Deeper down ran another, more desperate thought.
It will not happen to me. Im stronger than the others.
Usually, she was able to believe it.
When Eliza joined Gabriel in the kitchen, the oven clock read four AM. Tea was on the table, along with a pint of ice cream, open, with a spoon sticking out. He gestured to it. Nightmare ice cream. Family tradition.
Really?
Yeah, actually.
Eliza tried, for a moment, to imagine ice cream as her own familys response to the dream, but she couldnt. The contrast was just too stark. She reached for the carton. Thanks, she said. She ate a couple of bites in silence, took a sip of tea, all the while tensed for the questions to begin, as they surely must.
What do you dream about, Eliza?
How am I supposed to help you if you wont talk to me, Eliza?
Whats wrong with you, Eliza?
Shed heard it all before.
You were dreaming about Morgan Toth, werent you? Gabriel asked. Morgan Toth and his pillowy lips?
Okay, so she hadnt heard that . In spite of herself, Eliza laughed. Morgan Toth was her nemesis, and his lips were a fine subject for a nightmare, but no, that wasnt even close. I dont really want to talk about it, she said.
Talk about what? Gabriel asked, all innocence. What is this it you speak of?
Cute. But I mean it. Sorry.
Okay.
Another bite of ice cream, another silence cut short by another non-question. I had nightmares as a kid, Gabriel offered. For about a year. Really intense. To hear my parents tell it, life as we knew it was pretty much suspended. I was afraid to fall asleep, and I had all these rituals, superstitions. I even tried making offerings. My favorite toys, food. Supposedly I was overheard offering up my older brother in my place. I dont remember that, but he swears.
Offering him to who? Eliza asked.
Them. The ones in the dream.
Them.
A spark of recognition, hope. Idiotic hope. Eliza had a them, too. Rationally she knew that they were a creation of her mind and existed nowhere else, but in the aftermath of the dream, it was not always possible to remain rational. She asked, What were they? before she quite considered what she was doing. If she wasnt going to talk about her dream, she shouldnt be prying into his . It was a rule of secret-keeping, in which she was well-versed: Ask not, lest ye be asked.
Monsters, he said with a shrug, and just like that, Eliza lost interestnot at the mention of monsters, but at his of course tone. Anyone who could say monsters in that offhand manner had definitely never met hers.
You know, being chased is one of the commonest dreams, Gabriel said, and went on to tell her about it, and Eliza kept sipping tea and taking the occasional bite of nightmare ice cream, and she nodded in the right places, but she wasnt really listening. Shed thoroughly researched dream analysis a long time ago. It hadnt helped before, and it didnt now, and when Gabriel summed up with theyre a manifestation of our waking fears, and everyone has
them, his tone was both placating and pedantic, as though hed just solved her problem for her.
Eliza really wanted to say, And I suppose everyone gets pacemakers when theyre seven years old because manifestations of their waking fears keep sending them into cardiac arrhythmia? But she didnt, because it was the exact kind of memorable factoid that gets regurgitated at cocktail parties.
Did you know that Eliza Jones got a pacemaker when she was seven because her nightmares gave her cardiac arrhythmia?
Seriously? Thats insane.
So what happened to you? she asked him. What happened to your monsters?
Oh, they carried off my brother and left me alone. I have to sacrifice a goat to them every Michaelmas, but its a small price to pay for a good nights sleep.
Eliza laughed. Where do you get your goats? she asked, playing along.
Great little farm in Maryland. Certified sacrificial goats. Lambs, too, if you prefer.
Who doesnt? And what the hells Michaelmas?
I dont know. I pulled that out of the air.
And Eliza experienced a moment of gratitude, because Gabriel hadnt pried, and the ice cream and tea and even her irritation with his scholarly jabber had helped to ease the aftermath. She was actually laughing, and that was something.
And then her phone vibrated on the tabletop.
Who was calling her at four AM? She reached for it
and when she saw the number on the screen, she dropped itor possibly flung it. With a crack it hit a cabinet and bounced to the floor. For a second she had hope that shed killed it. It lay there, silent. Dead. And then bzzzzzzzzzzzz not dead.
When had she ever been sorry not to have broken her phone?
It was the number. Just digits. No name. No name came up because Eliza had not programmed that number into her phone. She didnt even realize that she remembered it until she saw it, and it was like it had been there all along, every moment of her life since since shed escaped. It was all there, it was all right there. The gut-punch was immediate and visceral and undiminished by the years.