Before I Wake

Before I Wake

Kathryn Smith

Kathryn Smith

Before I Wake

The Nightmare Chronicles

This book is dedicated to Steve for all his support, love, and hand-holding. And for always saying, “No Sweetie, you don’t suck”

every time I ask.

Also to Nancy and Erika for all the encouragement and support and the “let’s do this” enthusiasm that they both gave this project.

And finally, this book is for my mother—supporter of dreams, banisher of all things scary, and composer of dee-dee-dee songs.

Thanks, Mom.

Contents

“You’re a Nightmare.”

I was thinking about Noah’s dream when I opened the…

I was going to puke.

“You what?” Not my most witty response, but I was…

I slammed back into the real world still screaming.

I went to work Monday morning feeling like my eyes…

He kicked my ass.

I should have simply stuck a fork in my eye…

“No.” I glanced at the gorgeous Nightmare who was watching…

Nancy Leiberman had pills and alcohol in her system, but…

“My place?” Noah’s mouth was so close to my ear…

I froze. The blade in Antwoine’s slightly gnarled hand glinted…

What the hell was I supposed to do with this?

“You called, Little Light?” Karatos drifted up from the depths…

“Move the blade upward, like you’re gutting a fish.” As…

Morpheus fixed Noah’s physical wound within minutes, but it was…

I was late for work. Not by a lot, but…

Were I a normal person, I might have thought I…

At the end of the day, what it came down…

I hated keeping secrets.

My hope was short-lived.

“How much time do we have?” I wanted to have…

Just before sunrise, I felt a familiar tug at my…

“Jesus Christ.”

“Get your sorry butt out of bed. You’re going to…

About the Author

Other Books by Kathryn Smith

Copyright

About the Publisher

“You’re a Nightmare.”

Diet Dr Pepper halfway to my lips I paused, staring at the old man standing beside me at the Duane Reade checkout. My heart nudged hard against my ribs. “Excuse me?”

His face was the color and texture of a worn piece of leather, and his hair was a mass of tight, frizzy gray curls. But his eyes were as sharp as a child’s. “You’re a Nightmare, girl. What’re you doin’ here?”

I glanced around to see if anyone else in the drugstore had heard the old fella’s surprising—and very vocal—accusations. If anyone had, they were pretending they hadn’t.

He was just a crazy old man. No need to panic. No need to do anything. “Sir, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You are not of this plane,” he insisted, doing this weird little stomp with his foot that made me wonder if he had to pee. “You shouldn’t be here.”

I took a step away just in case his bladder gave out. It was instinct, driven by pure self-preservation. One thing living in a city the size of New York teaches you is that some people just don’t have the same boundaries as the rest of us.

Also, he creeped me out.

“Uh, okay. I shouldn’t be here.” I twisted the cap back on to my Dr Pepper as the cashier started scanning my items. Just a few more moments, and I’d be out of there. I should have gone straight home after work, but I needed tampons.

“You do know, don’t you?”

I had hoped that agreeing with him would end the conversation. Apparently, I was wrong. “Know what?”

“What you are.” He was staring at me now with a look of wonder. “Shee—oot. I bet you don’t even know how you got here.”

“I walked.” I would not, however, be walking home. God, I hoped I’d be able to hail a cab pronto once I left the pharmacy. I never wanted to be somewhere else quite so badly in all my life.

He did that foot thing again, only this time his face twisted in annoyance. I took another step away. “I don’t mean here. I mean here. On this earth.”

I swallowed. My throat felt like I’d just swallowed a piece of carpet. “Sir, I was born here. Same as you.” Maybe it was all the years of psychology classes, or maybe it was a little fear, but I needed to bring him back to the real world. This one.

He peered at me—a little too closely for my liking. “You may have been born here, girlie, but you don’t belong. I wonder how you managed to slip through.”

I wanted to get the heck out of there. What the hell was he talking about? “Just luck, I guess.”

He stared at me with eyes that were slightly rheumy, but keen. “Luck, nothing. How old are you?”

“Sir, I’m not going to tell you that.” Next he was going to ask my weight, and I’d have to kill him.

“Twenty-eight.”

His voice rang in my head like a gong. He was right. If I was creeped out before, I was ten times that now. It could have been a lucky guess, but I doubted it.

“You’re mature,” he informed me. “At your full potential. No tellin’ what havoc you might wreak.”

That was it. I threw some money at the clerk. I hadn’t heard the total, so I could only hope it was enough. I grabbed my bag and started for the door, grateful for once that most of my five feet ten inches was leg. The clerk didn’t yell after me, so I assumed I had given her enough to cover my bill.

I miraculously hailed a cab right outside and jumped in. As we drove off, I looked out the window to see the old man standing on the sidewalk near the door, watching me. He was drinking a bottle of Brisk—bought with my change I bet. He waved as the cab pulled away, and he yelled something. I couldn’t quite hear the words, but to my paranoid ears it sounded as though he yelled,

“YOU. DON’T. BELONG.”

I knew I didn’t. The question was, how the hell did he?

I was six years old the first time my mother told me I was a Nightmare. I cried, because I thought she was mad at me. But then she took me up onto her lap and told me I was special because no other child on earth had the King of Dreams for a father. She told me I could dream whatever I wanted, that in my dreams I could do whatever I wanted, and I believed her.

