Blood Visions

Chapter 1

Dark hair…a flash of gold… something large and close to the floor. Stone walls… a musty smell… waning sunlight.

The alarm clock’s bright red LED display showed that it was 4:36am. Again. Every damn night, for years now, Bianca was awake at precisely 4:36am. She leaned over the side of the bed in the dark and felt around for her dream journal and the pen that was tucked into it. She opened it and began to jot down what she remembered without turning on the light.

A sense of danger, but not personally…more like witnessing someone else’s nightmare. Flash of a large ornate mirror reflecting a stone floor...

She snapped the journal closed and threw the pen back on the floor beside it. It bounced and rolled under the bed where she left it with a sigh of resignation. Lying on her stomach with her arm hanging loosely over the side, she closed her eyes and tried again to remember just a few more details of her dream. It was driving her crazy. All she was doing was giving herself a headache. She rolled over and put her head back on her pillow. How many times had she had this dream now? Or maybe a more accurate question would be for how long? It had to be years at this point. Her best friend Abby had suggested that she try to write down what she remembered as soon as she woke up, but she knew that if she flipped back through the pages of tired scrawls in her journal there would only be the few same details as she’d just recorded now.

She eyed the alarm clock once more and reached out to flip it on its face. That bright light was annoying at this hour, and a constant reminder of the endless nights of broken sleep. The little bottle of sleeping pills sat beside her water glass tempting her to take another one. Most nights, that was the only way she could shut her mind off long enough to fall asleep. If she took one now, though, she would be out until noon. She pulled her sleep mask back on instead and turned over on her side, hugging her favourite pillow along her body. At least it could rest, even if her brain was going full tilt.

Almost an hour had passed while Bianca lay there trying to stop thinking long enough to drift off when she felt a familiar weight land on the end of her bed.

“Not now, Kansas.” She grumbled at her cat. The sun was beginning to rise, and he believed that meant breakfast time had arrived.

The cat seemed to get heavier as the foot of the bed lowered even more with its weight. Bianca felt the hairs on her arms stand on end and her heartbeat quicken. Kansas the cat had used up the last of his nine lives last year. She pulled off the sleep mask and looked for Kansas where he used to sit, staring at her until she either got up to feed him or threw him out of the room. No cat. The duvet was clearly indented in the faint light coming through a crack in the curtains, but it wasn’t Kansas.

Bianca’s ears began to ring and buzz, crackling like a radio station that’s not quite tuned in. She sat bolt upright, suddenly on high alert. She knew what was going on, but it still scared her every time.

“Who’s there?” she asked the empty space, “What do you want?”

Silence. The radio static stopped and the depression in the duvet disappeared. The foot of the bed raised to its normal resting level. It was gone. There was no chance she was going back to sleep now.

She swung her feet onto the floor, gave herself a moment, then pushed up and off the bed. Stopping in the small bathroom at the top of the stairs, she flipped on the light and splashed her face with cold water. She caught her reflection in the mirror and sighed. She could see the signs of sleep deprivation starting to show in the dark circles under her eyes and the lines on her forehead. Why did the other side not understand the concept of human time? She turned off the light and made her way down to the kitchen.

The light in the range hood was on, as it is every night. The soft glow was much easier to deal with than the overhead light on mornings like this when Bianca was up before the sun had fully risen, and it reminded her of her mom. Late evening baking sessions when the kitchen had cooled down, batters mixed under the light of the range hood, the smell of cookies spreading throughout the house, those were some of her favourite memories from childhood.

She filled the kettle with water and picked up the plug to connect it to the outlet on top of the stove but stopped abruptly with a quick inhale of breath. The hairs on her arms were standing up again and the ringing buzz was back.

The range hood light turned itself off, then back on again. Off, and on. Three times it flicked off and on, finally staying lit as it had been before. The overhead light turned on, too. And then the front hall, followed by the living room and then the light in the stairwell. One by one, every light in the house turned itself on.

Bianca just stood there in the middle of the kitchen

“Who are you?” Bianca asked out loud, “You’ve got my attention, what do you want?”

She was scared. The ghosts that came to visit her had never been this forceful before. Usually it was just like it had been upstairs. They make themselves known, then disappear. Whatever this was, it was different. It had much more power than anything she’d ever experienced.

“I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me!” she yelled, frustration overriding fear for a moment.

All of the lights turned off at the same time. She was plunged into darkness, holding her breath, waiting for her retinas to adjust. Her pupils dilated, and she started to make out the familiar shapes around her. She made her way to the kitchen window and slid the curtains open. Sunrise was in full swing, brilliant reds and purples pushing against the night sky, followed by oranges and yellows as the sun appeared between the houses across the street. She took a deep breath and turned around. The range hood light came back on. The rest of the house remained in darkness as it should be at this hour.

Bianca leaned against the counter in front of the sink and sighed. Whoever that was, they’d had a lot of power, but either couldn’t or wouldn’t communicate with her. What the hell was the point of that light show?

The kettle clicked off, startling Bianca. Hand over her heart, she chastised herself and took her favourite mug out of the cupboard. It was extra big and covered in a Hallowe’en motif. The water was still bubbling while she poured it over a tea bag, and the fruit loopy scent of bergamot rose from the mug.

She took her tea into the living room and sat down on the couch, leaving the lights off. She’d been waking up in the middle of the night with those crazy dreams and night visitors for so long that this was becoming her new normal. Her last boyfriend had refused to stay overnight after his first experience with Bianca’s nocturnal happenings. He’d have freaked right out if he’d been there for this one, she thought. That made her laugh softly to herself; he’d turned out to be a real dick in the end. A narcissist with more hang ups than Bianca could count. Sensitive people and narcissists don’t last together; eventually the sensitive one gets tired of the emotional abuse. It was funny to imagine Eric going through what had just happened, just the same.

Never mind him, she thought. Not worth the brain power. He was long gone at this point. There hadn’t really been anyone since him, and not for any reason in particular, except for… In her mind, a vision of Ben working behind the bar, toweling out a glass and putting it down in front of a customer, pouring a shot of vodka and a splash of soda into it, topping it with a slice of lime. His easy smile as he looked up at the guy and took his money, smoothly making change and placing it on the bar as he slid down to the next customer to take his order.

Ben. She liked him a lot, but she felt sure he didn’t think of her that way. He was at least 10 years older than her, with salt and pepper hair starting. He had a kid and an ex-wife, and 2 degrees that he wasn’t using. She was very drawn to him despite the age difference. He always wore a button-down shirt, open at the neck over a tee and sleeves rolled up to the elbows. He always looked ‘put together’, as her mother would say.

Her thoughts turned to her mom, and how much she would like Ben. She’d hated Bianca’s last boyfriend; she had seen right through him. Mom had the sight, too. She could tell you anything you wanted to know about a person just by being in their presence. She said it was just ‘mother’s intuition’, but Bianca knew it was more than that, because she had the same powers.

Her eyes welled up, suddenly missing her mom, and she reached for a tissue from the box on the coffee table. Her parents were now living more than an hour away, and Bianca wished she could get out to see them more often. Nothing was stopping her from making the trip, really, except that her sister was always there with her four very busy children. Make that 5; she’d had the newest baby 2 months ago. Shaking her head at herself, she took a sip of her tea and then put the mug back down, swung her legs up onto the couch, and relaxed back into the throw pillows. The strange incident with the lights just moments before already fading away from her memory. Just another odd occurrence in the life of Bianca. She would rather think about Ben.