AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Compulsion wrestled will.
Will won.
I fell to my knees hands scraping on gravel as I spat the taste of the imp from my mouth. My stomach seized so violently, my eyes watered.
Neme licked my hand as if she knew I was tempted to stay crouched there forever.
Hurting.
Empty.
I slowly pushed to my feet, painted on the wall, beams of light rose in front of me. I craned my neck back, reading the graffiti.
Only God can save your soul.
CHAPTER29
Zara
Sleep had been a nothing place,vacant of dreams, ever since I had become a facsimile of the Cucitrice. I used to dream before the memories.
Here, this night, I breathed a fog that floated away in a cloud, gaining distance, spreading, fading. I followed, unsure what I searched for.
People, it seemed.
People who slept.
The lost ones, they ran through dreams, swam and flew, gently breathing, snoring, twitching, and turning over in their sheets, restless with untold imaginings.
The dreams went on forever. I knew I was wandering through others’ minds, other occupants of the beds in the same building. That awareness anchored me, and still, I wandered, walking light as a feather through the grayness, with my hands by my sides, trailing my fingers through their dreams, an objective observer. Dreams were hopes and loves, needs and wants, the everyday minutia of life balled up and spread out, crinkled and rearranged.
Upside down people and thoughts.
Some made no sense. Others...had a clarity...dreams of babies and overseas journeys, of mothers hugging children, of people writhing in the rhythms of sex, crying in joy, in the throes of happiness. There were no nightmares, their absence remarkable and beautiful.
I floated until I came to a dreamer who gave a lengthy, drawn-out sigh—his lungs struggling for the gasp of last air.
And then he stood, turned and walked away.
I followed.
His trail led me down a spiraling path, a skipping, staccato stream. Disjointed images, sounds that coughed and spluttered. When it seemed our journey had no point, we reached a destination. The dreamer meandered out into a flickering snowfield, his outline gradually eaten away—his atoms vortexing into shredded tentacles of vanishing mist.
His very being decayed into a chaos of pixels and bits.
This was death.
A tingling spread across my chest as I watched someone become nothing.
No.
My sweaty hand almost slipped as I plucked at his sleeve.
“Come,” I whispered as I tried to yank him backward.
The dreamer shrugged me off and began to lose himself into the white again.
My sob broke as I gathered him up and carried him. He was so light, but as I drifted, my feet became heavier; he became heavier.
