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A Dreamer's Realm 2

A DREAMER'S REALM


Chapter Two: A vision of Heaven


"Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company"

- Mark Twain



Smoke coming out of the last drag begins to drift away as the wind starts to blow. The view from the roof of the Lighthouse is beautiful at sunrise, Connor’s favorite time of the day. It’s like a new beginning – the chance to start over, clean slot, and all that. He looks at the drag in his hand. He didn’t smoke before, he thinks, and now he’s down to three or four packs a day. Not that he’s going to get sick about it, but it wouldn’t help to stop the vice before Sarah starts to bitch and moan about it ‘till he’ll eventually quit just like he did with all the other stuff she’s been there to drag him out of. Sarah is his head waitress, but he considers her more like the guardian angel he’s certain God never gave him. After all, how can you give a guardian angel to someone who is already an angel in the first place?


“How is she today?” he asks one of the nurses at the station, later that day.

“Just fine,” the nurse replies. “We gave her a bath, so she should be all nice and clean.”

He smiles politely and heads over to the room. However, the scenario when he gets there is all but “just fine”: there is blood all over the room as well as pieces of Samantha. He looks at the scene in shock for a couple of seconds before his soul returns to his body and makes it scream out in horror. The nurses rush to see what has happened; Connor looks at them and points to the room, shaking, horrified, shocked, and screams again, “What happened?!”


They look at him, obviously confused.

“With what?” one of them asks. It’s the same nurse that told him Samantha was “just fine” not too long ago. Connor takes her by the shoulders and starts shaking her.

“Just fine?!” he shouts, “Does this look like just fine to you?!”

“Mr. Hayden, please let go!” other nurses try to pull him back. He releases the poor girl and turns to see the bloody scenario. He feels his body freeze when he sees the silhouette of an angel, standing on top of Samantha, holding her heart in its hands. Suddenly, he feels a painful sting on his hands. He looks upon them and sees that circles with strange symbols are appearing, as if they are being burned into his flesh.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Connor! Hey, Connor!” Sarah shouted as she splashed some water on his face in order to wake him. He woke up completely startled, looking around for evidence that he was still in the hospital. It took him a minute or two to recognize the storage room and that he had fallen asleep on top of his desk. “I know I said you should sleep more, but NOT when we’re about to open the place, m’kay darling?” Sarah slapped his face in a playful manner. “Com’on – you’ve got a bar to run!”

Sometimes all it takes is for you to stop and look around and you can actually sense the presence of a disturbance so overwhelming you know it’s going to change your life. For Connor, that moment came as soon as he exited the storage room behind Sarah. He felt it, running like a wildfire across his spine and sending shivers all over his body. He looked around, trying to pin-point it.

Table six.

One of the waitresses was taking the order at that table. It was set just across the stage, and the seating was sort of like a corner booth, so you couldn’t see who it was from where Connor was standing. But he knew something he didn’t like was sitting at that spot – and as soon as the waitress came with the order, he told her he would take care of that.


“Bottle beer,” she said giving Connor the note. The bartender took the bottle out and Connor took it, no tray, no glass; he headed over to the table, feeling his heart pounding mercilessly at every step he took.

The young man sitting at the table looked up. He looked older than Connor, probably in his mid-thirties. He had dark skin and short, wavy, white hair. He covered his eyes with dark sunglasses and was wearing a trendy black Armani suit.


“Out of all the multi-universes, I never thought I would find you in this one; I guess my bloodhound nose isn’t that rusty after all.” He said and took the beer from Connor’s hand. He had a very peculiar foreign accent.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in a mental institution?” Connor asked.

“I was,” the young man said as Connor dragged a nearby chair and sat across the table. “It was fun the first six months… But then Kalavan got himself a girlfriend, he stopped visiting, and my stay got boring after a while particularly when they took Kube to the suicidal ward and I had no neighbor to talk crazy to. Besides, I wanted a beer –”

“You’re the angel of vice, Danka; you taught Jesus the “water into wine” trick.”

“See, that’s the thing about mental institutions in Lenka; they think that just because you go a little crazy they can take your magic away for your own good. Cheers!”

“Annihilating an entire city and then do the same with your own legion when they try to stop you is not going a little crazy, Danka. You’re an angel you’re not supposed to go around killing innocent people.”

“Sheesh! You make one little mistake and suddenly everyone is judge and jury!”

“I’m warning you--- go.”


“Look, I’m just here to casually listen to the band. I hear they’re quite good and that they’ve won several tournaments. Of course, you know it’s considered cheating and that cheating is the same as lying? You’re an angel, Hard Rock: you’re not supposed to lie.” Danka finalized turning to the stage. There was a moment of silence between the two, broken by Connor.

“What do you want?” he asked taking a deep breath.

“I want to run some things by you, Hard Rock…” he looked at Connor over the sunglasses. Connor could briefly see Danka’s wine-colored eyes that shone brightly as they usually did when he was dead serious about something. “Do you still call yourself that?” he asked.

“My name is Connor,” Connor said in an undertone. Danka looked over to the stage once again.

“I promise I’ll just sit here, listen to the band play, have another beer, wait ‘till you have some time to talk to me… and then I’ll walk right out that door and you never hear from me again, Connor.”


Connor sighed. If there was anything Danka was good at was in keeping his promises.


After the second set (and in the mid of raging applause and whistling from the crowd), Connor came down to table six and motioned Danka to follow him to the storage room (which he did right after leaving the waitress a nice tip and blowing a kiss over to the singer in the band). As soon as they crossed the frame, Connor shut the door and turned on the small light in the middle of the room. Danka stood on the other side, looking around.


“Okay, what is it? And don’t make yourself at home, I’m not that happy to see you yet,” Connor said as Danka sat on top of the box crossing his legs in a lotus position.


“Heavy came to visit the other day. He looks like crap.”


“Heavy Rock?”


“Do you know any other sucker who goes by that name and who can look like crap?” Connor shook his head. “So he comes to visit, right? And he tells me that he needs me to come to this shit hole you call a home and bring you back to Camsui even if I have to drag you by your wings. Granted, he came over when I wasn’t bored or in the need of a beer, so I said that he might as well forgot about it because I wasn’t up to betraying your lovely Queen, BUT now –”


“You got bored,” Connor said conversantly.


“Yeah, there’s that --- and, well, now things are different.”


“Different? How? You finally realized that the Queen is not going to give you the time of day?” Connor arched an eyebrow. Danka took off his sunglasses and looked at Connor with intensity.


“Have you been having bad dreams lately, Connor?” he asked.


Connor suddenly felt eerily nervous yet he tried to hide it as much as he could. “My kind doesn’t sleep -- I don’t sleep; thought you knew that.”


“Really?” Danka said in an undertone, “So it’s not you who is screaming bloody murder at that girl’s hospital room while I’m holding her heart in my hand?”


“Sorry to disappoint you but no, and if a bad dream that made you wet your bed has brought you all the way over here, then you have to speak to your therapist because obviously they’re giving you the wrong medication, flippy.”


Danka snorted out a laugh. “I guess so,” he said. “Then again, I’m not the one who’s running away from my past.”


By the way Connor looked at him Danka knew he had hit a delicate nerve. Danka stood on top of the crate. “When you’re ready to listen, give me a holler. And by the way? Those circles in your hands? I have one too.” With that said he turned into water and splashed all over the place. Connor stood still for several minutes before he started kicking the remaining water pools grumbling only God knows what to only God knows who.

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