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“Explain,” she said.
“Up until that night in San Diego, I could detect only very strong emotions in auras. Fear. Anger. Excitement. Violence. Anxiety. Not a lot more than what most people can see if they pay attention to body language.”
He stopped and waited for her reaction.
“Tell me about San Diego,” she said.
Her voice was utterly neutral now. He didn’t have to open his inner window to know that she was waiting for another shoe to drop, but there was no way to know what that meant. Maybe she was trying to decide if he was delusional. This was not going well, but he had to try to hold on to her. He didn’t have any other options.
“A writers’ organization in San Diego invited me to give a talk,” he said. “The event was held at a hotel. I was told I would be picked up at the airport. I remember getting into the back of the car, and that’s the last thing I remember until the following day when I woke up on a beach.”
Pallas watched him as if he were one of the ghosts she tried to avoid brushing up against when she walked through a crowd. Her eyes, until now cool and wary, flashed with comprehension. He did not have to slide into his other vision to know that her aura was flaring. He could feel the heat.
He had her full attention.
Pallas appeared to recover quickly from her moment of stunned shock. Now she was riveted.
“Did you go to a doctor?” she said.
She was no longer asking questions. She was conducting an interrogation.Be careful what you wish for, Drake.
“I headed for the nearest emergency room,” he said. “I was given a thorough workup, but there was no sign of trauma. They did come up with a diagnosis—according to the doctor I had apparently experienced an atypically extended version of transient global amnesia.”
The fact that she did not request a definition of the term told him she was familiar with it. Of course, given the themes ofThe Lost Night Files, that shouldn’t come as a surprise. He, on the other hand, had been startled to discover transient global amnesia was not aparticularly rare phenomenon. What was unusual in his case was how long the episode had lasted.
“What about the writers’ conference?” Pallas asked. “Did the organizers contact the police?”
“No. When I called to try to explain, I found out the organizers had been told that I had fallen suddenly ill and had canceled.”
Pallas reached into her messenger bag and took out a small notebook and a pen. “Have you been able to recover any memories of what happened during those missing hours?” she asked.
He watched uneasily as she flipped open the notebook. “Maybe.”
She glanced up, frowning. “What do you mean?”
He realized the platter of buffalo cauliflower was empty. He sat back and picked up his beer.
“Sometimes, before I checked into the Institute here in Carnelian, I thought I’d catch snapshots of that lost night in my dreams. Nightmares, really. But the scenes made no sense. A portion of a room. Someone in a mask leaning over me. A hot aura. A sense of dread. Nothing concrete. But it was the sleepwalking that scared the hell out of me. You could say I deliberately developed insomnia as a defense mechanism.”
Pallas nodded. “You were so anxious about the sleepwalking that you started resisting sleep.”
“My ex called it quits. I became a recluse. I tried to avoid my family and friends, because I knew they would realize I was falling apart. I had trouble writing. Finally, my parents and my brother and sister concluded that I was having a nervous breakdown. They staged an intervention. Insisted I get help and gave me the number of the Carnelian Sleep Institute.”
“Wow,” Pallas said. Her tone was not without empathy now. “An intervention. That’s serious.”
“Yes, it is. Made me realize I had to take action, though. That’s how I wound up checking into the Institute for an overnight sleep study.”
“And now?” Pallas said, her voice gentling.
He tried to smile but he knew it probably looked twisted. It certainly felt twisted. “The short version is that things got bad and then things got worse. Since the sleep study the nightmares have become intolerable and the sleepwalking has become a nightly event unless I take precautions.”
“The enforced insomnia?”
“Right. If I let myself slide too far into a dream I’ll find myself in the front room, opening the door. My biggest fear is that one of these nights I won’t wake up until I’m outside the house, walking to some unknown destination. Maybe into traffic.”
“That is... terrifying,” Pallas said. “No wonder you’ve developed insomnia.”
“It wasn’t easy. I had to work hard to become an insomniac.”
