Dream King by Elise Knight
3
“Get back into the clinic now, Lowell!” Mr. McGee roared at me down the phone almost an hour later. I cradled my cell phone between my ear and shoulder as I wrestled the raven into a cage that once belonged to a guinea pig of my neighbor’s seven-year-old daughter. (Rest in peace, Mr. Snuggles) He must have been seriously pissed to use my last name.
The raven flapped its wings furiously, causing the stack of bills to fall onto the floor.
Shit! I had them piled up in the order I was going to pay them. Not that I could actually afford to pay any of them, but the electricity bill was on the top of my wish list.
“I can’t right now, Mr. McGee,” I panted down the phone. “Sorry. I’ve got a lot on my hands.” Literally. The pet bird of the most beautiful man I’d ever encountered and who, more than likely was a figment of my over-active imagination, squawked, and I almost let the little shit go.
“Well, get it off your hands,” he grumbled. “I’ve got twelve angry customers, and Mrs. Rose is refusing to pay.”
The raven took that moment to nip at my finger.
“Sonofa..!” Blood dripped onto the stack of bills adding to the already too much red as I shut the cage door trapping the little beast inside.
“Ana,” Mr. McGee practically shouted down the phone, bringing me back to the conversation. “I was called into the clinic at some ungodly hour to find feathers all over the sleep chamber, the machines all going haywire, and Chris blubbering in a corner. I suggest you haul your ass back here right now if you want to keep your job.”
I opened my mouth to apologize but found myself saying sorry to a hung-up tone.
“You can stay there!” I grumbled to the raven while pulling my blonde waves into a messy bun. “I might think about buying you some birdseed if I don’t get my ass fired first!”
The raven gave me a withering look and stuck its beak up in the air as though it understood exactly what I was saying to it.
Get a grip, Ana. It’s a bird, Not an omen... Probably.
However much I hated watching rich people sleep for a living, I needed the job. It was easy, and I was not qualified for anything else. And however little McGee paid me, it was still more than I’d earn doing some shitty waitressing job, which was exactly what I was doing before coming to work at the clinic.
I picked up the keys to my crappy old Audi and headed out of my apartment. The stink of old cabbage filled the air as I walked down the corridor to the entrance reminding me it was Thursday. Tomorrow the corridor would smell like fish, and Saturday, it would smell like curry. I’d not needed a calendar since moving into the shithole apartment block, thanks to my neighbor, Mrs. Amos’s unwavering cooking schedule.
I pressed the button on my keys to unlock Lucy, my ten-year-old car. It was held together with rust and wishes, but it was reliable and got me from A to B. Or, in this case, Apartment to Boring job.
I made it back to the clinic in record time, thanks to the earliness of the hour. Anytime after six am, Vancouver was gridlocked, but at four, it was a pleasure to drive.
Chris ran out to meet me in the parking lot, his red hair unusually messy as though he’d been running his hands through it.
“What did you run off for?” he pouted, falling into step with me. “You left me right in the shit.”
“Sorry, Chris. I didn’t mean to.”
The truth was, seeing that guy with the startling black eyes and having the weird heat wash over me had set me completely on edge in a way I couldn’t explain. I wasn’t accustomed to having what was basically an orgasm in public for no reason, and I certainly wasn’t accustomed to watching the hottest man I’d ever laid eyes on jump into another person without even waking her up. Not that I could say any of that to Chris. He’d think I was having another breakdown.
“I had a panic attack,” I half lied. “I had to go home to take a breather.”
Chris stared at me. He’d known me long enough to know when I was holding something back, but he kept his lips pursed.
“McGee said that the machines have all gone haywire,” I continued when he didn’t speak. Chris usually never shut up, so to have him so quiet was enough to tell me he was really pissed with me. Deservedly so.
He grabbed my arm. “No shit. I came back from Starbucks to find you zooming off in your car, the machines showing readouts like nothing I’ve ever seen, and all the subjects awake and angry. Not to mention black feathers all over the place. What the hell happened?”
“A raven!” I said, trying to come up with something slightly more plausible than what had actually happened. At least that part was true.
“A raven?” Chris arched one of his perfectly manicured eyebrows. “Seriously, if you’re in trouble of some kind, tell me.” Chris looked at me with worry in his eyes, and I hated it. He’d been a rock to me when David had left and taken basically everything I owned, including my sanity, with him. I couldn’t blame Chris for worrying, but I didn’t need it.
