Insomnia

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

Insomnia
© 2013 by J. R. Johansson.

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First e-book edition © 2013

E-book ISBN: 9780738737386

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Cover design by Lisa Novak
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To Ande, Cameron, and Parker—
thank you for making all my best dreams come true.

one

It had been over four years since I’d really slept, and I suspected it was killing me.

Tonight, finding someone other than Mr. Flint to make eye contact with before going to bed seemed like more work than it was worth. Besides, he was just an old man, the janitor of the Oakville Library. I’d seen the dreams of men like him before. The most exciting part was usually the new lawn mower they were using.

The instant his dream began, though, I knew I’d been dead wrong. This man was nothing like the others.

A woman sprawled across a bed with one thin arm thrown over her eyes, her jeans tattered at the bottom from dragging on the ground. Her white tank top was tugged up on one side, leaving her stomach bare, exposed. I thought she was pretty hot until I noticed the wrinkles around her mouth, the ring on her finger, and the clusters of gray hairs along her hairline. I groaned under my breath; sexy mom dreams are really not my thing.

The scene froze before me for a moment and I looked around. The walls were light green; there were tiny pink and blue flowers on the sheets. I heard the thunder before the smell of damp wood and perfume filled my nostrils. Each sense came like a wave, crashing over me.

Rain fell through the open window, pooling on the cedar chest below. The heavy green drapes rustled as they framed the darkness outside.

I knew I’d see Mr. Flint soon. The dreamer always showed up last, like the brain had to build the scene before thrusting the dreamer into it. It had taken me a long time to figure out even a basic knowledge of the way dreams worked. I didn’t think I’d ever understand it all. I’d tried for months before I realized that no dreamers could see me. Even when I stood right in front of them and screamed at the top of my lungs—they never knew I was there.

Kind of ironic that I knew so much about people’s dreams considering I never slept. Well, my body did, but my brain … not so much. The world of my dreams was no longer mine. It was forbidden and distant. I was just the guy that watched, a passive observer in the minds of others, seeing what they saw, feeling what they felt. I knew their dreams like I knew my own skin.

One thing I’d learned pretty fast was that all dreams had layers. Like the brain got too bored constructing only one dream at a time. There was always more going on under the surface. My brain tended to drop me in the layer closest to reality. At least, that was my best guess. I didn’t
know for sure, but it was the only explanation I could come up with for why I often saw fantasies and memories instead of the alternative. I still saw the bizarre stuff, but it was less frequent. Judging from the lack of leprechauns or talking furniture around me now, this dream was just another demonstration of that fact. I didn’t get the subtext, the metaphors; I got the real thing.

The thunder sounded again and I sighed, waiting for him to appear. I could already tell that Mr. Flint’s dream was a memory, and I just wanted to get it over with. I didn’t like watching memories. Somehow it felt even more intrusive than watching fantasies. Everything in a memory was crystal clear, with very little of the haziness that literally hovered over other dreams I saw. After years of watching, I knew this level of focus, of detail, could mean only one thing. This wasn’t a creation of Mr. Flint’s mind; this was his life. His brain’s twisted analysis of his past thickened the air around me, like a million observations given at once.

And then I saw him, in the doorway watching her. When his emotions hit, they crushed me, knocked the wind out of me. The janitor’s desperate, churning passions swept me in wave upon wave of sadness, anger, and betrayal. Each one hit stronger than the last until the pain eclipsed them all, unbearable yet unchanging. Pain was life now. No hope remained. The pain smothered it along with everything else that reeked of happier times.

I crouched, clutching my side and panting. I knew better.

The room was charged with an inexplicable energy as the physical pain faded in the shade of more ominous emotions: hatred, combined with blood-pumping adrenaline, turned into the purest kind of rage I’d ever experienced.

I clawed at the ground as Mr. Flint’s fury ripped through me. His need to destroy, to make someone hurt the way he did, overwhelmed me.

As he approached the bed, something glinted in his hand. I narrowed my eyes for a closer look. He clutched a shining silver letter opener with a navy handle. Combined with the grim intent on his face, I’d never seen a more lethal-looking weapon.

