The Eighth Death

I recognized buildings, advertisements, shops, and the corner café where I sometimes stopped, but the sidewalks remained empty; no cars were passing on the road. The city looked too deserted, even for that early hour just before dawn. I was walking fast, listening to the unnatural silence, and a hazy premonition was being awakened, growing inside of me. Soon, something was going to happen.

Something very bad.

First I heard the claws clattering on the pavement, like someone was walking their dog.

Don’t look, don’t turn your head.

I hurried, but that didn’t leave the sound behind, on the contrary, it was getting closer, it was multiplying − could it be the echo?

There’s no one here. What you don’t see doesn’t exist.

I ignored the warnings of my subconscious mind, looking over my shoulder. A Danish dog was approaching with limber movements, like a beast set out to hunt. From a side alley, it was joined by another one, then by others, emerging from alleyways, from behind the dumpsters. When they passed by a shop window, I saw them clearly in the light. They weren't dogs.

Hyenas on the streets of the city? Had they escaped from the zoo? A new thought dismissed my last shred of rationality; hyenas could not be that big . Those genetic anomalies were coming in leaps and bounds, stirred up by the closeness of their prey, and I started to run. The high-heeled shoes were slowing me down; I threw them away, racing along, like never before in my life. Street after street, the air jerking out of my chest, my heart pounding like a gong into the bone shield of my ribs, an alley I wasn’t able to remember, then, suddenly, a concrete wall sealing my path.

I had hit a dead end.

From behind, a heavy body hit me between the shoulder blades, knocking me down. I didn’t have time to get up. The hyenas rushed at me in a frantic squirm. They were biting, tearing my body to bits, while the blood was dripping through their fangs, on their wrinkled muzzles. I had become nothing but a pile of convulsions, mauled, devoured – but still alive. Claws like scalpels were burrowing into my womb to reach my insides, the hyenas were ripping off chunks of meat from my body, were fighting for them, growling with rage. One of them pressed its fangs into the throat of another, a third one licked the blood from my cheek, raking over my lips with its canines, and I could feel its fetid breath stinking like a corpse, something I was about to become myself, soon.

The pain had paralyzed my vocal cords and I wasn’t even able to scream, only to sink into a slump of agonizing torment, deeper and deeper until the bloody mist from under my eyelids turned into darkness.

And I died.

*****

I was slipping towards the bottom of an ocean of oblivion. There was peace, acceptance, and it felt good. Then, someone pushed me up, towards the surface. I didn’t want that, it was so quiet there, so peaceful. When I broke the water ceiling, and the air came rushing into my lungs, I swallowed it like some sort of bitter medicine.

They had killed me again. It was for the seventh, the eighth time? The last sound I remembered was the crack of my ribs under the fangs of the hyenas; the last image imprinted on my retina was that of my intestines being pulled out of the open crater of my womb. I looked at my body in amazement, although I knew that I was whole, unharmed. I had been a shell of meat, bones, blood, and there I was, no trace of bites, no scratch, not even a bruise. Lazarus, coming back from the dead, had kept his scars. I had only kept the memory of the nightmare.

My torturers had invented the perfect punishment. Why kill me once, when they could do it ten times, a hundred times? They would kill me and then bring me back to life, so they could kill me again.

And so on until when?

I was a prisoner in the nightmare-reality sequence, as in a temporal loop from which I could not get out. On the real world, the universal clock had slowed down its pace, the seconds were dilating, stuck in the neck of the hourglass, my eyelids were heavier and heavier…

“It’s time.”

Someone grabbed me by the shoulders, shaking me. Time to what? Then I heard footsteps in the hallway, getting closer. They were coming to get me.

“Already? I muttered lost, bemused.

I wanted to sink back into my dreamless sleep, just a little bit more, until the end of time, but they did not like to wait.

The men in white put me on the dentist chair, they fastened the straps on my wrists, my ankles, my waist, with thorough thoughtfulness. The orderlies stepped aside, allowing the nurse to place the inductors on my temples, on my forehead, while the doctor was calibrating the machines, pressing buttons with the swiftness of a wizard. The screens were turning on one by one, the lights were flickering like a Christmas tree. I got a sting in my neck, and then I heard the doctor counting out loud: 1, 2…By the time he got to 5, the cocktail of sleeping pills, hallucinogens, and narcoleptic sedatives had started to kick in. I did not want to sleep! I became tense, sticking my fingernails into my palms, hoping that the pain would keep me awake, and…

*****

I was in my town, on familiar streets, deserted as so many times before dawn. Then where were those feelings of imminent danger and déjà-vu coming from? Awkward sounds were coming from behind, like claws clattering on the asphalt. Before I turned my head, I knew what I was going to see.

