Delaney's Shadow

by Ingrid Weaver

  But she only went faster. Her hair was blowing across her eyes, and she lifted her hand to push it away, but now it felt as though she were moving through water. She couldn’t breathe. She fought to turn her head, to ask Stanford to help because it was dark and she was cold and why couldn’t she slow down? This wasn’t the way home and oh God what was that sound?

  Delaney curled into a ball in the center of the bed. The top sheet was wrapped around her calves but the rest of the covers had slid to the floor. No breeze came through the window, no noise, no light. The moon had not yet risen, and the maples beside the house hid the stars. There was nothing to wake her up or to guide her back.

  So she hurtled forward, through the cold and liquid scene, until the pale gray path turned shiny, then white, then fireball red, and suddenly she wasn’t moving anymore because she was outside, freezing and burning and helpless to block out those sounds.

  Metal screeched as it buckled. It moaned and cried like a living thing. Glass sang when it burst, a high-pitched pulse that stung the scalp behind her ears. Fire laughed and cackled as it ate flesh. Bones crunched like stalks of fresh celery.

  Delaney pressed her face to her knees. The sheet beneath her was damp from sweat. So was her skin. Slick and hot like the blood that ran from her hands.

  No. Please, no. Not again. No more.

  The worst noise was yet to come, the heart-rending sound of a man screaming.

  Stanford.

  He was dying.

  Again.

  She tried to move, but her legs wouldn’t work. Something held them down. Strands of seaweed curled around her ankles like slimy fingers. She tried to free herself but she couldn’t get any air even though she could feel the bubbles brushing past her lips as they rose through the water.

  Delaney was dying, too. Through the hell of her nightmare, that certainty reached her consciousness. Her mind cried out in desperation.

  No! Not again. Please!

  Someone settled on the bed beside her. She could feel the mattress dip with his weight and sensed that she was no longer alone.

  Yes, oh yes! He’d come back. He couldn’t be dead if he was here with her. Delaney moved toward the presence that she felt and spread her fingers to capture the warmth that flowed from his body.

  Odd, though, that the place where Stanford was lying didn’t smell of lime aftershave. It smelled of sunshine and fresh air and . . . turpentine.

  MAX SURFACED SLOWLY. HIS MIND WAS AS LAX AS HIS BODY, and both were urging him to sink back into sleep. His dreams, on the rare occasions when he did dream, were merely random firings of his synapses, kaleidoscope patterns behind his closed eyelids with no purpose and little form. His subconscious got sufficient exercise while he was awake and painting, so he usually slept like the dead.

  But this dream was prodding him forward, refusing to let him rest. It encompassed his senses as well as his mind. He was positive he was no longer alone. He was just as sure there was no one else in his bedroom, because he’d never yet allowed a woman to spend the night. But there was a presence in his bed, an unmistakably female one.

  Max felt no alarm at first. Having the woman here seemed right somehow. He could sense her weight on the mattress beside him and felt the warmth of her breath on his neck. He turned his head, and her hair tickled his chin. She smelled sweet, like roses.

  Like Deedee.

  Max’s eyes drifted open.

  The dream didn’t fade. Neither did the sensation of the woman’s presence. He swept his arm across the bed beside him. There was nothing in the space, and yet he could feel a resistance, as if the air was thickening . . .

  His pulse picked up. He looked around. The bed was cloaked in shadows. So was the entire room. The only illumination came from an orange glow that seemed to float in the corner. It was centered between a bookshelf and a potted plant.

  He had no bookshelf in his bedroom. He kept no houseplants. His bed didn’t have wooden bedposts, either. What the hell . . .

  The glow shimmered in midair, appearing to come from a dimension that wasn’t bounded by distance. He began to hear noises now. Crunching metal. It sounded like something was crashing over and over inside that light.

  The woman beside him pressed closer, as if he could protect her, just as Deedee used to . . .

  Finally, the pattern of what was happening registered in his brain. The last traces of sleep fled.

