A scratch on the window behind the TV made her jump. Her heart raced again, though she knew it had to be the ash tree out there, branches swaying in the wind. It had to be, because bone-thin Reapers with scythes would have just crashed through the glass and torn her apart.
Funny, she chided herself. But even though she thought her fears were absurd, she didn’t go any nearer to that window.
Instead, she found Professor Varick’s number in her contacts list and hit the send button. The rain drummed on the roof as she listened to the ringing on the other end of the line. Though Gran was in the room with her, and her parents were both presumably still awake elsewhere in the house, Amber felt more alone than ever.
MILES Varick stood in his mother’s kitchen, rinsing out coffee cups and wiping crumbs off the table. He washed the cups—and the small plates they had used to share the cappuccino cheesecake he had brought her—and put them away. Over the past few years, Toni Varick’s vision had been deteriorating rapidly. She could still see the shapes of things, but her vision was blurry and indistinct on the best days. At seventy-one, she knew a number of people who had begun to lose their sight or had had surgery to correct problems with their vision. But she refused to talk about blindness, or to accept that there would come a time in the not-so-distant future when even blurry and indistinct would seem like a fond memory, bad eyesight a luxury.
Though she was stubborn, Miles had been starting to edge his mother slowly into a mental place where she would be willing to accept help. Every Wednesday night, and on the occasional Sunday, he would visit and read to her. Toni loved books, but even the large print gave her trouble now. She resorted to audiobooks most of the time, but often enough there were things she wanted to read that weren’t available in that format. Given her insistence on doing things for herself, it said a great deal about her love of reading that she would never fight him over these times, pretending that they were just mother-son bonding opportunities, and that she could have read for herself if she wanted to do so. Miles let her go on pretending.
She drew the line at Scrabble, though. For as long as he could remember, it had been her favorite board game, but in order to play she would have to rely on him to read the spaces on the board that indicated multiple letter or word scores, and sometimes she had difficulty making out the letters on the tiles. He had bought a Braille Scrabble game, and his mother had sniffed at it like a child at strange vegetables.
“I’ll let you know when I need the blind people version, Miles,” she had said.
But he doubted she ever would.
So he read to her—right now they were halfway through a Clive Cussler adventure—and they played chess. Toni could feel the pieces to make sure she knew which one she was moving, but she had to bend down and stare at the board as if concentrating very hard to have any idea where the other pieces were. Miles didn’t let her win as often as he could have, but he played poorly on purpose. His mother had raised him on her own from the time he was four years old, making a living as a high school teacher in Hawthorne. Those years had made her tough and proud, and he never wanted to take those things away from her.
He dried the last of the cups and put it into the cabinet in the corner. He had to be careful to put everything away precisely where it belonged so that his mother could find it when she needed it. At some point, she was going to need more help than having her son over to read to her once or twice a week. Fortunately, she’d at least had the good sense to give up her driver’s license. She had friends who would take her on any errands she needed to do, and Miles helped out when he could. Her life would have been much simpler if she would agree to sell her house and move in with him, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Miles would leave it alone for now, but not for long.
He stepped back, took another look around the kitchen, and pronounced it clean. Sliding the chairs up to the table, he picked up the chess set and carried it into the living room, returning it to its usual place on an end table to await their next game. From somewhere in the house he heard water running and knew that his mother was getting cleaned up for bed. He had sent her off, insisting that he would clean up for her. She had agreed reluctantly, claiming that she allowed it only because she was so tired. Miles didn’t challenge her. Toni could hold on to the strength she had for a little longer.
Patting his pockets to make sure he had his keys, he grabbed his light brown canvas jacket from the back of a chair and slid it on. He just needed to say good night and let his mother know he was leaving, and then he could head home. His first class in the morning wasn’t until half past nine, but he wanted to relax a bit before bed, and he knew his mother needed her rest.
“Mom?” he began, not sure if she could hear him over the running water. She must have been brushing her teeth or maybe washing her face.
He was about to call for her again when a strange sound disturbed him. The rain had been a constant hard patter on the windows and the roof, but this was different, almost like something being dragged across the shingle siding outside the house. Miles frowned and started toward the window. He peered out, forehead pressed against the glass, but couldn’t see anything but darkness and rain and the glow of a streetlight.
His cell phone buzzed, making him jump.
“Dumbass,” he muttered, pulling out the phone and looking at it. The number wasn’t one he recognized, but at 10:30 on a weeknight, he figured it must be important, so he answered. “Hello?”
“Professor Varick?”
“Yes?”
“It’s . . . I’m sorry for calling so late, Professor. It’s Amber Morrissey.”
Miles glanced out the window again, but the sound had not returned. “Amber? Are you all right?”
The girl had had a seizure in his classroom that morning, and now she was calling him after hours. His thoughts raced with a hundred variations on the terrible news he was sure she must be about to deliver. He had been getting sleepy, but now he felt fully awake.
“I’m not sure, honestly,” Amber replied.
Miles sat down, rubbing one hand on the leg of his jeans, barely aware of how often he needed that friction to soothe his nerves. Hints of his childhood OCD slipping through.
