Opal settled back into the recliner. The room was unlit. Chinks between the boards in the windows glowed faintly like trails of dying embers. But the den was so familiar, she wasn’t afraid to be there. Vera was with her. She could almost pretend they were about to pop a movie in the DVD player and settle down to share a big bowl of buttered popcorn. Only the widescreen television stood as dark as the windows had been before they boarded them up. She told Vera to put a candle on the foldable TV tray beside her.
“I’ll concentrate on the flame. Maybe that will help.”
Vera set the candle down. She went off into the corner and found a purple beanbag chair, which she plopped down near Opal’s feet. She curled into the chair and the foam beads inside crunched like a pile of autumn leaves.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
“I guess so. I spent the last few years trying to stop my visions. I’ve never invited them in.”
“If it looks like you’re in danger, I’ll break the trance ... bring you out.”
Opal nodded. She reclined back as far as the chair would go. Napping position, Wyatt called it. And, as her legs came up and her head went down, her body’s blood flow changed, and she felt the weariness of the unbelievable day running off her like pounds and pounds of loosened sand.
She was exhausted.
Her arms tucked into the armrests.
“Slip my boots off, would you?” Opal said.
“Sure.”
Vera unlaced the boots and slipped them off. She fetched a knitted afghan blanket from atop the cedar chest against the wall and draped it over Opal’s legs and socked feet.
“How is that? Cozy?”
“I might end up falling asleep.”
“You start snoring, I’ll know.”
Opal’s eyelids drooped. She focused on the candle’s flame. Her chin rested against her chest and she took deep breaths through her mouth and let them go slowly. Through the walls she could hear Wyatt and Adam opening their ladder and fitting it into the closet. She told herself not to listen to them. They would take care of each other. She needed to do this experiment for them.
Vera settled into her beanbag.
She was on the edge of Opal’s field of vision. Silent now.
Around Opal domed the candlelight—low and gemlike, the flaming wick bent and danced around its pool of shimmering wax.
She closed her eyes.
After five minutes, she was on the brink of sleep.
Ten minutes later, she felt herself rousing. Impatient, irritated. It was any insomniac’s nightly ritual. The more she tried to relax and think about having the dream vision, the less capable she felt of doing it. The altered state of consciousness evaded her, almost as if it were a willful opponent. An enemy.
Could Whiteside prevent her from seeing him on this other plane?
She didn’t know the answer. It was all such new territory. She didn’t have time to explore it at her leisure. Her muscles were tensing. She could feel her abdomen hardening with stress. And her jaw clamped down, tooth on tooth.
She opened her eyes wide.
Dark room. Candle. Vera sat a few feet away, staring at her intently.
“Is everything alright?”
Opal sighed. “We’re wasting our time here. I think we’d be better off helping Wyatt and Adam in the attic. Actually doing something? Or maybe we should check the back entrance again and make sure ...”
Opal started to get up. But Vera laid a hand on her leg.
“Try again,” she said. “Empty your mind.”
“It’s too hard with what’s happening. I can’t tune it out.”
“Think about, I don’t know, a long grassy meadow where you’re walking and walking, or maybe you’re in a sailboat on a calm lake or floating in outer space. See your body going out into the unknown and being safe but searching.”
Opal leaned her head against the padded cushion. She shut her eyes.
“Here I go. Countdown to takeoff: ten, nine, eight, seven .. . six ...”
Vera took over for her with a silky whisper.
“Five .. . four ... three ...”
Opal’s eyelids felt like black paint over her eyes.
I’m bolding on to a rope and lowering myself into a cave.
Lower and lower. I feel the air cooling. Hear the trickle of moisture dripping down the walls. The air is clean, fresh. The light above is getting smaller and the cave is opening up like a cathedral underneath me....
But seriously. This wasn’t working. She wasn’t in a cave or on her way to outer space or anywhere but here in her apartment in American Rapids.
“Two,” Vera said.
Opal thought her voice sounded so small.
The wind keened.
She snuggled down into the plush recliner and drew the blanket tight around her. Vera’s voice had gone from uttering soft syllables to absolute quiet. Opal couldn’t even detect her breathing.
“Aren’t you going to finish? You know, one and ... blast off?”
Vera didn’t answer.
“Vera?”
Opal bolted up like a blind woman startled by an intruder. But she wasn’t blind. She opened her eyes.
Vera wasn’t there. Had she run off on them again? That little sneaky—
The candle was blown out. A string of smoke tangled in midair. Even the lights peeking between the boards were extinguished. It would have been a perfect dark. Except the TV swirled with electrical snow. And out of the snow, a shape formed. Opal’s fingers tightened on the blanket.
It was a head.
Filling the entire screen, it grew huge. A man’s head, she decided, though it was difficult to tell much because of its condition.
Without ears or a nose, it was very oval.
Like an Egyptian king whose mummy she saw once in a museum.
It looked at her with a sly, knowing dirtiness.
It began to unwind its bandages.