Chris Green - Only the Good Die Young

When I spied Gavin Edgett, with his startling blue eyes, short brown hair, and accusing expression, I wasn’t sure if he was better or worse than fake Dean.

“What are you doing in here?” Dream Gavin asked, his words stretched, echoing like a god’s.

It was like he couldn’t give a crap about the chaos going on around him. I was the big problem.

I searched for an answer, but came up empty.

In dream time, his hand reached out, then rested on my shoulder. A flood of sparks burned me, and I bit down on any response I might’ve had.

“You’re… real,” he said.

Above us, in the flaming sky, the air machine sputtered. When I pulled my gaze up to it, the little girl pilot was peering down at us, her long, dark hair trailing out from under her leather helmet, a worshipful expression on her goggle-hidden face as she lavished a look on Gavin.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked, my words dragging together as I finally backed away from his hand. I didn’t want him touching me.

He ignored the dragon as it resurfaced again behind him, then dove underwater.

“It’s a game.” He kept watching me, his gaze so intense that I thought he could see everything about me.

Something in my chest clenched.

“A game,” I repeated. Then I understood. “Your game?”

Was this the project he’d been working on when he was falling asleep? Flying machines… big ugly birds… dragons with human faces?

Where were the blood and blades from his other games?

Just as the question faded in my mind, the dragon thrust itself out of the water wall again, but it was going for the sky this time.

Its neck was so endlessly long that the monster’s teeth would be able to crunch down on the air machine that the little girl was flying.

Just as I started to slow-scream for her to watch out, I felt Gavin covering my eyes with his rough-skinned hand, like he didn’t want me to see.

I heard the sound of steel being unsheathed.

Then, in a flash of black, we were someplace else.

A room stacked with books on heaven-high shelves, but one wall was missing, and it opened to the lagoon-shaped pool just outside the Edgetts’ mansion.

Gavin was sitting across from me in the same chair he’d been seated in last night, both feet planted on the carpet as his hands clutched the armrests. Blood from his fingers trailed down the creamy leather, and he had a pearl-handled gun on his lap.

Now he talked in normal time, his voice deep and a little raspy as he checked me out.

“You’re so familiar,” he whispered. “Have I seen you before?”

Along with his speech, my thoughts were up to speed, too. So was my heartbeat.

Was he talking about last night, when I might’ve accidentally appeared to him during the haunting? Had he seen me then?

But this was a dream, and nothing made sense. Why should he ?

“You just saw me in that other room,” I said. “Remember?”

The way he was staring me down made me shift, and I realized that I was perched on the edge of a desk in the study that I’d visited during a tour of the mansion. One of my legs was crossed over the other, and I had my hands braced on the edges.

He slowly leaned forward, too, and I felt locked in his sights.

“Who are you?” he asked.

Outside, the pool water splashed, like someone was swimming. From the open wall, I could see gentle waves lapping out of the pool and against the concrete.

“I’m just a figment of your imagination,” I said.

Then I had an idea.

Could I make even better use of my time in his dreamland? Could I actually plant a seed in his subconscious—if that’s where we were—for all the odd things he would be experiencing about Elizabeth while I drove him to a confession?

Hell, I’d just seen Inception on HBO about a week ago. It’d sure worked there.

He rested his forearms on his thighs and stared me down with those pale blue eyes. They were such a deep, dream-enhanced extra-blue that I had to tell myself not to fall in.

Then he stood, coming toward me with a deliberation that made my stomach flip. The gun had disappeared from his lap.

“I know you,” he said.

Outside, it sounded like someone was getting out of the pool, water smacking concrete.

Gavin got close enough to me so I could hear him breathing, even in a dreamland. And every breath made my dream heart beat louder.

Danger, I thought. But that didn’t make me back away from him.

Just as he was opening his mouth to say something else, someone entered through the empty wall.

“Gavin?”

A light, bright voice. A woman.

And as he turned around, I saw that Elizabeth Dalton was standing there in a one-piece white bathing suit that would’ve been right at home in the ’fifties, when movie stars still shone with glamour and mystery.

Her short, wet blond hair was slicked back, her mouth lipstick red as she held a towel in one hand.

As Gavin began walking toward her, he fisted his hands at his sides, his body stiff.

Then Elizabeth disappeared into thin air, her towel dropping to the carpet.

But instead of a towel, it was a fashionable white scarf, lying prone on the floor like a corpse. And now…

Now there was blood all over it.

In slow motion—yeah, it was back, slower and more terrible than ever—Gavin turned to me.

He was wearing a mask.

Just like my killer had, but this one was different.

Before the details settled into my brain, horror screamed through me, and I shut my eyes.

Out. Out now !

With a rushed yank backward, I flew out of him, violently popping into the world again, back to where I was before.

In his office.

But this time I was on what I had for an ass, spread over the floor in front of his couch.

My essence quaked. I wasn’t a body anymore. Everything was back to ghost-normal, and he was still sleeping, although now he’d changed position, clearly restless, riddled with what had to be a nightmare.

I took a moment, just in case his subconscious was playing a trick on me and I was actually still in his dream. Horror movies always finished that way, with a shock ending that you don’t expect, just like Halloween , where Michael Meyers isn’t really dead.

When nothing happened, I relaxed. What the hell had everything meant in that dream, anyway?

Dragons. Air machines. A video game in action.

Elizabeth.

But what haunted me the most was Gavin’s face as he was turning around during those last moments.

Now that I was safe, my brain let me see what I’d blocked out as I’d exited the dream, allowing me to realize that his mask had been made of clear plastic, eerily dulling his features.

And emphasizing the trails of bloody tears running down his cheeks.

By the time I flew back to home base, night had fallen, and before I could stab another window in Amanda Lee’s house with shears again, I found her in the backyard, in the hot tub near her own modest pool.

She was neck deep in bubbling water, her red-and-gray-streaked hair pinned up. Actually, she looked like a bobbing head, just like that fortune-teller in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.

“What a night,” I said.

“Why, hello to you, too, Jensen,” she said as I settled over a wicker chair that faced the tub. She sounded real vegged out.

Until I told her about the dreamland in Gavin’s head.

She was giving off some nervous energy during my story—I could feel waves of it from her—but when I was done, a satisfied smile ended up taking over her mouth, like his dream was nearly as good as a confession.

“We’re so close to making everything right,” she said. “Do you know that? Just a few more pushes toward the truth…”