Sleep No More

TWELVE

I’m nervous. Like, meeting-a-first-date nervous.

Not that I actually know how that feels.

I decided we should meet somewhere more private this time. So I chose the library, which has private study rooms that you can reserve.

I should have realized Smith would be there before me.

“Do you have it?”

Not hello, not I’m so glad you made this decision. “Yes,” I reply with more than a little duh in my tone. When Smith doesn’t look convinced, I pull the pouch out of my pocket and hand it over.

And he still unfastens the drawstrings and looks inside to check.

“Maybe you need to learn to trust me,” I say dryly.

He doesn’t meet my eyes as he nods. “I know. I know,” he says, almost to himself. “I’ve just spent so many years . . .” His words trail off as he slides the necklace onto his palm. “We should get started.”

A jolt of fear races through my whole body, but the decision is made. Whatever he has to teach me, I’m determined to learn. “I had the vision again last night,” I offer after I close and lock the study-room door and jiggle the blinds shut. “The one about Jesse.”

“Exactly the same?”

“I think so.”

“Tell me about it.”

Despite the closed door and thick walls, I lean forward and lower my voice to a bare hush. I tell him about Jesse, the strangulation marks, and what I remember about the scene. Smith tents his fingers and lifts them to his lips, contemplating for a few seconds. “I can teach you to change the scene on your own—and I will,” he adds. “But I think for this first one I should come into your vision and coach you.”

“What do you mean, ‘come into’?” I ask, the fear returning with a vengeance.

“With both of us in contact with the stone, I can enter the vision with you. I have no power there, but I can help.”

It sounds so bizarre.

“You’re really going to have to trust me.”

“Okay.” He must hear the hesitation in my voice.

“Not just with your secrets. I need you to trust me to . . . get into your head, essentially. It’ll only be for a few minutes, max, but you have to open yourself entirely. Hold nothing back.”

“You can save him?” I ask, letting that last drop of doubt seep through.

“I can show you how to save him.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Then I trust you.” I’ll make myself trust him. For Jesse.

“Okay,” Smith says, pulling his chair closer until our knees are touching. “We both need to be in contact with the stone. You, so you can return to your foretelling, and me, so I can come with you.”

Again my stomach clenches at the thought of anyone else seeing my visions. My life—my already bizarre life—has turned completely upside down.

“Shelby and I did this hundreds of times,” Smith says when I don’t reach out for the necklace. “I promise, it’s safe. Strange, but safe.”

I nod and then lay my hands on top of his so we’re cradling the stone in between our two palms.

“No, no,” Smith says, moving my hand. “It’s easier if you can see the stone.”

I adjust and we start again.

“Okay, gaze into the stone and bring forward the scene you saw with Jesse. Then put yourself back in it.”

Back in it? Back into one of the most terrifying experiences of my life? But this is how I can change it. No risk, no reward. Here goes nothing. I look at the stone—it seems pink now—and picture the scene. When I’m sure I have it fixed in my head, I say, “Okay.”

“No. You’re using your mind. Your mind is not your . . . um, you probably call it your ‘third eye’? Maybe ‘second sight’?”

I look up at him, my forehead scrunched. “I know the words, but I don’t know what you mean.”

He sighs. “It’s hard to describe something you’ve never actually experienced. Okay, when you have visions—not the ones you’ve fought off, the ones you’ve actually experienced—you keep your eyes open, but inside you . . . you go somewhere else and darkness covers your physical sight, right?”

I nod, oddly frightened that he has described exactly what happens. Like some stranger telling you in detail what your underwear looks like even though you’re fully clothed.

“Stare at the stone again, and, um . . . will that darkness to cover your physical eyes. And do you . . . when you fight, do you have something you throw over the vision so you can’t see it?”

“A drape,” I say, still trying to push back the horror at a conversation that feels so suddenly intimate.

“Good! Perfect!” he says, latching on to that. “Once your physical sight goes dark except for the stone right in the middle, pull the drape aside. Don’t just peek behind it, you need to yank it away. Be committed. Your mind will sense if you have doubts.”

