Chapter Five

The thing about my mother that often surprises people is that she doesn't drink.

Ever.

I know plenty of parents in Callery who do drink, and others who are downright alcoholics, but my mother is not one of them. She doesn't even keep alcohol in the house. I discovered that when once, in a fit of rebellious rage, I stormed through the pantry in search of that elusive wine supply that every parent is practically obligated to have, only to find the usual array of crackers and canned soup.

My mother doesn't drink.

I suppose, if she were a good, kindhearted person, I would have been proud of that. It was something she always made very clear in situations where alcohol was involved, even though it vexed nearly every other adult in the vicinity. I always saw them shifting, ducking their heads, wondering what to do with themselves because my mother's piercing gaze made them feel inexplicably guilty.

But that isn't my point—my point is that my mom has no excuse for the way she behaves. I mean, sure, constant drunkenness is hardly a valid excuse, but at least it provides some kind of reasoning for acting like a crazed maniac. With Mom, there was none of that. It was just her personality; it was the way she acted on a daily basis. Her furious outburst had been unprecedented, but it was hardly outside of the norm.

Sending me to my room for over twelve hours, though—that was a little bit different.

As I sat listlessly on my bed, picking at a loose thread on my comforter and watching trees sway out the window, I tried to make sense of it all. My mother got mad a lot, and ninety-nine percent of the time, it was because of me. But I hadn't done anything this time except ask a simple question. A question which, I remembered, I had never received an answer to.

What had Chief Harding said? What words could have possibly escaped his lips that made my mother so angry?

Drawing Logan's jacket closer around my shoulders, I strained my ears to hear my mother clanging around downstairs. I didn't know what she was doing and I didn't dare check, but it was loud as hell.

It had just passed noon; I'd officially been locked in my bedroom for four hours. And since I'd skipped breakfast and hadn't eaten anything but the Eucharist during mass, my stomach was begging for food—loudly. I had half a mind to storm down the stairs right then and there and demand; that would show my mother to exercise her totalitarian authority on me.

But it would also involve effort, and I didn't feel like getting out of bed.

I tried to watch television, but there was nothing good showing. Not to mention that I was pretty sure my mom blocked half the channels, leaving me with a pretty scarce array of programs. When I couldn't find anything, I made a feeble attempt to finish the Nancy Drew book I'd fallen asleep on the night before. But I just couldn't seem to focus. My mind would hook onto a sentence for a fraction of a halted exhalation—then moments later, the words would twist and bend and spin out of sight in my head.

It was sunny outside. Burnt orange rays crept in through my curtains, but I felt a world apart from their tranquil brightness. My head was loaded with all kinds of messy, cluttered thoughts, and although I could make no sense of them, I knew they revolved around a single focus: the nightmares.

I wasn't sure why everything kept circling back around to those terrible dreams, especially now that I knew what they were. Sure, the experience of sleep paralysis was terrifying, but I knew the facts and the fear factor had decreased significantly. Or at least, I thought it had. So why was I sitting here, gnawing on my bottom lip and clutching that old necklace in my hands?

That was another thing that baffled me: the necklace. Since I'd rediscovered it the previous night, I'd had trouble removing it from my grasp. I was half convinced that the only reason things went so crazy at church was because I hadn't had it with me. Now, slung over my fingers in a mess of faded gold chains, it looked so delicate, so fragile. But at the same time, it exuded this—this aura, an aura of refined importance. And I found that I could not put it down.

I gave up on reading eventually, because my thoughts were crowding out the words on the page. I slid the necklace reluctantly between the pages and stood up, trying and failing to ignore the rumbling of my stomach. Just as I was about to give in and risk punishment to scavenge for food, there was a sharp knock on my bedroom door.

I jumped, startled; my mother hadn't made a sound whilst ascending the stairs, but she made plenty as she hammered against my door, nearly shaking it in its frame. Annoyance flooded through me as I shed Logan's jacket and crossed my sweater-sleeved arms over my chest.

