The Dream Runner (6 page)

"Hey, why don't you start in another room? I slept up here last night; I need to clean up before you take pictures."

"I'll help."

"Marsh…"

But he already had the door open.

As fate would have it, a ray of morning sunlight had fallen directly on the dream bottle, turning it into a rainbow shimmer that was impossible to miss.

Marsh whistled. "What have we here? Pretty fancy toy for a girl who doesn't even own her own furniture."

Before I could gather my wits to think of a diversion, he strode across the floor and had the shining thing in his hands.

I didn't want that bottle opened again. Not ever. Besides, dreams are supposed to be a top secret business and I'd be breaking all kinds of rules
if
Marsh figured out what was in there.
If
I reacted,
if
I shouted no, he'd probably open it just to be mean. I couldn't take that chance.

There was only one thing I could think of to do.

I followed him into the room, kissed him and put one hand directly on his crotch. I deepened my kiss and began to rub him, my free hand grasping the bottle and tugging.

"Wait." The damned man actually pushed my hand away. "You're weird today, Jesse. Yes, no, yes, like you don't know your own mind and I know that ain't true. Don't know what sort of game you're playing, but if I didn't know better I'd swear you don't like me holding this here bottle. What is it?"

"Perfume," I said, true panic beating at me with a thousand wings. "It's a freaking bottle of perfume. Paid a fortune for it but I hate it. Don't open it—the room will reek for hours."

He laughed. "Not much of a liar, are you?"

"Don't call me a liar. It's not nice. Give it back…"

"Seriously. What's your poison, Jesse? Drugs? Diamonds?"

"Dreams," I said.

His eyes narrowed. "Enough with the games. You're stone cold broke, any fool can see that. How did you get this?"

I stood there, breathing hard, trying to think. I'd already let him see that the bottle mattered to me, so it was too late to act like I didn't care. And the sex come-on wasn't going to work. Which left only one possibility.

Looking back on what happened next, I see it all like a movie playing out in slow motion. The grin moving across his face as he sees that he has won some sort of power over me—me moving back another step for maximum impact. His right hand lowering the bottle as his left reaches for the stopper. My foot connecting squarely with his woody and the pressurized balls behind it.

The impact threw the stone bottle out of his hands as he doubled over in agony and I slid to catch it, hands outstretched, like a kid in a made-for-TV baseball movie where everything in the world depends on catching that ball. I was good at sports as a kid, but it had been years and I held no real hope of success.

Against all the odds, I actually managed to make the catch, but the cork stayed in Marsh's hand. Black liquid sloshed out and down the sides of the bottle, and the whole damn thing slipped and slid right through my grasping, desperate fingers and struck the floor.

It exploded like a little bomb.

Shards of stone shrapnel littered the room. Dark liquid sprayed everywhere. Floor, walls, sleeping bag. My hands dripped with it. It seemed impossible that one tiny bottle could hold so much of the stuff.

My skin crawled. Cold seeped into my bones and I shivered uncontrollably. Distant voices seemed to shriek and mutter and curse; they were so real that my eyes turned toward the window, but nothing was visible except for sky and a bit of distant mountain.

It's only a dream
, I told myself.
And we're both awake. Wide-awake. It can't hurt us.

"What did you do to me?" Marsh gasped, still doubled over, his eyes nearly popping out of his head.

I wanted to shout at him. To beat him senseless, but then reality hit me square and fair. I was the one who had asked for the dream in the first place. It was mine—all of the ugly and the evil and the hate belonged to me. And my own actions had resulted in this disaster, the scope and extent of which was making me want to get on Red and run away again.

This time there was nowhere left to run.

Marsh's hands shifted from between his legs to his ears, and his eyes were wild. His whole face had gone white and his lips trembled. "Make it stop," he said. "Jesse, please make it stop."

"It's okay," I murmured, which was beyond doubt the biggest whopper I'd told in my life. "Come on, let's get you out of here."

My hands were still coated in the stuff and I didn't want to touch him, so I pulled one of my t-shirts from my backpack and wiped them clean. Then I dragged him out of my room and closed the door behind us.

