Peggy Holloway - Judith McCain 05 - Monroe Beach (8 page)

Simon laughed, “What were you hoping to accomplish, Judith?”

“I don’t know really.
I would like to know how he does it though.”

No one said anything until we had our food.
We had all ordered hamburgers and they were delicious. Suddenly Delilah put her burger down, looked out the window and then looked at each of us. She asked Simon to let her out of the booth and she walked outside.

“Is she all right?” Sarah asked as she watched
Delilah pacing up and down the sidewalk outside.

We continued to eat in silence as we watched her and
she finally came back in. “You have to kill him,” she said as she stood over us.

Robert put his sandwich down o
n his plate and wiped his mouth. “Delilah, we have to wait for due process. The DA will ask for the death penalty and I’m sure he’ll be convicted.”

“You don’t understand.
He ain’t like other men. In fact he ain’t a man at all. He is nothing but pure evil. He has to be destroyed. If you keep him locked up, he will get others to do his evil by entering their dreams. And, don’t ask me to explain it but he has a master that he’s obeying, who is more powerful than him. So you have to get him to tell you who he obeys before you kill him.”

What she was saying scared me more than if I had confronted him face to face and I wondered what had happened in her dream with him.

“No one is killing anyone, Delilah,” Robert said as he studied her face.

CHAPTER 16

That night when we got back to our room, and were comfortably propped up in bed, I asked her.
She got tears in her eyes and that surprised me because I had never seen her cry.

“It
were a sexual dream, Judith, and it makes me ashamed because I enjoyed it. And that’s why he has to be destroyed. I’m afraid he will cause me to do something awful. I don’t know why, but every time he has invaded my dream, it’s been sexual. In real life, I would never be attracted to him. I don’t understand it, me.”

“Don’t you think you’ll be all right if we all keep an eye on each other?”

“I don’t know, Judith, I just don’t know, me.”

# # #

I didn’t know what had woken me, but I sat upright in the bed out of a deep sleep. I looked over at Delilah’s bed and it was empty. Looking toward the bathroom door, which was open, the light was on, but she wasn’t there either.

I looked at the clock, two thirty seven
a.m. I threw on my jeans, kept on my pajama top, and didn’t bother with shoes. I called Robert from my cell phone as I ran down on the beach. I was frantic as I looked up and down the beach. Feeling a sense of doom, Running from one end of the beach to the other, I had just gotten even with the hotel when I saw Robert’s car come to a stop in front of the hotel and I ran to them.

“Look,” Robert said and pointed over my shoulder.
Delilah was coming up from the water. She was wearing her nightgown and she was dripping wet. I heard Sarah scream and saw her running from the opposite end of the beach.

Robert intercepted her, “Where did you come from, Sarah?
And what are you doing out here? I left you at home, asleep.”

Sarah fainted. Robert
caught her and picked her up. Simon picked Delilah up, when she got to us, as she fainted too.

We all
ended up in mine and Delilah’s hotel room. Evidently, Delilah and Sarah had had nightmares but I had been sleeping like a baby. We didn’t understand why.

“You’re going to have to keep him awake until he goes to trial,”
Delilah said. “He’s going to make us do things we don’t want to do, and what’s so scary is that someone else is involved, but I don’t know how.”

She looked around
and saw us staring at her and continued, “During the dream state, when you travel, his body is in the cell but his dream self is out there traveling.” She stopped again and looked around at each of us. “What, y’all didn’t know that?”

Robert looked at me, “What do you know about dreams, Judith?”

“Oh, my goodness, I don’t know where to begin. There have been so many books written about dream and so much research. Freud believed that one of the main parts of psychoanalysis was the interpretation of dreams. The main goal was to explore dreams in an attempt to make the unconscious, conscious in order to resolve neurosis. He believed that the unconscious was the seat of neurosis.

“Later, Carl Jung believed that the subconscious was where the healthy part of our psyche dwelled.
Then he talked about what he called the collective subconscious. Oh, shucks, I’m getting bogged down here. Let’s just say that there have been many theories about dreams.

“There was
a woman who did a thirty year study. I wish I could remember her name. She had set up a dream lab inside a cave and studied dream patterns. Her conclusions were that we each have six to seven dreams a night and they last from a few seconds to around an hour.”

Simon interrupted me
. I was glad, because I felt bogged down with information and couldn’t get focused.

“Judith, M
ay I interrupt you here and ask about your experiences in working with people and their dreams.”

“Thanks, Simon for coming to my rescue.
Maybe you can help keep me focused. I’ve worked with kids who were having nightmares. I use what I call directive dreaming. I’ve found that you can actually be the director of your dreams. It takes some practice but it can be done.

“Actually, I have mixed feelings about this technique because I think dreams are important to work through issues at the subconscious level.
Also, you can learn a lot about the issue of inner conflicts from someone’s dreams.

“My repeating dreams I had all of my childhood, and into my teen years, were really memories of being kidnapped at age three and my sister Julia had the same repeating dream because we
were kidnapped at the same time. She had the same memories.”

Robert cleared his throat, “Judith, bottom line, do you think it’s possible to enter someone else’
s dreams?”

“I really can’t say.
I’ve never run across it in all the dream work I’ve done with patients.”

Delilah
had been sitting quietly, listening to me and she finally spoke up.

