***DREAM***

Tom was dreaming about work.

Tom had what most people considered an odd condition: He repeated every day over again in his dreams. Rather than explore misty forests, or ride bumblebees, or be chased by implacable foes, or something cool like that, he got to experience each day twice.

On some days this was a great thing, like when he visited Disney World when he was twelve, or when he lost his virginity.

Other days, it was more of a curse.

“You gotta come pick up Lily’s stuff,” came Mr. Ben’s voice over the cell phone.

Tom’s skin went cold. Again. He listened to himself babble the same denial as yesterday.

“But I—”

Lily’s former landlord gave a raspy sigh. “Look, kid, the end of the month is coming up quick, and if you don’t help get her furniture out of the house, I’m gonna have to hire somebody to help, and that’s gonna come out of her deposit. They should be here in an hour.”

As usual, Tom’s dream followed the exact same pattern as the day before. He’d heard that the brain would conjure fantastic fantasies to explain the random firing of neurons as they stored the memories from the day before.

Tom was envious.

Tom slipped his phone into his vest pocket, shoulders tense.

“What’s up, man?” Jacob called from across the aisle. Jacob had thick black hair, a short, skinny body, and a vaguely French facial structure. He was one of Tom’s work friends, those people you only associate with between the time you clock in and the time you clock out.

The fellow freight guy was stocking bath supplies with mind-bending speed, blazing through his pallet and tossing boxes back with a constant ‘hup’ ‘hup’ ‘hup’. A thin sheen of sweat was raised on his brow as he worked.

“I gotta go. Lily’s landlord is—”

“Say no more!” Jacob interrupted, holding up a hand before itching his nose furiously. “I’ll cover housewares. I’ll probably be done with mine by midday anyway.”

“Thanks, Jacob,” Tom said, his body dragging itself away from the towering pile of housewares.

Tom started walking toward the exit in a tired shuffle.

Ellie. Ellie doesn’t have a mom now. The sudden realization from the day before struck him again, just as potent in the dream as it had been the first time.

The thought of Ellie turned back to Lily. How beautiful, vibrant and exotic she seemed, and yet had bothered to give the skinny nerd the time of day. He’d gathered the courage to tell her she was pretty and she’d basically stalked him after that.

Not that he’d minded. The girl didn’t have any family of her own, and Tom’s grandparents had been more than happy to welcome Tom’s girlfriend to theirs.

Just three weeks ago, she’d died in a car crash.

He couldn’t afford to miss work. Not with a hospital bill that was going to land on them sooner or later.

Tom groaned and leaned against the grocery aisle, knocking a few boxes of cereal off the shelves, spilling Great Grains all over the floor.

Great. Fucking. Grains.

Tom resumed his shuffling gait toward the exit, mind clouded with a fog of overwork and sleep deprivation. Even in his dream, he was strung out.

He felt a meaty hand clamp down on his arm. Attached to the hand was a fat wrist, and a chubby arm, and finally, a face.

Dan.

Manager Dan.

Dan the Manager.

A.k.a. the guy who decided who to hire and fire. That Dan. The Dan who was constantly looking for an excuse to fire him… Tom’s eyes narrowed. Dan.

“Where you goin’?” Dan asked, gum smacking between his teeth as he gave Tom a grin that had nothing to do with happiness. Well, maybe for Dan.

“My girlfriend’s dead. Her landlord’s gonna take the money from her deposit to move her stuff out unless I... I have to…” Tom pointed toward the door.

“Right,” Dan said, ignoring the words that were coming out of his mouth. “Here’s what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna stay, and you’re gonna work your ass off and then go deal with baby-momma’s crap because it’s Sunday, and we’re up to here with freight,” he said, motioning above himself. “Am I clear?”

“He says he’s going to do it in an hour.”

“Tom,” Dan said, flicking him in the forehead. “Stop and think. It’s the middle of the night, the man’s pushing eighty. You think he’s gonna be able to move all her shit without anyone’s help? He’s dead in the water.”

