Dreamwalker (11 page)

What had it pointed to, really? Sanctuary? Escape? Surrender?

She'd come here to save Estella, but somehow found Pete. Back in the tactile world, he'd have been a keeper. She felt something the first time a window opened and she met him in one of his dreamwalker excursions, something more than just the relief of being the hell out of Twin Moon City. So why the revulsion when he gave her the key?

First, guilt. She needed to free her sister, not leave her to Cauquemere's tortures while she hid.

Second, reality. She was dead. Buried alongside her sister somewhere in Philly. Pete was alive. No amount of warm feelings and good intentions would ever bridge that divide. Any dumb ideas sailing in that direction needed sink. Now.

She stood and stretched. The street looked clear. She crouched to leap through the window and paused. The key caught her eye.

With a quick scoop, she grabbed it and shoved it in her pocket. She vaulted through the window and ran for home.

Chapter Twenty

Pete was up and out of DiStephano's early the next morning, even before Mama D hit the coffee and bagels. He only had a few hours of sleep, but he'd catch up. Sleeping on a bus was easy.

Pete had plans for his first day off. He had to find out more about the real world life of the girl who now filled his sleeping one.

He knew Rayna's sister's name was Estella and that they had both died in Philadelphia on the same night. She said Estella called her in the late spring, so the deaths probably happened last summer. That should be enough information to put him on the path to more. He just had to get to Philly to find the trail.

He could find an internet café and surf for some details here in Atlantic City, but becoming acquainted with Rayna in cyberspace was too impersonal, too remote. He wanted to walk the streets she walked, see the sights she'd seen. Then maybe he would be a step closer to knowing the real Rayna.

Normally the idea of testing his VPD against a strange environment would keep him home. But not today. Not for Rayna.

Stop #1: free internet access at the public library. The Philly papers would surely have covered the simultaneous deaths of two sisters. Stop #2: all depended on Stop #1.

The bus schedule in the Ithaca station said there were regular Atlantic City-Philly runs several times a day. He could leave in the morning and be back in the evening, with a bunch of hours in between to search the City of Brotherly Love. He could keep expenses within the limited funds on his debit card. A paycheck from DiStephano's was going to be quite welcome.

At just after 7:00, Pete plopped in a window seat near the rear of a rumbling diesel bus. As it passed over the causeway out of Atlantic City, he felt like a Greyhound regular. A petite older woman in a flowered hat was the only other passenger, seated directly behind the driver. Pete was fine with that. The quieter it was, the better he would sleep. If he snoozed through the trip, he could hit the ground running.

Atlantic City died out fast as the bus found top gear heading west. Rural New Jersey took its place. Much to his surprise, the southern part of Jersey really was the Garden State. Dairy farms and harvested fields stretched out from the Atlantic City Expressway. It was nice to replace Atlantic City's faded colors and prominent grays with the bucolic explosion of fall's turning leaves and green grass.

The rear tires added a low steady hum to the drone of the bus exhaust. Pete settled back in the seat. A hypnotic succession of fence lines passed beside him. He closed his eyes, and before he knew it, the swaying bus rocked him to sleep.

Cauquemere paced his palace in unbearable frustration. He'd dispatched his hunters as soon as he sensed the dreamwalker in Twin Moon City. They had the building surrounded in minutes, yet he still escaped. How could the dreamwalker slip in and out of his city so quickly?

The dreamwalker wouldn't have left so quickly unless he'd picked up whatever information he was looking for. Someone had to be here to deliver it, and the mystery girl from Simon's dusky memory was the only candidate. Yet he'd only felt the dreamwalker. Only when he walked in the girl's footsteps, like at the brownstone, did he even get the slightest whiff of her scent. This had never happened with any resident of Twin Moon City. Everyone registered in his personal census.

Elusive dreamwalkers and phantom residents, disconcerting tiny rips in the fabric of world. He needed to mend them. Fast.

A disturbance caught his attention, like the twitch a spider feels when a fly hits the edge of its web. Cauquemere sensed a victim, outside the palace walls, outside Twin Moon City.

From the power of the sensation, this wasn't just any victim. The dreamwalker had fallen back asleep. This time his soul was clearly visible, not obscured as it had been earlier last night. The prey was out in the open.

Cauquemere moved in for the kill.

