 
DREAMER'S WORLDS: THE DREAMER'S WORLDS

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Dreamer's Worlds: The Dreamer's Worlds is Copyright © 2015 Dell Sweet

Copyright © 2010 - 2015 by Dell Sweet All rights reserved

Cover Art © Copyright 2014 Wendell Sweet

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your bookseller and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

LEGAL

This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places or incidents depicted are products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual living persons places, situations or events is purely coincidental.

This novel is Copyright © 2010 – 2015 Wendell Sweet and his assignees. The Name Dell Sweet is a publishing name used by Wendell Sweet. The Name Geo Dell is a publishing name owned by Wendell Sweet. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, electronic, print, scanner or any other means and, or distributed without the author's permission.

Permission is granted to use short sections of text in reviews or critiques in standard or electronic print.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

PREVIEW BOOK TWO

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
FOREWORD

My hope is that you enjoy this book as much as we enjoyed writing it.

Dell wrote the seed to this book some time ago. As we sat down together and began to work out how to write the actual book it seemed like a few hundred serious things happened all at once. I had things going on in my life, Dell had things going on in his life. It seemed time to concentrate on the actual writing would be difficult with a few hundred miles between us, and little actual time to get together physically, but in the end it all worked out. And now it's your time. Read. Enjoy. We will be back in the fall of 2015 with book two...

Geo Dell

DREAMER'S WORLDS: THE DREAMER'S WORLDS

"I had looked in that jerky way dreams have of showing you something. Pieces missing, frames skipped in the film, scenes out of order: Bits of information that seemed to mean nothing at the time. Things you only know and never see. Even explaining it doesn't do it justice, but if you've ever dreamed you know what I mean."

Joe Miller

"I will say this about buildings, walls, houses, cars, trees... They harbor evil. They can hate. Maybe not in the world most of us live in, but in the world I spend most of my time in the rules are different. They can hate you. They can love you. They can kill you. You should know that if you ever dream."

Laura Kast
ONE

In The Moonlight:

Joe Miller

"Easy... Easy, Boy." I lowered my hand to the dog's head and patted affectionately, trying to calm him. He whined low in his throat and looked around at the darkness that closed in on us.

We were in a garage, that much I could tell. Just a nondescript, average run-of-the-mill garage.

The dog lived here. Not the garage specifically. Specifically he lived with, or was owned by, the people that lived on the ground floor of the nearby house. I knew that was true because I lived on the top floor of that same house, even though I had only ever set foot there once or twice, and then only in dreams. I still knew the place. It looked the same. Familiar. The dog, Bear, slept in the garage.

The dog squirmed under my calming hand, whined once again, and then darted out of the garage toward the lower floor of the house. Maybe the first floor. Maybe the basement if he had or could find a way into it. Either way, he was safe now. A kind of exit stage left. Still, I waited a few long minutes to see if he might return, when he didn't I turned my attention back to the grocery cart I had just pushed for the last few miles to reach the garage.

It wasn't mine. Well, technically it wasn't mine, but everything in this world was mine if you came right down to it. I had entered what looked to be an abandoned house and found the cart, already loaded, sitting in an attached garage just off the ground floor apartment. I remember thinking... "So... This is how it begins...

It always begins some way and I suppose that sometimes the ends justify the means, and here was the end... I mean to say that I took the cart, loaded as it was, no more thought involved, pushed it out of the garage at a run and went blindly down the rain-slicked dirt road in front of me.

There was one bad part when I nearly got stuck, but I saw the problem from a long way off, put on a burst of speed and made it through the mud hole and out the other side. It was only a matter of minutes later that I had come in sight of the house and knew what the deal was. I had been contemplating the cart and it's contents, feeling ears of corn through the side of a large sack, about to check some other stuff, when the dog had appeared.

When the dog came, memories came with him: The house; The people that owned the dog... Returning from work... or? I don't know. Work or something else. Daily? Was it before things got bad? If so it had to be work: There was nothing else but work before. So work, or something like work... Coming home... The people downstairs... The family upstairs that I knew so intimately, but had never actually seen... Other memories... Leaving to go and get the cart... Knowing it would be there somehow... Getting there... Looping back to here and the present time...

The dog didn't come back. I stood, the moonlight washing over me: This was critical, all that I had to do was stay there. There meaning upstairs. Stay there. I would be home. I was home. All I had to do was stay. But it never worked out that way. Even as I was thinking about climbing those stairs, checking on the kids, climbing quietly into bed beside my wife, something else was pulling at me, and as I looked around, the big van was parked in the driveway. Almost talking to me. Had it been there a few moments before? A few seconds ago? Surely not. I'd just pushed that cart up that driveway. There had been nothing in it... And that was... Today...? Tonight...? Just a short time ago...? Sure it was.

I let my eyes move around the garage, sweeping over the cart and its load of bundles and packages... Junk too... I hadn't seen that before... Computer parts?... Maybe... Food and machines. That was ironic. But my mind was not satisfied. The van was there and if the van was there...... I felt in my pockets...... Keys...... And absolutely those keys hadn't been there a few seconds ago. I could feel their scratchy press against my thigh. Irritating yet comforting... My eyes turned up to the van.

The van was the way out. It could be anyway, if I could simply stay with it... But there was no time to think. Certainly no time to be thinking like that.

More memories came. Memories of always taking the van; always, and... And I couldn't make the rest of that ghost of a memory come, whatever it was, it was lost to me.... The city... Being lost in the city... Something.... It wouldn't come, but, well I couldn't stay here could I?

I glanced towards the house again, expecting the dog to come back... No dog... He had played his part and... And... I looked up at the full, bloated moon. When had I left the garage? I was standing next to the van... Looking in through the drivers window. The keys out of my pocket and into my hand. I could feel their cold, metal weight... Dawn was not far away, if I was going... That was it. The thought just echoed in my head... If I was going I better get going?... If I was going I better get to it?... I better throw away the keys and go in the house?... I better... But I stopped those thoughts. I knew where _I better_ lead to, it lead to, _'The time is short!'_ Once dawn moves in you'll be stuck! Whatever I had to do in the city with the van had to be done now: Before dawn, or not at all. There was no time to think about it... There never was... I looked down and sucked in a sharp breath.

I let the breath out slowly as my hand fitted the key into the ignition. When had I opened the door? _'For that matter,'_ my mind started, but I shut the door on those thoughts as the van roared to life. I dropped the lever into reverse and for some reason I looked up at the top floor of the house as I did. The lights popped on... A shadow moved behind the curtains of one window... _'Better go if you're going,'_ my mind whispered. _'You could stay,'_ another voice inside my head countered. _'Just walk up those stairs...'_ the curtain moved in that upstairs window and I quickly turned my eyes aside... I couldn't see that.... I always turned away: Always...

The van bounced and then lurched out into the street. Gears clashing, transmission whining. The tires chirped as I braked too hard and then slammed the gear shift into drive. The outline of the city glowed in soft yellow light before me. The moonlight bathed the road behind me bright and familiar. After all, how many times had I driven this road?... I sighed, slipped my foot off the brake pedal and let it fall heavily onto the gas. The tires chirped once more as I moved off down the road, snapping the headlights on as an afterthought. Behind me, in the back of the van, the dog whined. I lowered one hand and his head slipped underneath that hand.

"Easy... Easy, Boy," I said.

In The Moonlight:

Laura Kast

"Easy... Easy, girl, I wont hurt you." I lowered my hand slowly to let the dog get my scent as I approached the van... _Boy,_ my mind corrected... _Boy, Laura..._

"Boy," I said aloud and laughed. But the dog looked like he knew what I had said, cocking his head from one side to the other. His upper lip curled away from his teeth, but he was no longer snarling or growling deep in his chest. "Easy, Boy. Easy, Boy... It's me, Laura... Easy." I reached down and he allowed me to rest one hand on his head. I ruffled the thick fur there.

This was new. Did the dog know me? Did I know the dog? I thought about it and realized that at the very least I knew the dog. That didn't mean the dog knew me. And the dog was definitely not letting anyone near the van. Guarding it. He seemed to consider me on a deeper level, his eyes locked with mine. When had I looked back at him? I couldn't answer the question. With the dog looking at me like that the question didn't seen important at all. Wasn't, important at all, I corrected myself... _The dog corrected...?_

"You do know me... Don't you? ... _Bear?_ " The dog, who was not a dog, cocked his head to one side and seemed to smile at me.... "Your name is, Bear?... Good, Boy... You're... Joe's dog... Bear. Good boy, Bear... Is he here... In the van?" I eased closer as I talked.

Bear watched me, but no longer growled at all. Even the stiff posture he had assumed had changed. His tail dropped and moved slightly. It may have been the beginning of a wag. He whined low in his throat. His eyes reflecting green iridescence in the blue of the moon light. He whined again and then came closer to me, easing his head back under my hand so carefully it seemed as though it had always been there. I rubbed his head once more and then my hand slipped under his jaw, scratching, my head lowered at the same time. Bear whined again and then licked my face.

Laura, you take too many chances, I told myself. Too many. But my hand continued to rub Bear's head and scratch under his jaw, allowing my racing heart to slow. Catching my breath. Wondering what came next. I was new to this. I had never been this far before. I didn't know what came next.

"You get in the van," Joe said from the open window above me.

A small, sharp scream slipped from my throat before I could stop it; sounding like someone was strangling me as I tried to suppress it.

"Jesus... Jesus, Joe... Jesus!"... I managed to get myself back under control after a few seconds. I sucked air back into my lungs. Bear whined and looked up at me. My heart slammed against my rib cage.

"No... Not, Jesus. Thank God it's not that time," he said.

I met his eyes, but there was no smile in them. "You scared me," I said defensively, still breathing hard, chest heaving, heart slamming against my ribs.

"No shit. You think I wasn't scared too? You're not supposed to be here... You never have been." He finished quietly after starting in a loud, strained whisper. His eyes remained on mine. The wind picked up moving the limbs in a huge Elm that stood nearby. Its winter-dead limbs clicking and clacking as they came together. The heavy branches groaning and creaking as the wind momentarily gusted.

The wind continued to build for a few more seconds. Our eyes still locked on one another. Then the wind died down with an audible sigh and I shuddered involuntarily and shifted my eyes away.

"I know... I know," I started. I moved my eyes back to his, but he just stared at me.

"I do know," I started again. "I'm not even sure how... How I got here," I finished quietly.

Bear pushed past me, tail wagging, and jumped up into the van as Joe opened the door.

"That's how it happens," he said every bit as quietly as I had started. His eyes that had wandered up to the night darkened sky were back on my own now. Staring at me out of the open door. Bear's head popped up, looking at me from between the seats.

"Well," Joe asked?

"What," I asked? I cocked my head in an unconscious imitation of the way Bear was looking at me.

"Shouldn't you get in," he asked?... "Or don't you want to?"

And that was the question, wasn't it? Here I was, where I was not supposed to be, where I was not invited to be, where I had never been before and it was time to make the choice.

Bear cocked his head once more as if he were also waiting to hear my answer. The dog that was not a dog at all... a... wolf? Maybe... Maybe more than that too... His green eyes asked the question.

"I get in the Van," I said quietly.

Joe looked away and then turned quickly back. "Yeah. Yeah. You get in the van and we... We go... It's nearly dawn... There isn't much time and we have to get as far as we can before the sun comes up."

He stretched one hand across the seat, held out to me and I could hear the engine running... When had he started it?... I couldn't remember. My tongue poked out and licked at my dry lips. Bear seemed to grin. No. Not just a wolf either... One side of his upper lip curled over his teeth.

I found my feet stepping up into the passenger area and I followed...

In The Moonlight:

On The Road With Bear

Joe

I rolled to a stop at the intersection. The city was ahead, the house behind, I had never turned left or right so I had no idea what might be in those directions. Were those two roads, one to the left, one to the right, winding away into the distance, just conceptions? One of those photo realistic things that made you look twice, maybe even more? I looked again.

The roads were night dark, the moon playing hide and seek, gliding in and out of the heavy black clouds. The falling rain distorted both the near road and the distant road. How long had it been raining, I wondered, once the rain finally registered. Big, fat drops formed and rolled off down the slope of the windshield. I reached for the wiper switch but found nothing.

I took my eyes from the windshield and looked, supposing I had put my hand in the wrong place, but I had not. There was simply nothing but a gray, formless mass that slightly resembled the lower half of a dashboard. I blinked and when I opened my eyes once more the wiper switch was there. Exactly where it had not been. Exactly where it should be.

Tired I thought.

Bullshit was my second thought.

I blinked again, but the wiper switch remained. I flicked it on half suspecting that it wouldn't work. That the wipers, if there were any real wipers, would remain frozen to the glass, refuse to move, but they swept up and pushed the beaded drops of rain from the glass nearly silently. Bear whined and pushed his nose under my hand.

"Alright, Buddy," I told him. I stroked his head and then looked back out at the road. Left, right, straight, I asked myself.

There was a mystery to the city. Sometimes it went bad for me and sometimes it simply frustrated me.

... Running down the clock... One thing was sure, I had never come back out of the city in the many times that I had driven down into it.

... Left, right, straight, I asked myself again.

I pulled a small wire bound notebook and a pen from my shirt pocket and thumbed it open. Pages and pages of notes on the many times I had gone, but none of them amounted to anything except four entries:

The first entry, page twenty-Six, an address, 52715 Randolph Circle. I had never found Randolph Circle in all of my trips, let alone 52715. I had no memory of ever being there. Of any trip to the city when I may have gone there. I did not remember marking the address into the book. Nothing. A total blank.

The second entry, page twenty-five, read; Be careful of Locust street. Big bold letters. And I remembered being there. I had barely got away with my life.

The third entry, page twenty-seven said; 'West End Docks.'

I knew that place. I remembered being there, the first time and several other times. But the details weren't there. I couldn't see them. Why had I been there? I couldn't see it. Put my finger on it. There was a long, low building that fronted the docks. A house across the street. An old run down neighborhood. A low, curving concrete wall where I had sat and watched people come and go several times. And more. The feeling that I had been there other times that I could not yet remember. I say yet because I had the feeling that I would remember it. But page twenty-six? Nothing. Nothing at all. Not even a ghost of a memory.

A map would be useful, but there were no maps. It had taken a dozen times or more before I could count on the wire bound note book being in my pocket. Bigger things, like the van, had taken even longer. Before that I had had to walk or steal a car and that was always risky. But there was hope for a map. Someday, just not this day. At least I didn't think so.

A quick check of the glove box and the engine cover storage area proved that to be true. Nothing useful. And why was it so much useless stuff was there? A spare pen cap... A broken transistor radio, the van had a radio of its own... Sometimes anyway, but there were no stations on the dial, or at least not yet there weren't. That was another maybe, but it was there, so what good was a broken transistor radio?

Two paperclips. An insurance card, made out to me... For what? A fuzzy life saver, it looked like lime, my least favorite flavor. A flashlight with no batteries, and a dog biscuit. That was new. There had never been a dog biscuit before. Bear whined and gave a little woof in his throat.

I laughed, "It's yours, Buddy." He took it gently from my hand. The dry scrape of the Windshield wipers dragged my attention to the windshield. No rain. No rain on the road either. I reached down and flicked off the wipers. At least the switch was still there.

Straight, my mind finally decided. Better the evil that you know. Left and right could wait for another night. I eased off the brake as Bear jumped up onto the passenger seat, rested his paws on the dashboard and watched the countryside pass us by as we made our way into the city.

The fourth entry was on page fifty-eight. A series of numbers. 2757326901. All strung together, followed by a name Laura K. Whole first name, initial only for the last: Like I knew her maybe? I didn't though. I must have at the time I wrote the number down, but I didn't now. Who was Laura? Were the numbers a telephone number? Code talk? It bothered me that I had written the entry and yet had no recollection of doing it. Same as Page twenty-six.

I passed the City Limits sign as I wondered. Regular street lights. No traffic. Sometimes there was traffic, sometimes there wasn't.

The rain began to fall all at once. One second no rain, the next everything was drenched as though it had rained forever: Always; would never stop. I fumbled for the windshield wiper switch once more, but by the time I turned it back on the windshield was clear. No more rain. The road looked as though it had never seen rain, as if it had never been there at all.

I glanced at the speedometer and then lowered my speed. I didn't need to attract attention. There were cops here and they had no problem putting me in jail. It didn't seem to matter to them that I was no more real to them than they were to me, off to jail they took me. And before that was all said and done I spent ten days in that jail. Eating Bologna sandwiches, smelling that moldy-pissy jail smell and trying to convince my court appointed lawyer that neither of us were really there. Jail was no good. I had no intention of going back there. I looked once more at the speedometer, backed off a little more, and then passed the sign announcing the city limits.

The city was early morning dead. It wasn't dawn. If it were I would not have been there, but dawn was close. There was a glow above the city skyline. Faint... Pink... Growing as I sat idling at the intersection waiting for the light to change.

I noticed the rain was falling once more and I had either never turned on the wipers the last time it had rained, or I had turned them off after it had rained. I reached down to flip the switch on and that was when I heard the sound of a heavy engine screaming. Gears clashing. Bear voiced a warning just as my eyes cleared the dashboard and tried to make sense of the scene before them.

There wasn't much time to absorb it. A garbage truck just feet away from the driver's door and closing fast. Sirens screaming. Red and blue lights pulsing. Chasing the garbage truck, I wondered? That was nearly the only thought I had time for.

Bear barked again. My eyes focused on the truck only inches away from me, and slowly rose to the driver. A woman... Laura? ... Her eyes focused on my own for the split second before the Garbage truck hit the van's driver door full blast.

Pain exploded inside of me. Faintly, far away, I heard Bear howl in either anger or pain. Then that sound, all sound, was quickly cut off, replaced with a low snapping sound that quickly turned into a heavy crackling sound. The smell of Ozone filled my nose, but something else quickly began to replace that smell. Gasoline. Gasoline and something else... Diesel? And then, with a low wham, the heat came. I struggled to free myself, but it was no use. I had time for one more quick thought... Laura... Laura... _Why_...? And then the explosion came and the pain flared, then ended almost as fast as it had come and I found myself flying through the blackness of the void... Flying.... Falling... Panic building... Lungs trying to pull a breath... Voice trying to scream... Nothing coming out... Then sight returning in a rush... The street racing up to meet me... The remains of the Van and the Garbage truck burning far below me.... Red and blue lights pulsing... Cars parked aslant in the street where they had skidded to a stop... Cops behind open doors... Crouched to fire... Their guns pointing... Rain falling... The pavement coming closer... So close I could see the individual pebbles of the surface embedded in the asphalt mix...

The impact came with no pain. The remaining air crushed from my lungs... I tried once more to scream, but it was no use... I hit hard, bounced, came down once more and my eyes flew open wide as I impacted the second time...

Gray half-light... The buzzing of the alarm clock... My own sheets tangled around me... Damp with sweat. The red numerals on the clock read 6:47 A.M. I sucked air greedily, like I had never been among the living at all. Never known how to breath. Just returned from the dead. I released my breath in a long, shaky shudder, found myself half sitting up in the bed and fell back to the mattress urging my racing heart to slow... Calming myself... Morning had come.

I reached over, shut off the alarm clock and silence descended on the room. I could hear my heart beating in that silence. Rapidly slamming against the inside of my ribs. Hard. Heavy. Loose and wet. Hear my labored breathing. I lay still for a few minutes watching more color seep into the sky, then got up and made my way to the shower.

In The Moonlight:

This Present Waking To life

Therapy, Laura

Tuesday: Late Afternoon

Doctor Donna Shulman's Office

"So... How did that make you feel?" Doctor Shulman asked me.

"Feel? I don't know... Dead?.... Like it was real?... Like it's always real until I wake up and find out that it isn't real, you know?" I lifted my eyes to her, but she said nothing. "And..." I paused. No way should I say what was really on my mind. Shut up, Laura! I told myself before any of the words could slip out.

"And?" she prompted.

"And?" I questioned innocently.

"And you left off at And... It isn't a typical ending to a sentence. At least not any structure I know of. I felt you had more to say?" She lifted say so that it made her statement a question. She waited. She was a good waiter. The best waiter. The best I had ever met. They probably taught that in the psychology classes she had taken.

I had known Doctor Donna Shulman for two years now. All in therapy. Two years ago I had been speed addicted, just coming off living on the streets. Now I was back to my old job as a website designer. No one I worked for knew about my past. My Probation officer wasn't invasive like that. He was satisfied that I was working, maintaining a home, residence was the legal terminology he used when we discussed it, and probably what he wrote on the forms that went back to the judge. I was testing clean. I _was_ clean, and had been the whole two years. My probation ended in a matter of a few weeks.

"Laura?" She prompted.

"Sorry," I said, even though I wasn't. It was ingrained. I hated myself when I groveled or apologized for no reason.

"The guy," I said reluctantly. "I dream about this guy all the time. I mean every dream, and I'm dreaming about the same places all the time too. Over and over... He's.... I don't know... I don't want to sound crazy... He's... It's like he's real." There, I told myself, I said it.

"Do you feel crazy," she asked? "Impulsive? Like you're worthless? The way your father always made you feel?"

"No," I answered quietly. We'd covered a lot of ground in the last two years of mandated counseling sessions. All for resisting arrest. Well, I had kneed officer Macho Man who had insisted on touching me everywhere he possibly could while he justifiably subdued me. It still made me mad. And I had also shot a looping right to his eye, but it was only luck that I hit it. Okay, I had taken self defense classes... Maybe it wasn't just luck.

"Not feeling like using?... Getting high," she asked?

"Absolutely not!" I answered a little too strongly. But it was the truth. I didn't feel like using. Hadn't in a long while. Not since the last time that had found me in the fight with officer Touchy-Feelie. After all of that I would have had to have been insane to want to drink: Of course N.A. talked about that. The insanity of the drug use. The addict doing the same things over and over and yet expecting different results.

"I feel like he's substantial... He knows me... Knows things about me... Everything."I said.

"Well, Laura. They're your dreams... Naturally..."

"Right... Right... That's why I sound crazy... I know it... But it goes past that... Like... Like I'm not even in... In charge?... Control?... Control is a better word. Like I'm not even in control of the dream, you know?"

She studied me. "...No..." she said at last. "No I do not know." She studied me some more.

"Like... Okay... This will sound crazy... Like somehow I've crashed into _his_ dream. Like I'm part of _his_ dream... Like it's not even my dream, it's his, and somehow... Somehow I'm like some bit player in his dream... But it is my dream... So it's like I'm a guest in my own Goddamn dream... Or his... which ever it is," I finished quietly. I studied her right back.

"I see... Well, what do you suppose that is telling you?" she asked me.

"Telling me?" I asked back.

"Yes. Telling you," she countered, refusing to give me the answer. She waited.

"I," I sighed. "I don't know," I admitted.

"Really," she asked?

I shrugged.

She sighed. "We've been over this, Laura... Your Father controlled you. Obviously this man... You feel this man is controlling you. You feel like you are living his dream.. Acting in his dream... As though it's scripted by him... You can't see the correlation?" She leaned forward expectantly.

"I," I started, and then the small session clock on her desk chimed. I let out my pent up breath. She smiled.

"Saved by the metaphorical bell," she said and smiled.

I smiled back.

"Next week then, Laura?" She smiled again.

"I will think about what you said," I said, trying to mollify her. After all she did send reports to my probation officer; days to go could turn into weeks or months to go, maybe, if she turned in a bad report. "I really will," I said, forcing my face to look as sincere as I could once remember looking, or wanting to look, when I really wanted to convince my mother that everything was okay in my world. It had worked then... Maybe...

I looked up and she was smiling. "I know you will. I'll say that for you, you do the work... Have you given any thought to continuing therapy after the court ordered sessions stop? I'm sure you realize that next week is our last session." She smiled once more. "I've already submitted your last report. I recommended you be released, Laura."

My eyes immediately became moist and my throat caught. I cleared it, blinked a few times to keep the tears away. I hadn't realized how afraid of all of it I was. Of all the times to start having nightmares. "I'm so grateful for that," I said and I meant it. "I appreciate it." There I was groveling again.

She smiled. "Let me know about the other," she said as she opened the door for me. It took me a second, my mind was racing with all the possibilities of being free.

"Yes," I said with a slight delay. I had felt compelled to answer, _Yes I will. I'll keep coming,_ but I bit that back. "I will," I said, groveling again.

I stepped out into the hallway as I spoke and the door slammed hard behind me making my heart jump into my throat. I spun around thinking, The wind... Must have been the wind, but the door was gone. The hallway was gone. My heart hammered harder in my chest.

I heard the footsteps before I saw anyone. I was trying to take stock of my situation: Where I was. I had been there before. A wide open area of machinery. Huge ceilings twenty maybe thirty feet high. So much noise that I could hear nothing but the noise. And that made me wonder how I had heard the door slam. Heard the conversation for that matter. Heard the footsteps I still heard. My heart jumped higher, seeming to block my windpipe with every beat. Pulsing like drums in my ears.

_'Run, Laura, Run,'_ my mind screamed.

I turned and ran blindly along a high metal catwalk that was elevated about fifteen feet above the floor. The sounds of the machinery now blocked out the sounds of the footfalls, but a quick glance over my shoulder showed me the two cops behind me. Right behind me. Maybe all of twenty feet. I tucked my arms into my sides, pumped my legs harder and put on the best burst of speed I knew how to put on. The ribbed steel treading of the cat walk provided good traction, but how long would it go on for I wondered.

I turned a corner. The cat walk ended, and I found myself in a huge garage. A large Garbage truck sat idling, the driver's door hanging open. It seemed my only choice. Later I began to doubt that, but at the time it seemed so final, like there really was no other choice, but to jump into the idling truck, slam the door, and get away from those cops. Later it was obvious that it was too pat. A set up.

I hit the step of the cab and launched myself inside of it. My breath was coming in hard, painful gasps. My heart slamming so hard against my ribs that it felt capable of breaking bones... Or itself. A second later I was sitting upright, the stick shift in one hand, racing the gas pedal, punching my foot into the clutch, releasing the emergency brake and then nearly dumping the clutch all at once when one of the cops seemed about to jump onto the cab step. The truck roared, lurched forward and slammed into the closed garage door in front of it.

Glass and wood sprayed the garage. The door didn't slow the huge truck down at all. I ducked reflexively as the truck lunged through the door and out into the street.

Halfway down the street I had the engine wound out in fourth gear when a couple of things occurred to me. First; I had never driven a stick before. I didn't know how to do it. I shouldn't have been able to know about the brake and be able to get moving that fast. Second; were the cops right behind me even now?

As if to answer my question the sounds of sirens came to my ears. Red and blue lights pulsed against the interior of the truck. The rear view mirror reflected them, catching my attention. It was only a second, but that was all it needed to be. I looked up and there was his face. Shocked. Eyes wide. Just a few feet away from me. A red van. Inches now. No time to stop. I heard myself scream as I hit the van broadside in the driver's door lifting it off the road and into the air. The hood of the garbage truck flew up, smashed the windshield, and then came through it. It all happened in a split second, but in the same instant it seemed to last forever. To go on for a very long time.

I felt the pieces of the hood strike my face. Pain flared bright, hot, all consuming. All just a brief split second and then I was falling. I couldn't breathe... Absolute dark consumed me.... Falling faster... I hit the mattress hard, a scream tearing from my throat as I did. I screamed a second time before I realized I was in my own bed. Grayish-pink dawn light glowing against the dirty window panes. The hands of the old wind up clock standing at a quarter to seven A.M.

"Oh, Jesus God," I sobbed once I caught my breath. I curled up into a fetal position. Sickness ripping through my stomach. It was so real... So real.

In The Moonlight:

The Road To Anywhere

Joe

The first thing I felt was the cold hardness of the steering wheel under my hands. The second thing was cold air flowing against my face. Probably what woke me up, I thought before I actually had the time to think about it. I blinked trying to clear my mind, but it remained foggy. Cobwebbed. Stuck. Was anything here ever clear? No. At least that was one thing that I actually did know was true.

I was back. That much was clear. Sitting in the van in the driveway. No, I corrected, sitting in the van in a driveway. It was close to my driveway, but not quite right. The house too was almost right, but again not quite my house. Some little something was off. Whatever it was that made it my house was not there. Things like that were absolute, at least most of the time they were. It either was or it wasn't and this wasn't.

I looked around at the van. It was my van, although again it was not precisely right in detail, it was what it was supposed to be... Paper clips sitting in the bottom of the cup holder molded into the engine cover, and I knew if I opened the glove box there would be an insurance card and the broken transistor radio.... A few other things. But it wasn't exactly right, and that meant someone had approximated it. And, I forced myself to follow my own logic, if someone had approximated my van that meant they had to know about it in the first place, didn't it? They had to know it well enough to know what it looked like and what was in it too. That bothered me. There was no one at all that should have possessed that knowledge. No one.

I looked at the house again. Same size. Same basic layout. Two stories. Same garage off to one side. I began to doubt my initial feelings that it was not my house. The house looked more like my house than the van did my van. So why was the feeling in my gut telling me the van was okay and the house was not?... No clue. Just that vague feeling in my gut.

I clicked the key over once and the idiot lights came to life on the dashboard. No clock. There was never a clock. The gas gauge swung over to full and pegged the little steel post... Brass post, my mind supplied. Okay. Brass post, I agreed.

Full tank. The battery gauge came to rest dead center. A low crackle came from the radio that caught my attention.

The radio rarely made any sound at all. My fingers reached for the tuner knob automatically. As I touched it, it disappeared before my eyes. The radio face smoothed out and the old fashioned radio disappeared before me. A new, modern radio appeared in its place. Dozens of digital presets... I pulled my fingers away as if they were burned. The radio continued to crackle and spit static.

I stared for what seemed a very long time then reached out and pressed the first preset. The static smoothed out to glassy silence. My finger hovered over the next preset, about to press it when the strains of a violin reached out of the van's door speakers and filled the truck with soft strains of music.

The violin was a solo piece, or at least it seemed that way. It swelled, fell, and swelled again. Filling the interior and drifting out into the night through the open window. My heart caught in my throat. It was so beautiful to listen to, but... Someone might hear... Someone who shouldn't.

I pulled my attention back from the radio and caught the end of the steel sight of a gun swinging close to my face. Bright light exploded inside my head. No pain. No time for thought. I was spinning in the void, flying... Flying free. Then falling. Falling faster and faster.

I hit the mattress hard, the air driven from my lungs in one quick rush. I bounced and caught myself sitting upright struggling to breath. The clock blinked 6:47 A.M.... I was home again...