“All right, all right,” I muttered, padding over to the door. “I'm coming, hold on.”

After exhaling my irritation in a silent sigh, I swung it open. My mother stood at the threshold, her hair a surprisingly frizzy mane around her head, with a plate balanced on her hand. The plate, in turn, held a perfectly made grilled cheese sandwich—a rarity, because it was fried and my mother had removed any such foods from our diets. I don't think I'd seen a grilled cheese in months.

But there it was, right in front of me, and the sight of it coupled with its alluring smell was enough to have my weary stomach going crazy. Without really thinking about it, I reached forward, intending to take the plate (which had to have been meant for me) from my mother's hand.

She snatched it away.

“No,” she scolded, as if I was Zipper and not her own daughter. “Not yet.”

I raised my eyebrows. “What?”

She looked down her nose at me, her hazel eyes razor sharp. “I want two Our Fathers and a Hail Mary. Right now.”

“What the hell?” I demanded.

Surprisingly, she didn't even blink at my words. She stood with a weird, rigid determination, her expression flat. “Two Our Fathers. One Hail Mary. Do that, and you get the sandwich.”

I didn't know what kind of jacked-up mind game she was trying to play with me, but my stomach was growling too loudly for me to care. Throwing my hands up in defeat, I turned obligingly to the wall beside my bookcase and folded my hand in prayer.

“Our Father who art in heaven,” I intoned, feeling my mother's eyes on the side of my neck. “Hallowed be thy name.” I finished the prayer, repeated it, all under her scrutinizing gaze.

When I was done with the two Our Fathers, I cleared my throat and began the single Hail Mary. I tried to ignore how weird and random the request was.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus.”

I paused, licked my lips. There was a strange feeling growing in the pit of my stomach.

“Continue,” snapped by mother, knifing through the reverent silence.

“Holy Mary, mother of God, pray—sweet Jesus!”

I halted mid-prayer—my entire midsection was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling equivalent to that of being punched in the stomach by the Hulk. I doubled over, gasping; pain throbbed through my body in a steady, pulsing rhythm. My fingers scrabbled for a place at my jugular, and the pulse I felt was rapid and frantic. It almost seemed to stutter, as if it was just as confused as I was. The invisible wound in my stomach told me that my intestines had just been crushed, but everything seemed intact.

“Well.” The single syllable was all that escaped my mother's mouth, but it effectively reminded me of her presence. I looked up quickly, and she was standing just inside my doorway with one hand on her hip. Her face was impassive, but I thought I caught a quick glimmer of something like concern. It was gone in a heartbeat, however, and she stalked into my room as if she hadn't just seen me practically fall over in pain. She set the plate down on my dresser so that it clinked; I heard the jingle of dog tags as Zipper came hurrying up the stairs.

“There you go,” she said briskly, turning to go. I watched her dumbly for a moment before remembering my obligatory manners.

“Thank y—” I began, raising a hand to stop her. But if she heard, she made no indication, and my door swung in quietly behind her.

◙════════════◙

That night, despite the golden necklace tucked in beneath my pillow, I had another dream. It wasn't a nightmare—at least, it didn't begin as one. Then again, dreams never start from the beginning. So basically, whatever middle section of my dreamworld that I dived into as I slept did not begin as a nightmare.

In fact, it was almost normal.

When I opened my eyes into my mind's fabricated reality, I was disconcerted. I had become so used to darkness, but tonight, there was none. Tonight, there was only soft, gauzy light, pouring in from all the crevices of the space I was in and momentarily blinding me. I wasn't afraid, though; in fact, if anything I found the strange luminescence calming, because it had a certain fuzzy warmth that enveloped my body.

The light faded away after a few precious seconds, and I found myself in a kitchen. I was sitting on the floor by the refrigerator, and there was something soft and plush in my hands, but I couldn't see what it was. The gauziness hadn't faded away completely, and it created an aura of light around the figure of a girl who was perched at the kitchen table. She sat closer to the stove, facing away from it so that my view of her was in profile. I couldn't see her face; that breathy brightness had settled over her features, obscuring them in a hazy cloud.

