Soul Quest

Chapter 17

Liv/Laith

Time - Christmas Eve, December 24, 2014

Place - Liv's house/Laith's house

Queens, New York

"What lies behind us and

what lies before us are tiny

matters compared to what

lies within us."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Liv

The third dream was more disturbing and less cohesive. It was a series of flashes from the past with a common theme. Shy Donovan. He was in every flashback. He was the same yet he was different. I had become frightened of Shy because of what he had done to me that night in Gaea's meadow. His behavior at school was fraudulent and knowing. As the days passed I grew more and more wary of him. Unfortunately all of my human friends seemed to be becoming more and more enamored by him.

In the first part of my dream Shy was in Nazi Germany in 1940. He was a soldier dressed in uniform standing next to Adolf Hitler. You would have expected to hear Hitler giving Shy orders but it was the other way around. Hitler looked frightened as he stared into Shy's cold black eyes and listened to his command.

"Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future."

These words came from Shy's lips not Hitlers. Shy was controlling him. It felt like he was controlling my human class mates at Forest Hills High now. Is that what he was doing? Was he waging a war against me?

Laith

It had been a while since I had a dream about the future. At first I wasn't sure if I had been dream traveling or if I was just imagining my fears in dream form. It was a series of flashes from the future with Shy Donovan threaded through out. We were usually at school or a school related function. In my dream Shy was making me look like the bad guy. I was trying toPROTECT my friends from Shy by steering them away from him. My friends were mad at me. They thought that I was jealous of his popularity.

"Why are you so bent out of shape Laith? Are you worried about the possibility that Shy may be more popular than you? Everyone knows that the Shy camp would have won freshman government if you hadn't gone and kissed up to Mrs. Long. You've always been such brown noser." Jesse Howard accused.

How could he think that? I have never been like that. My sister Melissa is the social climber. I'm not a brown noser. I'm polite. I enjoy being nice to people. It makes me feel good to make people happy. I wasn't trying to be popular. I was just being myself. Being popular has never mattered to me and it wouldn't matter now if I wasn't worried for the safety of my friends.

Liv

In the next part of the dream I was in Dallas in 1963. Swarms of people covered the streets as they watched a parade. Shy was huddled in a circle with a group of men. Their faces were severe. They were standing on top of the School Book Depository. Everything seemed to blur in and out of clarity and it was difficult to make out what they were saying. Two other faces were recognizable however. They were Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray. The first man assassinated John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the second committed the same heinous act against Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. A pattern was forming and I made a mental note of it.

I remembered how quickly Melissa had forgotten her anger toward Meena when she discovered her dancing with Ray at my birthday party. Shy had asked her to dance. How had he distracted her so completely when she had been so angry? Melissa acted strange when she was with Shy. One minute she would be looking for Ray but as soon as Shy would speak to her he was completely forgotten. When Shy was around Melissa he had every bit of her attention. I have to wonder if this is a coincidence. I'm sure Shy realizes how popular Melissa is. Being her boyfriend would grant him a lot of social clout. One thing is becoming very clear. Shy is a master manipulator.

Laith

In this dream everyone was turning on me. It's true that my sister Melissa has never been my biggest fan but I would never have pegged her as my enemy. She was being two faced. When we were at home Melissa behaved the way she always behaved around me. We would play video games and talk about school. She would ask me about my friends especially Ray. We talked about our home work and other normal stuff siblings talk about. When we were at school she wasn't herself. She ignored me and my friends. She acted like Ray didn't exist. If I did happen to see her she was always with Shy Donovan. It was weird. When we were at home she never said one word about Shy. If I mentioned him she looked at me like I was insane. The dream was very confusing. Is Shy trying to turn my sister against me?

Liv

The last part of my dream was more like a collage of horrifying images. I saw pictures of fire, smoke and death. The series of snapshots played out in this way, airplanes exploding into the sides of the Twin Towers. The towers crumbled into smoking rubble and ash. The ash was spilling into and burying the streets of Manhattan and everything in it. Terror, loss, anger and resignation filled the eyes of innocent victims. There were other eyes too. Shy was not present in his physical form but I still sensed his presence. I sensed him in the eyes of the hijackers. His eyes burned into my soul.

Laith

The last part of the dream was the most unsettling. It was a mixture of jumbled up pictures instead of a story being played out. I felt like I was watching a series of slides in a slide show. Some of the slides I recognized and others made no sense to me. I recognized the faces of people I knew like my sister Melissa, Brayan's little sister Katrina and Jedd. They looked confused and afraid. The images I couldn't recognize were mostly faces of people I did not know. Some of the images were places. There was a hotel suite, a museum, a bridge. None of it made sense. I never saw Shy in any of the images but I couldn't shake the feeling that he was present. I remembered the way Liv looked that night when Shy had a hold on her at our birthday party. There was something in her eyes in that memory that I could see reflected in the glossed over look on Melissa's face. I could see the same look of panic in the frozen face of one of the strangers.