Mallory's Melody

Chapter 25

MALLORY HARDLY EVER DREAMT.

But for four nights in a row, she'd been dreaming. And she had no problem with its reoccurrence. What grated on her nerves was the uniformity about the dreams. Perhaps she might've dreaded it less if they were a little more dynamic, garnished with the spice of variety. But no. It was the same old, boring visions—terrors if she was to describe it—each time. So, what she did tonight was simple—

She didn't sleep.

She stayed up all night and engaged herself in a staring competition with the moon sitting in the lone night-sky. But when she tired of the moon's cutthroat attitude, and fieriness in ensuring she lost, she slipped right back into the sheets and challenged the ceiling to a face-off instead, and it was at that moment she made the biggest mistake of her life—

She slept.

At first, she was met with nothingness, just the bland waves of darkness one expected when unconscious. But as stealthily as a thief in the night, the dream slipped into being again, initially indistinct, and fuzzy highlights, but then morphing into alarming clarity, 72 by 98 feet cinema television type of clarity, with a resolution so high that it began simulating reality.

The dream was the same, situated in an icy blue ocean teeming with brightly colored fishes and starkly green, woebegone weeds. At first Mallory expected to take up the form of one of those jostling and exuberant gold-scaled fishes, but instead, she inhabited the body of a baby who was hovering at the surface of the water, fastened to a straw basket that was quickly submerging by the minute. She let out a boisterous and raspy cry at the sudden realization of her drowning, then her vocal chords —already stretched to its limit—tore apart when she sighted a monstrous wave overhead. Fast-approaching, given momentum by the ferocious tides inhabiting the ocean, and in the blink of an eye, the merciless wave engulfed her whole.

She was underneath water, the straws of the basket in which she was laid, dispersed in the water's body. Fishes circumvented her. And she would have said hello if her lungs weren't burning with oxygen-deficiency. She went deeper, and deeper, the crystal clearness of the blue ocean sinking into a much darker shade by the minute. Air rushed out of her lungs. Her ears blared with alarm. And just when she felt all hope drenching out of her body, someone—something began to rouse her, up and up, until she burst out of the water's surface with an odd sense of triumph, swallowing as much oxygen as she could, grasping and flailing her little arms in the air for the gas she would never again take for granted.

But when Mallory looked back to say – babble - a 'thank you' to her savior, she was hardly granted a minute with benign woman smiling at her, when the very wave that had swallowed her whole knocked the woman out. Gone as though she were never there in the first place.

And then that was it. Blackness flashed right through her eyes; the dream was turned off as though with a remote. It didn't allow her the satiation of thanking the woman. There were no sequels, no follow-ups. It was just that. Just nothing, and it was the same nothing that had been internally killing Mallory for four days. The fact that there wasn't any viable and clear scenes that could allow her to interpret the scenes. It was as though the dream itself was resistant to interpretation, shutting off the very moment when things began making sense. But more killing was the fact that she never had the chance to pay tributes to her savior, never the chance to babble thank you and ask her savior's identity.  But this time, instead of mulling about the despair the vagueness of the dreams brought on her, instead of lying around in bed and leafing through her mind to make chronological and logical sense of the dream, she did something different today—

She took the sheet of paper that had been lying on her dresser for the past days - the one Diana had given her – and strode to her desk, positioning her study lantern to directly face the roughened paper. Mallory sat back when it occurred to her that her heartbeat was at abnormal rate, and that she was sweating in spite of the frigid air rushing into her open window. She shook her cheeks and steeled herself to open whatever lied beneath it. Somehow, she'd known right from the beginning, that Diana's sheet of paper was the harbinger to unlock the cryptic meaning of the dream, even considering that the visions began occurring the day Diana tattled her securities away. But she'd fought herself against it, finding the fact that the paper had touched Diana's possibly bloodied hand particularly repulsing. There was something especially degrading about taking an adversary's offer. But right now, pressed to the limit, she swallowed her pride and deigned herself to open the paper. Whatever it might cost to her dignity and self-respect, curbing her curiosity was of higher importance now.