IMMORTAL/Chapter I: SPECTAR

[Valjeanne Jeffers]

She was in the basement again. It was pitch black, the only illumination a glowing, quarter moon etched into the floor. A burst of light split the darkness, and she moaned low in her throat.
Please, I don’t want to see anymore…I don’t want to look.
Yet her feet moved of their own volition, inching toward the mark…and the twisted bundle now lying in its center. A man was curled upon the stone. He wasn’t breathing, and his limbs were tiny and withered. But she knew he wasn’t dead.
He wasn’t human.
The daemon opened his eyes. I’ve been sleeping. But for how long? He could feel his arms and legs, but the sensations were muted as if they’d traveled from a great distance.
Then he remembered. He’d been imprisoned -- snatched from his body by the magic that had trapped him here. Even now sleep, like a delicious drug, threatened to overtake him. But he fought it away.
How many centuries would pass while he slept?
A doorway appeared in his mind and just beyond it, a tattered clump of flesh and
bone…
Karla’s eyes flew open -- the scream caught in her throat. It’s just a nightmare. I’m
Ok. I’m here now, at home.

The Indigo woman turned her head to look at the bedroom console. Six-thirty AM glowed on the screen. She scooted out of bed, picked up a remote from the nightstand and turned off the alarm.
Karla walked across the wooden floor of her living area into a kitchenette. A press of her fingers on the first sphere of a triangular pod, started coffee brewing.
She filled a cup with chicory, walked back into the living area and pushed the second button on her remote, activating a blue panel beside the window. Jazz music filled the apartment. Like her bedroom console the unit kept time, transmitted holographic images, and played tapes. Using the third button, she opened the curtains.
Curled upon her futon, the Indigo woman watched as the illuminae changed Topaz’s violet sky into a mellow shade of peach. She thought of the dreams.
For as far back as Karla could remember, she’d had them. Otherworldly, exquisite and always with an unsettling clarity so different from the normal phantasms she read about. When I eat, I wake up full -- and stay that way until lunchtime. If somebody hits me, it hurts like hell…

Copyright Valjeanne Jeffers 2007 all rights reserved