I fell back onto the mattress drew a deep breath into my lungs and focused on the ceiling. The ceiling was not my ceiling, it only seemed to be. I had stared at my own ceiling so many mornings after waking... Just like this. So many evenings trying to fall asleep, or avoiding falling asleep.

There was a hairline crack that ran from the light fixture towards the window. It wasn't there. I pulled another deep breath into my lungs fighting against the fear that was building inside of me. The trick, if there was a trick, was to act as though nothing was out of the ordinary.

I focused on getting my breathing back to normal. Slowing my heart rate as my eyes took in the room. Almost exact. Almost. The clock was the same, but wrong... Too perfect. My own clock didn't look so...

New, my mind supplied? Maybe... Maybe my own clock was a little more worn.... Broken in... And... And I didn't know what else. It was my clock, but it wasn't my clock. It was that simple. And I noticed as I took in my surroundings that the bedside stand was completely wrong. I had seen that stand before. It was in my head. That had to be where they had retrieved it from... My head... Had to be... This stand was in the house I had shared with my wife... The other bedroom. The one in the house on the dark road. The end of the dark road. Someone lived downstairs. I'd met them, an older couple, at least a few times. Bear's owners... I lived upstairs with my wife, when I was there: When I could be there. The rest of the time was up for grabs. Sometimes in my own room. Sometimes in places like this. Places that weren't real for a reason. And that troubled me. There was always a reason. I sighed, rolled off the bed and padded towards the bathroom.

I turned the knob on the bathroom door but it refused to move under my hand. Panic returned fast and hard. My heart leapt into my throat and then began to hammer away at me, pulsing hard at my temples. The bedroom. The hallway. Three doors and the stairs leading down. It all looked right, but I was sure that none of the other doors would work either. I turned towards the stairs and then changed my mind and went back to the bedroom. The clock blinked... 6:47 A.M. In red LED's. Not possible. I picked it up. No cord. No hinged door for the batteries. Nothing. I palmed the clock and walked out of the room quickly, hit the stairs and then took them down two by two.

The bottom of the house was absolute silence. Moonlight spilled through the front windows. I could see the van sitting in the driveway and that was wrong. Nowhere that I had ever lived had I been able to see the van sitting in the driveway. And if this was home the van shouldn't be there at all. So...

My thoughts froze. Someone was sitting in the van. I could see the shadowy outline as their head moved and was illuminated by the sparse moonlight. Someone. I shifted the clock in my hand and felt the cold steel as I did. And that was wrong too. Plastic. It should be plastic, I told myself as I looked down at my hand.

Cold blued steel. A small, compact pistol. Something with a clip. I didn't know enough about pistols to know exactly what it was. Maybe a .380. Maybe a Nine Millimeter. It seemed too small, too compact to be anything larger. I looked it over in the moonlight.

I could see the safety had been flicked to the off position. I took a deep breath, started to step forward and a sudden blast of cold air hit me hard. Sharpening my senses. Nearly causing me to gasp as I drew the cold air into my lungs.

I found myself on the side of the van, hand outstretched, pistol gripped tightly, aimed through the darkened opening of the drivers window... Window rolled down... The persons arm resting across the window channel, elbow sticking out into space. I crept closer setting each foot down carefully.

It was the last footfall that betrayed me. A loose piece of gravel gritting under my shoe. It gave me away. Music suddenly swelled out of the open window... Violin... And I knew. I knew right then, but when the figure turned towards me my finger jerked against the trigger anyway, and the night exploded with sound and bright color. My vision snapped into tight focus for a split second and then everything went black.

The black consumed everything. Sound... Light... Color... Thought... Air... Life... Feelings and pain and sometimes when it happened I wished it would just go on forever. On and On... Nothing else ever. Just blackness... Forever... Rest. Sleep. Real sleep... Peace of mind... Real...

But this time it didn't last and my body slammed down onto the bed so hard that I felt it slide across the floor. The table went over, the clock flying through the air and shattering into dozens of black and clear shards of plastic. I saw it. Just as I saw my body impact the mattress: The bed jump sideways; the stand go over. I saw it all from about four feet above my body where my spiritual self hovered waiting.

My body, the physical me, the one on the bed, struggled to breath. Fingers clawing at the mattress, twisting the sheets into his fists. He drew a deep breath and my spiritual self ceased to exist. I slammed into my own body hard, and the panic, fear, hot sweat, smells, light and air, feelings, all flooded back into me in one huge rush of light and heaviness. The breath I pulled seemed to sear my lungs, burning harshly as I greedily sucked it in. The blood rushed and sang in my head. Pulsing at my temples. Feeling as if it might burst from me and shower down onto the bed in a bright scarlet spray.

Silence... Then...

Bird song came to me from the open window on a light, warm breeze. The smells of greenery floating on it. The air settled into my lungs, I pushed it out, sucked in another deep breath and the panic began to fall away. The beads of sweat on my body beginning to cool in the light breeze. I lay still, calming myself... Letting the life come back into my body.

My hands opened and flexed and something slipped from my hand onto the tangle of sheets. I sat up and picked it back up... A shapeless mass of... Something... Plastic? Metal? It didn't feel like either. It felt cool to the touch. Cooler than it should be. It had no recognizable shape. No texture. No smell either, I thought, as I lifted it up to my face. And very little weight. Much less substantial than its size would have suggested.

So, I told myself, I bought something back with me... That was a first... What did it mean?
TWO

In The Moonlight:

The Garage

Bear

The man's smell was everywhere. Not the man who fed him, the other man. The man who came to him in that other place. The place he slipped away to whenever he closed his eyes for too long. The place he wanted to, go to but could not make himself go to. He had to wait. He had to wait until it happened on its own. He couldn't make it happen. Couldn't? Not exactly true. He could. Shouldn't was truer. And he wished that he could. He wished he could because things were bad here. Very bad. The man never came to feed him anymore. Even so, food wasn't really a problem... But the man had always come to feed him... For a... For a long time? He asked himself. For a long time, he agreed, but time was such a fuzzy concept.

He felt he was changing... Becoming something more... Different. Other than he had been... He didn't really understand it. It was light, it was dark. He was here, he was there. His eyes were open his eyes were closed... That was time... At least in this place. But this other thing. This other thing that was a... He couldn't grasp it. It was something like him. Something like a dog. Wolf? ... And it seemed to be taking more and more of him... Becoming him...

He was startled at the thought... Was there another place? Another... Self?

It had seemed as though there were an answer right there. Just a second ago. But he couldn't get it: If there was more than this he didn't know what it might be... The man...

He looked toward the house. The man from there bought food. He bought it from the house. That was also time. But the man didn't bring it anymore. Hadn't for.... Time.... Some time... More time. He turned his attention back to the Garage.

The other man... The other man's smell was everywhere. On the Grocery cart that sat in one shadow filled corner, half hidden in the darkness. On the doorpost where he sometimes stood and stared out at the moonlight and the house and thought about the woman who lived upstairs with the little ones. The ones that never came out. Or never seemed to come out. Still, although Bear didn't know how, he knew about them. Knew they were there.

He turned his shaggy head and stared out at the roadway. He knew the road too. He had been in the van with the man. It was exciting... Horrible... Terrible... He hated it. He loved it. It went places. Places other than this. Places that the man wanted to go. And sometimes it hurt him. Bad things happened. Pain happened. It made him afraid. Made him sleep. Maybe, he thought, as he stared out at the road, he could find the man down that road though... Maybe...

He stared up at the full, blue-tinted moon. It pulled at him. Said something in a language his old self understood. The old self that lived inside of him. The old, old self. The thing that the others couldn't find anymore. The thing that some of his own kind couldn't find anymore. Most beings, like the man, didn't even know it existed.

The moon... The road... Stretching away to.... Maybe the man?... The Van?... The rest of whatever there was?... Maybe food?...

He debated. Maybe he should stay. Maybe if the man came back, here is where he would come to. Here is where he would look for him, maybe... Or... Maybe the man was on the road... Somewhere else... Waiting for him to come to him. To find him...

Bear paced nervously back and forth, in and out of the shadow filled garage. Slipping into the bright moonlight and then fading once more into the black shadows. He suddenly stopped his pacing, looked once more towards the road, then up at the second floor of the house.

A shadow figure stood framed in the second floor window watching him. He whined low in his throat and the whine turned into a growl. He couldn't see much more than the shadow, but he was sure it was the woman, and the woman...

There was something wrong with her. Something wrong with the woman... Something wrong about her... He could smell it on her... On the air that flowed around her and found it's way to him. He hesitated for a moment longer and then padded out onto the road. The bluish moonlight glinted off the asphalt. He glanced back to the house but he saw no shadows this time. His upper lip curled back from his teeth as he sniffed at the air The man's scent was there. Strong. He looked back up at the moon once more, then turned and trotted off down the road...

In The Moonlight:

In The Bathtub;

Laura

I waited until the sick feeling in my stomach disappeared... Ten minutes? A half hour? It was hard to tell. I cried, held my stomach and it passed. Both the tears and the sickness.

The gray was turning more golden, dirty gold, but that was the window pane. The sounds of early morning traffic increased every minute. It came to me clearly through the window even though the street was six stories below. I focused on the window and saw the pigeon nearly at the same time that the pigeon saw me. He startled into flight, hanging over the window ledge for just a few wing beats.

Just as it seemed as though he was about to get himself under control a Hawk slammed into him igniting a storm of feathers and loosing a fine mist of red... Talons outstretched, hooked mouth screeching as he grabbed hold and both birds plummeted towards the ground and out of my view, leaving nothing but a few feathers floating on the warming air rising from the street far below.

I remembered to breath. My stomach clenched once and then let go. I left the bed and walked quickly to the window, looking down, but there was no sign of either bird anywhere. Most likely the Hawk had recovered from the dive and headed for the roof where she kept her nest. Hawks in the city. It was pretty common place. I had never known that the lives of birds could be so brutal. Or that they preyed on one another. Life with a Hawk on the roof of your building was enlightening.

I left the window and headed toward the kitchen. Coffee would fix me up. And if my head was clearer I was sure I could make some sense of what had happened. Like maybe how it had happened and why it had happened for starters.

It was my first death. I had known it could happen. I had only hoped it didn't actually kill me when or if it did happen.. That's the fear. The panicky part of it. How do you know? If it blurred the lines so hard how could you even be sure which part was real?

For instance, I asked myself as I fixed the coffee, was this real?

That actually made me stop and look around the kitchen. Of course it was, I told myself. Two false starts would be too much. One had been bad enough. This had to be real.

I snapped back and realized the tap water was overflowing the coffee carafe, turned off the water, poured out the excess and filled the reservoir on the coffee maker.

My eyes traveled worriedly around the kitchen. I tapped the cheap cabinet door. Real, I decided. It wasn't a great apartment but it wasn't too bad. It was home, and home had been worse. I would be able to tell if this was not real, I told myself.

Sure you would, my other self mocked. The same way you could tell the Doc. wasn't real.

That gave me pause. But the more my eyes traveled the more they saw that was familiar. I levered open the refrigerator and laughed in spite of my serious mood. Empty... As always: A half squeeze bottle of Mustard, crusted yellow brown at the top.

Attractive, Laura, I chided. I picked it up, carried it the garbage and dropped it in, promising myself as I did that I would do some grocery shopping today. Shop... Pay some bills... Normal things that normal people did every day. My life had been Bat-Shit crazy lately and it was only just beginning. I sighed, clicked on the coffee maker, and then left the kitchen. Two minutes later I was standing in the open bathroom doorway, towel in hand, clean clothes draped over one arm, screaming at the top of my lungs.

~

There was a body in my bathtub. A dead body. The water was tinged pink. The body bent forward... Face Floating... Long black hair pooled around the head, the face barely visible, floating just under the surface. A woman... Black hair... The same jet-black hair as my own.

I forced myself to stop screaming, shoved almost my entire fist into my mouth and stood as if glued to the floor in the doorway of the bathroom.

Two minutes passed. Maybe four. A rapid pounding came from my front door. Neighbors, I told myself. The walls were so thin... Thank God for neighbors, especially when you had a dead person, a dead woman, in your bathtub. I backed out of the bathroom doorway, remembering not to touch anything. Too many crime dramas on T.V. , but I was pretty sure that I had never touched anything when I had come in. The doorknob, my mind supplied... And maybe the doorjamb too... All that T.V. I knew you weren't supposed to touch anything in the crime scene.

I opened the front door and things happened fast after that.

Bear bounded past me into the apartment. Joe stepped in behind him and quickly slammed the door shut: Before the door slammed I saw a crowd of worried looking neighbors gathered in the hallway. At least they had appeared worried in the brief glimpse I had had before the closing door had shut them off. My breath caught in my throat. That seemed to be happening a lot lately.

"What," I managed as Joe pushed by me heading for the bathroom where Bear stood, paws wide apart, staring in through the open doorway.

"Jesus, Joe. What is it," I asked again. He said nothing, but stepped past Bear into the bathroom.

"Joe... Joe there's a dead person... Girl in there," I said.

"I know," he said as he stopped next to the tub. Bear moved to the tub, looked down at the woman and then looked up at Joe. Joe shook his head and turned to me. "We have to go," He said quietly, "Right now."

"Go," I asked? "Joe, that's a real dead girl in there! We have to call the cops... We have to... I could get arrested... We could get..." He cut me off.

"I know, Laura. I know. That she's dead is obvious. I... _We_ knew about it before we got here.... Laura, if you stay you'll have more problems than the cops and being arrested."

"What... Why," I asked?

"Jesus," he muttered. He took two backwards steps into the bathroom, reached down and grasped the mass of floating black hair and pulled the woman's face from the water and backwards.

A small blue hole rested between her eyebrows. Blood trickled from that hole and began to run down her face.

"Joe," I began, a ball of sickness once again forming in the pit of my stomach. I didn't finish as my eyes finally locked on her face and my mind began to work again. It took a second but I realized who she was. I screamed for the second time in just a few minutes. Joe let go of her hair and her head fell back into the water with a heavy splash. His hand rose quickly and clamped across my mouth shutting off the scream... His wet hand... The same hand... My stomach heaved and I pushed past him and barely managed to get the lid up on the toilet in time.

Somebody began to pound on the door once again. Loud. Insistent. Demanding even. I stood. Dried my face with the towel I had intended for my bath and then walked to the front door.

"A mouse," I said. "I can't stand them. A mouse... My friend caught it... I'm so sorry." I managed to keep a sickly half smile on my face as I spoke. I didn't know which of my neighbors had been pounding.

"Dear, I was going to call the police!" That was Olive Knickerbocker, late eighties. Lived across the hall.

"I'm so sorry, Olive. I really am," I repeated.

She stepped up to me. "You're sure," she asked in a low whisper. "He's not... _Hurting you?"_ Her eyes cut to Joe who had walked back to the front door.

"No. No... I'm just afraid of Mice," I told her. "I'm so sorry." It was all I had in my exhausted bag of replies.

Olive patted my arm. "Alright, Dear," she said. She turned back to the rest of the neighbors who had gathered in the hallway. "What," she asked? "Party's over. It was just a mouse. You know how big they are. It's time we contacted the owner again and get something done." She walked away as she spoke and the crowd went with her. A few casting glances back at Joe, Bear and me where we stood in the doorway as they went, but none curious enough to stay behind and challenge my mouse story. Olive Knickerbocker shut her door on the crowd. They milled around for a second and then they left in mass. Bear padded out into an empty hallway just a second later.

Joe took my arm, pulled me back into the apartment, and shut the door as Bear slipped back in past him once more.

"We can't stay, Laura." He said.

"Of course not," I agreed. "Of course not."

"You okay," Joe asked me.

Bear cocked his head at me as if asking the same question.

"Oh... Great... Tell me, Joe," I asked as I picked up my purse, car keys, and a light jacket. "Why is it that, that dead girl in my bathtub looks a lot like me," I asked?

"She doesn't just look like you," Joe answered as he opened the door on the empty hallway. We all stepped out. I locked the door locks and followed them to the elevator.

"No," I asked?

"No." He agreed. The elevator dinged. The doors slid open to an empty interior. We stepped in and Joe pushed the button for the lobby. Bear stood between us. I watched the floor lights change as the elevator dropped playing hell with my still queasy stomach.

"Then who," I asked?

The door slid open to a nearly empty lobby and we stepped out and began walking towards the front doors.

"You," Joe said as we passed through the front doors of the lobby and out onto the sidewalk.

"What?" I managed.

"You, Laura," he said as he unlocked the passenger side of the van. The van that shouldn't be here at all. He turned to me. "You, Laura. It's you. She doesn't just look like you, she is you." He said. His eyes met mine. In the distance a siren began to wail. "Dammit," he muttered. "We have to go, Laura. We have to."

I levered the door open, Bear jumped in and I followed. I leaned across and unlocked the drivers side door, slammed my own and locked it and a minute later Joe pulled out into the light traffic.

My eyes came up and really looked at the city. It was not my city. Somehow I was still not home. Somehow. And somehow somebody that was me was dead. I leaned back into my seat closing my eyes as I did. Bear's head slid under my hand where it hung off the edge of the seat. I stroked his head absently as Joe drove.

"I know a safe place," he said.

I nodded my head as the rain began to fall against the windshield.

In The Moonlight:

Machinery

Joe

It's an old dream. One I have had so many times it feels scripted. Badly scripted. Wooden. Like everyone there is tired of it. Including me. But, I can not stop it from happening. I can not stop it from running its course... It went like this:

"...it's on top of the refrigerator," she said.

She was my wife. Well, not precisely my wife, not really my wife. In reality my wife was dead. This woman was a blend of several women I had known. Like the best of this, the best of that, but also some things I didn't understand. Some things that bothered me. "On top," she repeated.

I looked and saw a paper bag sitting on top of the refrigerator. It hadn't been there just moments before. I had looked. I had looked in that jerky way dreams have of showing you things. Pieces missing, frames skipped in the film, scenes out of order. Bits of information that seemed to mean nothing at the time. Things you only know and never see. Even explaining it doesn't do it justice, but if you've ever dreamed you know what I mean. The bag wasn't there, now it was. And my wife had a pleasant 'See, I told you so,' look on her face.

I grabbed the bag, thought about looking into it, didn't, rolled the top to close in what ever was there.

"Just take it to the pharmacy. They'll take it, fill the new ones. The babies need it." She said, still smiling.

Babies, I thought. Sometimes it was babies, sometimes it was children. I never knew which. And I never saw them. I had memories of kissing them good night, but I could not recall ever doing it. I could not recall what they looked like. I couldn't even say with any real certainty whether they were little boys, girls, or one of each. I guess the information wasn't important.

"How do I get there," I asked?

"You know," she said and laughed. And she was right. I did know. I hadn't, but I did now. I could recall being there several times. Several memories flooded into my mind to back up what she had said.

"Sometimes I wonder about you," she said. She gave me a seductive smile, cocked her head to one side and fixed her eyes on me.

"Just tired," I said. I wonder about you too, I thought. What you really are. What you mean. "I'm going," I finished. And like dreams are, except this wasn't really a dream, I was gone.

There was a memory of leaving. Like traces of my actions, but I didn't see it, live it, if you know what I mean. The next thing I knew I was driving. I tried to make myself think about, see what I was driving, but no dice. The controls were too tight. I would have to take my chances where I could, if I could.

I knew the vehicle would break down before it did. I knew I would just accept that, get out and walk away. I knew I would get lost within just a few blocks while I tried to find help to get going again. I wasn't disappointed either. And I even managed to look back as I walked away. Not the van. Not my Van anyway. It was a van. It was always a van, just not my van. Or rarely my van...

Not my van this time anyway. But in another way it was my van. I could remember buying that particular van right off the lot several years back. I wrecked it in a snow storm the next winter, just a few months later really. It looked now like it did when I had drove it off the lot. Only now it was receding from eyesight. How, I wondered, could I lose track of something right in front of my eyes? It seemed impossible. It should be impossible.

I turned towards the front, saw a gas station a few blocks up and headed in that direction. As I looked back the van remained, but when I came back out with the attendant the van was gone. The street was changed. The neighborhood was different. I was lost. Lost like every other time. I turned to the attendant but he was gone too. Not surprising.

Time took another one of those skips. I understood I was trying to find a way back to where I wanted to be, or even somewhere that could substitute for that, somewhere safe, somewhere more familiar. But it never worked out that way. I found myself on an empty street or in a building; an empty school or college. That was my impression. Huge. Blocks long, stories high, nearly completely empty. The doors were locked, but I knew the way in the same way I knew it was nearly empty.

"No," I tried to tell myself, but my observing self had never been able to make my acting self hear those words or listen. I slipped down the side of the building. The seedy side of the building. Crowded next to a wide, fast running river. Trucks coming and going, delivering and taking away, I didn't know what. I was not allowed to. Never had been. But that was about to change.

I found my entrance. A fake shop. A small junk shop grafted onto the side of the building. It was so obvious I wondered why the owners of the building never took it away. Discovered it. But at that time I didn't know all there was to know, even though I had been there several times.

I slipped into the small shop, made the shaky, old wooden steps, and found myself in the attic area where I could cross over into the main building. I wasn't there more than a few minutes before I was discovered and the alarms began to sound. The chase was on once again.

The chase is always the same. I always get away. I think the idea is to scare me to run to where they want me to run. Because, after the chase I'm really lost. Lost and there is not much chance of getting out quickly. They have me. They can burn up my time. I believe that's the real goal.

It's the machinery that impresses me as I run. Huge machines. Stories high. Loud. Sucking the life from the river. From the trucks. What's in those trucks, I always wonder? I never have an answer. I still don't have all the answers, but I believe I'm beginning to get some of them.

As I run I see that the machinery changes: It evolves every time. Changes, reshapes itself. It comes closer and closer to what it really is. I can almost see it. At least I see enough to know that the purpose I see is not its true purpose. Not what it really is. A metal and brick Frankenstein come to life. Waiting for the electrical storm that will supply the life force it needs to become its own creation. It is sometimes something else. It means something else. That is what I mean to convey to you.

I ran. I run every time. The machinery changes every time. This time I caught a glimpse of reality. At least I think I did. A dump truck backed up to a large hopper that fed directly into the machine. I caught a glimpse, a very fleeting glimpse as the truck box lifted, the tarp rippled and whatever was under the tarp began to flood into the hopper. A hand. A human hand grasped at the top of the hopper. A split second. That was it. No time to slow down to see it more clearly. If I stopped they'd have me, so there was no stopping. And what could I do? Whatever I might be able to do would have to come later: After I thought about it. Right now escape was the important thing. I have been caught before. Not in this place but other places. If they catch you, they kill you, or they jail you. I'm not sure which is real. Either, I have become convinced, can kill you. I've seen it happen.

I ran for all I was worth and found my way out of the building ending up alongside the river. Walking the rock ledges beside the water. There was never any way to get to the top. It was nearly straight up.

I had no choice but to follow the ledges that bordered the river until it opened up. That would bring me to locust street. It always did. And locust street was always changing. At times it was just a run down neighborhood. No one cared if I came or went. They watched me. Knew I was there. But it seemed to me that they had their own problems to deal with. And I realized after several trips there that very many of them were like me. Dreamers. Only dreaming wasn't really what it was, was it? No. Dreaming was what it had started out as. But dreaming as most people see it, and dreaming the way I see it, the way I was raised to see it, the way some of my Native American Brothers and Sisters saw it, was a different proposition.

Dreaming was not just closing your eyes and re-living your day, hopes, life, things your subconscious wanted to show you. Fears, who knows what else. I dream too. But I mean dream. A different reality. A place where real things happen. In real worlds. With real people. There are places where the peoples never lost control of their world. Places where the old ways still hold. Places where not much of anything makes any kind of real sense. Places where other people rule. And this place. The land of shadows. The place that it takes two to make real and no more. Any two create and it becomes real. After it becomes, it exists. After it exists it can kill you as easily as anything that is real can.

So there are dreams and then there are dreams. Dreamers and also dreamers. And they have only one thing in common, the soul is drifting loose. Disconnected from the body. That is why either situation can kill you, but the dreamers in my world will die most often.

I feel, have felt for some time, that most of the people who live on locust street or in that neighborhood, are real dreamers. I mean my sort of dreamers. Those that can and do make things happen. That is why they had no interest in me. Live and let live. They probably saw in my eyes what I saw in theirs.

Locust street, at other times, was a trap. There were factions working against each other. You could get caught up and end up being dead on all levels of existence very quickly through no fault of your own. We watched each other, sometimes carefully, but rarely did trouble come directly from one another. At least not those who were obviously watchers. It came from hiders, shape-shifters. It came from what you could not see: Who you could not see. And when it came, it came quickly. It didn't leave time for thought. It just took you.

That was bad. I'd known a few who had disappeared. I'd seen them around. Gotten used to their faces. And suddenly they were gone.

The first dreamer was the one I called Chief, and not only me, I found out after he was gone. The second I thought of as Dog Face. He had that look. More of a snout instead of a nose and chin-mouth area. I had really wondered if he might be something special. And really, just because he had been taken did not mean he had been something less than special. Special didn't go hand in hand with smart. In fact I've rarely seen smarts and intelligence in the same package.

Dog Face came second, Chief was first. One day there, next day gone. And again there and then gone again. That was the way of dreamers. But then he was gone for good. Just not there anymore at all. I wasn't the only one who noticed, even so none of us, at first, could bring ourselves to talk about it.

It was Laura who mentioned it first. Of course that was much later, once I knew who she was, had been. And she nearly slipped by me.

The guy I thought of as the Crazy Wino said something to me. I was sitting on the low concrete wall that ran along the backside of the locust street neighborhood when he shuffled by.

His eyes were always wild. Hair unkempt, one hand clutched a greasy leather medicine bag that hung from a thin, leather thong that looked ready to snap at any time. He licked his lips constantly. His eyes never seemed to really focus. He looked lost, but we all are. He passed close to me.

"Gaw daw faze," he said in a near whisper.

It made no sense at first. "Gawdawfaze," all strung together, "Gaaw daw faze". He stopped and looked hard at me, but while I was trying to figure out the words he decided to move on again. When I got it, Got Dog Face, I had called out.

"Yes," I said. "Yes, they did. They got Dog Face!" I was shocked. I didn't know what else to say.

He turned back and smiled through a mouthful of rotted and broken teeth. "Cut a check too," he said.

I barely heard that, but I got it a split second later, _Got the Chief too_. So I wasn't alone in seeing it.

"More," he added and turned away.

"Wait," I said jumping to my feet. And that was when I learned that some dreamer's had powers that others don't. The Crazy Wino turned back to me, smiled again, said "More," touched his head with one gnarled finger and he was gone. It happened so fast that my eyes couldn't agree with what they had seen. There and then gone.

More, I remembered thinking, and there probably had been, have been more. There certainly had been more since I'd been there. Just faces you got used to seeing, then suddenly you didn't see them anymore. It made you uneasy, but there was no single thing you could lay it at the feet of.

The ledge ran on and on. Above me on the highway that ran beside the river I could hear traffic. I could hear cars moving fast. I could hear Cop cars moving slower, searching the sides of the road for me. I was going to have to go to locust street. There was no other way out.

Whatever came on Locust street I could not doubt would be new. It was always. Even though it was the same place, different things happened. So many people there all following their own will. It was the closest thing to real life, where life just happened with no scripting, in this world.

One of the things I could count on was the constant, pervasive feeling that it was an important place. That something was about to happen, and it often did, but this went beyond that. Like something major was on the verge of happening. If, for instance, one of us did the right thing, spoke the right words, something fantastic would happen. It was something very small that was missing, and once found it would fill in the blank, and Locust street would fulfill its purpose, whatever that might turn out to be.

And I had to wonder, what was the advantage of them pushing me to there? Chasing me to there? There had to be a reason. I mean to all of it, but I had no idea what that could be. Could they watch us as easily as we watched each other? If some of those we saw were not real, would we even know? I personally doubt it.

I reached the end of the ledges. The river had slowed and broadened. The high cliffs were receding. No slow moving cop cars traveled the roads at the side of the river. In fact the traffic was nearly gone. I scaled the bank and made the highway.

There was a small mom and pops store at the end of the first block. I bought a cup of coffee there and sipped at it as I walked up to the low curving wall. I sat and watched the people walking by. So many on their own. Maybe that is how you can tell us, I thought, loners. So the couple's maybe weren't real? That didn't feel right though: Who knew what it really was. Hopefully, eventually, I would know.

In The Moonlight:

Locust Street

Laura

Locust street: It was my place: Where I grew up. I went there always. There were good memories and there were bad memories there. And that is how it started out. I would dream of it. It was only a dream, as real as it seemed. But sometimes the dreams were good, and sometimes the dreams were a little rough. Sometimes they were out right nightmares.

Those were the worst. I would wish for a way, afterward of course, to have awakened myself as soon as it started to go south. To bail out immediately.

I mentioned it to Doctor Shulman and she had thought meditation would help. Something about relaxing before sleep possibly keeping the bad stuff away. And then I heard about Dreamers.

Dreamers don't actually dream, they create. I heard about it from a native woman I met from time to time at the probation office. We sat waiting for hours sometimes. She noticed my long black hair and asked me if I was a native, I told her on my mother's side, and the conversation went from there.

Her brother was a dreamer. A real Dreamer with power. I thought about it for a few weeks then asked her if I could meet her brother.

Maybe he had power. Actually I'm sure he did have power, knowing what I know now, but at the time I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure how much I believed or was willing to believe. He seemed nice. Serious, but nice. I met him three times and then he explained about Dreaming. How you could control what you saw: Where you went. What happened. He explained that the Dreamer's Worlds were actually populated with real people. Spirits. Spirit animals. And other things. Bad things that could and would kill you if you weren't careful.

I didn't believe much in Native religion at that time. I do now. But I've been through a good deal in the past six months or so. I didn't believe in Myths. Legends. The old stories. He knew that. The last time I visited him he told me so. Told me I could die unless I took it seriously. I didn't take that seriously. But I guess he was right all the way around. I should have listened.

Fasting. Preparation. Prayer. That will get you there. When you've been there once you can get back there easier: When you sleep; when you rest. How easy could it be? Sometimes I thought about a place and went there immediately. Not often, not always, but sometimes it was like that. Not an easy passage even, but the more I tried, the more I believed, the better I became.

Getting back was harder. But given time I could usually do it quickly. Unless I was prevented by someone or something. And there were some ones and some things that could prevent my leaving. In the end.... When the sun rose in whatever world I was in, I would be forced back. Fast. Hard. Not the way I wanted to come back, so I worked hard at bringing myself back. On my own terms.

