PizzaGirl's Alter Ego
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1 year ago
The first Visitation
She’d had the nightmares for as long as she could remember. The progression was always the same. At first she was just dreaming her way through a place. She was walking or driving. It was almost always at night. That first dream was bearable, pleasant even. She was just walking through a neighborhood or biking through empty streets. She had many dreams like that and sometimes things happened and sometimes they didn’t. After a second night of dreaming the same place she knew what she was in for. She’d be terrified to go to sleep after that, sometimes she’d make it a whole night without sleep, occasionally two, but never more than that and when sleep finally claimed her the nightmare would just drag on. Usually she just went to sleep to get it over with.
The second night the place wouldn’t be contentedly empty, it would be ominously so. Clouds would start moving in. She’d find herself looking for something. In the dream she didn’t know what it was but, while awake she knew exactly what was going to happen because it was the same thing that had happened a hundred times before.
By the third night the clouds would have built onto the brink of being a thunderstorm; the air would be full of static and it made her blood itch. The fourth night she’d find it, the child, who would be homeless or lost, and the sky would start to glow gold. The fifth and sixth night would be getting closer and closer to the act, finding the location, and the burning in her veins would increase until she felt like she was on fire. She knew what would put that fire out but she didn’t want it. She’d live with the agony if it meant she didn’t have to go through with this.
And then there was the seventh night where the storm wouldn’t break unless she went through with it and her burning blood had driven her insane and she had to do it to restore the balance of the world and make the rain come.
She’d wake up sobbing. That’s why she always slept alone even when she was leading a group, even if it meant that she had to sleep outside in a tent in freezing conditions. She couldn’t risk that they’d hear her crying.
Tonight was no different. She was in Mexico near the border making sure a couple of clients didn’t get killed. The dream had her walking among hovels. It was already rainy, but a warm rain.
The clients were a couple of rich kids pretending at being hippies. They wanted to be in the desert. They wanted to become “one with it”. They were stupid. They weren’t the worst clients she’d had, but they liked to wander off chasing horny toads and horse lubber grasshoppers. Not that it was a problem to track them down nor was it a problem keeping them alive, she’d started training herself to survive in the desert by middle school, but their unwillingness to listen and their constant prattling started to grate on her after a while. They didn’t know that, of course. She was everything to them that they wanted; She was tough, mysterious, and knowledgeable. At night she’d tell them the stories of the Aztec and Native American gods. In other words, she was worth every penny.
They had camped near, but not too near a village. She had allowed them to pitch a tent though she slept outside. She told them it was to keep watch for coyotes.
This night, the dreams were at their worst. If it hadn’t have happened a thousand times before, she might not have known she was dreaming. She was sitting on a rock, knees pulled up inside her raincoat, and then she blinked and the rain had stopped but the world had a dirty gold tinge. Her insides burned. It was almost as if her blood was made of molten gold and where it flowed through her eyes it tinted the world. She knew that to people looking at her she would glow with heat and golden blood.
She got up off her perch, shed her clothes, and started walking purposefully toward the village. She stepped on a thorn but the pain of it in her heel was nothing to the pain in her veins.
At the edge of the village, set apart from the other buildings was a trailer with a set of rotting wooden steps leading up to the door. Sitting on the steps was a boy huddled under a blanket. He watched her with a blank expression as she approached.
“You must be cold,” she heard herself say to him.
“You too,” he replied in Spanish.
“Come with me. I burn. We can make it rain.”
The boy took her hand, but stayed beneath the blanket as they walked. The boy started crying and Tally smiled, it was going to be a good rain.
They walked through the village together silently until they arrived at a drainage ditch still half-full of dirty rain-water.
Tally released the boy’s hand and climbed down the steep dirt slope to the water.
“You must come down here to make it rain.”
Still crying he shrugged the blanket off and heaped it on the ground along with a small stuffed bear he’d been concealing. He joined her at the water’s edge and together they waded to the middle. For the first time all night, she felt a tiny bit of relief from the burning as she entered the water and as she walked, she left a trail of gold steam behind her. The water reached Tally’s chest and when the boy stopped being able to walk along the bottom he clung to Tally.
When they reached the middle she looked down at his tear streaked face and asked him if he was ready. He nodded and loosened his grip on her. She pushed him underwater.
He struggled but she held him under until he stopped wriggling. At that exact moment, the sky broke and rain fell in torrents. Her skin stopped burning and, exhausted, she made her way to the side of the ditch.
It seemed to take her forever to reach the edge. In her dream-perception it was weeks. She started to feel cold from the rain as the blood furnace that had kept her going until then was abruptly gone.
In the same way that she blinked into the dream, while sitting blankly on the edge of the ditch she blinked back into real life. The transition was disorienting this time. She had expected to wake up on her rock. Instead she was naked on the side of the same ditch the one in her dream. She questioned that she was awake, but after a few minutes she knew she was not dreaming. She also knew that beside her was a child’s blanket and bear. On the other side of the blanket was a man. He was naked though he wore several earrings of various sizes and colors. His hair was jet black and hung to his waist in long wet waves.
Tally was in shock. She had only begun to process what might have just happened.
“Tally,” he said. He voice reminded her of the staticky sound of pounding rain. She looked into his eyes for the first time. He was monstrously ugly, though not in a conventional way, his face just seemed to a mix of ordinary features put together wrong.
“Tally,” he repeated. “I am Tlaloc. I am your father. You have restored balance today.”
He took out one of his earrings, a small gold hoop about the size of a dime with three beads hung on it. He reached toward Tally though she was too exhausted and petrified to move. He shoved the earring through her earlobe. He seemed to have no problem getting it through though she didn’t have pierced ears.
“Go. Travel. Wherever you go you will bring rain. Your grandmother will help you understand. The war is here and when you are ready I will call you.”
Notes