“Okay.” I try again with only the barest idea of what I’m doing. This time, instead of remembering the scene with Jesse, I picture the blackness in front of my physical sight that a vision always induces. As soon as I do, I almost lose concentration entirely when it appears right at the edges of my vision, but without the muffled sensation that always accompanies a foretelling. Okay, I think, trying to calm myself down, I just imagine it and it happens.

When I concentrate again, the blackness advances unnaturally, beginning at the edges of my peripheral vision, a slowly—so slowly—shrinking circle of sight surrounded by darkness. I widen my eyes and, oddly, that seems to help. The circle of light shrinks, smaller, smaller, until only the gem, shining purple now, remains. A tiny, tight center in the middle of sheer blackness.

An odd instinct kicks in and I know I need to raise my hands—not my physical hands, but the hands I rarely have control of in the visions. I lift my arms and reach for the dark veil that covers my third eye. It’s as though these hands weigh twenty pounds each, but I lift them anyway. After a few seconds, my fingers find the edge and pull it back.

I’m standing in the snow again, and Jesse’s body lies covered in a thin layer of flakes beside me.

I did it! I want to yell, to cheer, but even though I’ve managed to enter a foretelling on purpose for the first time in my life, there’s still a dead teenager on the ground beside me. Nothing about that has changed.

I glance around me, and everything feels familiar and foreign at the same time. I’ve been here before—technically I always come here during the visions I don’t fight—but it’s not somewhere I know. Not somewhere I was even aware I could know. It’s somewhere I fight against coming to almost every day—well, used to fight. To be here now feels wrong and strange. But even so, there’s a sense of possessiveness that’s welling up within me.

It’s my second sight; why shouldn’t I come here?

“You’re there, I can tell,” a soft voice says in that faint, faraway pitch that all outside noises take on when I’m either in or fighting a vision. Smith. “Now comes the hard part.”

The hard part? I’m nearly shaking from the effort of having done this much. “What do I have to do?” I ask, but the wind sweeps my voice away. I realize I’ve never tried to speak while in a vision before. There’s never been a reason to. Does my physical mouth talk when I’m in this other plane? Can Smith tell I’m speaking?

“I’ll talk you through it,” Smith says. “And don’t try to ask questions; you’re only talking inside your vision.” Well, that answers that. “First I’m going to place my fingers on one of your temples. It’s going to feel very jarring, like you’re in two places at once. Your mind won’t like that and will want you to pick one or the other. You can’t let it send you back. We’ll have to start all over again.”

I say nothing, just brace myself for his touch.

As soon as his skin comes in contact with mine, I gasp. Though I can distantly feel that it’s his fingertips very gently touching the side of my head, in the second sight it’s like his hands have wrapped around the entire scene, moving in closer and closer and threatening to suffocate me. My mind screams at me to return to the physical world, but I hold on, focusing my thoughts on the stone—until I’m wholly in my second sight again.

“Okay,” the reverberating voice says. “I should be at your curtain. This is the trickiest part. I need you to let me in.”

I sense him standing just outside of my vision. My whole world when I’m in my second sight. But I’m realizing now that this space is really very small. I don’t think there’s room for both of us. And . . . and it’s mine. He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t—

“Charlotte! Don’t push me away!” His voice is getting further and further away. It’s panicked now and it snaps me back into focus. “I can’t do this part; you have to let me come in.”

I look down at Jesse. My time in my second sight has now lasted longer than my original vision and the snow is starting to obscure his features. “Jesse,” I whisper, remembering why I’m here. I have to do this. I have to trust Smith.

I sense Smith standing at the black drape, waiting. I’m not sure what to do. I don’t see a curtain. And it’s not like I actually walked through one when I came; I just pulled it to the side and then I was here.

Maybe I’m making this too difficult. “Let him in,” I whisper into the night air.

Nothing.

My chest is tight and my muscles are clenched so tightly I know I’ll be sore tomorrow. I can’t stay in this weird limbo for much longer. “Let him in!” I yell now, lifting my face up to the sky. “Let him—”

“I’m here.”