Kerry Schafer - Wakeworld

He found aspirin in the medicine cabinet. Ran water into a tumbler. Swallowed. Swallowed again and again to keep it down.

His eyes managed to focus long enough to read the clock. Half past nine. He was going to be late. He was never late. Which meant calling in with some sort of an excuse—stuck in traffic, something. His cell phone was in the pocket of the pants crumpled on the floor. His head pounded with a whole new intensity as he bent to retrieve it. There was another object in the pocket.

Small, square box. Velvet.

Memories swarmed in without restraint, firing every neuron in his brain at once. Vivian had rejected him, turned down a diamond worth ten thousand dollars. After which he had dreamed strange dreams of acts far beyond the reaches of the law, so real they lingered on his skin weeks later. Insanity might start this way. A confusion between the dream and the reality, the two shifting places so that the real became the dream and the other way around. Maybe he had done it after all: had forced himself on the woman he loved, beaten her, been complicit in feeding living humans to dragons.

That thought dragged him back from the rabbit hole. Whatever sort of mumbo jumbo philosophers and physicists might bandy about, there was no way that dragons were real.

Feeling marginally better, he showered and dressed casually in slacks and a sport jacket, skipping the badly needed shave. If TV ads meant anything, the unshaven look was a thing; he’d pretend to have done it on purpose. And when he arrived at the office he would claim illness, make a point of how dutiful it was for him to show up while obviously ravaged by some vicious flu.

Head still throbbing but slightly subdued by the aspirin, he put on his shoes and walked out into the hall, where he froze, taking in the unexpected.

Vivian stood in the middle of his living space. Everything about her was unchanged: the auburn hair curling over her shoulders, the jeans and T-shirt he could never break her of wearing, the serious, listening look on her face that had drawn him to her the first time they met.

Only her eyes were different, glowing amber as if lit with an inner flame, and she was not alone. A tall man leaned against the door frame, watching, waiting. Jared had seen that face before, waking and dreaming. He felt the walls of his own house pressing in, his breath suddenly loud in his throat. He swallowed, hard, finding his voice with difficulty.

“So I was right. You do have a lover.”

Neither one of his guests responded to the barb. They didn’t flush or fidget or look at each other. They just waited. Uneasiness grew; his stomach churned and the pounding in his head intensified. This was not a social call.

Breaking a silence that seemed to span a lifetime, he shifted his gaze to Vivian. “You might have knocked.”

“But I still had a key. This just seemed easier.” She crossed the room to stand facing him, no more than an arm’s length away. Once he would have reached out and touched her; now there might as well have been a million miles between them.

Her eyes were all wrong. They had been gray, a little uncertain, changeable like smoke or mist. Now they were hawk eyes, golden and fierce. He knew full well that it was impossible to read somebody’s mind, and yet he felt that she could see deeply into him, past all the carefully cultivated layers of civility to the inner self that he kept under lock and key. Unable to sustain her gaze he looked down, only to see that the eyes were not the only change. An intricate tattoo marked the skin at the base of her throat and onto her shoulder.

Almost like lace. Or scales. He shivered as he slid into a memory that raised the fine hairs on the back of his neck, tightened his belly, turned his heart into a trip hammer.

Vivian, chained to a stone. She was dressed in a flowing white gown, her hair loose on her shoulders. A dragon stood facing her, its teeth stained red with the blood of other humans recently consumed. And then the unthinkable: Vivian shifted, changed . . .

“Jared. Look at me.”

Vivian’s voice. Vivian here, in his house, and not in some dream where she had turned into a dragon. He obeyed the command. She was very pale, and he saw now that her hands were shaking. Those eyes were a torment, but the words that followed were worse.

“Do you remember what you did to me? Do you know?”

He shook his head in denial, looking away from the disconcerting eyes only to catch the stare of the man who now stood only a pace away. Jared had reason to know that those hands, though they might look easy and relaxed, were capable of swift and lethal violence. He swallowed hard as his stomach rose in rebellion.

“What do you want?” he said, shifting away from both of them. “I need to go to work.”

“You’re not going to work today,” Vivian said. “We need some help.”

Her words loosened his tongue, heating his blood to anger. “Why should I help you with anything?” But even as he said the words, he felt the guilt run through him like a poison. In that dream, where the dragon had been about to consume her, he had been complicit. And there was the other thing that he had done. Still, the jealousy boiled. “If you wanted something from me, you should have come without your boy toy.”

“His name is Zee.”

“We’ve met. I have no idea what you think I can do for you.”

“We’re interested in your dreams,” Zee said. “Maybe you remember something about a Key.”

“I don’t—I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He tried to push past Vivian, but Zee blocked his path.

“You need to leave my house.”

“I think you do know something about the Key, Jared. All you need to do is tell me where it is.”

“I’m calling the cops.” Jared pulled out his cell phone, but Zee knocked it from his hand, casually, like a cat batting at a piece of string, and sent it sailing across the room.

“It doesn’t really look like a key. More like a cylinder, made out of black stone.” Vivian was no longer shaking. The golden eyes burned, for all the world as though there were flames behind them. The pattern on her neck had darkened and spread down her arms and onto the backs of her hands.

Panic built inside him. They were here to kill him. In the dream they were both killers, and now they had come to exact revenge for the crimes he had committed. In a dream.

Vivian put her hand on his arm, her face puckering as though there were something slimy on his sleeve. “Let’s go.”

“Go where?” The panic was alive now, beating at him, and he tried to twist away from her but Zee was right there, blocking him.

A door appeared where no door should be, right in the middle of the sitting room. It was green, with a brass knob. For one thing, he would never have such a plebeian-looking thing in his house. For another, it hung in the middle of the air, not connected to anything.

But Vivian opened it with her free hand, and through it he saw not the couch and the other side of his sitting room, but a thick forest with old-growth trees.

“You’re going to show us what your dream self did with the Key,” Zee said.

Jared wanted to say that he didn’t know what they were talking about but didn’t trust himself to speak, let alone to formulate a believable lie. Because everything they said was true. The minute that strange door opened, the dream memories seemed more real than this scenario playing out in his living room.

And if those dream memories were true, if what he’d written off as nightmare was real, then he was in the sort of trouble from which there would be no coming back.

Zee wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting to find on the other side of the door, but it wasn’t this. The part with the trees was all right, even vaguely familiar. What was unexpected was the sudden weight of memory that didn’t belong to him.