  Hell, this was no illusion. Deedee had returned, but instead of crashing his painting, she’d stolen into his sleep.

  Max sat up fast, pulling away from the presence on the bed.

  He didn’t move quickly enough. Something tingled across his back. Not a touch, yet deeper than a touch. It held him where he was as her voice slipped into his mind. “Don’t go. Please.”

  He felt himself start to soften, to lean into her, the way he used to. It was a reflex response. He gritted his teeth and held himself rigid. “What the hell do you want this time?”

  “Max?”

  “Who else did you expect?”

  “Max?”

  She sounded surprised. He didn’t know why she would, because this sure hadn’t been his idea. She’d been the one to bring him here.

  But where was here? She’d drawn him into her grandparents’ yard this morning. He’d recognized the scene as it had formed around him, because she’d often played with him there. He glanced at the corner again. The plant and bookshelf seemed real, but the rest had the wavering haze of an unfinished dream. He swung his legs over the side of the bed.

  “Max, wait!”

  “This has to stop, Deedee. Quit barging into my head.”

  “Don’t leave me.”

  “Hey, you were the one who left me.”

  “What?”

  “Forget it. Go back to wherever it is you’ve been all these years. We’re done.”

  “Help me, Max. I . . . need you.”

  “What? To remember? I told you—”

  “No! I don’t want to remember this part.”

  The sounds of crunching metal grew closer. The glow in the distance—in the corner—brightened until flames covered the plant and licked up the walls. At their core was a dark mass, part car wreckage, part seaweed, writhing in rhythm with the screeching metal. As he watched, it stretched tendrils across the floor toward his feet.

  This wasn’t a dream; it was a nightmare.

  Deedee’s nightmare.

  Max twisted to look at the bed. In the flickering light of the flames she had created, he could see the outline of her shape beside him. She had curled into a ball, her face pressed to her knees as she shivered and gasped for air. Someone was screaming, but it wasn’t Deedee; it was a man.

  The dark tendrils from the mass in the corner reached Max’s toes and flowed upward. Cold slime, like the muddy bottom of a pond, enveloped his ankles. He was being drawn toward the core of the nightmare.

  “Make it stop, Max. Please!”

  He could free himself with a snap of his thoughts. She was the one who was generating this image, not him. He could break the connection between them as he had before and be back in his own bed in the next second.

  That was what he should do. She didn’t belong in his life. This was the second time she’d ambushed him when his mental defenses were down, and she had no right. The boy she was looking for didn’t exist any longer. He owed her nothing.

  “I’m begging you, Max.” She was shaking so badly her teeth chattered. “I can’t do this alone. Help me. Keep me safe.”

  For all its urgency, the plea was silent. It was here and yet not here, like all the other words she’d spoken and the bed he sat on and the room he was in.

  Yet it held him in place as firmly as her touch that hadn’t been a touch . . .

  Damn. Damn! Max kicked loose from the slime that gripped his feet and swung his legs back onto her bed. “You’re okay, Deedee. It’s only a dream.”

  She moaned. “It’s real.”

  “It’s a dream,” he repeate
d. “It won’t hurt you.”

  “It will. It always does.”

  Always? Had she experienced this horror before?

  Light flared from the corner, sending the flames racing along the ceiling while the dark seaweed tendrils crept over the edges of the mattress and up the bedposts. Deedee wrapped her arms around her legs and curled more tightly into her ball.

  Max inched closer and leaned over her until he sensed the curve of her ear beneath his lips. “Deedee, you have to stop this.”

  “How?”

  The slime touched his feet again. He braced his hands beside her and shifted to his knees. “You know how. Go somewhere else.”

  “I can’t.”

  “We’ll go together. Think of sunlight. Birds. You like birds, don’t you?”

  Fire billowed through the air, curling above the bed like a living canopy. The man was still screaming, only the sound was turning guttural, liquid, melding with the whoosh of the flames.

