Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 110492 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 552(@200wpm)___ 442(@250wpm)___ 368(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 110492 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 552(@200wpm)___ 442(@250wpm)___ 368(@300wpm)
Somewhere in the darkness of the other universe, the Dark Father laughed and congratulated himself on planting the seeds of destruction in the race he hated. He would have his revenge and the Kindred Goddess would watch her people whither and die.
And there was nothing she could do about it.
One
They were coming.
Torri had seen them—they were coming in a huge black ship, filled with a silent threat. A threat that no one could see but her. She tried to tell others, but no one would listen. In fact, they had locked her away for trying to tell them.
Be fair, whispered a little voice in her head. They locked you away because you stabbed Chuck with a butcher knife.
Which was true. But she wouldn’t have stabbed him if he hadn’t grabbed her and shaken her so suddenly, in the middle of the vision—what the psychiatrists here at St. Elizabeth’s called “night terrors” or “fugue states”—depending on if she was awake or asleep when she experienced one.
“Seeing Dreams,” Torri’s grandmother had called them—she’d had them too, all her life. Torri wished Nana was still alive—maybe she could have made sense of the terrible dreams she’d been having. The dreams of the menacing black ship carrying death and destruction creeping closer and closer to Earth…
When she was in the middle of one of her “Seeing Dreams,” she couldn’t distinguish what was real and what wasn’t. Her husband, Chuck, had been trying to shake her awake—probably because she’d been screaming. In the middle of the night terror, he had looked like the “Evil One,” as Torri thought of the being she kept seeing in her dreams.
The Evil One—who called himself “the AllFather”—had glowing red eyes and he hissed with every word he spoke. He told Torri that he was coming for the Earth—coming for her—and there was nothing she could do about it.
The dreams had gotten so bad she’d taken to going to bed with a butcher knife under her pillow. She didn’t know how far away the black ship with it’s hoard of alien invaders and its red-eyed, hissing leader was, but she didn’t want to take any chances on waking up with one of those hideous creatures in the bed with her.
When her husband, Chuck, had shaken her and shouted that she needed to stop screaming “Right now, Goddamnit! You’re going to wake up the whole fucking neighborhood!” the night terror was still on her. To her muddled brain, Chuck had looked like the hissing, red-eyed thing that called himself “The AllFather” and swore he was coming to get her. So Torri had lashed out.
Chuck had needed thirteen stitches and she had barely missed his eye—something which he pointed out at least twelve times when he was getting Torri to agree to a simple “overnight evaluation” at St. Elizabeth’s Mental Hospital in Southeast Washington DC.
Somehow the overnight evaluation had turned into a week-long stay and then the psychiatrist assigned to her—Dr. Burrows—had deemed it prudent to keep her for the rest of the month after that.
That had been two and a half months ago and Torri was beginning to wonder if she would ever get out. It didn’t help that the fugue states and night terrors had actually increased in frequency and duration. Back home, they had been confined to small blips in the radar of her consciousness—at least during the day.
Now, they might come on her any time of the day and night—in the shower, (where she would stand, staring into space while the water went cold,) during group therapy, (where she might blank out in the middle of a sentence and not wake up until the therapy session was done,)—or any other time. Only the day before, she had blanked out in the middle of the lunch line, standing there, staring in horror at the vision only she could see, while the other patients murmured restlessly—angry she was holding up the line.
Finally, one of the staff had come to lead her away. Torri had woken up an hour and a half later, sitting in the patient lounge, in a broken-down easy chair with a cracked plastic seat that nipped at her thighs when she shifted the wrong way.
Her stomach was rumbling but she had missed lunch—there was nothing she could do about it. The Seeing Dream had taken over her brain, had commandeered her mind, careless of what damage it might be doing to her life.
But though the daytime fugues were bad, it was at night when she saw him—the AllFather. And that meant her Seeing Dreams turned into night terrors.
The night terrors were the worst. The visions were so intense—so real—and she could never get used to the gut-wrenching fear they caused. No matter how many times she saw the vast, black ship coming to conquer Earth, or the red, glowing eyes of the AllFather, she couldn’t get used to them. Her throat felt shredded from screaming in fear and the orderlies didn’t dare to come near her—she had lashed out one too many times when they tried to wake her from the terrible dreams.