And everything was as usual: the hyenas set out to hunt their prey, my shoes flying from my feet, the desperate rush with the pack breathing down my neck. Had I lived all that before in a nightmare, in reality? I was beginning to suspect that because as everything was unfolding, I remembered it all clearer and clearer, and the outcome as well. The alley was already stretching in front of me, leading to the dead end. The hyenas were cornering me, coming in leaps and bounds, knowing I had no escape.

Then I saw the door. It was painted in yellow, the only entrance in a two-story building. How come I hadn’t seen it before? I pressed on the door handle, I pushed it down, and – surprise! – the door opened. Without hesitation, I rushed inside, slamming it behind me. There was no key, no lock, and I looked for a chair to prop it with.

“There’s no need. You are safe here.”

What I was hearing was the reassuring voice of a man. Should I believe him? I clung to the wooden door, listening feverishly. Out on the street, the pack passed by, it was getting farther.

“What if they come back?” The panic, the terror would not release me from their grasp. Because now I remembered everything.

“Come see.”

I followed the sound of the voice, and, at the end of the dark hall, I entered a room full of all kinds of antiques: books bound in leather, statues, amphorae, paintings, etchings, tapestries. A wood fire was burning in the fireplace, and the candlesticks had candles instead of light bulbs. It looked like an aristocratic hall from Victorian England. Did I owe my life to a rich and eccentric collector?

The man that was standing in front of the window with the curtains set aside, tied with braids as big as ship ropes, was wearing old-fashioned clothes, after the trend of some other time. In the dusky light, the stranger’s long, brass strands of hair framed his unnaturally pale cheek like a halo.

He looked like a stylish, charming gentleman, who showed up at the right moment or like a hero knight, without armor or a sword. The prince, the lady, and the dragons in white robes − that was us. They will allow me to believe, to hope to a point. Then they will take a sledgehammer and they will shatter my cardboard castle, bringing me back to the reality of the nightmare.

“What do you want to show me?”

He stepped aside silently, and I saw what he was looking at, me. In the dead-end yard, the other Lorena had almost completely disappeared under the frantic onslaught of the pack. Her mouth was open, and maybe she was screaming, but no sound was coming through the window. I lumped in my throat, I felt sick to my stomach. My blood was being drained right there, on the pavement, along with my life. I could not take my eyes off of that carnage that seemed to go on forever.

The man pulled me away from the window, letting the curtains fall over the end of the show. “For them, everything will be as usual”, he assured me.

“Who are you? How can you alter reality?”

Not that I was complaining. Without him, I would have been a chunk of meat diligently ripped apart by the hyenas. He chose to answer my second question, ignoring the first one.

“Not reality. But we are in a different dimension, with different rules. The dream is myworld.

It made sense. He had short-circuited the make-believe of the others, offering me a breath of fresh air. But getting into someone else’s dream was...

“Thank you”, I whispered.

For the respite, I meant, for the moments when I had been more than a leisurely mauled corpse.

“You must go now”, I heard him urging me.

Otherwise, I knew they would have noticed the change in the scenario.

“Next time…”

The stranger grabbed my shoulders, looking me in the eyes:

“I will be here, Lorena.”

*****

Death was right behind me, brought by the silent leaps and bounds of the hyenas. The greedy eyes of the beasts were burning my shoulders like laser beams. I could hear their chattering jaws, the squeaking of their fangs, closer and closer. The alley turning right, the dead-end, and the yellow door – will it be there? It was. I reached for the door handle, but, before pressing it down, I hesitated. What if the last time was nothing but a dream in a dream? I held my breath, I pressed down. It wasn’t locked!

One minute I was pushing it down, I was getting inside, the next I closed the door behind me. It was only then that I remembered to breathe, and the air burst out of my lungs in a sigh of relief.

The hallway, under the same dim light, was leading to the same room. But the tapestry was no longer there, the walls had pastel colors, the chest of drawers, the armchairs, the showcase cabinet, the old-fashioned candlesticks, the ancient paintings had all been replaced with metal and glass furniture, avant-garde watercolors, and aerodynamic statues.

The master of the house was wearing clothes that were in trend with the background – jeans, sneakers, a checkered shirt with an upturned collar which, combined with his brass strands of hair, gave him a bohemian, non-conformist look. The man was waiting for the result of the assessment with an insecure smile.

