Double Cross [2] by Carolyn Crane

Packard’s hand, except this hand was smoother and smaller.
    And then it hits me: it
was
Packard’s hand—young Packard’s hand. And the dream was Packard’s memory. It had to be! But who were those bodies? There were more—I knew that somehow. Or he did.
    I think about the old abandoned school where he and Otto lived with other cast-off kids. I feel sure that’s what that place was; it had the feel of grade-school architecture. The chicken-wire glass, that was the safety glass schools used to use.
    I feel cold. How did bodies get into the walls? It’s like a horror movie.
    I get up and pad out to the kitchen in my clammy T-shirt, switching on every lamp I pass. At the sink I gulp down a glass of water, staring out the window at the market across the street, long green awning hiding its dark interior from my third-floor view, shuttered shops on either side. The dream lives in me still, its tendrils of dread reaching through to my nerves.
    All that wariness and alarm. Bodies entombed in the walls, like secrets. Young Packard stuffing leaves and stones in to hide them. Something bad happens when they come out—and they do eventually come out. I knew that, too, when I was inside the dream.
    A paranoid impulse makes me flip off the nearby lamp, feeling far too visible from the street. God, I’m still half trapped in the feeling of that dream. A creak from the direction of my bedroom—I freeze. No, it’s nothing. Dreams can’t come alive.
    It’s
nothing
!
    But telling myself this doesn’t help, and there is no way I’m going back into the bedroom now. Instead, I creeparound to the sitting area on the other side of the kitchen, flop down on the couch, grab my phone, and call Shelby.
    In addition to being my best friend, Shelby is also a disillusionist; her darkly enchanting despair about the pointlessness of life and the impossibility of happiness pulls targets into severe downward spirals. She’s also fun to have drinks with.
    Voice mail.
Damn
. I leave a message for her to call me and then I click off. She’d come over in a second if she knew I needed her. I throw the phone onto the cushion beside me. I could go over there except I’m feeling way too paranoid to venture outside.
    I contemplate calling Otto, but our relationship is still too new and fragile for a middle-of-the-night call. Anyway, what would I say? That I had a nightmare? How pathetic would that sound?
    It’s been a while since I’ve sat awake in the middle of the night, weighing my need to call a man against my desire not to seem pathetic. Only it was always a hypochondria attack in the past. Everything else is the same: a man I
almost
have. A semisolid relationship that’s not quite strong enough to withstand a freak-out.
    But this is different. Because Otto is the perfect melding of every man I’ve always wanted, and he wants to be with me. In fact, I think I went after all those other men because I was intuitively searching for Otto, and none of those other relationships worked because Otto was the one I was destined to be with. Still, I can’t quite bring myself to call him.
    If I called Packard, he’d be here in a snap, but I won’t be doing that, even though there’s something comforting in knowing he would’ve had the same dream. And he’d let me zing my fear into him, too, and that would make me feel a whole lot better. Packard’s the only one who can handle a zing. I don’t know if that’s because he’s theinventor of the whole insane technique, or if it has to do with his highcap power. It doesn’t matter; I won’t be calling him. Packard is a Faustian bargain.
    I read a sexy mystery book there on the couch for a while—a trick from when I’d be up in the middle of the night with a hypochondria freak-out, fighting with myself to not go online to look up symptoms.
    An hour later, my mind feels separated enough from the awful imagery of the dream that I turn out the light next to the couch to sleep—fitfully—like some