Locust street: The houses. The neighborhood. The low curving concrete wall, which was actually not a wall at all but part of an old foundation. It was all that was left of a huge barn of a building that had been gone for all of my life. My mother had told me about it. The factory that had been there. She'd found work there as a child.

In my childhood all that had remained was the concrete foundation that all of us children took for a wall and sat and played on. Walking its length, balancing as we went. Sitting and watching life pass us by.

As much as I sometimes hated life at home, in the house that always tried to pull me, I didn't mind Locust street because I could sit and watch life go by. It calmed me down. It was where I chose to start when I dreamed. I will say this about buildings, walls, houses, cars, trees... They harbor evil. They can hate. Maybe not in the world most of us live in, but in the world I spend most of my time in the rules are different. They can hate you. They can love you. They can kill you. You should know that if you ever dream.

I first saw him there. Just him. I didn't know his name, but I knew like me he was a dreamer. Like most of the people that were there were dreamers. Except they belonged there, he didn't. It wasn't his place. Maybe, I thought, he didn't understand it. I wasn't even sure if he knew he was dreaming. But I was new and I wasn't always sure if I was or wasn't dreaming. That was before I came to realize that it made no difference. Real is what you believe it is. Believe that.

He was sitting on my wall. Like he owned it. Early evening. He looked lost. He probably was lost. I watched him for over an hour and then I had to move on to the things I had to do. I came back later but he was gone. I used a rock to scratch my name into the wall as I sat watching the people go by. I was tired. I had not found what I had hoped to find. I was not even sure it existed. I looked at my name and it came to me that maybe the man I had seen earlier might come back. I scratched my phone number by my name, feeling like some dumb school kid carving their initials into a tree. Would he see it? Would he even know what was it? Would he be able to remember the number after he went back? I didn't know. What I did know was that no one I met there was willing to help me. He looked like he needed help too. Maybe we could both help each other. If I had only known what a mess I was creating... But it seemed so innocent.

In The Moonlight:

Getting To Know You

Laura And Joe

They sat side by side on the low, curving concrete wall. The Moon shone brightly above. Laura felt more exposed as herself that she did in her normal dreamer state of a sparrow.

"I dream of the house... The garage... The dog-wolf. For five years I've dreamed that dream every other night. No matter what I did I couldn't shake it."

Laura nodded, her large, dark eyes reflecting the moonlight. Had he thought she was only pretty? He had been wrong. She was beautiful. Maybe a little too thin, but that was hard to tell. She preferred baggy clothes that tended to make her look thinner...

"Earth to Joe," she said.

"Yeah?"

"You zoned out on me for a second."

"I did... I'm sorry," he replied.

"So what were the dreams like? Did they change before or only after you start dreaming?"

"Hmm. You know, you're right on the money. They changed completely right after I started to dream. It's like... Like after I opened the door, I couldn't shut it. And so every time I was disconnected, like dreaming, but also when I went to sleep, I went to explore, even if I didn't want to go... Like once I was able to turn it on and off on my own I lost the ability to stop the state from happening." He said.

"Or they turned it on and off for you," she said. Her eyes locked on his.

"You think?"

"I do... I do because they have to know about us. The legends say nothing happens in the Dreamer's Worlds without all having the ability to know. The darkness whispers to the evil. Both from the book of dreams states... I think I said them right."

Joe nodded.

"So my point is not just that the other dreamers could see us. The Trickster... The Dream Killer... The Thief Of Souls... And so many demons that work for them... All evil. They know we're after something... They have to, and they can see us too... They caused us to kill each other that one time... They caused you to shoot yourself... They know, and they want us dead... It will only get worse."

He nodded again. "I know, but," he looked around and decided it made no difference. A listener could have shape shifted into the fabled fly on the wall. There was not much way of not being overheard. He whispered anyway. "We aren't even sure," he lifted his eyebrows.

"Wrong," Laura whispered back. "We are."

"You mean?"

"I do. What other purpose is there to be here? You know it all works on purpose. The Creator's purpose has been waiting for thousands of years. It only takes a strong dreamer to bring up that purpose and go forward."

"And you think we are that good," Joe asked? He was still whispering.

"Yes... I'm not just saying that. I think you are really good... And I can do things I didn't know I could do. I... I know only a handful of dreamers, some from here, some from there, but, none of them travel the way we do... The Dog Face... Chief... Others... They couldn't do what we can and it got them anyway... They were worried enough about them to get them," Laura said.

"How would we ever find her," Joe Asked? His voice was small and tight.

Laura shrugged, tapped a small beat with her heels against the concrete wall. "We will... We'll be... _Lead_ ," she shrugged again. "I believe that." Her eyes met his and there was something else going on there. He looked away.

"Don't you think we should," she said a few minutes later.

"If we can find her," Joe answered.

"No. I'm off that subject. I was talking about us."

He looked up and her dark eyes pulled him in. "We should what?" he asked

She took his hand and he jumped slightly as if an electric shock had passed through it. "It's almost morning anyway...?" She left unsaid what she had intended. Losing her nerve at the last minute.

"We should what?" Joe asked again through dry lips.

She had looked down, staring at her hands in her lap, she looked up now, her eyes speculative. She took a deep breath. "Turn the page," she answered.

"Turn the page?" he asked. Her eyes were locked on his own. "Oh... Here...?"

"No... When we go back... You're what... Twenty minutes from me?... I could drive..."

Her eyes held his, but he didn't speak.

"Unless you don't want to," she said at last.

"No," he said quickly... "It's been awhile... I..."

"Me too..."

He licked his lips. "I... I want to."

She nodded. "I'll be there as soon as I take my shower..."

"I have a shower at my place," he said.

She laughed. "Okay... Okay..." Then she became serious. "I'll bring my stuff with me... I guess I'll just go back, wake up and hop into the car." Her eyes were so deep, so liquid, so impelling.

"I will make breakfast," he offered.

"I eat like a horse."

"I'll get some hay."

She laughed. Looked at him seriously again. Bent across the short space between them and kissed him. A second later she was gone.

In The Present Dream State

Laura

Not all dreamers are Native Americans. Joe is. I am part, but there are several who are not. How they came to be there with no guidance I don't know. Joe says it's in our blood. He said some non Native Americans there are something else. Not dreamer's. Not exactly. Something else. Something that is sometimes bad. Bad for us anyway. But some, he thinks, are what he calls the Rainbow Tribe. Native American at heart: Where it counts. Faithful to the creator, to Mother Earth, more than some of us. But not Native in the blood. Either way, he says, it makes no difference. They are equally powerful. Equally, versed in power. Equally, skilled dreamers. But no one Dreams like Joe. Not that I've seen. Yet he continues to tell me I have the real power... I don't see it yet.

This is the present day. Real time. But that is also meaningless when you dream. Time is not what it appears to be. It does not go forward or backward. It just unfolds parallel to itself. It moves of its own accord. It is more of a multidimensional thing. I know this. You can be in two places at the same time. And worse there can be two or more of you in the same place at different or the same times. It's confusing, but important. Because you cannot be in the same space as the other you. You can not touch you in that same space do you see? You can be dead and you can be alive. That is where I am now. Dead. And that is why I cannot come back from dreaming: If I do I'll die. Die in the real world and in the dreamer's worlds. It's complicated. For now, for me, it's going to mean drastic changes. Drastic changes...

In The Moonlight:

Momentary

Joe

His eyes were closed. He seemed to have stopped his struggles. The fat man walked around him twice. Slowly. The fat man was sweating freely. His over sized white T-shirt that usually billowed like a sale, clung to his fat. Drenched.

He wore heavy leather gloves. Blacksmith gloves. He bounced a metal spike against the palm of one hand. Closed his hand over it, held it tight in his closed fist. He stopped and thrust the blackened tip into the fire once more.

"Have you still nothing to tell me, Karl... Nothing at all," he asked?

The man bound to the chair opened one eye. His lips moved. Cracked. Bloody. Revealing broken stumps of teeth behind them. He croaked. The effort sent a trickle of blood rolling over his lower lip. It splashed to his chest and rolled away down his stomach.

"I didn't understand that, Karl," the fat man said. He lifted the now glowing spike from the fire and held the end up so Karl could see it.

"Yes, Karl. Yes," he said as he brought to spike's super heated end to Karl's face.

"Please... Please..." Karl screamed.

~

Spinning... Falling... Light from the darkness... I slammed into the bed hard, threw my arms up to catch myself and began the business of breathing once more.

I had done what I could. Laura would be saved or she wouldn't. All I could do now was rest and wait for my dreams to take me back to her. I fell back against the mattress breathing hard. I was so exhausted. I needed sleep, but I was afraid to slip into uncontrolled sleep. I need to be somewhere safe first. Somewhere where no one could find me. Then I could direct some sleep. Suggest some dreams. Get some rest while my spirit self watched over me.

I coughed, spat, sat back up and dragged myself from the bed. I looked around my apartment wondering what I should take. Nothing, I decided after a second. There was nothing there that I wanted. I pushed my hair back on my head, caught it up in a beaded leather drawstring to hold it, and a few seconds after that I was walking out the door. I debated locking up and then decided not to. I would never be back. I knew that.

I walked down the short hall and out into the early morning light. The traffic was picking up. People on the sidewalks. I hailed a cab. I watched my building disappear from view for what was probably the last time. I sighed and leaned back into the seat for the ride.

"All right, Brother," the cabbie asked?

Not Native I saw as I lifted my eyes. At least not in appearance.

"I am now," I said.

He laughed and turned his attention back to the light traffic.

'I hope so anyway,' I thought, as I watched the building slip by. 'I hope so.'

In The Sunlight:

Laura

No sleep; I couldn't and I didn't miss it. What was tough though was filling up all of that time. For a place where time didn't really exist, it was tough to deal with.

No dreaming: Since I was still me I could dream. But if I dreamed without my physical self, or ties to my physical self, without that watching presence, where would I end up?

No telling. Could I even direct it? Probably not. It is most likely, I'd told myself, exactly what they would hope that I would do.

They: I don't know who they are. It's not your basic paranoia they. It's a real thing. A real they. I suppose it sounds the same though. I don't know who they are, but I think Joe does. I think he has a plan. At least an idea, but he has to maintain his physical body. I don't. Somewhere there is still a physical body, but it is maintained by prior events and circumstances. It needs nothing from me. There is a point where my physical body ceased to exist. It's the same for everyone. Mine just ended sooner. And I don't yet know the reason for that either. I have questions, no answers. I have fear, but I have patience too. I have Bear here with me. I have Joe out there somewhere in the physical world. I'll be okay...
THREE

In The Sunlight:

Real Time Correlations

Joe

I drove to the motel. I knew the area from having worked there a few times. Seedy. What would have been considered a crack motel back a few decades before, was now something worse. Something I didn't want to think too hard about. But, whatever it was it would be safe for me. Who would look for me there? No one.

I hoped that was true. I was being forceful in my mind. Absolutely convinced that I would be safe. Positive energy force. It might help. Couldn't hurt. And it was everything in Dreaming. It could be in the physical world too.

I parked the van in a lot two blocks east. It was the only real way to guarantee it would still be there, at least the way I left it, when I was done with sleep. Maybe dreaming too, I realized. Where else would I go? Could I go? Nowhere.

I pulled the hood from my sweatshirt over my head. Pushed a pair of cheap black sunglasses over my eyes, pulled a pair of brown cotton work gloves over my hands. The fingers were cut off. Sometimes I used that trick for work to keep my fingers clear. I flipped my collar up and left the van.

I knew the look I wanted. I wanted to say, Stay away from me! I wanted my clothes to scream it as I walked along.

I had dressed the same way when I had worked in that area. Jeans, denim jacket over a hooded sweatshirt, and fingerless gloves. Now there was a bulge in my jacket that appeared to be the gun I had once carried when I had worked here. The right size, but it was not a gun, it was the material I had managed to bring back and forth several times now. It was far more dangerous than a gun. It was something that had somehow maintained a link with the other realities, worlds, dreams states, which really meant it kept a link with real time. What time really is.

Even in this neighborhood most people got out of my way as I walked along the early morning sidewalk. I listened to snatches of conversation as I went...

"...She said she was obliterated. That..."

"...that's a bad man, Honey..."

"Hey, Baby... Wanna get busy..."

I tried to ignore it all, but I learned long ago that you didn't really ignore it. The brain just shuffles through it and decides what to listen to or ignore for you. You can try to shut it out, but the brain is a learning machine. It wants to know. It wants to learn. And sometimes I wonder if it is its own intelligence away from what my self needs. Alive. The link for my soul, but something of its own too.

"... That guy..."

"... It don't mean shit to me. Ain't..."

"...come on... Just a taste... Just..."

I walked up the cracked sidewalk and into the motel office.

In The Sunlight:

The Dream State

Joe

"What do you mean, exactly?" He asked me. I had no idea who he was, only that he was no dreamer. This seemed to be an ordinary aberration, some new configuration of my experiences.

"What I mean exactly is that the world is not what we believe it is. She is alive. Mother Earth. We Walk about on her. She gives us everything we need for life. So," he said, "I see it clearly, now. You must not believe in the creator."

"Of course I do," I said. "Creation requires a Creator."

"Your Mother Earth gives you what you need, not God."

"She gives to us because the Creator made her to do that. That is Her place. Her purpose. She gives life, births life. Rivers, the trees, the air, a place for us to live. The materials to build, to make, to stay warm, clean, treat diseases. Everything we need forever. You see? The Creator makes each of us for a purpose. Each creation for a purpose. Fish. Wolves. Humans. Bears. All birds... We're all brothers. This wasn't simply created for us." I finished.

We were walking along the riverbed. High summer, pleasant, warm. This man, who was a composite of all the men I have ever known, walked beside me.

I paid attention following from my spiritual place a few feet above them. But I wasn't truly watching. My sleeping self was in my mind, under my watchful eyes as well. My mind's watchful eyes. I slept in the motel. The curtains drawn against the sunlight. My body obtaining the rest it needed. My soul untethered, walking in the garden of dreams. Re-learning what I already knew, may have forgotten, hadn't thought about until someone or some unlikely event brought the bubble of memory rising to the top of my subconscious minds pool of deep running thoughts: Where it was acted out in a dream. So like real dreaming, but so unlike it at same time. An urge to awaken for whatever reasons could end this dream. My dreams died harder. Took a bigger physical toll.

~

We were seated at tables in a restaurant now. At separate tables, close to one another. Just sitting. Our personal conversations ending. Nodding to one another.

My dreaming self sat next to a tall, platinum blonde. I leaned over and kissed her which seemed to surprise her.

"Well, what was that about," she asked?

"Oh... I missed you," my dreaming self said.

"Really," she asked? "You're so full of it. I shouldn't buy into your lies." She shook her head.

"Ready to order?" The waiter.

"No," myself said.

"Yes," the blonde answered. "Bring me... You know what, bring me a martini... No! ... Bring me chilled vodka... A double." She stared at myself.

Myself seemed amused. He flapped one hand at her.

The scene shifted and the wife I had always felt inadequate to or for, slipped away...

Prison. A barred window in the back of the cell. The yard closed. Deep winter. Snow drifted, blowing. My head rested against the bars. The cold of the iron sinking into my forehead like a spike. My breath fogging the safety glass. The noise from the tier bleeding through into my thoughts. Only unconsciously, but even so making its impression.

Yells. Screams. Laughter. Radios on different stations vying for supremacy. Rap, rock, country, opera. The tap, tap, tap of the CO's stick as he walked the concrete in front of the cells; holding his nightstick out and letting it click against the bars as he walked. Water dripping. Crying. The wind howling against the safety glass. Phone ringing... The scene shifted...

Snow, cold, intense. Wind. Featured for the second time. This time blasting against my skin as I stood at the top of a summit and looked out at the world, instead of blasting against the safety glass in a prison cell.

Wolves below me, winding sinuously through the blowing snow. White Wolves, barely marked. Hard to see against the snow. They caught my eye on occasion as they came on and it seemed to make them crazy. They snapped at the air, saliva dripping from their mouths, freezing on the wind. I'm waiting too long. I have to keep moving or they'll get me: If they get me they'll kill me; if they kill me...

The scene changes again... The ferry crossing the Saint Laurence river to Canada. I'm young. Is that really the way I looked at ten? Am I ten? I am.

I'm standing at the front of the long ramp that will be let down to allow the cars to drive off: Behind it; to shelter me from the wind. The wind again.

The rail is to my right, I'm looking out over the water. It seems like ocean water to me. I have never seen the ocean. All the wind has been from the north, I think. I don't know what it means.

Cold spray flies over the rail of the ferry. My father told me there are fish in this river, Sturgeon, that can be as long as twenty five feet. He showed me a picture. Fish hanging from the trees. How did they ever catch them I wondered? How?

The water comes over the rail again and soaks the decking beneath my feet. My feet begin to slide. The deck is slippery. One foot begins to slide faster. My heart jumps within my chest, but before panic really catches me one of my father's hands falls upon my shoulders. Stopping the slide. Steadying me.

"Okay, Bud," he asks?

I look up at him and smile for an answer. I love my father. It's still good between us. The bottle hasn't gotten him yet, or me. There are no walls up between us yet. Water sprays over the rail, but I'm safe. Love has safety in it, I think.

The scene shifts...

An old man shuffling across the park. Stooped over. I can not see his face, but something about him looks familiar.

Something about him puts my spiritual self on alert...

Something...

I think too goddamned slow, I chide. Something... I can't get it...

My dream self catches something too. He hurries to catch up to the shuffling man. It should be easy to do, but it isn't. Somehow the shuffling man stays ahead of me. Somehow he moves faster than I can, although I'm trying really hard.

"Wait," I say. My dream self says... Nothing... "Goddammit wait!"... Nothing...

My breathing is coming faster... My spiritual self is concerned. About to pull the plug. Whatever it is I don't like it. My dream self falls back.

The shuffling old man slows... Slows... Turns, and I see his face... It's horrible. Eyes gone. Bloody sockets... Red and black gore leaking from the sockets... Broken, rotted teeth behind swollen, lacerated lips...

"Godmeoo... Godmeoo... Gotmetoo, Joe! Got me too! anywanyoutoo!" He screams. _"They want you too!"_

The scene tears away from my eyes shredded into darkness. I'm being sucked back into consciousness... Fast...

My body sits up in the motel bed... Early evening... The noise outside is incredible... Near dark, the motel's busiest time. Someone in the room next to mine is either being killed or getting laid. It's hard to tell which. Panic is fluttering around in my chest... The old wino... He shouldn't have been in my dreams. Not that it couldn't have been... It could happen... Did I believe he would be next?... Was he? Was he already? Could a good dreamer inhabit a real dream world In another person's mind?... No answer. Except, it was him. It was. And it unsettled me... _They got me too! They got me too! And they want you too!_

I rolled off the side of the bed, pushed my hair out of my eyes, gathered what I needed from the dresser and made my way to shower.

In The Sunlight:

The Big Empty

Laura

The place he took me to is nowhere. I mean that literally. There is nothing here at all. No road. No electricity. No vehicles. No sounds in the distance. No animals. Nothing.

This is an old and peeling three story house surrounded by thick, tall trees. It looks so out-of-place sitting here in the middle of the woods. But I suppose that was his idea. It spooks me though. It spooks Bear too. He doesn't like the woods at all. Shadows within shadows. And more shadows behind that. You don't know what is what.

The trees are massive. More than tall. More than wide. The ultimate male expression. Soaring ramrod straight into the sky. But they seem less than alive. Something dead is mixed in with whatever life force they have. I had begun to think of them as Franken-Trees almost immediately.

The house is sparsely furnished. Old stuffy couches and chairs. Leather of course, they screamed man. Heavy drapes. Dust everywhere.

I spent most of the day cleaning. Opening windows, beating the dust from rugs and drapes. Kicking up so much dust that even Bear sneezed a few times.

With the dust gone, windows open, I thought that the house would present a different face. Less sinister. Homier. But it made no difference. There was no fresh air. No fresh forest scent. No breeze. No real warmth from the over-bright sunshine the fell through the streaked and warped old glass in the windows.

I did work up an appetite. I hadn't been sure about that. Did I need to eat? Did it matter?

The water from the sink cleared up after I let it run for a few minutes. A mystery. Pressure for the water but no power for a pump. How was that possible? It wasn't of course. The water ran rusty and then clear and cold. A slight metallic taste, but Bear and I both drank it greedily.

Food was another matter. No refrigeration. I finally looked in the pantry and found food. Canned goods, packaged goods. Crackers, cookies, corn, peas, instant potatoes, rice, and more in that vein. It was definitely stocked by a man.

Bear and I shared some slightly stale crackers and slices of a Summer sausage. The day dragged. Nothing happened. No planes passed overhead. No far off sound of chain saws, or traffic, or off-road bikers, or the hum of power lines... Nothing at all.

There were no clocks. The sun struggled to reach mid sky. I took Bear with me deciding to explore the barn that backed up to the woods. Nothing. Empty. No smells of cows or horses or even old automotive oil, hay, nothing but the bland smell of dust. Motes of it floated in from the windows. No barn swallows. No mice. No barn cats. An empty world in every respect.

The woods were no better. I decided to see what they held, if anything, but walking just a few feet into them caused such a suffocating panic to settle onto my chest that I had to turn around. Bear, I noticed, had been none too eager to explore them either. Stalking slowly with his tail between his legs. He was only too glad to leave. The basement, the attic, the woodshed; nothing.

The small pond between the house and the barn, devoid of any fish. I could see the bottom. Cobbles, but no fish. No frogs. No minnows.

No birds called from the trees. No twigs snapped in the woods. No leaves rustled.

We were not driven here. Joe had parked the van and dreamed us here. He did not want Bear to know. Me to know. He didn't want it to be in our minds, he said, where the trickster could pluck it out. Or the Dream Killer, or the Thief of Souls. I knew the names. Joe knew the reality: Them and their minions.

I've never seen them. Joe has fought them. Fought them and lived to tell about it. I don't know any other dreamer who can say that.

They can't exactly read your mind, but, like a good dog they can track you. They can also pick up your thoughts and find their way to you unless extraordinary precautions are taken. Joe believed your own brain could betray you. Act like a giant beacon. Broadcasting to the whole world. He said it is how we pick up real knowledge. Real thoughts from others. Like when we get a feeling about someone, or we suddenly know something's true about someone. Something that we shouldn't know, couldn't know. Or when we find ourselves liking someone on short notice. Knowing them better than we should for the few words we have exchanged. The beacon.

I don't know. It could be: After finding out that dreaming is real I could believe in anything. I could see that things I could not conceive of, could not believe real, were actually real all along. It humbles you. It made this woman a believer. So, brain waves? Could be. Better safe than sorry.

Bear and I spent the balance of the day looking out the window watching the sun's slow journey across the sky.

In The Sunlight:

The Thief Of Souls

He was tall. Silver haired sometimes. Raven others. Short if needed, male, female, thin, fat, he could be what ever he needed to be whenever he needed to be it.

Now he was tall, silver haired, on the thin side: On foot in the City of the Dead.

Walking: Death was such a good experience he had to walk it. The smells of corruption. Rotting flesh. The roaring furnaces roasted some alive; the greasy pork smell hanging on the air. The clouds of flies and mosquitoes that were loading up on death to take it where it could do the most good. The feral dogs. The wolves, jackals, big cats. They all made way for him. He was their Moses parting a red sea of sorts. A sea of blood and corruption.

The river ran red. Blood and corruption again. It was what he wanted. He could spend all of his time in The City of the Dead. He could except that there were those who dreamed: Those who dreamed of things they should not dream. Came too close to truths that they should not know.

He was no God protecting his apple tree, or whatever fruit it had been that tempted the Christian God's peoples. It wasn't that simple. It wasn't that complicated either. It simply was. He collected souls and the bodies kept pouring in hour upon hour. It was his purpose. His only reason to live, if indeed he did live and sometimes he doubted that he did.

He turned his mind to the Dreamer. The one that was supposed to take him from his throne. The one he had been so worried about. He had her body, but he had no soul. A body and no soul. He needed that soul. There were checks and balances. A soul was not allowed to simply wander free. It didn't happen... Usually didn't happen, he corrected himself. Shouldn't happen, he added, _shouldn't_ happen, nevertheless it had happened.

He knew who had made it happen, and he knew where to find him... Usually. Usually find him. He was gone. And the Dreamer's soul was gone. Free. Floating. Possibly finding out things it shouldn't.

He passed a pack of wild dogs ripping apart what looked as though it had once been an attractive woman. He turned his eyes to them and they ceased to fight, tucking their tails between their legs, howling, crying, running for their lives. He chuckled once, then once more.

He had searchers looking for both of them. They couldn't hide forever. He had had several dreamers killed, tortured, but none had known a thing.

The frame, he thought now, might be wrong. You may not know one thing at 7:00 PM on Thursday. You may not find out until six A.M. Friday morning. Or you might not know in 1997, but you might in 2097 and that was the problem, when they knew what they knew. It would take time, but he would find them. Steal their souls. Torture their souls in the city of dead forever as punishment. He chuckled once more as he walked along. Kicking a small feral cat from his path that had frozen when it saw him.

Light From Another Moon:

Slip Sliding

Laura

He sat on the wall for hours. I watched. I saw when he noticed the name and number. Nothing. I slipped sideways, I watched. He traced the name with one finger. I saw his lips form the numbers. He closed his eyes, mouthed the name, the number, opened his eyes again. Closed them once more.

How long, I thought. I slipped sideways again, traveling across time to the same place; short bursts. Less this time. It was dangerous. I wasn't even all that good at it either. He was a no show. I slipped. I slipped again. There he was. His eyes closed, his lips moving. He opened his eyes looked right at me. Really saw me. But I felt he didn't know what he saw. I was not me... Not my actual self.

I dream as a sparrow. Unique? Probably not: After I decided to dream as a sparrow, I realized there were hundreds of dreamer's who dream that way. Birds. Cats. Dogs. Lizards. A fly on the wall. His eyes held mine. He did know. I slipped back to where I had started from once again, and then let go, drifting in the blackness. Hoping for an easy return.

I fell hard, but there was no panic in. I lay on the mattress and wondered when it would happen. The ringing of the phone answered my question for me. I picked it up, but did not speak. An unreasonable fear lit a fire in my chest. He could be anything at all. He did not necessarily have to be a dreamer. He could be The Trickster himself. The Thief Of Souls. He could be...

"Laura," he asked?

I drew a deep breath before I spoke.

"You dream," I said. There was nothing else to say.

"Wise words from a Sparrow," he said. His voice was deep. No real accent. Inflection.

"I was afraid," I said.

"Yeah," he agreed. "Me to... So..." He asked?

"Where do you know," I asked? "What places?"

"The docks... Around there... The factory... The house where I live with my wife and children. And I can create... I can create places," he answered.

"Wife and kids," I asked? Good, Laura, I chided. How stupid could you be? Or obvious... I thought about it. No matter, I still would have asked.

"I don't understand it," he said. "I used to go there in real dreams. Then one time the dream seemed to become a real place, or the place became real in the dream... It makes no sense. I rarely actually go there, but I very often start out there in my dreaming... There's something wrong with it... Her... In that place."

"There are places like that," I agreed. A dream wife, I told myself.

"There's a place farther up the river. Below the main factory. On the ledges. An older factory. They don't seem to be there. No one... No dreamer's. It's a place from my childhood... Really not more than a foundation left on the river bank," he said.

"How will I find it," I asked?

"I'll go to Locust street: Sit on the wall. Watching, waiting. Once you come I'll walk there; it's not that far. You'll follow me," he suggested.

If he was anything other than a dreamer I could be in trouble, but it didn't feel that way at all. "All right," I agreed. I hung up, laid back on the soft mattress and slipped into a dream. A few seconds later I settled on the branch of a tall pine tree and waited.

He took longer. One second the wall was empty, the next it was not. Once he saw me he got up and began to walk. I followed him.

When he stopped I saw nothing but a small clearing at the river side. It was possible he saw something more than I did. Something I could not see. It was his dream after all.

Shape shifting is no big trick. If you dream you have gifts; I can shape shift easily. I dropped from the sky, slowed myself about five feet from the ground and changed.

It is fast. I have watched it in a mirror. It is not so fast that you can not see what happens. But even if you see you may not understand.

My bird body expanded quickly, morphing as it did. I knew enough to cover myself as I changed. The clothes were an afterthought and did not come immediately. So far I had only shocked myself with that and I had no wish to shock anyone else with it. Most especially the first other dreamer I had chosen to reveal myself too.

It wasn't so much naked. We have all been naked. If you dream it is a natural state of the dream unless you're conscious of it and clothe yourself. It is the process that can be hard to understand. The feathers melt away. The flesh knits itself together, races across my body. Building it piece by piece. It happens fast, but it can be unnerving. For a brief second you can see the blood vessels swimming to the top of my skin from someplace deeper within me. Finally, the clothes come, the hair, the features draw themselves on my face. Dramatic. I knelt close to the ground, standing as I came together.

"I have never seen anything like that," Joe said.

"It can be a little freaky," I agreed.

He pulled out a notebook. "Page twenty-six," he said, thumbing through it.

"What," I asked?

"Page twenty-six," he repeated. He turned it to show my name and the numbers. "Drove me crazy. I wasn't as good then. I couldn't remember where I got the name or the number from. And I could never remember the number in the waking world." He turned the pad around closed it and slipped it back into his shirt pocket.

"Eventually I figured out how to take the notebook with me. I wrote in it, but it took so long to remember that I had written in it. Then once I found it, to know what it was."

I nodded. "You can take it back and forth?"

He nodded. "Yeah. I can translate it both ways."

I was impressed. "Maybe you can teach me. I've never tried."

"Yeah, maybe you can teach me to shape shift" He raised his eyebrows.

"If I can," I agreed. I looked around: As we had talked the old crumbling factory walls had rebuilt themselves around us.

"It's because it's private," I said, gesturing at the walls. "A private place. It has to be built from your mind."

He nodded. "Almost dawn," he said.

It was my turn to agree. "You come here every night?"

He nodded again. "I'll meet you here tomorrow."

"You're not weird... I'm not weird... Maybe we can help each other. I'll be here." I agreed.

I thought that he would say more, but he simply flashed out of existence. I shifted, side slipped, we were not of the same time, and I felt myself falling... Falling. Seconds later I landed. Crouched on my bedroom floor. Feathers flew in the air in a perfect gray-black storm. I made my way into the kitchen, started the coffee, and headed for the shower.