Pete's eyes snapped open to the scream of a siren. He lay on a gurney in an ambulance. With each swerve of the truck, his gurney rolled a few inches sideways. Tall, unfamiliar buildings whisked by the tiny windows in the rear doors. Horns blared and the occasional screech of brakes bounced off the vehicle's sides. Two clean-cut, male paramedics were on either side of him. One rooted through some type of medical kit. The other monitored a data screen of flashing vital signs.

Pete tried to sit up. A thick black strap girded his torso. Similar bindings held his ankles and wrists to the polished silver side rails. He pulled against all four. Nothing budged.

Fear welled up inside him. The last thing he remembered, he was on the bus. Had there been an accident? He didn't feel injured.

“Hey,” he said to the paramedics. “How did I get here?”

The two didn't respond. The one on the left kept rummaging in the medical kit. The one on the right stared at the vitals display like a gambler at a slot machine.

An alarm on the vital signs monitor blared. The displayed pulse rate went into free fall. 60…50…40. The eyes of the paramedic watching the screen lit up as if it just came up three cherries.

“We're losing him!” he shouted with unabashed glee.

Pete felt fine. If anything, his pulse was racing.

“Hey, hey, I'm all right,” Pete said. “That thing's out of whack.”

No response. Pulse rate 30…20.

“Give him adrenaline,” the paramedic said, still transfixed by the monitor screen. “Super dose. In the heart.”

“Super dose?” Pete said. “What's wrong with you two?”

The other paramedic pulled a huge needle from the bag. The bright green liquid within glowed like a nuclear pile.

Pete craned his neck for a better look at the monitor. The blood pressure cuff and all the sensors hung in a limp, swaying bundle from a hook on its side. His arms were bare.

The beeping alarm went to monotone.

“He's going!” the first paramedic cried. “Hit him!”

The needle wielding paramedic spun around on his stool. He placed the cold, sharp needle point on Pete's left breast.

“What the hell!” he yelled.

The paramedic drove the needle down in one fast stroke. It pierced him like a frozen dagger. He screamed. The paramedic squeezed the needle's plunger. Neon goo filled his chest like an injection of dry ice. His heart stopped. He gasped for air.

“Paddles!” shrieked the other paramedic. He was still glued to the data screen. His voice had an ecstatic, high, asylum lilt to it. “We're losing him! Juice him good.”

The paramedic on the left yanked the needle from Pete's chest. Pete sucked in a shallow, wheezing breath. The ball of ice in his chest spread within his body. His head swam.

The paramedic raised the two electric paddles. The faces had a wide pattern of sharp points across them, like sandals with crampons.

Pete managed a wheezing, pleading croak.

The paramedic clamped the twin paddles to the sides of Pete's head. The sharp points scraped skull. Pete's mouth opened in a silent scream.

“Clear!” the paramedic yelled.

Pete's senses exploded.

Thousands of volts arced through his head. Every nerve ending sent a simultaneous plea for help. The world burst into bright, white light. His muscles involuntarily spasmed against the gurney restraints. Tendons tore. Blood ran from his nose. He collapsed against the gurney. He'd shit himself.

The ambulance siren died. The vehicle jerked to a halt. The doors flew open and the two paramedics hustled the gurney out and through the hospital doors. A wave of nausea rolled over Pete.

He rolled feet-first down a, dazzling white hallway to two swinging doors. An assortment of patients in hospital gowns lined the hall and watched him pass. Their emotionless faces were pale, drained of life. Their glassy eyes followed his gurney at it sped by.

At the hallway's end, the paramedics gave the gurney a mighty heave and launched it through the swinging doors. Pete rolled into an operating room and came to an abrupt stop. An array of stainless steel cabinets covered the wall in front of him, and ceiling to floor white curtains partitioned each side of the room. Two enormous spotlights lit the gurney. Pete's street clothes disappeared and he was naked.

A nurse in teal-green scrubs appeared at his right side. A matching turquoise cap and face mask hid all her features but a pair of piercing blue eyes. She gave Pete a cursory visual examination.

“We're too late, Doctor,” she said. “This one's a goner.”

He tried to tell her he was alive. Nothing came out.

The doctor appeared on his left. He wore black scrubs.

“No options then,” he said to the nurse. “Prep for harvest.”

A new wave of horror washed over Pete.

“Right away, Doctor,” the nurse replied.

The doctor turned away to inspect a medieval assortment of surgical tools. The rusty utensils were all in huge proportions. A wide saw blade with jagged irregular teeth. A meat cleaver. Something that looked like a giant corkscrew. A pair of scissors with serrated blades like a set of shark jaws. These things made incursions into the human body, not incisions. Pete's mind started to buckle under the terror.

