Nightmare's Edge Read online

  Cringing at the pain, Nathan pressed down on the fingerboard and pushed the bow across the strings. A note screeched through the air, worse than nails on a chalkboard.

  He lifted the bow. “I can’t. My hands hurt too much.”

  “Consider them healed,” she said. “Imagine yourself playing with soft, supple, perfect hands. Let the pain melt away.”

  Nathan focused his mental image. As his mother probably suspected, the teenager in his mind had bandaged hands. He forced the imaginary Nathan to strip off the wrappings, but the hands were still raw and oozing blood. He couldn’t make the redness go away.

  Again he pushed against the strings, and again a horrid screech erupted. Pain ripped from the tips of his fingers to his shoulders.

  “Let’s just do it with the computer,” he said, lowering the violin. “I just wanted to see if I could translate the noise.”

  “Nathan.” His mother’s voice was still calm, yet forceful, “I have told you a hundred times that you have more talent than I do, yet you have not reached into your soul to grasp it. You have to roll away the stone that’s keeping that talent from rising into your heart and into your hands.” She pressed a fist against her chest. “If you don’t let God play through you, your music won’t come from a heart of pure passion. It will be nothing more than a mechanical recital of rigid notes on a page.”

  Nathan touched his own chest with the butt end of the bow. “But there isn’t a stone in the way. There isn’t anything blocking my passion.”

  His mother’s brow eased upward. “Isn’t there?”

  “No.” He lifted his bandaged hand. “This isn’t pretend. We’re dealing with reality.”

  “I see.” She took the bow and pointed it at the violin. “I will need that, please.”

  As the static continued, Nathan laid the violin in her extended palm. His makeshift bandage had loosened, exposing her bloody gash. “Mom. Your hand. There’s no reason to — ”

  “I told you I’d show you some of my old spunk,” she said as she set the bow over the strings. “You might want to take notes.”

  Grimacing as she pressed down on the fingerboard, Francesca played the last few notes of the song, apparently matching what she heard in the static. Although she began with a slight hint of flatness, the melody soon sharpened to the proper pitch. As she glided into the first phrase, cringing with every note, the tune’s lyrics came to Nathan’s mind, as if bidden to rise by the matchless virtuoso.

  Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart;

  Naught be all else to me, save that thou art.

  Thou my best thought, by day or by night,

  Waking or sleeping, thy presence my light.

  She took a breath and looked up at the ceiling, tears flowing. Then, raising the bow again, she played the same notes, this time even more beautifully than before. Every push and pull of the bow brought an anguished frown and the weakest of grunts, but she played on, sweating, crying, and — Nathan looked at the hand running up and down the fingerboard — and bleeding.

  A trickle of blood dripped and streamed down the fingerboard. Francesca Shepherd seemed to pay no mind. Playing on and on, she had lost all awareness of her surroundings. Only the slightest bend in her brow gave any indication that pain still shot through her fingers. She was a woman in love, but Solomon Shepherd was not the man on her mind.

  As the tune began again, the words to the second verse flowed through Nathan’s soul, each one echoing from ear to ear as they faded.

  Be thou my wisdom, and thou my true word;

  I ever with thee, and thou with me, Lord;

  Thou my great father, I thy true son;

  Thou in me dwelling, and I with thee one.

  He looked up. The globules in the curved mirror had already burst open, and the colors had merged into a scene within the pie-slice wedge, blurry but discernable. Little Francesca Shepherd stood in her old bedroom, no more than ten years old, playing her violin in front of a music stand.

  Nathan gaped at the sight. How could this be? Gordon had said they would pick up the strongest signal, but his mother wasn’t dreaming. He looked back at her face — eyes closed, breathing steady, body moving in a flowing rhythm.

  Or was she?

  In the scene above, little Francesca stopped playing and crawled under her bed. As if followed by a movie camera, she appeared in the dim shadow of her bed’s frame, her eyes peering under a frilly dust ruffle at shoes rushing past her hiding place. Then, closing her eyes, she folded her hands into a praying clench and moved her lips rapidly.

