Midnight Secrets (20 page)

That skull-like head with no eyes
,
watching her.

And
,
just as she had known
,
monsters came out from the walls
,
an army of them.
Bearing guns
,
swords
,
in a killing rage.
They wore black masks and seemed inhuman as they shot and cut their way through the happy throng
,
happy no more.
Trying to flee the monsters.

Men and women
,
shot and stabbed
,
dying.

And still no one heard her scream.
The breath in her lungs wasn’t enough.
The black-suited minions continued killing and killing.
And yet she was spared.

She looked again to the podium and he hadn’t moved.
Dark voids where his eyes should be but somehow she knew he was staring at her
,
watching her as all around her people died.

Then
,
he smiled.
A
horrible rictus of a grin
,
the empty holes where the eyes should be
,
the mouth lifting in an unnaturally wide smile
,
mouth another dark hole.

That horrendous face filled her horizon
,
coming closer
,
ready for the kill
,
closer
,
closer.
Though he hadn’t moved
,
she was suddenly shackled
,
immobilized.
Utter prey as he came closer.

She tried to scream
,
scrabbled with her feet
,
fought for her life...

“Jesus, honey, calm down. It’s a dream.” A deep voice. Calm. She knew that voice. Her nightmares didn’t have voices, nobody spoke. They were like silent movies from hell. No deep, calm voices. Something was stroking her face. “Open your eyes, honey. You were having a bad dream. See for yourself where you are.”

Something that had shackled her released, just as she opened her eyes and saw she was in her bedroom. With Joe. Who was looking calm, but with deep brackets around his mouth. “It’s okay,” he said.

She hadn’t been shackled. Joe had put his arms around her. They were still around her, only not so tightly.

“I’m going to let go of you.” His dark eyes bored into hers. “Do you understand that you were having a nightmare?”

She nodded, throat too tight to talk.

“Good,” he grunted, and stroked her hair.

She was with Joe, in her bedroom. She was safe. It was like something had been squeezing her, stopping her from breathing. Isabel took in a huge wheezing breath. Another.

“That’s right,” Joe said. “That’s my girl. What were you having?”

“Nightmare,” she gasped. “Not real.”

But it had
felt
real. The evil, the killing, the man with empty eyes staring at her—it had all felt as real as anything. Her heart was still triphammering.

“No, not real,” Joe said. “Here.” She always kept a glass of water on her bedside table. He pressed it into her hand and she sipped. “See if you can get it all down,” he urged and she did.

“Better?” Isabel started shaking her head no, when she stopped. Actually, she did feel better. She nodded.

But his face didn’t clear, it still looked tight.

“You scared me.” He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “Scared the shit out of me, as a matter of fact.”

“You should have seen it from my point of view,” she said and gave a little laugh that might have been hysteria.

“No, thanks.” Joe put pillows behind him, sat up and coaxed her to sit between his legs, her back against his chest. He grunted with satisfaction when his arms went around her. She was surrounded by warm, hard man. Warm, hard, reassuring man. “It was bad enough being beside you. I couldn’t get you to wake up. It sounded like someone was torturing you but you were gagged. And your legs were running, like you wanted to run away.”

This,
this
was the reason she hadn’t slept with anyone since the Massacre. The nightmares. It wouldn’t be any fun at all for a man to sleep with someone who went crazy every night. No wonder she hadn’t had a love life. Too scary, too creepy.

“Sorry. I’m so sorry.” Isabel pushed her hair out of her eyes. She felt washed-out, as if she’d run a thousand miles. Maybe she could convince Joe to go back to his house. And then avoid him until he got the message. It was too humiliating for words being exposed like this. What had she looked like while in the nightmare? Not pretty, that would be her guess. She hadn’t been pretty since the Massacre but in the light of day she could at least put up a front. Or if not a brave front, she could at least put on lipstick. But at night, when having nightmares? The rawest part of her was exposed.

Luckily, she wasn’t facing him. She didn’t know if she could face him right now.

Joe’s arms tightened briefly. “Good God, don’t apologize! I was just terrified that I couldn’t wake you up. What was the nightmare? Do you remember?”

“What it always is, the Massacre,” she said wearily, looking down at her hands. He’d clasped them in his warm fists. Where she touched him—all along her back, along the sides of her thighs, her arms and hands—she was warm.

The rest of her was deathly cold.

“The Massacre? In detail?”

“No. And it’s not really the Massacre itself, I shouldn’t have said that. I have retrograde amnesia and my memory so far is not coming back. I don’t have memories of much of anything beyond Friday afternoon, the day before the Massacre. What I’m dreaming of—what’s in the nightmares—is more like—like a metaphor. A metaphor of the Massacre.”

Joe rested his cheek against the top of her head. Her head was now warm, too. “Tell me,” he said gently. “Tell me everything before you forget it. And do you have these nightmares often?”

“Every night,” she blurted, then covered her mouth. She’d wanted to say
never
because only crazy people had constant nightmares. But the truth had simply fallen out of her mouth, like poison her body wanted to expel. “I have them every night. Except last night.” She twisted her head briefly to see if that sparked a smug smile. Fabulous sex that kept the little lady from her nightmares. He could be proud of that.

“I’m glad.” Joe didn’t have a smug smile. He just looked worried. He nudged her with his shoulder. “So, tell me. Is it always the same nightmare?”

Isabel blew out a breath. “This is going to sound weird, possibly cowardly, but I am so terrified when I wake up that my only thought is to get the images out of my head as quickly as possible.”

“That doesn’t sound weird and it sure doesn’t sound cowardly. Do you think you can make an exception now and try to remember instead of trying to forget?”

