Next Chapter                     Last Chapter                           Nikola's Nightmares Home 

Chapter 11: From a Nightmare to a Painting

Nikola revisited the law firm in her dreams that night. She found herself walking down its hallways, looking for something. She wasn't quite sure what she was looking for, she only knew that she would recognize it when she found it, and that she should hurry. 

There was someone behind her: she could feel him, even though she couldn't see him, and she knew she had to find what she was looking for before he got to her. The hallway was lined with doors, all of them open, with people standing in each doorway. She recognized the lawyer she had spoken to that afternoon at one of the doors, and the receptionist at another. Strangers standing at the other doors thrust sheets of paper at her.

She knew that she should take one, they all wanted her to read it, but she was afraid that the paper contained bad news. She didn't want to take one, but with every step she brushed against them, shoved at her from all sides. The people in the doorways, who had by now become faceless, pushed them further and further out into the hallway, until she could not avoid them even by side-stepping. Finally, no longer able to resist the pressure, she took one and looked at it. She was shocked to see a picture of the Woman in Red at the bottom of the stairs - or was it a picture of herself?

The longer she looked at it, the more frightened it made her. She broke into a run, but her efforts were futile because the hallway was endless and always the same. Someone still followed her. The people in the doorways had disappeared, leaving her alone with her stalker. She could not see him but sensed his presence and the danger he represented. She continued forward blindly, not daring to look back.

The hallway transformed itself into an urban street, uninhabited except for Nikola and her follower. The sidewalks consisted of their regular concrete, but the streets became an impassable river of molten lava. Nikola continued running until she came to the end of a block, and found herself stuck. She finally turned to face her follower, but saw only a burst of light. It was another nightmare, it had to be. Once she discovered that it was a dream, she forced herself to wake up.

Nikola opened her eyes. It was dark all around her. At first she thought she was at home in bed, but then she realized that the shadows were different. She looked around frantically, impatient for her eyes to adjust to the dark. When she finally began seeing shapes, all she saw was bars - surrounding her, as if she were in jail, or in a cage. She grabbed the bars and shook them, trying to push them away. At first, they seemed to yield, but then they pushed back. More than just springing back into shape - the bars seemed to push her with their own independent force. They pushed with enough strength to throw Nikola backwards towards the center of the cage. Much to her surprise, she landed on something soft - a mattress. She lay there for a moment looking straight ahead at the sky above her. Instead of the expected ceiling, she saw stars. A circular pocket of stars, framed by silhouettes of branches and leaves hovered indistinctly in her view. The branches swayed softly, continually changing the frame's dimensions.

She heard voices off to her left. They sounded close, but not in the same space - in the hallway perhaps. She turned her head towards them and saw a stream of light coming towards her. She squinted at it, and saw it for what it was: a door, slightly ajar, letting in some light from the hallway outside. Nikola felt as if she knew this place - she felt a strong sense of deja vu. However, she couldn't specifically recognize it, and the deja vu was accompanied by a sense of dread. She turned her head to face the stars again, in an attempt to escape to them, but they were gone. She was suddenly, unmistakably, indoors.

She decided to investigate the noises in the hall, so she crept out from under her covers to the edge of the bed. The bars were gone, she was on a regular single bed. She sat there for a moment, staring at the stream of light, dangling her legs. The thin sliver of light reflected off the carpet to provide the only color visible in the room. As it tripped over the deep red hues that predominated the pattern on the decorative carpet, it looked like a trickle of blood, spreading slowly as it flowed into the room. It frightened Nikola, but she had seen it before and knew that it wouldn't come near her. 

When she thought it safe, she jumped down to the floor and tip-toed towards the open door, careful to walk along the shadows and avoid the red. But she knew she was in trouble before she could get there. A huge silhouette, twice her size at least, appeared in the doorway, blocking out most of the light. A shrill voice and a pointed scolding finger accompanied the figure.

Nikola turned, ran for the bed and dove underneath the covers, but she was not fast enough to miss a sharp painful slap that landed in the middle of her back. Another slap followed as she cowered under the covers, but this one was cushioned through covers and stung significantly less.

The large dark shape moved back towards the door and out of the room. When it left, it shut the door completely, leaving Nikola alone in the dark, crying into her pillow.

It was in this state that she awoke in her own apartment, on her familiar double bed, still shaking from the dream. Yet again, she found herself awake before the sun and afraid to go back to sleep. As she moved through her apartment, she couldn't help but think back to the nightmare.

She recognized several elements of the previous day: the law office scene was clearly taken from her visit to Morse-Chester, and the papers forced on her reminded her of the constant barrage leaflets people pushed at her when she was in mid-town, on her way to the office building. Since the law firm bought the Women in Red series, it seemed appropriate that it would turn up in that context. The papers also reminded her of Marty's journal, which had been on her mind a lot since she had read it. However, she had no idea where the second part of her dream came from. All of those images were foreign to her.

She knew that they could be just inventions of her imagination or a reflection of an image she saw briefly on the streets or TV, but those answers didn't satisfy her. They also didn't explain her sense of deja vu in the dream and she thought that could be important.

She searched her brain to place the room or the woman from the dream. She thought of every room she had seen at St. Mary's, but none that she could recall even came close. Most of St. Mary's didn't even have carpets, and the few she remembered there were simple and inexpensive, a complete contrast to the ornamental one she had just seen. She had no better luck with the figure in the dream. Nikola had assumed that she was a woman, but, upon reflection, she couldn't be sure.

Finally, Nikola allowed herself to entertain the possibility that the end of the dream contained elements from her seven years of lost memories. She wanted more than anything to recover those years and had always hoped that her dreams would provide her with clues, but she feared them as well. Her dreams were all nightmares and she knew that it was possible that her subconscious lost those memories for a reason - to protect her from them. If her exploration was successful, would she be able to stand whatever she would find? All these questions raced through her mind as she paced through the apartment.

Not knowing is the worst of all, she assured herself as she approached her drafting table. She gathered her courage and prepared to start analyzing the dream. Her first step was to try to remember every detail. Before she knew it, she found herself writing it down. It was a technique that she had used in the past, and she found that it helped her to remember her dreams more vividly and for longer.

By mid-morning she was sketching the image of the figure in the doorway onto one of her large canvasses. She was still in her bathrobe, now covered with smudges of charcoal, working obsessively to reconstruct the scene. She worked that way through the entire day, hardly even taking time to eat, and was surprised by how easily she could fill in details. Certain things, like the pattern of the deep red ornamental carpet, seemed to form on the canvas of their own accord, right underneath her hands. Although she didn't specifically remember these details from the dream, she knew that they belonged there.

She continued working at that pace until she had to leave for Eddie's party, by which time she had blocked in all the major colors and shapes. This was going to be one of her darkest paintings ever, since most of the scene was in shadow. The few colors that she planned to use were all deep, subdued hues. She knew they would create an ominous mood.

Next Chapter             Last Chapter               Nikola's Nightmares Home                    ClaudiaM Home

	Web ClaudiaM.com