The doctor flourished a big, black Magic Marker. He drew a dotted line across Pete's waist, then another from his belly button to his sternum, like the perforations in the face of single serve cereal boxes, the ones you're supposed to slit open to make a bowl.

An incoherent scream filled Pete's head.

The doctor moved to the instrument table. When he turned back around, his surgical cap was gone, replaced by a black leather, peaked officer's cap. Dangling dreadlocks hung over the ties of the surgical mask. The doctor's skin turned jet black. He locked his eyes on Pete's.

“Ready to operate, boy?” he said in a Caribbean accent.

Cauquemere ripped a saw through Pete's midsection in one violent stroke. Pete's mind spun in circles. Cauquemere reached down and grabbed a handful of intestines. He yanked them up so Pete could get a close-up view. He felt the radiating warmth of his pulsing organs against his face.

“A beautiful harvest,” Cauquemere said.

Pete woke himself screaming, back on the bus to Philadelphia. All the terror the dream's paralysis had dammed up inside him escaped in a flooding shriek. Sweat soaked his shirt. Breathless, he fell back into his seat, mentally wasted.

The driver and the little old lady in the flowered hat spun their heads around. They exchanged hushed words. The lady rose and walked down the aisle to Pete. Her bright yellow pants suit perfectly matched her hat. Her frail hands steadied her against the seatbacks with each lurching step. At Pete's seat, she cocked her head in genuine concern.

“Are you all right, young man?” she said. Her voice had the slight stutter of age.

“I'm fine,” Pete said. He felt his face turning crimson. “I just had a nightmare.”

“Sounded like a dilly,” she said. “You didn't sleep through your stop, did you?”

Pete looked out the window. A sign showed the bus was still on a New Jersey state road passed by.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I'm going to Philadelphia today.”

“Visiting relatives?”

“No,” Pete said. “Looking up a friend, that's all.”

The old lady released her grip on the seatback. Her hand moved like a striking cobra to Pete's neck and collapsed his windpipe. Pete gagged and his vision blurred. The old lady's green eyes turned brown. He'd just seen those eyes.

The old lady's lips parted and the voice of Cauquemere came forth.

“See you there.”

Pete startled awake in his bus seat again, alone. His heart ran like a cheetah. In the front of the bus, the old lady in the floral hat stared out the window. The driver casually drummed his fingers against the steering wheel as farmland passed by.

Nightmares. Back to back. Dream within a dream stuff. Holy crap.

Worst of all, he hadn't known it. All his life, vivid as his visions were, he was always aware they weren't real. But the hospital vision felt real, every sight, smell, and slash as sharp as real life.

Rayna said Cauquemere could create nightmares so real that people lost their minds in fear. He sure as hell believed that now. How many hell-raisers like that had the poor bastards in Twin Moon City endured before they crossed over?

Cauquemere had Pete's number now. Outside of the mansion, Pete was fair game. That copper wire and knife trick didn't seem ridiculous at all anymore. He wasn't sleeping without that line of defense ever again.

And he sure as hell wasn't going to sleep on this bus. His dream-induced adrenaline surge would make sure of that.

Chapter Twenty-One

Luck was with Pete when he arrived in Philadelphia. Despite the ticket agent's look of disbelief when asked where the nearest library was, the man followed up with the right answer. The Independence Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia was about half mile away on 57th Street. He scratched the directions down on some paper anyway.

Philadelphia couldn't have been more different than Pete's desolate slice of Atlantic City. Skyscrapers surrounded the low bus station. The streets teemed with people. Scads of tourists hustled by to the historic district. Bustling, bright stores in The Market across the street disgorged animated customers loaded with sacks of goods. Street traffic flowed by in a surging, big city way.

Pete crossed several streets to find the library. He spun around for the return view several times, always aware that in this world he was always one street away from being lost. The crowd swept him along, a welcoming change from depressing west Atlantic City.

As he walked south on 7th, he saw the library. Its glittering steel façade stood only two stories high, wedged between two brick office buildings like an inviting silver flower growing through a crack in a stone.

Inside on the right, a row of computers lined the wall. The first few had “Card Catalog Access Only” signs on them. He saw the magic words he sought labeling the computers farther down the line for internet access.

