A Dream of Summer Rain (Chapter 2)

"A Remedy for the Aftermath of my Habits"

They sat in the cramped church basement as rain hammered the ground outside. Lacy shared a table with Danny, while Drew, their teacher, stood at a podium beneath a broken clock and a golden crucifix, reading from a well-worn Bible.

“Now class, who can tell me about the Tower of Babel?” Drew said. “Liam. Care to offer your take on this?”

Lacy jerked forward in her seat.

“If you’re trying to run down the clock again, Liam, we’ve still a half-hour left. Tell us: why did God strike the Tower down?”

“Uh, He did it-”

“You, Liam.”

“W-what?” Lacy said.

Drew leaned forward on his podium, smirking as darkness papered over the ceiling above. “It was your fault, Liam. You and your family. It’s always been you monsters.” His blue eyes morphed red, and his holy book caught fire. The fire spread to the podium, down onto the rug.

Lacy leapt from her chair, and looked and saw she was all alone. None of the others had stayed with her, except for Drew. Horns sprouted from Drew’s forehead as his teeth sharpened to fangs. The fire, orange and red and golden, consumed everything in sight. Outside, rain assaulted the ground, flooded the world, shattered the windows to the church basement and poured in. But instead of quenching the fire, it fed it. The water burned in the hellfire furnace, and Lacy found herself drowning in a Lake of Fire.

Above her hung a Star, shining blue, piercing through Hell, reaching for Lacy. Lacy reached up for it, but she closed her hand too slowly, and it slipped from her grasp and flew away. The fire grew and grew and grew all around her until a hand reached down from above. She clasped it, let it raise her up from damnation, and found that it belonged to… Herself. To another her. This one was all wrong though- carried herself like a man, dressed like a man in a three piece suit and tie, with eyes of an inverted pattern and pointed ears and a voice like a storm. No, not like a storm- it was a storm, wearing her face, a twisted force of destruction clad in her reflection and waiting to sweep her away. He kissed her cheek, and as she turned and ran he called, “be seeing you!”

She ran after him, ran until found a castle sculpted from a single sheet of pitch black metal standing beneath a moon quartered into the points of a diamond. Between the castle and the moons floated the remnants of a city that yearned to drift out into an endless sea of empty blackness and oblivion. Snow fell in a heavy torrent, and Lacy lumbered up to the front door with her greasy, hairy body and tore it off its hinges. She lumbered through its interior, and found it was a library: an endless maze of shelves that reached four hundred feet for the ceiling, each packed with tomes and volumes. Some were inked in English, and bore titles such as Necronomicon, Arcanum Unbound, and The Unabridged Histories of Magic. Others were in tongues she could recognize, or at least take a guess at-, Latin, Aramaic, Farsi, Igbo, Japanese, Russian. But others were in languages she had no idea of, of languages long forgotten to human memory, from the days of antiquity when the world itself was more… Malleable.

She climbed the spiral staircase up to the very top of the castle, where she found a single, slim volume waiting for her at the final step: The King of Elfland’s Daughter.

She’d seen this before.

She stepped on it, then moved on. She dragged herself onto the roof of the castle, and she stood beneath the floating city and the four moons. The snow melted on her skin, and she drank in the cold. Hideous laughter bubbled up inside her and burst forth as she reached her hand towards the sky. From the center gap between the moons, her star descended from the heavens. It lowered itself slowly into Lacy’s outstretched hand, and she guided it into her heart.

An agonizing blaze engulfed her insides. It consumed all that she was, and when it was done, all that was left was her hate and rage and resentment, and a world upon which to avenge herself. Behind her, the storm that wore her face laughed at her as she inched closer and closer to becoming him. He came forward, the thing she didn’t want to be, the man pretending to be her, the monster he wanted her to be, and they danced together and became one.

“I’ve been so looking forward to this,” the Storm said with her mouth, she said with the Storm’s voice. She turned her sights to the east, where the island ended and the Sea of Glass stretched over the abyss. She smiled, and she set forth, baying for blood and order, lowering her soul deeper into the Lake of Fire with each step.

