Her Mind Games: A Dark and Erotic Paranormal Romance Page 5

  Eddie was the only guy who’d hung around as long as I had. Him and Nancy. She worked the bar upstairs.

  She and I had a thing once, very brief. It didn’t go very far.

  Eddie and I became the regulars downstairs. That’s where the best tips were. Tourists preferred downstairs. Maybe they wanted to be near the constant stream of beachgoers sauntering over the sidewalk in nothing but their skimpy towels and tight bikinis while they waited for a plate of Fried Ally (that’s short for alligator, by the way) or our famous Mahi Mahi Sandwich. It was usually locals on the upstairs deck. It had the most incredible sunsets, and a much better view. But the tips were smaller.

  Except at the bar, and especially not when Nancy was working it. She isn’t your classic “sexy” babe. I mean, the chick has purple highlights, wears a Goth collar, and sports a nose ring. But she has one of those exotic looks (and a pair of knockers to make any man drool) that reeks of sex appeal. It was what had brought us together at first—mad, insane sex. And then it died, and we stayed friends. We stayed good friends. Eddie tried to get in her pants a few times. But Nancy isn’t that kind of chick. And the reason she and I got together is because we thought we loved each other. I was young, and it hadn’t been long after my mom’s passing. Maybe she provided a comfort for me that I needed, but we soon both realized there was nothing to it.

  To her clients, though? She exudes the aura of “that kind of chick,” and raked in truckloads as a result of it. We all have to make a living. I did the same.

  Let me be blunt. I was a womanizer. Before Nancy, I had never been in a relationship as such. West Rocks has a ton of tourists and, truth be told, I used every one of them that I could. After Nancy and I split up, I went back to my old antics. It doesn’t help having a millionaire friend like Eddie. He’ll be playing the game until he’s ninety, set up with his own Playboy Mansion over at Belleair, I’m sure. I went at it for years, not caring, not thinking, downing the booze until I could hardly walk and I needed Eddie to practically carry me over the causeway because the trolley wasn’t running anymore at this time of night.

  The dreams were always there, a hidden interweave through the fabric of my life that I could never get away from, and which I told no one about.

  I feared the dreams.

  I feared them every night they came.

  I’ve told you that when I woke up I remembered nothing after that initial second. Except for the terror, the terror of dying, the screams.

  The screams stayed with me all day. They haunted me while I worked.

  So I chased women. I drank, and chased women, and drank, and chased more women.

  Before the dream of the Jane Doe in the ocean there had been another recurring dream, a dream of a light-haired girl, almost blond, with green eyes and a body that captivated my soul.

  As with the other dreams, I remembered little about her when I woke up. But I remembered more than usual. I remembered parts of it with such clarity that the view of her sometimes blinded me as I caught the trolley over the causeway to work in the mornings. And her face would be there, imprinted on the blue bay which extended endlessly toward the horizon; her locks of gently curled hair, the smell of her skin as my nose had rubbed against it. The warmth between her legs.

  I recalled these things as flashes of insight; not so much as a clear vision of it but more as an all-engulfing experience.

  I took to sketching, trying to put my thoughts into pictures on paper as I had done as a child but the skills evaded me. I hadn’t done it in so long that I only ended up feeling frustrated. I went to the library in my free time and sat on the third floor and looked out over the utopia of the bay while I read anything and everything I could find about dreams, dream therapy, second lives, alter egos.

  All of it was bullshit.

  I felt like I was reading the theories of men who knew as much about an alternate existence as I knew about knitting.

  I don’t knit.

  And there was a man in the dreams as well. No, more like a presence. A demonic entity that walked with me in my mind just as the green-eyed girl had walked with me, both their images imprinted in my head as if they were both a part of me. A trinity of impending doom as certain as the sweet scent of gardenias in spring and the scuttling rush of roaches in the summer.

  I had been dreaming of the green-eyed girl for some months. She had imprinted herself so deeply in my mind that...I had lost all interest in women. And it had been here where Eddie knew something was positively wrong with me.

