Again (2 page)

Chicago, 2006

I
n the darkness, Tyne thought she heard him whispering to her. It came like that at times, both memory and fear, followed by a tears-and-sweat struggle to maintain her reality, to know he was not actually there in her room ready to claim her.

She raised her head from her pillow and listened. But the only sound was the distant throb of a motor that grew steadily louder as it approached then ebbed away, leaving her alone again.

Her eyes searched the shadows and found nothing. Still shaky, she let her head fall to the pillow, her forehead sprouting beads of sweat in a room that was sixty degrees on a cool Chicago night. She willed her heart to slow to its normal pace. Emptying her mind of threatening thoughts, she lay quietly until her eyelids grew heavy and consciousness began to die away. Finally she succumbed to the somnolent pull of a tired body and mind.

The dream world quickly sealed her into a vacuum of shapes and faces, a reality recognizable only on a visceral level. Images flitted one after another until her journey reached the last scene, the non-variable in her nightly excursions. Again, she found herself sitting at a long table laden with food she could see but not smell. People, some known, others not, sat talking and eating. The women wore evening gowns, the men, tuxedos. April and Donell sat toward the other end, their heads together in conversation. Everything played as it had before, except this time Eve chattered incessantly in Tyne’s ear, some nonsense she couldn’t understand. Tyne looked down and saw she was wearing the same green strapless evening gown, a color that shimmered against the latte of her skin. She reached to pick up her fork to taste the leathery meat on her plate, but at that moment, as always, a man’s hand fell hard on her bare shoulder. She looked up from her seat.

The table and guests faded away, leaving Tyne and the stranger alone. She stared up where his face should be but saw nothing but a dark void, an abyss into which her soul threatened to fall. She sat trembling, waiting. He reached out to her, the glint of the knife flickering under the light. It touched her throat lightly.

She woke with a start. Sweat trickled down her temples. The digital clock on the nightstand read a little after two, only minutes since she last drifted off. She had a few more hours to get through. Yet she didn’t know if she would make it out of the nocturnal web this time. Or the next. One night her heart would simply stop and she would be trapped in her dream world forever.

“You yawning again? Musta been some night. How was he?” Gail smirked. Tyne winced. Gail defined herself by her blatant carnality and referred to herself as an “open sista…Big O, that is.” Words often tumbled carelessly from her lips. Tyne turned around to the cubicle that faced hers and held up her middle finger. The older woman threw back her head and laughed, causing her medium-length, auburn-by-the-box hair to swing stiffly around her shoulders. Tyne sighed and turned back to her computer.

“Girl, you wouldn’t tell a soul if you
was
getting some. Ms. Born-Again-Virgin.”

“Mind your business, Gail,” Tyne warned over her shoulder. “Besides, the way I hear it, you’re getting enough for me and half the female population as it is. Might do you good to abstain for a while.”

A few cubicles down, she heard Rhoni cackle, obviously listening. Tyne wondered at her lie. She hadn’t heard any gossip about Gail. It just felt good getting a dig in.

Gail harrumphed, mumbling beneath her breath. Tyne smiled to herself, at the same time wishing she had an office instead of a cubicle that sat in a maze of disjointed walls, which didn’t provide even the illusion of privacy. She often had to modulate her voice whenever she made a personal call, knowing that Gail, Lem, Rhoni or any of her other nearby co-workers might be listening in.

Not that her life was fascinating. A researcher and copy editor at the
Chicago Clarion
, a small black community newspaper on its last legs, she hardly lived life on the edge. As for her social life, her last relationship had been a couple of years ago and had ended rather badly. Hardly something to divulge to her nosy coworkers. She believed in keeping her personal business to herself. Which made her business that much more intriguing to the busybodies who peppered their lives with the goings-on of other people. Yet they knew more about her than she liked. She shook the flurries out of her head and got back to work.

A few minutes later, in the middle of typing her report for Stan, she hit the Enter key. Nothing. She hit it again. Still nothing. The computer sat frozen. “Damn!” she muttered. She hadn’t saved the document for some time and would probably lose several paragraphs if she rebooted.

“Lem,” she shouted over her cubicle, “could you come here, please?”

Lem shouted back, “Be right there.”

Alem, or Lem as he was known around the office, was the official copy editor as well as the unofficial tech guru. Everyone knew to call him whenever anything broke down, which kept him pretty busy. Being a two-fer on one salary made him indispensable to the paper since it kept down some of the staggering overhead. In the end, this would prove a boon for Lem. Rumors going around now predicted that heads were going to roll, as the paper’s circulation had dropped 40 percent from a couple of years ago. Making matters worse, the
Clarion
had just lost a major advertiser this January and stood to lose three more. But if there were going to be any survivors among the carnage, Lem would definitely be one of them. Everyone else, including herself, was dispensable.