“I’m not in trouble.”
Chris shook his head and folded his arms. “You need to know when to let people help you.”
“This isn’t about me,” I mumbled, wishing I wasn’t having this conversation. I sucked in a breath and tried to think of a way to flesh out the lie that didn’t sound too implausible. “I told you it was a bird. It somehow got into the sleep chamber. I had to go in and get it out. I guess it must have set the machines haywire.”
Chris narrowed his eyes at me and pursed his lips again. “The door to the sleeping chamber was closed when I left to get coffee, and I think I’d have noticed a bloody big blackbird flying around in there.”
“Raven,” I reminded him like it mattered. Not that I knew what the difference was. They were both big, black birds.
Chris clenched his hands into fists by his side. “I don’t give a flying fuck if it was a peacock dancing the can-can; it wasn’t there when I went to get coffee.”
Maybe I should have told him the truth. I already had told him half of it, and he did see the weird guy too. If I was crazy, then so was he...but then I thought of my mother asleep in a hospital wing in Winnipeg and decided against it. My mother was one of the people that had never woken up after The Big Sleep. She was the reason I needed to find out who the strange guy and his pet bird were before I was confined to the loony bin.
“I guess a gust of wind must have blown it open somehow,” I said as I pushed the clinic door open. “You thought you saw a hot guy, remember? Who knows what you could and couldn’t see.” Urgh. I knew I was being a bitch, and none of this was Chris’s fault, but I was irritated and confused by the whole thing, and I just wanted it all over with so I could go back home, go to sleep, and try to figure out what the fuck to do next.
He still didn’t believe me. Not that I needed him to. It was Mr. McGee I had to convince. He was the one that paid me.
I found him sitting with his head in his hands as I entered the main office. With bare white walls and pale gray carpet, the place lacked any kind of interesting atmosphere, and the only concession he had made to decoration was a lone, framed photo of his wife and teenage kids that I knew for a fact he only kept there because his wife made him. He waited until I sat down before he began to speak.
His moustache twitched with anger, and a vein throbbed in his forehead, but he just about managed to keep his voice in check. “Do you want to tell me what it was that cost me the best part of thirty-six thousand dollars tonight?”
“There was a bird,” I began, feeling foolish. “It somehow got into the sleep room. I had to go in and get it out.”
“A bird?” His moustache twitched again as he steepled his fingers and leaned forward in his seat. He was close to losing his shit, and his face was so red that I could practically feel the heat radiating from it.
I nodded, trying to keep my own cheeks from reddening. I never was any good at lying. Lady Gaga’s ‘Poker Face’ was most definitely not an ode to Anasazi Lowell.
Gritting his teeth, he almost growled. “I checked the door log, and once the door was shut at ten pm last night, the only one in there tonight was you. Do you mean to tell me that a bird managed to clone one of our key cards and figure out how to use it to get in?”
He twisted a pen between his fingers as he spoke, his knuckles white on chubby red fingers.
I swallowed thickly, feeling myself falling deeper and deeper into the lie and glad that we didn’t use security cameras in the sleep room. “Maybe one of the clients took it in, hidden in a pocket?” Even to my own ears, it sounded like a pile of shit.
He tapped the pen on his desk a couple of times and licked his lips. “Come with me.”
I followed him to the observation room to find reams and reams of paper from the printer in a pile on the floor. He picked up the end and practically slammed it in my face, only coming to a stop three inches from my eyeballs. “The Polysomnography tests are all over the place. A bird could not have done this.”
I looked at the lines on the paper. Pretty normal stuff until 1:58 am. Turning, I sat at my desk and wiggled the mouse to wake up my monitor. The same thing...for all the subjects. Normal sleep, everything within the realms of normal sleep patterns, and then just as I’d entered the sleep room, all but one of the subjects simultaneously began to experience sleep problems. If you could call my swearing at a raven then running out of the door in a panic with said raven a sleep problem.
One of the subjects had started with the strange brain waves a few minutes earlier. I thought back to what had happened minutes before everything had gone to hell. I’d gone to the toilet, and Chris had seen the guy in black. Him.
Mrs. Rose! I typed in her name and brought up her results. Just like the others, her results were wacky, but hers went haywire thirty seconds before anyone else’s—the exact same time the guy jumped on her. She had felt him after all...in her dreams.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said, shutting the screen back off. “A bird got in. I went in after it, and I must have woken everyone up. Sorry.”
