“I can’t believe that.”
“Karena, I’m older than you. I’ve been through a lot more than you have. I may have provided you with hope and a reason to go on for many years, but that time is over. I’ve come to my senses, and it’s time to finally accept reality. We can’t survive. We’re dead. We were dead ever since he first started manipulating our lives.” There was clear hurt in Shawn’s eyes as he said this, as if it was something that he desperately didn’t want to have to say, but said anyway.
There was a long silence, and Karena stared at Shawn fiercely, more fiercely than she ever had before. She wasn’t going to accept the “reality.” She wasn’t going to give in. Shawn had planted a seed in her long ago that he couldn’t take out of her now. She would kill the Sandman and end all this, mad as that might seem.
“The Sandman will be killed. What he’s done there can be no rational purpose for. I will end his life.”
“You’re talking like a madman.”
“Well at least I’m not as mad as you.” Karena ran out the door without another word. It was time to start making a plan.
42
Karena didn’t go back to class that day. She didn’t even go back to the orphanage, as a matter of fact. She spent the whole rest of the day walking around the city, thinking to herself about what she needed to do. It was time for her to not focus on anything but the Sandman.
But even more than that, she thought about Shawn. How could he just change his opinions on this so suddenly, and not want to do anything? Was he being a fool, or was he actually right? Karena quickly decided to turn her mind away from the latter option. She couldn’t let herself fall to the place where she thought that was true, as much as she respected Shawn. This time she wasn’t going to listen to him.
Karena looked all around for the Sandman. The weather was freezing, and she had no coat since she’d just run out the door without thinking about anything, but she hardly noticed the fact that she was getting a cold and that her digits were turning blue. She only focused on using her piercing eyes to find the Sandman, if he was, indeed, anywhere. That was the only priority.
When the day was over, Karena was hungry, tired, and frozen to the bone, but she didn’t care. Physical things scarcely had any effect on her any more. She returned to the orphanage late, sneaking in through the back entrance where she usually snuck in and out when visiting Shawn. All the children were already asleep in the long hall where she slept. She crawled into bed and dreamed about the Sandman.
He was standing in Quencher’s, where he was more often than not in her dreams. The dream began exactly like all others. She was sitting down, and the Sandman was near her table, standing even though in real life he normally was sitting at the table in the corner. This time instead of trying to ignore him, Karena turned fiercely and stared directly into his eyes. It was a defiant look, the sort of look she’d given Shawn earlier that day, but this time filled with more hatred. Of course, he stared back at her, but for once Karena felt undaunted. Or at least not as daunted as she had before.
The Sandman’s face remained expressionless as he stared at her. His bones that showed through his tissue paper skin were set, gaunt. It was like his jaw was fractured in that position, without the physical ability of smiling.
Karena stared harder, her eyes boring into his skull, into his brain, searching for answers. It was a battle of glares, a fight to the death to determine whose will was stronger. “What do you want!?” she suddenly cried. “You’ve been taunting me my whole life, taunting me with that silly little hourglass of yours, and there’s no reason for it, no purpose! I ask again, WHAT…DO…YOU…WANT!?!? Just show me what it is! Do your will!”
The Sandman reached into his trench coat and pulled out the hourglass. The sand was near the bottom. And he reached his long, skeletal fingers, the joints and bones visible, out as far as he could, and he curled his fingers. It took a moment, but Karena found out what he was attempting to do. He was beckoning to her. Karena stood up, though she didn’t know why.
And the Sandman proved her wrong.
Because he smiled.
It wasn’t a friendly smile, though. It was the sort of smile that would come from an evil person who has just had a big success, a person with a heart so cold that it showed even in a facial expression usually interpreted as nice. Karena gasped and fell backwards onto the table behind her. The atmosphere grew darker, and the air took on a dark violet color, and Karena could almost feel the violet seeping into her, though she did not know what it was doing. It grew in intensity, though not in brightness, and Karena found herself standing, running to the door.
But there was no door. There was nothing there but a swirling mass of violet, and Karena stepped back.
And then she found herself falling, falling through an airy oblivion with no end in sight. It lasted longer than it should have, as she continued to fall for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, who knew how long. She only knew that she was falling and that she wanted to get out of this nightmare.
And then she hit the bottom, and with a jolt she woke up.
Karena looked around to see that there was no Sandman, that she was safe. She was back in the orphanage, in the long, smelly hall of slumbering children, and she was the only one awake.
Karena lay back down. Telling the difference between her dreams and her realities was becoming increasingly difficult. Maybe the phycologist had been right after all. Maybe this was all one big, massive dream and that one day she would wake up, just as she just had, and she’d find herself in her real body, to live a real life, a life where she wouldn’t be plagued by the Sandman.
But until that happened, if indeed it ever did, she would have to be strong.
43
The next day Karena woke up early, which wasn’t particularly hard since she wasn’t really sleeping anyway. She snuck out of the orphanage and resumed her search.
