“Well, the dreams are always different, but—”
“But the woman. She doesn’t change? Her features, her height, her voice—”
He remembered the feeling of pulling her into his arms, the way her head always came up to the same place on his chest, the way she often laughed at the almost comical discrepancy between them. He remembered the vivid gold of her eyes, the way her hair moved and shifted when she tossed back her head to laugh, those rich brown ringlets that never quite fell the same way twice… then he shook his head. “She’s the same person.”
“And where do you meet her? Is it always the same place, like Lana’s dreams about the forest?”
He shook his head. “It changes. It’s as though she’s in control of it… I see her deciding, sometimes, where we’ll go next.”
“Do you ever go anywhere around here?” Cato gestured towards the stone walls around them. “I mean, around the insula here. The forest, the mountaintop, the lake…?” Conrad shook his head, and Cato shot Lana a triumphant glance. “See?”
“What?” Conrad folded his arms, not liking the idea of Lana and Cato having talked about this without him.
“Regular dreams are usually pieced together from stuff that’s familiar to us, would you agree?”
Conrad hesitated. It was true that most of his dreams that didn’t include the golden-eyed woman tended to take place in the Palace. “I suppose so.”
“So what does it mean when your dreaming mind gets this creative? Making up a whole person, as well as a whole world? I’ll tell you,” he said, not giving Conrad a chance to respond. “I don’t think your mind’s making her up at all, Conrad. I think she’s a real person.”
He couldn’t help but laugh at that. “A person who lives in my dreams?”
“No more than the forest lived in my dreams,” Lana said softly. “It was real when I was dreaming about it as well as when I wasn’t.”
“I think you’re visiting her in your dreams, Conrad,” Cato said excitedly. “I think she’s real, and that you’ve built up this relationship through your dreams. And that might mean—”
“Wait,” Conrad said, holding up a hand. “Just—give me a minute to process this absurd idea.”
“It makes sense, Conrad,” Lana said softly, while Cato visibly fought to stop himself from speaking. “Me visiting the forest over and over for years, you visiting this woman… it would explain why she’s been weighing on your mind so much.”
“There’s more,” Cato said, then shut his mouth tightly at the warning look Lana shot him. Conrad sighed.
“Tell me.”
“The way you described the places you go with her,” Lana said carefully, her eyes holding his intently. “The streets, the strange trees, the objects you couldn’t name… it sounds like Earth, Conrad. I think you’ve been visiting a woman from Earth in your dreams.”
He let that idea sink in for a moment, the silence in the room suddenly heavy. Lana had told him all about the strange world she’d come from, farther even than the places Cato had been… but how could it be possible that he’d visited that place when Lana herself hadn’t even been able to find a way back to it? He had a hundred questions, a thousand… but when the silence grew unbearable, he simply chose one at random. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Lana said simply. “Neither does Cato. But… didn’t you say you felt like she was in danger?”
A cold feeling settled into the pit of his stomach. Even knowing she was a dream, he’d felt uneasy about the palpable sense of danger that had been emanating from that thing outside of her house. If what Lana and Cato were saying was even possible—if he’d been meeting with a real woman in his dreams, not simply imagining one—then that meant the danger was real, too.
But how could he protect her when he had no idea how to reach her?
Chapter 5 - Mira
Two days later, Mira’s phone rang again. This time when she looked at the screen, expecting to see yet another unknown number, it was almost a relief to see no number at all… replaced quickly by unease. ‘Private Number’, that was what the screen said. What did that even mean? She let the call ring out before she tried blocking the number, to no avail. And a few minutes later, her phone rang again.
This was somehow worse than the nonstop texts from Eddie. He’d sent a couple more over the last few days, but she’d been hopeful that he was losing interest. Maybe he’d just switched to this new tactic instead. But something kept gnawing at her, telling her that something more sinister was going on… and finally, the tenth time the private number called, she decided impulsively that she wanted answers.
“What do you want?” she demanded as soon as she’d picked up the phone. But there was only silence on the other end of the phone, a long, yawning silence with a faint electrical crackle behind it. Then she heard a click, and the call ended. Somehow, that crackling electronic silence had been even more unsettling than heavy breathing. She spent the rest of the night uneasy, flipping from channel to channel in the hopes that something on TV might take her mind off the uneasy churning in her belly. Nothing did. She didn’t sleep well, either. Ever since the dream in which her blue-eyed suitor had pointed worriedly to the van parked on her street, she’d been sleeping badly. And as much as she’d hoped he might return to comfort her, he was nowhere to be found that night.
The van was still on the street, stubbornly silent. She even went up to look through its windows, emboldened by her growing frustration, but there was no sign of any identifying information in the empty seats… just a neat, well-kept cabin, with a divider that stopped her from seeing into the windowless back section of the van.
Even more bad news was waiting for her at work. One of the girls from reception flagged her down on her way through, telling her that she’d missed a meeting with a client the day before. Mira’s dismay quickly changed to confusion. The day before had been Monday, her admin day—she never met with clients on Mondays, preferring to have the flexibility to work from home. She’d spent the whole day updating her website. But the girl just shrugged.
“They didn’t seem like your regular clients. Maybe they made a mistake.”
Despite her confusion, Mira hesitated before she asked, some part of her worried that she didn’t want to know. “What do you mean, they didn’t seem like my regular clients?”