Sleep No More

SIXTEEN

I grit my teeth, grateful that at least in reverse, the girl’s body is coming back together. It’s only when we reach the initial strike of the machete that I’m able to figure out who it is—because the very first thing the monster does is slice his blade across her face.

My throat convulses, but I stare hard as her skin is made whole. “Nicole,” I whisper. “Nicole Simmons.” She’s part of the student council leadership and she reads the announcements on the school TV channel every day. I’ve seen her each morning my entire junior year. Every student in the school would recognize her.

I wonder briefly if the killer knows this. If he slashed her face first because it was so identifiable. Or was it just happenstance?

But my personal connection with her goes back well beyond that. Nicole used to live two houses down from me. Our moms were friends. We played together all the time. My Oracle stuff wasn’t even the reason we stopped being friends. Our parents used to do things as a couple and then suddenly one of them was gone and the other was in a wheelchair. Stuff like that is too much for casual friendships. And when the parents move on, the kid generally does too.

Even so, now that I know who she is, this feels even more personal. More important. Maybe she’s not really my friend anymore, but she was.

Still, in reverse, the killer drags Nicole out of the shed by her hair and finally the doors open, and Smith and I are able to exit the workshop turned slaughterhouse: him, quickly; me, with my slow, grueling steps.

“No way,” I breathe as the killer takes Nicole right to her door. A few seconds later, she’s safely in her own house and the killer is ringing the doorbell.

I halt the scene and, after a few panting breaths, turn to Smith. “He’s going to take her from her own house!” I say in shock. “This whole time we all figured that if we were at home we’d be safe. This is going to start a panic. People are going to be afraid no matter where they are. They’ll—”

“Unless you stop it,” Smith interrupts, pulling me back into the moment. “Go back a little more. I bet her parents aren’t home.”

I swallow and nod and focus my energy on pushing the scene back even further. Sure enough, in a surprisingly short time, we see two adults leave in a black sedan.

“Okay, stop now,” Smith says.

I do and we’re standing in front of a half-raised garage door, watching Nicole’s parents depart.

“Is there another car in there?” Smith asks.

I duck down and look under the edge of the garage door. “Yeah, one more.”

Smith blows on his hands and then rubs them hard together. “I think the simplest thing is to get her to go to a friend’s house as soon as her parents leave.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to have her to leave with her parents?”

“Possibly, but we don’t know where they’re going. Maybe it’s somewhere she can’t go. On a date? To a bar? You only get one shot at this and you want to pick the path that’s most likely to succeed.” He grimaces. “‘Least likely to fail’ is probably more accurate.”

He has a point. “Okay. She’s on student council. She’s probably friends with the other girl on there. Sara Finnegan.”

“That should work.” He stands with his arms crossed over his chest, observing the scene. “Because you can’t physically affect anything, you’re going to need to go under the garage door, reverse the scene again, and slip through the door and into the house while the parents are leaving.”

“Aren’t you coming with me?”

“I’m going to stay here and keep an eye on him,” Smith says, pointing at a nondescript gray SUV parked about half a block down beside a snowbank. Fear clenches at my stomach.

“Is that the killer?”

“That’s him. If he gets here before you can finish your job, I’ll yell for you.”

“Can you do that?”

“Yell?” Smith asks, looking confused.

“No, stay here. I mean, you’re in my second sight—shouldn’t you have to stay with me?”

His forehead wrinkles. “I’m not sure. But if I stay right here—if you leave me right here, it seems like I could.”

“What if I need your help?”

Smith shakes his head. “It’s been over two weeks, Charlotte. Assuming this has all been the same guy—and I really think it is—then he’s more than ready to kill again. We know he would have killed Jesse. He’s probably planning this murder right now. He’s got to be getting frustrated. And people who are frustrated are unpredictable. What if he suddenly changes his mind? Or comes in early? Then your vision’s no longer accurate. I think one of us needs to watch his car. And since I can’t actually do anything . . .” He lets his words trail off.

