I barely caught a glance of their features. One was a guy who appeared to be close to my age. He had long, black hair that went past his shoulders and hung over his ears but was free from his forehead, and green eyes with irises nearly unperceivable from his pupils in the low light. The other was a girl shorter than me, but I didn’t get to see her face before I turned, pressing something in the wall with my palm.
Immediately, a massive wall began to move across heavy railings, closing over the doorway and sealing flat, now making it appear like there was no opening at all.
“Hurry!” the girl said. Then I was running again. We had exited into a room with a low ceiling, only a few inches higher than my head—if I’d been claustrophobic I might have been petrified. We dashed up a set of stairs and around a corner that my subconscious didn’t even take the time to illustrate, and shot though another door into the cold night.
There was a vintage Oldsmobile waiting under the moonlight outside, and I leapt into the driver’s seat. I turned the key in the ignition without hesitation. It rumbled to life, the old radio bursting out music as it did, and we roared away without taking a second to turn the sound off.
My heart raced even though I still had no control over anything that was happening. My clothing felt odd: the design of my shirt was old, my jacket stitched tighter than I was accustomed to. On my right hand was a silver ring that glimmered in the lamps that hung outside of the buildings’ doors. We shot out of the alley and into a giant parking lot surrounded by buildings and a chain-link fence, racing toward an opening on the other side.
But suddenly from all directions, a multitude of other cars appeared, and my foot slammed on the brakes. Tires squealed as the cars blocked our escape. But my dream self wasn’t giving up, switching gears into reverse and pulling around the other way, only to find that we were trapped in a corner.
None of the cars moved, no doors popped open. I switched gears but saw that I was boxed in no matter which way I turned. There was nowhere to go.
I turned my head to look at the girl who was in the passenger seat, as she searched our surroundings for a way out. But there wasn’t any. So she turned to me, and for the first time I saw her face.
I had seen her before.
But where? It was like time had slowed to nothing. The dark hair, the blue eyes… Somehow I knew her eyes microscopically well, down to every fleck and line in her iris. I always remembered a pair of eyes.
Callista.
She didn’t say anything. She only stared deep into me as if she could read my thoughts.
I heard doors popping open from the cars outside our windows, men in suits emerging. The song continued to play. None of us moved.
A man appeared through the front window of the car, unhesitating steps as he moved to stand an inch from the center of the hood. He was thin and tall and wearing a long coat with no tie, arms nearly enveloped in his sleeves, his breath blowing mist. His chin was sharp and his gray eyes studied us through the window—no smile, just a dry and dutiful stare. His eyebrows were completely white in contrast to his deeply black hair. He held a pistol with a long barrel, which he lifted with no emotion and pointed straight at the side of my head. On one of the fingers he had wrapped around the gun’s handle, he wore a red metal ring.
All of this had faded into the background. I was unable to tear myself from my deep entrenchment in Callista’s merciless gaze.
A burst of noise.
A vicious crack.
A shattering of glass.
My bedroom ceiling fan whirred above my head like a cage of hornets was caught in its motor. I found myself staring at the fan blades going around and around before my eyes had fully focused on them, hypnotizing me as I lay motionless in wide-eyed terror, my bed drenched in sweat. The heavy click of the gun would not leave the recesses of my eardrums, even though it—and the stairs, the car, the girl—had never been real at all.
I was scratching my hand furiously so I forced myself to stop, trying to slow my breathing before I hyperventilated. The darkness of night still surrounded me. I managed to turn my head to look at the alarm clock. 5:31 AM. Far too many hours until morning.
Again, I had to stop myself from scratching my hand. The sweat was causing me to itch all over, and this only added to my growing misery as I forced myself to sit up.
This is your own fault, I told myself. It was because I’d spent so much time concentrating on her picture before falling asleep. There is nothing more to the dream than what was caught in my subconscious.
Yet I’d dreamed of running again, for a second time. Now I’d been running with the girl I’d never met—who was dead—and a boy I’d never seen before in my life. I couldn’t make the horrible images in my head disappear.
“Crazy dream,” I hissed to myself, standing up but refusing to turn on a light. I wiped my forehead with the back of my arm, hair damp. When I couldn’t take the ferocious itching any longer, I walked quietly down the hall to the bathroom, closing the door so I wouldn’t wake anyone as I switched on the dim shower light.
I went to the sink and tossed a rag into it, wiping my wearied face with the cool water. It was such a relief against the heat. I held the rag up against my neck.
I dropped it in fright.
In the reflection of the mirror, I saw that the black birthmark on my right hand was now surrounded by red. The line was still dark but now swelled to the size of my knuckle, and the skin surrounding it was vibrantly inflamed worse than any rash I’d ever seen.
Startled, I touched my birthmark, drawing my hand back at the sting. The skin was hard. I scrambled to turn the water on and ran my finger under the cold, but it didn’t help.
What is happening to me…? I thought, breathless. Poison ivy? Something that’d been in the work gloves I’d gotten from Spud’s truck? That was all I needed, something else to add on top of the gloom of this week. I rubbed the mark, struggling to numb it.
The burning!
I ground my teeth together, fighting back a sharp scream as it struggled to exit. A massive tremor of pain shook throughout me, heat seeming to radiate from the spot I had touched. The skin had come loose, sliding, peeling…
My eyes had closed in the grimace but I forced them open, breathing heavily, looking down. Between my own two fingers, stuck to their tips by my own blood, was a thin strip of my skin that had fallen off.
From my birthmark, a trickle of liquid started to run down my hand, staining the white porcelain of the sink with red.
I found gauze in the cabinet above the toilet, wrapping it so tightly around my finger that it forced the flow of blood to stop and hid the wretched sight. The spot of skin looked mangled like a burn victim’s, so I covered my entire hand in ointment to be safe, making me wince even more. My finger continued to throb. I scrubbed the sink until it was clean again, and hid the rag in the trash under a wad of tissues.
I didn’t sleep any more that night, mulling over the most horrible thoughts I could collect under the watchful eyes of the photographs on my walls. Maybe the briefcase had been booby-trapped with a chemical defense, and somehow I’d caught a skin-degenerating disease. Now there was nothing too supernatural, nothing too otherworldly that I could simply dismiss as impossible.