“Come on, girls. Let’s go to bed.”
She was about to bend down to pick them both up when she saw that the red light on her combo phone/answering machine hanging on the wall was still blinking. She had erased the message from Dougie earlier, which meant this had to be new. She didn’t know that many people, and it was too late for work to be calling.
Unless maybe it was Susie wanting to talk about what had happened or Kevin, the coffeehouse’s manager, checking in to see what exactly had gone on that night. Susie had called him right after she’d called the police.
Cass hit the button, heard the soft dulcet voice inform her that she had one new message, listened to the beep, and waited.
She hit the erase button before he could finish. She didn’t have to listen to the rest of the message to know what he was going to say. She’d heard the same song often enough before, which had been her reason for not giving him her new number. Not that it had worked…obviously.
And the fact that he had called after 1:00 a.m. was no surprise. Once Leonard Farver struck upon a new idea or found a new candidate to research, he could be relentless. She knew that from experience.
She waited for the guilt that usually surfaced anytime she blew him off, but this time she felt nothing. Exhaustion trumped guilt every time.
She made her way down the short hallway and let herself fall face forward into the double bed that took up most of the room. She could have gone with a twin bed and added a vanity or dresser, but the cats slept with her and they needed their space, too.
Bone-weary, Cass considered crashing in what she was wearing, but knew the discomfort of her bra would only wake her up later. Sitting up, she shucked off the shirt, toed off her sneakers and kicked out of her pants. Then sighed blissfully when she unhooked and discarded her bra. In nothing more than a pair of white panties, she scooted under the covers.
“Spook. Nosey.” She felt one then the other leap onto the bed. One settled by her feet, the other against her side. Their soft purring served as the best kind of lullaby. After what could have been only seconds, she felt her body and her mind drift off to sleep.
Cass dreamed she was at a ball. There were women in gowns and men in tuxedos. A champagne fountain emitted tiny bubbles in the center of the ballroom, and tables laden with all sorts of exotic foods surrounded a large dance floor. And she was on that dance floor, moving, spinning and twirling like a little girl playing Cinderella to the beat of an orchestra that played a waltz.
When Cass glanced down at her feet in amazement, knowing that she had never danced like this before, she saw that she was wearing sneakers instead of glass slippers. Black work sneakers coated with the dust of coffee beans and dry milk. She wore her apron and her green Salvation Army coat.
The ballroom now silent, she stopped, aware that everyone was watching her.
Looking to the side, she saw her grandfather on the edge of the dance floor, shaking his head. She couldn’t decipher his expression; she’d never seen it before.
But she didn’t want to talk to him. Her grandfather was synonymous with betrayal. And worse-guilt. She didn’t want to ever have to talk to him again. She turned to leave, but a gasp from the crowd as Malcolm McDonough walked out onto the dance floor stayed her. It was his party.
She wanted to hide, she wanted to run, but her feet were stuck to the floor.
“Who are you? Why are you here?”
Cass opened her mouth to tell him that his sister had invited her, but before she could get the words out, the ballroom was gone and she found herself alone in an empty white room.
This place she knew. Here, she was comfortable. This is where they came to talk to her. Where she welcomed the dead who wanted to speak.
Cass stared at the door and wondered how she could be here, now, in her sleep. Was it possible that she was preparing to make contact? Part of her mind rejected the idea. The definition of a medium was being in the middle. A conduit between two people, one living and one dead. If the dead were trying to come through, then who did they want to talk to?
Her? In the dream, she’d seen her grandfather. But she’d always been able to block his connection. It had been so long since he tried that she thought he might have given up, if such a thing was possible of the dead.
The door to her room slammed open. Cass struggled to brace herself for the energy to hit her, but the image that was forming beyond the door had her gasping for breath. It wasn’t a man or woman.
It was a monster.
With a piglike snout and horns that burst out through its head, it reared back and shouted with a horrible reverberating baritone voice. It was the size of a man, had a powerful chest and stood on two legs. But hooves replaced hands, and fangs replaced teeth. It shouted again and the sound was as crippling as the pain of impact. In the room, Cass dropped to her knees.
When she looked up, she saw it was moving toward the door. The certainty that if that thing reached the entrance it would do what no one else had done and cross into her room filled her with a strange panic.
Struggling against a lethargy that pulled at her, Cass pushed to her feet and forced herself to move across the empty space. She reached for the door and watched as the thing on the other side stepped closer and closer, the whole time shouting indecipherable words at her. Instinctively, she did the only thing that seemed logical. She shut the door in its face.
As she let out a heavy sigh of relief, the white room faded away.
Cass woke up with a start, clutching the covers to her chest.
Someone had brought a monster from the beyond. Who? How?
The questions assaulted her, as did the essence of danger, which meant she needed to stop for a second and regain her mental balance. Using techniques she’d learned through yoga, she took a cleansing breath in and then let it out slowly.
Cautiously, she sat up in bed, wondering what the physical effects of the strange encounter would be. Although the pain was in her head, her body always manifested physical evidence of the contact. A bruise here or there, a bloody nose. This time the energy that had overwhelmed her had been intense. Her mouth hurt. With her tongue, she stroked her bottom lip. It was swollen as if she’d been hit.
Checking for her cats, who routinely slept at her side, Cass noted their absence. It was morning, early morning based on the hazy quality of light outside her single bedroom window, and earlier than she normally would have awoken. Typically, the girls never left the bed until she did. This morning they were gone. She wondered if she’d thrashed about during the strange dream.
“Spook? Nosey?”
No morning meow to signal they had gone in search of the dry stash that she left out in the kitchen. No galloping feet to suggest they had been caught napping on the new futon during what was supposed to be their nightly vigil. The silence was disconcerting. The memory of what she’d dreamed…experienced…made it that much more unsettling.
Cass rolled out of bed. Dismissing her discomfort, she found a robe in her closet and made her way from the bedroom down the short hallway to the living room.
She found her girls in the foyer, sitting silently, motionlessly, in front of the locked door. As she came to stand behind them, their two heads turned, one clockwise, the other counterclockwise, in her direction.
There was a message conveyed in their feline eyes. Cass thought maybe she was being dramatic, but, after what had happened, she didn’t think so. The lingering sense of evil still shook her, and she knew without a doubt that death waited for her on the other side of the door.