I look down the road where I can barely make out a dark form through the windshield. The killer, just yards away.

Except that he’s not real; he’s just in my head.

But this is his future.

Smith is right; someone needs to keep an eye on him. “You have the stone,” he reminds me softly.

“I’ll make it happen,” I vow, and without letting myself have a second thought, I duck under the garage door.

It’s eerie walking past the frozen car, feeling like as soon as I start the scene, they’ll be able to see me. “I’m not really here,” I whisper. “Not here.”

I position myself right beside the back door and focus on moving the scene backward again. Mr. and Mrs. Simmons almost brush me as they walk backward into the house and as the door closes—opens, technically—I slip through. I pause the scene, and before I let it start up again, I take several fortifying breaths. Smith believes I can do this by myself and he appears to be right; I’m just going to have to feed off of his confidence.

As ready as I’m ever going to be, I go ahead and start the scene again. As soon as the garage door closes, Nicole peeks through a barely cracked door and then runs to the front window to watch them drive away. I get right up next to her and shout in her ear, “Go to Sara Finnegan’s house!” There’s an insane amount of thought and will behind my shouting, but I’m already so worn out, it’s easier to vocalize as well.

I don’t know what kind of mischief Nicole intended to get into, but when I yell at her, she straightens and gets a funny look on her face. “Go to Sara’s house now!” I scream the word now as loud as I can.

Then I start to push with that same flow of energy that I used with Jesse. And Nicole moves. It’s slow. Like she’s fighting me almost, but she’s going. I focus on the stone—on all of my energy going through it and getting bigger, stronger, and together, we walk. We’re halfway across the kitchen when she suddenly veers off and I almost cry in disappointment, knowing I’ll have to catch her and then get her back on track.

“No! Sara’s house!” I yell after her, my slow steps not equal to her near run down the hall.

But a few seconds later, she appears with a jingling set of keys in her hands, and relief courses through me. I’m okay; it’s working. I start pushing again. I push, I shove, and for the second time today I break into a sweat and feel my clothes dampen, but I don’t give up. I’m so close.

Nicole pauses for a second at the garage door, looks at the small white Suzuki, and then dubiously down at the keys in her hands.

She’s going to change her mind. She has no reason whatsoever to go to Sara’s house. But I picture her mutilated body in my mind—especially that first strike that destroys her face—and put every ounce of will into my command as I shout Sara’s name once more and shove with all my might.

Ten seconds later, Nicole is in the car and the garage door is rising. I’m on my knees, too exhausted to even stand. I know we’re not out of the woods yet, but there’s nothing else I can do except keep shouting in my head for her to go to Sara’s.

It’s only as her car starts to move that I realize I’ve got to get out of the garage or I’ll be stuck on the other side of the door from Smith. I don’t want to leave the vision without finding out what he saw. I crawl across the cement. One hand, one knee, the other, the other. Slowly I make my way out of the garage as Nicole backs out. The door closes just inches from hitting me, and her little car makes its way down the snowy roads in the direction of the town center.

I kneel in the snow in front of the house and let the scene continue to play. For a second, I don’t see Smith anywhere. Then I catch sight of his form jogging up the road, just ahead of the gray SUV.

“Charlotte,” Smith says, gasping, when he reaches me. “He just saw Nicole leave. He’s furious.”

The SUV pulls right over the edge of the yard, plowing through the snowbank. A masked man jumps out and I hear an unearthly scream emanate from his mouth that makes every drop of blood in my veins turn to jagged ice.

The shriek of a monster.

I leap to my feet as he draws near. Something whistles by my head and I hear a loud thud and turn my head sharply toward the workshop.

The machete. He’s thrown it into the side of the shed where it digs in just enough to stick, and wobbles crazily back and forth. He gets back into his car and—after a couple of tries—backs out of the pile of snow, driving slowly down the road in the opposite direction as Nicole.

“He was waiting,” I whisper, my eyes still glued to the machete. “He had this all planned.”

“Looks that way,” Smith says tightly. “She’s safe now. Let’s get out of this scene.”