  -10-

  He took me out for a beer at Tiki-Licious, started digging. His first thought was that I was seeing Nancy again. When she and I had been together I’d stayed away from other girls completely, even when that blonde with tits the size of Mars jumped on my lap and started rubbing herself against me without so much as a blink. I threw her off me and was actually upset at her, swore at her for acting so foolishly. Eddie had laughed at me at the time, telling me I was whipped. Maybe I was. And it was a new feeling even for me. I had never been with a girl for more than a week, so I didn’t know if I’d be the “faithful” type or not. Turns out I was.

  So this time round Eddie figured Nancy and I were hitting it off again, but he quickly dropped it because he said he would have noticed her acting differently at the bar. “The girl was on cloud naheen the lahst time you to hit it ohff,” he said with his merciless accent.

  Eddie and I had become close friends, not only drinking buddies. I knew about his three divorces, his four kids he missed, his estranged daughter who hated his guts after he had kicked her biker boyfriend’s ass for taking her virginity at sixteen when the guy was twenty (they ended up getting married, but she never forgave her father, and Eddie still hates the fuck). I knew about the years of ennui he’d suffered running multiple corporations down in Australia, how he’d turned to coke to ease it off, how it had destroyed his first marriage. And his second one. I knew about his stint in rehab and how it had “turned him into a man” and how he might drink more than an elephant in a Saharan watering hole but that he’d never touch a stick of weed or a line of coke again so long as he lived. I even knew about the crabs he’d picked up from a local chick who’d been busting his balls for a month to get it on with her and then, in a moment of complete drunkenness, he’d taken her and regretted it. He had especially regretted it when I picked up all his extra tips while he ran to the bathroom and scratched the shit out of his nuts the next day.

  And he knew about me, too. We had spent many a night opening a bottle of Maker’s 46 and baring our souls to each other at my mom’s old place.

  I stay across the bay in a two-storey house with a cottage in the back. It’s terribly rundown. It was built in the thirties so, like most houses in Primavera County, it’s termite ridden. A guy would come over every few months and spray the place, also for roaches. Roaches are big in Florida. Big in all senses of the word. So are lizards and mosquitoes. The house is split up into three apartments excluding the cottage. One big apartment on top, and two in the bottom with a thin wall between them.

  I had heard many a person getting busy in that apartment next door when I was growing up, squeals of women and thumping bedposts that get the imagination of a ten year old boy thriving dangerously.

  There was a time when Eddie practically lived with me when he was between places, and it’s only when I got tired of hearing those banging bedposts again in the middle of the night that I decided it was time for Eddie to stop using the place as a crash-spot any time he felt like it. It’s one thing to overhear sex when you’re young and don’t know the people, it’s quite another when the dude doing it is over fifty and he’s getting more action than you are. It got a little frustrating.

  Eddie knew about my mother, all the weird shit she had been into (I don’t think it’s so weird anymore), my dad. I told him once about Lewis, but only in the vaguest terms and his answer had been, “It can happen, mate. Life’s not all we suppose it is.” I never knew at the time that the d
ude was deeply into this new-age stuff.

  Eddie had also been the only one I’d confided in about Nancy, how I had felt about her. More importantly, when I realized I didn’t love her, he helped smooth things over so that we stayed friends. Sometimes people hang on to someone they don’t love, and that’s worse than simply pulling off the plaster.

  If there was one person I could talk to about the green-eyed girl in the dreams, it was Eddie. He might think I was crazy, but no topics were off limits for us.

  So I told him.

  He stared at me blankly for a second, then said, “Mate, that’s fuckin amazing.”

  “You don’t think I’m nuts?” I asked.

  Eddie gave a mischievous grin. “I’ve had money all mah life, mate. I been trekkin with the fuckin swamis in India, monks in Asia, frickin sangomas in Africa. I been everywhere, mate. I done it all. I seen plenny a stuff that’d blow your mind.” His eyes were like those of an owl.

  “And you gave all that up to...waiter?”

  “I was bored. What can I say?”

