Faelorehn (9 page)

Both of us released a laugh at the memory, and the tension that had been building up melted a little bit.

“I, I’m sorry Tully,” I whispered, hiding my arms and the scratches covering them from her view.  “Do you promise not to freak out if I tell you the truth?”

Tully raised her right hand and crossed her heart with her index finger.

“I don’t know how I got these scrapes.”  I held my arms out in front of me again, as if looking at them would give me the answer.

“How can you not remember?” Tully insisted.  “They look pretty new.  Are there any others, I mean, not just on your arms?”

“Yeah, my knees actually, and I feel like I’m going to be finding bruises all over the place in a day or two.”

“Did you fall down yesterday, maybe playing basketball with your brothers?” Tully asked.

I actually considered it, and to tell the truth, I couldn’t remember much of what
had
happened yesterday, not much at all.  When I told Tully this she furrowed her brow and sighed.  “It’s like someone has erased your memory.”

As if Tully’s words were the snap of a hypnotist’s fingers, part of my dream from the night before surfaced in my mind.  An image of a white dog and trees standing stark against the light of the near-full moon flashed across my vision.  Unfortunately, it was gone before I could get a good hold of it.

I sighed again.

“Maybe you hit your head when you got hurt, and are suffering from amnesia.”

I shrugged, then suggested we drop the subject altogether and focus on our homework.  Tully readily agreed with me.  I think deep down we were both a little rattled by the whole thing, and right then and there I had no answers to offer.

When I got home later that day, I decided to take a nap.  Mom thought I might be getting sick, but I just waved her off and said that studying for science often made me brain dead for an hour or two anyway.  As I crossed the living room I saw Dad’s magazine sitting askew atop the coffee table.  A familiar image of Stonehenge dominated the cover and for some strange reason I recalled noticing that before, when I had left that morning.

A terrifying image shot through my mind then, of a dark forest scene crowded with the rotting corpses of dogs, a moonlit meadow and something else I couldn’t quite see . . . I gasped, the burning image of glowing, violet eyes piercing my skull.

My mom was at my side before I completely lost my composure.

“Meghan!  Meghan, what’s wrong?”

“I’m okay Mom,” I mumbled as I clutched my head.  It didn’t really hurt, my head, but the sudden return of details from what must have been my dream from the night before had shocked me that much.

“What’s the matter?” she pressed, using her petit frame to keep me on my feet.

I thought lying was the best choice in this situation.  “Headache,” I grumbled.

I had had migraines when I was younger, in the years after they found me in Los Angeles, and a few since then, so it wasn’t a complete impossibility.  In order to add to the act, I pressed my arm against my forehead.  Too bad I had forgotten about the scrapes.

“Meghan!  What did you do to your arms?”

“Uhh,” I answered dully, “tripped in P.E. on Thursday.  We were playing softball.”

The grumbling sound next to my ear told me that she chose to believe my story, for the time being at least.  She helped me down the spiral staircase that descended into my room.

“You’ll kill yourself climbing down if I don’t help you,” she insisted.

Once downstairs, I sat on the edge of my bed and told her I could take it from there.  She stayed for a bit longer, closing the blinds that hung from my sliding glass door while making comments under her breath about my messy room and its likely contribution to my headache.  Mom liked things immaculate.

Finally she left, but only after I feigned lying down and going to sleep.  I listened to her footfalls as she climbed the carpeted steps, but even after she had closed the door behind her, I stayed in bed, my forearm over my forehead and my eyes glued to the glowing stars stuck to the ceiling.

Only after my breathing evened out and I no longer felt the waves of terror flooding over me, did I allow my thoughts to wander back to my nightmare from the night before, and most likely, the reason for my current state of scraped skin and exhaustion.

-Eight-

Familiar

Of course, no answers ever came to me and after an hour of agonizing reflection, I came to the conclusion that I had simply had a nightmare the evening before and that my scrapes and bruises had been a result of a violent case of sleepwalking.  Though my room remained fully intact, I knew there was no other explanation.