I looked up at her, and I felt the warmth of a smile shining from her face-cloud and dancing over to me. Something in the way she swung her thin legs and twirled a pencil in her hand made me think that she was young—twelve, maybe thirteen.

“Come here, lovely,” she said sweetly, as I continued to look at her and she smiled back at me. Without meaning to, I pushed myself off the ground, hugging whatever was in my hand to my chest. For some reason, though, I didn't get any taller. The girl still looked impossibly high up from where I stood.

Anxious, I looked down, only to see chubby child fingers clutching a worn teddy bear, and little bare toes scrabbling across the linoleum. Before I could wonder, however, I felt hands under my arms, and then I was being lifted into the air and into the lap of the bigger girl.

“You wanna see what I was drawing?” she asked me, her voice riding ecstatically on air as if sharing a private secret. I felt myself nod, though I'd given my body no consent to do so.

“Here,” said the girl, “take a look.” She shifted me onto her other leg and lifted a sheet of crisp manilla paper from the contrasting dark wood of the table. I leaned forward as she held it closer to my face.

The picture was a figure, a shadow, really, of a girl in a fluttering dress. She lay at the center of the page, her body a darkened silhouette surrounded by a thin veil of white. All around her, glossed in sooty pencil, was a Cimmerian shade that started thin at the edges and became more and more dense as it neared the girl's prone frame. But the closer I examined the drawing, the more it became apparent that the thorough shading wasn't a single texture. Etched throughout it were shapes, humanoid chassis that mixed and blended with the darkness. They hovered around the figure of the girl, just out of sight, their invisible eyes watching her as she slept.

Suddenly terrified by the image, I began to cry.

As fat tears rolled down my cheeks, the girl squeaked and let the paper slip out of her hands and back onto the table. She brushed my hair out of my face, shushing my hiccuping sobs.

“Sh, sweetie, sh,” she murmured, rocking slightly. “It's only a drawing.”

From the living room, a doorway apart from the kitchen, a strangely familiar voice rang out. “Is everything all right in there?”

“Fine!” the girl called, bouncing me anxiously on her knee.

An anguished wail escaped my lips. Footsteps came pattering over, and a moment later, a woman was peeking her head into the room. She, too, had a blurry face, one that undulated every time I tried to set eyes on it. She took one glance at me and rushed over, drawing me into her arms.

“What happened?” she asked gently.

I glanced over my shoulder, sweeping the teddy bear over my wet eyes, as the faceless girl turned her picture so that the woman could see it.

“Nothing!” she cried. “I just showed her my drawing, and...” She trailed off suddenly the woman emitted a quiet gasp, shifting me to her hip and simultaneously swiping the drawing off the table and staring at it in horror.

“No,” she murmured. “No.”

“What?” demanded the girl. “What are you doing?”

“No,” the woman repeated blankly, crumpling the paper in her hand. “No, sweetie, no, no, no.”

The scene shifted suddenly. One moment, I was in the woman's arms, the next I was in a room, in the dark, cocooned beneath blankets in a twin-sized bed that felt impossibly large. I felt like I was waking up as I blinked my way into the scene, but the shadows of the room were foreign—not mine.

Just then, a quiet whimpering drew my attention from the right. I rolled over carefully, so as not to make a sound, and peeked out through the sheaths of plush comforter. The girl from before was lying in a bed not three feet away, her face in shadows her blanket pulled up to her chin. She was shaking, quivering, staring away at something I couldn't see.

“Get back,” I thought I heard her whisper. “Get away from me. You're not real.”

Confused, I looked at the air around her, but I couldn't see whomever she was talking to. At first. Because as I narrowed my eyes, focusing on the white beam of moonlight streaming through the window and onto her face, I thought I saw something.