I tried to strip him out of his contaminated clothes and put him in the shower, but he wrenched away from me and ran for it. Down the stairs two at a time, out the door without bothering to close it, and into his truck like all the demons from hell were at his back.

He spun the tires in the gravel and fishtailed out of my yard, leaving me alone with a house I was pretty sure was now officially haunted. Damn it—I could never sell it with a dream that ugly permeating the walls and floor of one of the rooms. The Bunny Room at that. Somebody would put a kid in there, and scar the poor thing for life. Even renting would be a problem, and I sure as hell had no intentions of staying in this town to take care of the house myself.

An image of matches and gasoline flickered through my brain. Burn it down, collect the insurance money. It was a thought. But then the memories came, thick and fast. All I still had of my dad was here. And Will, a little voice whispered, but that one was easy to shush.

 

 

B
y the time dawn
appeared over the mountain, I had torn up the ruined carpet, rolled it, and lugged it down the stairs and outside. A trip to the all night gas station yielded five gallons of gasoline and some matches, which lit the carpet okay to start with, but it burned reluctantly and with a lot of smoke and a stench of burning tires. The wallpaper I'd shredded off the walls was still too wet to burn and I toted it all outside and spread it out to dry, piling rocks on top so it wouldn't blow away. My plan was to give it a day of sun and light it up when the dark rolled back around.

In the unforgiving daylight, both the room and I were a deconstructed mess, stripped down to basics, smudged and dirty. First things first. I scrubbed that room from top to bottom. Walls, floor, even the ceiling with the help of a push broom and a rag.

Next, the shower, where I scrubbed my own skin almost raw and washed my hair five times, looking for signs of telltale black swirling down the drain. When I was done I burned my sleeping bag and the clothes I was wearing. I knew I was over the top—only a nightmare, only a dream—but I couldn't seem to pull my rational self together.

Sleeping was out of the question, and the house was no longer my friend. Nobody to visit, nothing to do, and my thoughts kept going to Mia. Poor thing had no idea how dangerous a dream could be. What if the kid had gotten into it? What if hers got spilled? What kind of angel of destruction was I, handing these things out to people right and left as though they were a cure for the common cold? Take one dream, and call me in the morning.

Ba dum. Ba dum. Badumbadumbadum.

My heart stopped when the shark ringtone kicked in. She knew. Of course the Dream Merchant knew what I had done and there would be retribution. As I scrambled to find my phone in the middle of the chaos I'd created, I tried to tell myself it might just be a friend from Seattle checking on me. Maybe even Marsh, pretending nothing weird had happened and trying to salvage his dignity. But no, the caller ID display was totally blank, and I answered with cold dread at the pit of my stomach.

"What?"

"Time to collect the dream."

"What? Why?"

The line was dead. I stood with the phone in my hand, too numb and confused to figure out which action to take next. I'd thought for sure the Merchant was calling about the spilled dream and my attempts to clean it up.

As for picking up Mia's dream—the only way I could figure she was done with it already was if something bad had happened.

Motorcycles are unforgiving and I was tired and distracted. The gravel almost took me down at the first corner, but by then the morning air was starting to clear my head and I righted us, steadying and centering myself, and the rest of the drive was uneventful. Beautiful even, despite everything. The wild roses grew thick beside the road that leads down to the highway, simple and sweet with their golden hearts, and the fragrance of them pushed the darkness back a little. Once I was on the highway I could see the lake, wreathed in tendrils of mist this morning, all greys and shadowy blues. As always, it threatened to submerge me in memories and I made a point of looking elsewhere the rest of the way into town.

There was very little traffic. Businesses wouldn't be open for another hour. School was newly out for the summer, everybody on a more laid back schedule. On Mia's street, nothing and nobody moved. The windows of her house were dark and curtained. When I put my ear to the door I heard nothing—no sound of TV, no voices, no footsteps. Even this early, a little kid like Jayden should be up watching cartoons. The unease in my belly burst into full-blown worry.

No answer to the doorbell, or to the following flurry of loud knocks.

"Nobody's home," a voice said, behind me.

I turned to see a woman standing on the edge of the lawn next-door, decked out in gardening gloves, with shears in her hands. She crossed the lawn toward me.