“What did the doctors say today?”
“It’s not that,” Amber said. “It’s just . . . Well, it’s been a wicked strange day, Professor.”
Not that? Miles thought. Then why are you calling me, Amber? He hoped it wasn’t some kind of teacher crush. A situation had developed several years previously with a lovestruck, delusional student, and he didn’t want to deal with that kind of stress again.
“Maybe you should elaborate on that, Amber. Are you talking about the stuff I saw on the news? The traffic lights and the animals going crazy?”
“The birds, you mean?”
“Not just birds. Dogs and cats, too, according to Ed Harding on Channel Five. Probably other animals, as well, but we only see the domestic ones, and the birds, of course.”
“I didn’t know that,” Amber said, thoughtful.
“I suspect there’s some kind of atmospheric disturbance. The animals could be reacting to the storm. There are all kinds of stories about that kind of thing. But that wasn’t what you were calling about.”
“No.”
“So what do you mean, ‘wicked strange’?” Miles asked.
“Okay, this morning? When I had that seizure?” she said, as if he might have forgotten the sight of a beautiful girl spasming on the classroom floor.
“Yes?”
“I had what I guess you’d call a vision,” she said, and in her tone he could tell that she had begun to wish she had never called. “It was awful. Like a nightmare, but not. I forgot a lot of it. It was kind of vague in my head, maybe because I was just focused on the seizure and the hospital, y’know?”
“Okay,” Miles said, encouraging without interrupting.
“Well, I just had another one.”
“Another seizure?”
“A vision,
” she said. “Shit, this is all coming out wrong. I sound crazy. But screw it, there’s no real way to tell you any of this without sounding crazy. I just thought . . . you know history and mythology and all of that, and you were in the . . .”
Miles sat down on his mother’s coffee table. The sound of water running had ceased and he figured she had already gotten into bed and turned on the news.
“Amber? What was I in?”
“Never mind. The point is, you were the first person who came to mind. Maybe I’m going a little crazy, but it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like I’m really seeing something, like I’m tapped into a signal that’s broadcasting from somewhere, weird as that is.”
Miles rubbed at his eyes. “Look, Amber, can we talk about this tomorrow?”
“Please, Professor. I’ve got to get this stuff out of my head. It’s awful. I’m hoping you can tell me if you’ve ever heard of anything like what I’ve seen.”
He sighed. “Okay. Shoot.”
So Miles listened while Amber told him about chaos and suffering in Hawthorne, about things she called Reapers who ripped the life out of people, and about a goddess with blue skin, razors for fingers, blue-black fire for hair, six breasts, and a face that shifted from beautiful to monstrous with every blink of the eye.
“They kept saying this word. Navalica. I think it might be her name.”
Something creaked upstairs. He barely noticed, enrapt by Amber’s visions. If they were invented, that would be interesting in its own right, but if she had really experienced these scenes as true visions—or even as dreams—they were fascinating.
“And you’re sure you’ve never seen a picture of this ‘goddess’ before?” he asked.
“Positive. She reminds me of something out of Hindu mythology, but it’s not that. She’s not anything I’ve seen before, and the things that are her servants, or whatever . . . I don’t know what that is about. I just . . .”
Her voice got very small.
“I’m afraid to close my eyes, Professor. Afraid to go to sleep.”
Miles took a deep breath and let it out, thinking. As he did, he heard that scrape against the side of the house again, but this time from higher up on the shingles outside. He stood up and went to the window, looking out as he spoke.
“I wish I could help you with the sleep thing, Amber, but I don’t know what to do about that. I guess a doctor or a therapist could prescribe something to help you sleep, but you don’t even know if you’ll have another of these things.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s gonna be a long night, but I’ll feel better in the morning. Stupid, but in the daylight, I won’t be so freaked out.”
The wind gusted, rattling the windows, and he heard a sound from the roof. Cursing silently, he wondered if the storm had started pulling off roof shingles or siding. Maybe that was what he’d been hearing.
“Listen, Amber, I’m sorry but I need to go,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what. Tomorrow morning, I’ll do some research into your goddess. Maybe I can dig something up.”
“That would be amazing,” Amber replied, her relief carrying through the phone signal. “I don’t want to be channeling some ancestral memory, or something totally bizarre like that, but it’d be better than the whole thing being a hallucination.”
“You never know,” Miles told her. “With the things we’ve learned in the past decade or so . . . nothing would surprise me now. It’s a weird world.”
“You can say that again.”
They said their goodbyes and hung up. Miles slipped his cell phone into his pocket, thinking about Amber Morrissey’s seizure and her visions. The occult had always been a particular obsession with him. Most historians tended to look down their noses at his enthusiasm for the study of such esoterica, preferring more generalized research into ancient theology, but Miles had always found it fascinating. In the modern world as redefined by the existence of vampires and magic, his store of knowledge had become decidedly more valuable.
In centuries past, Amber would have been accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake. Ages earlier than that, she might have been called a saint. But these were different times and the world had its eyes wide open. There were things in the shadows; humanity knew that for a fact. But the line between saints and shadows was badly blurred.