Just a trick of light, I thought—until it appeared again. A tendril of smokey black; a finger of darkness; a thin, ebony ribbon that crossed through the air in sinister waves. It blocked the moonbeam, snaking in to wrap itself around the girl's neck. And as I continued to watch, it solidified; it became a limb, an arm; it grew a hand with fingers that tightened their grip.

The girl was fighting now, flailing, but there was no breath in her lungs to scream. I wanted to do something, but I was frozen in place by the sheer volume of my fear. The girl's face seemed to be darkening—soon, she would be completely out of air. In moments, she would be dead. But in the culminating moment before she lost consciousness, the darkness let go.

She was thrown back onto her bed, gasping, as the onyx arm drew back and returned to its hazy form. Then, it slithered away from the moonbeam, out of my sight, and I was no longer sure if it was still there.

“Oh, God,” murmured the girl. “Oh, dear God.” Her frantic fingers flashed in the darkness, dusting the sign of the cross onto her skin. She clutched her hands to her chest, folded together in prayer, her ghostly lit lips moving silently and glinting tears tracking paths down her cheeks.

I awoke sometime later in a pool of sweat, my face wet because Zipper was sitting on my chest, licking me. It was still dim outside, but evidently, my mother had already let the dog into the house. The memory of the strange dream was fresh in my mind, crisp like new money, and it only intensified as I caught a whiff of a strong, herbal scent. I couldn't hear any evidence of my mom cooking downstairs—and anyway, nothing she made ever smelled so good. It was piney and spicy, both at once, and it brought back the dream in vivid colors in my mind. And I lay there silently until my mom called me, remembering the image of the faceless girl as she quietly cried herself back to sleep.

◙════════════◙

“You never called me, you know,” Logan said. I jumped slightly at the sound of his voice, looking over to see him snaking his way down the aisle to where I sat. He was carrying too much stuff—his backpack, three textbooks, and two stainless steel coffee mugs. I winced as he stumbled slightly, mentally kicking myself for forgetting.

“I know, I'm sorry,” I apologized softly, “my mom grounded me for the rest of the day.”

Logan's eyes became saucers as he kicked out the chair beside me and dumped his books onto the desk. “Serious? What for?”

I shrugged. “Don't know. She talked to Chief Hummel and got really peeved, and then freaked out when I asked what it was about. She's crazy.”

“Wow,” Logan said, shaking his head. “Are you okay, though? Any nightmares?” He set one of the mugs in front of me, sloshing a little bit onto the cap. “I brought you coffee, just in case you aren't.”

I smiled, allowing myself a small chuckle at my best friend's anxious face. Coffee was strictly prohibited in my household, and since Logan's coffee was the best in the universe, every time he brought it for me was a special occasion. I patted his arm with one hand and pulled the mug closer with the other, utter a sincere, “Thanks, Logan. I'm fine, really. And I didn't have any nightmares last night.” I took a swig of the drink, not minding as it burned my tongue. “You're the best, you know that?”

We chorused on the response: “How can I forget when you keep reminding me?”

His face broke into a relieved smile, and he pulled me in for a one arm hug. “I'm glad you're okay,” he said seriously, sliding in beside me. “By the way, did you do the weekend reading?”

“For this class?” I let out a quiet curse. “Shoot, no—I forgot. Wanna give me a recap?”

Logan slurped his coffee and swallowed loudly before answering. “It was actually super interesting,” he gushed. “It was all about memory, and how different smells can make you remember certain things. It's because the olfactory nerve is close to amygdala, the part of the brain that deals with emotional memory, and it's close to the hippocampus, too. So when you smell things, your brain connects it to visual stuff that happened at the same time when you once smelled the scent. And if the hippocampus or the amygdala are damaged, it can impair your sense of smell, because you won't have a memory of ever smelling things. Isn't that cool?”

Logan was bouncing in his seat, excited by the topic and probably by the coffee as well. He grinned at me, totally placid, but my mind was whirring.

