25. DREAM COME TRUE
LEESA AWOKE IN A COLD SWEAT. She had just suffered another one of those powerful, all too realistic dreams. This time, she could only recall the final image, but that haunting vision was more than enough. She had seen a teenage girl standing outside a window peering in. Her hair was long and lank, her eyes wide but lifeless, her mouth hanging slightly open. Everything was dark behind her, but the light coming from inside the window partially illuminated her face. The total effect was one of longing, sorrow and terrible suffering.
It was a horrifying image, one Leesa wished she could wipe from her memory. But no matter how hard she tried, the picture remained clear as a photograph. The girl’s face seemed to be seared onto her retinas.
Unable to make the image go away, Leesa changed her focus, struggling instead to recall details from the dream. Who was this girl and where had she come from? What horrors had she suffered to make her look the way she did? And why had she appeared in Leesa’s dream in the first place?
No answers came. The first part of the dream remained as elusive as the girl’s despondent face was persistent.
Frustrated, Leesa sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. The dorm was silent. A glance at her clock told her it was only 4:35. Out from under the covers, she felt the chill of the room enfold her. Enough light leaked in from the night outside for her to make out the dark outlines of her furniture. She got up and grabbed a terrycloth robe from her closet and slipped her feet into a pair of fleece-lined moccasins.
Warmer now, she crossed to the sink and splashed cold water onto her face, rinsing away a film of dried sweat and hoping that becoming more fully awake would make the image go away. The sweat disappeared quickly; the distressing image of the girl’s face remained.
Leesa was in no hurry to go back to bed—she doubted she would be able to fall asleep even if she tried. Instead, she crossed carefully to her desk and sat down. Usually, she did not mind the dark, but tonight the dimness seemed especially oppressive, so she switched on her desk lamp.
This was the third one of these strange dreams to assault her sleep. People said things often came in threes—she hoped it was true, for that would mean this was the last one. She doubted she would be so lucky, though. Where were the dreams coming from, she wondered? She’d never had nightmares before, though if anyone had reason to suffer from them it was her, with her mom’s story of the one-fanged vampire and her dad abandoning the family when she was so young. Growing up, she had dreamed, of course, and some of them were scary. Every kid had scary dreams now and then, and she was no different. None of those dreams had been anything like these three—not even close.
She asked herself the same questions she had asked after the first two dreams, and got the same frustrating lack of answers. There was nothing she could point to that might have caused the nightmares, no precipitating event she could recall. They seemed to spring up out of nowhere, for no rhyme or reason, but a part of her knew that could not be true. Nothing so powerful and realistic could spring out of nothingness. There had to be some reason, some cause—she just could not find it.
Two days later, Leesa stared at her television in astonishment and dismay.
Things had been going smoothly these first few days back at school. Her classes were good—no more physics, thank god. None of her choices this semester were going to be as much fun as Vampire Science, but her second psychology class looked like it would be as interesting as the first one, and since she had always liked history, she expected her American History class to be good as well. Sociology promised to be okay, as did part two of the required English literature series, which ran from 1900 to the present. There was even an Anne Rice book on the reading list. Chemistry would be her hardest class, but there was no way it could be as difficult as physics.
Her professors had taken it easy on the students this first week, assigning minimal homework as the kids recovered from their vacation and got back into the swing of school. Leesa had spent the last couple evenings hanging out with Cali, Caitlin and Stacie, having fun and swapping stories from Christmas break. Caitlin sported a blue rubber sleeve on her right elbow, courtesy of a slip on the ice back in New Jersey, so when Guitar Hero came out, she could only watch and cheer. And sing along to the music, of course.
Tonight, though, Leesa was alone. She had planned on going down to see her friends a bit later, but right now, she was in her room, doing some reading for history. The television was turned to the news, providing background noise and distraction. Ten minutes into the show, a story caught her attention. It was the words “dead daughter” that pulled her from her reading. She closed her book and listened as a reporter in New Orleans interviewed the parents of a seventeen-year-old girl who had died in a car accident a few months ago.
The mother was crying, while the father recounted how they both swore they had seen their daughter standing outside their window the night before, peering in at them. The tale of distraught parents imagining they had seen their dead daughter, as heartbreaking as it was, would not have been newsworthy, especially on a national level, except for one thing. When the police went to the girl’s gravesite the next day, they found the plot dug up and the casket open. The girl’s body was still inside, but no one had any explanation for why it had been unearthed, or by whom.
What caused Leesa to cringe in horror was not the desecration of the grave, however. It was the picture of her daughter the mom tearfully displayed to the reporter—the daughter looked an awful lot like the girl Leesa had seen in her dream just two nights before!
The television switched to a car commercial, but Leesa’s eyes remain fixed on the screen. She was not seeing the commercial, though. She was once again seeing the haunted face of the girl from her dream.
Leesa’s fingers danced furiously in her hair. What on earth was going on? This was the second time one of her dreams had seemed to come at least partially to pass, and both had to do with dead people. Were her dreams really seeing into the future? How was that possible? And why did two of them have to do with dead people coming back to life? If she had dreamed of people turning into vampires, that she could understand—she had been bitten by one of the creatures, after all. But corpses rising from their graves and wandering around made no sense.
There was one thing that troubled her even more than the dreams of reanimated corpses, and that was the third dream, the one where a girl was chained to a wall by a vampire—a girl she had come tantalizingly close to recognizing, but just hadn’t been able to see clearly enough. What if that dream were to come true? What if, like the other two, it already had? And who was the poor girl? Was there anything Leesa could do to save her? She had plenty of questions, but no answers.
A sudden, terrifying thought struck her. What if she was not just seeing things in her dreams that were coming to pass, but somehow was causing these events to occur? She immediately tried to banish the thought from her brain. No way could she be making these things happen. The idea was ridiculous, impossible—wasn’t it? But was it any more unbelievable and impossible than seeing into the future, or visualizing events she had no knowledge of? It was all crazy. There was only one thing she was sure of—something incomprehensible was happening with her dreams.
If this kept up, she would soon be afraid to close her eyes at night.