Within a minute, he loomed—there was no other word for it—at the entrance to her cubicle. Six feet five, Alem Gebre always had a smile, his teeth luminescent in a walnut-complected face, his Eritrean heritage evident in the broad forehead and slightly flared nose.

“What’s going on?” he asked with an accent that always made Gail and a few of the other women suck air through teeth, lick their lips, and, Tyne suspected, clinch their crotches. Yet to Tyne, Lem’s cocksure confidence was a turn-off.

“Help,” Tyne mock-pleaded. “My computer’s locked up again. I don’t want to lose this report.”

Lem shook his head. “And I bet you didn’t save, either.”

“Yes, I did…well, sort of. But it’s been some time, and I’m going to lose a lot of input.”

Lem came in and Tyne moved out of her chair to let him sit down. He pressed a series of key combinations and then shook his head.

“Nope. The only thing I can tell you is that we may be able to retrieve something from the auto save files. I have to reboot. Sorry. After that, I’ll search through your temp files, see if I can find the last save.”

Tyne closed her eyes in frustration, mentally castigating herself for her stupidity. This had happened before; she should have remembered to save every five minutes. Especially on this ancient equipment. The
Clarion
hadn’t updated anything since 1998.

The screen flickered as Lem did an Alt-Ctrl-Del and the Microsoft 98 logo appeared. The dialog box asking for user-name and password followed.

“Your call here.” He moved aside, and Tyne sat and plugged in her personal info. After the computer entered Windows, Lem again took the seat, went into Windows Explorer and did his thing. His nimble fingers tapped a rhythmic litany on the keys that had her temporarily hypnotized. She watched him and an unbidden thought of long, tapering fingers moving along her flesh, caressing slowly, softly, each finger pursuing its own rhythm, coming together in a tingling chord….

“OK, I’m done,” he said. “This is the latest auto save, which was a few minutes ago. So whatever you typed after that is lost. Sorry. Wish I could have done better.”

“That’s OK. No need to apologize. It’s my fault. You told me what to do last time, and, of course, I didn’t.”

“Not that any of you ever listen to me. After all, I’m just the token guy around here.”

He smiled, taking the bite out of the criticism, but she knew he really felt this way. He was one of only two men in the seven-person office, including the editor-in-chief, Stan Johnson. Cultural differences between Lem and “the Americans” as well as gender differences between Lem and “the women” sometimes created tension. For all his cockiness, Tyne got the feeling he didn’t really like the female adoration. He was probably one of those brothers who liked a good chase and didn’t want an easy thing. Probably held fast to his African—and patriarchal—belief that men should do the pursuing. Which put Gail out of the running. But for some reason, she continued to chase. Like now.

“Lem, I think something’s wrong with my computer, too.” The woman had the nerve to be standing at Tyne’s cubicle entrance, looking all helpless and “female.” Never mind that she had the heft of a good 190-pound construction worker. Tyne blinked as the woman actually batted her eyelashes.

Lem sighed and nodded to Tyne, then left, following Gail like a reluctant child. Tyne sat at her computer, looked at the temp file, then exhaled in relief to see she was missing only a couple of paragraphs from her report. She began typing, forcing herself to ignore the almost purring sounds of pussycat Gail trying to make a kill. The woman was too obvious.

Tyne found Gail antagonizing at times, but in all honesty, she envied her, too. Gail might be shallow, but at least she knew what she wanted. Gail aimed low and achieved what she aimed for. Tyne had aimed high all her life and been miserably disappointed when she fell short. So, she couldn’t even really look down on Gail.

Besides, most likely Gail slept well at nights. Didn’t have someone chasing her in her dreams, touching her, making her do things—and, for the last few nights, caressing the blade of a knife against her throat.

As Tyne continued typing, her tired mind threatened to shut down. Sleep, elusive at night, threatened to take over in this safe sun-filled place. She battled the lethargy pulling at her lids, slowing her fingers on the keys. Despite her efforts, her breathing deepened, her vision blurred. The sounds of the office—the disparate syncopation of keyboards, ringing phones, Gail’s coos—began to fade.

A breath—soft and whispery—grazed her cheek as the hand moved slowly down, its fingers pushing aside the satiny material of her dress, seeking, finding one nipple ready, pliant, massaging it between two fingers, stroking the orb as lips moved to her ear, touching, licking, whispering…

“You know what you want. So do I.”

