Familiar

Pt. 4 - Of Kith and Kin

Bones found himself dreaming again—something he hated.

He drifted down into what he'd only heard Claude describe once in Prague as 'The Gloaming.' He wasn't the most partial to sleeping, because that was just another extension of his enthrallment.

Even outside of his waking life, Bones could not have his thoughts or dreams to himself. Usually he drank or smoked himself into a stupor to avoid the pull of dreams, but tonight, this one was painfully in-focus.

Like many of his dreams, he never looked through his own eyes, only those of others––nameless, usually faceless strangers through time, never the same person.

Except this one was different. This gaze felt like a familiar, lived-in point of view that somehow harkened back to feelings he knew. Like a book he'd read and loved long ago, but forgot on a shelf.

He watched, through their eyes as they looked down at their surroundings. Small hands hung a cardinal red jacket on a bare, twisting bush. All around, silent, snow-dusted woods and air that smelled like November frost. White puffs of air came through their lips as they turned and ran through the woods.

In the distance, Bones could hear shouts, growing closer. His host crashed down a muddy embankment, small shoes streaking with mud. He could hear their pulse rushing like rapids past his ears, and the dull bass of a thundering heart. Signs of excitement. Or fear.

He always hated this part the most. The dreams would come, and he could never control whether they were good or bad. Even some of the best ones eventually grew, cynical, sad or violent. Very rarely did the shard of ice in his eye ever show him something beautiful—only every now and then—like a splinter of forgotten glass catching the light, reminding you it was there. That you had forgotten it, but it had not forgotten you.

He tried to close his eyes against the dream and remembered that in this in-between, he couldn't. The bottoming-out feeling of disembodied helplessness returned, like a twisted version of sleep paralysis, where instead of feeling unable to move, he was unable to feel himself.

Voices grew louder in his host's left ear, and the heartbeats grew more erratic. They ducked behind the crumbling stump of an old tree, at the base of the ravine, eyesight wending as they trembled in the cold.

The sounds of a pack of children tumbled over the ravine as they stood at it's edge, looking for what he imagined was his host, taking refuge behind the fungi-infested tree stump. His host quietly crouched behind the rotting, low branches on the stump, and peered up at the children, middle school girls holding something that looked like a bike padlock and a jump rope. They began to point downhill. Bones felt dread fill him. Or perhaps it was his host.

"Over this way," one of them, that Bones couldn't quite see, called to the others. "I see her jacket."

They turned and retreated back into the woods towards the voice, shouting back and whooping.

His host got out three, small, shaking breaths before something covered their mouth. Their scream was cut short as Bones felt their center of gravity shift backwards. He wanted more than anything to just close his eyes to the cruelty that would inevitably follow. Just to make it stop. He wanted to just be able to change the course of the things he saw. His heart began to drop.

Something spun his host around and suddenly he was face to face with his younger self.

If he had a body and lungs to breathe with in The Gloaming, he would have stopped breathing. Konstantin Vasilyich Ivanovov, no older than eleven, standing in front of him like a feral apparition, ripped flannel jacket and two good eyes, still.