  “Think of roses, Deedee. I can smell them on your hair.” Max pulled out a memory to build the picture in his head. “Look, we’re in your grandma’s garden. Here’s a bud that’s almost open. Aren’t the petals soft?”

  Cold was spreading across the sheet as the glistening, wet darkness advanced. Overhead, the flames screamed in harmony with the man.

  Max lifted one hand to her shoulder, holding his fingers close enough for her to feel his warmth. “Deedee, you have to let go of this dream before it swallows you.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can. What color is the rosebud?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “I think it’s yellow. Sure, it’s the color of soft butter.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  He concentrated harder. “There’s dew on the petals.”

  “It’s around my ankles. It’s wet and cold and—”

  “No, that’s only dew. Let go of the bad part and see the good.”

  “Max, I can’t. I forgot how.”

  He moved his hand down the shadow of her arm. Energy sparked along his palm. “Feel the moisture on your skin.”

  “Max!”

  “Use it. Make it do what you want.”

  Her breath hitched. “My skin’s burning. Don’t you smell it?”

  He did. He could feel his own skin puckering. He had nothing to shield himself. She’d brought him into this dream as naked as he’d been in his own bed. “Think of the dew. There’s rain, too. It’s going to put out the fire.”

  “But—”

  “You’re safe, Deedee. Nothing hurts here. Nothing bad happens.”

  “Nothing bad.”

  “It’s our own special place, remember?”

  She unlocked one of her arms from around her legs.

  “That’s it. Snuff the flames, Deedee.”

  She extended her hand past his shoulder. “I still feel them. They’re hot.”

  “That’s the sunrise.”

  “Is it morning?”

  “Sure. The night’s over. The sun’s coming up. It’s shining through the rain.”

  “On the roses?”

  “Right. Whatever you want.”

  Inch by inch, the wet blackness receded from the bed and drew back to the corner where the plant stood. The screams took longer to fade, but they did in time, taking the flames with them.

  In place of the nightmare, a rainbow-tinged mist spread through the air. From it came the lilting call of a robin, the whisper of raindrops on leaves, and finally, the image of a rosebush in a slanting beam of sunlight.

  Max sat back on his heels and rubbed his palms on his thighs. His skin was damp. He was breathing as hard as Deedee now, but it seemed as if the worst was over. Details continued to appear in the scene that was forming. Sunshine spread past the raindrops to warm his skin. The scent of earth wafted past his face. She was assuming control of the dream herself, as he’d known she could. Her mind had been almost as powerful as his when it had come to building their play world.

  She used to love playing hide-and-seek with him among her grandmother’s rosebushes. It had worried him, because she would often snag her clothes on the thorns and sometimes she’d get scratches, but she hadn’t cared because she never got punished. She’d giggle when he found her and raise her arms to him for a hug.

  She’d felt small and solid, or the next best thing to solid, since he hadn’t actually been able to touch her. The sense memory of holding her that first time by the pond had been enough to make her real in his mind. That, and the power of Deedee’s own imagination, had given substance to what had happened whenever their thoughts had been together, just as it had tonight. At times, she’d been as pesky as a real little sister, but he’d never been able to refuse her.

  Apparently, that hadn’t changed. He could be anywhere, and he’d sense her touch. He would know he was alone, and yet he would feel and hear and smell her so vividly that often he got confused.

  His fantasies didn’t confuse him these days. They were what powered his art.

  Max returned his gaze to the bed. The sunlight Deedee had imagined was spreading across the mattress, giving him his first clear view of her. Apart from a sheet that was wrapped around her ankles, her legs were bare. So were her arms. A satin nightgown was twisted in tight folds around her waist and hips. It revealed a woman’s body, not a girl’s.

  The sight jarred him, but it shouldn’t have. Time hadn’t stood still for her any more than it had for him. She would be close to thirty by now. There was no trace of the baby fat that had rounded her limbs when she’d been a child. Her calves and thighs were slender. So were her arms. He could see the ridge of a hip bone beneath her nightgown and the sloping, feminine curve of her buttocks.