Another hand navigated a silky thigh, found the crevice that separated it from its mate, found her bare beneath, wet and waiting…

She shook herself awake. Her hands lay motionless on the keyboard. She sat dazed for a moment, trying to grasp what had happened. Just that quickly, she lapsed into a dream state and found him waiting for her. She felt disoriented, unreal—and frightened. The dream had continued where it’d left off. It had followed her here to this innocuous place where sunlight streamed in through large but dirty windows and kept shadows from merging into other shapes. The dream had never invaded her days before, never left her trembling as it did now.

She lifted her fingers, her mind pushing them to finish her report, but they wouldn’t obey. They hovered over the keys, tremulous. Her mouth was dry and she found it hard to swallow. She had to get control over her flayed nerves. If she didn’t, she’d have a full panic attack right here in front of everybody.

Tyne stood on wobbly legs, left her cubicle, and headed toward the water fountain. As she passed Rhoni’s cubicle, she caught a glimpse of her coworker idly talking on her phone, probably to her boyfriend. Tyne envied the carefree laughter of the young woman. As for herself, she felt like bursting into tears. She reached the fountain and bent to take a few sips. But the water ran dry over her tongue, barely lubricating it. Still, just getting up and walking a few steps had slowed her racing pulse. She took a few lung-cleansing breaths, drank some more water. Feeling better, reality edged back in with the thought that she had several pages to finish on the report before she headed to lunch. She started back, passing Lem on his return, or more likely escape, to his workspace. Obviously relieved to be away from Gail, Lem smiled at Tyne, then disappeared into his haven.

Back in her cubicle, Tyne sat down at her computer, her nerves steadier now. She still had to input the percentages from last quarter; most of the numbers were in red. She positioned her fingers to type and looked at the screen.

Her breath caught in her throat as her eyes read over her last line. It stared back at her, blatant in all caps. Bold. Underlined.

WE’RE GOING TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER

But how? She had fallen asleep. That much she was sure. But somehow, in her sleep, her fingers had typed out a message for her…to her. The same message
he
whispered in her ear nearly every night for the past few months, the last thing he said to her before she woke up and escaped.

W
e’re going to be together forever.
The words seared into Tyne’s brain as she sat during the train ride home. They were the words she heard in her dreams and lately in the still of her room, between reality and dream. But until this morning, they had stayed safely within the privacy of her room and her head. They had never appeared anywhere else.

As always when she heard them, they brought fear and a need to escape.

This—thing—whatever was happening to her—was getting worse. Most of all, it made no sense. It was ruining her nights and possibly her sanity because she didn’t know how long she could go on like this.

Even now, her eyes were heavy, her body craving the sleep that was robbed from her nightly, but fear wouldn’t let her drift off. The thought of the train denizens, mostly old, street-wizened men with their own demons, watching her toss and grapple with her nocturnal pursuer, a pursuer who had now chased her into her waking hours, into the safety of her office….

Somehow she had managed to keep it together at work, fighting off an impulse to run and scream and hide. She had sat and stared blindly at the message for a few minutes. Then instinct took over as a finger touched the backspace key and deleted the spectral words. Her fingers finished the report without her, or at least without her conscious self. Her eyes fed her fingers words and numbers from the remaining handwritten pages without thought and meaning, bypassing her brain altogether. She continued in automode for the rest of the morning until she completed the report.

Afterward, she walked the report into Stan’s office where she distractedly watched him write in his ledger, waiting for him to acknowledge her. She guessed he was going over the budget. Stan’s bald pate gleamed smooth, making him appear younger than his fifty-eight years. Tyne figured he had shaved his head for just that reason, all signs of gray effectively eliminated. His face, when he finally looked up, displayed a series of small moles off his left eye, and a hefty salt-and-pepper mustache that only partially covered his full upper lip. At that moment, the lines that furrowed his forehead were more from worry than age. He looked up, seemingly pissed at the interruption even though he had been bugging her for the report since late yesterday.

“What’s up?” he asked, his tone dismissive.

She handed him the report and he nearly snatched it out of her hand.

“Finally. Took you long enough.” In the same breath, he laid it on his desk and picked up his pen again. “Can’t look at it right now. Gotta go over this budget.”

So her surmise had been correct. Normally, she would have started thinking of what provisions she would have to make just in case her salary had been struck through on the ledger. But there was nothing normal about her day, which she was going to bring to an abrupt close, not caring how it might look. She wasn’t all that eager to be the good little employee to an employer who was about to kick her ass out on the street.