  He had theories, stuff like soulmates or an alternate dimension or even the possibility of magic.

  That was one month before the dead girl in the ocean.

  The girl in the ocean would change everything.

  The girl in the ocean would make me realize the two worlds were actually one—one life being lived on two different planes.

  The girl in the ocean would show me that the green-eyed girl of my dreams was real.

  And that she had a name.

  -11-

  So now we’re gonna jump forward, which is around where we started. The girl in the ocean has been found, the press has attacked West Rocks like dogs to scraps, and now they’ve left like flies after the shit has lost its flavor.

  I thought about the Jane Doe and the green-eyed girl many times, every day, but never came to any answers. The Jane Doe was the key, that undeniable reality of having seen her in my dreams before she had died kept me thinking about the green-eyed girl. Because if one dream had been true, then the other one...

  And then a new dream arrived, a dream of a gathering, a desert, a tall woman with black hair that was some sort of leader.

  And the memories of the green-eyed girl became sharper, almost...believable.

  It was while I was thinking of them both, the green-eyed girl and the Jane Doe, digging deep into myself for the answer which I intuitively knew lay within me, that the headaches began.

  They hit me like a meteor to the skull. At least that’s what it felt like. It felt like Babe Ruth had just used my head for field practice.

  I thought the headaches might have started because of too much booze and too much of a long walk on a hot night as I trekked the three miles from Ally Joe’s over the causeway to my place downtown. But that was my mind rationalizing. Because I wasn’t aware of the headache as the cars zoomed past me and the bay stretched out for miles on either side of me.

  By the time I got home, however, it struck.

  It struck with a vengeance.

  I became fully aware of the headaches the moment I stepped off the sidewalk and put my foot down on the lawn...

  ...it was like being hit by a truck. Again and again. Over and over.

  And I was dying.

  To call them headaches is being too polite. Calling them headaches is like saying Bin Laden was a “naughty boy.” Like saying Stephen King writes slightly scary stories. Like saying George R.R. Martin has a clue about characters you care for who then get killed like they were so much dog poop.

  These weren’t headaches. They were calamities, seismic phenomena. They were supernovas, suns bursting, semis crashing. Technically, it was only one headache, one colossal, life-sucking, body-thumping slammer of a cranium killer. But it came in waves throughout the night, waves like gnawing termites, and my skull was the wood. I felt like I’d developed ten tumors, and each was about to burst. My neck was in a guillotine; my back muscles had pulled in tight trying to stop my head from falling off, but the blade just kept on slicing.

  I walked the four or five steps to my porch. And the headache hit me for a knockout as I walked in the door to my house.

  I fell, actually stumbled against the wall, clutching my skull, feeling like it was about to explode. I thought of calling Eddie, Nancy, the new girl Kyla who was temping at the downstairs bar, Round Rosie—fuckin anyone!—but the thought of looking at the bright touchscreen of my phone to make the call was too much to handle. I staggered onto the bed, felt instantly nauseous. The jackhammer inside my skull prevented me from getting up and barfing in the bathroom. I’ll just fuckin do it here, onto the floor, and clean it up tomorrow. I never did barf, thank gods.

  With every ram of pain, came an image. An impression. A sound. A sight. A scent. A woman...on a crucifix—nausea—and the body in the ocean, the floating corpse...as well one final image: light brown hair, almost blond, eyes so green they looked like emeralds.

  Crystal. That’s her name. Crystal Loradeen.

  The name floated in my mind like wisps of rising smoke, ethereal, difficult to reach, evading my grasp.

  Crystal, I called out in my head. Crystal. Crystal. Crystal...

  ...“I’m here.”

  The world is black, a darkness so thick I can touch it. I see nothing. Feel nothing on my skin. All around me is darkness. No wind. No heat. No cold. Nothing. Except...

  “Luke.”

  The voice is a whisper—from her!—in my mind, a sound so faint it might be a dream.

  A dream.

  A dream?

  I see scars, three long gashes on the green-eyed girl’s back and her thigh.

