Waking Nightmares

by Christopher Golden

  As Amber and Ben found a pair of seats by the tall, drafty windows, bathed in the warm morning sunlight, Professor Varick glanced at the clock on the wall and then confirmed the time with a glance at his watch. Stragglers hurried through the door. Professor Varick set the leather book on the corner of the desk and picked up his lecture notebook. Some teachers used laptops to aid them during lectures, but Amber thought Professor Varick would be using paper notebooks for as long as he had students to teach.

  A Middle Eastern girl darted into the classroom—Amber thought her name was Priya, but the semester was only a couple of weeks old and she didn’t know everyone in the class yet. The girl went up to Professor Varick and muttered something, practically under her breath.

  Professor Varick gave her an irked look. “I’m not your father. Go if you need to. Class begins in”—he glanced at the clock again—“about a minute and a half.”

  For a second, Amber thought the girl would argue, but she seemed to think better of it and hustled from the room, making a beeline for the women’s bathroom down the hall. Professor Varick did not try to hide his disdain, though whether it was because the girl had bothered to ask permission to go to the bathroom or because she would now miss the beginning of his lecture, Amber didn’t know.

  He made his way to the lectern and opened his notebook, glancing casually at the clock. The second hand ticked away the last thirty seconds and then 8:50 rolled around.

  “Today,” Professor Varick began, “we’re going to discuss the strange dynamic of the relationship between the Eastern Roman Empire—the core of Byzantium—and the Huns, beginning with the ascent to the throne of Emperor Theodosius II in A.D. 408, at the age of seven. Theodosius II, also called ‘the Calligrapher,’ built upon the achievements of his predecessors in several ways you will want and need to remember, but in order to firmly lodge him into your brain, I will first tell you the story of how he paid Attila the Hun not to kick his ass.”

  A ripple of laughter went through the room.

  Professor Varick smiled thinly, letting them enjoy their own amusement for a moment. Amber understood that it was all choreographed; it was a show to him, and one he had performed many times over. But that was what she appreciated the most about Professor Varick—his showmanship. It was what made his lectures so memorable, and memorable lectures were invaluable when it came time for midterms and finals.

  “If any of you did the reading, you might be able to tell me who served as regent for the child emperor,” he said, surveying the room with a dismissive glance, a challenge. “Anyone?”

  Amber waited to see if anyone else would answer, then raised a tentative hand.

  “Miss Morrissey?” Professor Varick said.

  “It’s a trick question, Professor.”

  “Is it? Would I do that?” he asked, arching an eyebrow.

  “Constantly,” Amber said, and the class rewarded her with a cascade of chuckles. “There were two regents before Theodosius was old enough to rule. I don’t remember the first guy’s name, but the second regent was his older sister.”

  Professor Varick frowned, always surprised when his students actually did their homework.

  “Not bad, Amber. It may be that some of you aren’t complete airheads after all,” Professor Varick said, turning to write the name Pulcheria on the board. “Much like ‘Augustus’ for Octavian in Rome, they called her Augusta. Probably because her actual name sounded like some kind of sexually transmitted disease. Or maybe as a sign of respect. I’ll let you all logic that one out.”

  The whole class scribbled in their notebooks. Amber wrote Pulcheria = Augusta and kept her pen flying, trying to keep up with the stories of ancient Byzantium. As she wrote, her hand began to tremble, and she frowned at the strange markings on the page where she knew she had written words. Her writing had become a trail of swoops and scratches.

  She frowned, blinking, and looked up at Professor Varick, who was gesturing to the class, almost acting out the lecture. But Amber couldn’t hear him anymore, just a muffled drone, as though she had her ear pressed against the wall, desperately trying to eavesdrop on a conversation in the next room.

  The aftertaste of her morning coffee turned bitter on her tongue.

  “Professor?” someone slurred. And maybe it had been her, because now blurred faces were starting to turn her way.