  Francesca’s violin played on. Nathan glanced at his mother out of the corner of his eye. Deep lines creased her brow. Blood dripped from her hand to the floor. More words arose in his mind, now fainter, more desperate.

  Be thou my battle shield, sword for the fight;

  Be thou my dignity, thou my delight;

  Thou my soul’s shelter, thou my high tower:

  Raise thou me heavenward, O power of my power.

  Little Francesca crawled out from under the bed. Kneeling by her mother’s body, she wept pitifully, rocking back and forth in time with her sobs. Soon, a large hand came into view. Francesca took it, rose to her feet, and walked away with Nikolai Malenkov, hand in hand, into a dense fog.

  The scene shifted suddenly. Now in the backseat of an old car, she gazed out the window, watching her home shrink in the distance. As she held a stuffed bear in her arms, tears streamed down her cheeks.

  The lyrics marched on.

  Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise,

  Thou mine inheritance, now and always:

  Thou and thou only, first in my heart,

  High king of heaven, my treasure thou art.

  The scene shifted again. Francesca, now a young woman, walked down the center aisle at a church. Dressed in silky white and her raven hair decorated with tiny white flowers, she glided like an angel, her bridal veil unable to hide her brilliant smile. Nikolai, dressed in a black tuxedo, walked at her side, his smile nearly as wide as hers, though a tear sparkled on his cheek.

  A tall, broad-shouldered gentleman, also dressed in white, waited at the front. His smile, muted and trembling, communicated much more than joy. It shouted, “I can’t believe the amazing blessing that walks my way.”

  When they reached him, Nikolai laid her hand in the groom’s and seated himself in the front pew. Then an organ blended with the violin, also playing the wondrous hymn.

  Now breathless, Nathan again looked at his mother. Her bleeding had eased. The lines in her forehead had disappeared. Her eyes still closed, a gentle smile graced her lips — soft, pain-free, content.

  As her playing slowed, the notes lengthened, growing stronger, deeper, richer. Majestic lyrics broke into Nathan’s mind like a flood.

  High king of heaven, my victory won,

  May I reach heaven’s joys, O bright heaven’s sun!

  Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,

  Still be my vision, O ruler of all.

  The final note rose from the strings — stretched out and fading to a whisper. Francesca withdrew the violin and dipped her head low, letting her black hair drape the front of her shirt. After taking a deep breath, she looked at Nathan and gave him the violin and bow. Her smile was weak and sad, but she said nothing.

  Nathan held the bow and violin. He couldn’t say anything either. There was nothing to be said. She had once again proven that something was wrong inside him. If he really did have her talent, he hadn’t yet dug deep enough to let it flow. Somehow, he had to find a way. The fates of three worlds might well be hanging in the balance.

  8

  THE NIGHTMARE HOLOGRAM

  “That was remarkable!” Dr. Gordon called. “I’m learning something new with every experiment.”

  Solomon turned his way. “What happened?”

  “Francesca generated her own sphere. Her thoughts penetrated the dream world, and the Earth Yellow telescope picked it up.” Dr. Gordon tapped away at h
is keyboard. “I am adjusting the fields to plunge deeper into the dreamscape.”

  “And what of the other Earths?” Solomon asked.

  “Francesca’s energy surge allowed me to refine the calibrations. I’m pretty sure we can bring the other two in clearly.

  I’ll let the computer generate the music for each world, but I’ll keep the volume down. With three different tunes playing simultaneously, it wouldn’t be pleasing to our ears.”

  Nathan looked up again. His mother’s wedding scene had darkened, while two other slices transformed into the usual chaotic colors. At the center, however, where the three wedges met, a circular portion stayed dark, taking up about a tenth of the entire screen. With a black hole in the middle, the curved viewing area now looked more like a doughnut than a pie.

  After several seconds, all three wedges began to clarify. At the upper right, the section his mother had filled earlier with her daytime dream, a snow scene took shape — the same city block where they had picked up Molly and later found Tony.

  With deepening drifts covering parked cars and sidewalks, no pedestrians braved the cascading sea of falling flakes.

