Chapter Twenty-Three

Scriiiiiiiitch.

I wake with a gasp, the sound of it a panicked hiss slicing through the remnants of The Dream. My eyes snap open to the soft light of dawn creeping across the ceiling. Under normal circumstances, the sight of daylight would bring at least a small amount of comfort.

Not now.

Not as my brain echoes with the noise of The Dream.

Which, alarmingly, was slightly different from every other time I've had it.

The Dream 2.0.

Rather than being hit with a brief glimpse of peaked tent ceiling above me and still-full sleeping bag beside me and long, dark gash running between us, this new, unimproved version gave me a longer look at all of it. Especially the sliced tent wall and the slash of darkness beyond it in which something is usually sensed but never glimpsed.

This time, though, I saw something.

What it was, I don't know. It was too quick, too hazy. A blur in the dark impossible to make out. But that mere glimpse is enough to unsettle me in ways I'm not used to. My heart continues to drum in my chest as I sit up, stretch, blink against the brightening sun still crawling over the ceiling.

I check the time. Quarter past seven. Too early to get up, too late to go back to sleep. Which makes it the perfect time to write about the new version of The Dream in my notebook. If, God forbid, I ever have it again, I'll have a record of when it started. Still unknown: why it started.

Still groggy, I reach across the nightstand, seeking out the notebook and my pen.

They're not there, even though I'm certain they were on the nightstand when I went to sleep. I distinctly remember writing in the notebook before turning off the light, summarizing the night's events in four succinct words.

Billy has a grudge.

But now both the pen and notebook are gone, making the nightstand seem vast and empty without them.

Panic hitches in my chest, making my still-thrumming heart beat even faster. I tell myself to stay calm. That there's a perfectly logical reason they aren't where I left them, even if that reason is something ridiculous, like sleepwalking. It certainly isn't burglary. Why would someone break in and only steal a notebook and a pen?

The answer, immediate and obvious, is that this possibly hypothetical burglar took more than my pen and my notebook. They also could have taken my wallet, my phone, anything else of value that's not nailed down. I picture the rest of the house, already sparsely furnished, now completely empty, one bare room leading into another.

The image is enough to propel me out of bed—and I instantly step on something on the floor next to it. Looking down, I see one bare foot atop a corner of the notebook. The big toe of my other foot brushes the pen.

I grab them both off the carpet, my panic evaporating. Replacing it is another emotion: embarrassment at my foolishness. Clearly, I knocked the notebook and pen off the nightstand at some point, probably in a fit of sleeplessness now forgotten.

There was no intruder.

I immediately overreacted. Again.

I open the notebook and flip through the pages, seeing similar overreactions scribbled down in the prior months. Stuff about being afraid to sleep, of being equally afraid that I won't sleep, of feeling lonely or sad or guilty. It's my fault, one entry reads, although I can't remember which transgression I was writing about. Maybe all of them.

I turn to the last entry in the notebook—and my fear comes roaring back. I think of the volume dial on a radio, ticking higher. If my earlier panic was at a seven, this renewed alarm is a nine, spinning perilously close to a ten.

Because on the page in front of me, scrawled in handwriting not my own, are three words as terrifying as they are familiar.

HAKUNA MATATA DUDE