After a whole day had gone by again, Karena began to, just the slightest bit, start ignoring that voice that was telling her to ignore Shawn’s words. She hadn’t found the Sandman anywhere, and she’d been searching for two whole days. All over the city she walked, seldom taking public transportation, instead going there by foot. Just as before, she was freezing and hungry by the end of the day, and her feet were sore. And she hadn’t found any Sandman.
Really, she thought, it was ironic that she wanted to find him at all. Why would she want to see the person who caused her to panic when she saw him? It was completely crazy. She should’ve been glad not to have found him. And yet she was only more determined to resume her search the next day.
When she made her way back to the orphanage at the end of that day, it wasn’t as late as before, and so the teacher guarding the door was still awake when she walked in.
“Karena!” the teacher said, and Karena recognized him as the teacher who’d been teaching her when she’d run away. “Where have you been for the past two days? We’ve been looking for you everywhere! Why did you even run away in the first place?”
Karena shrugged and started walking forward, but the teacher grabbed her by the shirt.
“I’ll need more of an explanation than that, young lady.”
Karena reluctantly turned around and looked the teacher straight in the eyes. “Can I explain in the morning? I’ve been walking around all day and I’m pretty tired.”
The teacher stared at her, and then it happened. The same thing that had happened to the nurse happened to the teacher. His face became different, deformed so that the skin was tissue paper thin, and so his eyes were piercing pools of steel. His hand was on her shoulder, but, as Karena watched, his hand moved higher and clasped around her throat, the long, bony fingers stretching so that they covered her whole neck. Karena expected to feel herself choking in moments, to have the breath be taken out of her and to have her wide, terrified eyes go limp. But it didn’t happen. The Sandman was only grabbing her neck, not squeezing it. This wasn’t an attempt to kill her. This was a threat.
But what had she done so that she would be threatened thus? She stared deep into his facial expression, looking at the whiteness of his skull, and tried to find why he was doing this. But he was entirely inscrutable.
And then he was the teacher again, and the teacher let go of her neck, moving his hand back down to his side. “Well, what’s the deal?” he asked.
Karena was terrified, but nonetheless she managed to choke out an answer. “I was looking for you,” she said.
“What do you mean?” the teacher asked.
“Who you just were, a few seconds ago, I was looking for that. I just succeeded. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“I know, but that’s normal with me.” Karena turned and walked away, and somehow that served as answer enough for the teacher, because he let her go into the hall where all the children slept, and lie down in her bed.
He’d come again. Two days very close together he’d come. And Karena didn’t think that this would be the last time either.
44
1 month later…
The following month can be skipped in this particular telling of Karena’s tale, because during this month the Sandman did not appear, and thus nothing of much significance happened, since the presence of the Sandman essentially defined whether an event was significant or not in these days. Karena paid no attention to anything in school, or in the orphanage, or in the news, or in anything during this one-month period of time.
Every day she was convinced that he would appear at any moment; that he’d be around the next turn in the corridor, waiting for her, or sitting in one of the desks in her classroom. There was no knowing where he’d be next.
But he never did show up during that one-month period of time. Karena talked to Shawn often about this, and Shawn became more and more convinced that there was nothing they could do about him, especially as Karena saw no sign of him. He, for one, was used to his unpredictable behavior, perhaps more than she.
Nothing new happened, overall, and Karena was merely waiting, waiting, waiting. There was nothing to do but wait. And wait she did.
But finally, he showed up again. It was late one night, after everyone was asleep. Karena was lying awake in her bed, staring at the wall, not wanting to go to sleep for fear of having another terrible dream. It was nearly pitch black, but since she’d had her eyes open for so long they’d adjusted to the darkness and she could quite easily see the shapes around her of the slumbering kids and the rickety wooden beds.
Karena rolled over to see the other, identical side of the long orphanage with the slumbering children and rickety wooden beds. Suddenly, a door opened at the end of the hallway and Karena heard someone step inside. This was a perfectly routine thing. Someone always came into the hallway when everyone was asleep and walked down the aisle making sure that everyone was asleep. It seemed rather ridiculous to her, but then again, practically everything seemed rather ridiculous and pointless to her. Karena shut her eyes and feigned sleep as the teacher came closer. They didn’t have a flashlight, which was slightly strange, as they usually did, but it was of little consequence. Karena slowed her breathing so that it looked and sounded like she was sleeping. The teacher would just walk right by. He always did.
But just when the footsteps reached Karena’s bed, they stopped. It had to be one of the kids around her, she thought. She hadn’t heard anything, but one of them must be doing something wrong. Karena felt a strange, inexplicable sense of dread. Something wasn’t right here. This never happened, not in all of her past three lives. It had happened a couple times in her first life, as she was a bit of a troublemaker back then, but certainly not now. Even if she’d run away and if she didn’t pay attention in class, it wasn’t as if she was causing trouble simply for the purpose of causing trouble. And besides, if they were going to chastise her for any of those things, why would they do it in the middle of the night?