  Nathan cocked his head and whispered to his mother. “Since someone’s dreaming this, that’s not the real weather. The snow stopped quite a while ago.”

  “But who is the dreamer?” she asked.

  “Good question.” Nathan tilted his head back. Watching the huge screen directly overhead made his neck ache and dizzied his brain.

  In the upper-left section, another picture took shape, dotted with static, like a TV broadcast from far away. Weather-beaten tombstones rose at crooked angles from a weed-infested lawn. Storm clouds boiled in the sky. Jagged bolts of green lightning crashed to the ground, raising sparks and igniting fires that sent purple smoke and yellow embers into the swirling breeze. Again, no one was in sight.

  “Another cemetery?” Nathan glanced at his mother to his right, then at Daryl to his left. “Why is it always a cemetery?”

  Daryl shivered. “Reminds me of The Omen. If I see triple sixes on the screen, I’m out of here.”

  Finally, on the lower third, at least from Nathan’s awkward angle, an even fuzzier scene came into view — the New York City skyline on a clear, sunny day. Standing tall in the midst of their lesser neighbors, the two World Trade Center towers reflected the morning sun. Nathan eyed the buildings. Why would they still be there? They collapsed years ago.

  The scene switched to an airplane cockpit. The pilot, sweating profusely, spoke into a microphone attached to his headphones, but no sound came out. A man of Middle Eastern descent stooped at the pilot’s side and pushed a blade against his throat.

  “That’s my daddy!” Daryl cried. “The pilot’s my daddy!”

  Tony put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay. It’s just a dream.”

  “Oh, yeah.” She sniffed and wiped her fist under her nose. “Now I remember. He’s talked about this dream. He’s the pilot of a jet that crashes into one of the towers. He says he always hopes he can stop the tragedy, but — ”

  The hijacker jerked the pilot from the seat, leaving a trail of blood. With the limp body at his side, he took the controls. Through the windshield, the tower drew closer and closer at tremendous speed. Then flames blasted across the screen. Glass, furniture, body parts, and streams of fire flew everywhere.

  Daryl covered her eyes. “I can’t look! I can’t look!”

  Nathan cringed but kept watching. What would happen next? Surely this was the end of the dream. Would everything get sucked into a void as it had done at the playground?

  A crack formed at the top of the section, tearing open the boundary between the dream and the ceiling’s central black circle, the doughnut hole Nathan had labeled in his mind. Darkness blew into the fiery carnage, swirling as it slurped everything in sight. Within seconds, the scene vanished, and only a sea of blackness appeared in the section.

  Nathan looked at the computer desks. Dr. Gordon and the two Simons alternately watched the ceiling and their monitors.

  “Can someone give me an explanation?” Nathan called. “What’s going on up there?”

  “Yeah,” Daryl said. “This is like The Twilight Zone meets The X-Files meets Night of the Living Dead.”

  Simon Yellow pointed at the snow scene. “That’s the dream world here. Someone has likely fallen asleep recently and is remembering the snowstorm, but he or she has exaggerated its ferocity.” He shifted his finger to the cemetery. “That is the Earth Blue dream world. It seems clear that a dreamer has imagined quite a terrible graveyard nightmare. Perhaps soon we will see that person appear.” He walked closer to the center of the room and nodded toward the final section. “That was a dream in Earth Red. Apparently our telescope found Daryl’s father and showed us his dream.”

  He looked at Daryl, half closing one eye. “From what you said, I gathered that this disaster is one in your history, but no one has told me about it yet.”

  “Nine-eleven,” Nathan said. “Terrorists flew airliners into the World Trade Center towers on September eleventh, two thousand and one.”

  Daryl smacked her palms together. “Knocked ’em both flat. My dad’s been obsessed with it ever since. He never made it as a pilot for the big airliners, and he dreams about what he would’ve done if he’d been there.”

