Chapter Four
I don’t move until I know Logan’s back in the living room. I can hear the couch sigh a little when he sits on it. Only then
do I leap up from the bed and strip off the blankets. I don’t want to find evidence of mice, but I have to know.
Once I’m sure the bed is clear—it even smells clean, which feels like an actual miracle right now—I open my suitcase and begin to pull out everything required for my nighttime
ritual.
My skincare routine, which I unpack in the bathroom I can barely squeeze into. The vanity, toilet, and bath are so crowded
together, it’s a wonder anyone could use any of them. I go through the calming twelve steps my therapist and I devised for
centering purposes as well as beauty routine—because a girl has layers even when she’s not right in the head—then consider
myself in the dusty mirror.
“I am calm. I am peaceful. I will sleep calm and peacefully.” It’s my bedtime mantra, and it serves me well.
Some people have emotional support animals.
Mantras are more versatile and don’t require care and feeding.
I repeat it silently in my head as I go back out to the bedroom.
I replace the pillowcases on the bed with my lavender-scented ones.
I am calm. I am peaceful. I will sleep calm and peacefully.
I consider a sleeping pill, the last step in the ritual. Normally, it would be a no-brainer, but I don’t like the idea of
being at all fuzzy in this strange, new place. With danger lurking in every shadow and that choking darkness outside, complete
with a sinister clock tower.
Maybe it’s not real danger—maybe it’s all in my head like it always is—but I’ve never been able to convince myself of things I know are real
when I’m feeling like this.
I remake the bed and climb into it, the scratchy blankets surprisingly warm with a pleasant weight. My nose is cold, but I
am exhausted—
And I must fall asleep quickly, because the next thing I know I’m awake.
But not in the house.
A dream. It’s a dream.
I’m walking up a street—and it looks just like the street we drove down tonight with the narrow, watching houses and the suffocating
dark—toward the clock tower.
The clock beams like a beacon and I am helpless to do anything but walk toward it. Barefoot and cold.
So cold.
I can’t tear my eyes away from the clock tower, and sure enough, with a terrible sense of inevitability and horror, the first
crack appears in the smooth side of the tall column.
Followed by a quiet snick that has me flinching, even as I walk.
I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do this. I’m trying to say it out loud, but I can’t. I can only walk on toward my doom.
And I know that’s what’s waiting for me, because I have had this dream before.
This is the same dream that plagued me as a child, night after night, until my father got me professional help. Until I developed the routine.
There’s another crack, a louder noise. The tower is crumbling from the middle out, and I feel frozen solid—though still compelled
to keep walking—as the first wisp of a glossy, sickening blackness slithers out into the night.
One-two-three, everything is fine. One-two-three, your imagination can’t hurt you.
My throat aches with all the screams I can’t get out.
My chest hurts from all the sobs trapped inside.
Trying to breathe is not helping. I have no choice, so I watch that blackness. And as I do, slimy and unavoidable, the dark in the crack of the tower has eyes.
And I know they’re looking right at me.
Then there are millions of them, pouring out and slithering into the waiting, welcoming dark. For a moment, there’s only that
slithery sound that I almost want to convince myself is the wind in the trees, but I know better.
How I wish I didn’t know better.
And then it starts. Terrible, sickening sucking sounds. I hear distant screams.
They’re feeding.
And I almost think I know exactly what they’re feeding on, so horrible that it makes my stomach twist and my gorge rise—
“Lex.”
It’s Logan’s voice.
I manage to tear my gaze away from the tower, but everything behind me is black. Just black. Maybe I am filled with that same
blackness, too, like a poison—
I feel Logan’s hands on my shoulders. My eyes blink open, though I didn’t think they were closed, and I’m surrounded by soft
light from a round, hand-painted lamp. I’m in a warm room.
I’m disoriented.
I’ve woken up from the nightmare, hallelujah, but . . . I’m not in bed. I’m also not standing under a crumbling clock tower, so that’s a win. But I am standing in the
middle of an unfamiliar living room, not at all sure how I got here.
I look at Logan and actually see him this time. His expression is grim.
That is most assuredly not a win. Not on my sunshiney brother.
“Great,” I manage to get out, past my thick and scratchy throat. “One night in a flyover state and I’m sleepwalking.”
That’s the worst of it, I tell myself.
Even though I know better. Because I know full well that I’ve dreamed of that clock tower before, and more than once.
Long before we arrived in Iowa.