Mr. Ben hadn’t exaggerated. Tom remembered that much from the day before.

The sheer injustice of being forced to work for eighty bucks while he could have saved four times that amount in fees got on Tom’s nerves, even in his dreams.

“I don’t—”

“Look at it this way,” Dan said, his smile growing wider. “You walk out that door, you’re not coming back. Not with the amount of time off you’ve been taking recently. You move too slow. You only do about two-thirds what Jacob gets done.”

“Jacob’s on cocaine,” Tom said, sticking to his script from the day before.

“I don’t care. You leave now, you leave for good. We need you here on Sundays.”

Tom vividly imagined punching Dan in the face with everything he had, unleashing a primal howl and tearing a metal bar off the clothes stand before beating the insufferable twat to death with it.

He imagined it so hard he could feel the skinned knuckles and the pain in his wrists as the metal pole transferred shock back to his hands.

There was a strange tearing sensation all around Tom’s body as he hauled back and punched Dan in the face. The sight of the fat bastard’s eyes wide, blood spraying out of his nose as he flailed backwards was absolutely priceless. The memory would live inside him for the rest of his life.

Tom blinked.

What just happened?

This didn’t happen when he was awake. Awake, Tom had swallowed his anger, thought hard about his daughter, and finished his shift like a responsible parent, only to discover Lily’s apartment already cleared out.

“You little shit, what the he— You’re fired!” Dan said, his voice shrill as he crab-walked away from the skinny kid staring at his own skinned knuckles like an idiot.

“Am I…actually dreaming, or what?” Tom asked, staring at his knuckles as blood began to bead up on them. There was a sense of…something worming through his stomach. Guilt? All of a sudden, Tom was reminded of a little girl from elementary school.

Suzie Collins. He couldn’t remember much, just red hair and freckles, and a deep-seated sense of shame.

What the hell is going on?

“I knew it, you’re on drugs! Get the fuck out of here!” Dan the manager shouted, his voice sinking back to his usual artificially deepened timbre as he climbed to his feet, looming over Tom as best he could.

Tom honestly wasn’t sure if he was dreaming or not, so he had to treat it like it were real and salvage the situation to the best of his abilities, and that meant moving Lily’s furniture and preserving some of her deposit.

“I gotta go,” Tom said, brushing past the manager and aiming for the rear entrance. Dan flinched out of his way, getting out of punching range. Tom vaguely waved to Jacob the Cokehead whipping through freight on the way out the back of the store, slamming his palms into the metal bar and pushing out into the night air of the employee parking lot.

Tom’s car was a piece of shit Subaru. The previous owner’s dog had literally eaten the seats, the lining on the ceiling, and the seatbelts. It made him smell like wet dog wherever he went, but it was cheap, and the engine was healthy.

He couldn’t afford to buy new seatbelts.

Tom slid into his car and pulled the empty belt down, pinning it to the side of his seat with a couple safety pins there for that express purpose.

He couldn’t afford to pay the ticket for not having a seatbelt, either.

Tom took a deep breath and headed over to Lily’s apartment, just a couple blocks down the road.

Lily’s place was always an enigma. Her apartment was in the middle of a slum, yet filled with old things, fine furniture, and heavy wood. How she managed to support herself after high school was a mystery. How did someone with no family afford an apartment with no job? That kind of lifestyle? How did she even move the furniture? The obvious answer would probably run in the vein of drugs or prostitution, but Lily never came off as that kind of person.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Well, the answer probably didn’t bear thinking about.

Not anymore, anyway.

Tom sighed as he put the car into park, looking up at the squat two-story apartment building with a moving truck in front of it.

A couple big dudes that made Dan look cute were relaxing next to the truck, drinking coffee. One waved at him. Tom waved back.

The truck had Big Tim’s Moving Co. stenciled onto the side, along with a picture of a dude hauling a dresser with a happy smile.

Tom followed the stairs up to Lily’s second-story apartment. It was a place he’d visited so many times, he could’ve gotten the right door with his eyes closed.

