Chapter 12
“We’re all very impressed,” said a low voice in the darkness. It laughed. “Well. Strictly speaking, some of us are annoyed.”
At first, the voice itself filled Hazel’s awareness, though she was still too close to unconsciousness to make out many details.
Then she realized that she was lying down on her side and the room was dark, which meant she had to be dreaming, since there was no way in hell she’d have turned the light out.
She’d fallen asleep.
If the hand was still outside her door, she’d be helpless.
As her muscles tensed with alarm, a hand came down lightly on her shoulder. “It’s gone,” said the voice. “Those tricks take too much strength to keep going.”
For some reason, Hazel believed it, even though she had no idea who was talking.
She started to turn over for a better look, but she couldn’t quite manage to move.
“Best not,” the voice said, and Hazel felt slim fingers slide up her neck, stroking her hair back behind her ear.
“I’ve no intention of hurting you. Not here and now. ”
That was very specific, she thought, but she didn’t feel half the fear she should have. She supposed it was a dream thing.
Her visitor perched on the side of her bed behind her, a solid presence that also could have been menacing but was ridiculously comforting instead.
She heard a quiet tsk. “Such a waste, really. Nobody expected you to be doing so well for this long. I confess I’m eager to see your next move.
” Their fingers moved down, tracing the line of her jaw around to her chin and leaving a train of tingling warmth.
Hazel caught her breath at the feeling, then widened her eyes in shock when it rippled downward, tightening her nipples and pooling between her legs.
Am I really getting turned on by my sleep paralysis demon?
She didn’t know if that was the correct designation, but turned on was accurate. Now she felt the soft fabric of her nightshirt brushing against her breasts with every inhalation. The seam of her boxers made itself known as well, a light pressure that she still couldn’t ignore.
“Oh,” said the stranger. Their voice deepened, surprised and amused, and they stroked their thumb down her throat to her collarbone. “Is that the state you’re in?”
If Hazel had been able to speak, she might have tried denial, but she doubted it would have done any good. Not when her breathing had hitched again at the thought and her thighs had squeezed together. Apparently she could move just enough to embarrass herself.
“You are a surprising creature.” The visitor’s fingers traveled lower, across the upper slope of Hazel’s breast, then brushed over the rigid peak pushing at her shirt. Melting pleasure spread out just from the faint contact, and she felt a sudden rush of dampness against that agitating boxer seam.
The stranger cupped her breast more firmly, circling her nipple with their thumb. “And a very responsive one.” The bed shifted under them as they bent down, breath hot against her ear. “Even when you’re helpless. Or perhaps, especially.”
It seemed like the moment for a witty answer, but she couldn’t think of one.
She couldn’t even think of an answer. Her brief forays into kink had been fun, but nowhere near as overwhelming.
Then again, her near-immobility under the stranger’s touch went way beyond padded handcuffs, well past what would be reasonable or safe outside her own dreams.
All she knew was that she needed more.
“Then again,” her visitor murmured, as their hand continued its tantalizing work, “how helpless are you, really? You might not be as…active…as normal, but I suspect you could let me know if you truly wanted me to stop. Am I wrong?”
Naturally, she couldn’t reply one way or another, and low laughter winged out into the darkness. The stranger pinched her nipple very lightly. “Let’s see. I already know that you can move a bit. I’d know even if you weren’t trying to rub yourself against your own clothing, poor tormented creature.”
Hazel’s face went hot clear to her ears. That didn’t stop another rush of moisture at her core, though, or another involuntary, minute rock of her hips.
“So, then. I’ll count to five. If you make no effort to turn over, I’ll cease my attentions. If you try, I’ll go on. I’d like a more extensive canvas, anyhow.” The visitor spoke with utter confidence. Their hand went still on her breast for just a moment. “One.”
She sucked in a breath.
“Two.”
Unfulfilled desire broke through her paralysis, whatever it was.
Before the stranger could get to three, Hazel was throwing herself over onto her back, the motion about as graceful as a fish in a bucket.
She didn’t care. All that mattered was that she was on her back, she’d given the signal, and now she was spread out for the stranger’s pleasure and her own.
As they laughed again, she tilted her head back, looked up…
…and met a pair of glowing red eyes.
* * *
Hazel snapped awake to midmorning light flooding the room, the knife clutched in her hand, and her entire body aching with lust.
“That didn’t happen,” she told the empty room.
She didn’t mean the hand. The hand had been terrifying, but she didn’t have the luxury of denial. Dreams where she eagerly offered herself to the red-eyed thing outside her window, who might very well have been the demon she’d stabbed…oh, denial seemed like a very appropriate solution.
Although it would have taken about a minute and a half to get herself off, Hazel got out of bed quickly.
The thought of seeing those red eyes when she climaxed was alarming.
It wasn’t just alarming, which worried her even more, and she propelled herself into a cold shower in the hopes of killing off both the memory and the lust.
Sex dreams were always weird, she told herself, and they almost never meant much.
The red-eyed figure and what they represented were on her mind.
Her subconscious was trying to make the entity less threatening by putting it in an erotic context.
Furthermore, she should probably try less pepperoni on her frozen pizza for a while.
And she really, really needed to get out of the house.
* * *
Hazel had circled around Dawsonville proper on her moving day, respecting the need for twenty-mile-an-hour speed limits and stoplights every four blocks but not particularly wanting to deal with either.
From the highway, she’d gotten a glimpse of low, square buildings made of red brick and gray concrete.
An internet search had told her a little more. There wasn’t very much.
Downtown Dawsonville amounted to a pair of crisscrossing streets.
One side held four churches, a restaurant, and a funeral home.