I fought his emotions and struggled to move, to hide from what I knew would come, but it was no use. I couldn’t leave. I could close my eyes, but the emotions of the dreamer were the worst part and I couldn’t hide from them. If I didn’t see what was happening, my mind filled in the gaps. Too often the disturbing images I came up with were so much worse than the nightmare I was stuck in.

He held a pillow over her head as he stabbed the letter opener through her tank top three times. Her gurgling screams pierced the air. Mixed with his grunts, her death created a horrific melody until all sound muffled to a whisper. The sudden stillness swallowed me. As I tried to control my breathing, her blood spilled from the triangle of wounds through her shirt and onto the floral sheets. My head hurt and my heart pounded in my chest.

His rage ended as abruptly as it came, leaving only despair behind. I could feel how much he hated her, hated himself. His absolute certainty that life was no longer worth living landed square on my shoulders and I shook under the weight of it. Mr. Flint held her hands in his and sobbed. He pulled the gold wedding band off her finger and held it to his lips. Wracking moans gushed out of his body, burying both of us in misery, barely allowing room for air.

I was horrified at myself for pitying him, even though it was impossible not to when I
felt
his emotions. The dream might have been a memory but Mr. Flint was actually asleep as it played out, hovering in that place where the boundaries between right and wrong blurred—I wasn’t. Feeling sorry for a murderer disgusted me, but it didn’t matter. His self-pity swamped me, overpowering my own revulsion.

My gaze darted between him and the woman, his wife. This wasn’t the same man who’d first entered the dream. There was a change in him, so strong I could feel it. He was a murderer now. He would never be the same person again. There was no coming back from this.

He was a reflection of my ability—my curse. Having seen what I had, I’d never be the same again either.

I woke up coughing, my body covered in sweat. Curling in on myself, I wrapped one arm around my knees and tried to catch my breath. Why did I have to pick him? Why a murderer?

Being a Watcher sucked, especially when everyone else around me was a Dreamer. I didn’t know if there were any more like me out there, but I knew that whatever lucky Dreamer was the last to catch my eye, I couldn’t break free of them. No matter how much I wanted to escape, I was stuck with that person for the night.

A loud thump rattled my door and I rolled out of bed.

“It’s the weekend, Mom.” My voice came out croaky and exhausted. I stumbled toward the bathroom, taking deep breaths and forcing myself not to think about Mr. Flint’s dream.

In and out.

In and out.

“It’s almost noon, your majesty,” she yelled back from the kitchen.

I stopped in the middle of the hallway and rubbed my eye. “It’s almost
eleven
. Stop exaggerating or I’ll have to hire new help.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mom muttered.

I fought the urge to tell her, to tell anyone, about what I’d seen. As much as I would have liked to go to the police and tell them I’d witnessed Mr. Flint murder his wife in a dream, I knew no one would believe me, and the psych ward wasn’t my idea of a prime weekend hangout.

I grabbed the newspaper off the table in the hall and took it into the bathroom. The cold of the tile shot tingles through my feet as I flipped the pages. There it was:

Donna Marie Flint, born May 9, 1971, died last week during what appears to have been a failed burglary attempt. Friends and family may pay their respects at the Oakville Mortuary on Tuesday.

Tomorrow.

Mrs. Flint hadn’t been dead very long, but it was still too late to save her. There was nothing I could do, nothing I could have done. The police were on the wrong track with the burglary, but they would eventually figure out what happened without my help. I had to believe that.

For one morbid moment, I wondered: If I was right about what was going to happen and this curse was slowly killing me, what would my obituary say?
Parker Daniel Chipp, a sixteen-year-old junior at Oakville High School, died of sleep deprivation.
Or would it be listed as something lame like
natural causes
? Either way it sounded pathetic.

I shuffled to the shower, turning the dials so the water was so icy it stabbed my skin like a thousand shards of glass. Most days it was the only way I could keep myself awake. The water raced down my skin in rivulets, carrying away images from the dream. Warm showers were a thing of the past now. After scrubbing my body raw, I turned off the water.

