Every Night

Chp. 4

I get my computer started up, and open up Skype first. "Good," I sigh to myself, "she's online."

I send a call to my wife, and she answers within seconds. "Dan, are you okay?" She asks me.

We usually schedule calls with each other, it's very rare we call on a whim. She can also see my face is still red.

Before I can answer her, my daughter crawls up on her lap and says to me, "Daddy, are you sad?"

That just breaks me again, and I can't help but cry. I turn away from the camera as not to show my face. My wife takes our daughter off her lap and tells her to go play in the other room for a bit. She then sits back down and asks me, "Dan, what's going on, is everything okay?"

I've stopped crying enough to talk to her, and I explain everything, the nightmare, the fear, and the incident at the arch.

She looks me in the eyes and says, "I'm never going to let the darkness take you, soon you'll be home and you'll understand, you're safe, the darkness is not that strong."

We talk for a few more minutes and then she has to go, Arrow got stuck in the toy box again. We say goodbye and she signs off.

I think about shutting down my computer and heading back out to the common room, but something inside me makes me open my music program.

I keep coming up with different rhythm patterns, and laying them over each other, till I'm left with a sound so strange and eerie, I'm content with my work. I'm just about to close the program when I hear a faint knock on the door. "Come in," I say.

The door opens slowly and Wayne creeps in, taking a seat beside me. "Whatcha working on?" He asks me.

"Oh nothing, just trying to get my feelings out."

"Would you mind if I heard it?"

"No problem," I say. And press play.

He sits silently and listens, when it's over he just lays his head on my shoulder and gives me a hug. "It's, nice, nice but dark."

I realize the clock says its 1:30 am, and I nudge Wayne's shoulder. "Should we go to bed?" I ask.

"You can if you want, but I'm not gonna sleep tonight, damn insomnia."

"Well, I'm not that tired either."

He reaches down and grabs his guitar. He leans up against me and begins to strum. I start hum different melodies, and I sneakily press record on my computer. We sit there for what seems like just a few minutes, and then sleep overtakes me. After I feel asleep, I didn't even feel Wayne lay me down on the couch. He brought out my pillow and blanket from my bunk, and put them on me. He then walked back out to grab his, and propped up against his pillow and continued to play. He played all throughout the night.

When I finally woke up in the morning, I was a bit disorientated, I had forgotten I fell asleep back here. I sit up from the couch, and look over to see Wayne, still sitting there, strumming away. He looks up from his guitar, "Well good morning sleepyhead." He says to me with a smile on his face.

"Morning," I say, scratching my head, "what time is it?"

He looks down at his gold watch on his left wrist, "10:00am" he tells me.

"Wow," I mutter to myself, "I was really tired last night."

"How'd you sleep?"

"It was strange, the nightmare began to start again, but all of a sudden, right before the dark was about to take me, a beam of light broke through the mist, and all the darkness faded away."

He just smiled at me and said, "good."

He then set his guitar back down and helped me up off the couch, we walked into the common room to find Ben and Platz sitting there waiting for us.

"Where are we?" I ask, knowing we had driven quite a while since yesterday.

Ben looked at a small sheet of paper, then opened up the blinds a bit to look outside. "If I'm correct, we should be just outside of Chicago."

I begin to apologize for my breakdown yesterday when Platz shushes me and says, "Don't worry about it, the good thing is you're okay."

I sit back, and just place my head on Wayne's shoulder, and we ride like that until we arrive at the venue.

Then it's off the bus again, and back into the green room for some interviews. One of the interviewers really got on my back and asked me, "We heard rumour that yesterday you walked out of the Arch crying, what was that about."

I tensed up and was just about to snap at this guy, but then Wayne took my hand and held it and told the interviewer, "It was just a rumour, you can't believe everything everyone says."

The interviewer looks a little distraught, and says "but...."

But before he could finish asking, Wayne looked him right in the eyes and just says in the sternest voice, "But, what" and the interviewer moves on.

Once we're done, Wayne walks over with me to one of the couches in the corner of the green room. He sits me down and holds my hands, "Look me in the eyes, buddy," he says calmly, I look up at him, "What that interviewer said, just forget it, he was a jerk anyways. I'm here, and he doesn't matter."

I smile at him and give him a huge hug, "thank you" I say, "just, thank you."

"No problem buddy," he smiles at me, "come on, sound check is about to start."

He helps me off the couch, and we head out of the green room and towards the stage.