The other had a Rite Aid, a McDonald’s, and a Starbucks, with an elementary-middle school a few blocks down.
Local offices, a few more stores, and a small apartment complex filled in the rest, and a two-story concrete building near the intersection held city hall, the courthouse, the post office, and the local library.
Hazel entered it in the early afternoon, two bags of cleaning supplies and a few other essentials in the back of her car, and thought that most government buildings smelled similar. It might be the combination of wood polish and stamp glue, or civics itself might have an odor. She wasn’t sure.
She was a skosh punchy, both from nerves after the night’s events and from the surprising oddness of being around people again.
There’d only been two other shoppers in Rite Aid, plus the cashier and a guy stocking potato chips, and Hazel had still felt their presence.
The feeling reminded her of the first few weeks after lockdown, but then everybody had been readjusting. This time it was only her.
Another difference from the first days out of lockdown: Public places were safer now, at least for a time.
The presence of many living people, all strengthening the physical and influencing the ethereal in often contradictory ways, reinforced the barrier between worlds.
It was why ghosts rarely appeared to large groups, and it gave Hazel a temporary reprieve.
Eventually her condition would overcome any resistance, with horrible results, but she had a couple hours of freedom.
The library was basically one room, though a row of computer desks divided it in half. Long shelves on one end held nonfiction, adult novels marched along the shelves on the other end, and kids’ books occupied a corner. A couple spinning racks up front offered mystery and romance paperbacks.
As Hazel had sort of expected for a Wednesday afternoon before school let out, the library was pretty empty. When she stepped in, nervous for no real reason other than unfamiliarity, the noise of the closing door made the librarian look up from their paperwork.
They were probably in their mid-twenties or so, since they looked about fifteen to Hazel, and tall.
A lock of purple in their blond hair probably had gotten them into a few arguments, unless Dawsonville was more liberal than some of the flags Hazel had seen suggested. Their name tag said Jess, they/them.
“I’d like to get a card,” said Hazel, once she and Jess had completed the initial pleasantries. “I’d like to look up a few books, too, but first things first.”
The ethereal didn’t have a Wiki entry or a textbook, she’d told Stephanie, and that was true.
Nobody that Hazel knew of had developed any comprehensive guide to the other side or the creatures there.
People had written down information, though.
It came in dribs and drabs, and it often took effort to sort out the real data from the bullshit, but Hazel had learned from a few texts and knew the names of others.
Learning, and learning about subjects that had been low on her priority list before, had become much more important over the last few days.
Jess picked up the form Hazel passed them, started to enter the information into the computer behind their desk, and then glanced back in Hazel’s direction. “Forty-five Statton—that’s the third house after the Sunoco station?”
“Fourth, I think,” said Hazel. The librarian’s description called to mind a string of neat suburban homes with no more lawn than would hold a Playskool tree house out back, easily contained and countable.
Statton Road’s few other houses were in better shape than hers, and so was the land they were on, but there was a lot of land between each of them, and the distances were irregular.
Even a careful observer could have miscounted on the drive. “Kind of green, gray roof.”
“Yeah. You’ve taken on a job there.” Jess shook their head. Despite the purple hair and the mismatched earrings, the impressed-yet-doubtful expression on their face would’ve looked normal on their grandfather. Hazel almost expected them to say whoo-ee next.
“You know the place, huh?”
“Every teenager around here knows it. Or did. I don’t think people went inside much, but it was a good place to, you know, drive out to.”
“I hope I haven’t disrupted anybody’s love life too badly,”
Jess laughed quietly. “I think they’ll adapt. And I’m sorry if I’ve just dumped a bunch of TMI on you. Seeing the address just brought back a lot of memories.”
“Oh, no. It’s good to hear more about the place, actually. I’m guessing nobody’s lived there for a while?”
“Not in ages. I think—” Jess tapped at their upper lip. “I kind of remember people selling produce and firewood out there when I was real little. But I might be remembering wrong. Hey, Kathy?”
They didn’t raise their voice very much, but an older woman turned from where she’d been restacking the fiction section. “Mm-hmm?”
“Do you remember anything about 45 Statton?”
Kathy left her trolley and came over, taking Hazel’s measure with bright brown eyes on the way.
“Statton…well, nothing dramatic, if that’s what you’re wondering.
The Whitlakes used to live there. I think they sold it and moved up to be with their daughter’s family in New York, but that would’ve been, oh, in the nineties.
It’s just not exactly prime real estate. ”
“I wouldn’t have been able to buy it if it were,” said Hazel.
“Oh, did you?” Kathy took another look at Hazel. Her glasses had bright blue frames, Hazel noticed, that almost matched the bluebird on her T-shirt. “You’ve signed up for some work.”
“I’m getting that impression. Nothing dramatic in the past, though, you said?”
“Every family is dramatic in its own way. Happy or not,” said Jess, who had propped themself on their elbows and leaned forward to more fully involve themself in the conversation.
Kathy rolled her eyes affectionately. “I can’t say much more than Tolstoy here,” she admitted.
“I babysat for them a few times when I was a girl, but that was back in the sixties, and it’s not as though people really confide in the sitter.
They seemed nice. Their second son died in Vietnam, and of course that was awful, but it wasn’t really rare back then either.
And they never had very much, but that wasn’t rare either. Still isn’t, sadly.”
“No,” said Hazel, thinking of the houses she’d driven past. For every solid-looking farmhouse or neat little prefab, she’d seen a wreck almost as bad as the one she’d bought, with peeling walls or a sagging roof or both.
Most had cars parked out front, a few in the yard.
“It’s not a big deal, really. I was just curious. ”
“There’s a lot of history around here,” said Kathy, “but none of it’s the kind they make movies about. Thank goodness.”