The teacher stepped between Karena’s bed and the bed of the person adjacent to her. What was going on now? Karena thought about who slept next to her, but her mind came up blank. Surely it was the other person, and not her, that the teacher wanted. The teacher stepped through the narrow area in between their beds, coming closer to Karena’s head. Karena found her breathing becoming harder to control. Why was she panicking? There was nothing dangerous about this. Unless…
Karena didn’t have a chance to think about it before a hand came on her shoulder. Karena kept her eyes shut, not wanting to look at who it was, her breathing increasing. It was him.
“Karena,” the man said.
Karena opened her eyes in surprise. It wasn’t him. He wouldn’t say her name. Karena recognized the man before her as the teacher who’d been the guard at the door a month ago, when she’d run away.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Karena, you need to come with me,” said the man. “We need to talk.”
Reluctantly, Karena sat up and got out of bed. If this was about her lack of participation and her negligence when it came to schoolwork, she didn’t care. But she had a feeling this wasn’t about that at all, though she didn’t know why, and she couldn’t imagine what they would want to talk to her about other than that. All she knew is that she portended dread as she followed the teacher down the aisle in her nightgown, past all the sleeping children, and out the door.
They walked through the orphanage, through the dark hallways and corridors. The place wasn’t very pleasant at night, with shadows being cast wherever there was light enough to make shadows, and with those sparse lights flickering like they would go out at any second, leaving you in the dark alone. Karena had never been particularly scared of the dark, except for if the Sandman was there, or if there was a chance that the Sandman could be there, which there was now. So it was unnerving walking through this place all the way upstairs and into an office, where they shut the door behind them.
It was a place Karena had never been to before. But from looking at the sign on the desk before her and at the man who was sitting at the desk Karena was able to determine that it was the headmaster’s office.
“Good evening, Karena,” said the headmaster, extending a hand in a businesslike fashion towards her from his position behind the desk. Karena merely stood there in silence, not extending her hand in greeting. “Er, um…yes,” said the headmaster, retracting his hand awkwardly, before hiding it under his desk as if he’d never offered a handshake in the first place. Clearly the man wasn’t used to being denied pleasantries at the start of a conversation, even if the person with which he was conversing had been woken up in the middle of the night. “I suppose I should have expected that. Please, have a seat.”
Karena stood standing, refusing to take a seat in the chair that was sitting before her. The teacher, on the other hand, happily took a seat. She continued to stare in silence.
The teacher leaned forward. “You probably should have expected that one, too,” he said. The headmaster nodded slowly.
“Anyway,” said the headmaster. “I suppose you want to know what this is all about.”
“No, not really,” Karena replied, even though she did, in fact, want to know what this was all about.
“Well, you’re going to find out anyways,” said the headmaster. “We’ve noticed your behavior in this orphanage of late…”
Karena no longer cared what he said. All she had to hear was the first sentence to know that it was something of little significance. Karena looked away, not exactly letting her mind wander, as there wasn’t much for it to wander to, but rather simply not listening to the headmaster as he droned on.
“Karena!” the headmaster said. “Are you listening to me?”
“No,” said Karena.
The headmaster sighed. “Look, I know you think this is just stupid and that we’re just going to ask you to behave better and all that, but that’s not what we’re saying at all. If you’d just listen, then you’d find out.”
&nbs
p; “Is it about the Sandman?” Karena asked. She had asked this question in order to prove that whatever the headmaster intended to rant about wasn’t worth her time. But she didn’t get the reaction she’d expected.
The headmaster stopped and stared at her. Karena had expected him to have no idea what she was talking about and dismiss her stupidity, but instead he only grew more interested. “So I was right,” he breathed. “You do see things.”
45
“So what if I do or if I don’t?” Karena said. “It’s none of your business.” Karena was surprised at the headmaster’s reaction, but not surprised enough that she couldn’t formulate a comeback.
“Perhaps that’s true,” said the headmaster. “But you have to listen to me. If you work with me here, then things will work out better for you. What I want to do is try to help you.”
Karena gave a dry laugh, which was the only kind of laugh she was really capable of giving now. “Help me?” she said incredulously. “Believe me, there is nothing you can do to help me. To him, you’re as insignificant as infinitesimal pieces of dust. Dust that he can manipulate to do his will; dust that will help him in his plot. The only thing I can do is help myself.”
“There are other ways, Karena,” he said. “We can help you with the Sandman if you’ll just let us. Your lives keep repeating, but that can stop. There are ways out of this that don’t seem possible, but there can be an end to this. Trust me.”
Karena suddenly felt tempted to hear him out. Was the headmaster telling the truth? Could there actually be another way out of this other than waiting it out? Was there a way to stop the Sandman? If so, what on earth would the headmaster be able to do against him? And why did he even care?
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