Chris Green - Only the Good Die Young

Whoa. Like he was seeing that half-angelic spirit in Wendy’s photograph, with light-colored hair spread out in the air. Beautiful, ethereal, spellbinding.

And he looked completely bewitched by me.

My dream heart pumped excitement through my body as he closed the book, speaking again.

“Were you there tonight?” His words were slightly dream-slurred. And he didn’t need to explain that he was talking about the séance.

“Yes, I was,” I said.

“That psychic let something in that should’ve stayed out… .”

“I don’t know what it was.”

“Why don’t you?”

I only shook my head. I should be the one asking him a million “why”s.

No… Elizabeth should be the one.

I walked closer to him, and his pale eyes lit up, like he appreciated that I wanted to be near.

He couldn’t take his gaze off me. He was even smiling, warmer in this dream than he’d ever been in life.

I was going to take full advantage of his fascination, even if my dream libido was beating, telling me to go in another direction altogether. A taboo one.

“What happened that night?” I asked, talking about Elizabeth’s murder. “You have to tell me.”

“That night?”

He seemed confused and—

Without warning, the room went dark, the lights turning off. I hit the floor just as a slant of illumination angled out of a corner of the room. But as the light got brighter, I saw that this wasn’t a room anymore.

I was in the desert, but not like one I’d ever seen. The red sky had followed me here, and the cactus plants had stiletto knives instead of needles sticking out of them. Blood dripped from the blades as well as the sky. The sand looked like crushed skulls beneath my tennis shoes, and when a tumbleweed undulated by, it was composed of hissing asps.

My perception had slowed a hundred times to a barely moving flow, and I realized that this dream of Gavin’s was the opposite of his original one—the faintly less surreal portion coming first and the weird-as-shit part coming second.

A hand grabbed my arm. Awareness tingled in me, claiming every cell.

But it was only Gavin standing next to me, touching me. A normal guy against the fucked-uppery of this land. A cipher who might never be solved.

He let his fingers trail down my arm, his gaze following his gentle touch. He looked like he wanted to confirm I was real. But there was an edge in his irises, too—black splinters cutting through the blue.

He was attracted and repulsed by what I was—his compelling, torturing devil. A floating ghost who looked like an angel of death in Levi’s jeans.

I closed my eyes, trying not to let him affect me.

In the near distance, a humming sound claimed the atmosphere, and I opened my eyes to see that a Victorian air machine was slicing through the red sky. It was the same machine as in the original dream, with the little girl pilot and her dark hair flowing from her helmet.

But wait. There were two machines this time.

I was so busy slow-watching the skies that I was barely aware that Gavin had started pulling me back from something, forcing me to get behind him with such suspended speed that it took me forever to process what was going on.

But when a hideous, huge black spider appeared in front of us, I screamed.

Its face… crushed, just like the dragon’s had been in Gavin’s original dream.

I watched helplessly as the spider dangled and those air machines flew over us, dipping low, the first little girl pilot in her goggles, leather uniform, and flying long dark hair. She was waving at Gavin. The second machine began a drawn-out dive, too.

But that’s when the spider turned toward the girls, opened its mouth, then shot out a bony, skeletal web that flew with rickety grace at the first air machine, caging it. Yanking it down and crashing it into the shattered skull-sand.

As the dust flew around the wreckage, that first little girl cried out, her scream one long echo. The other, airborne pilot didn’t seem to notice the danger, and she kept diving in her air machine, the same long dark hair streaming out of her leather helmet behind her.

The spider scuttled toward the trapped pilot as she wailed.

“No… ! No, please, no… !”

Gavin tried to take a step toward her, but his boots were mired in the crushed skulls. I tried to move, too, but fear had me in its hold.

Then, suddenly, another cry filled the air. Inhuman. Crowlike.

At next glance, I saw that the huge bird that had been shadowing the first little girl’s machine in the original dream had materialized and it was diving down, aiming for the hanging spider. And when it impaled the creature, black blood flew everywhere—over the cacti and the sand.

When the liquid hit Gavin, speckling his white shirt, it was like the blood freed him, and he began to run toward the first girl, even though his boots were getting sucked into the broken skulls.

With every step, he sank deeper… deeper… . But he wasn’t giving up, and with a ragged cry, he stretched his arms toward the massive bird and the spider, who was getting impaled over and over again.

When Gavin raised his fist and punched through what was left of the spider, drawing out a dark blob of a heart, he held it up, staring at it. Then falling into a spent heap to the ground.

As the other girl’s machine kept diving toward us, the first pilot crawled out from the wreckage and then between the bones of her cage to Gavin, ignoring the bird and the spider like they were invisible. When she got out, she threw herself over Gavin’s back, clinging to him as he lay belly down, motionless on the ground.

In the sky above, the second machine pulled up from its long dive, then flew past us, continuing its journey like nothing had happened below. The little girl’s hair kept flowing, just like a dark river, and I saw her waving back at us until she faded away.

The bird began to bury the spider beneath the skulls while the rescued first little girl kissed Gavin.

“My hero,” she said worshipfully, clinging to him.

Then it was as if all of it—the girl, the bird, the cacti, and the skull-sand—had never existed. Just Gavin in a red, empty space. Just me, still on the ground, unable to move.

And then footsteps that thudded like a reanimated corpse’s.

It took a few dream seconds, but I looked over my shoulder to see who’d arrived. Elizabeth?

She was naked except for the bloody white scarf tied over her eyes, blinding her. Worst of all, her limbs were attached by large, thready stitches, like someone had tried to put her back together after her killer had dismembered her.

She didn’t say a word to us, only shaking her head in sad pity.

From somewhere, the sound of a muffled bell shook me, and when I looked at Gavin, he wasn’t next to me anymore. I should’ve known that was the end of the dream, even before my body got yanked once, twice, and then I flew backward, out of the red land, through the darkness, back to Gavin’s bedroom.

Expelled, I skittered over the carpet, leeched of energy.

Before looking anywhere else, I spied a wall socket, and I began moving toward it so I could stick myself into it for a rush of energy. The hallucination, the dream, the residual effects from the dark spirit had done their work on me, even with my power-line fill-up.

Behind me, Gavin’s voice came, wide awake. No fear. No energy I could take from him to make me feel better.

“You came back,” he said, almost regretfully. “You really should’ve stayed away from this place.”

I could barely look at him, but when I did, I saw a man sitting up on his bed, forearms braced on his thighs, his hair bed-ruffled. He had a longing on his face I didn’t understand.