Memory. Smells. I flashed back to that very morning, and the smell that had filled my room and intensified the dream. Could I have experienced something similar, but in reverse?

“Parker?”

I started as Logan leaned his face in front of me, his expression concerned. “Huh?” I stuttered, drawn abruptly from my thoughts.

“Did you hear what I just said?” he asked.

“Y-yeah,” I said, “I did.” I smiled, taking a sip of the hot, sweet coffee. “And I agree—that's totally cool.”

Somehow, I managed to focus through the entire lecture, taking notes on everything Dr. Hennessy said. Psychology was, by far, my favorite subject to study. I loved delving into the human brain, finding the scientific explanations for general human habits. But most of all, I was fascinated by the mind, all its little quirks and oddities, and the way that every person is different because of what's inside their head.

The lecture was on memory, and although I'd missed the reading, I caught on quickly enough. My fingers flew on the keys of my laptop as I drank in every word that left the professor's lips. He discussed forgetfulness, and how, if one does not revisit a memory often, the memory will decay over time. I loved the way he described it: decay. As if memory is a solid, tangible thing that can rot and molder like an orange left too long on the kitchen counter.

The one-and-a-half hour period finished too quickly, and I lingered for a while as everyone packed up around me. It had occurred to me, at some point during the lecture, that if there was anyone to ask about sleep paralysis, it would be Dr. Hennessy. Despite having already received information about it from Dr. Pham, I wanted something less clinical—something more than a mere definition. So, once I'd finished packing my things, I grabbed a daydreaming Logan by the hand and pulled him after me, down the stairs and to the pulpit of the lecture hall.

“What are you doing?” my best friend hissed, trying and failing to slow me down.

“I just have a question,” I replied.

Our footsteps echoed on the cool tile that made up the center floor of the room, but the professor did not look up. He stood at his stone pedestal, shuffling through his notes, pausing every now and then to survey them through bespectacled eyes. It wasn't until I cleared my throat that he even acknowledged us, and even then, all we received was a grunt.

“Excuse me, Mr. Hennessy?” I asked confidently, striding up to the pedestal with my bag slung over one shoulder. He looked up at me, his dark eyes narrowing.

“Don't you have a class to get to?” he asked frigidly, his voice deep and rumbling. I felt Logan shift beside me, but I was unperturbed.

“I have fifteen minutes, sir. I was just wondering if you could answer a quick question for me.”

“Hmph,” was his response.

“I was wondering,” I began, shifting the now-empty coffee mug from hand to hand, “if you know anything about sleep paralysis.”

Silence. Dr. Hennessy froze in place, his papers slipping from his calloused hands.

“What is your name?” he asked abruptly, looking up and peering at me sharply.

I stuttered for a moment before answering, “Parker Elway.”

He nodded. “Well, Ms. Elway,” he intoned, “it appears that today is your lucky day. It just so happens that I wrote my doctorate thesis on sleep paralysis.”

“Really?” I asked, intrigued.

“Indeed,” said Dr. Hennessy, a rare smile spreading a flash of ivory against his umber skin. “In fact, it's one of my favorite subjects.”

“Parker,” Logan hissed. I elbowed him in the stomach, smiling at the professor.

“Well, that's convenient.” I hefted my backpack higher. “I guess that means you know a ton about it.”

The man shrugged, brushing something off the sleeve of his suit. “You could say that. What would you like to know, Ms. Elway?”

I nearly froze, deer-in-headlights style, but at last moment, spat out, “Just anything, really. Some interesting facts, or something.”

Dr. Hennessy clapped his hands together, his face lighting up immediately. He bent down and shuffled through some papers at the bottom shelf of his pedestal before retrieving a fairly thick stack of files.

“This,” he said, waving the papers, “is the part of the phenomenon that interests me the most: the supernatural element of sleep paralysis.”

“Supernatural?” Logan repeated. It was the first thing he'd said, and he sounded blatantly dubious. As was his custom, my best friend was immediately suspicious of anything and everything that bordered on the paranormal.