Despite the fact that there were still bits and pieces of my dream missing, I felt somewhat satisfied with my conclusion.  After all, it wasn’t like I had never forgotten a dream I’d had before.

I joined my family for dinner, putting on my freshest face and pushing aside any concerns they voiced aloud.  Of course, my mother was the only one to display any true worry.  The boys had no idea I had almost fainted (they had been at the grocery story with my dad when I had first come home from Tully’s).  Dad had merely given me his customary once over.  As long as we had all our limbs and weren’t hemorrhaging from the head, there was absolutely nothing wrong with us.

After dinner we huddled down to watch TV before Mom and Dad started getting the twins and Aiden ready for bed.  They all complained when the time arrived, but somehow my parents managed.  Logan and Bradley soon followed, grumbling about how late it wasn’t and how they weren’t even tired as they yawned and rubbed their eyes.  I grinned, finding something amusing in their simple, childhood woes.

Yawning, I called a goodnight to my parents.  I had school in the morning, hurrah, and a test early in the week.  It would do me no good to start the week out cranky and tired.  I clambered down my spiral staircase, half eager for the warmth of my bed, half afraid of what would happen once I fell asleep.

The visions and voices and nightmares were returning, I could deny it no longer, but I wasn’t sure I could deal with it again.  I couldn’t go back into therapy and the medication I had taken when I was younger had made me feel nauseous all the time.  And the truth of it was, it never really helped.  I only pretended that it did so they wouldn’t give me more of the awful medicine.  Like before, I would just have to find a way to ignore my visions.  If I was lucky, in a week or two everything would go back to normal once again.  I pulled on my pajamas and curled into bed, counting imaginary pink and yellow butterflies visiting white flowers as I tried to keep my frightening memories at bay.

* * *

Monday morning was a riot in our house, as usual.  I packed a lunch and grabbed my backpack, squeezing out the front door right before Jack and Joey started throwing cereal at one another.  The morning was foggy once again, that nice thick fog that rolled in from the Pacific Ocean and nestled itself in the lower areas of the coast.

I strolled along the side of the road, making my way down to Tully’s.  A group of middle school kids waited for their bus on the corner of the street.  Today they stood huddled around the street sign, the other kids trying to look cool while the little kids picked up acorns and launched them at one another.

As I watched, something caught the corner of my eye.  I turned and glimpsed the dark sweep of a bird’s wing disappearing into the redwood that stood behind the wide stone barrier wall that denoted our neighborhood.  I stared at the spot where the wing had disappeared, thinking it was just a crow.  As I watched, however, the bird edged closer to a gap between the drooping branches.

I sucked in a breath.  The thing was huge, nearly as big as an eagle, and it stared, no,
glared
right at me.  Not for the first time that week, an icy chill prickled up my spine. 
No freaking way
.  It was the raven from last week.  I knew it without a doubt.  Unless, of course, there happened to be huge ravens lurking around our area lately, and I highly doubted that.  I cast another wary glance at the bird.  It appeared to be thinking, calculating, deciding whether or not it wished to eat my eyes or my liver first.

“Meghan!”

I nearly screamed.  Instead, I jumped and let out a pitiful noise that sounded closer to a Chihuahua yelping.  All the kids at the bus stop turned and looked at me.  Most of them started to laugh and point.

Feeling my cheeks turn pink, I turned towards Tully, who also had a big grin on her face.

“Get out much in this wide world?” she teased.

I grumbled at her and marched to her driveway where her mom’s car waited.  She had the flu or something, so Tully was allowed to drive the car to school.  Despite our advanced ages, we still didn’t have our own cars.  Vehicles were necessary in a rural town, but they were also expensive.  I understood that.  My parents weren’t destitute by any means, but having all us kids took a toll on their finances.  Luckily, I had friends to bum rides off of.

