SEVEN
Gabriel opened his eye a crack and smiled. He could see the curve of a muscular thigh just behind his own. He felt a body pressing ever so gently into his back spooning him. Sex dream, he thought his mouth curving into a satisfied smile. <Much better than intruder dream.> He pressed himself back into his dream lovers body and reached back to pull an athletic arm around his chest. Who would it be this time? Clooney? Daniel Craig? Maybe Gary Dwire from tenth grade.
“I don’t have very long,” said a quiet, unfamiliar voice.
The arm tightened and released.
“This is my dream,” Gabriel said. “You have as long as I say.”
“You’re asleep and you aren’t.” The voice was a whisper tickling Gabriel’s ear. “You’re on the edge of sleep. As long as I hold you here, I can talk. But like I said I don’t have long.”
Gabriel turned ever so slightly, ran his fingers through a curly tuft of chest hair between two large, lovely nipples. He opened his mouth and glanced up; the smart remark he’d been ready to offer tripped up on his tongue.
Titus Dean.
“Ugh,” Gabriel said and finding his voice, “I can’t even dream of a live guy. This is sick on many levels.”
Titus smiled sadly at him and said, “Your visitor from last night will be back shortly. I’m here to apologize in case what I’m about to do doesn’t work.”
Gabriel stared. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“And you shouldn’t; I guess you really don’t need to. Suffice to say that I pissed off the wrong person, wrong power, wrong entity, whatever. And eradicating Titus Dean has become its number one goal. Apparently, eradicating me down to my last drop of blood and all who came into contact with it. A Police photographer and a Detective are already dead because of me. I couldn’t save them. I don’t want to be the cause of your death too.”
Gabriel shook his head.
Titus placed a finger over Gabriel’s lips, “You don’t have to believe anything. You just have to sleep and try not to be afraid; that feeds it.”
Gabriel’s lids did feel quite heavy. He wanted to say more. It was his sex dream, he wanted to do more… but his head felt leaden and his eyes slipped closed. He felt lips brush his… and then he felt afraid. There was someone in the hallway just outside his bedroom door, someone threatening.
He opened his eyes, but he couldn’t otherwise move. He could see Titus Dean, naked and clothed at the same time, two versions of the man occupying the same space superimposed on one another. Dean stood next to the bed facing the door to the hall. He said something Gabriel couldn’t make out. Whatever it was caused agitation in the shadows in the hall.
Gabriel watched and tried to quell the fear that rose in his chest.
Dean, now wearing a light robe of some kind that brushed the floor, stepped toward the door.
The shadows in the dark beyond the door shuddered and coalesced into something hunched and vaguely manlike. Needle-tipped hands hung from the sleeves of its cowl and the darkness beneath its hood seemed to squirm and writhe. It stepped into the room.
Dean stood between the thing from the hallway and Gabriel’s bed.
The thing slashed out with its thin, blue fingers. It plunged its hands into Dean’s body and tore at him.
The results looked to Gabriel as if Dean were an image projected onto a shredded screen. Ribbons of him hung in the air. They moved in a breeze Gabriel couldn’t feel. They lashed themselves around the bent figure in the doorway pinning its arms to its sides. Dean seemed a cloth unraveling, and the threads that had made him were encasing the intruder. As there was less and less of Dean, the figure in the hallway seemed more and more hidden from view. It struggled in its cocoon and with a sound like water echoing down a long pipe and a flash of bright light, the two vanished.
Gabriel found he could sit up. He had no idea what he had seen… or if it had been a dream or an undigested bit of beef, blot of mustard, crumb of cheese. He didn’t know if he wanted to find out. He guessed he could ask around to find out if a Detective and a photographer in BPD had died in the last day or two. Maybe he would. Maybe he’d leave it at a whacky sex dream gone horribly wrong.
It had been nice to have a man in his bed even if he had been a hallucination… dream… vision? Any which way, he had been a dead man, and Gabriel was more than ready to join the living.