The Light From Another Moon:

Shifting Realities

Joe

The garage was dark, as always, but enough light spilled in from the Moonlight to go through the items in the cart. The sacks were ears of corn. The parts were varied. A keyboard, missing the space bar. Two plastic stubs stuck up where it should have been. An old computer. The dinosaur kind. Huge and boxy, probably worthless. A small LCD screen or plasma maybe, the old flat screen type before flex screens.

She spoke from the darkness.

"Why do I always find you out here," she asked?

I jumped. My heart skipping beats.

"The kids miss you. You're never home." She smiled, but the smile had too many teeth. Was too sweet. Too nice.

"I just got back," I said. And that was true as far as it went.

"You're always just getting back," she said. She moved closer. The moonlight shining through her nightgown left nothing to my imagination, which is pretty good all on its own. Her hand touched my chest. Her palm flattened against it.

"I miss you too," she said huskily.

"I... I have to go... I have to go again," I said.

Her hand spasmed and then slapped flat against my chest. She backed away. "You are never here. _Never!"_

"I..."

"I, what?"

"I try..."

"I try? I'm your wife..." She leaned closer. "What's in those other places," she asked in a rough whisper. Her tongue came out, forked, purple, and licked at her lips. Colors shifted across her face. Iridescent greens, reds, oranges, yellows, purples. I sidestepped, and...

I found myself in the garage. Empty, but wrong. Something moved in the shadows.

The troll was on me so fast I did not have time to think. Stinking, hot breath on my neck, sharp claws sinking into me. I threw myself out of the dream and spun away into blackness. The pain followed. I spun down faster and faster.

I'd left my body sitting in a wooden chair pulled up to my desk. The force of my impact back into my body shattered the chair. I sprawled on to the floor and skidded all the way to the wall where I slammed to a stop.

When I caught my breath I checked myself over: Nasty bites on my chest, deep scratches on my arms. It could hurt you. It could kill you. I waited until I had my breathing under control and then made my way to the bathroom medicine cabinet.

The Light From Another Moon:

The Tracker

Abignew

Abignew squatted on his short legs and lowered his head to the ground. He inhaled deeply, sucking up the scent of the dream. He shook his head and shuddered as the scent worked its way up into his brain. A few minutes later he lifted his head and looked around the empty garage with his red glowing eyes. He snuffled deep in his chest. A bass sound like a suppressed snort. He lifted his head and sniffed the air, then slipped into the time stream.

The Light From Another Moon:

The Story Of Wandering

Bear

The road was not what it seemed to be. He knew that in some base way. Something inside himself that understood the road for what it really was.

Road or not, the man's scent was there. He followed.

The Moon rode across the sky. He padded along the lonely blacktop. Watching the shadows on the side of the road as he went.

He found the van parked on the side of the road a short time later. The smell of the man was strong. Everywhere. Part of everything. The air, the ground. The doors were shut. The windows open. He could smell the man's breath coming from the van window. He was here, but he was gone. Bear understood that. Even though we didn't know exactly where the man's dreaming self was, he had come upon the man in the garage several times. Asleep on his feet. Seeming so. But actually somewhere else. Somewhere in some dream world. This was the same. There, but gone someplace in his head. Maybe he would come back soon.

Bear crawled under the van and rested his head on his paws. He would wait. The man would come back from where ever he was and when he did Bear would be here. The man would know what should be done. He could.... He could belong to him. He knew that. The man would take him with him. He watched the shadows at the side of the road and waited.

FOUR

Before Dreams:

Enlightened Teachers:

Benjamin Bear Killer

Joe

I had come back to spend time with Laura. I could not tell her my real reasons. That I was afraid of leading the Dream Killer to her. Or I was not sure even whether I was coming back in the end, so I had wanted to see her one more time. She asked me about the Bear Killer who had been my Uncle and so I told her as we sat in the quiet of the evening and talked..

I thought a moment, gathered my thoughts, and then began to speak to Laura.

"I Knew Benjamin from my father's side of the family. My grandmother was Blackfoot. She came from Canada with my father and my uncles and aunts. My father was the baby of the family. He looks Indian. Black hair, facial markings. So do most of my uncles, Benjamin excluded."

"Benjamin is not a blood uncle, he is an uncle by marriage to my Aunt Ethel. He is a full blooded Irishman who married my aunt, gave up his Christian religion and has never looked back. If he could have ended the civilized world with a wish and turn it all back to the old ways, he would have. I'm not that dramatic but there are days when I can see his reasoning."

"Benjamin Bear Killer knew the myths and legends. He understood more than some of my blood uncles did. They would go to him to learn. They saw him as one of the Enlightened Teachers."

"Enlightened Teachers are something that the creator has given to us. They guide us. They teach us to respect the world, the Earth Mother. Teach us the legends and myths that we need to know. When my dreams became too much, too real, Benjamin Bear Killer came to me."

Laura nodded for me to continue.

Bear crossed to the fireplace, yawned, curled up and rested his head on his paws.

"I had mentioned the dreaming to my mother, and she had spoken to my Aunt. My aunt had spoken to Benjamin and he had come to see me. Benjamin saw it as duty. It was part of what the creator made him to do, he said. At that time I wasn't sure but now I believe that he is exactly right. Who knows what would've happened to me if not for the guidance and the stories he gave to me. Knowledge is meant to be used, he told me, why would anyone go to a Bear fight without a knife? A strange analogy maybe. But he wasn't called the Bear Killer for nothing. So it made some sense to me."

Bear yawned.

"Benjamin told me the legends first......."

"In the beginning the Creator made a way to the peoples that will always be open. First Woman, The Clan Totems, the Star People, were all able to communicate, and they are still able now, up to this day and beyond, until your days cease you will have a pathway to that knowledge. A way to reach all that is possible. You hold the keys to all that is within yourself. We all do..."

"This is how the Creator came to make that way open for us, Benjamin told me."

Laura nodded, curled her feet under herself and settled in to listen.

"We were in a sweat lodge at the time. One Benjamin had built with the help of my Uncles and Cousins. So many used it though that we had to check first to see if it could be used."

"The Owl Woman's Society use it," he told me. "That meant nothing to me. At least nothing concrete. I had known my mother belonged to the Owl Woman's Society. I didn't know what they did: Where they met. What they decided. How important they were to each other, to us, to the well being of our people."

"We settled into the sweat lodge and Benjamin began to tell me the legend of the Dreamer's Way..."

"In the beginning there were very few people. In those days there was direct communication between the creator and his creations. Mother Earth spoke to Grandfather Sun every day. Grandmother Moon spoke to Mother Earth. The trees spoke to the people and the people spoke to their four legged brothers. The Enlightened teachers kept the legends. They passed them down from generation to generation. Grandfathers taught Grandsons. Grandmothers taught Granddaughters. And it could be that they both taught all the children equally well. The generations were not vast at that time. Time itself was brand new.

We as a people did not see our destiny. We did not realize where we would go. The things that would befall us. As we matured, evolved, we became more independent. We talked to the Creator less and less. We lost our ability to communicate with our four legged brothers. Our winged brothers the birds. The fish. We forgot that the trees themselves, the rocks, the winds, the directions all had their own languages that we could use to talk to them as we had at one time. We had begun to live a life that did not include regular communication with the other beings we lived with, or the Creator, or the Earth Mother."

"One day a young girl, she was called Sparrow Spirit, was walking beside a swollen spring river that ran near her village. She was just into her ninth year. She was not a princess. Not someone specially selected for honor, or in her case death. She was the legends say, an ordinary girl."

"She watched as the waters roared by. Huge trees were carried along in the current. Boulders were swept along and even seemed to float. Sparrow Spirit stood on a rock ledge and watched these things. Amazed at how powerful the water spirit was."

"A tree larger than any living tree she had ever seen came down the river. It was floating, being pushed and pulled by the current."

"Now the trees, we know, are alive. They breathe, think, feel, just as we do. And this tree said to itself, 'Here is this young girl just watching me die. And she is not lifting a finger to help me.' The thoughts, although unreasonable, angered the tree. When it reached the ledge, big as it was, it could not bring its limbs up high enough to snatch her, to catch her long black hair and pull her into the water."

"There was no time to think so that tree rammed itself into the rock wall under the ledge Sparrow Spirit stood on with all its might. Hoping to cause the little girl to lose her footing and fall into the raging water, where the tree could entangle her by her long flowing hair and then pull her down into the depths to drown her."

"Tree's plan worked better than Tree had hoped. The ledge itself under Sparrow Spirit's feet crumbled away and plunged her into the cold, fast moving water. Tree reached out with her spindly limbs and entangled them in her hair, pulling her down into the depths; drowning her."

"Now Bird Song, who was Sparrow Spirits mother, could not be convinced that her daughter was dead. Even though many who had seen what Tree had done had come and told her. She refused to accept it. Refused to believe in it.

"Bring me her body then, if she has gone to the spirit world," she told her husband Four Feathers. "If she has died we need to sing her to the stars."

"Four Feathers had personally seen Sparrow Spirit fall into the river. And he was positive she was dead. He did not think there would be any chance of finding her body and singing her to the stars where the ancestors lived among the Star People. The river, this time of year, never gave any of its dead back."

"Even so Four Feathers knew his wife would never accept Sparrow Spirit's death until he bought her the little girls body. And even though he was sure he would never find her, he believed the spirits would probably allow her to go to the ancestors if he at least looked for her."

"Four Feathers had no sons. And he was sure that Sparrow Spirit was part of his own spirit. He had no proof, just a feeling. But it caused him to love Sparrow Spirit more deeply, and he too wanted to find her and send her on her way. He feared Bird Song would never be the same until he could show her, her daughter dead or alive. So he set out beside the river that same day in search of Sparrow Spirit's body."

"Now he traveled for three hands of time. Days walking and keeping lookout along the river's edge. Nights sleeping beside her. Letting the land, the bounty of Mother Earth protect and nurture him."

"He found many animals, and even a few of the people who had fallen into the waters. And he prayed them to the spirits and continued to search for Sparrow Spirit."

"Near the end of the three hands of time he became sure that he would not find her. He was in a land that he did not know. No one knew. No people had been there before him."

"That night he slept beside the river and dreamed. In his dream Sparrow Spirit came to him and spoke to him just as she had when she had been alive."

"Father," she had said. "You will find my bones on the river bank just one more days travel. You must take them back to my mother so she can be at peace. As for me, my Father, I have found my way to the Spirit World."

"Four Feathers wept in his sleep. He had thought she was a child of his spirit, now he knew she was. In the morning he set out once more and by the end of the day he found Sparrow Spirits bones on the river bank just as she had told him he would. Her Medicine bag was still caught within her ribs. He carefully packed her remains and set out back to the village.

Now on the way back Sparrow Spirit often talked to him. All the days and all the nights. And as he walked he listened and Four Feathers learned about the way that it had once been."

"As he learned he began to follow Sparrow Spirit's voice as she led him to other worlds. To the homes of Grandfather Sun. First Woman. Grandmother Moon. To the ancestors who hearths are scattered among the stars."

"He met the Clan Totems who lived among the stars with the ancestors. She showed him how to dream. What it was: Where it could take you."

"As the three hands of time passed on the return trip Four Feathers spent less and less time in the waking world and more and more time walking in the other worlds. He found the City Of The Dead. He met the Coyote, The Trickster, the Dream Killer, but he was not afraid. He was becoming a powerful dreamer. He was the first dreamer."

"When Four Feathers arrived in his village he handed over Sparrow Spirits bones to Bird Song. Bird Song spoke to the Clan Mothers. The Clan Mothers came together and listened to the story that Four Feathers told about finding the bones. About the Spirit Worlds. About dreaming, how Sparrow Spirits voice still spoke to him. The Clan Mothers went to the Chief. The Chief called all the people together and told them. They held their first prayers to the Creator, to Mother Earth, to Grandmother Moon and Grandfather Sun, that very day."

"As the first Dreamer Four Feathers spoke to the spirits, discovered their ways, told the people and helped the people to understand. He became greatly respected, but he was not alone. From those days until these days, there have been Dreamers. They keep the balance. They speak for some people who wish to speak to the spirits, but can not. They help to keep the balance. But most important they keep the lines of communication open."

"Benjamin Bear Killer leaned back into the steam as I took in what he had told me."

"You are a dreamer," he said at last."

"Me," I asked? I suspected something like that, but I was still shocked though."

"You know you are." He looked at me through the clouds of steam. "It's a bad time. A dangerous time. Everything is out of its natural order. We need dreamers. The people need to have a relationship with the Creator, all of creation itself needs to be bought back into balance." He eyed me through the steam."

"I don't know how and what could I do?" I asked him."

"You already do it. You only need guidance. What can you do? Plenty. The Thief of Souls, the Dream Killer, the Trickster. They rule the spirit worlds. They rule only because there is no one to oppose them. No one to stop them. It has been allowed because as a people we have fallen away from The Creator. A strong Dreamer will have to fight for us. A Dreamer as strong as the first. You will be part of that," he told me."

"I am not that dreamer. I am just one man. An ordinary man at that. I don't know how I do the things I do." I said."

"But you will," the Bear Killer told me. "You will learn. And that dreamer will be lead to you: Come to us through you; because of you."

"I had my first productive dreams with Benjamin Bear Killer's guidance. He went with me. But he had no blood. Will, but no blood. I only have partial blood. Why would I be stronger than someone who has all Native blood," I asked him?"

"Because you are willing and they are not," Benjamin Bear Killer said. "We are our own worst enemy. That is not just something to say."

"So I followed, and I learned from him and I soon out stripped Benjamin. Not long after that I realized how serious the Thief of Souls was. He sent his minions to take Benjamin's soul. He died in his sleep, lost without it. I have dreamed every night since then. And I know how dangerous it is, but I believe it is my only true calling.

Before dreaming I had felt aimless: Out of touch with my native roots. I did not know how to address the stars. Thank the Mother Earth. The Directions. The Winds. My Wolf Totem. Grandfather Sun. Grandmother Moon. I had no relationship. No relationship with my own clans. My Bear and Wolf totems. I was a man taking up space. I truly felt useless. I did not know my purpose. And the creator makes each one of us for a purpose: Since I have started down this path I have not looked back."

"What happened to Sparrow Spirit," Laura asked?

Bear was stretched out by the fire place. A fire burned there. His paws twitched and I wondered what sort of dreams spirit wolf dogs dreamed. And maybe he wasn't a spirit dog at all. Laura, after all, had been a sparrow when I had first met her.

I laughed lightly. "I asked the same thing. Benjamin told me. Like he was waiting for me to ask him."

I thought for a second and then began.

"The clan mothers took Sparrow Spirits bones to the death house to cleanse them and paint them before they could be buried and start the trip to the ancestors."

"There was a full Moon time involved in preparing the bones. Now that they knew how to speak to the spirits, how to find the old ways, they did what Four Feathers told them to do. And he told them what Sparrow Spirit told him. And she was telling him what the ancestors told her to say."

"After cleansing: After a full Moons time; after painting the bones with the sacred red. The day came for the burial. But a strange thing happened on the ceremony day.

The bones had been placed into the Mother Earth. Food, weapons, clothing, were placed in the earth over the bones so Sparrow Spirit would have those things in the spirit world."

"The Shaman came forward, the heads of the Clans. The Grandmothers. They sprinkled the sacred red earth down into the grave along with handfuls of rich, black dirt. The red rock had been gathered, crushed, and then mixed with Bear fat to paint the bones. Today it isn't made the same way. Just one more thing that is wrong with our people, Benjamin told me." I paused.

"When the Ocher and the dirt hit the clothing covering the bones something happened. The legends say that at that moment the Creator was petitioned by Mother Earth, Grandmother Moon, the Clan Grandmothers, Grandfather Sun and many of the ancestors that lived among the stars to return Sparrow Spirit's life force to her." I met Laura's eyes.

"The bones began to move beneath the clothes and piled gifts. Clacking together. The Grandmothers stood with the Shaman unafraid. They had been part of the prayer after all and they believed in what they had prayed. They believed because they believed Four Feathers, and Four Feathers believed Sparrow Spirit."

"The bones rattled for three days and three nights. At the end of the third day, towards dusk, the bones fell silent. The people, who had been frightened, came back to stand behind the Grandmothers and the Shaman, to see what would happen."

"As the sun began to sink there came a different sound from the grave. Some people looked fearfully to the grave, but the Grandmothers waited with expectation. Bird Song allowed herself to walk closer and stand with the Grandmothers. The sounds that came to them were the sounds of gravel and dirt being pushed aside. Two small pale white hands appeared at the top of the grave just as Grandmother Moon began to lift into the sky. A head of pure black hair appeared next, and then Sparrow Spirit's face came into view. She climbed from the grave and stood next to the Grandmothers. She had come back, but she was not the same."

"While she had been dead the Thief of Souls had stolen and enslaved her soul. And although the Creator was displeased about it, he had created the Thief of Souls for a purpose, just as all of us have a purpose, and so he would not force him to give Sparrow Spirit back her soul."

"She stayed for one Moon, but she was so unhappy living among the people without her soul that the Grandmothers prayed to the Creator to let her go back to the ancestors. She went on the first new Moon."

"Since then, the legends say, Dreamers have sought the Thief of Souls to get her soul back and set her free. And all the other souls he has taken too." I finished.

"That poor little girl," Laura said.

"That poor little girl is thousands of years old now," I said.

"You know there is someone who is purposed to kill the Thief of Souls. He doesn't rule forever," I said after a brief pause.

"Who," Laura asked?

"I didn't know. Benjamin told me. There is a purpose given to every soul that is born. The Thief of Souls was purposed to do exactly what he does, evil. But there is a counter to him that is purposed to end his purpose."

Laura seemed to think about it. "Who did Benjamin think it was," she asked at last. "You?"

"No, Laura. He believed I would meet a Bird Woman. He believed that Bird Woman would be the one who would have the key and the power to kill the Thief of Souls," I said.

She blinked, but continued to stare for a few minutes. "Not me," she said softly.

"No," I asked? "It seems you exactly."

"But I don't know how," she said.

"So you'll learn." I told her, " you'll learn."

In The Sunlight:

The Book Of Memories

Laura

Joe left, but he was with us for most of the night. When I asked him how he could do what he needed to do and still be with us, he answered he was doing what he needed to do.

At first I thought that that meant he considered keeping me safe a priority. But I wonder if that is all he meant? If my own vanity colored his answer and I missed the real answer. It could've meant that he was doing what he was supposed to do, what he should do... In other worlds... At the same time... He has that kind of power.

Our situation has improved: While he was here the things that were wrong about this place seemed to get better. What felt cold and alien, became more familiar, alive... Warm. The house changed. And in the daylight the changes were even more pronounced.

I had mentioned the woods. I had mentioned the barn. The pond. The emptiness of everything that surrounded us. I noticed the changes after my mind was free to notice them. Just before dawn when I went down to the front porch to watch the sunrise I noticed a light switch by the front door. I never did get to watch the sunrise. I ended up looking through the house and I found light switches everywhere. The lights worked. I snuffed the candles we had used and marveled at electric lights.

The kitchen held a refrigerator. Eggs, meats. Anything I could wish for. I promised myself to fix a big breakfast for Bear and me, but that waited awhile too. I went to the front porch after my delays and marveled at the landscape that had replaced the Forest. Open, rolling fields that seemed to go on for acres. The woods had been pushed way back: Still dark and brooding, but far, far away on the horizon.

The pond had become a lake and when I realized that something was nagging at my mind, right there at the edge of discovery, I realized it was noise. The noise of life. Real life. Birds calling from the top of the barn where they roosted basking in the golden sunlight. Birds answering from the telephone poles and utility wires that marched away into the distance.

A rooster crowed, which took Bear and I on a short discovery mission. Chickens in the barn... Cows in the pasture out in back of the barn... Horses in another nearby pasture. Two colts chasing each other around the field. Blue and white mountains framed in the background. Even Bear seemed excited.

With a little coaxing I managed to get two of the horses up to the rail fence. They didn't stay long when they realized I had nothing for them, but they seemed to need nothing from me. Fat and sleek. Content to graze and drink from the troughs that lined the fences closer to the barn.

Life changed the world. We walked to the small lake and watched the minnows dart around just under the surface of the water close to shore. Larger, darker shadows cruised by farther out, yet still within our sight. The air even smelled different. There was air movement for starters, and it carried scents... Hay from the fields... The smell of the Horses, the cows close by... The scent of the lake water. The sweet smell of tall grass in the warming sun.

When we went back to the house I found the other surprises as I explored the inside of the house to see how much had changed inside.

A library that featured several books on Native American culture, Myths, Legends and more. Story history... Clans, Tribes, all that I could have asked for. I picked up one of the books on legends that had been passed down from different clans, through different tribes, and sat down on the couch and began to read it. Half the day was gone before I realized that I had never made the breakfast I had intended to make for Bear and me.

I went through the house looking for Bear. I found him on the front porch, eyes fixed on the dirt road that came from the distant east and followed along the wood line. He was watching the dust that was being kicked up as something made its way along that road, heading in our direction.

Within a few minutes of watching the dust resolved itself into the shape of and old fashioned white pickup truck of some kind. It made its ponderous way down the road, lumbering towards us. Had to be us, I decided, there were no other houses here. Possibly anywhere in this world.

Bear and I exchanged glances but it was an unknown. Nothing to do but wait for it.

In The Sunlight Of Another World:

Bad Dreams

Joe

I sat on the low curving wall and watched the Moon ride the sky. My hand stole to my coat pocket and felt the small silver ball there. A chain ran from it to my belt loop. It went where I went.

A new thing had happened; I had made it into the city without losing the van. Without losing myself. I wasn't sure what to make of it.

I had left the driveway of the house earlier than usual. I didn't debate. I believed the van would be there and it was. I got in and left. No traffic at all until I reached the city and then it was only sporadic. It had left me nonplussed. Where to, I had asked myself. And so I had driven to Locust street, parked the van nearby, and come to the wall and sat, when I could think of nothing else.

Sitting on the low curving wall reminded me of another wall. Down by the docks. Nearly the same wall, I realized. I tried to picture it in my mind, but I could not. I debated for a few minutes and then walked to the van, convinced it would not be where I left it, but it was. I drove to the docks. Even less traffic.

The wall was not similar it was exact. I wondered why I hadn't noticed that before. But I had no answer for myself.

I sat on the wall and looked around. The view was not exactly the same. It was different in many aspects, similar in others. As I watched a sparrow flew to a nearby Elm, settled on a branch and watched me carefully. I checked the wall, there were no initials carved into this wall though. I lifted my eyes to the sparrow. My sparrow, I wondered? No way to know. We watched each other for a few minutes, and that was how Abignew nearly killed me.

I was so caught up in wondering about the sparrow, that I paid no attention to the old man wandering slowly up the path behind me. The grit of a footstep at nearly the last second was all that alerted me. My hands came up reflexively and caught the edge of the wire as it came down to circle my throat. It bit into my hands momentarily before I was able to duck, roll off the bench; pulling myself free, hanging onto the wire with one hand. Pulling Abignew with me over the top of the bench. Catching him by surprise.

Blood ran down one of my hands from the bite of the wire, but both of my hands closed around Abignew's neck, my thumbs on his windpipe, crushing. Squeezing. I suddenly shot forward into empty space, off balance as Abignew vanished before my eyes. But I caught his scent, closed my eyes and followed.

My feet touched down in a new world. One I had never seen before. One I had not even known existed. Tall, gray pines. A worn path snaked away and I could see Abignew's shaggy head disappearing into the woods off the side of the path not far from me... Slowing... Not yet aware that I was following. I crouched, left the path, laid my dreamer body down into the tall grass, as hidden as I could make it, and began to follow with my Dreamer's Eye. My body remained off the side of the path, barely into the woods, but safe for now I hoped. My spiritual self hovered close by... Watching... Back in the real world my physical self lay in the bed in the Motel room. Light creeping around the edges of the heavy drapes. Lost in the Dreaming... Breathing shallowly. Waiting to be awakened...

My Dreamers Eye sped along the air currents, found Abignew, slowed, and began to follow him as he made his way deeper into the trees.

In The Moonlight:

The Pigeon On The Ledge

Abignew

Abignew had never made himself into a bird before. He didn't like it. He felt too vulnerable. Too small, to insufficient to the task at hand.

All he had to do was sit on the sill, watch and learn. Was there an action to take? Probably, but it hadn't been decided yet, or if it had, it had not been made known to him. It was not his decision to make. He carried out tasks. Followed orders. He didn't always like it, but he would never disobey.

He moved his claw like pigeon feet and shuffled across the stone window ledge. No one yet. He didn't know what exactly he was watching for, but there was no one with her. She slept... Soundly it appeared... He shuffled back and forth... Peering through the glass periodically as he did... Waiting...

In The Moonlight:

The Bathtub Revisited

Laura

I had yet to meet Joe. It seemed that all he did was look at the number, trace the name with his index finger and that was all. I could do the change. I could be me. I could walk right up to him and introduce myself, but I wasn't sure what he was.

I don't mean to say that I didn't know whether he was a Dreamer. Obviously he was. But what kind of Dreamer? Who did he worship? What was his purpose?

I understood purpose. I knew my purpose, at least I thought I did. Who could be one hundred percent sure? Not me.

He was a Dreamer. I just didn't know enough to trust him with my life. If he was good then the name and the number on the wall would be enough for him to find his way to me. I sat and waited. Occasionally changing the grip on the twig of the limb I was perched on. Joe sat, one finger or another worrying at the name, the number... At the very least I had caught his attention.

Morning came. I could feel the pink edge on the horizon plucking at something primeval in my bird spirit self, while my other self prepared to leave.

I closed my eyes and thought, and when I opened them once more I was falling through the pink void, faster, faster, the light chasing me, my heart hammering against my tiny chest.

I hit the gray morning light several hundred feet up in the air. I fell briefly, plummeting towards the ground, pulled myself together, slowed and drifted on an air current towards my building.

Still, in the dream state I passed easily through the window that fronted my bedroom. I hovered gently, my body changing. A drift of feathers floated down around me as I lowered my spiritual self back into my physical body.

My eyes began to move behind their lids a few seconds later... My breathing began to pick up... Seconds later my eyes fluttered open and I awoke to the early morning semi-darkness of my bedroom. It was so much easier coming back under control rather than in a rushed panic. I sat up slowly, yawned, stretched. A sudden sneeze caught me and I doubled over with the force of it. I waited for another but it did not come.

Reluctantly I swung my feet over the side of the bed, headed for the kitchen to start the coffee, but changed my mind. Deciding on a hot bath first.

I collected clean clothes, a towel, and made my way to the bathroom. As the water ran I rubbed at my temples... A headache coming on, I thought... Great...

In The Moonlight

The Alley

Abignew

"What is it I want you to do," Abignew asked?

"Okay, Man... Okay, you want to give me some money to go off some chick... Somewhere, I don't know where... No... Sixth floor..." His eyes shot up to the sixth floor of the building "Is that about right, Man?" The young man's eyes were red road maps as he stared back at Abignew. The left side of his face twitched. He blinked rapidly.

Abignew shuffled his feet. He hated this body. A human body. Too big. Too uncomfortable.. Too... Too pretentious, he decided. But, he told himself, when in Rome....

"You got most of it," Abignew agreed.

The kid nodded his head rapidly. "So, like, where's the green, Dude?"

"The green... Dude, is in my pocket. In my pocket is where it will stay until you do what I need you to do... A little job.. The little job we spoke about... A little pleasurable job... Big money... All the shit, as you say, that you could want after it's done." Abignew told him. "Except you can't seem to remember the details and get them right."

"Yeah... Yeah," The kid nodded his head rapidly. "But see, that's where it's fucked up, see? See, the money's got to come first... Otherwise, well.. Otherwise, how will I even know you got it? Right, Dude? How will I know?" The kids eye's shone as though he had just solved all the mysteries to the universe after years of study. On his drug addled level of thinking, Abignew thought, that was probably exactly what he did think.

Abignew pulled a large roll of cash from his pocket. The kid's eyes jumped in his head. "Right here," He told him. "And right here in my pocket is where it will stay until you are done." He pushed the wad of cash back into his pocket, fished around in the opposite pocket and pulled out a small twenty-two caliber pistol. A cheap pawn shop item. Likely to cause more harm to the shooter on any given shot than to the shoo-tee. "You take this. You do the job," he thrust the small gun into the kids hands. "Then you get the cash... Get it?"

The kid licked his lips. His eyes swiveled to the building, shooting back up to the sixth floor windows again. "Up there, huh," He asked? He looked back down at Abignew who only nodded. He seemed to think a second. "Okay, Man. It's a bet. It's a bet." His fingers closed around the gun. He looked at it for a second as if surprised to see that it was there and then he stuffed it into his pocket. "You'll be here, right? Like, you'll be right here when I'm done?"

"Right here," Abignew assured him and smiled. "Waiting."

"Six Oh Eight?"

"Six Oh Eight."

"A fuckin' Bazillion dollars, Man... A fuckin' _Bazillion._ "

"An even five grand, as you say," Abignew told him.

"That's... That's like a Bazillion... That's..." He lost his words. His lips moved, eyes closed. A second later his eyes opened once more. He looked at Abignew. "Later, Bro. I'm off." He spun and walked off down the alley toward the rear fire escape.

"Yes you are," Abignew chuckled to himself. He leaned back against the greasy alley wall to wait.

In The Sunlight Of Another World:

More Bad Dreams

Joe

The Forest closed in around me quickly. Even as a spiritual presence I could feel it: I began to worry about my body where it lay at the edge of the woods. Hidden, but hidden well enough? I could only hope that it was. Abignew was setting a fast pace and I was drawing farther away from my dream self, splitting my spiritual self to do it. I didn't like it at all.

There was no moonlight here. A pale silver disc graced the open sky above the trees. Sunlight then, I thought. The time here in this world must be completely different. This had to be more than a shift or a slip sideways.

I kept one part of my mind on the silver ball in my pocket. A large part. Not as large as it had once been, but still large. Another part was watching over my physical self. The sounds of the day-quiet motel drifting at the edge of everything else my mind was processing. Occasional rattles of keys, a far off argument. The sounds of a scuffle. An aluminum can rolling down the steel steps from the floor above. Hollow, metallic 'Pong' sounds as it fell from step to step. A breeze sighing over the low rooftop. A crows' raspy call as it overflew the motel roof and winged its way into the city.

Another part of my mind was with my dream self, watching the area where my spiritual body lay. And my vision skated over the forest floor watching Abignew as he walked fast along an old worn path.

I sensed the wolves before I saw them. Nothing concrete. A scent on the wind. A rustling in the grasses. I broke away from my travel and slammed back into my dream self fully.

