9

The room was darker when I woke up. Veruca must have drawn the curtains shut, because no evidence of the coming full moon penetrated into the room. I sat up, planning on stumbling blindly towards the hotel room’s bathroom. That attempt at motion signaled to me just how much was horribly wrong in the room. I know, after the week I was having, I should have been quicker on the uptake.

Slender arms, not Veruca’s, were clutching at me. The girl on the bed next to me was wide-eyed, the whites of her eyes bright with fear. By their pale light, I could make out a mess of blond curls framing a face too young to be sharing a bed with me. I renewed my efforts to sit up, but the bed under me was unstable. The girl fell into my arms. “Shh, Teddy. If we make noise, he might come back.

My vision flickered, blurred, as if I were looking beyond her for an aura. The world split in two and I was simultaneously a resident of both. In one, the tangible world where a little girl no more than twelve clung to me, I was not a man, but a dark-furred teddy bear with kind, round eyes, a sewn nose, but no mouth. In the other, the world where the bed had shifted and collapsed, I was me, but the bed was a pile of dead bodies. The frame had decayed into skeletons. The box spring was full of feminine corpses in varying stages of decay. All were older than the girl, but most were still younger than me. The mattress was a jumble of teenage beauty queens, all naked, most in the last stages of dying. It might have been easier on me if they had been dead, not gasping with putrid bursts for one last breath. The pillow the bear rested upon was, in this shadow world, a fifteen-year-old red head with a syringe sticking out of her jugular. If she was still alive, I was grateful she wasn’t moving.

I stifled a scream. I sensed that if I did yell, it would mean horrible things for the child who held me. He would return and that would be bad, very bad. I tried to whisper to her, to tell her I would help, that I would get her out of here before the bad man could hurt her again. I couldn’t; the teddy bear had no mouth. I struggled but I couldn’t force out anything through those missing lips. By default, I did what teddy bears do: I held her.

It was a dream, just a dream. If I could just close my eyes and ignore the stench and the writhing, I would wake up in a hotel room in Oklahoma. It was just a dream.

“Not for them, my love. Not for her.” I knew that voice. Somewhere between a dusky soprano and a high alto, hers was meant for romantic suspense on Broadway. Hearing it comforted me, confirmed the dream state, and yet simultaneously made the bed of corpses more solid, more real. Details of the girls’ faces, skin tones, and manner of demise were noticeable now.

I answered in my that-realm voice, where the lips moved…if I could ignore the dying girl’s hair in my mouth. I couldn’t turn my head without breaking the physical link to the motionless teddy bear. “What’s killing them? A serial killer?”

“Criminal neglect,” Dream-Sarai answered. “I need you to listen, my love, my hope. Our time is short.”

I took in a deep breath, pressed the stuffed animal closer to the girl, and closed my eyes. “Hurry.”

“You won’t save them, my love. Maybe you could, but you won’t. You need to save her, though. Whenever you’re distracted, whenever you’re tempted to call it splits, remember the one clutching the teddy bear. Save her and the rest will be avenged at least.”

“It’s just a dream, Sarai. I’m a stuffed animal. How can I save her?” My voice was weak and tired, like I was speaking in the real world, but hearing the faint echoes of it in dreamland.

“It’s real for her, my love. Her father is horribly abusive. Tomorrow, she will run away. The day after and the week after, there is nothing you can do for her. Even the year after, the world will still be a terrible place. But when the time comes, when she holds you again as she clutches you now—save her, save the world.”

“Save the world?” I mumbled, more awake than asleep now.

“Save her. Even if you have to let me go to do it…save her. No matter what Lucien asks of you, no matter how dark and vicious the valley becomes, hold the course. Save her and we can finally rest.”

When I awoke in the hotel room, the moonlight of the midnight hour was softly falling through the curtains. For a moment, I thought I saw Sarai standing there in the pool of silvery light. Then she was gone.

I stumbled into the bathroom. In the dark, I took care of business, then splashed water on my face while trying not to look into the mirror. The dead girls and, worse, the dying might be looking back out at me. On my way back, I checked to make sure the Necronomicon was safely tucked away. It was still in the same drawer, though the Gideon’s Bible had disappeared. I eyed the vile book nervously, half-expecting it to burp out a single corner of a page, like the cartoon cat post-canary.

When I laid back down, a sleeping Veruca draped one arm over my bicep without waking. I had to bite down on my tongue not to scream. It had been a week like that, where even the best things got twisted.