“I know I ain’t got your education, me.
But I’ve seen some things and I have run across this here before and I ain’t lying. I’m goin to tell you something I witnessed with my own eyes.

“Down there in the bayous in Louisiana
a lot of strange things happen. You all heard about Voo Doo. Well there was this young girl who we believed was possessed. She didn’t practice Voo Doo, no. But she had been raised by two bootleg uncles and they was all three a little strange. We always suspected that they practiced incest.

“When she got into high school
, some of the girls in her class started making fun of her and accusing her of having sex with her uncles. The boys all wanted to date her because they thought she was an easy lay.

“Outwardly she
was very shy and seemed to tolerate all the torture, by her classmates, but all of a sudden, some of these teens started killing each other. They arrested the killers and they all claimed that they had been ordered to kill in their dreams.

“All of them claimed that this young girl had demanded that they either do these killings or die themselves.
They believed it because a few weeks before this started, a sixteen year old boy died in his sleep and they never found anything wrong with him.”

We waited but she appeared to be finished with her story.
Simon laid his hand on her arm and she looked into his eyes. He didn’t ask her what happened but he seemed to have the answer. “Don’t worry, honey,” He said. “I understand what you had to do.”

Neither one of them said any more.
I guessed that she must have killed the girl herself. I wanted to ask some questions but I knew Simon and Robert didn’t want what happened said out loud. If they didn’t know, then they wouldn’t have to arrest her.

Sarah had been listening but
hadn’t said anything until now. “I had this sudden urge tonight to go down on the beach but I didn’t know why. I kept dreaming I was on the beach and, the next thing I knew, I was on the beach. It scared me so badly and I screamed and now I’m here.”

“And I had been dreaming of swimming and I don’t even know how to swim.
I never learned,” Delilah said. “Next thing I know I’m out in the water fighting the waves. I thought I was going to drown or freeze to death, me.”

Robert let out a long breath.
“So, it’s a warning from Randy or whoever the hell he is. But what I can’t figure out is why you slept well yourself, Judith.”

“I was wondering the same thing and a
lso wandering why he didn’t come into your dreams and get you to open the cell door. Wouldn’t that make more sense?”

Then I thought about Jupiter and how she played games with me and about the sociopathic personality part of her that enjoyed manipulation.

“It’s a game to him,” I said. “It’s like a cat playing with a mouse before killing it and devouring it.”

CHAPTER 17

My cell phone woke me up and I felt like I had just gone to sleep.
I looked at the clock. It was 7:27 a.m. We had talked until almost four thirty a.m., but things were still unresolved when Sarah, Robert, and Simon went home.

I picked up the cell phone and went into the bathroom so I wouldn’t wake up
Delilah, but I saw her stirring in the next bed. The caller ID said the call was from Julia.

“Hello,” I said as I eased the door closed.

“Judith, oh God, Judith, what’s happening to me?”

“What’s wrong, Honey?”
My heart had picked up speed. Julia had been through so much and I dreaded what was coming.

“I woke up this morning with paint all over me
. I went into my studio and found a painting on my easel. It was a portrait of a weird looking man, an albino looking man with pink eyes. I must have painted it in my sleep. All my brushes are ruined. Paint has already started drying in them.”

“J
ulia, don’t worry about your brushes. They can be replaced. Where is Walter, he’s not there with you?”

“He is at a conference in Boston.
He’ll be coming in around noon and then we’ll be flying out of here to come see you around two.”

“Julia, there’s some weird things going on here and the man you painted is the serial killer they arrested yesterday.
I can’t explain it but he’s capable of getting into people’s dreams and making them do things they don’t want to do. I don’t know if it’s a good idea for you to come here right now.”

“Please, Judith.
I need to be with you, and besides, it doesn’t look like it’s going to matter where I am. He’s already gotten to me here.”

“Okay, are you going to be all right until Walter gets there?”

“Yeah, as long as I know I’ll see you soon. Love you, Judith.”

When I came out of the bathroom,
Delilah was sitting on the side of the bed brushing her hair. “What happened,” she said and I told her.

“I’m going to call Wa
de and see if he’s still coming,” I said.

W
hen I hung up, I said, “Yep, he’s still coming. I made sure I told him I was rooming with you.”

Delilah
laughed, “What, you can’t trust yourself? No one will think less of you if you decide to sleep with Wade. I know you want to.”

“
Delilah!” I was so surprised.

She had never tried to intrude
into my private life before. I was kind of flattered too because I felt like it meant we were getting closer. I had always admired her, from the moment I met her, when I was fifteen, and she seemed to have so much insight into what was going on with me.

Now she laughed again and I joined in.
For some reason we both went into hysterics. Maybe we needed it.

CHAPTER 18

We met up with the other three for breakfast and Simon slid into the bo
oth next to Delilah. I saw him take her hand under the table. I was thinking that maybe she wanted me to take another room so she and Simon could share our room. That made me smile to myself. Delilah looked at me and winked and I got the feeling she knew what I was thinking.

I was thinking about Wade
and realized Robert was talking. “…so I thought we’d do that. What do y’all think?”

He saw my puzzled look and laughed, “Where were you just now, Judith?
What I was suggesting was that we all share a house together until Randy the freak is picked up by the FBI on Monday. I have a friend who owns a big house just outside of town. It’s not on the beach but it has, I believe, about seven bedrooms.