The wolves were on me before I could gain my feet. The lead wolf, nearly pure white with smudge gray markings that were barely there. Glowing pale-red eyes, launched himself through the air, his teeth finding and closing on my throat. I fought my way up to a sitting position. My own hands came up automatically to his throat, but even as I squeezed I willed myself to end the dream. I focused all that I had as a second wolf slammed into my back, claws hooking into the skin, clawing for purchase, riding me as his jaws bit deep into the back of my neck.

The black came fast, closing down my sight, pulling at my soul. The battle lasted less than a second. The wolves were no match for the power I had developed. My soul leapt into the void. I felt myself falling faster and faster.

I hit the bed so hard that it felt as though I had broken it. Within seconds someone began to beat on the thin Motel room wall from the room next door.

" _SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP, MOTHERFUCKER!"_ A shrill screaming. Someone barely holding onto their sanity, at least it sounded that way to me.

I tuned it out and struggled to breath, finally pulling enough air into my lungs to get them going again. I pushed myself off the bed, struggled to my feet and then promptly bent double and vomited.

It took precious minutes to get myself in some semblance of order. Slow my breathing. Get my heart beat under control. Time that I could not get back. I finally staggered into the bathroom: Washed my face.

The eyes that stared back at me when I looked into the mirror were shot through with red. Puffy. Wild looking. I dried my face, walked back into the main room, picked up my duffel bag, set it on top of the scared dresser top and began to rifle through it. I found the soap carrying case. Cheap plastic. Hinged on one side. A thick plastic lid and sides. Solid blue plastic. No see through unit. I'd made sure.

I opened the case. Looked at the gray shapeless blob inside for nearly a full minute. Then closed it and shoved it into the front pocket of my shirt. That was when I realized the silver ball was gone. I nearly went to my knees once more.

How? I questioned myself. How? I took a deep breath. Another. I closed my eyes and tried to focus.

"Nothing for it... Nothing for it," I muttered under my breath.

I walked quickly to the bed. Sat on one edge. Swung my feet up onto the mattress where they had been. A split second later my body fell back onto the cheap spread that covered the mattress. My eyes fluttered and then closed. My body went rigid. My hands closed into vein popping fists and then just as suddenly relaxed. My breathing slowed. I was gone from that place again... Falling into the black once more...

FIVE

In The Sunlight:

The Book Of Memories;

Laura

The old truck bounced and then bumped down off the road and into the yard. It slowed to a stop just beyond the porch. The motor popped and belched unevenly as an old man climbed down from the cab, smiled our way and then walked over closer to the porch. The truck continued to pop and idle choppily behind him.

"Miss," he said. His eyes fell to Bear. "Fella," He added. He took off his old fashioned hat, beat it against his leg to remove the dust, smoothed it out and then placed it back upon his head. He cleared his throat. "Dry," he said.

"Could I offer you water," I asked?

"Please... If you would be so kind."

I left, but Bear stayed behind. On all fours. Body stiff. He wasn't growling, but he wasn't accepting either. Nothing had changed when I returned with a cold glass of water a few minutes later.

He drank the water down in one gulp. Wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his white button-down shirt and then thanked me.

I waited.

He looked down at the ground. Kicked at a small stone he had found there. Checked the sun in the sky.

"What is it I can do for you," I asked at last.

"This is a nice place," he said in response. "Ingenious. Unbelievable. I wouldn't have thought of it, Miss." He met my eyes, reached into one pocket and pulled an envelope from it. He handed it to me. I was reluctant to take it, but after discovering no good reason not to I took it. "He sent it," the old man added.

I looked at him.

"He," he repeated

I flipped the envelope in my hands. 'Laura' in bold script on one side. Nothing else. I slipped the envelope into my back pocket and leveled my eyes on him. "What else," I asked?

He shrugged. "I'm to wait for a response." He scuffed the paint on the lower step that lead to the porch but made no move to climb the steps to the porch. He said nothing else.

I sighed inside, but I pulled the envelope from my pocket, levered one fingernail under the glued down flap, and ripped the top open. A small single sheet of lined notepaper resided inside. I had seen that paper before: Joe's notebook. It was folded in half. I opened it. Joe's close script graced the page.

Laura,

I can't come to you. I can't explain it. The messenger is a dreamer I trust. I think you know him too. Whatever you do don't leave there. I can not promise how long I will be gone, but I can promise I will come for you just a soon as I can,

Joe

The old man cleared his throat, lifted his eyes from the ground and looked at me.

"You can take a message," I asked him.

"I can," he agreed.

"You know where he is?"

"Well, not exactly... I know where part of him is."

"What does that mean?"

"It means I can not go to him. Where he really is, but I can dream to him." He paused. "Write what you want to say on that paper. I can get that paper to him. That I can do. And I won't read it either. I promise you that. Your man has a bit of a fight, alright." He looked up at the sun in the sky. "I guess you both do. There are some of us who will help when we're asked... When we can, Laura... Right now this is what I can help with. It's what I got. You say what you got to say... Write it out and I'll get it to him." He nodded his head vigorously when he finished as if to assure himself.

I thought, he had to have come from Joe. No other dreamer knew my name. No one knew where this place was. Maybe if he came himself he would be like that beacon he had talked about. I took the paper into the house, found a pen and scratched out a quick response. Re-folded the paper again, and took it back out to the old man.

"What do I call you," I asked him as I handed him the small slip of paper. He slipped it into his front shirt pocket.

"Some call me Bear Killer," the old man said slowly.

I looked into his eyes, but there was no sense of a lie or a tease there.

"But... But you're dead... I thought..." I said.

"Yeah," he agreed. "Mostly." He turned and walked back to the truck that still sat chugging and popping in the dooryard. He turned as he reached the door.

"He said to tell you to read the book of Memories. It's legends. Myths. Tales. The stories of our peoples. All of our peoples."

"I," I said.

He smiled. "The book of memories. It used to be mine. You do need to read it." He chuckled, pushed himself into the little cab, waved once and then slipped the clutch and made a U-Turn in the dooryard. He bounced the truck across the uneven grass and dirt of the dooryard, bumped it back up onto the road, over the humped crown, nearly stalled it, and then chugged back off the way he had come.

We watched until the dust itself disappeared in the distance. Bear came back inside with me. I went to the library of books. It took a couple of minutes of searching to find the book. I took it to the couch, kicked off my sneakers, curled my feet under me and began to read.

In The Moonlight:

Abignew

She sat up in the bed, yawned and then stretched. Abignew's spirit self stood watching from just inches away. He could smell the sweetness of her soul on her breath. He opened his closed fist. Millions of small, swirling particles danced on his palm. The light catching and reflected off the smallest pieces as they spun. He bent closer to her as she finished her yawn and stretch and began to open her eyes. He lowered his mouth to his palm and blew softly. A swirl of color rose from his palm, danced and bobbed on the air current created by his breath and then engulfed her face. Her face swam in and out of focus in the swirling maelstrom and then the swirling cloud passed into her. Abignew stood back and watched.

Laura's eye's opened and then she sneezed hard. She waited, finger to nose, but a second sneeze did not come. She got up and padded off to the kitchen. A moment later she was back gathering clothes and then a towel and washcloth on her way to the bathroom. Abignew laughed to himself as he watched her go. A second later he was a pigeon once more. Watching through the glass from the ledge outside the bathroom. He flapped his wings, rose from the ledge and took flight.

In The Moonlight:

In The Bathtub Again

Laura

The water was perfect, I thought, maybe a little too perfect... It was putting me to sleep.

I rested my head against the rim of the tub and drifted. It really was relaxing me. I tried to follow that thought, but found that I couldn't. My eyelids felt heavy. Too heavy. Heavier than normal... Weighted. It took so much effort to open them.

I tried to focus my thoughts, but every time I opened my eyes the bathroom swam in and out of focus and I had to shut them once more. As I tried to make sense of it a face swam into view, it panicked me, but even so there was no physical reaction from me at all. Even the panic I felt seemed removed. Aloof. Panic felt by a disinterested party. Like it was a reaction that belonged to someone else instead of my own.

"Hey," he said. A young guy. Unshaven. Wild hair. I could smell the street on him.

His teeth were yellowed and chipped. Looked to be blackening in places I saw. His tongue continuously licked at his cracked lips. I couldn't speak. Wouldn't have known what to say if I had been able to, and I was having a very hard time keeping my eyes open. The lights were too bright.

"Hey," he said again. "I didn't know you would be naked... In a bath tub... He didn't say that... I'm sorry.... I really am sorry." His hand swam into view as I watched. Normal except a black lump seemed to be fused to it. A black lump with a blacker hole in the end of it. Fire spat from the blacker hole. The lights went out.

In The Sunlight:

The Wolves

Joe

The wolves were easy to track. I had bounced back to where they had attacked me. Blood covered the ground. Shredded bits of cloth from my clothes. They had ripped the pocket out and the ball had spilled out. They had taken it, either purposely or just because it was there. I had no way to tell, but it was hard to believe they would take it just because it was there. I refused to believe that. They had taken it because they suspected that it meant something.

I told myself that there could be no way that they would understand all that it meant. What it really was. All it Protected. What it protected. Of that I was positive.

They had not been careful because they had believed I was truly gone. After all I had escaped, why would I return? Some kind of reasoning along those lines I assume.

I found them on the road to the City of The Dead. I overflew them with my eye, settled to the ground and changed: Shape shifting as I melted into the shadows at the side of the road they traveled.

I settled into my spiritual self and I became an altered version of myself. My own body became thicker... More muscular... Razor sharps talons sprouted from my fingers and toes. My jaw shot outward and filled with teeth as it did. The gray mass in my hand shifted... Melting, or seeming to, then reforming. It settled into the shape of a curving, blued-steel blade. It was easily two feet in length... I waited.

The fight was over fast. I had banished three wolves before they even fully reacted. Sending them into the void. One wolf alone drew my attention. The silver sphere hung from his lower jaw on it's silver chain. The blade flashed and his head fell to the ground. Blood fountained up into the air. His still rolling eyes tried to focus as I bent forward and quickly snatched the chain from his now still jaw and slipped it over my neck.

Two wolves remained. Snarling, snapping, but keeping their distance. A second later they both vanished and I was alone on the path with the wolf that I had killed. I crouched down and hefted the severed head by the ruff of fur on its neck, holding it easily in one hand. Without its head it could not come back from the dead. That was the rule for all of us. Dreamers, spirits, anything else that inhabited this place. I did not know what the wolf really was. But whatever it was it would not be coming back.

As I stood from my crouch my body began to change once more. The talons falling away into nothing. Jaw receding. The glow that had come into my own eyes was leaving. My thoughts became my own instead of my totem wolf's thoughts.

The blued-steel blade shifted, shimmered, and then turned back into the gray shapeless blob that it had been. I closed my eyes and tilted my head to the sky. Thanked the Creator. Thanked my totems wolf and bear. Opened my eyes once more and threw myself into the void.

Ten Thousand Years Of Pain:

The Second Sparrow

Sparrow Spirit

The sparrow watched from the safety of the limb. She knew who Joe was. And although she could do nothing for him to help him, she and thousands of other souls prayed for him daily as he walked his way. They had prayed for him ten thousand years ago without yet knowing who he was or would be, but believing that he would be. That he would come. And that he would accept his path when he did come. Then they had been few: As the years passed they had become many.

She watched the brief struggle with Abignew. She knew who Abignew was. She and the many had nothing but hate for Abignew.

When they had both left the realm, she lifted from the branch on her tiny wings, unable to follow. She was still trapped as she had been for all the time that had passed. She flew to the wall and her shape shifted as she settled upon the wall. She finished up in a ball. Hugging her knees. Blue-Gray feathers danced around her hair, her bare arms, swirled and then disappeared.

She straightened, standing on the wall. Several of the other dreamers who had been nearby descended from the trees where they had roosted and came to the wall where she stood and settled beside her. Their faces lifted to the sky with her own. Eyes closed. Deep in prayer to the creator. Her small white hands were lifted high into the sky. Her body, thin and childlike still: Frozen as it had been for so long, shook with the effort of the prayer that poured from her lips.

The prayer finished, the small, pale girl dropped her hands to her sides, seemed to shimmer for a split second, fading in and out of reality, then she collapsed inward upon herself. A split second later the sparrow flew from the midst of the collapse, pulling itself into the sky, a small black shape against the moon.

The Hearths Of The Ancestors:

Among The Dead

Joe

He came as close to me as was allowed. He looked the same to me as he had always looked. He smiled easily. And his smile was just as genuine. His concern was the danger of me being there.

"You have traveled far," He told me.

"I have learned in my travels," I answered.

"We know," he agreed.

"I," I started.

He raised one hand. "There is no need to ask," he looked off in to the stars. "I have been restless... Do you have it?"

I lifted the silver ball and chain from my neck.

"You," he asked?

I nodded. I reached my hand into one pocket, retrieved my notebook, wrote briefly, tore the sheet free and handed it to him along with the ball on it's chain. "He could kill you forever," I said. I knew he knew it, but I had to say it to him anyway.

"He won't find that easy," he told me with a smile.

"No," I agreed. "I don't suppose that he will." We both stood for a few minutes as I struggled with what to say.

"You shouldn't tell me where you're going," he said.

"I know," I sighed. "I don't even know if I can make it back."

He nodded. "We each serve our purpose," he said quietly.

It was my turn to nod. I did and then we both stood for a few moments longer. "Walk well, Benjamin Bear Killer," I said softly.

"Walk with Four Feathers. Walk in the Right. Walk the Red Path." He told me. He turned away, shimmered for a second and then he was gone.

I looked down at my hand where my notebook was still clutched, closed it and tucked it back into my pocket. A second later I slipped into the black and I was falling...

On A High Hill:

In The Dead Nothing

Joe

I dug the hole deep. It was my duty. My job. I did it.

The whole area was dotted with small, stone cairns that covered the graves of those I had already bought here. Perhaps two dozen. It surprised me that there were so many, yet worried me that there were so few.

The soil was black and filled with stones. The digging of the hole took awhile to accomplish. There was a pale-blue moon that shone from the sky, illuminating the work I had to do.

I stood on a summit that overlooked nothing. Eternity. The complete void of blackness. Everything and nothing. The end of all things.

The spiral represents life. Cycles. All that can ever be. This place represents the end of everything. All things. It was a dangerous place. A place to be respected. A place not to be taken for granted. A place of power. Power I could not fully begin to understand.

I finished my work, lowered the bag that contained the head of the wolf into the hole. Filled in the hole; using the excess stones to build up the cairn. I stood and brushed the dirt from my hands. I had done what I could on all fronts. There was nothing else I could do. It was time to take on the fight directly. I had made things as safe as I could for Laura. And she was not alone. I knew now about Bear the wolf-dog who was no wolf-dog at all. He would protect her there. Die if need be. He had his own purpose and he would follow it too as I followed mine.

I stared off into the black nothingness. It seemed to suck the blue cast of moonlight into itself, leaving more than just an absence of light. A few seconds later I lifted my hands, sent my prayers on their way to the Creator, then slipped into the black void once more.

In The Moonlight:

In The Alley

Abignew

The kid practically ran into him as he turned the corner and tripped into the alley.

"Jesus," the kid said. His red eyes were redder. His hands shook. He thrust the small pistol away from his own hands and into Abignew's hands.

"You took care of my problem," Abignew asked?

"Yeah... Yeah, Man. But it was fucked up. Really fucked up, you know?" His eyes pleaded with Abignew to understand. "You know, Bro?"

Abignew smiled. "Yes, Bro... I do know." The smile fell away from his face and one hand plunged into his coat pocket. "It seems there is a matter of some money." He pulled the hand from his pocket holding the thick roll of cash. The kid leaned forward, his eyes drinking in the cash.

"Yeah," he whispered. "That's what the fuck I'm talking about right there," he said. His faces was inches away from the cash Abignew held in his hand.

"Yes... Get a good look," Abignew told him, "A good look." The kid leaned forward further. Abignew's hand flew up suddenly and clasped the back of the kids head, catching him off balance.

"Hey!" the kid yelled, startled.

The roll of cash shifted, turning into an ice pick. Shiny steel. Wooden handled. The hand that held it suddenly shot forward driving the ice pick through the kids right eye; deep into his brain.

Abignew's hand closed around the kids neck and he picked him up into the air and held him just off the ground. The kids feet began trying to kick themselves through the asphalt of the alley. Abignew lifted him further and his feet danced in the air. He held him until his feet began to jitter to a shaking, juddering stop. Kicked once more. Kicked again. And then fell still. A few seconds later he dropped the now lifeless body to the trash strewn asphalt of the alley. His own body shifted, and a second later he rose into the air, riding upwards on the currents. He winged his way to the ledge outside Laura's bedroom. Settled to the sill. Tucked his wings into his sides and began to wait.

In The Sunlight:

The Book Of Memories

Laura

I started from the first page of the book of memories. It was not a long book. Not a new book. The leather covers were old, mellow, but it had been taken care of. The pages were yellowed, slightly stiff, but they were not falling apart. A slim book, but I felt that what words it did contain most likely more than made up for the size. I began to read from the first page...

... In the beginning there was only the Creator. There was no Earth Mother. No Grandfather Sun to shine. No Grandmother Moon to light our way in the night. No Animals. No Thunders. No Directions. No legends to tell, because there were no peoples.

The Creator lived with the Star People in the heavens. But The Star People were not talkers, and so the Creator became lonely and wished for someone he could talk with.

One day as he walked among the Star People, he decided that he would create a world where he could go and talk to his creations.

Now all the things that ever were, or ever could be, lived within the Creators words. Within himself. So even though he had never walked on a world of the kind that he had in mind, he knew exactly what he wanted and what it should look like.

As he walked among the Star People thinking it out, he realized he did not want just another world full of rocks and trees, mountains and plains. The stars were full of worlds just like that. Those were worlds that were alive, but they were not the kind of life that the Creator was. What the Creator wanted was companionship. Someone he could visit with. Talk with. Someone like himself.

Now a tree or a rock could be visited, talked to, but what he had in mind was something that would answer back. At that time trees and rocks were not much on talking. There came a time within the legends when the trees and the rocks, when many things we do not think of as talkers, did talk. But that was not at this time.

Many cycles passed by as the Creator decided on what he wanted to do and how he should do it. What it would look like: Where it would live. And what the Creator would talk about with this new creation.

Finally, the day came when the Creator decided to create. He chose the earth as the place to create. At that time the Earth was a small, dead world with no Sun. No Moon.

He formed the Sun from the Star People around him and he set it into the void. He formed Grandmother Moon from a small part of the Earth and set her on her path. They had no life of their own at that time though, they simply reflected the life of the Creator.

The Creator then began to speak the words of life as he stepped from the stars onto the Earth, coming to stand in a summer tall field of wheat.

Next he made the directions and named them. The winds; and he gave individual names to each wind. But there was nothing yet to move the winds. No reason yet to the directions. No purpose yet to the greenery, for the wheat, for the rocks. For the Creator had not yet made purpose.

The Creator then bent and placed his hands upon the Earth and spoke her into life, calling her Mother. The Mother of all that could be.

As he stood from the ground he began to create purpose and assign it to his creations: The winds to move the air. Mother Earth's breaths to move the winds. The directions so that the winds could find their way over the Earth Mother as they moved.

Mother Earth took her first breath and the tops of the Wheat began to sway as the winds picked up her life giving breath and began to carry it to all the corners of the Earth.

The Creator and Mother Earth spent the next several cycles talking. The Creator was pleased with his creation.

Now the Creator enjoyed Mother Earth's company, but he also had many friends and favorite places among the Star People. Sometimes he would go for long walks among the Star People. Every time he left Mother Earth would become lonely and long for his companionship.

One day when the Creator returned from a walk among the Star People, Mother Earth spoke about her loneliness. The Creator understood her loneliness. It was the same loneliness that the creator himself had suffered through. So The Creator reached deep inside of himself. Taking a part of himself, the Creator mixed this with the words that lived within him, the words of Power and Life. He sowed this seed into the soil that covers Mother Earth.

"These seeds are the words of life become whole. They are of me," the Creator told her. "Part of your Creator. They will speak themselves into being in the fullness of time and you will never be lonely again."

The Creator lifted his hands and spoke Grandfather Sun and Grandmother Moon into life, causing the Creators own breath to fall upon them; and so they began to move on their own paths of purpose. "They will be for Times and for Seasons," he said.

Now several cycles passed and the seed that the Creator had planted within the Earth Mother began to grow. The day came when Grandmother moon came down to hold Mother Earth's hand and comfort her during her birthing of life.

Grandfather Sun spilled his light upon them and spoke quietly with the creator as the Earth Mother cried out in her birthing pains.

The peoples came first. Red, Yellow, Black, White, the Brown man, and all the shades in between. The birth waters gushed forth from her as Mother Earth's womb opened and all the peoples were born.

The birth waters became oceans, lakes, rivers and streams.

The Clan Totems and Animal Totems came next. Their place was not on the Earth. Their place was among the Star People where they would live with the Creator. But they bought the Earth animals before them and instructed them on what they were to be for, before they themselves ascended into the Heavens.

Mother Earth's sacred birth waters bought life to all that they touched. The fish swam in them. Brother Eagle came from the waters and ascended to the sky. Brother Wolf walked from the birth waters and made his home in the forests and the mountains with brother black Bear. Each animal found its place and knew its purpose.

Now the people had no spirits living among the stars. They had no ancestors to guide them. They did not come to fully know the Creator or the Mother Earth. They had no leaders. Knew nothing of totems. Spirits. Brotherhood. And they did not seek to learn because there was no one they would listen to that would tell them.

Now after a time the people began to divide themselves according to their colors. Leaders arose, but leaders who ignored the purpose within their souls, so they began to provoke wars among each other. With the other peoples. This was their nature.

Mother Earth became sadder and sadder as the peoples continued to war and fight. Many died, sending more and more of our kind into the spirit worlds, but they were proud. They didn't understand life or purpose and they would not lift their arms or their voices to the Creator or the Earth Mother to ask for help. In fact as time passed they did not speak to Mother Earth or the Creator at all. They withdrew and became laws and Gods unto themselves.

One day a little boy was born to a great war chief. The chief held him in his arms at the naming and called him 'He who speaks with those unseen.' He did this because even with his first words he began to speak to the ancestors and those who had passed into the spirit worlds and now lived among the Star Peoples.

As the boy grew he spoke of the things that the ancestors told him with his people: He told them everything that the ancestors talked to him about.

He warned them about war. Spoke to them about peace and how all people, every one, were made for a purpose, to live a purpose. How part of that purpose was to live together. Even so the way of death and war continued.

But his own peoples believed and they began to worship the Creator. Speak to the Earth Mother. Sending praises up to the Creator and asking Mother Earth for guidance. In return The Creator and Mother Earth taught them about purpose, life, and to respect all living things on the Earth.

As the creator listened to his peoples, he realized that many of them wished to live in peace, even though some of them desired to make war and follow the way of death. With Mother Earth's help he made places for all of them to have their own territories; and he separated them with oceans and deep lakes to keep them apart.

"We will have to hope that they have learned to live in peace by the time they learn to cross the great waters," the Creator told the Earth Mother.

Time moved on. 'He who speaks with those unseen' grew up to become the leader of his people. They prayed to the Creator and kept his ways. They held Mother Earth in great regard, respected her ways, and the people grew and prospered. There were no wars, no famines, no sickness in his people.

'He who speaks with those unseen', finished his time and went to be with the spirit people among the stars. As the generations passed, however, the peoples again forgot the ways of the Mother Earth and the Creator. They learned to cross the great waters. They learned to hate again: To make war again. And Mother Earth called to the Creator to separate them once more, but he refused to do it.

"They will only come to kill each other once again. To Enslave. To make war. They must learn to make their own peace. Learn their lessons as a law. Come back to us as they should: As they once were. They will have to learn what peace means. Respect, until then we can do nothing with them."

Mother Earth knew that the Creator was right. Even so with his words she wept. Her tears became the rain that we know. Lifted into the air and carried by the cloud people, to bring her gift of life from the heavens to all peoples through her tears.

It is said that they will continue to come as Mother Earth weeps for all the peoples. And they will be a sign for all peoples to remember that war and killing is not the way.

They will be a sign to us that Mother Earth will continue to bring life from death, the peoples cause. Sending her tears to us in hopes that they may heal us. And to show us that her love will always be with us.

I held the place in the book as I closed my eyes and sent a small prayer to the Creator for allowing me to read those words.

Across from me Bear slept. His paws twitching. The fire crackled companionably. I opened the book and began to read once more...

In The Moonlight And The Sunlight:

Other Dreamers

Bear

He was sent. It didn't mater what he was, only what he could be. Still, it felt alien to him and he felt fear mixed in with the confidence that pumped through his blood.

He was alone. Alone was not a place he liked. He thought of it like that. A place, not a circumstance.

He no longer had a physical body. He hadn't had one for so long that he could barely remember what it had been like to have one. But without a body he could go where he pleased. Be himself. He had never been alone for long periods of time. There had always been others. But there had never been someone that he felt drawn to until the man. And then the woman. And neither of them were just or only a man or a woman or one of the people. They were both more. He could feel that about them although he didn't exactly understand it.

What he did understand was the way it made him feel. He belonged to, was part of, the whole... He had a purpose, or at least he finally knew what his purpose was.

When he had had a body, thousands of years ago, he had been more than a dog, more than many of the things he had lived with. Rocks, trees, the waters, the fish, the medicine herbs. He was more than those things, but he was far less in many ways too.

He had become, come to be, because of power that had been gathered together over time until it had become something more than just power. He had been created from bits of power that had belonged to many things, by a woman who talked to the Star People. To The Creator. To the Mother Earth. To the Winds. Rocks. All the things that lived around her. She had gathered power together from all of them and kept it in a sacred leather bag she wore around her neck. And she used that power wisely. She used the power to help the people. And she was loved by the people. Under her teaching Bear became very powerful. He became aware that he was... What he was. But she had become lost in a winter storm and died in the high mountains while on her way to find her people and died.

An evil man wandering the high mountain passes had found her frozen body. He had recognized the sacred leather pouch for what it was. Power in its purest form. He had taken the power and the power had been misused by him. Even power could not always choose how it was used or by whom. He used the power for his own gain. That is not the purpose of power. Power was meant to be used for the greater good.

Since Bear was the power he began to look for a way to leave. He did not want to continue to be forced to do what the man bent power to do. The dog was Bear's chosen vessel. The dog was only slightly removed from the wolf. A friend to the people. A helper back when the people depended on the dog. There were no horses. Had been no horses except in legends for many cycles. He had felt the pup the dog had been and he had entered him, leaving the leather sac and walking with the dog.

A boy who walked with that long ago dog, Gray Duck, named him Bear after brother brown Bear which he had resembled, and he had taught him to dream. To travel. How to use the power he had. And when his body had failed him after years of being with the boy, the boy helped him, stayed with him as he passed into the spirit world and became a spirit form.

As a spirit Bear had learned to travel the many worlds: Inhabit other bodies. He had become even more powerful. He had come to own the power that he had been made from.

He had learned about purpose. He knew that he too must have a purpose and so he had begun thousands of years before to search for it.

The Man had made the wolf-dog in his own Dreaming and Bear had taken him as his own. Became him. Slowly replacing him with himself. Following his purpose. But the wolf-dog was not all he was or could be. He possessed great power and had learned to use it well over the many thousands of years he had lived.

Now he sat quietly within the shadows of the stone work that overhung the building. Laura's building. His sharp talons holding a purchase for him on the slick granite surface. He watched the pigeon land on the stone window ledge. Its head darting forward in quick jerks. It's black eyes watching the interior beyond the glass.

In the dark shadows of the old garage where Bears body lay he gave a little woof in his throat. His paws twitched. A low growl began to rumble in his chest.

On the roof top his eyes peered from the shadows, watching, tracking the pigeon that was not a pigeon, waiting.

The pigeon hopped from foot to foot, time moved by.

As Bear waited the moon slipped across the sky in both worlds: Unlike human Dreamers he was not constrained by time, but he knew that the woman would be coming back soon, unable to dream in the daylight. A few seconds later the pigeon startled off the ledge, flapping backwards into the air. Bear left the shadowed overhang silently, wings tucked into his body, and fell at the pigeon.

He hit him hard. Talons ripping, the force of the impact itself crushing the pigeon in midair. Driving bits of broken bone into its tiny heart. Bear could feel the life force leave. Feel the soul that was trapped still. The soul that had not been able to escape in time.

Bear came out of his plummeting dive a few hundred feet from the ground, rose once more into the air and rode the air currents over the city, overflying vacant lot after vacant lot. Finally, choosing one, he dropped from the sky like a rock, releasing the pigeon before he landed.

Seconds later he shifted into his own shape. His feathers seemed to be drawn back into the fur that covered his body.

He walked to the pigeon, sniffed it, and then went to work with his paws digging in the soft dirt of the trash strewn lot. A short time later, the hole complete, he dropped the pigeon into it and then began to fill it once more.

As he finished he felt the man calling to him. Searching for him. Only then did he find out that he had killed Abignew too late. He had already accomplished what he had been sent to do. Laura was dead.

Back on the fireplace hearth, Bears paws twitched once more. He had side slipped in time trying to find an earlier opportunity to find Abignew and kill him. An earlier time before he had killed Laura. His eyes moved behind his closed lids, seeing other places. He gave a low woof in his throat once again as he searched.

On the couch Laura looked up from her book concerned, but Bear settled down and she went back to reading.

In The Sunlight:

Checkout Time

Joe

My time was out of sync. It was very early morning at the Motel. The busiest time. The noise from outside bleeding through the thin walls and even thinner doors. Vibrating against the glass, seeming as though it was amplified against my ear drums. I had come back into my body slowly. One of the few times in recent memory.

My physical self came back to waking life reluctantly. I felt shaky. I smelled horrible. I realized that I could not recall the last time I bathed. The last time I had eaten. The room stank. The air was putrid and rank. This place had outlived its usefulness. I really needed to be able to dream for longer periods of time. I needed someone to take care of me. Make sure my physical needs were taken care of as I dreamed.

I dug my phone out and punched the buttons reluctantly. "Auntie?" I asked when she answered. "I need your help... Probably the Grandmothers too."

A half hour later I stepped fresh from the shower, looked around the room once to make sure I had forgotten nothing, opened the door and peered out onto the wide, long balcony. Groups of people were everywhere. I eased the door shut, turned towards the stairs and headed down to the street level. I found myself hoping the van would still be where I had left it in the parking lot.
SIX

This Present Day:

In The Land Of Shadows

Benjamin Bear Killer

The mountain climbed another two thousand feet from where I was at. It made no difference. For my purpose, I was up high enough.

