Finally, I dismissed the entire process, along with its product, in favor of the infinitely more pleasant nether world between sleep and wakefulness. Judging by the nightmare that followed, I wish I had concentrated on the equation a little harder.
Fear.
Anger.
Fear.
Anger.
Surprise.
“I didn’t expect you to come back.” A man is speaking to me.
We are surrounded by darkness, yet we are awash in an eerie light. A little girl clad in white lace levitates near him. Floating weightless in the air. There is no visible means of support for her tiny body.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” I return, this time my words echo through the air instead of disappearing into nothingness as they had done before.
He is standing no more than twenty feet away from me, dressed in a dark ceremonial robe. The hood is pushed back to reveal his face, and it lay limply across his shoulders.
“I’m not disappointed,” he says. “Just surprised. I don’t know what you think you’re going to do.”
The little girl’s body is drifting about on a gentle breeze, bobbing up and down slightly but never straying far from him.
“Stop you,” I tell him evenly.
“You can’t stop me,” he says. “I told you, she’s The One.”
“Why are you doing this?” I ask.
His only response is a sour, demonic laugh.
I’m falling.
I’m screaming.
Silence.
“Rowan, so nice to see you.” Ariel Tanner is standing before me. Beside her is the same little strawberry- blonde girl holding tightly to her hand.
“Mister, why don’t you stop the bad man?” The little girl looks up at me with wide, sad eyes then turns her gaze to the right.
I follow her eyes, looking far off into the distance. There is a grove of trees surrounding a small clearing. Centered in the clearing is a hooded, robed figure standing with hands raised high. Moonlight glints from an object held in those hands. Moonlight glints from an athame. A ceremonial knife.
A small figure lies prone before the cloaked one. A small figure clad in white lace. Preened and arranged. Unblemished and virginal.
The scene begins to grow increasingly distant as trees erupt from the landscape, obscuring the view as they continued to appear, closer and closer.
Immediately before us, the earth trembles and begins to sink. Almost as quickly as the depression is formed, it is filled with water. The glossy surface ripples in the slight breeze, moonlight reflecting from it in a shimmering stripe.
The ground continues to shake, and another stand of trees erupt skyward. The tall pines form a line before us, now completely obscuring the clearing and all but the smallest glimpses of the shallow lake.
I turn to the little girl. She is pointing at the sign. “What does it say, Mister?”
I look downward, following along her finger to the small white sign. Bold, black, capital letters spell out PLEASE DO NOT FEED GEESE.
“Only you can save her now, Rowan,” Ariel’s lilting voice gently touches my ears.
I turn to her, and she holds forth her hand. In it, a tarot card. A tarot card known as The Moon.
She stiffens and the card flutters from her hand. Her eyes go wide, and blood streaks down the front of her dress.
“Hey, Mister, what time is it?” the little girl is talking to me. “What time is it? Hey, Mister!”
I look up to the glowing marbled disk of the full moon high above. Spinning around its face are the hands of a clock. I watch as the minute hand chases rapidly after the hour hand, overtakes it, then begins the race anew.
“Hey, Mister!” the tiny voice demands. “What time is it?”
Darkness.
A deafening, demonic chord.
The sound of water splashing violently.
I can’t breathe. My lungs are on fire, and the flames are licking up my throat. My chest feels heavy, and there is something tightening about my neck. The atmosphere feels thick and fluid around me. I want to gasp for air, but something is telling me I shouldn’t. My thoughts are beginning to cloud; my mind is turning murky and dark.
I open my eyes, flailing my arms in front of me. I so desperately need air. I need to breathe. The air is thick and murky. It stings. I catch a distorted glimpse, rippling and blurry, of the full moon above. It is all that I can see. All except for one thing-a pair of murderous gray eyes.
My world begins to fade.
Twilight.
An endless scream, “Why, Rowan, why?”
Darkness.
Falling.
Impact.
I was vaguely aware of struggling toward consciousness as my nightmare world sought to meet reality. Something, or someone, wasn’t ready for that however.
Running.
I am running blindly through a forest.
Chased.
Hunted.
The icy snow numbs my frozen feet. I am nude. Nude and streaked with blood. Wounds cover my tortured body.
Fear tears mercilessly at my soul as my labored breaths take in the wintry air, bringing frozen pain to my already frostbitten lungs.
I stop and search franticly for a place to hide. From what, I do not know.
A tortured scream in the night.
Fire.
Fear absolute.
The taste of death.
I am running.
I started to sudden wakefulness, eyes snapping open, and my body feeling as though it had just been soundly pummeled with a two-by-four. Foggy disorientation quickly lifted and was replaced with knotted fear in the pit of my stomach. Fortunately, after a few short moments of deep, labored breathing, I realized that it had only been a nightmare. It was simply yet another terror in the long series of phantasms that had once again begun to plague my sleep in these recent weeks. I thought I had seen the end of them, September last. Apparently, I was mistaken.
It was coming up on six months since my friend and former student of the Wiccan religion, Ariel Tanner, had been hideously tortured and finally, murdered by a sadistic killer. It was also approaching six months since I had stopped that killer from doing the same thing to an innocent little girl for the purpose of a twisted ritual sacrifice. To this day, no one had been able to determine what he had hoped to accomplish; perhaps fortunately, four 9mm slugs had seen to it that we probably never would. What we knew for certain was simply that his deranged mind had pushed him to mutilate, torture, and murder five women. Then, in the name of some perverse evil, kidnap a small child with the intention of doing the same to her. In stopping him, I had almost been separated from my own life that night in Wild Woods Park beneath a full, silver-veined moon. Had it not been for the marksmanship of my friend Benjamin Storm, a Saint Louis city homicide detective, I’m firmly convinced he would have succeeded. Ironically, Ben was the very reason I had become involved in the investigation to start with.
