Chapter 5- Home, where my love lies waiting
"Brrrrrtttt"
Oh thank god I thought, as I felt the furry face smashing into mine. I reached out to grab the cat and held onto him, scratching him above the tail. Krom purred at me. After a minute, he'd had enough and squeezed himself out of my grip and back onto the coffee table to stare at me. I checked my phone, it was after 10pm. I had missed my alarm, Amy would be home soon and I really needed to talk to her. Baloo had jumped onto the couch behind me and started bapping at my head, I was surrounded. I grabbed at him to pull him in for a hug, and he latched onto my arm. It fucking hurt. My left arm felt sunburned, and the skin was raised like I had been stung by bees. I sat Baloo down easy, trying not to freak out so I wouldn't get sliced up.
I stood up, too quickly, nearly losing my balance and falling over. I caught myself on the table. I paused for a moment, I felt different. I ran my hands over myself and took visual inventory to be sure. I was a little bit lighter than I had been when I went to sleep. I moved to the bathroom to confirm. No crackling ankles, no rusty knee, no shoulder pain. I looked different, felt younger. My left arm throbbed again. It looked an angry red and swollen, with welts from the elbow to my knuckles. I applied some aloe with lidocaine and wrapped it in gauze; that relieved the burning. I took another minute to look over my appearance, not in the greatest shape, but I had to have lost 15 pounds in 3 hours. I wondered at how that could work. Reality is malleable, I thought, remembering some grand insight I thought I'd had while I was reading Cosmos in highschool. Maybe I had been right.
I left bathroom and nearly tripped over the gray boys, who were stretched out in front of the door. "Okay," I laughed, "I hear you. I'm on it." I prepared dinner for the dynamic duo and checked my phone for messages. Nothing new. It was difficult to grasp that it hadn't been that long since I last checked. I was even still high from earlier today.
I tried looking up information on encountering entities while dreaming, but it was pretty much all sleep paralysis experiences that didn't seem related to what was happening to me. At least on the surface. Thinking about it more, and recalling what my own sleep paralysis episodes had been like, I did wonder if that could be a result of the mind becoming aware of an intruder and trying to sound the alarm. Maybe the race of dream feeding aliens were solely responsible for that phenomenon. Either way, I didn't find anything explicitly helpful, so I played with the cats until Amy got home.
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I ambushed her at the door with a huge hug. "I missed you too," she laughed, "can I get in the door and set my stuff down first?"I helped her with her bags and got a look at me, "what happened to your arm? You don't look like yourself-""-I know, I know," I said, "I have a lot of stuff to tell you about, but I'm starving and I feel like I haven't been home in forever."
Amy had brought home some food from work. I destroyed the buffalo chicken pasta while I told her everything that had been happening. She listened patiently, and asked questions when I'd get ahead of myself, keeping me on point. "And yeah, I know that sounds crazy, but I mean..." I gestured at my now unwrapped arm, and then at the rest of me. "So, I don't know what else to do besides go along with it.""It sounds awesome, but yeah, I'd think you were crazy without some evidence" she said. I could tell she was thinking about how I still might be crazy, and trying to come up with other explanations for the physical changes."It was awesome at first, and it's not bad when it's happening...mostly" I told her, suddenly thinking about the dead men, "but I'm pretty sure other real people are starting to drop in. Are they in my head or does it exist as its own place now?" I went on, "Plus, I'm afraid of being awake for too long because while I'm here, I'm vulnerable there.""Yeah, when you put it like that, I see what you mean," she said. She was quiet for a moment, thinking, "Okay, from what you're saying, there is a bleed through effect happening, and it feels pretty much the same, being in either place, right? Can you do magic here then?"I just stared at her. It hadn't occurred to me to try."Whatever is happening there," she nodded at my arm, "is affecting things here, and maybe the only way through it is to actually get through it, but maybe it doesn't have to be all bad?"
We must have sat on the bed in the dark for hours, cats running amok around us. After few minutes of concentrating, I had been able to produce a dim mote of light. By the end, I had managed to conjure all three, and Amy had added a single flickering orb of her own. Just by walking through the process, asking questions, step by step, "how does the air feel when you do this? Is there any internal sensation when you do that?" Amy was able to replicate the effects of the light spell. And like that, we had something good.
The cats chased the orbs out of the bedroom, the door closing behind them.