“Stan, I gotta go home. I’m not feeling well.”

He sat up and slammed his pen down with a flourish that was meant to intimidate. It didn’t.

“Ah damn it, that’s just great! What the hell am I supposed to do if I need changes done to the report? There’s no one else here who can do it.”

“Just leave any suggestions on my voicemail, and I’ll be in early tomorrow and make whatever revisions you need. But right now, I really can’t stay.”

He studied her face, probably trying to determine just how sick she was. “What’s wrong? It’s not some woman thing, is it?”

Inwardly, Tyne cringed. She disliked Stan thinking of her in any intimate terms whatsoever, and his mention of her menses was too disturbing.

“No, I’m fighting some sort of bug, Stan, and I know you wouldn’t want me spreading germs, considering the staff is already small, and if I stay I could have you down to two people.”

She felt no guilt lying to Stan. He lied often enough, calling in sick when everyone knew he was out on the golf course or sitting up in a bar somewhere shooting the shit with some of his journalist buddies. He felt no qualms transgressing the laws he laid down for the underlings. Which was why the employees’ loyalty was solely to their paychecks and not to Stan.

“And you’ll be in early tomorrow?” He repeated her words, his tone relenting because outside of firing her right then and there, there was nothing he could do.

She nodded. “Going home to dope myself up, and I’ll be in bright and early,” she assured him, knowing even then she couldn’t assure herself. Only the night would tell.

Sitting on the train now, she tried to remember when the dreams had started. Every thought pinpointed the night of the
Clarion
party nearly two months ago. It had been held at the Fairmont in recognition of retired founder Willard Stingley’s eighty-fifth birthday, and the staff had been required to attend. Black-tie gala, full-dress, tuxes and gowns. Which made some sense of her dream. Or at least the setting.

She had attended alone, not bothering to go through her book of friends to beg them to share her tedium. She planned to stay only until after the meal, mingle for a half hour, then slip out, but it hadn’t worked out that way.

Stan had cornered her and kept her by his side as he made the rounds among the journalist luminaries. Even as he used her, she couldn’t bring herself to get angry that he was deliberately giving folks the wrong impression. She found his charade kind of pathetic. Stan, excellent at deadlines and keeping down costs to maintain a crippled paper, had yet to get and keep a woman for more than two dates. Tyne had sidestepped his earlier attempts to expand their professional relationship to something else when she first started working at the
Clarion
. But that didn’t keep him from using her. She was thirty to his fifty-eight and he liked people believing that he could “bag a young ’un.”

Nothing out of the ordinary had happened that evening. Nothing to warrant the dreams that recreated that night with minor changes. She hadn’t worn green that night. April, Donell, and Eve hadn’t been there, either.

As for the stranger…

She turned from the window to find a grizzled man, probably homeless, staring her down from another seat, his eyes seeking hers. She turned her attention back to the passing buildings outside the train, went back to her thoughts.

The stranger in her dream had no face. She never got a visual sense of what he looked like, not the color of his hair, his eyes or his skin.

She closed her eyes, trying to stave off the memory of the feel of his hands on her skin, the way his fingers traveled down her shoulders and sides, pulling at the soft, green fabric. How his hands cupped her breasts, teased her nipples until her body tensed and her crotch began to cream. How he knew just where to touch her, knew places that caused her body to cry out, places no other lover, either through ignorance or selfishness, had ever explored….

She felt the warmth of his breath as his lips touched her mouth lightly, then forced it open. She tasted the subtle trace of champagne and something unfamiliar on his tongue as it explored her mouth. She felt his hand move down, down….

She woke with a jerk of her head just in time to see the hand stretching toward her breast. But instead of a tuxedoed, faceless stranger, the old man who had been staring at her a moment—or moments?—before was now leering down at her.

“You weerre moannning,” he slurred. “Thought sompin’ was wrong wit’ you.”

“Get away from me,” she said between clenched teeth, keeping her voice low, wondering what the man had heard her muttering, worried that he was about to cause a scene. But the other riders weren’t even looking at them. They probably assumed the man was begging for money, a normal scenario on Chicago trains.

“Noww, why you acting like I’m doin’ sompin’ wrong. Just tryin’ to helllpp.” He turned and staggered away, but paused to look over his shoulder and spew under his breath. “Haughty aasss bitchh…nobody want your aasss any damn way.” He muttered his way down the aisle, then opened and walked through the door leading to a connecting car.

Tyne raised her hand to push a stray hair out of her eye. Her hand was trembling.