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Liandra opened the door and walked into the front hallway of her house. She was bone tired after a long day of school, made worse by the fact that she’d barely caught a wink of sleep last night. It had been a week since her hallucination and hospitalization, and just as she feared, her nightmares had come every night since then with no sign of improvement.
She quickly removed her coat and hung it on the coat hanger by the door. As soon as she closed the door behind her, she heard her mother’s voice calling out to her.
“Liandra, we’re in the dining room. Come in here, dove.”
She walked down the hall, past the living room and through the kitchen to get to the dining room. She found her parents sitting at the dining room table with a strange-looking man. Liandra connected eyes with him as soon as she entered. His eyes were dark blue and held a predatory sharpness to them, like the eyes of a hungry salesman. She distrusted him on sight. He was already grinning like he held some sort of secret. That made her distrust him even more. She decided to continue standing.
She broke her overtly suspicious gaze on the man to talk to her parents.
“Hey, Mum, Dad. What’s going on?”
“Well, dove, your father’s taken it upon himself to get some additional help for your night terrors. This man here is Richard Roocean. He’s a dream interpretation specialist.”
The man laughed and ran his index finger along his thin mistletoe mustache, and then lightly twisted and untwisted it at the end with his thumb and index finger.
Hideous gesture, Liandra thought.
“That’s a rather fancy and technical title you’ve given me, Mrs. Keyrouz. I prefer to be styled an expert dream reader, but beggars can’t be choosers.”
The man was right, he did look like a beggar, or at the very least a crazy person with all the cheap trinkets he wore on his fingers, wrists, and neck. His hair was deep black and slicked back into a ponytail, and his beard was cut into a thin anchor near his chin. From his seated position, Liandra could see that he was wearing a black vest under some type of multi-colored shawl or poncho with deep purple, fuchsia, and blue floral looking designs on it. He was wearing a scarf with the same colors, but a different striped pattern over the very top of his forehead to the middle of his head.
“I’ll consider that next time, Mr. Roocean,” her mother said, smiling at the charlatan.
“Oh, that’s too formal. Just call me Richard.”
“Okay, Richard. This is my daughter Liandra, who I’ve told you about.”
“Yes, of course. How goes it, Liandra?”
Liandra couldn’t bring herself to be rude to this man right away—like she wanted to. She opted for pleasantry instead, for now at least.
“It goes well, I suppose. Thanks for asking, and it’s nice to meet you.”
He repeatedly twisted and untwisted his mustache.
“That’s nice of you to say, but we both know that you don’t really feel this way, now do you?”
Her parents stared at him with wide eyes, both blatantly surprised. Liandra contemplated him the same as before.
“Come again?” she asked.
“You don’t really think that it’s nice to meet me,” he said smiling.
Liandra let his question linger in the air for a bit, before deciding on her answer. If the man wanted honesty, he’d get it.
“That’s right. I’ve had plenty of doctors, therapists, and other specialists try to fix my little problem and they’ve solved very little. So, there’s nothing you can do at this point besides taking my parents’ money and getting their hopes up.”
Her parents both looked at her as if she’d let off a bomb. She couldn’t stand that they were even entertaining this lunacy. She couldn’t direct her anger at them since they were just desperate to help her, but this sham in front of her deserved every spiteful word.
“Of course, you care about your parents. Who wouldn’t? But we’re all here right now to help you. They’ve taken extreme measures in hiring a guy like me, with the reputation that I have. I don’t take that lightly. I already know that I am the last option anyone wants to resort to because I specialize in an unknown craft, a craft not yet properly dissected by science. I’m only here because all the sane alternatives have failed. But I can tell you this—there’s a reason why I get any business at all. It’s because I get results. I am the right person to help you. You see, I figure there is something buried deep within inside of you that’s screaming to get out, to be known. It’s something that all these doctors overlook every time because they lack the training and foresight into these matters. They read the dreams as they want them to be, not as they really are. Your dreams, I imagine, will tell all if we read them right. But that is nearly impossible without some guidance, and that’s where I come in. I will use my skills to help you decipher your dreams and bring peace to your troubled mind.”
Liandra held his gaze.
“That’s a nice sales pitch, but I don’t see much proof.”
He let out an overacted sigh and looked at her as if she were a little child to whom he had to explain a terribly complex idea.
“I don’t carry any proof with me. I don’t usually need to. I’m not selling anything at all. I’m offering a service.”
She was tired of his lying.
“This isn’t charity work you’re doing. Like the others, you want to be paid.”
Liandra’s parents were looking concerned now.
“That’s enough now, Liandra,” her father said.
“No, it’s fine. I want to put all her questions to rest. Children are highly curious, after all.”
“I’m not a child. I just want to know what makes you think we should pay you for your services. I have no guarantee that this will do anything for me.”