***

Lacy woke up drenched in her own sweat. Again. She’d had the dream. Again. She went about her designated hour of self-loathing, again, and when it was over her stomach growled with such ferocity it forced her into the kitchen in search of food. A-fucking-gain.

The kitchen was the largest part of the house. The hallway at the back of the house, which contained the doors to their respective bedrooms and the bathroom, emptied into the mouth of the living room, where their black couch, brown chair, glass coffee table, and plasma screen television resided in a cramped consortium. To the left of that was the kitchen, a tightly-compacted area wherein a black stove, a microwave, an oven, a fridge, and a wooden, rectangular kitchen table all gathered. Danny sat at the table eating his breakfast of maple sausage and hash browns, the aroma of cooking still pouring off of the skillet on the stove. He was a slender young man with light brown hair and blue eyes, standing at– as he quite insistently phrased it–just below average height.

“My God,” Danny said. “She lives.”

Lacy grunted.

“Morning to you too, sunshine. Make any sales?”

Lacy nodded, then held up five fingers.

“Good work!” Danny smiled. “I’m gonna head out soon. Same as usual for you today?”

Lacy nodded again.

“Good to hear, good to hear.”

“Anything…,” Lacy said, “Anything happening with you?”

“No, not really. Talked to Corporate this morning after blowing her off last night.” His thick eyebrows knitted tightly, and his mouth locked into a sneer. ‘Corporate’ was what he called his mother. Granted, she was part of the corporate office for Woodrow Knives, and she was their immediate boss. Lacy had met the woman a few dozen times growing up. She was… A bit of a bitch, frankly. Danny avoided talking to her when he could.

“How’d that go?” Lacy asked.

“The usual.” Which meant it had devolved into a shouting match.

Lacy winced. She put her hand on her friend’s shoulder and said, “I’m sorry about that. I know how much she gets under your skin.”

His shoulders drooped, and he smiled sadly. “Thanks, Lace.”

She nodded. “Of course.”

She poured herself a small bowl of dry cereal and ate in silence, then said good-bye to her friend as he tied his tie and went off to work with his suitcases full of knives. Lacy sat there a while, listening to Danny’s truck as it drove further and further away. Finally, she got up and headed for her room, only for the spinning wheels and rumbling engine of an approaching car to catch her attention.

She opened the door as a police car pulled up in front of the bungalow. Two officers lumbered out. “Are you Liam O’Sullivan?” one of them asked.

Lacy nodded.

“We have some unfortunate news about your parents.”

Lacy had always expected to hear one day that her father had killed her Mom and then, like the miserable coward he was, capped himself. Even still, Lacy’s heart sank into the acidic pit of her stomach as the cops explained that her parents had been murdered. It sank further when they showed her the pictures of her parents’ bodies, and she realized what had happened.

They’d been killed in the exact same manner Drew had been. Chests dug open, hearts torn out. Someone… Something had desecrated their remains. Something with fangs and claws.

The inside of Lacy’s skull became a pressure cooker of dissociation and anguish. The cops left, and once they were out of eyeshot, she got up, went into the woods, and beat a tree with a shovel while screaming at the top of her lungs. She did this for several hours, until her muscles throbbed and her voice was hoarse and the stench of sweat was thick on her body hair. She fell to her knees, she listened to the wind snake between the trees as she stared up at the sky through the viridescent canopy, and she wept. The clouds were thick and gray, and she wanted the rain to come to wash away her sin and filth, wash away the whole world until there was nothing left that could hurt her ever again. She ached with rage and despair, and as always, her star waited for her in the sky above. It clawed for her, desperate to get in, desperate to corrupt her, desperate to turn her into something she wasn’t.

“And what are you, exactly?” Drew asked.

Lacy blinked. Her head turned behind her, then in front of her, then up and down and side to side as she searched in vain for the source of the voice. She fell onto her back and looked up. “I dunno, Drew,” she said. “I really don’t.”

She half-expected to hear Drew’s voice again, for him to respond with a simple but cutting utterance of the word ‘bullshit’, but this was not so. She was left in that moment with only her own heartbeat and her Star looming above her. She was left in that moment with the simple, irrefutable fact that her parents were dead, and the same monsters who had killed her teacher, who had been trying to kill her for over a decade, were responsible.