I’d dream about Sarah dropping her phone, she’d shatter her screen a few days later. Dream about her firing a coworker before hearing about it over dinner. Small, insignificant things that I thought just meant we were close. Everyone has weird premonitions about family and loved ones. I have family that are into New Age/supernatural stuff and suggested we had a “soul tie” that expressed itself as premonitions. Too bad I couldn’t premonit(?) her dumping we. We stayed friends, it was good, but the Dreams kept going, too. Dreams about crashing her car, breaking her arm, her grandmother passing away. All happened. I decided to write these things out of me instead of constantly stressing and being a toxic person, “checking in” on her.
I probably wrote one Dream in my journal ten, twenty times before it manifested. Sarah’s watching TV on the couch in her apartment. This living shadow, like a man shaped tornado of embers and ash, appears next to her. It pulls ‘the move’ on her, wrapping its appendage around her and dragging her in tight. She sighs happily. Then she starts to fade like fog on a window. I can see more and more of the pattern on the couch behind her. She tries to stand up, but the Thing forces her back down. It gets darker and more defined as she fades away. She breaks free and screams for help, but it grabs her. Her eyes erupt in embers and scarlet flames erupt through her translucent form, spilling out of her mouth, burning and cracking her cheeks and lips. She burns. Painfully. Slowly. Blisters forming all over her body, popping into jets of dark red flame. Her skin boils off of her. Chunks fall off completely, letting her boiling fat ooze out from underneath. Something changes in her stance. The fire flares and she shrinks in, bending at the knees, her elbow retracting, shoulders back. She looks like she’s going to fight someone as she dies. The Shadow claws playfully at her as my friend burns from the inside. It catches her ashes like snowflakes. It rolls in her fluids, rubs the ash on what counts as a face. It starts grasping at her remains faster and faster, overturning furniture and scraping the ash off furniture to get more of the stuff. It sinks to its knees, clawing apart pieces of the rug as Sarah ends.
When it has the carpet out of the way, it draws what looks like a magic circle, like Full Metal Alchemist or Dr. Strange or something, on the concrete beneath the padding. Then it looks at me. Every other Dream, I’m just a bystander, third person, like playing a video game. The demon knows I’m there. It opens what counts for a mouth and spits a tongue of flame at my eyes. I feel heat and wake up gasping for breath. Sometimes I scream. Once or twice, I cried. It’s absolutely ridiculous and not like the other Dreams, so there’s obviously no way it’s real. But I still felt in my heart, it meant something.
Symbolically, I was right. Five months later, an arsonist torched half her apartment building. She was unaccounted for. A little part of me died when her mom, Karen, called and told me. Offered to let me be a pallbearer, because we had ‘such a beautiful friendship’. They let me sit with them, in the first pew at the funeral home. Right beside her new boyfriend, Sam. He was a manager at a small, family-owned grocery store, and was regularly rude to me when we’d bump into each other, even before dating my ex. Now, he seems to hate my fucking guts. Won’t make eye contact, won’t speak to me. He snatched Elliot, Sarah’s youngest brother in kindergarten, right out of my lap when the kid clambered onto me, crying. The service was beautiful, though. Closed casket. Lillies.
Three weeks ago, I Dreamt of Sam. It’s dark at the cemetery. The moon’s new, dark, and a heavy fog is trying its best to choke out the light from the lampposts around the graveyard. Sam glances around before pulling the hood of his jacket over his head as he approaches Sarah’s plot. He kneels at the edge, whispering something as he unloads his backpack. He dumps a long knife, a weird oblong triangle with a stick on the end, a black slab of glass that shines brightly despite the darkness, a bottle of ash, and a bundle of hair onto the grass. The triangle thing turns into a shovel when he pulls the stick on the back and makes sure the head is tight against the extendable pole. It doesn’t move past a foot.
“Fucking cheap Amazon bullshit,” After a few minutes of playing with the survival shovel and cutting himself on the serrated edge, Sam gives up and grabs the knife. He cuts a larger slash across his palm and flicks the blood across the grave. Whispers something I can’t understand and locks his fingers together. Sarah’s plot changes. I don’t know what to call it other than quickdirt. It’s fluid, but still packed earth and the sparse grass that’s grown over the month she’s been buried. You can see it ripple as the wind blows across it. Something moves under the not-water. Sam murmurs again and the thing shoots out like a dolphin breaching.
Sam claps his hands together just before her casket hits the ground, and the quickdirt becomes earth again. He takes the glass, scratches something into it with his knife, and pops open the lid. I want to wake up. I don’t want to see her like this. I want to remember her as Sarah, not an arson victim featured on the nightly news. But I can’t control what I’m watching. So I’m forced to see Sam open her mouth, ignoring the bits of charred skin flaking off her jaw and lips, and stick the black stone between her teeth. He curses to himself, takes back the stone and dumps the bottle of ash on it, mixing it with bits of the hair, chanting again in that strange language. The stone glows brighter. He shoves it back in her mouth, smears blood across her lips, and speaks louder. Birds are screeching in the trees. Stray cats and dogs hissing and yowling at the top of their lungs. Then she moves.
It’s not the shambling, graceless movement we see on TV. Sarah’s zombie wobbles like a child. Arms limp at her sides, pushing forward with her head, having to turn and look in a direction before moving in it. She tumbles out of her coffin, landing hard on her hip, which breaks with a sickening crack. She screams around the stone, which she can’t seem to get out of her mouth. Sam pulls her to her feet and pushes her back, clearing his throat and wiping his hands on his pants.
“Find that voyeur fuck.” He tosses a thin black robe over her, then a rain jacket over that. She clambers away. Looks more like a lost drunk than a reanimated corpse. My viewpoint turns to watch her leave, but something happens. She shifts, and she’s My Sarah again. Healthy. Alive. Crying. Scratching manically at black chains on her wrists, coiling up to her chest, They’re the same as that stone. Some weird glow-y black with little symbols etched on them. She looks at me and runs. The dream shifts.
I’m outside my own apartment. She’s there, scratching letters into the frame. Sarah moves to the door knob, turning it slowly. Powerfully. The cheap metal creaks as she dents it, attempting to break it off. Something primal goes off in me and I scream. Sarah startles, grips her head and bites down hard on the stone in her mouth. She runs.
I thought it was just an insane dream. Survivor’s guilt combining with my dislike of her boyfriend or something like that. But then the landlord called, absolutely pissed, asking who I’m “in with”. Said he didn’t want any trouble in the complex and if I was running with a gang or a cult or something, I needed to leave now. I didn’t get it at first. Reassured him I wasn’t part of any social gatherings aside from weekly Magic. Then I went to work. Saw the weird runes carved into my door and the long scratches in the wall leading towards it. Felt the contour of her fingers pressed into the metal of my door knob. I haven’t Dreamt of Sam or Sarah since then.
I’ve also not stopped researching since then. Gotta find some way to kill a necromancer, or protect myself from him and break the soul tie, or figure out what the hell a soul tie actually is and then go fight a death wizard, or kill my door and break a death wizard and fix a soul tie and I can’t think straight. I haven’t sleep in four days. Constantly worried about what’s happening to her each night, driving myself crazy thinking I’ll have another dream about her. And maybe find a different apartment.