Night Lights and Dark Places

Chapter Seventeen - Plummet

The nightmares began just before her family moved from Fordham to New Rochelle, when her neighbor fell from the roof of the apartment building.

Bodies don't splatter when they hit the ground, all the damage is internal. At most, they pop. Her neighbor popped, just a little. She was four years old, sitting on the steps to her unit's back door and fumbling with the plastic buckles of her roller skates when he landed. It'd been nearly two decades and she'd never been able to forget the sound; that awful combination of a dull thud and a fleshy smack, backed by lower, subtler notes of crunching bone and expelled breath.

She took off her skates and trotted over to him.

"Hey, mister? Oh, uh, mi scusi Signore? Sei bene? Uh, sei caduto, ah... caduto giù?"

Of course, he didn't answer. His limbs were splayed about unnaturally, like a rag doll, and his insides were poking through a split in his abdomen. When she circled his body and looked at his face, his eyes were vacant and bulging, mouth hanging slack, blood trickling from his nose and ears. Despite having a weak grasp on the concept of death, it was apparent that this man was irreparably broken. Childlike concern mutated into horror, horror into shock, and shock into despondency. One of the police officers told her she was very grown-up for not crying, but it never occurred to her that it was something to cry about; she hadn't even processed the event yet.

It was the man's eyes that stuck with her, bright blue, foggy and unfocused. She couldn't sleep for a long time, in fear that she'd roll over in bed and see him there beside her, lying limp, his dead gaze fixed upon her.

After years of therapy, she wasn't scared of seeing him in her bed or on her floor. He was in her dreams, then. In some dreams, she watched him fall, or saw his face. In others, it was just his eyes. There were nightmares about falling, or knowing someone was going to fall but being unable to stop it. When her subconscious was feeling especially cruel, she'd be frozen in place, watching someone she knew or loved walk over the edge of some sheer drop.

For the first time since they'd met, James fell. Her subconscious conjured a hiking trail and James was walking just ahead of her, out of reach, and trying to catch up to him was like walking against a rip tide. The sky was a void and the roots of the trees provided an unnatural light source, flickering to life along the edges of the dirt trail, illuminating the area just well enough for her to recognize that there was nothing at the end of the path.

He had told Claus and George this story, that he'd fallen off a cliff and climbed back up, but she knew better. While being larger provided more wind resistance, the guy couldn't have weighed less than three-hundred pounds. Even if the drop distance was shorter, at minimum his bones would be shattered. Did he know that? She called out to him, warning him, begging him to turn around and come to her. James glanced at her over his shoulder, no trace of familiarity anywhere in his eyes. She was a stranger to him. Tolly called out his name, and he startled, turned his head to look at her, and then stepped off the end of the trail.

It was stupid to have been upset by this. Not only was it just a dream, but it was a dream she had often, and yet when she woke up, adrenaline was coursing violently through her veins. For a few minutes, she stared up at the ceiling with her hand on her stomach, breathing diaphragmatically. A deep sense of loss tightened her chest from within; a vacuous ache that shouldn't have been there, and with it came a profound yearning to hold him, to be held. Closeness and comfort, both emotional and physical. The thought was nice, until her imagination compulsively perverted it.

God damn it. With a heavy sigh, she got up and began her search for a sweater that was both moderately clean and adequately modest, or at least some pants, maybe. Seeking solace in the subject of her subconscious' erratic bullshittery probably wasn't the best idea, what with the twin phantoms of trauma and lust still ghosting around uninvited. With any luck, they'd retreat blue-balled to whatever shitty, shadowy part of her brain they came from now that their somnium spitroast had been canceled. The clothes hunt ended with the poaching of a pair of flannel pajama pants, and she trotted out into the hall, sufficiently covered.