“Yes, supernatural.” The professor pulled out a single page and held it out to us. Printed on the paper in black and white was a strange, grainy image. It was hard to determine what it was at first, but I quickly realized that it was a person lying down, their head hung back and their arms splayed wildly. On their chest was a demonic-looking creature—a gargoyle-like entity with a demented face and powerful wings sprouting from its back. And beside the demon, with her face in shadows, was a barefooted woman in a long white robe. She watched the sleeper silently, the intensity of her gaze obvious, even through the picture.

“What is that?” I demanded, aghast.

“This,” Dr. Hennessy stated, “is an ancient interpretation of sleep paralysis. Before modern science and psychology were developed, sleep paralysis was seen in many cultures as an example of demonic activity. Cases were reported as being visitations by malignant creatures, and that is how people depicted it.

“This piece isn't one of his, but in the late eighteenth century, an artist named Henry Fuseli created an oil painting interpretation of sleep paralysis called 'The Nightmare'. It was rather to similar to this one; both have this creature on the chest of the human, which is meant to signify the feeling of pressure that people feel when experiencing sleep paralysis.”

I leaned forward, squinting at the picture. “Why that, though? Why such a disgusting-looking...thing?”

The professor chuckled. “Well, it was often believed in many societies that sleep paralysis was caused by an invisible, evil old woman who would sit on people's chests as they slept. Incidentally, it is often called 'old hag syndrome'. But of course, people are people, and we've coined many fascinating terms for sleep paralysis over the years. Some say that experiencing sleep paralysis is being touched by the devil. Many scientists believe that sleep paralysis can account for stories of alien abduction. And then there's the idea of The Intruder, or this woman here, who you can feel watching but can't really see.

“The Intruder, personally, is my favorite, because it is not necessarily connected to sleep paralysis. People often experience the feeling of being watched, or followed—that feeling that they are not alone. And it generally occurs when a person is in a situation that the brain perceives as frightening. A common theory among psychologists, which I personally agree with, is that, because sleep paralysis brings about a feeling of terror, the human mind creates these so-called 'intruders', but whether they are real or not is essentially opinion-based.”

“What do you mean?” Logan scoffed. “Obviously these...things aren't real. Stuff like that doesn't exist. Aren't you a scientist? You're not supposed to believe in this kind of thing.”

I winced at the cutting sound of his voice, but Dr. Hennessy didn't even blink. His dark, bushy eyebrows raised as he shook his head.

“I never said that I believe in it,” he stated. “But the truth is that the phenomenon of sleep paralysis isn't something that science can completely explain. There are still so many blanks; so many unanswered questions that may stay open-ended forever.

“I am a man of science, son. I believe in rational answers whenever they can be provided for me, and if they can't, I am apt to search for them. But in all the years I spent researching sleep paralysis, I was unable to find concrete evidence that every bit of the condition can be demythologized. Many of the things I studied, in fact, bordered more on parapsychology. That's a science—it's a branch of psychology. But it also includes the study of paranormal phenomena. Basically, while I am more inclined to believe in the more logical part of the subject, I know that there are many people who are not. There are plenty of researchers out there who think that the reality of sleep paralysis is demons and devils, intruders and incubi and old hags. And I have no evidence to prove them wrong.”

Dr. Hennessy shrugged lightly, his movement nonchalant. “It's just something to think about,” he said lightly. “Science is not necessarily the answer for everything.”

A quick glance at Logan told me that he disagreed, but my friend held his tongue. He also refused to look at me, and I sighed internally, realizing that he was mad that I'd brought him along with me here. The thing about Logan was that he was extremely logical, and despite being a regular church attender, he privately refused to believe in anything he couldn't see. And I suppose that I could hardly blame him. His mom, Anna, passed away when he was really young, and even though he'd never say it, I knew he thought that if ghosts and spirits and paranormal beings were real, he would have been able to see her again. And since he hadn't, his views on the supernatural were nothing if not cynical.

