Harvestland

SIXTEEN

In her dream, she was floating down an endless hospital corridor.

The doors to all the rooms were open. Light poured in through large grid-iron windows and flooded the hallway, like the entire place was built of light.

One door: closed.

The number on the door: 616.

Underneath the door: black, no light.

She lifted her hand to touch the doorknob but had the sudden feeling—no, the knowledge—that it would be hot to the touch. The blackness underneath the door rippled, dark shadows shifting and writhing and taking on beastly shape.

She stepped back and knew she wanted to be nowhere near that door.

She looked back down the hallway of light. Alison stood down there in her angelic lady-in-white get-up. Noah stood next to her, also in all white, suited up and looking like a televangelist. She didn't want them to tell her like they always did that they were dead.

So she looked the other way down the hall but saw the light at the end begin to dim and then suddenly fade to black. She looked back at door 616 and knew that the shadows behind it were sucking the light away.

The hallway lights began to shut off in droves, the darkness coming Charlee's way and gaining speed—boom, boom, boom—as she stumbled back and saw the shadows slither out from underneath the door like heavy plumes of black smoke. They grew and swelled and tangled into one another, into one large shape, a beast bearing down on her.

She turned and began to run and of course was going nowhere. Alison and Noah stood there staring at her sadly, looking like if only she had listened. In fact they seemed to get even further away as the darkness swept past her, extinguishing the lights as if they were errant candles and submerging the corridor into pitch blackness, the beast falling upon her and swallowing her whole with a growl of gnashing teeth—

She shot up in bed, sweating and gasping and trying to breathe. She tried a few long sighs to get her senses back and slow her heart down. The faint gray light of early morning began to peek around her window shade. She checked the clock on her nightstand—

6:16.

Double-take.

Still the same time. She slowly lay back down and didn't get back to sleep. Her alarm would go off soon anyway for the first day of school.

And Noah would be there. They could start to get their old lives back.

It was enough to make her forget the dream—up until her alarm went off three minutes before she set it.

School indeed was better.

No one could keep them apart there.

The vampire lovers risked the sun and became day-walkers once again. They were back holding hands in the school halls and kissing in the empty and sometimes not-so-empty corridors and more than a few times sneaking out during lunch or study hall or a free period to find a place to have sex.

With their love they christened bathrooms, broom closets, prop storage rooms for the drama club, different rows in the auditorium as well as stage front and back, underneath the bleachers by the football field, and in one particularly impressive feat, the faculty lounge.

Their midnight trysts continued but were less frequent considering the early hour to rise for school. But they were always resourceful.

Their parents, realizing that communication was inevitable in school, loosened the reins a bit to allow for the occasional get-together—heavily chaperoned, of course. They could meet for church functions or when either family went out to the movies or to dinner. It was hardly an allowance, but it was something, even if they had to suppress much of their usual conversation and leave the talking to their eyes or a naughty game of footsy under the table.