Now that Joe was with her, now that she was surrounded by him, now that she could feel his steady heartbeat against her back...yes. Having him here made all the difference. Before, all those nights and nights of waking up in terror, cold sweat covering her body, she’d felt absolutely alone. Not just alone in her house but
alone
. The last human in a dark universe populated by monsters.

“Okay.”

Joe’s hands tightened around hers and she realized her hands had been trembling. It gave her a spurt of warmth and energy. No one had held her hands during the night terrors.

“I can tell you about
this
nightmare. The one I just had. I’m in a room. A big room, a room I’ve never seen before. It is filled with people dressed up for an occasion and there is the air of a big party in process. The people are laughing, happy. Waiting for something big.”

“That sounds like the ballroom the night of the Massacre. So you do remember it.”

“No.” Isabel frowned, trying to explain what she barely understood. “My memory of the Massacre, if it ever returns, will be different. Because I’m familiar with the Burrard and I knew a lot of the people there to celebrate—” Her voice wobbled. “To celebrate Dad’s intent to run for the presidency. There would be a lot of the party activists I wouldn’t necessarily know but I’d know a lot of people there, if only fleetingly. Dad’s friends, reporters, donors. There wasn’t anyone I recognized in my nightmare. And there was this air—”

She shivered, looking for the words to describe the horrible feeling of menace.

“Take your time,” Joe murmured.

He was good. She’d been to two shrinks who had tried to lead her through her memories but she had felt pushed, prodded. Joe simply waited to hear what she would say. You’d think soldiers would be restless adrenaline junkies, but Joe was the opposite. He always gave off an air of infinite calm and right now of infinite patience.

“This air of menace. Of great evil. I know that sounds crazy—”

“Evil exists in the world,” Joe said quietly. “I’ve seen it, touched it.”

Yes, he would understand. He had been a soldier in terrible wars. He would understand evil.

“Dark, menacing. Horrible.
Triumphant
. As if it knew something we didn’t. But all these people dancing and laughing and celebrating—they’re clueless. Something truly horrible is about to happen and I am trying to warn everyone, but they’re not listening. They can’t hear me. I want to scream but I can’t. I want to run around but I can’t. I can’t move. It’s horrible.”

“Sleep paralysis,” Joe said. “Glycine and gamma-aminobutyric acid paralyzing the muscles during REM sleep. It’s a self-defense mechanism of the body. Otherwise we’d kill people in our sleep.”

“Awful. Just awful.” Like being trapped. “So no one would listen to me, no one paid me any attention at all, though I knew something horrible was going to happen. They didn’t even pay attention when something horrible
did
happen.” She drew in a deep shuddering breath. “People started dying.”

They were silent. Isabel couldn’t go on and Joe simply wrapped himself more tightly around her, a wall of warm flesh acting as protection.

Finally, Isabel spoke again. The nightmare was starting to lose its contours, fade. She wanted to nail it while she could see some flashes of it. “I was told by police authorities that they used machine guns during the Massacre. They even told me the make and the caliber, though I don’t remember any of that.”

“AK-47s,” Joe said softly. “The weapon of choice of your discerning terrorist.”

Isabel shook. AK-47s had killed her parents, her brothers. Her aunts, uncles, cousins. And hundreds more family friends and supporters of her dad’s policies. She squeezed her eyes tight but one tear seeped out, ran down her cheek.

Joe wiped it away with his thumb. He didn’t apologize for telling her the make of the weapons. Any website would tell her. She’d wiped it from her mind, but the reality didn’t change.

“In my dream they had guns, of all types. And swords. They hacked at people. I saw limbs being sliced off. What I think was a shotgun nearly took off the head of a man standing next to me. I’d been holding his arm, trying to get his attention, when all of a sudden I was covered in blood and brains.”

She twisted again to look at Joe. His face was expressionless but his dark eyes were warm. “None of this is real, though. From what I understand there were no swords. The lights went out immediately anyway and nobody could have seen anything. So it’s a nightmare that comes from my subconscious and not my memory. Do you see the difference?”

He nodded his head slowly.

“And then there was...
him.
”

“Who, Isabel?”

There was only one possible answer to that. An answer that came straight from the bottom of her soul. “Evil. Pure evil. A—a man. On the podium, staring at me. Only I couldn’t see his eyes, they were deep in shadow. And he had a huge mouth, full of teeth. It seemed like he had more teeth than a human should have...”

Isabel shut up. It sounded like she was describing a vampire, not a human. Some supernatural being. It was her subconscious ascribing monstrous qualities to him when the monstrosity was internal, not external.

“Sorry. He was...unsettling. And he smiled as his minions mowed people down. As if he were enjoying it. As if he were on the stage watching something that pleased him. None of the killers had a face, they were like devils, killing and killing. And yet some of the people in that big room still hadn’t understood what was going on, were still laughing and chatting, while others were being killed in the most horrific ways. And I couldn’t get them to listen, to pay attention. To run away. It was as if I were invisible. So I tried to get them to head for the exits but I couldn’t, and I slipped in the blood that was flowing and I tried to run harder...” She buried her face in her heads.

“And then I woke you up,” Joe said gently.

She nodded, her limbs shaking, a huge lump of something sharp in her throat.

Joe pulled the blankets up to cover her shoulders, rocking her gently, as you would a child.

At that moment, Isabel felt like a child. A child who’d seen the boogeyman and was terrified he’d come back.

Joe let her take her time putting herself back together again. He didn’t say anything, he just held her, rocked her. Finally, when she was calm again, he leaned down and spoke in her ear.

“You know, Lauren is a great artist. Do you think you could give her a description of this man, like you would to a police artist?”