friend since kindergarten, when she and her mom first moved out to Empire; but Aislen hadn’t been a very good friend lately, too wrapped up in her schedule.

  You couldn’t have two more different people. While Aislen was serious, Genesis was more of a free spirit, a go-with-the-flow kind of girl, wild and mystic. Where Aislen gravitated toward science—facts and proof—Genesis explored weird things, like astrology, tarot cards, and alternative healing traditions. Aislen liked to tease Gen and call her “kooky,” but at the same time she was the easiest person to be around. Aislen always felt immediately at home in the presence of her friend.

  “Uh, yeah, I guess we could do that. I can call her later and see if we can hang out,” Aislen said, hoping the promise would appease her mother. She changed the subject. “How about you? How’d you sleep?”

  “Alright, I guess. But I should really stop watching the news first thing when I wake up. It sets the day off wrong.”

  Mom always worried after watching the news, like the chaos in the world would somehow leak into their lives and ruin all that they were working so hard to rise above. But, as much as her mom worried, it didn’t stop her from watching every 20/20, Dateline, TruStory, Forensic Evidence, Who-Done-It program that came on.

  “The world seems to be going crazy lately. Another big earthquake, if you can believe it. Freak tornados. More suicide bombings in the Mid East. Unemployment and foreclosures are up again this month...it never ends.”

  “Well, none of that affects us, Mom.”

  “No. Some of it might not, but there was a shooting in town last night. Some man was found shot in his house, with his son sitting all bloody next to him. They think the kid may have shot him.”

  Aislen stared at her mother. A creeping sensation wiggled across her back as she remembered the man in her dream getting shot by a little kid. “When did that happen?” Aislen asked, thinking maybe she’d heard it on the news before she fell asleep, which would explain her dream.

  “Early this morning. They weren’t giving out too many other details and I turned it off before they could. Modesto is still a small town when it comes to this stuff. I am afraid I will know these people somehow.”

  Aislen was distracted now. The murder had happened while she was sleeping—while she was dreaming. She had the sudden need to get out of the room—to get out of the house—and put this disturbing news behind her.

  “You know, I need to get ready. I have a long day ahead of me.” She got up and gave her mom a kiss on the cheek. “Love you, Mom.”

  Aislen turned to head back up the stairs.

  “I love you, too, Buttercup,” her mom replied.

  Aislen stopped dead in her tracks. Her mother had never called her Buttercup before. The air in the kitchen turned electric, h
er skin bristled into a cloak of gooseflesh. A wave of nostalgia surged through her, the feeling that she had lost something precious, something she loved. It was the same longing ache she had felt in her dream when the unknown voice spoke to her in the desert.

  Aislen looked back at her mother, but Sabine was already looking back out the window, taking another sip of her coffee, seemingly unaware of the novelty of the pet name she spoke.

  Aislen turned and ran back up the stairs. She jumped in the shower and began scrubbing herself in the hottest water possible, trying to wash off her heebie-jeebies. She toweled off, dried her hair, and threw on a pair of scrubs.

  She stopped to check herself in the mirror. Her hair was slicked back in a neat pony, she wore no make up, and there were the damn freckles that would never fade. She leaned forward and looked closer at her reflection.

  There it was: the “butt-chin.” Strange. She had been looking at herself in the mirror for 24 years and had never noticed the shallow hollow of her chin. She reached up to the mirror and pressed the chin of her reflection.

  The warm humidity of the room suddenly chilled, dropping 20 degrees in an instant. Steam clouded over her reflection, and the mirror made a loud popping sound from the sudden shift in temperature. A tingle ran down her spine and Aislen became aware of a presence in the room with her.

  “I love your little butt-chin, Buttercup.” The voice from the dream desert whispered to her, reaching inside her chest and wrenching her heart. She wanted to run, but something—or someone—gripped her and pinned her before the mirror.

  “I’ll be here when you wake up,” a man’s mellow timbre whispered in her ear, as plain as if he were standing at her shoulder. Another deluge of emotion sluiced through her, filling her with the deepest sadness.