I threw my backpack into the back seat of the silver station wagon with Tully’s and we climbed in.  As we pulled up to the stop sign, I looked back into the redwood tree.  I told myself it was to avoid eye contact with the kids I had embarrassed myself in front of, but I really wanted to know if the raven was still there.  To my great relief, or perhaps disappointment (I honestly couldn’t say which), the unnerving bird was gone.

Just another hallucination,
I told myself as the car chugged along,
just another figment of your imagination.

When we pulled into the high school parking lot five minutes later, I found myself scanning the edge of our campus. 

I had no idea I was doing it until Tully asked, “Whatcha looking for?”

“Nothing,” I said automatically, leaning back into the seat and basking in the warmth of the car’s heater for a bit longer.  The day would warm up, once the fog wore off, but at the moment it was cold and damp.

I sighed and glanced back out the window.  What
had
I been looking for?  As we found a place to park, I reached into the back of the seat and grabbed my backpack.  Through the rear window I could see the bench where the local public bus stopped.  I froze, my hand clutching the strap of my backpack to the point where my knuckles turned white.  It was then that I became aware of what I had been searching for.  The homeless man was back, sitting hunched over on the bench as if he were asleep.

Why in the world had I wanted to find him?  An image of a tall man dressed in a hooded trench coat flashed before my eyes.  I felt my face drain of color and my palms go clammy.

“Hey Meghan, you don’t look so good.  You’re not feeling sick are you?” Tully asked.

I swallowed, only to find my mouth had gone dry as well.  “I’m fine,” I managed, sounding somewhat normal.

Tully shrugged and smoothed out her skirt and pulled up her neon-striped leggings.  Most people would call her sense of style flashy or a bad reproduction of the Eighties, but I couldn’t imagine any other style that would reflect her personality so well.

“Hey girls, what’s up?” Robyn called from across the parking lot.

The majority of the student body made way for her.  Considering they all dressed and acted like they lived inside some high end fashion catalog, I was never surprised when they got out of Robyn’s way.  I grinned.

Just then, the bell rang, signaling the start of school.  We all grimaced.

“Well, time to get another Monday underway!” Robyn proclaimed.

Unfortunately, I didn’t share her enthusiasm.

* * *

I managed to survive the week without encountering too many misfortunes.  My science test wasn’t a complete disaster and the people in my geography group were the types who strove for good grades.

On Friday, Robyn gave Tully and I a ride home, so after my last class I gathered my books from my locker and headed out to the parking lot.  We piled into her old car just before the lemmings poured out of the hallways.  I always smirked when I thought of that nickname for the popular crowd and their followers.  Robyn had thought of it, of course.

“They’re like lemmings!  They would all follow each other off of a cliff if that was the cool thing to do.  Completely mindless,” she had said in disgust.  The name had stuck ever since.

They each had their own cars, every one of them much newer than any of my friends’ vehicles of course, and often cut us off as we all made a mad dash for the exit.  For some reason, however, they never bothered us when Robyn drove.  I couldn’t tell if it was her tendency to cut corners a little too close, or if the state of her car itself acted as a deterrent.  I didn’t care.  As long as they stayed away I was happy.

As we pulled out of the parking lot and onto the tree-lined highway, I caught a glimpse of someone standing just within the tree line.  It was Hobo Bob.  My heart lurched and the hair stood up on my arms, though I couldn’t say why.  I couldn’t figure out why he bothered me so much.  He hadn’t been hanging around as much as before, and it wasn’t as if he ever approached any of us or shuffled around muttering and shouting random curse words.  A thought flashed through my head, not as vivid as the one last Sunday of the weird dogs, but clearer.  A picture of me standing in the clearing in the swamp where my friends and I had enjoyed the bonfire on Halloween.  Only, it wasn’t dark out and I was wearing jeans and an old T-shirt.  Just as quickly, the thought flickered away.  I shook my head.  Oh well.