The cave was exactly where I remembered it being. It had been many years, in a life that belonged to someone else, since I had seen it. But when I had seen it I had known that it had an important part to play in my own life. Here I was to see whether I was correct, or if you think like I do, what part it intended for me to play. What my purpose was.

I ducked low under the overhang and slipped inside. It felt safe. A stone womb where nothing could touch me. I realize for some of my brothers that it is impossible to find such a place.

The remains of the fire were long dead. There was no animal smell in the cave. That told me it had been a very long time since it had been inhabited by anyone or anything. I pushed in the rest of the way and set about finding some answers.

The City Of The Dead:

Most Honored Among The Dead

Sparrow Spirit

Her prison was what she allowed it to be, and she had never allowed it to be what the Thief of Souls had intended it to be. In every purpose there was a twist. Sometimes the knife did turn: When it had to turn she tried to make it turn on him. In the many thousands of years she had not submitted and she could not envision a time when she would.

He owned her soul, but she did not submit. The advantage he had always hoped to gain did not exist. The knife cut whenever she could make it cut and as deep as she could make it cut.

She was as free in her mind as she could allow herself. In reality he kept her soul imprisoned in a small stone that was set inside an iron cage, which in turn was surrounded by wrought iron fencing tipped with spikes.

A moat filled with demons from the underworld surrounded the fence. Even so, in all the land of the dead, it was the most honored place. Honored by the inhabitants of the City of The Dead.

There were only a few who knew who it was that was held there. Very few. But within her small stone prison she had built her own world. She could not leave and stay gone from her soul for long periods of time. She was too weak. Too many thousands of years hidden away from the sunlight. Without freedom. Without a touch that wasn't meant to subjugate. It had worn away her strength. Still, he could not kill her completely. She had her helpers. Helpers that even the threat of everlasting death could not scare away.

The birds that were her namesake were also her greatest allies. They allowed her to live briefly within their souls. And they could not be kept away by steel bars, spikes and moats. Demons were meaningless to them. They came to her and sat close to the stone so she could feel their heat. She joined with them and traveled to the dreamers worlds to listen to the dreamers that spoke. Left the city of the dead. At least in the dream state.

Deep within the stone she had made a world of her own. Valleys green with grasses. Plains, mountains, oceans and rivers all existed: As real as anyplace she had ever seen in the real world. She was not the dreamer. Four Feathers had been the dreamer. But she had learned over the years to create: To build from nothing. All that she lacked were physical companions. The sparrows her totem spirit sent to her were always near. Sometimes she would dream them into her world.

She walked now with one of them. The sparrows tiny clawed feet wrapped around one finger as she climbed the rocky path to her cave. The sparrow spoke to her in bird song, and Sparrow Spirit responded with her own song.

Her long black hair shone blue in the sunlight of her world. Her pale white skin made to look even whiter where her hair rested against it. Bone beads, buffalo horn beads and bits of feathers were woven into her hair. A pattern of small squares, three by three were tattooed on one cheek. They had been on her physical body as a child. They identified her clan and her place in it. Her high cheekbones were smooth and marked with two yellow chevrons on each.

Today she wore a leather tunic and skirt. Soft smoke cured leather that lay close against her skin and kept her warmth inside. The thing that always invaded, even here, was the cold. The cold of death. The cold she had lived with for thousands of years.

She had decorated the tunic herself. Spirals, circles, more square patterns that matched the squares on her face. Hand prints, chevrons. The power symbols of her ancient people. The symbols that still lent power to her lonely existence.

She sang back and forth to the small sparrow as she climbed. Shutting her real circumstances out, pushing them away. The sparrow told her the news of the fight against the Thief of Souls. The sparrow related news from all the other sparrows. All the sparrow brothers and sisters in all the dream worlds. Passed along the prayers of the dreamers who sent them to her. She knew Bear Killer and was glad to know that he was back from the world of the dead. He had less power that she had, but he had decided to use it as well as he could. The Red Path was not the same for all, and it was never easy, but it was the only way to walk. She was glad to know that the Bear Killer walked it again.

The sparrow told her about Joe, the dreamer who was at least the equal of Four Feathers. Maybe, Sparrow Spirit thought, the time of the end of the Thief of Souls was here at last. It was why she remained to fight instead of surrendering her soul to him. A purpose. There was someone whose purpose it was to free her. Someone, and she believed they would come soon.

She continued to sing back and forth to her sister sparrow as she climbed the path to her cave.

In The Darkness:

Grandmothers Of The Clan

Joe

Joe's body lay on a low bench in the middle of the circle. The Grandmothers of the clan sat in the circle. Candle light lit the small room. His body shone with red ochre and bear grease. Spirals, circles, and Clan markings were drawn on his body in black. The prayers of the Grandmothers rose and fell as they prayed to the Creator and the spirit world to accept him and guide him in his dreaming. The prayer chant rose one last time and then came to an end.

"And our minds are one," Grandmother Crow said.

"And our minds are one," The others echoed.

Joe's chest rose and fell slowly. His body was fed and the Clan Grandmothers would take care of him as he dreamed, from this time forward. They would see to his needs. He would not have to interrupt his dreaming or cut it short any longer.

Grandmother Crow lifted her eyes to the ceiling where Joe's eye still lingered watching... Waiting...

"Go," She told him. "You will be safe with us."

No one else spoke. Grandmother Crow lowered her eyes back down to Joe's body. "He's on his way," she said softly. "He's on his way."

In The Sunlight:

The Dawn Of Knowledge:

More From The Book Of Memories

Laura

I had read my way through the small book throughout the day as Bear slept, dreaming his dreams, if spirit-dogs did dream, and after watching him I believed they did. One story remained. 'The way of the dreamer.' I began to read...

The understandings of Four Feathers the first and most powerful Dreamer, who forged a way to the spirit world with the help of Sparrow Spirit.

Four Feathers was the most powerful Dreamer the people had ever known. They tell legends of him still. They invoke his name when they dream now. They follow his paths to the stars and to the spirit people, paths that would not exist if he had not first walked them. This is the legend of the paths to purpose. Why they are there, and how to dream them. It is also a foreshadowing of the one whose purpose it is to take the purpose from the Trickster. From the Dream Killer. From the Thief of Souls. To lock away the evil and abuse of power, and to set the souls that have been stolen free. To allow Sparrow Spirit to come back to her people where she belongs.

Now Four Feathers lived to the age of 932 years. The years were made from the four seasons. Carefully counted and accounted for. And the writer attests to the truth that is written here.

Four Feathers dreamed himself to the ancestors on his last day. Some say he left, that he chose to leave. The Creator would have allowed him to dream forever. That is how powerful their relationship was.

His bones do not lay within the Mother Earth because he took them with him and buried them in the sacred burial grounds of the original Star People. But some may find that path and gain his power. It can be walked.

The pathways to the spirit worlds are all around all us at all times. You simply wish them to take you there and you are there. Four Feathers taught us this all of his days. The powers. The spirits. The Creator, Mother Earth, are with us every cycle of our lives. At all crossings. All testings. All failings. All successes. If they are with us, their powers are with us as well. Living with us. Inside of us. A part of who we are, so they are accessible to us and can help us or answer our prayers at all times.

The pathways are clearly marked, and this is how you should know that. The paths are straight. The true paths are a testing to all who seek them out. The true paths are many but the true destination is but one. The doors that open for you will lead you to where you want to go, but they will not light the way for you. Your belief will be required to open the doors. Your faith will be required to light the path, your trust in the Creator to set your feet. The courage of all the ancestors that is always at your call to fight for you. The bravery of every warrior that has ever drawn a breath will keep you from being turned aside. Allow you to concentrate on the task that has been set before you. In the ending, even though you may go to where you have sought to go, where your purpose has called you to, you may find you have gone where you did not wish to go.

If you have been called, you have been called. If it is you the Creator has purposed, none other can take your place. If it is your true purpose you will know it. You will feel it in your soul. Your soul will cry out to the creator for guidance, the creator will provide it.

If you follow you must not be concerned with your physical well being. It would be best if you have no concern, and the legends say you will not for physical life. No ties to keep you or tie you to your body. For the one who sets out to follow the path must be willing to give up their physical life for all time. Yes, the one who chooses to follow the path will lose their physical life but they will gain true life.

Once your feet are on the path you will not be able to turn back. You will feel the power that will be yours. You will become the superior of the dreamers, of all dreamers, and legends will be told about you, so you must dream well.

Four Feathers walked those paths. He lived. He learned. He knew all the ways of the spirits. It is said that the one who is to come will convince Four Feathers to come back from the stars and hand his power over to the new Dreamer. And that Dreamer will rule forever over all the people. The ways of the Creator will again be honored. The people's will turn from killing, from wars, from lusts, and prejudices and love one another as the Mother Earth loves each of us.

This is a road with no exits. Once the soul departs without a body, there is no coming back for any reason. Prepare yourself well, Dreamer, prepare yourself well...

I turned the page, but there were no more words. I set the book down, raised my hands and began to pray to the Creator.

Among The stars:

Benjamin Bear killer

Benjamin had gone back to the stars where no one could touch him. It was not a guarantee that Laura would be safe. There were no guarantees. If your life belongs to the creator how can you take it back? How can a giver of life, the author of all that is or can be, be told that he does not have the right to do what he chooses with your life? How, if the Creator asks, can you say no? By what right? Power? Laws? You are either on the path or you are not.

Benjamin knelt at his altar. The silver ball on its chain hung nearby. Inside the world that Joe had created. The world that supported Laura and kept her safe. But even he knew that the creator had called her. If there is a purpose for you no one else can fill that purpose. Creation had to sometimes wait thousands of years for a purpose to be fulfilled. It happened all the time. Right now in the city of dead Sparrow Spirit waited for the freedom that was purposed to come to her so that she could lead her people.

Somewhere, probably walking the city of dead, the thief of souls waited for his time to come to an end. He knew for every purpose there is an end. The purpose is only born to die. The Thief of Souls may lie to himself but it will do no good in the end. Death itself is a purpose, Benjamin knew. And it is a purpose that is clear to anyone.

Perhaps the Thief Of Souls felt that Laura would be too afraid, or would not answer the Creators call. But Benjamin knew that wasn't true. He knew when he met her that she would answer. He looked again at the silver ball and chain.

He could feel the power of her life within the ball. The power of the wolf-dog, Bear, who was not a dog at all. His power was part of what Laura would need to defeat The Thief of Souls. He could feel it. That had been what Joe had been afraid of. That is why he had asked Benjamin to take the ball and chain to the after world. He had nearly lost it to the underworld once, he didn't want to chance that again. He was sure the wolves that had come to him had smelled that power and had taken the ball for that reason only. Benjamin suspected that it wouldn't be long before it would make no difference. Laura would answer, it was only a matter of time. He knew it and Joe knew it. And he was sure that the Thief of Souls knew it too. The trickster. The Dream Killer. All lesser evils, but evil was evil. And evil knew power. It knew purpose.

Benjamin Bear Killer sat, prayed and waited to feel Laura's spirit leave the ball and start on her journey. He loved Joe. He had promised him he would protect her. But Joe knew as well as he did that purpose and power could not be denied.

No. He would pray her on her way, and ask the creator to watch over her. And he would help her in any way that he could, but he would not stop her from going. The creator called, purpose answered.

In The Sunlight:

The Red Path

Laura And Bear

Laura became aware that Bear was watching her and waiting. She had been lost in thought. Sure of what to do, unsure where to start. The book was so confusing. The path is easy to find and hard to walk. So mystical, why couldn't anything be in plain language. Straight forward. Understandable. Not spoken, as the old ones said, with a shadow on the tongue. As she ended her thoughts, she looked up and caught Bear's eyes watching her.

"I think I'm going there," she said softly.

He cocked his head and held her eyes. His body shimmered, resolved, reformed into a shifting mass as she watched. The mass came together, expanded, came together, as if breathing. It shifted again and a young woman stood before her.

Her jet black hair was worn loose, beads and feathers were woven into or strung on the strands of hair. Her brown skin shone. A leather tunic and leggings covered her body. She wore beaded moccasins on her feet. She spoke.

The language was one that Laura had never heard. Musical, low, rising and falling. She understood every word.

"It is your decision, but the creator wants you to follow your purpose. You are the one, the only one who has been chosen to walk the path at this place," she told her.

Laura nodded. "Who are you... I mean really," she asked?

"I am who I am. I have been the wolf dog, Bear, for thousands of years. What you see is what I was when the power first came to be that would become me. My life force," she answered.

"You'll go with me," Laura asked?

"Yes," she answered. As she spoke her body shimmered, fell to pieces and Bear stood with his head cocked staring up at her.

Laura nodded. "Okay, Bear. Okay."

Among The Stars:

Benjamin Bear Killer

He felt the power go out of the silver ball. It was there, it was gone. Benjamin fell to his knees and began to pray hard. The Star People gathered with him, the ancestors, and more prayers went up to the creator.

On The Red Path:

Purpose Prevails

Joe

I felt Benjamin's prayers when they went up. At the same instant my spirit sought him out and found him in prayer with the ancestors and the Star people. He felt my presence and stood from his knees, reached into his pocket and produced a small piece of paper.

My feet touched the stardust and Benjamin handed me the paper. I took it, hesitated, and then opened it.

"Nothing can change her purpose," Benjamin said softly.

"I know that," I told him. I focused on the paper; Opened it and read...

Joe,

I hope you are okay. I'm worried more about you than I am myself. I feel something calling me. I don't completely understand it. I wonder if you do? I wish I could be here when you come back, but I believe I will be gone. I can't say why, only that I feel it very strongly.

I wonder if we will see each other after this is over? I saw you and I knew there was something. I didn't know if that something was your purpose to lead me to where I needed to be, or something else. I wonder if there will be anything else. Time for anything else. I hope there is.

Laura

I carefully folded the note and slipped it into my shirt pocket. I buttoned the pocket, but my finger still lingered. Feeling the shape of the note through the fabric.

"You have a purpose yet," Benjamin said.

I nodded. "I just wonder where the path will take me, Benjamin Bear Killer."

"As do we all, Joe. But the Creator does not include us in his plans. We believe. We follow."

I nodded. There was nothing else to say.

"I will pray you on your way," Benjamin said.

I nodded once more. "Walk the path, Benjamin Bear Killer," I said. I closed my eyes and spun away into the blackness.

This Present day:

In The Land Of Shadows

Benjamin Bear Killer

The fire had gone out while he had been gone, but it was simple enough to re-start it. He had Smudged the entire cave earlier, he repeated it once more, acknowledging the directions and giving thanks to the Creator as he did.

"Creator, I have come to thank you for the guidance you continue to bring to me as I walk in the land of the dead; and I lift up my brothers and sisters whose fight this is to be. And ask that you continue to protect and guide them as they walk their path."

"I give thanks to the Earth Mother. The rains that bring her tears. She supports us as we walk about on her. I send greetings and thanks."

"I give thanks to all the waters. They come from the Earth Mother and bring her gift of life with them. They have power. The deep rivers. The waterfalls. Water is life to us in all of its forms. I send my thanks for the water."

"Creator I send thanks for our Brothers the fish whose purpose it is to cleanse the waters. I'm grateful that we have pure water. Our Brothers the fish also give themselves to us for food. I send greetings and thanks to the fish."

"I send thanks for the plants, Creator, that you have given us. The food plants, the medicine plants. They cover the Earth Mother and clothe her. They provide food and medicines for many life forms. We plant. We harvest. Grains, vegetables, beans and berries have sustained the people for all of our time. The food plants and medicine plants are always willing to serve their purpose. I send greetings and thanks to them Creator."

"I send thanks for all of our Brothers the animals. They teach us many things. They provide themselves to us for food, clothing. They are companions that help us to live in this world. We see them in the forest, in the fields. Some live with us. I am glad that they are still with us, Creator, and I send my thanks and greetings to them."

"I turn my thoughts the trees. Mother Earth has many trees, and all the families of trees have their purpose. Some provide us with shelter, some shade, some medicines, some with fruit, beauty and many other useful things that we need and use in our daily life. Our Brothers the trees were here before us. We appreciate their wisdom they share with us. So I send my thanks to our Brothers the trees, for their strength, wisdom and beauty they show to us."

"Creator, I thank you for the birds, and the spirit birds you have given to us. They sing beautiful songs for us. They remind us to live and enjoy life. The Eagle was chosen to be their leader. To all the birds, from the smallest to the largest, I send thanks and greetings."

"I send thanks to the four winds. They carry Mother Earth's breath to us. I hear their voices often as they serve their purpose. Without them we would not have that purifying breath from the Earth Mother. The cooling breezes on a hot day. They bring us messengers and strength. I send my greetings and thanks to them."

"I next turn to the thunders. Our elders the thunders live in the west with the lightning beings. It is they that bring Mother Earth's tears that renew all life. I send my greetings and thanks to our Elders the thunders."

"I next turn my attention to Grandfather Sun and send him my greetings and thanks. It was Grandfather Sun who watched over the birth of the peoples. He travels the sky, sets the daylight hours for us so that we can see to live. He gives his strength to all of us. He is the source of fire that gives all of us life. I send my greetings and thanks to Grandfather Sun."

"I next send my thanks to Grandmother Moon. It was she who held Mother Earth's hand as she birthed the peoples and our brothers the animals. She is the leader of all women all over the Earth. She gives us light so that we can see at night. She moves the ocean tides. She watches over the birth of all children. Through her changing faces we can measure time, seasons, and know when to plant, when to harvest, when to send our thanks and greetings in our most sacred ceremonies. I send my thanks to Grandmother Moon."

"Creator I send my greetings to the Star People who have been with you always. We see them in the nighttime sky. They join their Grandmother Moon and help us see in the night. Their patterns are familiar to us, they stand for Clans and Totems. They tell us about seasons and guide us in our travel. Our ancestors live among them in the places the Star People helped them to create. I send my greetings and thanks to the Star People."

"I send greetings and thanks to the Enlightened Teachers. They tell us the legends, myths and stories so that we can know about our past. Since first you gave us Sparrow Spirit you have provided Enlightened Teachers to help us in this world: They teach us your ways. They teach us about the medicine herbs. How we should live. The words we should say to you. Without them we would be lost. I send my thanks to the enlightened teachers, those who live, those that have passed and now make their hearths with the Star People or in the land of the dead."

"Finally Creator, I send my thanks to you. For the gifts of life you have given to me, to my clan, to my totems, to all of our people. I thank you for the Dreamers. I ask you to walk with Laura and Joe and the spirit wolf-dog Bear. I ask you to continue to watch over Sparrow Spirit, as I know you have. I know, Creator, that all is created with purpose, and no purpose goes unfulfilled. I send my thanks for all you have given to me, to all the peoples. And, Creator, if I have forgotten anyone please forgive me."

Benjamin lowered his hands to his sides, but his eyes remained closed for a few seconds longer.

His eyes opened to the fire lit cave. Shadows jumped and shifted on the walls, seeming to bring the ancient symbols and shapes to life.

One curving stone wall contained an unnumbered herd of buffalo that seemed to move and run as the flames jumped and fell. Another wall contained the sacred symbols. The Circles, Spirals, Chevrons, the Clan markings, the hand outlines of the people, the water symbols, the air symbols. The next wall contained Brother Wolf, Brother Bear, Brother Eagle. They seem to move closer in the firelight ready to lend their assistance to Benjamin Bear Killer.

Benjamin stood inside a circle. The circle was made of the bones from the sacred buffalo. The Brothers Wolf and Brown Bear. Turtle, Badger, and many other clan and totem animals. In the center of the circle Benjamin squatted next to a skull. Red spirals decorated the skull. Circles were drawn into the dirt that surrounded it. All that was, all that could be.

The skull represented all the peoples. Benjamin lowered himself to the dirt floor and closed his eyes once more. Before him, next to the skull, two bowls waited. One held the sacred liquid, the other the pipe. Although he had no real physical body, he would still take them both to help him go deeper into the dream, so that he could follow and lend assistance. The spirit of the drink, the spirit of the smoke, would see his need and they would lend their qualities.

Benjamin opened his eyes once more, picked up the bowl with the strong smelling liquid and drank it off in one long pull. The pipe came next. The strong scent filled the air and took him back to the times when he had had a physical body.

He took the smoke and blew smoke out to each of the directions. Smoked some more and then set the pipe in the bowl. The effects of the drink and smoke took him almost immediately and he gave thanks for that to their spirit parts, that honored their counter parts and helped him into a deeper dream state.

He fell into blackness, fast, faster, but then he slowed and his eyes began to see once more.

In the beginning:

Joe

The Moon swept across the sky, it seemed to move so fast. The light was so strong it was almost like daylight to me.

The house stood before me, the garage behind me. Benjamin the Bear Killer was with me, in my mind and my thoughts, and a spiritual presence near to me. Even so it was my dream to understand.

The curtains moved in the upstairs of the house and the woman who called herself my wife stood in the light of the Moon staring down at me. Her hands beckoned to me. Her long, black hair hung to her waist. With one quick move she pulled her long night gown over her head and let it fall behind her into the darkness.

Her breasts rose full and firm, her hands beckoned, I found myself nearly to the house before I could stop my feet.

This was my seventh dream state. I could feel the power that raced through my veins from the powerful drink Benjamin Bear Killer had given me. I no longer needed the smoke. Soon I would no longer need the drink. I would be able to bring myself to this, my starting point in the spiritual world, without the need to drink or smoke anything at all. The woman calling herself my wife was the problem. I had only gotten past her two of the seven times. The trick was to not look into her eyes. I had looked.

I kept my eyes averted, forced myself to turn around, and looked down at the moonlit road that snaked away into the distance. My feet moved, trying to betray me, but I forced them into the road. Her pull was incredible. So powerful. Her scent was on the air, in my nose, seeming to entice my brain, sending messages on the air that stuck and lodged in my brain. I continued to force my feet to move; the closer I got to the road the easier it was for me.

Behind me I could hear her scream building in her throat. A power unto itself. Loud before it even attained volume, but I knew it was coming. Its presence screamed at me. I continued to walk.

The scream came with the shatter of glass behind me. It rose and rose. I knew the lights were coming on in the house behind me. The dog that I had yet to see gave a warning bark and I could hear his claws scratching at the wooden boards of the porch as he launched himself at me, growling deep in his throat as he came.

Behind me the man called out as he always did.

"You there! You there! Stop!" I was so close to the road, just a few more steps, if I had not looked I would have been there already.

"If you had not believed, you would have been there already," Benjamin Bear Killer reminded me.

Two steps and I heard the old man breaching his shotgun behind me. One more step and I heard him snapping the gun closed. I stepped and that world died behind me as my foot touched the asphalt of the road. My path. My start. I turned and looked back at the house. Dark. Empty. It held nothing for me at all.

"I should go," I told Benjamin Bear Killer.

"No," was his answer. "You go when you're right. You're not ready."

"I am ready," I argued.

"Really," he asked? "She has no charms? Was it you that nearly walked into her arms again? I told you she is there to keep you weak. To keep you from walking your path. A man or woman must give up those impulses to dream. You must control, not be controlled." He finished.

I knew what he said was true. I let go of the dream realm and fell into the blackness to begin the long journey back. I went from the blackness to a mountaintop. A stone scattered trail led off the mountain. I could see my home in the distance. I began to walk.

In The Beginning:

Real Time

Laura

"I don't try to think about it... I don't want to think about it. Maybe that's truer," I asked?

I knew in my heart that talking about my past might be difficult, but that it would help me to be who I wanted to be. Not someone hemmed in by experiences. Life. Years of bad choices. Negativity. But my head did not understand that at all. My head was practicing denial. Deny it and it doesn't exist. Simple.

"I believe that it is... Closer to the truth," Dr. Shulman agreed. "Even so, if you don't think about it you have arrived at the same place haven't you?"

I nodded and sneaked a peak at the session clock. No way could there be forty five minutes left. No way.

"My father... He had to have things his own way. He... Okay. He had an idea of how my life should be. He had an idea of how I should live it. He had an idea of how I should act, dress... Behave... A lot... A Goddamn lot. Even after I left home," I said, shocked that I had said so much. Just spit it out like that. My father's golden rule was like the Vegas golden rule. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

"My father's rule was like the Vegas rule you hear about. What happened in our house stayed in our house," I said aloud, shocking myself even more. I had just broken it.

"I guess I just broke it."

"I guess you did... And how did it make you feel to break it? And... Consider this, don't just answer it, but... How would it make _him_ feel if he knew you had broken his golden rule? And, how would that make you feel?"

"Jesus... That's a lot, Doc... A lot." I had leapt, now was the time for regret. What person didn't have screwed up things from their childhood.

"Powerful... Angry... And... The last one... I guess... I guess scared." I answered.

"So, powerful... You gain power... Maybe self esteem? I think so... And I take it you mean that he would be angry with you?" She lifted her eyes to ask the question. I nodded.

"And you would be scared... Interesting... Why is that? And is it that? I mean is it fear? Or, maybe fear mixed with embarrassment? Or... Or are you really afraid of a dead man?... Him alone?"

"Embarrassment... I didn't know any families that were different. I grew up in the projects. Not the Rez. Not until later in life anyway. And, when we moved to the Rez. To live with my uncle it was no different there. Kids get screwed over the most. It's so easy. And it was like that with all of my friends in the projects and the few I made at the Rez. The same. Kids get screwed," I said. "I'm glad he's dead... I'm ashamed to say what our life was like... Sitting here it seems so bad... But then it was normal. I lived it... So... So I don't see... I don't see how you can judge it like that."

"Laura, I'm not. Believe me I'm not. I'm just asking questions. Trying to figure out why your life took you to the streets. Why drugs seemed able to help you and people did not."

"I know they didn't help me... Hurt me," I said. I felt defensive. I hated that. And I felt I could begin crying at any second. I hated that more. "I'm not stupid... I know... You want to know if he raped me? Did something he wasn't supposed to do? No. He didn't. But he touched... me..." I broke down, and hated myself. I took my time and got myself together. "This is real. Not some... Goddamned Joke," I said at last. Still angry.

"I know that... I appreciate that... Let's leave it alone... Unless you?"

"No... Not today."

"OK, we'll leave it alone." She set her pen and pad into her lap. "Laura. Set your boundaries. You decide what you want to talk about... Okay?"

I nodded. I didn't trust myself to speak.

She looked at the session clock. "We have a few minutes left. I want you to try something... Will you?"

"Sure," I agreed. And then wished I hadn't until I was told what it was.

She picked up a small remote, pushed a button and music drifted down from the overhead speakers. A few more clicks and the lights died down. I was already reclined in an overstuffed chair.

"Just relax. Let that chair flatten out even further if you want to. Think about going away... Think about leaving this world behind... All of it... Let yourself float... Believe that you can leave this world behind."

I was overwrought. More emotional than I thought I would be. I listened to what she said. I tried to visualize it. It really seemed like a good trick to learn. _Relaxation Method_ , I told myself. It could work. I knew people that did it.

I felt myself begin to float. I felt myself disconnect from myself. A few seconds later I was hovering above myself and looking down on my body. The office, the Doctor. It seemed so natural that I didn't even think to freak out about it. I could remember dreams where I did this very thing. Floating above myself. Looking down. Keeping watch.

I turned away from myself. A hole in the ceiling above me beckoned... I knew I could turn and fly through that hole, really leave this world. I had done it in dreams. In dreams, I reminded myself. I realized right then that I was not dreaming. And once I realized I was not dreaming I stopped believing and being able to do what I was doing.

I snapped back into my body hard, it felt as if I had dropped out of the sky and landed in the chair. It felt like I bounced. I sucked in a deep breath and shot up out of the chair, eyes wild.

"It's all right, Laura. It's just the session clock."

I shook my head to clear it. "But we had, I don't know, something past 15 minutes."

"Had," Dr. Shulman agreed. "You slept. The relaxation technique worked for you. It is probably something you'll want to try at home... We'll pick this up where we left off next Wednesday?"

I nodded, "Sure, Doc." But my mind was on what had just happened. I was looking at the ceiling expecting the hole to be there. I had not been asleep. I had left my body... Well, don't tell her that, I thought. I made my way out of the door trying to act as natural as I could.

The Evening Of The Day:

In The Sunlight

Laura

I had to know. I made myself lay down on my couch, set my stereo to a classical music station and began to relax. It seemed to not happen for quite some time. And then, all at once, I found myself floating above myself once again.

I looked. I looked hard. Blue jeans. My favorite pink socks with white toes. Blue pullover, also one of my favorites. Was that what I had been wearing? Yes, it was, but was that the truth or what I was just telling myself was the truth? It was the truth. I could feel it. I believed it. I turned to look and see if there was a hole in my ceiling as there had been in Dr. Shulman's office.

There was and the hole was different. Wider. Blacker. More... _Purposeful?_ Something like that. And this hole seemed to speak to me. Call me. Even so I pulled back. Afraid of what I didn't know: Once more I impacted back into my body like I was attached with a rubber band that had been stretched to its limit... Or a beam of energy that simply grabbed you and pulled you back. Strong as a magnet.

The Evening Of The Third Day:

Friday

Laura

I spent hours online. I was pretty sure I understood what was happening. If it was real and not some delusion brought on because of all the emotion I had been dealing with.

The hole would lead me to another existence. Or it would lead me to my path to get to another existence. Or several other existences. Or I was having a delusion brought on by stress. Or I might be experiencing the effects of LSD. Or what could be called a flashback, except I had never done LSD. So I could not be having a flashback. Or I could be crazy. I was really hoping for the other existence. There had been a time in my life where I had been crazy. I didn't want to go back there. Or worse yet, maybe I had never left the state of craziness. I actually felt my body, my face, to make sure I was really not high. Really sitting in my own apartment where I had paid the bills and life was drug free and stable. It felt real. My apartment seemed real. I stretched back out on my couch.

It was faster this time. Maybe I _was_ crazy, I thought. In seconds, without the separation I felt the first time, I was floating free of my body.

I have read about the umbilical cord, there was none for me. I was really floating free. About six feet above the floor. Hovering. I turned and looked at the ceiling.

The hole was there. Scary, but pulling at me in spite of that fear. I gave in, floated into the hole and slipped through.

I found myself on a path. Sitting high in a tree. A sparrow. It surprised me until I remembered that my mother had always called me her little sparrow. Now I was a sparrow. I ruffled my wings, spread them experimentally and then took flight.

