I slept and I dreamt about a baby.
There were a few of us on a medium sized boat, though the only two people I remember in the clouds of wakefulness are myself and Kai. I do not know where we were going, if anywhere. Our boat was on midnight waters; the sky and the water were both so black that the only thing distinguishing them from each other was the onyx-like glint that kissed the edges of moving waves, appearing only within a short circle of our dim boat.
There were no stars, and it the night was despairingly cold.
Someone on-board had a baby, and somehow it went overboard. We crawled to the most dangerous edges, reaching for it. Someone dove in. I don’t remember who all was actually in the water, but we were all wet and cold when the baby was finally pushed up onto a safe surface. Kai happened to be laying there, exhausted from her efforts, wet. The baby crawled up underneath her shirt–for warmth, I suppose–and curled into a fetal position there.
End dream. Alarm clock. Several snoozes. Kissing Rowen’s neck and telling him that he has to get up and go to work, come on.
Rowen goes to work. Sleep assaults once more, like a dark bag thrust over my head.
And dark it is… so dark.
I dream about Death. She manifests very similarly to “the girl” from The Ring. She is after my friends, and some people who appear to be strangers, as well, but who I apparently feel some acquaintanceship with in the dream.
It is easy to tell when someone is marked by her. There is a long period of torment before she finally snatches them. The darkness appearing out of walls; little accidents that brush by your cheek. Slices and dices you know were meant for you, but which you evade, because you know that death is after you, and that she is cruel and dark. The people who are marked grow pale, with dark, sleepless circles under their eyes. Death, a vicious cat, preys omnipresently.
I am always rushing about, trying to save them–trying to help them dodge the thing that grips them every second of their terrified lives.
It takes Eileen. For the rest of the dream, I spot her stalking in the background, hunched over… A thin, open-mouthed avatar, consumed by the infusion of death, perpetually circled by black air that seems torn from the fabric of void.
Death finally targets someone I care deeply about. I do not remember who, except that it was a girl. I faintly remember blond hair, though I might be wrong. (For the record, Kai is not present in this dream.) Desperate to save her, I battle and bargain as I’ve never done before. I stay on her arm and follow her where-ever she goes, protectively, even though death’s fog circles in all her corners, and massive objects are prone to fall in her vicinity.
I am finally able to get some sort of power, or arrangement, from a third party. It is a system of sorts, a trade-off: only 75 attempts on her life will be made per day, however-… I do not remember the “however”.
Still, I tell her this with some sort of perverse celebration–only 75! Then it goes up to 100, then a little more, and well, it’s only a temporary stall, but anything is good…
She is blank with exhaustion and fear.
I look past her and I see that a wide spot of bricks on the wall have turned onyx black. I almost want to touch them, shaken by the mystery of the force that colored them. Death’s presence is all around. The fog creeps. I see her.
Frightened, the lot of us pile into the one room off the hallway–a gothic jewelry shop of sorts. Even though I am cold with terror, I do not allow it to show–I take on an attitude of leadership, and make certain to maneuver my friend away from any fixtures in the ceiling. I feel as though the 75 attempts are flickering by as each possibility is dodged. 75 does seem very small against the infinite turns of fate.
But she is there in the shop with us, crouching in the shadows. When I pass by her, her dead-colored hand shoots out and grasps my arm, firmly.
“You and I need to work things ooout.” She somehow coos it and growls it all at once.
I jerk free, and for the first time I get the terrible, horrible sensation that death has noticed me. That through all my efforts to protect others, I may finally have been marked. The truth is, I do not feel outright marked… merely noticed.
My jaw is hard. Angry, steady, protective. The terror is real, but so is the defiance. Death stands and steps into the room proper, leaning over a table–to light incense, to write inscriptions, I don’t remember, but it is something of the sort.
“Someone is trying to reach through,” she comments. There is a sort of mocking, cruel, sing-songety quality to her tone, whose irony is its apathy.
I remember the black bricks, which had seemed to unusual to me–a manifestation I had never observed. I realized, then, that someone must have been holding a sort of seance, and that they are attempting to communicate with death. I think that whoever they are, they are an idiot, who have no idea what they are actually reaching toward, or what is coming.
As I watch death lean over the table, I take note of her colors. The skin is a grayish, greenish brown–like decayed, but still hydrated, caucasian tissue. There are veins showing clearly through the skin, and all sorts of other imperfections, blurring into some sort of common texture. And then I see her hair. Only the hints of color left, and yet it is clear to me, as I gaze at the tiny braids that are bound through a sort of bandanna and wash all the way down her back… She is a red-head.
Suddenly, I feel the barest hints of affinity, and I address her. I do not remember the exact conversation–it was short and harsh–but through her comment to me, someone else identifies what historical society she hails from, and death confirms it.
She was human once? My thoughts race; I wonder if there is some way to reach through to her, and yet I sense with every bare inch of my intuition that this is impossible. She is what she is now.
“You must be very proud of your work,” someone says.
“Actually, I am disappointed with it,” she says, with as little regard as if she were conversing with a wall. “—”
I don’t remember the second half of her statement. I am busy wondering if Eileen will prowl the earth for centuries, too, and reap people to their ends.
The conversation intensifies–death grows more threatening. The last image I have in my head of her is leaned into the crowd, toward me, over the table, hissing something important. I think talking about the death of the person I’ve been protecting. But at that point, my physical body interrupts. My bladder is screaming so badly that I literally pull out a pen and hit “pause” on my dream, holding up a finger and saying, “Hold that–I’ll be RIGHT back!”, rushing to find a bathroom in my dream.
I get up and use it in real life, but of course, the trail of the dream is lost by the time I return to my bed. I am only left with the strangeness of finding a human element in death, and wonder if it is my own mind trying to make it more tolerable–trying to give me the illusion that it is something to be negotiated with.
