Sweet Dreams by William W. Johnstone Page A

her. She felt his slickness press against her and his foul odor filled her senses, nauseating her with its hideous stench.
    She had noticed the genitals of the creature. They were as deformed as the rest of this manlike creature.
    But it was not sex the brute wanted from Lisa . . . yet.
    Lisa felt herself lifted off the ground and pushed toward the pulsing light. The light, the creature, and the human came together, becoming as one.
    Excruciating pain touched every part of the woman’s body. She attempted to scream, but no sound escaped from her throat. Her brain seemed to be swelling. She felt as though it would burst from her skull. Blood began pouring from her nose and ears and mouth and eyes. Her very life was being sucked from her by some invisible force.
    Could she have turned around, she would have seen the creature absorbing her blood, would have seen it seeping into the skin of the brute.
    Suddenly, she felt herself being pushed forward – forcibly bent at the waist. The creature’s huge erection drove into her, bulling and tearing its way deep inside her. But she could make no sound to protest this pain and outrage. Her entire head was inside the light, and inside the global illumination, it was quite a different world.
    Inside the ball of light, a violent storm was taking place, but a storm unlike anything she had ever witnessed. Lisa was seeing a molecular energy storm, a fury of such intense electric vividness she was totally blind seconds after her eyes touched on it. The crackling, the charging, the roaring were so extreme she was also deaf.
    Lisa did not know it yet, but she had witnessed, briefly, the electrical impulses of tens of thousands of beings, animal and human.
    As the creature sexually, brutally, took the woman, her blood and his semen staining her naked thighs, life as most people understand it left Lisa. But life as a few know it, never dies. Instead, the electricity of Lisa Baldwin became more fuel for the light. The light – the reason for the creature’s existence, its mother and father, its source of life, its womb for hundreds of years, its home after the evil shaman’s original death, and its fountainhead for reincarnation. This was the creature’s seventh reincarnation. Already the creature would be almost impossible to kill.
    One more reincarnation, and it would never die.
    Â 
    Jerry could not understand why his head was pounding so. He had had very little to drink at Maryruth’s house. He pulled the covers higher but still the pounding persisted. That was odd, because he felt no pain.
    Then he realized this was not a headache. Someone was hammering on the front door. He rolled over, looked at his clock/radio. The digital numbers read 10:00.
    â€œAll right!” he yelled. Now his head really did hurt. “O.K. I’m coming.”
    He fumbled for his robe, slipped it on, and stumbled toward the front door. When he flung open the door – irritated because he did not like arrogant, impatient knocking – he was momentarily confused.
    His front porch was filled with uniforms: state police, sheriffs deputies, local cops.
    He waved the officers inside. “Sorry it took you so long to rouse me, gentlemen,” he apologized. “But last night was the first really good night’s sleep I’ve had in several weeks. What’s on your mind?”
    A large highway cop, built like the trunk of a huge tree and wearing lieutenant’s bars, came right to the point. “Doctor Baldwin, is your wife here now?”
    Jerry blinked and had to think hard for several seconds. He had left Maryruth’s house at three o’clock Saturday afternoon, and then had gone back to her house at seven for dinner. He had arrived home just after midnight. He had not heard Lisa enter the house. His sleep had been interrupted only once, at one forty-five. One of his patients had phoned, complaining that she could not sleep. Jerry had told her to take two