  Her arms flailed and her legs shot out as she began to shake violently. Her chair toppled over and she hit her head on the floor, a murmur of warped monster voices around her. Her whole body jittered, her teeth clacking together, and she tasted blood in her mouth, coppery and warm.

  . . . AND she stands on the beach, her feet sinking into the sand as the surf foams and ripples around her ankles. She feels a moment of peace before it is shattered. The golden sunset darkens too quickly, the sky turning bruise-purple, indigo clouds beginning to gather, low-hanging and pregnant with brutal storm. It is as though the storm and the angry night chase the sun out of the sky, drowning it in the ocean on the horizon.

  “Why?” she asks, though there is no one to answer, and she isn’t even certain of the meaning of the question.

  Car horns blare and tires screech and she tenses, waiting for the crash that must follow, but instead that scream turns into another . . . a human scream. She glances up the beach and finds that she is standing in the center of Hawthorne, though the tiny waves still ripple around her and the street is still giving way beneath her feet like sand. Glass shatters and there are more screams as it begins to rain.

  Hot rain. The drops are painful, searing her flesh.

  Dark things flit in the storm. A man and woman—she knows their faces but not their names—run down the street, water splashing around them. Their terror is carved upon their faces, and suddenly they have a child with them, a little girl with a long ponytail who is crying—Amber can see her tears, even in the rain. The little girl’s mouth is open, but her little-girl screams are drowned out by other shrieking, like the whistle of fireworks just before they explode, but so much louder and filled with such anguish that at last Amber screams, too.

  The Reaper stands in the street, swirling from nothing to solidity as though sculpted from and by the storm. Black ribbons of fabric whip in the wind and hot rain, dragging against its body so that she can see it is anything but human. Its limbs and torso are thin as iron piping, and the wind wails as it passes through the gaps where its eyes should be. Yet it turns and looks at her, and there is a kind of ice-blue light that gleams deep down in those pits like distant stars. In each of its hands it holds a thin, curved blade, black as pitch but gleaming in the rain.

  It moves through the air as though it is spilling from one world into another. Ribbons of torn clothing flutter from its stick-body. Sickles slash the air and it has fallen upon the family, cutting the woman and her husband and her child, but it isn’t blood that splashes out of them. It is light. It is laughter. It is spirit.

  And the rain pelts down, and screams echo along the streets of Hawthorne, and the hateful storm sags lower, smothering, and there are so many more Reapers in the sky, riding the winds like murderous ravens, like ancient witches . . . like Death.

  Amber only screams. The hot rain is burning her skin, eating flesh and muscle, heading for bone. The sky splits, the clouds peeling back like the edges of a wound, and something is born from the labial folds of that storm. She can see infinite stars like Reaper’s eyes in the night sky beyond that split.

  In the street stands a woman, bathed in the light of those stars. But she is not a woman at all. She is wrapped in gauzy veils that do nothing to hide her three sets of heavy breasts. Her long arms end in talons as sharp and savage as the Reaper’s blades, but entirely her own. Her hair is indigo fire, burning cold, and her flesh the blue of drowned children. Light and shadow play across her face, showing beauty and grotesquerie in zoetrope flashes.

  The Reapers flock to her, moths to a terrible flame, their sickles gone. Their hands are filled, instead, with
the viscera of their victims, and with it they begin to paint their goddess’s flesh the bright crimson of human suffering, and the goddess shivers with arousal.

  The whistle of the wind through the Reapers’ empty eyes grows suddenly loud and Amber spins to see one of them spilling through the air toward her. At last, she stops screaming. She can only stare at this death that comes for her.

  The rain turns cold.

  “No,” a silken voice says. “Not her.”

  Amber turns to stare at the goddess, and finds the old one looking back at her. Knowing her. And this time her scream destroys her own voice.

  She knows me.

  DESK chairs scraped the floor as students got up. People swore and muttered, whipping out cell phones. Some of them were calling for help, but others were catching the girl’s seizure on video.