I wrapped a towel around my waist, trying to focus my mind on some of the happier dreams I’d seen. Other people’s dreams took up so much of my life—and my brain—that it wasn’t hard to reach into the pile and find a different one. They were each unique, and each equally exhausting.

The dream layers were often the hardest part. They could leave my head pounding for hours after I woke up. It was like the dreamer’s subconscious brain had stretched its imaginative muscle and wanted to pack in as much as possible, just to torture me or something. Sometimes the other background layers were a haze, hovering over the main layer of the dream like a sheer curtain. Rarely, dreams were made of what felt like physical layers—some more reality-based, some more bizarre than an LSD addict’s favorite hallucination—stacked above one another, and the Dreamer bounced between them like a ping-pong ball, like their brain couldn’t decide what dream to have.

Then there was the mist of thought that twirled through the vivid memory dreams. If you stood in the curling tendrils of silver vapor, you could actually hear the Dreamer’s brain thinking, reliving, deciding. The words and thoughts were so jumbled and convoluted, within a few seconds they’d make your mind spin. I’d carefully side-stepped the mist after my first experience with it.

The worst was when the other layers were so foggy that they were like background noise; it’d sound like a million bees buzzing in my head. I always had a terrible headache the day after watching one of those—the kind of headache no pain medicine could touch.

I took a deep breath and tried to focus on the task at hand. As I dried my face, I could actually feel the deep circles beneath my eyes, like they’d been there so long they’d hollowed me out. I shivered, pushed my messy black hair off my forehead, and tried to see if I looked any worse than the day before. My ice-blue eyes stared back. Yes, I looked like crap. But was there anything I could do about it? Nope.

I tugged on jeans and a sweatshirt and headed for the kitchen. It smelled like citrus and berries. Fresh fruit: Mom’s favorite breakfast. She glanced up with a grin when I passed, but it slid from her face when her eyes met mine. I knew what she was thinking. Her constant worrying was the reason I only watched her dreams when I had no other choice.

“Did you sleep well?”

“Sure.” I nodded and looked away from her concern.

Mom stepped in front of me and placed the back of one hand on my forehead. With a sigh, she brought it down and twisted her lips to one side. “Well, you
feel
fine … ”

I grabbed her shoulders, smiled, and stared her straight in the eye. This early in the day, it didn’t matter who I made eye contact with. I was safe, for now.

“That’s because I
am
fine.”

She stuck her fist under her chin and moved it back and forth as she watched me hunt through the kitchen for a snack. I knew that move. I’d seen her look at Dad that way so many times before he left that it was impossible to forget.

The first year he was gone, Mom had been so upset she’d thrown herself into her work. I was always fed and taken care of, but she’d never noticed how tired I was. That was over three years ago. I still missed those days. When
she wasn’t around, I didn’t have to pretend to be normal.

I sliced an apple with the biggest knife I could find and fought the mixture of frustration and resentment that rose up every time I thought about Dad. I had enough problems without being forced to put up with the baggage he’d left behind.

I glanced up, ready to handle her the way I always did—with distraction.

“So, any appointments today?”

Mom grabbed her cell phone off the countertop and scrolled through the calendar. “I have a couple of showings this afternoon and a few more tonight. I might be a little late. Will you be all right alone?”

“Yeah. I’m probably going to do something with Finn.”

“That’s all? No one else is coming? Just Finn?” She squinted at my face. Once again, she didn’t believe me.

I popped an apple slice in my mouth and walked over to the window. This conversation needed to be over now. “Yep, just Finn,” I crunched.

She nodded and turned back to her phone again.

I shuffled to my bedroom and pulled on some sneakers. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think they were made of lead. Gravity was my enemy these days. Each morning my arms and legs—even my eyelids—felt heavier. I was amazed when the scale showed the same weight, or lately a lower one, than the week before. Each time I stepped on it, I was certain my head alone must be a few pounds heavier. It was so much harder to hold it up every day.