Page 38 of In Her Bed
Sandra looked around at the endless jungle of audio equipment, seeming to truly notice it for the first time.
“I’m not sure,” she said slowly.“I woke up from a nightmare a little while ago—an awful nightmare.”Her voice grew distant, her eyes unrousing.“I remember only impressions now.”
“Tell me about the nightmare,” Jenna urged, her sheriff’s instincts fully engaged despite the surreal setting.
Sandra wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly looking smaller, vulnerable.
“I was being pursued through the street at night,” she said, her voice dropping to just above a whisper.“I ran through a narrow passage between two buildings.I remember trying to hide in a warehouse.”
Jenna’s heart began to beat faster.“What else do you remember?”
Sandra seemed to consider the question for a moment.“I tried to call for help.”
“You screamed?”Jenna asked.
“No.On my phone.But it didn’t work … I think it was because of the warehouse walls.”
Sandra paused for a moment, as if struggling to remember.
“I took off my shoes,” Sandra continued, looking down at her bare feet as if noticing them for the first time.“I thought I could move more quietly that way.But he found me anyway.”
“He?”Jenna asked.
Sandra’s hand went unconsciously to her throat.“He seized me from behind.I felt something around my neck—a cord of some kind.I couldn’t breathe.”
Jenna fought to keep her expression neutral, to not show the horror rising within her as Sandra described what was clearly not a nightmare but her actual murder.
“I remember going limp,” Sandra continued, her voice becoming mechanical, as if reading from a script.“While he bound my hands and feet to something hard and metallic.I couldn’t move.And while he tied me up, he kept babbling, saying crazy things.Something about astral voices.And a midnight voice.Also something maybe having to lure the midnight voice ‘to where it all started,’ the place where she ‘spoke to the world.’None of it made sense to me.”
“Did you see his face?”Jenna asked, the question urgent now.“Sandra, did you see who attacked you?”
Sandra looked at Jenna with confusion, as if the question made no sense.
“What does it matter?”she asked.“It was just a dream.”
“It matters,” Jenna insisted, stepping closer.“It matters very much.Please try to remember.”
Sandra’s gaze drifted past Jenna to some point in the distance.
“I only glimpsed his face,” she said absently.“It seemed familiar somehow, but I couldn’t remember from where or when.”She shook her head.“It’s slipping away from me now, like dreams do.”
“Think harder,” Jenna urged.“Was there anything distinctive about him?His voice, his clothes, anything at all?”
But Sandra didn’t seem to hear the questions anymore.Her attention had returned to the phonograph, which continued to play the century-old recording.She began to sing along once more, her voice blending with the ghostly tenor as if Jenna had ceased to exist.
“In the good old summer time, in the good old summer time...”
The edges of the scene began to blur.The towering stacks of equipment seemed to lose their solidity, becoming transparent, then fading altogether.Sandra’s voice grew fainter, though her lips continued to move in song.
“Sandra!”Jenna called, reaching out, but her hand passed through the singer’s shoulder like smoke.“Sandra, where are you?How can I find you?”
But the dream was collapsing now, the entire setting constructed of the dead woman’s memory dissolving into darkness.Sandra’s form became indistinct, then vanished entirely, her voice the last thing to fade away.
Jenna’s eyes snapped open.She lay in her bed, early morning light pouring through the window.Her heart hammered in her chest, and a thin film of sweat covered her skin.She sat up abruptly, pushing her short chestnut hair away from her face, struggling to clear her mind.
She had received a visitation.
Sandra Reeves was dead, murdered in the same manner as Marcus Derrick.