  The differences in her weren’t only physical. The child he had known would never have produced a nightmare like the one he’d just witnessed. She’d been pampered and doted on. She’d embodied everything peaceful and good to him because she’d had no concept of evil or of pain. When had that changed?

  Deedee rolled to her back on the mattress beside him and flung out her arms, as if abandoning herself to the pleasure of the scene she had imagined. The neckline of her nightgown was twisted to one side, revealing the graceful length of her throat. Ivory satin pulled taut across her breasts and outlined the contours of her nipples.

  Max sucked his breath through his teeth. No, she wasn’t a little girl anymore. She wasn’t his sister, either.

  “Can you taste it?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “The rain. Tip your head back.”

  “Deedee—”

  “Don’t you remember how we used to catch the rain on our tongues?”

  He slid his gaze from her breasts to her mouth. “Game’s over, Deedee.”

  “C’mon, Max.” She opened her mouth and touched her tongue to her lower lip. The motion didn’t appear childish in the least.

  Max felt an unaccustomed stir of conscience. He ignored it and leaned closer.

  That was when he saw the strip of raised skin that curled around her right arm from her elbow to her shoulder. It had the shiny pink tightness of a healing burn. A similar, wider scar crossed her collarbone and split into ragged white fingers that disappeared beneath the edge of her nightgown. The satin was pulled taut across that, too. The puckered edges of the scar extended to the upper slope of her breast.

  What the hell happened to you, Deedee?

  Her eyes opened fast, as if his thought had been a shout. She stared at him.

  He soaked in the contact as he soaked in the sunshine. Her eyes were the same warm green he remembered, the color of new ferns, but there was an unfamiliar murkiness in their depths. The nightmare was still there. Waiting. He touched his fingertips to her scarred shoulder. “What the hell happened to you?” he repeated.

  The garden vanished, along with the mist and Deedee. And just like that, Max was back where he’d started. In his own bed. Utterly alone.

  He reached for her instinctively, exten
ding his mind into the darkness to follow her warmth, but she had shut herself off, curling her mind into a defensive ball the same way he’d seen her curl her body.

  He pushed harder, trying to get her back. He needed more. He needed her. He couldn’t lose her this time . . .

  Max drove his fist into the mattress, then rolled to his back and dropped his forearm across his eyes.

  No.

  He didn’t need anyone.

  FIVE

  DELANEY SCOOPED A FISTFUL OF CLOTHESPINS AND LIFTED a sheet from the wicker basket by her feet. Like so many things here, the smell of fresh air and her grandmother’s lemon detergent took her back to her childhood, effortlessly calling up the days when she’d run along the row of laundry, her hands slapping against damp cotton. She had read somewhere that scent memories were the strongest. They bypassed the reasoning part of the brain and went straight to the vestigial animal brain that governed emotions.

  That was probably why she imagined lime aftershave when she thought of Stanford.

  Then why did she smell paint when she thought of Max? Why had she smelled it on her sheets when she’d awakened this morning?

  She brought the damp fabric to her nose.

  It smelled like fresh air and lemon detergent, nothing more. Of course, it would. It had gone through the cotton cycle of Grandma’s heavy-duty washer. There was nothing like hot water and twenty minutes of agitation to get rid of a few leftover molecules of imaginary turpentine. It used to do the trick with imaginary mud pies, too.

  Delaney pressed her lips together as she hung up the sheet. She wished she could smile, but she wasn’t quite there yet. A five-year-old believing in a pretend playmate was considered cute. A thirty-year-old doing the same could be considered troubling, to put it mildly.

  Her latest encounter with Max had been a dream, she reminded herself. Overall, it had been a positive one, and she should be grateful for that. In fact, she’d awakened feeling refreshed instead of worn-out. For the first time in six months, she’d managed to take control of her recurring nightmare. She’d turned its familiar elements of fire and water into something she could deal with. Sunshine and rain. It was actually very clever, the kind of thing Dr. Bernhardt might have suggested. He would have approved of her progress.