Morpheus Fields Chapter 4
Morpheus Fields Chapter 3
Tommy came into the kitchen in nothing but a towel, his pink tinged hair dripping water that slid down his chest and back. He noticed the light blinking on the answering machine but didn’t bother with checking it. No one ever called him anyway but Jack, and Jack was passed out in the living room. No need to bother with that then. He made a pot of coffee and sat down to have a cup, the hot liquid sliding down his throat.
Little did he know he was being watched.
Adam stood, invisible to the human eye, watching Tommy drink his coffee. He realized that Tommy had not remembered his dreams from the night before; since he wiped them clean himself. He had gotten carried away and let the man he was staring at touch him in ways that he hadn’t been touched in a very, very long time. Nichol was not going to like this turn of events. And now he found himself invested in Tommy’s life, or rather in preventing Tommy’s death. He had seen Tommy stash the half bottle of morphine and couldn’t help the frown that formed on his lips. He was supposed to manipulate dreams, so he couldn’t take the drugs away and dispose of them.
But he wanted to, he really did. He also found himself wanting to take away all of Tommy’s hurt and pain. He sighed to himself, because he shouldn’t even be here, should be resting instead. He was never supposed to get this involved in a human’s life. He had his own to live, if you could call what he had been doing for the past few hundred years ‘living’. It was a shame really, that it took a suicidal human to make him even think of being with someone, or caring that there was someone near.
Taking one last longing look at the pink haired man, he opened a door and stepped into the grey mist of home, shaking his head at himself, knowing he was in a hell of a lot of trouble. For the first time ever, he was frightened of failing an assignment.
Tommy crawled back into the bed with a slight smile on his face. He had managed to score two more bottles of morphine. That gave him about five mg total now, not near enough, but closer than he had been. Falling onto a pillow, the thought about the dream man, Adam, and how he had brought up all those bad memories. Sometimes when he closed his eyes, he could still remember how it felt as he sat beside his mothers dead body and sniffed, too afraid to cry out loud, because you didn’t wake up his passed out drunk dad. And then when he was eight, how his dad took him to the same field he still dreams about, snorted a line of coke off the back of his hand and blew his brains out.
His sister Lisa had left long before his dad killed himself; she was older and couldn’t take the shit from their father anymore, once their mother was gone. Mom may have been a druggie but she had loved them. He never really knew if his father loved anyone, maybe their mother, maybe not. Who knew for sure? The only person who did was long dead.
Brief thoughts of his family drifted through his mind; his sister he hadn’t seen or talk to in too long, his mother and father when they were sober taking him to the field for a picnic, his mom’s funeral, his dad’s blood on his face.
Those were his lullabies on this night, so it would be natural for him to fall into the old nightmares.
Adam stepped through the door and landed in a deep darkness only lit by an unseen source of reddish light. Gone were the field of wild flowers, gone was the white rabbit, and gone was the blue sky above. The floor was covered in what looked like thick murky water. Where the light shone into it, it looked like dark red blood. Adam realized this was some sort of building and he stepped down the hall a little further, looking for his charge.
In the first room down the hall, he found a woman, obviously dead, lying in her own puke, eyes wide and staring at nothing. He wasn’t surprised when she spoke in a flat, raspy voice.
"I failed him."
Adam looked around, waiting for Tommy to show up, but he didn’t. Looking back at the woman on the floor, she lay in the same position as before, eye looking at nothing, hair tangled and sopped in puke. He shook his head and moved out of the room.
Back in the hall, he stopped at the next door and looked in. It was set up much like the last room, same woman, same dead eyes, but this time, a very young Tommy sat beside her, tiny arms wrapped around his knees, head laid sideways on the tops of boney kneecaps. Adam felt what he assumed was pity wrap around his heart. His breath caught when those brown eyes looked up at him, pooled with tears.
"She won’t wake up mister."
Before Adam could think to answer the small version of his charge, the scene changed rapidly and he was back in the field of flowers, a light breeze blowing and the adult Tommy standing beside him.
"Why do you keep showing up in my dreams? You’ve never been in them before. What do you want? Why can’t you let me dream in peace?"
Adam pulled Tommy to him before the man could sprint away and chase that damn white rabbit again. "Would you believe that I’m here to help you?" He brushed the pink tinged blond hair back from Tommy’s eyes, looking deep into them. "Would you believe I can take away some of this?" Adam gestured with his hand.
Tommy looked into Adam’s glowing blue eyes, brows pulled together and a frown on his lips. "No."
One corner of Adam’s mouth turned up, "No?"
Their surroundings morphed again, this time to the field at night and to Tommy as his eight year old self standing there covered in blood. He looked up at Adam with his adult eyes in his child body, "No, because it’s all pretend. See?" Young Tommy pointed to a man laying in the field not five feet away but partially hidden by the grass and flowers in the darkness. Adam stepped forward and heard the young Tommy following close behind him.
"My mother killed herself with an overdose. I don’t think she meant to but I found her. I can remember it like it was yesterday, even though I was just four. When I was 7, my sister left me with my father." They stopped and looked down at the man in the field. "At eight, my father did this." Tommy pointed with his child’s finger to the dead man in front of them. He lay in a pool of blood, pistol in hand, blood seeping into the ground, bone and brain fragments dotting to flowers and grass.
The light began to change and brighten, until it was glaring down like a spotlight on the body of Tommy’s dead father. Tommy turned his blood splattered face away from Adam. "You can’t fix all of this, no one can. Let me go."
Before Adam could grab him tighter, the clean-faced, eight year old Tommy slipped free from his arms and ran through the now brightly colored field, no longer marred by the bloody scene from moments before. Adam moved back to his usual spot at the edge of the field and watched as the young Tommy chased his white rabbit, giggling with childish glee. He couldn’t keep the smile from his face, even though he knew what that white rabbit represented.
Tommy woke the next afternoon, still tired and cranky. He stumbled into the kitchen, seeing the blinking red light of the answering machine, but ignoring it while he made coffee. Sipping the strong brew, he walked over and hit play, listening in shock to his sister’s voice.
"Goddamn it!" Tommy threw his coffee cup across the room and it shattered against the lower cabinet door. But even in his anger, he scribbled down his sister’s number and erased the message. He went into his room with the scrap of paper and put it in his stash box with his growing horde of morphine.
He sat back on his heels, wiping at tears that refused to not fall freely. "Why now, Lisa?" He asked the room, arms wrapped around his torso as he rocked himself back and forth.
Adam watched all of this unbeknownst to the man on the floor, trying to ease his own pain. He felt his heart tighten and gasped as the pain from his charge flowed through him. How was he supposed to fight that kind of pain by manipulating dreams? Not for the first time during this assignment, he wondered if he could complete it with success.
Morpheus Fields Chapter 5