McGee massaged his temples and gritted his teeth as I held my breath. I couldn’t afford to lose this job. It paid for my shitty apartment, and my shitty apartment was only one up from living on the streets or begging Chris to let me sleep on his sofa. And I knew what Chris did on his sofa...regularly.
“I need you to call all today’s subjects and apologize to them,” McGee grumbled. Do. Not. Mention. A. Bird.” He said each word slowly and deliberately as though he thought I’d either gone deaf or lost my mind. I wasn’t altogether sure I hadn’t.
“Yes, sir.”
He pointed a pen at me. “Tell them that you were PMSing or something. Then call tonight’s subjects and reschedule them too.”
I resisted the urge to grab the pen and shove it up his fat nose. Instead, I plastered on my best eat-shit smile and said “yes sir” again, almost following it up with a salute.
I spent the morning placating annoyed rich people and promising them ten percent off their sleep trial. Not that they needed it. Anyone that could afford three thousand dollars to be watched sleeping for a night by Chris and me wasn’t the type of person that needed a discount.
It was only the thought of my unpaid bills that got me through the next few hours, but I did get through it and set out, three hours after my shift would normally end.
The raven was still there when I finally got home. I was not quite sure why I expected it not to be. It eyed me beadily as I pulled my coat off and threw it on the table.
“Sorry, bird. I forgot the birdseed. It was your fault, though. No time to hit the pet store because I had to clean up the mess you and your owner left behind. I’ll get you some tomorrow.”
It ruffled its feathers and turned its back on me.
Fuck you too!
It looked like a normal bird. A bit haughty maybe, if haughty was a word that could be used to describe a bird.
I was totally losing it. It was not haughty. It was a bloody bird, that was all, not some harbinger of doom, not some kind of grim from Harry Potter, and most certainly not the bringer of mysterious orgasms. I grabbed a bread roll from my kitchen and broke a bit off for the bird. It pulled it through the cage and swallowed it down before turning its back to me again. Rude fucker.
After slapping a couple of slices of out-of-date ham in what was left of the bread roll and eating it, I pulled my clothes off, dragged on my ratty old nightgown, and hopped into bed. Despite the exhaustion I felt, sleep was a long time coming. The irony of my insomnia never escaped me, doing the job I did. I could do with a sleep trial myself, but I’d never be able to afford the price. Not that I really needed it. Insomnia was insomnia. No mystery there. I finally felt my senses begin to dull and my mind wander as the first tendrils of sleep crept in. I gave myself up to it, letting myself drift...
I was back in the sleep clinic, but the edges of my vision were out of focus. The beds in the sleep chamber were empty, but the printer in the observation room was going crazy. My heart pounded as I tried to make sense of it. I could hear McGee screaming at me from outside, banging on the door trying to get in. But I couldn’t let him in because then he’d know that I was not doing my job properly. And then, in the sleep chamber, red stamped envelopes flew around. There was nothing I could do. They were through the one-way mirror, and I couldn’t get to them without passing McGee. My heart was pounding, and there was not a fucking thing I could do to stop it. To stop any of it. I struggled to catch my breath as the envelopes turned into black feathers that swirled around slowly.
The man appeared again, but this time, he was looking right at the mirror. Except he knew it was a one-way mirror, and he was looking right at me through it as though it was not even there.
I suddenly felt calm. The panic fell away as I drank him in. I couldn’t take my eyes from him. His hair floated in the air as though he was underwater, but he was bone dry. It meant I could see more of his chest and his tattoos. They’d moved since I last saw them. I reached out to him, but my fingers touched glass, the window to the sleep chamber. The moment of calm was gone, and once again, I was fighting for breath.
I opened my eyes. I was wide awake, my heart hammering like thunder in my chest and sweat pouring down my face.
It was a dream. I was at home in my own bed. The peeling paint and familiar cracks in my ceiling were enough to tell me where I was.
I sucked in a deep breath and tried to calm down. My bedsheets were soaked in sweat, and I had somehow managed to coil them around myself. I untangled myself from them and swung my legs out of bed. Turning my eyes to my alarm clock, I recoiled in horror.
