Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 85029 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 85029 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
“Why not?”
“Because Syrsee is sick and I can’t leave her alone.”
Paul chuckles in that disingenuous way he has. Like he’s laughing at me. “You don’t have to leave, Ryet.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re a vampire with the gift of dreamwalking. Why do you think you’re so attracted to that dirt under the house?”
I just stare at him. Almost unable to think, my head is so foggy. “What?”
“The dirt, Ryet. Why do you think I go into the earth? Do you think I sleep there?”
“Well…” I kinda did think that. And then I’m so tired of these fucking mysteries, and unanswered questions, and loss of control over my own life that I just give up. “Why don’t you just tell me what the dirt is for, Paul? And why don’t you just tell me what you want me to do with it? Let’s make it all very simple for once.”
“You would like me to tell you what to do so you can follow directions?” He laughs here. “Since when?”
“Since now. What is the dirt for?”
That smarmy smile of his is back as he relaxes into his chair. “It’s a conduit. It runs between worlds, through this world, all over the place, actually. You can go anywhere you want in the dirt, Ryet. And you don’t even have to move.” He taps his head. “It’s all up here.” He pauses again, eyes practically twinkling. “Of course, there is… a catch.”
I open my mouth to reply, but he’s gone. Like he was never sitting in that chair in the first place. Or… maybe… like he was here and he just ran out of time.
Was he not an illusion? Was that really him? Is being stuck in the purple like being in the dirt? Only he’s unable to come out of it?
I get up and start pacing the room, my boots thudding on the wide-plank hardwood floors.
If so, this whole purple thing doesn’t sound like much of a punishment. He can come and go places as… what? A ghost? Not a ghost. Ghosts are dead people. He’s not dead, he’s just stuck. So he comes and goes as a… well, I don’t have a word for that. A kind of energy, maybe.
Of course, being pure energy has its limitations. Maybe he can’t hang around for long because he runs out of energy. Maybe it costs him a lot to come visit me like this, so being corporeal is a need. So he can affect the real world.
It makes sense, in a vampire way, I guess.
I blow out a long breath as I walk into the bedroom to check on Syrsee. She looks the same. Sweaty, pale, and unconscious. I sit down next to her on the bed, bite my palm, and then trickle the blood past her lips. After about a minute of this, she swallows. And I wait—like I do every single time—to see if this is the limit. To see if we’ve crossed some kind of threshold. To see if this is enough to wake her up.
It’s not.
So my next decision isn’t really a choice, it’s a foregone conclusion.
I get up, take off my clothes, then go down to the tunnel that leads to the root cellar. The whole passage has been torn up at this point. It’s nothing but dark, rich, loose earth. And not only does it feel soothing under my bare feet, it smells pretty fucking good too.
Not really sure how this whole dirt road thing works, I figure I must be on the right track if all my instincts are telling me to just lie down in the hole and cover myself up. So that’s what I do. And as soon as I’ve got a good layer of it over me, I feel better. Like I’ve been carrying a weight and I just put it down.
I’m not completely covered and my face isn’t covered at all, but I begin to wonder what would happen if I was truly immersed in the earth. And for long periods of time, the way Paul does it.
It’s not something I’m going to try now. How would I breathe? Do I need to breathe? I have so many questions and the only way to get answers is to initiate this conduit through the purple that vision-Paul was talking about.
I don’t know how one might do that, but I am pretty familiar with dreamwalking. And the moment I think this, I close my eyes and there it is. The lavender mist, floating all around me. Only I’m not lying down in a hole, I’m standing in the middle of that forest. The winter one where I saw Paul sitting on the fallen tree trunk while holding that baby.
And then there he is, minus the baby—naked and covered in dirt, just like me.
He just stares at me for a long moment. It’s unsettling because normally this stare would be accompanied by the smarmy smile, and this time he’s not smiling.