Pete took an open terminal. With a deep breath, he touched the mouse. Computers were hit and miss. So much information. So crowded on the screen. Webpages were not designed for people with Visual Processing Disorder.

The black screen sprang to life. He found the
Philadelphia Enquirer
home page and clicked on the archives link. The page was blessedly uncluttered. He typed in “Estella+Rayna” and hit “Search”.

Two article titles appeared on the screen. The first was from July 26. The title read “Tragedy for Sisters in Downtown Apartment”. Without even reading the second entry, Pete clicked on the first. Paragraphs filled the screen.

TRAGEDY FOR SISTERS IN DOWNTOWN APARTMENT

Neighbors complained to the super that the alarm clock had been beeping in Apartment 206 for hours. When he investigated, he found two sisters the alarm would never awaken.

Police report that Estella Fisher, 20, and her sister Rayna, 18, were lying on the floor of the apartment at 1214 West 17th Street when they arrived. An ambulance rushed both to St. Vincent's hospital were Estella was pronounced dead. Rayna was admitted to intensive care in a comatose condition.

The investigation is continuing, but police have discounted that the sisters were the victims of a crime. Neither showed signs of trauma. The locked apartment did not show signs of forced entry.

Estella worked at the Four Season Floral Shop where she arranged flowers for delivery. Natalie Ladd, her supervisor, said she had not been to work the last few days.

“She wasn't looking well,” Ms. Ladd said. “She looked real tired all the time. I asked her if she was sick. She kept saying she was fine. Then the last three days, she didn't come to work. Didn't even call.”

Rayna was enrolled as a student at Susquehanna County Community College. She was visiting her sister before starting her first fall semester.

The parents of the two women were not available for comment.

Philadelphia police encourage anyone with information about the two girls to contact the police tip line at 267-555-TIPS. Information can be given anonymously.

Pete imagined what the tiny story must have looked like in the paper, probably less than two inches of text wedged into the “Crime Beat” section. The average reader gave it a few seconds, if they read past the first few sentence at all. Just another faceless tragedy in the news.

But Rayna's name
had
a face that went with it. A beautiful, captivating face. Pete fleshed out the story with visions of Estella stalked to the edge of sanity and Rayna's furiously mixed suicidal concoction, her ticket to follow her sister into the unknown. The tale was more desperate than the
Inquirer's
readers would ever know.

Pete hit the “back” icon and returned to find the second article. The title read like a flare rocketing into a pitch black sky.

COMA VICTIM MOVED TO LONG-TERM CARE

Rayna did not die.

At least not then,
he thought, to rein in his enthusiasm. The date line on the second article was August 14, three weeks later.

Rayna Fisher, discovered comatose in a locked apartment nearly three weeks ago, today was transferred from St. Vincent's Hospital to Legacy Hospice in Philadelphia. Doctors expressed doubts that she would ever return to consciousness.

They described her condition as a persistent vegetative state. Her brain still controlled autonomic functions, but tests showed no activity in the part of the mind that controlled higher functions such as speech, thought, or the processing of external stimuli.

Police found Rayna, 18, and her sister Estella, 20, in an apartment on West 17th street on July 25. Rayna was unconscious and her sister was dead. The coroner later concluded that Estella had died of natural causes, a heart attack. The police theorize that Rayna attempted suicide with a mixture of prescription drugs when she found her sister. Paramedics and doctors at St. Vincent's were able to stabilize her.

Staff at Legacy Hospice said that Rayna could live many years in her condition since her body was young and healthy. Her parents could not be reached for comment.

Pete's conflicting emotions swirled and sparred. A living Rayna still had some tenuous connection to the corporeal world. Rayna was no longer just a soul lost somewhere between Pete's mansion and Twin Moon City. She still lived and breathed in the real world.

But on the other hand, that was literally all she was doing. Her body existed on this plane, but nothing else did. Her soul, her consciousness, whatever it was that passed into the Land of Dreams and Nightmares, had gone for good, with no mind to return to, the shell left behind useless as a snake's shed skin.

No wonder her life force was so vibrant in Twin Moon City. Unlike the others condemned there, she still had a link to the tactile world, a conduit to another source of energy. Perhaps that gave her the survival edge.

Which meant she was still alive here, three months later.

Pete grasped at a straw of hope. Doctors don't understand comas. People come out of comas without warning. He remembered a firefighter who came to after over ten years. She could make it back if anyone could. There was only one way to validate this optimism.

He had to pay a visit to Legacy Hospice.