I asked my father what it was like to be the Lord of Dreams. He didn’t know what I was talking about. It was shortly after that I realized he wasn’t my father. My real father was the man who played with me in my dreams, who put a sweet smile on my mother’s face. The man I called Dad looked at me like he didn’t recognize me, and at my mother as though he knew he was losing her to a man with whom he couldn’t compete.

Was it any wonder that I soon found myself preferring the Dream Realm to the real world? Of course there were parts of the Dream Realm—The Dreaming—that my father told me to stay away from. Apparently my uncle Icelus had let some of his

“creations” wander free. Since Icelus’s domain was all things disturbing and frightening, I listened to my father and never ventured outside of his castle, terrified of these monsters and what they might do to me. I already knew to be careful of the eerie mist that surrounded the land.

My childhood seemed normal to me. I was in grade nine before I realized that something wasn’t right. That I wasn’t right. It never occurred to me that I was different, even though my mother told me in so many words. Other people didn’t think of their dreams as being real. Didn’t talk about them as though they were significant.

Jackey Jenkins picked on me mercilessly. She was petite and thin and blond, with a great tan and a perfect wardrobe. I was tall and curvy and so white I looked like Casper. She always raised her hand, and I only spoke when spoken to, and yet in the classes we shared, I made better grades. Looking back, I could say she was jealous. That she resented the fact that she worked so hard for what came easy to me. Despite being her polar opposite, I had good friends, and people tended to like me once they got to know me—especially teachers. Jackey reacted in the only way she could—she made my life hell.

One day I got my period at school. I wasn’t prepared and spent the rest of the morning with a coat tied around my waist. As I was leaving school to go home to change, Jackey yanked up the jacket and showed everyone outside (and you know there had to be a crowd) the back of my jeans. People laughed. Not a lot of them, but some.

I was so mad, so humiliated, tears filled my eyes, which pleased Jackey to no end. I remember telling her that I was going to get her for what she had done.

And I did. It was the great Carrie moment of my life. That night I went into Jackey Jenkins’s dreams, and I tortured her as only one teenage girl can another. It didn’t make her nice to me. It just made her afraid, and I think that made her hate me even more. I didn’t have quite the feeling of satisfaction I thought I should, not when every time I looked at her I could see in Jackey’s expression just what a freak I was.

Shortly after that I heard she was seeing a shrink because she was afraid to go to sleep at night—and she became less and less pretty as the circles beneath her eyes darkened. Eventually I think she recovered, but I didn’t.

Normal people didn’t go into other people’s dreams. Normal people couldn’t. And if they could, they didn’t go about trying to terrify young girls.

I had become one of the monsters my father warned me about.

After that I stopped playing with dreams. I built my own little world that I could go into, and I didn’t let my mother or my father, Morpheus, or anyone else inside. I was going to make myself normal if it killed me.

To say my mother was disappointed was an understatement.

After that, I managed to finish high school without anymore Freddy Kruger-esque behavior, and I went on to university in Toronto and got my PhD in neuropsychology. My grades were well above average, but it was my research on dreams that brought me to the attention of Dr. Phillip Canning—an associate of my mentor’s. Dr. Canning was at the top of his field in sleep research. I had read all of his papers and his books on treating parasomnias and post-traumatic nightmares. You can take the girl out of the Dream Realm, but you can’t take the Dream Realm out of the girl, and all that. I didn’t need all my textbooks to realize that there was a part of me that needed to work in that field.

I needed to help people have a normal night’s sleep—to help them protect themselves from the dangers of a world they thought harmless and “all in their heads.” Weirdly enough, at the same time I needed to deny that world for all I was worth.

Now, here I am a genuine doctor of psychology and a full-time (albeit still plebeian) member of Dr. Canning’s team at the MacCallum Sleep and Dream Research Center in New York City. My two years of proving myself and visa restrictions are almost up, and soon I’ll be able to practice on my own. I do a little bit of everything as low man on the totem pole—clinical and research—but mostly I work in dream analysis and therapy, with heavy emphasis on nightmares.

So much for denial.

When I arrived at the clinic later that morning, Bonnie, the receptionist, informed me in an all-too-smug and knowing manner that,

“He’s heee-rre.”

She sounded way too much like the kid out of the Poltergeist movies. I didn’t have to ask who “he” was, not when Bonnie waggled her finely waxed eyebrows like that. Bonnie was in her midforties and kept herself trim, dressed to the nines and was never seen without lipstick. Add a Brooklyn accent, and it was no wonder I adored her.

I shot her what I hoped was a reproachful look as I hung my coat in the closet and retrieved my lab coat. “You shouldn’t use that tone when talking about a patient.”

“Oh, like you’re not the least bit tingly over seeing him,” she replied, not looking the least bit chastened. “He’s still in the sleep room if you want to peek.” Bonnie didn’t treat me like the senior staff—either because she thought I was a kid, liked me, or because my lab coat was baby pink with rhinestone buttons.

The coat had been a gift from a sweet grandmotherly patient named Irene who thought women should be rosy and sparkly at all times. I’m not sure that I agree, but I have to admit, I felt perky and girly whenever I wore it.

“If you like him so much, Bonnie, maybe you should ask him out.”

“Nah.” She waved a perfectly manicured hand, her long nails blood red as the light bounced off them. “Poor thing, I’d break him.”

I grinned. That was entirely possible. Bonnie wasn’t a big woman, but she certainly had appetites, and apparently the stamina to support them. At thirty, Noah Clarke was obviously too old, and too fragile for her to consider dating.