  For a few seconds, Miles Varick could only stare at the flailing, bucking student sprawled on the floor. In his years of teaching, he’d had classes disrupted before—by rude boys, feuding girls, snoring sleepers, ringing cell phones, and once even by the police there to make an arrest—but never anything like this. Is this some kind of joke? he wanted to ask. But then his thoughts and vision both cleared and he saw that it was Amber Morrissey there on the floor, twitching hard enough that her skull kept knocking on the linoleum, and he knew it wasn’t a joke. Not from Amber. She wasn’t that kind of student.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered, and rushed from the lectern, knocking his notebook to the ground. Miles strode toward the students who had begun crowding around her. “Back away. Give her space, you idiots!”

  Most of them scrambled away as though burned. Only Ben Draper did not flinch at Miles’s approach. The kid hovered around Amber in alarm and confusion, looking like he wanted to do something but clueless as to what.

  “Did someone call 911?” Miles snapped.

  A chorus of replies assured him that help was on the way. He spent his days grappling with an internal debate over whether he loved his students for their potential or hated them for their lack of interest. But suddenly they weren’t his students anymore, and he felt a momentary pang of regret for calling them idiots.

  He dropped to his knees and pulled her head into his lap to keep her from slamming it against the floor. A light froth bubbled at her lips, and he tried to remember training from years before that would have told him whether he needed to do something to keep her from choking on her tongue.

  “Mr. Draper,” he snapped at Ben, “hold her legs, please. Let’s try to keep her from breaking anything.”

  But even as Ben knelt to help, Amber went rigid, frozen in place. Her hands clenched into fists and the muscles in her neck stood out. Her eyes had rolled up to the whites, but now she blinked and then stared at the ceiling as though something terrifying hung above her.

  Amber started talking, muttering in a tiny, frightened, little-girl voice—the same three words over and over, although Miles had to bend closer to make them out.

  “She knows me. She knows me. She knows me . . .”

  And then it stopped. Amber sagged in his lap, eyelids fluttering closed. Her breathing steadied and the rigidity went out of her. The seizure had passed.

  “Jesus,” Ben said, looking up at Miles. “What the hell was that?”

  “Duh,” one of the students said. “She’s epileptic, dumbass.”

  Miles ignored him. If Amber Morrissey had epilepsy, it was the first he’d heard of it. Not that students always shared such information with the administration or their professors, but over the years he’d had a number of students with diabetes or epilepsy who did share that news, just in case of a situation like this.

  “Amber?” he ventured, gently sliding her head from his lap and kneeling beside her instead. He took her hand. “Amber?”

  “I don’t think you should move her, Professor,” Ben said.

  “I’m not moving her,” Miles replied. He bit his tongue on the rest of his intended reply. What he wanted was to make sure the girl wasn’t going to lapse into a coma, and that the seizure hadn’t caused brain damage—or the other way around. He was pretty sure that an aneurysm or tumor could cause seizures.

  Amber let out a long, shuddering breath, and Miles tensed, afraid she would start to seize again. She coughed, and then one of her hands floated up to wipe spittle away from her mouth.

  “She’s coming around,” a girl said softly, just over Miles’s shoulder, crowding him.

  He hated to be crowded. His mother had called it a kind of claustrophobia when he was a child, his teachers said he had antisocial tendencies, and his ex-wife had said he didn’t like people getting too close because he was a coldhearted bastard. Most days, Miles thought they had probably all been equally correct.

  “Go away,” he said, looking up.

  His students looked back, wondering who he was talking to. He scanned the room, trying to get it through their beer-soaked and college-sex-addled brains that he meant all of them.

  “Go. Class is over. EMTs are on the way. Read chapter four and take notes. Refer to the syllabus for themes. I’ll make up for lost time on Friday, so missing that class would be a spectacularly bad idea.”

  Some of them started to leave immediately, reaching for books or bags or backpacks. Others looked worriedly at Amber, who had begun to blink and look around like Dorothy stepping out of her black-and-white farmhouse into fullcolor Oz.

  “Is she—” a girl named Yasmin began.

  “Miss Joyce, I’ve got it from here. You’re all dismissed.”