It takes hardly a thought for me to cast us both from my second sight. Then we’re back in my mom’s Corolla, the heat blowing hard on both of us and the touch of Smith’s fingertips very light on my temple before he lets his hands fall and leans heavily against his seat. “Doing this right—catching this guy—is going to take work, Charlotte.”

“Thank you, Mr. Killjoy. Can’t we take two seconds to celebrate the victory we’ve had?” I ask with my teeth chattering despite the hot, stifling air in the car.

“One, two,” Smith counts mechanically. “I went over to this guy’s car and he was already masked with the machete on the seat beside him.” He turns to me. “He was ready. We don’t know how much he planned before, but he’s definitely planning now. And he looked like he was hungry for a kill.”

“So what are we supposed to do?”

“Like I said before, we have to get him caught. Leaving behind the machete—not to mention tire marks—was a stupid move at best. Next time . . .” He pauses, then holds both hands out in a calming motion. “Now just think about this, okay? Next time I was thinking we could let the victim get attacked, but not killed. I know that sounds harsh”—he rushes on when I gasp—“but not only will that allow the killer to let off a little of the pressure building up inside him, whoever it is might get close enough to see something. To get a fingernail full of DNA, you know, that kind of thing.” He pauses. “Maybe the cops could even catch him in the act if we draw it out enough. I think it’s worth a shot.”

I hate that it makes sense. “I’ll think about it,” I finally say.

The car is silent as I drive about a mile back to where I picked Smith up. He starts to grab his door handle, then stops and turns back to me. “You did well in there. And if we had a year to do this, I think you would be enough just by yourself. But we don’t, so I think you should take this.”

He holds out the ancient velvet case and, despite everything, I suck in an excited breath when it touches my hand.

“Wear the pendant while you sleep,” Smith says. “There’s a whole plane of existence that contains all of the possible visions of every possible future. I don’t know if it’s in your head or somewhere else entirely, but Shelby used to talk about going there in her dreams when she wore the necklace. She always described it as an endless dome full of visions of the future.”

The domed room. From the book. The supernatural plane. Holy shit! It’s real. My blood races with excitement, but I try to appear calm.

“She said she could practice altering reality and everything all night and never be tired in the morning. It wasn’t somewhere I could go, so I can’t help you with it, but try it and if you’re dedicated, I know you’ll get stronger.” He clenches his jaw. “And you’re going to need to be strong to beat this guy.”

“I just wear it and go to sleep?” It sounds too easy.

“Think about going there before you go to sleep. It’ll feel a lot like a dream, but one where you’re completely in control and can move about at will.”

“Won’t I . . . change things?” I ask, nervous about doing something to make everything even worse than it already is. Not to mention getting caught by Sierra. This is so beyond rule-breaking that I have no idea what she would do.

“Not while you’re sleeping,” Smith says, pulling my attention back. “You won’t be entering a specific vision—it’ll be the supernatural plane in general. Shelby said it was like seeing every possible future all at once. And because she knew she couldn’t actually change the future in her sleep, that’s where she would practice.”

I can hardly even comprehend such a place, but then, Shelby probably couldn’t either before she went. “Okay,” I say, slipping the necklace case into my deepest pocket. “And thank you.”

“Whatever you do, don’t let your aunt see it. Promise?” Smith asks.

I chuckle bitterly. “Believe me, Smith, that is one thing you do not have to worry about.”

“Okay.” He opens the door and steps out, tucking his scarf back into the front of his coat. He starts to swing the door shut, then stops and leans down so I can see his face again. “And be careful, just like the other teens are supposed to be. I know all you Oracles supposedly find out ahead of time when your deaths are and everything, but if anything should happen to you—” He closes his eyes and shudders. “No one here knows it except me,” he says soberly, “but we’re all depending on you. You are the only person standing between that monster, and your friends. And if you die . . .”

His voice trails off, but instead of finishing his sentence after a few seconds, he stands and pushes the door closed.

“Message received,” I whisper to his back as he walks away.