“Isn’t this the trend now?”

Now. As if there was a breach, a gap between my present and his present; as if he remained stuck in a certain time, decades or maybe centuries ago. But today he knew what the present looked like, because he had seen it, he had read it in my mind. This finding was making me feel tense and almost physically uneasy. It made me feel naked. But – his dream, his rules! Better than the outside alternative.

The stranger was rummaging through my mind as if it was some antique chest, taking out one memory at a time, looking at them with insatiable curiosity, ready to stick his hands up to his elbows in my life.

“I’d rather you didn’t,” I told him coldly.

“Forgive me, Lorena. But there are so many…”

…things he didn’t know about me, or generally speaking? He seemed genuinely upset that he got carried away. And I had to allow him to use me as a yearbook of events, encyclopedia, and the history of the world in dates and customized images, because…I stepped close to the window, looking through the aluminum blinds that had replaced the curtains. At the end of the alley, the hyenas were thoroughly mauling a Lorena who was about to get into clinical death. When this happens, I will have to go back to my reality, or else…

“Not necessarily. Not yet.”

I turned around, looking into his eyes. Were they grey or green?

“Have you changed your mind?”

I raised my eyebrows, questioningly, and he felt like he owed me an explanation.

“Time is...”

“Relative?”

The Einstein theory was part of those events that unfolded when the stranger had disappeared from the real world − but his answer was surprisingly modern.

“An illusion. A convention.”

Then he elaborated – how he had discovered the America of temporal paradoxes, and what epochal idea he had after I left so that I would be able to stay. I nodded, sympathetic as if everything had become clear. And it really was, crystal clear! He lied to me at first. He didn’t want me to stay for too long in his dream because he didn’t trust me. It would have been my turn to at least find out his name. A bit of mutual transparency, right? But the stranger’s thoughts remained in his possession, while he had read me like an open book. He was looking for... Really, what did he want to know? He had followed my reasoning because he frowned.

“Nothing. Everything. Can you do something for me?”

I avoided a direct answer. He had settled too comfortably in my brain, so he was perfectly capable of telling the truth from the lies.

“I owe you my life, twice now. Anything you would ask of me...”

“I want to know you, Lorena. And to help you understand what I am.”

I understood him better than I wanted to. Someone had locked him in another kind of dungeon, and had forced him to perpetual nonexistence, putting his body in suspended animation, and his spirit...When you look the abyss in the eyes for a long time, in the end it will look back at you.

“And how were you able to keep...”

“My sanity? Realizing a simple truth, there is no prison from which you cannot escape one way or the other.

Forced by circumstances, the man next to me had created an entire dreamlike universe. I tried to put myself in his shoes.

“What’s it like living in an infinite dream?”

“A study in shades of black about absolute loneliness!”

“What keeps you from...?”

He interrupted me, almost brutally.

“…to put an end to it? When you don’t really live, you can’t truly die. Do you want us to drink for this?”

A little table with two tall champagne glasses appeared between us. He was holding a bottle with a black label, Chateau Neuf, 1789. He filled the glasses, and I emptied mine in one gulp – it was the best champagne I had ever drunk. But he had barely taken a sip, and he was looking at me weirdly.

“Ask me, Lorena. Who I am, what I am. Anything. What do you want to know?”

“Nothing. It would spoil the harmony of this moment.”

He leaned towards me, I raised my head, and our lips touched. Naturally, as if that were to happen. It was a kiss between two ghosts. And still, I felt it with strange intensity.

It was so real.

“See you soon, Lorena.”

The light from his eyes was the last image I kept imprinted on my retina, like a goodbye gift.

THE END

Bio: Rodica Bretin is a member of the Union of Writers from Romania, the PEN organization and the Association of Fiction Creators from Romania. She is the author of novels and storybooks in the domains of fantasy, science-fiction, paranormal, and medieval times. Rodica Bretin is published in magazines from her country, but also in Cirsova Magazine, Aphelion, Gracious Light (SUA), Teoria Omicron, Maquina Combinatoria (Ecuador), and Antares (France). She lives, with her cat Lorena, in Transylvania, Romania, in a town called Brasov, surrounded by old and dark forests, not far from Bran Castle where the legend of Dracula was borne.
True stories from the sixth decade, the Communist period in the Eastern European countries, are published in her blog.

E-mail: Rodica Bretin

Website: Rodica Bretin's Website

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