HIS HAND WAS clutching broken china and blood trickled out onto the floor. He could see the food scattered on the tiles in the dim light from the stove. He brought his left arm up toward his head and stared at his watch. It had only been a few minutes this time. He pulled himself upright to a sitting position. He was lucky. No one would see him like this. No one would care about a broken plate. He stretched his right arm up and took the bottle of ale from the edge of the table. The first mouthful still held a cold edge to it, the perfect first bite of the bitter drink. The rest wouldn’t be as good. It didn’t matter. He put the bottle down beside him.
What now? What the hell happens now, Nate? He knew what the dream was, where it had come from this time. He’d had Sela on his mind. Her voice, the way she looked in the silver gown. He’d borrowed her stories, the images she’d fed to them all night, mesmerizing him with her voice. He’d woven it all into his dreams.
“Creative bastard, aren’t you, Nate,” he said into the empty room.
What did it mean? He was still out of control. This thing, this stupid, persistent thing in his brain, the thing Janis called TLE, a temporal lobe episode in displaced realities. It wasn’t going away.
He wanted to slam his fist into something but Sierra didn’t need anything else broken. Besides, it wasn’t his way. He’d never opted for violence, even on the job if he could help it. He wasn’t going to start now. He didn’t want that. The end, whatever end was waiting for him, would only come faster.
He stood up and grabbed some paper towels to pick up the mess and clean the floor with water. He threw everything away. He made a sandwich out of leftovers from the refrigerator and took it into the living room. The fire was out but some heat came from the radiators near the windows.
You’re living an ordinary life, Nate, he told himself. That’s what it is. It just happens to be filled with dreams you can’t shake.
A ticking sound went through the room and he looked up. It was raining. He went over to one of the windows. The driveway was free of snow and its black top reflected the light of the street lamp. Some distance away through the swaying trees he could see fragments of light from the house of the nearest neighbor. A sudden shape appeared in the road and passed under the street lamp. It was a deer. It stood for a moment in perfect stillness and then in one fleeting step disappeared.
So what was it he wanted? As if he had a choice. He would wait for the next time the anomaly decided to take over and propel him back into the strange landscapes it kept insisting he enter. It would keep happening until one of those times he dropped dead.
He could have the surgery. That was an option still out there. What was keeping him from allowing it? He knew the answer and its unexpected clarity left no doubt. With all his resistance, for all that he was afraid of the outcome, he didn’t want to give up the dreaming. That couldn’t be right, he thought, yet he knew it was. He was stuck not only because of the parasite in his brain, but because he had grown used to what it brought to him, to the worlds it showed him. He didn’t want to give them up. The realization surprised him.
Even at such a risk?
That was the other side. He didn’t want to die.
He sat down again and finished his sandwich and swallowed the rest of the ale.
“In the meantime,” he said aloud, “you do your job, Nate, okay?” The words brought a respite, a sense of peace and consolation. He did have work to do. He’d give himself to that as long as he could. It mattered just as much. He knew that was true all of a sudden with a conviction he hadn’t felt for a long time.
He went upstairs to his room. The dreaming was done for a while. The cycle was growing predictable. He could get a full night’s sleep. He’d go up to Jackson in the morning, just as he’d planned. The idea of it seemed to have existed an eon ago, as if he’d been away a long time, but it was nuts and bolts real. It was something he could do his way.
YOU ARE READING
The Magic Hour
Mystery / Thriller"It was not exactly dark, but a kind of twilight or gloaming. There were neither windows nor candles, and he could not make out where the twilight came from, if not through the walls and roof." -Childe Rowland "T...