  There is a truth here somewhere. I can sense it. Something I should know...about the voice...or the dreams.

  “I’m asleep, aren’t I?” I ask.

  “Lucien, where are you?”

  “C—Crystal?” I’m not sure if the name is correct, but it sounds correct on my lips.

  Fear grabs me, a terror stomach so tight it threatens to burst my insides.

  “Luke. Oh, gods, Luke, where are you?” Her voice is frantic now, a nervousness in it that does nothing to soothe my own unease.

  Crystal.

  There is something here, something I should grasp. A lake. A...a...a...sacrifice?

  Screaming. In my head I hear screaming, a familiar sound, as if I’ve heard that screaming endlessly before. As if I’ve heard it for years and the only thing I fear in this world is not the darkness or the pain or the knives or blood or villains—it’s those screams. Their screams before they’re cut with blades and the blood pours down their—

  Never deny them, Lucien. Never deny the dreams. They’re real.

  “Oh, gods,” I say, realization dawning. “Oh, gods, no. It can’t be...”

  The scream transforms into a prism of pictures, distorted as if being looked at through a diamond of refracting light, flashes of the Jane Doe in the ocean, the one they’d had on a slab...

  And duty. I know my duty. I know nothing else but my duty.

  ...and the men around her. No, not men. Not—

  “Lucien, please, tell me where you are and I’ll come to you!” The voice of sweetness. Crystal. Her name forms patterns in my mind, beautiful spirals of magic and a tongue so sweet—

  “Oh, dear gods,” I say. More realization. More understanding. “Oh, dear mothers of mercy—it can’t be.”

  I see my confusion, my sense of duty overwhelmed. Six months ago? Eight? Four? The girl—Crystal. The girl with the green eyes. A sudden sense of duty toward her and not to the duty itself...

  No. Confusion.

  The girl is the duty. The duty is the girl. The duty—

  “Luke, dear fuck, tell me where you are!” The girl called Crystal—a girl I...love?—screams in panic. She’s hunting for me. I can hear it in her breaths, the crack of twigs under her feet.

  But I see no woods. Nothing. I see nothing. Only black, black and black.

  I see a memory of my t
ongue reaching out for hers and feel the cleansing of my soul like all the pain in the world is gone, gone, gone and there is nothing but her lips and my hand, sliding over her skin, reaching naturally lower to the only place it belongs. She knows it, I know it, and when my finger finds her, her moan ripples the very fabric of the sky. Stars crash as the world changes and before I know it I’m inside her, completely inside her but I’ve never been inside a woman like this because it’s not only my sex inside her, it’s me, my heart, my soul. My life. I am yours.

  “LUKE, WHERE ARE YOU!”

  The blackness in the dream remains, but the memory continues: That moment of bliss, when I fill her with love and we unite under the stars in a twirl of passion while we tumble through the endless sky in roiling madness, her screams of ecstasy piercing delicate fissures in the protective walls of my mind.

  “It cannot be,” I whisper now in the darkness. “Dear sweet gods—it cannot be.”

  “What cannot be, Luke? What? I hear you only as an echo. Where are you?”

  It cannot be—but it is. And as the reality of it seeps through my thick, unbelieving skin; as the truth of my double-life rends a hole through the barriered layers of my mind; as the understanding lands on me—the understanding of us, my life, myself—I realize what torture it has been to be torn from her in the morning. Torn like a slave, ever answering to the call of duty, never questioning, lured like a dog with a bell to its dinner.

  Until she came along.

  And the call diminished, overpowered by another call, a deeper call. The call of her.

  “I remember,” I mumble into the darkness. “I remember.”

  But what I remember is not only the endless hunts for the last ten years, the fever dreams that took me when I first discovered the vocation—what I remember is the sadness. The gash of pain as the memory left me every morning when I awoke. I remember the tearing of my heart as it bled to remember Crystal especially, fought against the laws of nature itself to grasp onto a recollection so dear and sweet and lilac-filed that I would have killed and murdered and torn apart cities to find her.