He was here! At the end of my bed. Really, this time. This was no dream. Chills swept through me as I took him in. His black eyes looked upon me with intrigue as though I was the weird interloper in this scenario. His long blue-black hair fell over his shoulders, covering his muscular chest and the weird armor he wore, not to mention the tattoos. Atop his head sat the crown I’d seen him in before. And below it, a face with cheekbones that could cut glass, perfect lips, and eyelashes that should be illegal on a man. By god, he was beautiful. Insanely, overwhelmingly so.
And a fucking, weirdo stalker dude that somehow had not only found out where I lived but also broken into my apartment. I wanted to look to see if he’d broken my window and gotten in that way, but I didn’t dare take my eyes from him.
The forceful feeling washed over me again. Rushes of intense waves of pleasure. I crushed my lips together, but it wasn’t enough to stop the moan from escaping my lips.
What the actual...
He’d done this to me twice now. Or at least his bird had. I wasn’t sure which one of them had given me more pleasure than any man I’d ever been with, not that the bar was set that high, but the guy hadn’t even laid a finger on me. He hadn’t even taken a step toward me. He waited until I was finished, and then with indifference in his voice, he spoke.
“You have my bird.”
His voice was deep, almost guttural, with an accent I couldn’t place. It was also sexy as all hell which only added to my embarrassment of moaning like an overpaid hooker in front of him.
“You messed up my sleep trial,” I retorted, pulling the straps of my nightgown back up over my shoulder before the girls fell out. Might as well try and have a little dignity.
He didn’t speak again. I watched as he turned and opened the small cage door where I’d put the bird.
He struggled to get the bird out owing to the fact the cage was made for a guinea pig, not a freaking raven.
I had no idea who this guy was, but he wasn’t human. Ok, like, what the fuck was I thinking? He had to be human...but he wasn’t. No human looked that perfect. I’d seen with my own eyes him somehow jumping into Mrs. Rose. I wondered for a second if he was a demon? Only I could get myself involved in some other level exorcist shit.
“You possessed Mrs. Rose. Did you take her soul? Are you a demon?”
Even to my own ears, I sounded like a lunatic, but what other explanation was there? He stroked the back of the raven then looked upon me with disdain in his eyes. His anger at me was palpable. Another feeling came upon me as his gaze pierced me. This time, it wasn’t pleasure I felt. It was a frisson of fear.
“To you, I am the devil himself.” His voice sent a shiver down my spine more than the words themselves, although they were damning enough.
He jumped again, just as he had in the sleep chamber at work, but this time instead of jumping into a body, he jumped toward a red door. A red door that was most definitely not there when I had gone to sleep. I leaped out of bed and reached out to him. Devil or not, I was not going to let him go. My hand almost connected with his arm, but I was too slow. He was already through the door. I leapt fully off the bed and dived through after him. I closed my eyes as my whole body was squeezed through what felt like a tube of toothpaste.
When I felt ground beneath me, I opened my eyes. A dark forest floor covered in shadowy gray leaves and dirt spread out in all directions. Two long parallel rows of identical grey doors cut through the forest as far as the eye could see, one row to my left running into the distance both in front and behind me and one to the right. Doors, door frames, but no walls. The doors were not attached to anything and went nowhere. Between the frames, I could only see more of the dark forest. Behind me was the door I’d just come through, and above me, stars twinkled in the night sky, giving this part of the forest at least a little light.
“Where the fuck am I?” I murmured, wondering if I’d lost it completely. Behind me, the red door shut with a bang, almost making me jump three feet into the air.
I barely had time to check out my surroundings as Mr. elusive-as-fuck was already almost through one of the gray doors. I hauled myself up from the forest floor and hot-footed it after him, but it was too late. He was already through the door. And if the last five minutes hadn’t been weird enough, he didn’t come out through the other side. Not only that, but the row of doors all began to move in unison, shifting one spot toward and then beyond the red door.
The forest was eerily quiet and devoid of color. The tree trunks were gray, the leaves different shades of gray. The silence was foreboding. There was nothing living in it—no creatures scurrying through the undergrowth, no birds in the branches above my head. If I hadn’t been completely sober, I’d have wondered if I hadn’t fallen into some drug-induced haze.
I was alone. Fuck knew where in a forest that smelled of flowers and summer rain but looked like death. The smart thing would be to turn right back around and go right back home through the red door before it too decided it didn’t like where it was and went on a vacation around the vicinity. Thing is, I’d never been smart. Smartass maybe, but not smart. Instead, I put my hand on the grey door handle nearest to me, opened the door, and stepped inside.