“Yes, you’re right. I’m not a charity worker. The gods have deemed fit to curse us men with bellies, so I have to eat. I use what I know to help me pay my bills and keep me poorly fed. From all that your father has told me, you could really use my help, and I would love to assist for free, but it just isn’t in my best interest. Your parents were generous enough to pay for my flight here. It would be a shame to leave them with nothing.”
“I understand all that. I just want to know that if none of this works, will you refund every last bit of my parents’ money?”
He smiled broadly.
“Oh, I’ll do better than that. Your parents won’t have to pay me until you’ve all seen some real progress. The airfare for the house call might as well be considered a consultation fee. My rate is cheap besides. Just give me a few days to help you fix this. We can begin now actually.”
Liandra was taken aback by that.
“Wait, what?”
“Go on. Tell me about your dream last night.”
“I ... I can’t really remember.”
“Tell me what you can remember. We’ll start from there.”
“I’ve already gone over this with the others. I can never remember any images from these dreams, only feelings. Only a few times have I remembered anything at all when I woke up.”
“Like what?”
“The only things I can remember seeing are some silver chains and a fire, and this black bull with an angry face.”
“That’s the creature that showed up in your hallucination last week. Tell me about it.”
He was beginning to sound like her therapist now. She realized her parents must have told him about the bull.
“There was a dark shadowy face following me around my house last week. It had these angry blue eyes. I knew it wasn’t real, so I just walked past it all night. I didn’t know it was the bull creature from my dreams until it burst into my room screaming at me.”
She decided to take a seat across from him. He asked his next question more softly than the others.
“What was it screaming?” he asked.
“All sorts of nasty things. Mainly angry things. It called me a failure, a traitor, a reject. It said something about punishing me, said I deserved something worse than death.”
Tears fell from her mother’s face, and her father was misting as well. This was her first time explaining the details of her hallucination in front of them. They’d only heard an abridged version before.
“What a foul thing to say, even from a monster. Now, about your dreams, you said your feelings stick with you after. Can you describe these feelings for me? What did you feel after your dreams last night, and how do you normally feel after your dreams?”
“Why do you call these night terrors dreams still? You make them sound pleasant.”
“Ah, well, to me it’s splitting hairs. All of this is a means to an end. By understanding these images and feelings you’ll gain a better understanding of yourself, your past, and for those most attuned, even past lives that they’ve lived. Now ... back to your feelings.”
Liandra pondered that for a while before she continued.
“Well, what I felt last night is what I feel every night. Only one feeling is intensified over another from time to time. There’s always fear, anger, hatred, melancholy, helplessness, betrayal, and fatigue. There’s also this overwhelming feeling of being ensnared and unable to move, like I’m stuck.”
She was surprised she’d told him so much, and so easily too. It had taken her years to tell some of this to her therapist, and she didn’t even tell her everything she’d just told this strange man. He rubbed his chin and stared at her thoughtfully.
“What an awful way to spend your nights! You’ve described these dreadful feelings so clearly that they must be strong. And they persist every night. Your mind must be awfully strong to resist going mad. Older men and women than you have cracked under such a barrage of nightly darkness. I am compelled to help you fix this.”
“So, you’re promising that you can fix this completely? Not just make it a little better like everyone else?”
He didn’t hesitate.
“Yes. I’m saying your nightly terrors and abnormal sleep patterns will be gone once we finish our sessions. For now, we’ll focus on understanding what’s happening inside each and every one of these dreams. We’ll study them one by one to start unraveling what they are trying to convey to you.”
Liandra felt like she needed to test him somehow.
“Well, what can you tell me so far about my dreams?”
“I’m not a psychologist. Images give me more to work with than feelings. I cannot do much more until we get more images out of you.”
“What about the bull-headed beast? Any idea why I saw something like that?”
He looked around the room to each of them briefly.
“Oh, the blue-eyed, black-furred creature that expressed its disappointment in you and its need to punish you? Well, that has to be your mother, of course.”
Liandra looked right at her dark-haired mother and into her now puffy blue eyes and was suddenly worried. A long silence stretched over the room as everyone thought about the implications of that, including her psychologist father. Roocean managed to break the silence nervously.
“Tough crowd tonight. That was just a joke in case you were wondering. I have no clue what that beast currently means in your life since I don’t know you well enough yet. I just know that from your description it looks like your mother, sort of. No offense, Mrs. Keyrouz.”
There was a stretch of silence followed by blank stares all around, which were finally followed by her mother’s giggles.
“No offense taken,” her mother said.
Soon after, the whole family burst into uncontrollable laughter. The audacity and poor timing of this man’s horrible joke had somehow made it funnier, and now the laugh-starved family cherished this moment of brief levity. They hadn’t laughed this hard together in a long time, and that gave Liandra a newfound appreciation for this goofball, even if he was a sham.