Miles went to the stairs, ascending quietly in case his mother had already fallen asleep. He wanted to say good night, but he didn’t want to wake her. As he approached her room, he heard the creak of old bedsprings and frowned, wondering what she might be up to. At least she was still awake, and he could talk to her before he left.
“I’ve got to get going—” he began, as he turned into her room.
The scene unfolding upon his mother’s bed staggered him, knocking him back so hard that he had to grab the door frame to steady himself. Miles shook his head, his body beginning to shake, exhaling nonsense words, trying to deny what he saw.
A nightmare.
A man—not a man, a creature, a thing—crouched over his mother atop her bed. Coal black and skeletal, its face a dully gleaming helmet, a horseshoe crab with its tail darting out as if it were the creature’s tongue, the thing held his mother up and jerked her around like a marionette.
The bed creaked under her shifting weight, but the thing had no solidity, did not even make an impression in the bedspread as it tore at her. Miles opened his mouth and screamed for his mother. As the thing twisted to look at him, eyes like seeping blue mist, he realized that it was not holding his mother up with its hands. It wielded twin blades, curved like scythes—
Dear God, just like Amber said.
—and the thing had one of those blades thrust through his mother’s sternum, hoisted up like a fresh kill at the slaughterhouse. The other scythe slashed and dug into her abdomen, impossibly deep, so deep that it should have punched right through her back but did not.
No blood. How can there be no blood?
He blinked, breaking through his shock. The thing—Amber called them Reapers—ripped something out of his mother, then, a squirming thing of shifting color, like liquid light.
“Get off her,” Miles growled, shaking off the momentary paralysis of shock and fear. “Get the fuck off her!”
Sickened, mad with anguish, he charged at the thing and threw himself across the bed. It darted away, light as air, flying for the wall. He scrambled over his mother’s prone form—dead, she’s dead!—and lunged for it, but his fingers caught nothing. He crashed into the wall and fell to the ground. A painting of Victorian ladies fell off the wall, and the glass in the frame shattered.
“No,” Miles whispered. “No, no.”
He stood up, head ringing from smashing it against the wall. One of his fingers had jammed and might be broken, but he was only dimly aware of the pain. He glanced around the room, thinking it might still be there, but the wraith had gone. On the wall where it had passed through was a dusting of black. He ran his finger over it, and it stained his skin. Rubbing it between thumb and forefinger, he found it reminded him of soot.
Shaking, he squeezed his eyes closed, turned toward his mother’s bed, and opened them. A sigh of grief escaped his lips, and he staggered toward her and fell to his knees beside the bed.
“Mom?” he ventured.
No blood, he thought again. The sheets were not splashed with crimson. Hope insinuated itself into his heart, a false friend. For when he looked at her more closely, he knew that though he saw no blood, nor even any wounds—somehow the scythes had passed through her without cutting muscles or flesh—his mother was dead. Her body remained still, no sign of a breath. Her eyes were closed but they did not move beneath the lids. In life, she had sometimes been stern or frustrated, but more often had worn a smile. In death, she wore a mask of utter sadness that broke his heart.
Miles held her hand, felt for a pulse, and found what he expected—nothing. He slid to the floor, holding on to her, and the tears began.
“What was it, Mom?” h
e whispered, leaning his face against the hanging bedspread. He pushed up closer to the bed, staring at the sooty smudge on the wall, fearful it might return.
“What the hell was that thing?”
Amber. Somehow, she had known the creature existed. She’d had a vision.
Miles stood. He placed his mother’s arms gently across her chest and then sat beside her, reaching for the phone on the bedside table. He would need to speak with Amber about her visions—warnings, really; they must be—but right now, he had to call for help. The police. They would bring the coroner. Someone had to take care of his mother.
His mother.
He shuddered, wiping at his tears as he mumbled something to the 911 operator. After he hung up the phone, he lay down beside her to wait, and he wondered about the diaphanous butterfly of softly colored light that the thing had torn out of her, like a baby from her womb. Miles didn’t want to think about that thing, what it might have been, and where the creature had taken it, because if he let himself contemplate that, he feared he would go mad with anguish.
He didn’t want to think about her soul.
CHAPTER 6
OCTAVIAN could feel the air pressure change as he drove through Salem. The meteorologist on the radio talked excitedly about the rapid and unexpected change in the local weather, explaining it away with the classic pass-the-buck of generations of New England forecasters: “If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a minute.” But Octavian could hear the confused edge in the woman’s voice; she had no idea where the storm had come from and didn’t like that at all. Maybe she felt incompetent, or maybe she was just afraid that global climate change had finally made her occupation obsolete.
“Everything is so unsettled,” Keomany said, bending to look out her rain-slicked window. “And I can feel it spreading. It’s still mostly in Hawthorne. The town is filling up with chaos like it’s a bowl, but the storm is only the start. Eventually, the bowl’s going to overflow and the chaos is going to spill out like a dam bursting.”
Waking Nightmares Page 10