  The edge in his voice—the cold steel of it—shut her up. At last they had all begun to retreat. Even Ben Draper, with his poet’s eyes and football neck, had reluctantly started to back away.

  “You can remain, Mr. Draper,” Miles said.

  Ben seemed relieved. Miles didn’t have the heart to tell him that he hadn’t asked the kid to remain because he needed help or wanted company, but because the university had rules about the conditions under which faculty could be alone with students. They didn’t want anyone suing, saying they’d been groped or worse.

  As the last of the stragglers departed, leaving only the three of them, Amber let out another long breath and gave her head a little shake, wincing in pain.

  “Damn, that hurts,” she said. Eyes narrowed, the sunlight washing through the windows too bright for her, she focused on Miles. “Professor Varick? What happened?”

  Miles leaned against a desk. “Maybe you can tell us. You had a seizure. Just fell out of your chair and started shaking.”

  “You scared the crap out of the whole class,” Ben added.

  Amber tried to sit up, but couldn’t quite manage it. She reached a hand up to touch the back of her head, pushing her fingers through that coppery red hair. Miles stared, worried that she’d find blood there, but she only winced with pain and stopped probing. No blood; that was a good sign, at least.

  “Don’t try to move. Some of the other students called 911. Wait for an EMT to look you over. We’ll wait with you,” Miles told her.

  “Okay,” Amber agreed. But he could see she wanted to get up and get out of there. She had a faraway look in her eyes, her brow furrowed with unease.

  “I always see you with coffee,” Miles said. “Sometimes if you don’t eat enough but overindulge in caffeine . . . do you drink those energy drinks, too?”

  “Not really,” she said. “I mean, I have. But usually it’s just coffee.”

  “You said something,” Ben added. “When you were coming around.”

  Amber frowned. “What did I say?”

  “I couldn’t make it out,” Ben said. “Professor Varick was closer.”

  Miles wanted to snap at him. Whatever had been going on in Amber’s mind during her seizure, it had really upset her. Why bring that up?

  “It was just mumbling,” he said. “Were you having a bad dream or something?”

  Amber hesitated, gnawing on her lower lip a moment. She would not look either of them in the e
ye.

  “Yeah. It had to be a dream, right?”

  Miles arched an eyebrow. A dream, as opposed to what?

  “It was a bad one?” Ben asked.

  “The worst,” she said. “There was a storm. And these things were coming down from the storm and . . . and killing people. Cutting them. And the rain—”

  A crackle of static interrupted them. They all looked toward the door, and a second later the EMTs were bustling into the room, hurrying over to Amber and asking questions, and the conversation about what she had seen during her seizure was over. Miles wanted to know more, but he stood back and let the professionals do their job.

  “Anything I can do for you, Professor?” Ben asked, shuffling over beside him.

  Miles kept his gaze on Amber and the EMTs. “Get her to cut back on her caffeine,” he said.

  But he knew that whatever had caused this, it wasn’t coffee. He only hoped it wasn’t anything truly serious. Students like Amber made it easier for him to put up with the morons. The class would be far less interesting without her. Although today she had made it a little too interesting for his tastes. The girl was lucky she hadn’t cracked her head open.

  As the EMTs checked her vitals, Miles remembered the fear on her face just before the seizure ended, and the way she had stared at the ceiling, rigid with terror. He wondered if she would turn out to have a tumor after all. That might have caused her to hallucinate.

  Otherwise, it had been one hell of a nightmare.

  TOMMY Dunne sat in the shade of the little cabin of his father’s thirty-two-foot Boston Whaler, nudging the throttle now and again to make sure she didn’t drift too much. Days like today, when he knew a lot of his friends from high school were sitting in a college classroom somewhere, he relished being out there on the water, the sky so blue and the salt breeze off the Atlantic still warm. But now that the nights had begun to cool down and he knew fall was not far off, he had started thinking about what it would be like to be out here night and day as fall turned to early winter, and he’d begun to have second thoughts about his decision to skip college.