  Simon Yellow looked at Simon Blue but said nothing, though his brow was bent, making his owl-like glasses slip down his nose. Nathan eased back a step. The tension was thick. Since the two Simons had been working together to prevent Earth Yellow disasters, apparently Simon of the Blue world had been giving his Yellow counterpart a history lesson, a morbid laundry list of the calamities that were going to befall the people of Earth Yellow. Apparently, Simon Blue hadn’t mentioned “nine-eleven,” but that was still several years away, and with all the differences now between the worlds, the terrorists’ plot might not come about at all.

  He stepped closer to the computer screen and eyed the unintelligible digits filling several windows. “So how did we happen to dial in Daryl’s father?”

  “We’re picking up the strongest signals,” Dr. Gordon said. “My counterpart on Earth Red told me that Daryl’s father is waiting for her at the observatory in that world. Perhaps he has been there a long time and has fallen asleep under the mirror. It could have magnified his dream signal.”

  Nathan nodded. The same thing had happened to Daryl Blue. She dreamed in the Earth Blue observatory, and he and Kelly had walked through her nightmare until Cerulean rescued her from it. “Are there any more clues to where Kelly’s signal is coming from?”

  “It is somewhat stronger,” Dr. Gordon said, “but we still have no way to determine its source. There just isn’t anything else comparable.”

  Simon Blue raised a finger. “Shall we show the new arrivals the hologram imaging?”

  Dr. Gordon studied his screen for a moment. “Since we have good data in all three realms, I don’t see why not.”

  “If this works,” Solomon said, “we can begin our search for Solomon Red immediately. We already have my energy signature in the computer, so we just have to find an exact copy somewhere in the dream worlds. He may well provide the final pieces to the interfinity puzzle.”

  Using his touchpad, Dr. Gordon adjusted a slider on his screen. “As of this morning, we were able to display the real world images in the hologram, but the new mirror should give us an unfragmented representation of the dream worlds.”

  At the center of the room, something clicked underneath the telescope, and a humming sound emanated from the floor. The telescope descended on a circular platform, and a metal plate slid from the adjoining floor panel to cover the hole.

  Above, dozens of beams of light shot out from all around. Nathan searched for the source, but the lasers, or whatever they were, stayed hidden behind a narrow shelf that encircled the observatory where the base of the dome met the walls.

  The beams converged just above where the telescope had stood. Fog
swirled in the midst of a wide cylinder of multicolored light, rising from near the floor to about twelve feet in the air.

  “Synchronizing the beams,” Dr. Gordon announced in a mechanical voice. “Visual clarification commencing.”

  The fog evaporated, leaving behind recognizable shapes within the cylinder, the same trio of scenes that had been displayed on the ceiling, but now upright and in 3-D.

  Sliding closer, Nathan gawked at the hologram. In the section nearest him, a knee-high tombstone stood near the edge of the cylinder, though the surrounding light made it look like a ghost, too vaporous to be seen clearly.

  “Reducing background radiant energy,” Dr. Gordon said, his voice now shaking with emotion. “In a few seconds we’ll see the results of all our efforts.”

  The laser beams diminished somewhat but stayed visible. The cylinder of light, however, faded away, leaving only the holographic images within. Now the tombstone became clear. Staying outside the original cylinder’s perimeter, Nathan stooped near the marker and read the engraving.

  Here lies Felicity, an ugly blind girl.

  Born — No one knows

  Died — No one cares

  Doomed to rot in this dark hole for all eternity.

  Another hard lump grew in his throat. This had to be Felicity’s dream. Whoever she was, she must be able to generate powerful signals. But where was she now? Might she appear in this dream and bring Kelly along?

  A shadow rushed away from the tombstone, then darted back. Nathan squinted but was unable to see into the dimness well enough to sort out the competing shades of darkness. The shy ghost would stay hidden, at least for now.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Dr. Gordon said as he rose and walked toward the hologram, “welcome to a dream come true.”

  Solomon joined Nathan near the grave marker and whispered, “Almost literally a dream come true, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah.” Nathan shivered. The cadence and quality of Solomon’s voice matched his father’s exactly. “I think the graveyard is Felicity’s dream, and Kelly went to wherever she went. Should I tell Dr. Gordon, or just play it cool and check it out on my own?”