“ This is just the dress rehearsal,” she tells me matter-of-factly, looking up at my face with large bright eyes. “I’ve got to go now, Mister.”
I try to speak as the girl slides off her seat and begins skipping up the aisle, a fogless void enveloping her. Nothing comes out. She disappears.
“ All…Is…Forgiven,” a deep, demonic voice filters into my ears.
I look back to the stage. The hooded figure holds his hand aloft, vermilion streaks dripping down his bare arm. In his hand there is grasped a still-beating heart.
The fog has reached my face. I try to hold my breath, but it slides in anyway. It creeps into my nostrils and into my mouth. It tastes foul.
It continues to rise and now covers my head.
I can hold my breath no longer.
Darkness.
An endless scream.
Once again, I awoke to the sound of my own tortured scream. As Felicity had suspected days ago, the nightmares weren’t going to end until this was over. Not until the real killer was found and stopped.
As neither of us had foreseen, the episodes were growing more intense. Each nightmare was more disturbing than its predecessor-more vivid, more maddening. Each dream was drawing me closer to what could only be an inexorable convergence with the cancerous insanity eating away at the mind of the murderer.
My wife straddled me in the bed, gripping my shoulders and shaking me violently. I continued to scream.
“Rowan!” Her mouth formed the word, my name, but her voice couldn’t penetrate the banshee wail that filled my ears. “ROWAN!”
A stinging sensation suddenly radiated through the side of my face as my head wrenched to the side, and silence faded quickly into the room. It had taken the shock of Felicity’s hand impacting my cheek to awaken me from the pain of the nightmare.
“I’m sorry,” I heard her say, rapt concern flooding her voice.
I pulled her close.
It was my turn to cry.
“How many?” she asked softly after my sobs had waned. “How many of these nightmares have you had?”
“Four,” I choked, pulling back from her and pressing the heels of my palms against my eyes.
“They’re getting worse, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” I affirmed, “they’re getting worse.”
My wife rolled to the side and fluidly got out of bed. She continued to stare at me as she slipped into her bathrobe, her expression rapidly beginning to show irritation on top of the concern.
“Why haven’t you told me about this?” she demanded angrily as she knotted the belt.
“I started to this morning.” I swung my legs over the side of the bed and hauled myself up. “But that media circus was waiting for us, and then everything else…” I let my voice trail off.
“Well, everything else is over,” she flatly rebutted my objection. “We’re going to talk about it now.”
“I’ll be all right,” I protested. “We can talk in the morning.”
She glared back. “Now.”
The tone of her voice told me in no uncertain terms that I shouldn’t argue. I finished pulling myself from the bed and stood shakily, still rubbing my eyes.
“Can I take a shower first?” I queried.
“I’ll be in the kitchen,” she answered.
I felt somewhat better after standing under the cool spray of the shower for a few minutes. At the very least, I was no longer drenched in sweat, and I had stopped shaking for the most part. Felicity was seated at the breakfast nook, cradling a mug of freshly brewed coffee in her hands when I entered. Salinger, Dickens, and Emily lined the wide window sill, staring back at me through slit eyes, ears cocked out to the sides of their heads as if they were three wise, albeit small and furry, prophets.
I pulled down a mug from the cabinet and poured myself a measure of the black caffeine-laden brew.
“Feeling better?” Felicity asked as I poured.
“A little,” I replied and then slid in across from her. I had quickly recorded my latest nightmare in my Book of Shadows before showering, and it was now tucked beneath my arm. I pulled it out and dropped it to the table with an audible smack. The trio of felines followed its course in unison, from my hand to the table, and then looked back at me expectantly. “I’m still feeling rattled though.”
“So you want to fill me in, then?” My wife peered at me over the rim of her cup before taking a sip.
I tapped the bound sheaf of papers that was my dream diary. “I’ve written them all down. The first one was Saturday when I fell asleep on the couch.”
“I remember,” she confirmed.
“I didn’t have one that night though,” I continued. “I guess I was too exhausted.”
“So, is it a recurring nightmare?”
“In some ways I guess it is, but not really.” I thoughtfully fingered the rim of my coffee cup. “Ariel is always in them. She’s always dressed in white lace, and by the end of the nightmare, she’s always dead.”
“That’s pretty straightforward,” Felicity told me, analyzing my words carefully. “Just think about what you’ve seen.”
“It’s bad enough seeing her die over and over,” I outlined. “But she always says something like, ‘Why don’t you stop him?’”
“Subconscious reaction to a feeling of helplessness?” she proffered. “You want to be able to save her, but you can’t. It’s probably your own psyche saying it.”
“That’s what I thought at first too,” I partially agreed. “But there’s too much detail, and the variations in the dreams seem to form a pattern. It’s as if Ariel is trying to tell me something. Like she’s trying to give me clues to the identity of her killer.”
“So you don’t think these are just nightmares then?”
“Not since the third one,” I answered. “They’re just too damn real…And they keep getting more intense.”
“What kind of clues do you think she’s giving you?”
“I’m not exactly sure. One of the things that has recurred in the past two nightmares was the Seven of Pentacles.”
“The tarot card?”
“Yeah. In the third dream anyway.” I flipped through the pages of the Book of Shadows halfway hoping an answer would leap out at me. “Ariel always was fascinated with tarot.”
“What do you think it means?” Felicity queried.
“The inherent meaning of the card is something like hard work and patience brings growth… and something to do with money, if I’m remembering correctly. I was never that interested in the cards.”
“Neither was I,” she echoed then paused. “You said it was a tarot card in the third dream. What was it this time?”
I scribed in the air with my finger while taking a sip of my coffee. “The symbol, from a card, only it was on a pair of tickets and a program.”
“What, like concert tickets or something?”
“Tickets to a play. Or I guess it was a play.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” I sighed. “In this nightmare, I went to what appeared to be a play, but there was this little girl with me. I’m pretty sure she’s Ariel as a child,” I explained. “Anyway, she told me that it was just a dress rehearsal.”
“What was the play about?”
“The murders,” I answered flatly. “The curtain opens up and there are three faceless women on the stage. A strawberry-blonde in the center, a brunette on her left, and a blonde on her right.”