“Ms. Elway,” our professor continued, jolting me from my thoughts, “if you don't mind me asking, what made you so interested in this subject? It's not a very widely-known study.”

“I-I—” Swallowing hard, I racked my brain for an answer that wouldn't involve my having to tell Dr. Hennessy about my condition. “I saw a piece about it on TV,” I stuttered out eventually. “It was really interesting, and I wanted to find out more about it.”

I dug my nails into my palm, hoping desperately that he wouldn't question further. He didn't. Instead, he scrutinized me thoughtfully, creases forming on the leathery, dark skin of his face.

“Here, take this,” he said after a moment, holding out the file full of papers. “There's plenty of great study material in here if you're interested in the subject.”

I stared at the stack in his hand. “Are you sure, Dr. Hennessy? I don't want to take all your research and, like, lose it or something terrible.”

The professor looked at me down his long, wide nose. “That is why you won't lose it,” he said sternly, “correct?” I nodded reflexively, and he let out an emotionless sigh. “And anyway, a good doctor always makes copies of his files. I wouldn't have much success at my job if I didn't have back-ups for everything.”

He smiled at me, his demeanor so different from the chilly lecturer that he was during class. “Anyway, I really do want you to take these. You can return them to me whenever you're through reading them, whether that be in a week or three years. I like to see such young, eager blood on the front of psychological studies, and it's my job as a teacher to encourage your academic interests. Enjoy the information, learn from it, and emerge a wiser person at the other end.”

My hand was practically shaking as I gently removed the file from my teacher's hand. It was over an inch thick, and so full of papers that it actually weighed my arms down. I grinned down at the package, excited by all the potential learning material stuffed inside of it. What had begun as a simple question about a sleeping disorder had quickly piqued my interest, and I was quickly finding myself become just as interested in sleep paralysis as Dr. Hennessy.

“Thank you, sir,” I said, thoroughly awed.

“You're welcome, Ms. Elway,” he said. He nodded stiffly, and, as if someone had flipped a switch, his face became impassive again, and he turned back to his notes. Over his shoulder, I saw that more students were filing into the hall; it was nearly time for his next lecture. The clock on the wall told me that my next period was fast approaching as well. I had a good two minutes to run across campus to my 11:15 criminology class, a trek that usually took at least five. Logan, the lucky duck, looked distinctly more relaxed; his watercolors class wouldn't begin for another quarter of an hour.

Swallowing a series of expletives, I beckoned to Logan and took off across the pulpit, trying my best to hurry without looking like I was running. About halfway to the door, Dr. Hennessy's voice stopped me in my tracks.

“Oh, and Ms. Elway?” I glanced over my shoulder, but he hadn't turned from his pedestal. “If you are so inclined, you might consider looking into the parapsychology classes offered here at Butler. I have a feeling that they might interest you.”

“Yeah,” I replied in a normal tone. “I'll do that, thank you.”

Then I turned and skittered over to Logan, who was standing in the doorway and looking very displeased. “I hope you're happy,” he snapped, huffing a white puff of breath into the cold morning air.

I rolled my eyes as we sped down the sidewalk, knowing he'd cool off within an hour. “I'm very happy, thanks,” I replied dryly.

And I was. I wasn't sure why, exactly, but learning more about the nightmares, though they had only haunted me twice, made me feel like I had some power over them. Not to mention that all the new information was brimming in my brain, easily wiping the memory of the previous night's dream and the strange scent I'd detected upon waking. I found that I couldn't wait to return home and pore over the papers, and I knew that Logan would be soon be interested too.

I was five minutes late to my next class, and I didn't even care.

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A/N: I got a hundred percent on my speech about sleep paralysis and my teacher said she loved how it was written :D

andhalfofwhatiwroteinitwasjuststufffromthisstorylol

thanks for all your comments btw guys, i love reading them eventhoughi'mlazyanddon'trespondcough