I overflew a street that fronted the water. A long, low wall caught my eye. Trees. People. I flew down to one of the trees and sat looking. Awestruck. Amazed.

After a short while I wondered how I could find my way home: The thought alone took me there. I found myself once more sitting in the tree just outside the hole I had dropped out of. I could see my sleeping self through the hole. Eyes closed. Body relaxed. I took flight, passed through the hole and found that I could not control my return as well as I would have liked to. I slammed hard into my body. Making my real self jump and startle back to awareness once more.

The End Of The Beginning:

52715 Randolph Circle

Joe

I believed in knowing where I needed to be. Of everything I had written down I had resolved it all except for the Randolph Circle address. I had never found it and as I moved through the darkness I still did not know where I was on a conscious level. But something shifted inside of me. My purpose became clearer. If it was Laura who had the power to fight the Thief of Souls, then my purpose must lay elsewhere. Somehow it would tie into whatever Laura had to do. It only made sense, why else would our paths have been crossed by the creator. What was it she needed me for? For that matter what did I need her for? Besides the obvious thing, that I had fallen in love with her over a period. The end of her note had given me hope. It said something like, she wished there were time for more. I patted my pocket, but didn't take the note from my pocket where it remained. It said what it said. I hadn't misread it. She did say it.

It seemed ironic to me that I would fall in love with someone who was now dead. There was no absolute guarantee that if she won she would get her life back. It was possible. It could be tried, I would try, but there was not a guarantee I would succeed. Not at all. And what if her place was in the stars? With Sparrow Spirit? What if, what if, what if.

I spun through the void with my thoughts rushing at me at a million miles an hour. I bought it back to Randolph Circle. The idea that Randolph Circle might not be a street had settled in my mind. It had been bothering me for a while, but I just couldn't dwell on it as it seemed to have no solution.

There was a long curving wall on market street. Across from the docks there was another long curving wall that was nearly identical to the one on locust street. They were not separated by much physical space.

I came from the darkness into the moonlit sky. I shifted into a crow and began to drift on the air currents. I was high enough to be able to get a rough idea of whether what I was searching for was there. The curving walls were part of an old factory. At least one of them was. The one I knew from locust street reminded me of the one in the town I grew up in. Same with the one by the docks.

From the air they curved to meet each other. Although a quarter mile apart, they formed part of a circle clearly seen from the air. I began to drift lower on the air currents. I had never walked the length of either wall, but I had remembered the name of the old factory, Randolph.

Laura had mentioned it in passing. She had mentioned that her mother had found some sort of work there as a child. That was her memory of it. The wall was hers and mine.

In my world the house had existed. The house that sat a short distance away. The house that sat within the circle that the remaining Randolph factory walls formed. She knew the wall, the name, I knew the house. A set of clues that could not be put together without help from each other.

The house appeared identical in both places. It was the same distance away from the locust street wall as it was from the wall by the docks. There was nothing else in the circle. That in itself was strange. Other buildings. Roads, something, but there was nothing. Trees, but not even real trees. Stunted scraggly wild brush, tangled in between the two houses. High enough to block the view from either house. No wonder I had not realized the proximity to each other. I hadn't been able to see it. The brush appeared, as I spiraled lower and lower, to be impenetrable. It probably was.

So which house stood for 52715? And what did 52715 stand for? I started with the house inside the circle of the docks. I dropped from the sky. A huge, black crow, changing as I neared the ground so that it seemed I stepped out of thin air. Laura had taught me well.

A few black feathers swirled around as I became my old self. I was at the wall. I decided to pace off the distance, but it didn't equal 52715 paces, or feet either for that matter.

When I reached the house I circled it: There were no numbers on the house of all. As I came nearer to the house bits and pieces began to pick at my brain. I remembered the house. The house had been a four family house in my neighborhood. One of my friends had lived there. I stopped dead in my tracks 52715. I had thought that I had written that number, whenever it was that I had come here. But it had just dawned on me as I had looked at the numbers once more. I did not write 52715 at all. I had written Siles in my horrible handwriting. I had written it upside down in the notebook. Probably not paying attention as my mind worked without me. Siles upside down became 52715. Siles was the last name of my friend that had once lived in the house. I looked at the house. The apartment on the left on the ground floor was where my friend had lived. Which house was the one? This one or the one on locust street?

The wall was mine and Laura's, the house was mine alone. One wall for each of us, one house for each of us? Maybe. But what exactly did that mean? I didn't know. Whatever it meant was beyond me.

If I tried one house and it was the wrong house, what would that do? Anything? And once I knew the right house and right apartment what would I find? Too many questions. I stood looking over the house.

No lights on either floor. No people that I could see. I walked to the steps but stopped before I put my foot on the first step. I had to be missing something. Had to be. I backed off and walked around the house. Looking it over as best I could without going inside or setting foot on the steps. I thought setting foot onto the steps, or crossing the threshold would be considered commitment. Whatever could happen if I made a bad choice would happen.

I made several circles. Nothing. I could not tell if this was the right house or not. I shifted shapes, flew to locust street, dropped from the sky and became myself once more. But walking a couple of circuits around the house convinced me. The houses were not the same. They weren't even close once I really looked at them. They were only made to look the same. This house was not the house my childhood friend had lived in. This house belonged to someone's childhood or adulthood. It belonged to someone's dream. Possibly Laura's. But it had no part in my dream. I shifted, beat my wings against the moon, lifted into the sky and headed back to the house by the docks. My house. The house my friend had lived in.

Once Upon A Dream:

Early Moonlight

Joe

I opened my eyes... Early morning... Light just starting to color the blackness of the night. The clock said 6:32 am. I should get up. I had things to do. I... I drifted for a few more seconds. My wife moved beside me, my arm came up, covered her, and pulled her to me. I drifted in the warmth.

My eyes opened... A little gray in the black. I looked to the clock... 6:21 AM... There was time... Plenty of it... I lifted my arm, dropped it across my wife's upper body, feeling the warmth of her breath on my hand as I did, and I pulled her to me. There was time... Plenty...

She moved in my arms and began to turn towards me. My eyes opened, flickered really. More light in the day. I was feeling something else now. A little tingle... My arm seemed almost transparent as I lifted it out-of-the-way so I could see the clock... 6:05 AM... The light from the sky seemed to make my eyes see things that were not there... A thin trail of vapor lifting from my hand as I lowered it. My wife continued to turn... A small buzzing came from my head... Inside my head... Bypassing my ears... It resolved into a tinny sounding voice...

My wife continued to turn, her face coming into view... The red numbers on the clock appeared in front of me, swimming, 5:58 AM... A face... Her face, coming into view... Green tinted, peeling skin, yellowed eyes set in sunken black sockets... The voice, the tinny voice called... _"Joe... Joe!..."_

Something seemed to tug at me... Her face came more fully into view... The mouth yawning... Yellowed fangs, broken, rotted stumps leaning between cracked gray lips... I tried to scream...

The physical pull on my body increased... Her arms slipped around me... Her mouth began to fall toward my neck... The voice called... Light burst all around me and I fell into the void... Blackness all about me... The smell of decay fell away... Falling... Falling... I slammed back in my body hard...

I had been sitting in a chair and Benjamin Bear Killer had all he could do to keep me from hitting the floor... I gulped air greedily... My eyes sprung open... My real eyes... I flopped in the chair... Benjamin held me... I finally got air into my lungs, and the panic began to fall behind me... I pushed out of the chair... Pacing as I walked...

"Who... _Who was that?"_ I asked.

"That," Benjamin Bear Killer told me, "is what she really is... The one who tries to hold you from your path."

The Beginning Of The End:

The Lights Are On Who Is Home

Joe

I work on the Internet. It makes my time completely flexible. Website design, search engine placement. Keywords. Custom graphics. HTML. C, C ++. It's a varied set of skills. There's always something coming in to do. I worked for a small computer store doing installations before I went out on my own. It was OK. It paid the bills. But working for myself it was always something interesting. It suited me.

When dreaming became a major thing in my life, I was still working in that small shop, getting my own business going at home.

I sat down to do a small install for a new machine. An hour later I came back, the box blinking on the screen asking me to set preferences. The installation was over, and I had no idea where I had been for that hour. Benjamin Bear Killer sat beside.

I found that I had gone dreaming entirely on my own. Benjamin Bear Killer got a call at home from my Aunt, who had received a call from my boss, concerned that I had slipped into some sort of diabetic coma. Maybe he thought drugs, but he was being kind. Benjamin came to get me, found me in a dream state and came into the dream to get me.

He found me sitting on the curving wall by the waterfront. Even in my dreaming I was unaware, and it took some time to get through to me and bring me back. That was the end of my job. It was a good thing I had my own business working.

Afterward I remembered having a thought about the low curving wall as I had started the installation. That was all that it took to take me there. I never used anything to take me to my dreams after that. Benjamin Bear Killer said it worked that way for some people. Others could never dream without help from the drink or the smoke or both. Even then it could be difficult. He suspected my blood line ran back to Four Feathers.

Then there was Laura. Laura could do it all. It took time for us to meet, but once we did I knew as suited to dreaming as I was, she had me beat.

Natural grace. Natural ability. Fluid. Sure, she had her bad dream re-entries. If you have to run quick you have to run quick: It's not designed for that. Or, maybe I should say the human body is not designed for that.

I settled to the ground now, in front of the house and looked it over.

The apartment where my friend had lived had to be my entrance. The lights were on, and that bothered me. There had been no lights before. And the rest of the house was dark. I stretched my wings, tucking them into my side and then shifted to my true self.

The wide steps lead to a central hallway. The central hallway lead to a staircase and entrances to both of the downstairs apartments. I knew that hallway well. In the winter time we used it as a place to get warm so we could build another snow fort, have another snowball fight. Hide from bigger kids. The last was year around.

In the summer that long, central hallway was always cool and shadowed. With both the front and rear doors opened, the screen doors allow the air to flow straight through. It was a good place to hang out and looking at it now my mind wanted to associate all of those good times with this place. I had dreamed enough to know better than that though.

This, I had thought, was my creation; as it turned out it wasn't. Dreamers don't create the exits. They don't create the entrances. Dreamers could dream for others. In other words, more than once Laura had made me feel as though I were acting in her dream. I'd done the same thing to her in the beginning, it was her way to pay me back. But my skill at it and her skill at it, we're like night and day. She could make me believe that it was my dream and everything in it was mine when almost every element of it was hers. That's the way the house was, and, by proxy, maybe this whole area. How could I know what was mine?

Was the wall mine? Laura's? Both? Was this house mine? Certainly not. I can not create enough. It couldn't be mine. It would make no sense that it was Laura's. And even if it was Laura's it couldn't contain an entrance. Only the creator could make an entrance or exit.

An entrance or exit in itself was not inherently bad or good. It simply was. My question to myself then was; is this really an entrance? Or is this a trick? And my answer was, I just don't know. It seemed to me if this was a trap there was no reason to go through all of this. They want me to be tricked, and this involved too much mystery.

I scuffed at the ground with my foot, moving a small pile of dirt around with one booted foot. A few seconds later I mounted the stairs, toed open the old, rusty screen door, and stepped into the long hallway.
SEVEN

The Way Of The Dreamers:

The Circle Randolph

Joe

I walked to the apartment door and as I walked the flood of memories came back in...

Sledding in the winter. Sleds stacked up in this hallway as we went off to have a snowball fight or to see a movie. Smoking cigarettes in the hall closet, positive we would not be found out. Not realizing that the smell was drifting out of the closet and up into the second floor hallway. Telling stories. Camping out in the hallway after a real camping trip in a nearby field was rained out. Too many memories to process. And I wondered if they were coming to me because I wanted them to come, or if they were coming completely of their own. Or maybe pushed my way for a reason. I didn't know, saw no way that I could know. I stopped in front of the door and listened.

Dead silence and nothing more.

I lifted my hand to knock when the voice came to me from the shadows at the rear of the hallway. The voice froze me in my tracks. I turned slowly and was shocked when my friend Gary Siles stepped from the shadows and into a small pool of yellow light cast by the bare overhead bulb. He had said my name, Just the once, but there was no mistaking his voice.

"Gary," I managed.

His eyes seemed flat. But other than that it was him. The only problem with that is that he was no more physical than Laura. Or my ex wife. Everything, it seemed, that I loved, or had loved, was dead. My best friend and his girlfriend, along with my own wife had died the same night in a car I had driven.

"Aren't you going to ask me how I'm doing," he asked?

I shook my head. The emotion was almost overwhelming.

"It's funny," he continued," I saw Jana and Sarah this morning. I asked them to come with me, but they said they would pass."

"Don't do this, Gary." I asked.

"Don't do what? I didn't _do_ anything... You did." He walked closer to me as he talked.

As he came closer, stepping from the shadows, I could see what the years in the grave had done to him. His face cracked as he talked. Small pieces flaking off and powdering the front of the moldy gray suit he wore. The grave smell hit me like a physical force. _'Not real.'_ I told myself. _'Not real!'_ But it didn't stop what stood before me. It didn't drive away the smell. It didn't kill the memories.

His chest heaved as if he were struggling for breath. Rot and corruption drifted from between his yellow, too-long teeth as his over-bright, black eyes focused on me.

I realized he was changing as he talked. He had seemed nearly normal at first, now he was looking as though he might actually look after five years in a box in the ground. I wondered why my wife Jana had not come. Why his wife wasn't there to accuse me as well. I didn't question whether or not this was real: Whether this was his real spirit. I believed it was. And that was all that was required. If I believed it, that made it real. Telling myself I didn't believe in it made no difference at all. He was still there.

"Oh, I am me," he said. A fat worm tried to crawl from his mouth as he talked. His yellowed teeth shredded it, half fell to the floor the other half fell back into his mouth. I felt my stomach flip hard.

I had thought that he was the only one who hadn't been out right killed except me. I hadn't been hurt at all except a small scratch on one cheek. I had been desperately looking around to find Jana when Gary had begun to scream.

I was on shore, the car had continued into the river. Gary was trapped in the car. Afterward the State Police had told me there was no way that I heard Gary scream. He had already been dead. But I knew better. I knew what I heard. I knew. The facts didn't matter.

"Ain't reminiscing great?" Gary asked now. "Remember when we got caught smoking that time by the babysitter?" He turned and pointed to the hall closet. The door hung halfway off the hinges, yawning open. I could see two little boys in there, coughing, passing a lit cigarette back and forth. Taking pretend puffs and pushing them out of their mouths before the smoke could make them sick.

"No," I said.

"Oh," Gary said. "Sorry for bringing up the past. But hey, I've got no future to fill you in about... Know why that is?"

I didn't answer.

"I said, do you know why that is? huh? 'cause my best friend killed me. Deader than that old dog we found out in the woods that one time... Remember?... What were we... Nine? ten? Just like that," he finished.

He snapped his fingers together for emphasis and dust filled the air. The tip of one finger crumbled. Chunks falling to the floor. He stared at his finger as if surprised.

"Gary," I tried, but my voice failed. I turned on my heel and headed out of the hallway. The screen door slammed behind me.

"Run away... Sure! Run away you chicken shit bastard... Run..."

As I ran my feet left the ground and I found myself in the void. I started to fall and then stopped, hanging silently in the absolute darkness. Sadness overwhelming me. Dragging back five years of memories to my mind. I recoiled and then gave in, falling into the memories.

In The Before Time:

Memories

Joe

I opened my eye and peeped at the clock. Red numerals in the near dark bedroom. 5:58 AM. Time, lots of time... I could sleep longer. I wrapped one arm around Jana and pulled her to me. She snuggled next to me and I dropped off into sleep once more. The warm press of her body bought me back the consciousness a few minutes later. The clock read 6:05 AM. A little more gray had seeped into the morning. My arm wrapped around Jana and pulled her even closer. I felt her respond, pressing herself closer to me... More time, I thought... More time... I drifted off, and when I peeked at the clock again it read 6:21 AM. Still time. I let one hand caress her arm and then wrap across her breasts as I pulled her into me. Her own arm grabbed mine and pinned it to her breast. I snuggled into her warmth and lost myself for a few more minutes.

The next time I opened my eyes the clock said 6:32 AM. I pulled her close to me once more. This time she giggled and began to turn into me as I pulled her.

Her face turned, her hair falling across it as she turned toward me. Her softness pressing more fully into me. She brushed her hair away with one hand.

"What are you trying to do, Honey," she asked?

"Who me," I asked innocently.

"Yeah you," she said as she brushed her lips across my chest. I started to speak but her lips closed mine and I forgot what smart ass remark I had intended.

~

It was well after 7:00 AM by the time I found my way to the bathroom.

I looked around the apartment as I walked. We had just moved here. Second floor apartment. A spare bedroom, we both wanted children. Downstairs neighbors seemed okay. They had a dog that looked to be part dog, part wolf, named Bear. An impressive looking but a very gentle dog. He seemed okay too. Life was pretty good.

"I am going to be late," I complained as I headed to the bathroom.

"You started it," she laughed, "Besides, maybe you just started a little one... I know were not officially trying. I have a months worth of pills left, don't let me forget, but if we were trying wouldn't that be worth being late for?"

I laughed and then the laugh caught in my throat. I could be a father. I was ready to be a father. I wanted to be a father.

"Babe," she called? "That wasn't me pushing."

"It's okay. I just thought, well, I am ready to be a father... I want to be a father."

"Really?"

"Yes, really." I said. I looked to my left and there she was looking at me the way she always did when she wasn't sure if I was kidding. An old pair of sweats, one of my too big white tee shirts hanging off her slim shoulders.

"You know, you look so much better than I do in that t-shirt."

"Stop it," she said. But it made her smile. "You mean it about the baby?"

"Yeah," I said. I squeezed toothpaste on to my brush. "I mean it for real... There's no reason to wait, is there?"

"You mean that," she asked?

"Yeah... I really do mean that too. If you want we can really start... _begin..._ I mean we were waiting for a place, a job, stability... We're there... You know what I mean?"

She brushed past me, opened the medicine cabinet door, pulled out her pill packages for that month and held them up to my face. I raised my eyebrows.

"You're serious," she asked?

I nodded. My mouth was full of toothpaste. I envisioned looking like a rabid dog if I talked. She took two steps to the trash can. Pushed down the pedal with her bare toes. Looked at me once more. I nodded and she dropped the pills into the garbage and took her foot off the small, plastic handle. The lid snapped shut.

"Oh my," she said. She slid up next to me.

"Oooho my," I tried.

"Spit," she said.

I did what I was told.

"Rinse," she said. I did that too. She took my hand. "I think you're going to be a little later," she said as she kissed me. She held the kiss as she pulled me into the bedroom. I was late.

That Evening.

Joe And Jana

It was early evening when the phone rang.

"I got it," I said. Gary's excited voice sounded in my ear. I tried to speak, but gave up after a second. Instead, I just called out the news as Gary told me. Sort of play by play with my own little spin.

"Gary asked Sarah to do something, Honey... I don't know what," I said. "It might have been sexual," I added.

"Asshole," Gary said.

"It had something to do with her asshole," I called out.

"Double Asshole," Gary said laughing.

Jana padded in from the bedroom smiling. I held up one finger.

"Gary asked Sarah to marry him?" I said. "Holy crap, Babe, he really popped the question," I said amazed.

"About time," Jana said, "she said yes?"

"Yes, but he hasn't said what she said." I listened.

"Stupid," Jana said. "Of course she said yes." Janet took the phone away from me. "It's about time," she said. "Uh huh, Uh huh. Put the boss on... You think you are. Now put the real boss on..." She waited... "Finally," she said once Sarah was on the phone.

I was floored. I thought Gary would never get married. I hadn't seen it coming. "Honey," I said; she looked over at me. "We should go celebrate!" I mouthed.

"Hey, Sarah, we should go celebrate. Joe and I decided to have a baby today... Today... Nope... No, I wouldn't kid you... Yeah... We have to... You guys are getting married! Getting married! And we're going to have a baby as soon as I can get pregnant... You bet I am," she laughed. "Today... I'm not wasting time... No... No... We'll pick you up... We'll go out dancing... We have to, I won't be able to dance in a couple of months and you'll be an old settled down married lady... Wow... Wow... Do you realize our lives are changing right now... Forever. Hey, for real, we'll have to enjoy ourselves tonight... Love you too, we'll come get you in... Oh yeah... Yeah... Okay, two hours... Okay... Okay," she hung up and looked at me with a huge smile on her face.

"We have two hours... This would be the best night to start a baby," she told me as she took my hand and lead me back into the bedroom.

~

I was the designated driver. I had two drinks early and then I drank coke for the rest of the night. The girls danced all night while Gary and I sat at the table and talked about how much our lives had changed since we were little kids growing up in the same neighborhood. The last dance was a slow dance. It had been a long day. It felt so good to hold Jana close as we danced.

We left early morning after last call and headed out of the city. As we sat idling at a crosswalk, Jana and Sarah giggling and talking excitedly, a young woman with mascara running down her too-pale face staggered into the crosswalk, stumbled into the passenger side fender and sprawled across the hood. After a brief second she straightened back up and made her way around the car. Her long black hair hung listlessly around her face as she finally negotiated the car and the rest of the crosswalk. I shook my head. A sister too, unless the hair was fake. It was popular to dye your hair black, goths, vampires, but from what I had seen she looked Native. Something in the part of the face I had seen. The light changed and I put her out of my mind.

The traffic was light going out of the city. The girls talked back and forth, Sarah leaning over into the front seat, Gary smiling and looking happier than I had seen him in a very long time. I left the city, merged into traffic on the river road and headed for home.

The tire blew in an area where there was a slight drop off from the river road. It dropped down into a grassy area with picnic tables right alongside the river. Gary had said something. I lifted my eyes to the mirror and the tire blew.

The wheel spun in my hand just like that. One second fine: I could feel the road in the steering wheel as the tires passed over the expansion joints in the concrete road. Thump... Thump... Thump... It could lull you into not paying attention, and I have often wondered if that is what happened, if it lulled me into relaxing. The next second my world came unglued.

Thump... Thump... Gary spoke... Thump... I raised my eyes and the wheel was torn from my hand, spun through my grasping fingers, leaving its heat stinging against my palm. Gone before I could catch it.

Because the road dipped and the land fell away? Maybe, I don't know. The tire blew on the passenger front right at the entrance of the little park so there was no guardrail to stop the car. The wheel spun, the car dropped off the road, became airborne, and as I was turning I saw a tree coming for the passenger side of the windshield. I tried to get the wheel back and steer, but I was airborne, I couldn't get the wheel, I couldn't steer. And there was no time anyway.

We hit the tree hard with the right front, slued sideways in the air, and then the car continued on and dropped into the river.

I was ejected through the driver's door which sprung open as the car hit the tree. The car slued to the right, the same side it hit on. The door popped open, the car slued again, I would've hit the door and stayed in, but since it was open I fell out onto the ground in a sitting position. The car flipped end over end once and then dropped into the river. I watched it all in slow motion from my seat on the ground.

I sat stunned for a few seconds and then began to look for Jana. Then Gary began to scream.

Loud... In pain... In panic.

When I looked I saw that the car was sinking into the river: It was also been carried away with the current. The car was nose down. Since Jana was not with me I realized she had to be in the car: Maybe trapped from the damage to that side.

I dove into the water just as the car sank out of sight.

I never caught sight of the car again after it sank. I had no idea where it had gone. I dove, but the water was black and depth-less. Each time I dove it was farther to get back to the shore, the current carrying me away.

The last time I made it to the shore, coughing and choking, two bystanders got me and held me. I fought, but I had no real strength left.

In The Moonlight:

Dreams Of Dreams

Laura

I was tired. It was early morning. The sun was up. I Had to get some sleep. I had shopping to do. I was working the afternoon shift at Ellie's, a small diner around the corner. It was work. Actually, the tips were good and it allowed me to be flexible.

I had been dreaming all night, trying to find my way, but I only had more questions. It wore me out. I set the alarm, buried my head under my pillow, and a few seconds later I drifted off.

Early Morning In Reality:

Dreams Of Dreams

Laura

I was using again. Actually, in the dream I could see myself sleeping. So I was dreaming about dreaming. Was it a dream about dreams within a dream? My dream self didn't seem to care.

I was wasted bad. It was early morning. I watched as my dream self stumbled out of an alley, pulling a lightweight jacket around myself as I went. I fell, sprawled on the concrete sidewalk. Got up. Blood seeped from one palm, but my dream self didn't seem to notice.

I gained my feet. I was still unsteady, but staggered off down the sidewalk.

Behind me a far away sound of an engine came to me, and a small tinkle of laughter with it. Tires against pavement came to me next, as the car slipped past me, and edged up to the stoplight and the crosswalk just ahead.

I froze for a second in my dream, maybe waiting for the car to move on. Maybe I was afraid, after all it was dark, who knew who was in the car. I waited, apparently decided it was safe, and angled off at a fast stagger for the crosswalk.

I missed the crosswalk and walked into the side of the car, bounced, and nearly went down on my back side. I overcompensated and found myself sprawled across the hood of the car. I got myself together before the light changed, found my way around the car and across the crosswalk. A block down I turned into an empty lot. Found the unlocked window I was looking for. Listened as well as my fuzzy brain would allow, silence from inside, then somehow managed to climb through the window, drop to the floor inside and pass out.

A second later I was back at the car, walking into the side of it once more. Bouncing back. Throwing my hands out for balance, then managing to catch myself. I raised my head. The windshield of the car blurred by... Something... _Someone..._ But I was staggering down the opposite sidewalk a second later.

I awoke to the alarm, made myself get up, but I did not feel rested. The dream was still in my mind, and it made no sense to me. A warning that I could screw up again? My mind saying it wanted to use again? My mind showing me how bad it really was? Maybe. Maybe all of that and more.

The dream left me feeling as though I had missed something. I got up, took my shower, ran my errands, and went to work. But the feeling that I had missed something stayed within my mind throughout the day. Nagging at me. It was after work, early evening, when I was walking home that the pieces of the dream seemed to click.

In my mind I saw the windshield blur by, but not too fast this time. I just hadn't been paying close enough attention. This time I did pay attention and I caught the driver's face. The eyes. The way he wore his hair. The shape of his mouth... _Joe?_ Looking back at me?

I still didn't know what it meant. It bothered me, but I decided not to mention it to Joe. Who knew what sleeping dreams meant? I had a hard enough time trying to figure out my waking dreams.

Out Of Time:

Abignew

Abignew was in his own body. Short. Squat. Tow headed. His hunched shoulders dominating his chest.

The parking lot was empty, but it would soon be filled. He found the car he wanted, squatted down beside the passenger side front and looked at the tire. One bent and gnarled hand caressed the sidewall and it suddenly bulged. From inside the tire the sound of strands of nylon popping came to him. The cords being pushed past their limit.

He caressed the tire once more, thought for a second as if looking at something far away: And in a sense he was. He was replaying the car in his head about fifteen minutes from now and what he saw made him smile. He patted the tire's side wall some more, the tire bulged out further. More nylon cords popped inside. He stepped back, dissolved in midair and a second later a pigeon winged its way to a nearby building roof, rested for a moment and then flew off to where he had seen the car fifteen minutes later.

In The Moonlight:

Searching For Answers

Laura

Laura kept glancing up at the second floor window where the demon who claimed to be Joe's wife lived. The windows were dark. Even so, as Joe started the van and began to back into the street, one curtain moved. Laura saw nothing at all there, but she had no idea what might have been there if Joe had looked.

He made the street, chirped the tires, Bear slipped a little on the metal floor of the van, his nails clicking. He woofed at Joe as if to chastise him. Then the van was moving, the house falling behind them into the darkness. No longer important.

Bear nosed around in the storage pocket built into the engine cover. Looking for the dog biscuit, Laura realized. She dug it out and gave it to him. He took it to the back of the van. She pulled the rest of the contents out of the pocket.

They had noticed a few weeks earlier that since both of them had been traveling in the van different things had begun to appear. The broken old fashioned transistor radio, a flashlight, spare pen cap, the paper clips, the fuzzy lime lifesaver were still there, but now there were other things mixed in as well. A pair of dice, one red one black. A length of coiled leather cord. A small feather. A worn pocket dictionary and a small pair of virtually useless plastic tweezers. Neither of them had found a use for any of it yet. Except the dog biscuit which Bear found an instant use for every time he was in the van.

The road unrolled in front of them. Laura had been traveling as herself lately. They were both trying to find their way to their entrance to the City of the Dead. Or at least an entrance that eventually would take them there. They had other things they would probably have to do first. But there was no real way to know until they came to it.

They were both convinced that either the docks or locust street held their answers, but so far they had found nothing that seemed to pull them, and nothing at all obvious in either place.

They had taken to spending some time together after dreaming every day, but the relationship seemed to want to go past the obvious sexual attraction. They were both careful, no harsh words, no promises; sometimes, one or the other thought, too careful, but what had gone so far had only pushed them both closer to each other.

A set of headlights appeared far down the road and both of them began to pay attention. Bear came up from the back, placed his paws on the dashboard and looked out.

Joe watched the headlights approach. It could be something, or it could be nothing. "I've been thinking," he said.

Laura turned her head. He glanced at her briefly then back at the road.

"The junk." He nodded at the stuff she had been looking through. "It's like the junk I pushed to the garage in the grocery cart. Ears of corn, computer parts. It's just the stuff that would mean something to our spirits. Basic stuff at that... I make a living with computers. Corn is life to our people. The thing that allowed us to finally live better lives. Hunger became a thing of the past. We could grow all the food we needed. Have a surplus even. It's like... Like the junk drawer of our lives... You know?" He turned to meet her eyes again and she nodded.

"I think so to," she looked over the scatter of stuff that was in the storage pocket of the engine cover. "All the bits and pieces that have no place...?" She looked back again.

"I think so. And I think we don't need to worry about them. They amount to nothing. They come to nothing except distracting us away from our real goals."

He looked harder at the road, took his foot off the gas and coasted to a stop.

Across from them a nearly identical van coasted to a stop. While the glass in their van was clear, the other van was solid black tint. Bear watched the van along with Joe and Laura. His upper lip curled, fangs showing. Silent.

The sound of an electric window motor came to them in the quiet as the glass in the drivers side door began to drop on the other van. The sounds of both vans quietly idling, the whine of the motor, nothing else.

Joe's hand clutched the gray shapeless mass at his side. He felt its constant shifting as he touched it. Just waiting to be what he dreamed it to be.

The glass came down, but the blackness inside the van was still impenetrable, as if no amount of light could find its way into the interior of the van.