My heart thundered like surf in my ears, but I tried to hold out some hope. A vacation, a visit, an early trip to the grocery store. I managed to force a smile. "Do you know when she'll be back?"

"Ambulance came for her last night." She stepped closer, adding in a loud whisper, "Overdose. Couldn't bear the loss of her husband, I imagine."

My body settled down into a cold calm. Mia wasn't the first dreamer who had been driven to self-harm. I tried to chase away my guilt by telling myself that she was desperate to begin with, that it wasn't the dream that pushed her over the edge. Hell, maybe the dream had helped her hold on another day or two. At that moment this platitude looked about as fresh and bright as the room I'd stripped up at my haunted house.

"Alive?"

The neighbor shrugged. "Lights and sirens, so she must have been when they left here."

"Where's Jayden?"

"At a friend's house. His aunt will come get him if need be."

I needed to get into that house to retrieve the dream, but the neighbor was a problem. She knew everything, and she knew I wasn't a friend of Mia's. A long lost sister or cousin story wasn't going to fly.

I smiled, wide enough that my face felt like it was breaking. "Well, then. I'll run up to the hospital in just a few minutes. But she had something she wanted me to look at—I wonder if I should still do that, since I'm here."

It was about the lamest thing I could have said, and I had no expectation it would work. But the woman's face twisted, and she gasped, "Surely not the Boston Fern."

I'm not necessarily proud of it, but I seized the day and ran with what she gave me. "Why yes, that's exactly it. How did you know?"

The old woman instantly drew herself up to full height—which was maybe five feet tall— and literally huffed. "She doesn't have a clue how to take care of that plant. Shirley should have left it to me. I can't believe she's trusted this little snippet with a plant like that. Please tell me it doesn't have mites."

"That's what she was worried about." I smiled again, this time for real, and stalked off on my plant saving mission, leaving the old biddy standing there.

Since the doors were going to be locked, and I didn't want anyone to see me break in, I went around the corner of the house and to the back door. It only took me a minute; I'd been a street brat for a while, and although I drew the line at stealing from people outright, I was not above sneaking into an empty house for a sandwich and a hot shower.

As a dream runner I'd perfected the ability to pick a lock—it was necessary every now and then when a dream was ready for collecting. If I'd read the neighbor correctly, she'd be along momentarily to school me about the status of the plant, so I moved fast.

The kid's room was easy enough to spot, and the only other bedroom had to be Mia's. A wedding picture hung on the wall—she looked young and frightened, clinging to the groom's arm with both hands. I stopped and stared. The man in the picture was not the man whose face I had seen when I'd read her for the dream. His eyes were soft and a little bit sad, and the expression on his face was pure besotted love.

I was confused and disoriented for a minute, but I didn't have time to ponder. Maybe he'd changed a lot as he aged. Maybe the alcohol had done it. If we knew what turned men into abusers, we could fix them before they got there.

Mia's bed was unmade, the only messy thing in that whole house, and even that was minimal, as though she had taken up as little space as possible under the covers and lay there unmoving. A packet of over-the-counter sleeping pills and a half empty glass of water sat on a spotless bedside table, next to a familiar stone bottle.

Damn, I'd been so off-kilter  I had left home without the briefcase. I stood with the bottle in my hands, considering the possibilities. If I dropped and broke it—had an accident on the bike, or if somebody stole it—I'd be in deeper doo-doo than I was already. This didn't bear thinking of.

On the other hand, if I didn't take it now, I might not get back in. It would be a lot harder to fabricate another story for the neighbors. Family could be here. The kid, Mia's sister, Mia herself, if she wasn't dead.

Please, don't be dead
.

I went with my usual policy of  now or never, seize the day.

I'd never had a crash on Red, after all. There was no reason to think I'd have one now. After a long moment of consideration, I stuffed the bottle into my bra. If I'd had D cups or even C's this might have been a perfect solution, but I am not that girl. The bottle would be as safe there as it was going to be anywhere on my body, but looking in the mirror I could see it, like a lumpy and misshapen third breast. The only eyes I was going to have to deal with were the neighbor's, though, and I was counting on her age and proper upbringing to keep her from looking at my cleavage or commenting on anything she saw there.