A hand swam out of all that black and rested on the top of the door, a cigarette smoldering between two fingers. A face swam out of the darkness. The hand raised the cigarette. The mouth opened and took a deep drag from the cigarette.

Behind that face another face swam into view. They were looking at themselves, but some other version of themselves.

The other Joe dragged on the cigarette once more, flicked it out the window and chuckled. "So you do exist," he said. His voice was lower, gravelly.

Joe nodded. The other man's face was rougher, harder. The angles more pronounced. A meanness rolled across his mouth like a line: pulling the corners down into a perpetual frown. "Are you supposed to mean something to me?" Joe asked him.

The other Laura lit her own cigarette. Her jet black hair framed a nearly blue-white face. Ghostly. Pale. Dead. Her mouth was too red. Her face all hard angles and shadows. Her eyes caught Joe's across the distance seeming like chips of ice reflecting cold light into his soul.

She drew deep on the cigarette and blew the smoke out of the window.

"You're looking at what will be unless you give up this dream," she said. Her too red mouth seemed as though it could start to bleed at any minute.

"I Left you behind," Laura said. "You're as dead as you can be." Her voice held a hard edge.

"Did you?" the other Laura asked. "Maybe you did, maybe you didn't." Her eyes shifted to Joe. "Did she tell you about the things she did when she was living on the streets. Did she? Does she do them for you?" She dragged deeply on her cigarette, coughed harshly, and then faded back into the darkness until only her red mouth showed. "Go back before you die," she said quietly.

"Laura," the other Joe said.

Laura took her eyes from her other self and focused on the man.

"Don't mind her she's bitter..." He smiled, lit another cigarette of his own, took a deep drag, blew out the smoke and then continued.

"Did he tell you about Wifey, Laura? Did he?" He waited for Laura to speak: When she didn't he went on.

"Killed her... Drunk... Killed her in a car wreck. His friends too, Laura... Why would a smart girl like you follow a man like that... Why?" He hit the cigarette hard once more, then tossed it out the window where it hit the road in a shower of sparks.

Joe's hand tugged at the gray mass. It shifted. He could feel cold steel beneath his fingers.

The mans face began to shift. The skin stretching as the bones beneath shifted. Pulled tighter... Split, and black blood began to run freely down his face. He leaned forward, drops ran and splattered on the roadway, smoking and hissing as they hit the asphalt. A hot electrical smell filled the air.

Joe turned toward Laura beside him, but she seemed frozen, transfixed.

"Laura," he yelled! "Don't look at him!" Her eyes broke and came to his own. Wet: Disoriented; hurt, something else. Joe turned away and bought his hand up as he turned back to the other van.

A small flare gun rested in his palm. The other man's eyes opened wide as he saw it come up. His foot tramped down on the gas pedal without first taking the van out of park. Joe fired. The other van's engine raced as the man struggled to drop it into drive.

The flare jumped across the short space and hit the other man squarely in his face, throwing him back into the van. The van lurched as it finally dropped into drive when the man was torn away from the controls. The van moved off down the road, smoke pouring from the open window. Screams came to them on the still air. A second later a flash lit the night sky as the van blew up. The sound came a split second later. Joe dropped their own van into drive and roared off, watching the burning van fall away in the mirror.

You okay," he managed after he got his breath back.

"Yeah," Laura managed. "He tried to do something to me."

Joe nodded... "We're safe now... We're safe for now, Laura."
EIGHT

The Beginning Of The End:

The Way Of The Dreamer's

Laura

The path was old and worn. Bear took the lead, seeming to know exactly where we were going. Probably, I thought, he did. This world was no ordinary world. Twin suns graced the sky. One moving faster than the other. The faster one was also the larger sun. The larger was a bloated orange compared to the fiery yellow-silver of the smaller sun.

The farther the two moved across the sky the farther apart they became. When the larger sun set, the quality of light changed appreciably. The burnt brown-green of the trees turned to a cooler green-silver. A breeze popped up and helped with the heat that had built up through the long day. It seemed as though the larger sun had been capable of holding back the breeze.

Shadows popped up where there had been none. The temperatures finally began to drop. I was grateful for that. Dreaming required belief. Belief required you believe in what you see. I believe well. Maybe too well, but Joe had told me that that was what made me a good Dreamer. Perhaps better than any other. Better than any Joe had known. I didn't want things like that to go to my head.

I had learned to dream on my own, or that was my view of it. Joe said he believed I was led to it. Taken by the spirit of Four Feathers. Maybe Sparrow Spirit who knew the way. Maybe both. In any case, Joe taught me much more. Everything that Benjamin had taught him.

Teaching was not like I thought it would be. It was like having the knowledge inside. I only needed to hear it once to remember it. It had felt that way. Like a memory unlocked. So he showed me, or told me, and I knew it. I understood.

This was my own walk. My own path, and even though I knew what I knew. I believed what I knew. I was still concerned. Worried about not whether I would find my way, but what would happen when I got there.

The path began to drop from the higher ridge we were following toward a long low valley that was spreading out before us.

Smoke rose up through the trees, the only evidence of anything below the green canopy. As the second sun was beginning to set, a pale yellow Moon began to rise into the coming night sky. We dropped down to the valley floor and Bear slowed his pace.

A short time later the path turned and began to follow a wide and deep river. Shortly after that the second sun dropped from the sky and the greenery turned to near black this time. No green moonlight reflected off the river surface.

I stopped when Bear did. Seconds later he shaped shifted and an older man stood where he had been. A beaded yellow leather tunic with matching leggings covered his thin, bent frame. Three feathers were woven into his still black hair, and several sections of hair were adorned with hair pipe and beads.

He spoke in the same language the young woman had used, but once more I understood perfectly what he had said. A moment later I shifted into my sparrow self and took to the wing as the old man began to walk.

A short space of time bought us to an open area, a large village stretched away into the valley, fires lit the night sky. The smell of wood smoke and pine pitch was on the air.

Several young warriors watched Bear as he approached. I flew tree to tree, following his progress. He stopped as two young men stood from a log rolled up to a fire and walked towards him. Hands on their knives which were sheathed at their waists. Flint, or least they appeared to be flint to me, hafted to a wooden handle. Small Knives, but I had no doubt they were razor sharp. In any case I had no wish to find out. I settled down on a tree limb and waited to see what would happen.

The Beginning Of The End:

The City Of Dead

The Thief Of Souls

He stood in the pale moonlight and contemplated the small stone that sat not far away within its iron prison. The iron imprisoned the stone and the stone imprisoned Sparrow Spirit.

He wondered whether the time where he ruled in this world was really close to being over. That was his greatest fear. But even though it was his greatest fear he could not bring himself to truly believe that a day would come when he would not be here in his city.

This city was all about him. What good would it be without him. What purpose would it serve? What would it stand for? What would be its accomplishments? The City of Dead, without him? No! It was unbelievable. Death was believable. And for that he was necessary. Needed. Purposed? Yes. No one else was purposed for what he was purposed for... Was there? No, he answered himself. No!

He contemplated the stone. All to set free a soul that he had every right in the world to take. Even the Creator, the old magician, had not made him give it back. And if he had asked nicely he would have given her back. He ignored the fact that he would have no choice.

A rock. So beautiful. He could not see her in her prison, but he could feel her there. Feel her small heartbeat. Like the sparrows frightened heart beating against its tiny ribs. So small. He knew exactly what that felt like. He had held sparrows captive within his hands. Feeling their frightened hearts beating against his palm And he had crushed them as he held them. Felt that fluttery heartbeat stop. That was what he had wanted to do to Sparrow Spirit. Not too much to ask, no, not too much. He sighed.

They were coming. He didn't know when, or, yet, precisely who, but they were coming. They were coming from different directions. Separately. They had powers with them. Prayers were being sung for them... Why was everyone against him? What would they do without him? It was a purpose. A real purpose. He sighed again.

Let them come. Others had come. Nothing could make these dreamers anymore successful than the hundreds who had come before them.

One of the demons from the moat surfaced, swiveled its scarred troll like face around and then slowly sank back down into the oily black water once more. No, he decided. No one had ever succeeded. They got sold on it. They believed in it. But they never succeeded. Therefore, these dreamers, whoever they were, would also not succeed.

A frown line that had creased his forehead smoothed out. He went back to contemplating Sparrow Spirits prison.

The Way Of The Dreamers:

Village In The Valley

Laura

I flew from branch to branch as I followed Bear. The warriors had come up to him respectfully and followed as Bear walked into the village as though he knew his way. A small boy followed along, his eyes shifted from Bear to the trees. I realized he was watching me when he waved one hand at me.

The village opened up before us. Large tepees scattered across the valley floor. Community cooking fires. We passed a group of three women butchering a large Elk. I watched as two of the women dug their heels in and began to strip the skin from the animal in one sheet. Their hands clenched, forearms strained, and the skin peeled back from the flesh. It looked easy, except I could see the way they dug in their heels, straining to keep the pressure on the skin as it came off. The third woman worked with a stone scraper, cutting the skin loose as they pulled it from the animal. A few small dogs waited hopefully for scraps as did a few of the children. The women looked up as Bear passed.

The little boy said something in a language I couldn't understand and the women looked to me where I flew from branch to branch following Bear. The two women pulling on the skin nodded in my direction respectfully and then went back to work. I noticed though that they kept their eyes on me as I flew from tree to tree.

We came to one of the largest tepees. There were no more close by trees, so I flew to the frame poles that protruded from the top and perched there.

An old woman sat before a small fire, a bowl of some sort of liquid in one hand, a lit pipe in the other hand. She sipped from the bowl, set it down and pulled smoke from the pipe into her mouth. She nodded to Bear and then surprised me by swiveling her head up to the tent poles and winking at me. She spoke in English, not well, but well enough for me to understand.

"Dreamer," she flapped one hand at me and then addressed Bear in his own language.

Bear listened and lifted his eyes to me occasionally as she spoke. He turned to me as she finished.

"She says, she would like to meet the Dreamer that she has been told about for generations." He smiled his old man's smile. "Maybe something similar to what I'm wearing," he suggested.

I flew from the pole, hovered next to Bear, and then changed. My feet touched the ground amid a swirl of small feathers fluttering around my body. Arms tucked into my sides and wrapped protectively around my sides. The leggings and the tunic came almost instantly, and I straightened up to face the old woman.

Almost everyone was staring wide eyed, but the old woman had an amused look on her face as she appraised me.

By thick black hair hung straight and long to my waist. Gold and ivory, buffalo horn and shell decorated my hair, strung on thick strands along with hair-pipe. Small feathers woven in as well.

She offered her tomahawk pipe to me, I took it and smoked respectfully before handing it back. It was a beautiful pipe made of beaten copper plate. A deer antler had been straightened, carved with a forest scene and used for the handle and stem. The blade and bowl made from the beaten copper. It was beautifully made. She smoked, handed the pipe to Bear, he smoked and handed it back.

We made a second round of the pipe and then the old woman sat it near the fire on a river stone that seemed to be there just for that purpose. She placed her hands in her lap and then began to speak slowly.

I had never heard the language. It was not the language the woman who had once been a holder of Bears power had spoken, but it was familiar nonetheless. Like I had simply not heard it for a while, but so familiar that it almost seemed to be my own native tongue, it fell so well on my ears. And when it came time for me to speak it, it fell from my tongue with ease.

"The people were told by the Dreamer Four Feathers that a day would come when one who dreamed deeper would come to us and ask for passage into the Land of the Dead," she looked at me.

"It is not a place to go to lightly, whether you are among those that are dead or not. You must die further to go. There can be no life left within or you will fail... Are you the dreamer that we are waiting for... _Sparrow..._?"

"Yes," I answered. I had thought to say what I felt just a few seconds ago. 'I'm not sure.' I think maybe I am, but I'm not sure.' But as the words began to form they fell away from my lips and the simple answer became the truth. _"Yes, I am."_

"You were unsure," the old woman said.

"I hadn't believed as I should." I answered.

The old woman nodded. She turned to Bear.

"And you are ancient. More than your face shows. And not a man at all, but a spirit as she is." She looked to me. "Sent to be a help. A guide. A source of power and comfort to her."

Bear simply nodded.

"Walk well," she said. She picked up the pipe. Thumped out the bowl. Packed a new bowl, took a small twig from the fire, lit the pipe and began to smile. She blew smoke to the four directions to show respect, then passed the pipe to me, back to her, then Bear. This time we smoked three times. She set the pipe down. Took a small branch and fished a piece of charred wood from the fire. She dropped it into a fire blackened bowl that sat beside the fire. Took a stone and began to crush the charcoal from the lump, then discarded the wood itself. She spat several times into the bowl and taking the stone began to make it into a jet black paste.

When she was finished, she lifted the bowl to the heavens and began to pray in her own language. I could not understand the words, but understood it was prayer and I bent my head respectfully. She tapped my shoulder a few minutes later and lifted my eyes to her own. Deep black. I couldn't tell the pupil from the cornea. Slightly yellowed whites set deep in the browned web of wrinkles. Her eyes smiled.

She dipped one finger in the black paste and began to draw on my face. She spoke in her own language as she did it, occasionally lifting her eyes skyward: When she finished with me she moved on to Bear. Spirals, circles. The nine squared symbol I had seen on the young woman who had been Bear's power. Three squares by three squares. A power symbol? Clan symbol? I didn't know but it was tattooed on her own face too. Whatever it was, it was part of who she was.

Her eyes came back to me. "It is my name," she said in a language I could understand. "That is my name and my family name. It means all that I am, all that they were." She set the bowl down. "It is power. All the power we have to protect us. I have put it on you to protect you as you make your walk." She paused and looked at me.

"You must walk. You must walk for three hands of time. You will follow the river from this village. If you are _the_ dreamer. A true dreamer. _That_ true dreamer, you will be rewarded on the last day of travel." She folded her hands, set them free, and then folded them again.

"These others. These others will do what they are purposed to do. You must not concern yourself with that... You love one of them... You cannot allow that to sway what you must do... You understand?"

She held my eyes. I wanted to say no, but I found myself nodding in agreement.

"You understand that the Creator decides all things. The Creator holds all life. It may appear another way, but it is not. Hold fast... Do not leave the red path... Three hands of time and you will know what is in your heart."

"They will take you this night, but only just so far. There you will stay and wait for the morning to begin your walk." She motioned to the warriors that had walked us to her Tepee. She seemed to think a second and then nodded as if to say that's it.

I nodded and Bear began to rise. The old woman picked her bowl up from the ground, sipped at it and then returned it. Her eyes did not move back up to us. Bear began to walk and I fell in beside him.

"We walk now?" I asked, even though it was obvious.

He smiled wryly. "It is obvious," he said in agreement.

I nodded.

The warriors, joined by what seemed to be half of the village, followed us down to the river. A worn path ran beside it. The people stayed and watched us as we walked off. Presently they were gone and the night dark woods closed in around us. The moonlight illuminated the path as we walked in silence, the warriors leading the way.

The Stars: The Hearths Of The Ancestors:

Sparrow Clan

Bird Song

The hill was steep, but from the first day that Bird Song had died and come to the ancestors in the heavens, she had come to check on Sparrow Spirit every day. The Thief of Souls may have taken her soul, but he didn't have her body, the ancestors did. The clan Grandmother's of the Sparrow Clan had prayed it to here after Sparrow Spirit had left. Here she had come. Not dead, not alive. Somewhere in between.

Bird Song topped the hill and walked to the stone alter where Sparrow Spirit's body had lain undisturbed for nearly ten thousand years.

She looked the same as she had the last time Bird Song had seen her alive. Her face was too pale. Her whole body: The delicate features were the same. Untouched by death, but equally untouched by life and all the years that passed. Bird Song heard a noise on the path, but she remained where she was. She knew who it was.

Four Feathers walked slowly to the altar and encircled Bird Song with one arm. They stood silently for short time. Finally, Four Feathers spoke.

"They are coming," he said quietly.

Bird Song nodded. She had waited for this time to come around for nearly ten thousand years, but so had Four Feathers. And of course Sparrow Spirit.

Bird Song spoke slowly, raising her hands into the air.

"Creator, we thank you for Grandfather Sun, Grandmother Moon. For the trees... The Star People. The medicine herbs. The life you once caused to live inside of us. We thank you for the waters, the fish, for our four legged Brothers. The Enlightened Teachers. The Thunders, the Dreamer's, Mother Earth and her tears of promise. Creator, help those who came to walk the path. Send our greetings and thanks to all of those I mentioned, and forgive me if I have forgotten anyone. And now our minds are one."

"And now our minds are one," Four Feathers agreed.

The Way Of The Dreamer's:

The Circle Randolph

Joe

The void held me... Sightless... Absolute black. I felt I could stay there forever as I replayed the events of five years prior in my head.

The divers hadn't found the car until the next day, over two thousand feet further down river from where it had gone in, stuck on a sandbar that jutted out from an island in the center of the river.

Jana had been killed instantly, so they said. Crushed when the car hit the tree.

Sarah had gone through the windshield, as she had been leaning over the front seat. They found her three weeks later, washed up over twelve miles downriver.

Gary had been decapitated they had explained to me. The force of the crash pushed him into the driver's side rear door. As the car spun off the tree the front of the car dropped down, hit the top of the picnic table just right, flipped it up into the air and back. Gary's head was pushed out the rear window because of the force of the crash. The broken table took his head off neatly at the shoulders. They found it under another picnic table later in the day. By that time I was in the hospital: Sedated with my scratch.

The blackness spun and I played the scene over and over again as I had before I had begun to pick myself back up and get on with my life.

For the longest time I would begin to think about it and suddenly find several hours had passed while I played it over and over in my head to see what I could have done differently. There were so many things. So many things.

The blackness pressed tight. It felt good. It felt almost dead. But reality began to seep back in.

Whatever I could've done differently I hadn't done. I could replay it a million times but it would never change. Whatever Jana's purpose, Sarah's, Gary's, they had fulfilled it and the Creator had recalled them to him. It hurt. I had real guilt, but no real reason to have it. And Laura needed me now.

In the blackness my hand stole to my pocket. I could feel the weight of the paper square as it pressed against my chest. A few seconds later I was out of the black and my feet were touching the ground just out from the steps. I took a deep breath and then climbed the steps two at a time, pulled the old screen door open with a screech and stepped back into the hallway.

DREAMER'S WORLDS: SPARROW SPIRIT

PREVIEW
ONE

On The Path:

Day One.

Laura And Bear

The morning sun came up bright. Bear and I were sitting before a fire we had built a few miles from the village. We were not meant to travel in the night, that had been made clear. A few miles from the village everything changed. We weren't in the land of the dead, any more than we were in the underground, but this was not the normal world either.

Neither of us knew exactly where we were or where we would end up. What would happen after three hands of time. Fifteen days.

But we had heeded the warning, and so, although neither of us needed sleep, we stopped, built a fire and spent the night wondering about what might lie ahead.

Several times in the night something came close to us. Studied us. We could see the eyes reflected in the black.

Some of those creatures sounded like horses. Hooves beat the ground, but their eyes matched no horse I have ever seen.

Some made the ground shake as they walked. Just before morning one of them called out to us once more.

"Dreamer's!" The voice had come from the blackness, after the sounds of labored breathing and vibration from the ground as the creature moved.

The silence spun out.

"Hear this!" The voice continued... "If I find you in the daylight I will do all that I can to help you... I have prayed you well, and I will continue to pray you well, but if I come upon you traveling during the night I will kill you both."

The voice alone made the ground tremble. When it finished, the sounds of labored breathing came back. And heavy footsteps moved away. We had no doubt that whatever it was was meant as a straightforward warning to us. That, along with the warriors warning made us glad we had stopped for the night. If there were a doorway or doorways along this path, there was no telling what could cross over from other words. No telling at all.

Shortly after the sun rose, the second sun rose, and the heat began to build. We broke camp and began our walk on the well worn path that ran beside the river.

We looked but we found no footprints or unusually disturbed areas of earth. I began to put it from my mind as the morning wore on.

On The Path:

Joe

Gary stood where I had left him. But it wasn't really Gary. He was whatever I believed he was. My own guilt turned into a mirror.

His state had changed considerably since I had left. His face was sunken, split to yellow bone. Beetles and worms crawled busily over his moldy gray suit and through his hair. His eye sockets were deep black with chips of blood-red at the centers. His hands not much more than bones and crumbly skin. Fingers clicking and clacking together as he moved them.

"I'm going in," I told him. My hand fell on the knob.

"I'll look forward to your arrival here," The thing that was not Gary said.

"You'll wait a long time," I said quietly. My eyes left his and I turned the knob. It turned easily beneath my hand, the door swung inward, and complete blackness greeted me. I took a breath, tried to slow my heart rate and stepped into the blackness.

At first the floor remained under my feet the absolute black before my eyes. But the floor shifted, tilted down, changed texture. I stopped and regained my balance and at the same time the blackness began to clear.

A path came from the darkness winding down a steep cliff face to the valley floor below. I took another step, and another, and the blackness retreated completely to be replaced by early morning sunlight that fell from the sky above. I turned my eyes up to those skies above the valley, where twin suns rode close to one another, lifting from the edge of the world, sailing into the skies. I looked back to the door but it had disappeared. Nothing remained of my old world. I turned my attention back to the path and the valley below.

A large village spread across the valley floor. Smoke rose from several fires. I wasn't close enough to see what those places were. The people seemed no larger than half sized ants crawling across the valley floor. Even so, I felt that they knew I was there. Felt me. My presence. And they had been expecting me to come to them. I clutched my medicine bag where it hung on its leather cording around my neck. Sent a small prayer of thanks to the Creator and began to walk my path.

In The Stone;

Sparrow Spirit

Sparrow Spirits eyes opened. This world was as real as any she could remember. The physical world. The world she had traveled while she was dead, but she had never succumbed to its reality.

It was early morning. The sun in the sky seemed so real. The clouds that floated in the pale gray early morning sky, their bottoms tinged with pinks and oranges, seeming to promise rain. And rain may come, but it was not the thunders that would bring it, she knew. The clouds were no more real than anything else here.

Something had awakened her, she did not know what. As she wondered a sparrow song came to her, sending the greeting once more that had pulled her from her sleep.

She called the sparrow to her and she materialized within the stone, her tiny feet wrapped around Sparrow Spirit's small finger. The sparrows spirit looked and seemed as real as anything else in her prison. The sparrow sang its message as Sparrow Spirit listened.

Out Of Time

The Thief Of Souls

He strode briskly through the cool night air, his feet stepping on rocks, bricks, glass and nails alike. His feet were bare but he paid no attention to where he put them. He stopped before a slight mound, just a few inches across and squatted next to it. One hand shot out and exploded the earth were it touched it. His hand reached down throwing the dirt that remained aside. He slowed, stopped, and then lifted out a few feathers and bits of bone, a fragile, yet intact bird skull. He placed the pieces all together on a clean handkerchief he had pulled from his breast pocket. He stood, brushed the dirt from his hands, folded the handkerchief carefully and then walked off across the lot the way he had come. A few seconds later his feet touched down on a street in the City of the Dead.

His boot heels clock-clocked as he walked, bouncing off the empty buildings, echoing along the vacant streets. Dogs and coyotes fought over a nearby body. But they fled as the scent of The Thief of Souls came to them. The fight suddenly not important all. He walked to the edge of the city, savoring the pall of death that hung over it. The smells. The silence except for the death machinery.

He stopped at a small clearing. A stone altar and bare earth. He walked to the altar, placed the handkerchief upon it and then carefully opened it, allowing the bones and bits of feathers to tumble out onto the cold, stone surface. He set the handkerchief aside leaving the bird bones exposed in the weak moonlight. He withdrew a shiny steel knife from a sheath inside his coat.

Long, over nine inches of smooth steel. Curved and honed to a razor sharp cutting surface. The tip itself was honed to a needle like sharpness. He held one hand out, palm down, and drew the steel blade across it. A few drops of thick, black blood dripped down upon the remains.

The effects were immediate. The bones began to shift, curl, the feathers seemed to melt into black goo surrounding the bones as they twitched and moved.

Smoke began to rise in curls. The drops of blood slowed. The thief returned the knife to his sheath, took the handkerchief that he had discarded, wound it around his palm a few times to stop the flow of blood, stepped back and watched the blood serve its purpose.

A few minutes later the mess began to grow, covering the altar top. Time slipped by as it continued to grow. Finally, it ceased and Abignew lay stretched out on the table. The thief bent low, placed his mouth over the demons mouth and breathed life into him. Abignew came alive with a sharp cough and a cry of alarm. He settled down when the Thief laid his hand upon his chest, pushing him softly back to the stone altar top.

"You let them kill you... You are not usually that stupid," he said.

"I'm sorry," Abignew told him.

He shook his head. "Don't say sorry. Sorry is only a word. Go find them and this time, kill them. I don't ever want to hear of them again." The Thief removed his heavy hand and helped Abignew from the altar. Together they walked back into the City of Dead.

The Red Way:

Laura And Bear

The first dead passed us by before both suns had fully lifted above the rim of the world.

We had heard them long before we saw them. Crawling, stumbling, crashing around in a thick forest that crept up to the edge of the path in many places. In some places it fell back a few hundred yards, in others limbs overhung the path as if reaching their wooden fingers for the river beyond. What the dead had been doing in the woods was beyond me.

Bear and I watched stunned as they began to pour from the woods, which were so thick that it seemed as though night still held dominion there, and take up following the path.

Bear had no more explanation than I did for why they were in the woods. Like me he thought that they were here to finish following their own path. For all who died there was a journey of death to make. The final journey. And it made sense to both of us that they were on the same path as we were.

"This path is part of their journey," Bear said. "We are in search of our entrance, and they are as well." He seemed to think for a moment. "Somewhere along this path their journey may end and they will find their way to the Ancestors, the Land of Dead, or the Underworld." We walked in silence for a time.

The dead came heavy from the woods as the suns rose into the sky. They came as they had died, or as they had become after death. Some crawling. Missing limbs. Eyes. Some not much more than skeletons, collections of bones walking along to the accompaniment of the clacks and clatter from their bones.

Some seemed whole, some nearly so. A young woman walked past me and smiled shyly at me as she did. As she smiled I thought she looked like the picture of life until she turned more fully to me and I could see the opposite side of her face was a ruined mass of torn flesh. One bright eye stared back at me from the ruined mass.

"Could you help me?... I can't... I can't find my way." She said. She moved on without waiting for an answer, drops of blood spattered to the ground as she walked.

Some were more terrifying than pathetic. They stumbled about headless, bumping into one another, and nearly bumping into us occasionally.

One came crawling along the ground. Her body was gone from the waist down. The flesh was stripped away from her face, rotted away or eaten by the birds who still harassed her as she crawled along. Landing on her and pecking away small strips of her flesh.

As I watched one landed on her head, dug in its claws and pecked one of her eyes out. Her hands, which had been working to pull her along, came up and grabbed at the bird as a scream came from her throat. One hand hit the bird and it fluttered up into the air.

A man stumbling along beside her snatched the bird from the air, crushed it in one fist and dropped it to the ground. The woman snatched up the bird in one hand. Her fingers were down to the bone from pulling her body along, the white tips poked from the flesh, streaked with blood, bits of flesh and dirt. The birds mouth opened weakly. The woman looked at it for a moment with her one remaining eye and then thrust her head forward and bit its head off. The sound of the head cracking and breaking in her jaws came to me as she threw the body away, dug her hands back into the ground and began once more to pull herself along as she continued to chew on the birds head.

Shortly after that we both began to focus farther off down the path so we wouldn't have to look too closely. As the day wore on the woods seemed to empty and the path became crowded in places. No matter how fast we walked the dead moved faster, as they were always coming up behind us and passing us. Occasionally one would stop, look around, and then wander off the path to the river or the woods. I saw at least two dozen disappear into thin air as I watched.

By noon the predators showed up and the crowded path began to thin out.

My first reaction was to stop them. To chase them away. And I did the first few times, but that only told them to stay away from us.

Wolves, Bears, big cats attracted to the smell of so much death. They ran at them, but the dead had no real way to run away or to defend themselves. They dragged them off into the woods where the screaming continued long after it should have.

Bear and I agreed that they were not really animals of all, but demons, spirits come to steal the souls of the dead. The ones that came as themselves were the worst of all. They swooped from the blue sky. Black shadows against the white clouds and dual suns. Hideous faces, some as dead as those they preyed upon. Some came from the ground, and twice they crawled from the river itself: After that we stayed farther away from the river.

By the time the suns were straight up in the sky there were very few dead left. The predators were stalking those and taking them one by one. They stumbled along fearfully, watching all around them as they tried to run. Or they ran toward Bear and me, screaming for us to help them. Swerving away at the last minute as if they realized we were something different and could not help them.

As the suns lifted higher into the sky the dead became less, although we could still hear their cries from the deep woods as they were devoured. Bear and I walked on in silence.

The predators, whether demons or real, ran along with the dead at the tree line. Sometimes concealed, sometimes showing themselves. Sometimes scenting the dead, sometimes seeming to scent on Bear and me. But always just a short space away. We didn't lack for company.

The river, black and oily in the darkness, was not much different in the daylight. An odor of death and rot came from its waters as they bumped over rocks and rapids on their way to where ever dead water went to.

The birds came in mass just before the first sun sank into the horizon. They picked at the bits and pieces of the dead that had fallen on the path. There were so many at times that Bear and I had to push them aside in order to walk. Once the first sun set the birds took flight: The path was picked clean as it had been the night before when we had started out on it. Now we understood how it had gotten that way.

Just before the second sun set the Moon began to show herself. I didn't know if this was a Grandmother Moon, but I sent a prayer to her just the same as she came up to keep the darkness away.

As the sun set the other noises came: The shadows built at the edges of the forest. The heavy footfalls came from deep within the trees. The ground shook, and I remembered the voice from the night before.

Occasionally, as the sun set, we heard the cry of one of the bigger predators as they became prey to whatever it was that ruled the night. Just before nightfall we stopped, gathered dead fall together to see us through the night, and made a small camp at a wide area of the path.

The Moon came up full and Bear and I sat before the fire, each lost in thought.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Dell Sweet

I was born in New York. I wrote my first fiction at age seventeen. I have driven taxi and worked as a carpenter for most of my life. I began working on the internet in 1989 primarily in HTML, graphics and website optimizations. I spent time in prison, lived on the streets two years as a drug addicted teen, and have been clean and sober for the last ten years.

I was honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy in 1975. I am a Musician who writes his own music as well as lyrics. I am an Artist accomplished in Graphite, Pen, and Digital media. I have written more than twenty books and several dozen short stories.