Tom walked into the apartment that still smelled like her and spotted Mr. Ben with his own coffee. The wrinkled old man gave him a nod.

“Tom. Didn’t expect to see you.”

“I didn’t expect to be here,” Tom muttered, poking a vase and watching it wobble. After taking a moment to pause and consider it, he’d realized he was still dreaming, except now he was dreaming about things that hadn’t happened.

How come I didn’t know I could do this? he thought, frowning.

Once again, the thought of Suzie Collins came back to him, and a vague sense of shame.

Weird.

“Well, coffee’s done. You ready to move some furniture?” Mr. Ben asked.

Tom shrugged. “Not that much different than what I was just doing. And hey, can we dump the furniture at my house? I’d rather not get the bill from the self-storage place, too.”

“Yeah, we can do that,” Mr. Ben said with a shrug. “You’re lucky you showed up on time.”

Tom shook his head and got to work hauling chairs and couches.

About halfway through the night, he was carrying a dresser downstairs. He was hauling the heavier end down when the damn thing decided to bite him. A piece of façade came loose and sliced into Tom’s palm, proving that the dresser was not hardwood and also a jerk.

Tom hissed and dropped the dresser, which caused the moving guy to drop his end too. Normally, that would be it, but the dresser practically exploded when it hit the staircase. The flimsy wood was concealing a secret compartment filled to the brim with gold coins.

Tom and the movers stared in stunned silence as the gold coins rattled their way down the stairs, like a tinkling waterfall of pure money.

“Is this real, or like, a D&D prop?” one of the big guys asked, picking up one of the big coins and inspecting its imperfect surface. The coins looked homemade, rather than the crisp perfection of gold coins Tom had seen online, minted by the U.S. government.

A glint of silver caught Tom’s eye. Resting inside the false wall of the dresser was a book with silver lettering on the side.

Tom leaned closer, trying to make out the words, when he noticed everything was getting blurry. Tom blinked his eyes, but it didn’t clear up.

Matter of fact, everything got blurrier, and over everything else, he began to hear the sound of Gramma’s cast iron pan clanging against the stove, meaning breakfast was being made...

***AWAKE***

Tom woke up with a rapid intake of breath, sitting up and blinking the afternoon sun out of his eyes. He glanced over and spotted his own window letting in the light, his own room covered in dumb anime posters he hadn’t bothered to take down since he was twelve.

So it was a dream, Tom thought, climbing to his feet, his body aching from the freight work he’d done the night before. He felt a crinkle in his left hand and raised it up to his face, staring blankly at the paper he saw there.

It was the combined receipt for two different bills: one for two hundred dollars from Big Tim’s Moving Co. and a second for a hundred and seventy from Badger Self-storage.

Tom had to concentrate for a moment to remember how the day had actually ended.

He’d finished his shift at work, gone and argued with Ben for an hour or two before coming home. After that, he’d collapsed into bed and passed out instantly.

Which brought him to now.

Tom staggered out into the living room, the smell of bacon and eggs making his stomach do flips in anticipation. Gramma always made a second breakfast for when he woke up in the afternoon.

Once Tom blinked the yawn away, he froze.

There, in the center of the room, holding his baby hostage, was his nemesis. A demon in human form…

Carol.

“Looks like your sperm donor’s awake,” Carol said, bouncing Ellie on her knee. “Yes, he is!” She nuzzled his baby.

Now, when you hear the name Carol, you think dumpy middle-aged woman with three kids and a book club where they talk about how unsatisfied they are with their sex lives.

This Carol was not that Carol. This Carol was skeletal, with all the appearance and mannerisms of a meth head, without the rotten teeth.

If there were anything to complement this she-beast about, it would be her teeth. They were immaculate, and almost feral the way she bared them whenever Tom came close to her.

How she came to be Lily’s best friend, Tom would never know. He didn’t even wanna know. They were together a lot though, when Tom was dating Lily, and the skinny bitch did just about everything short of cold-blooded murder to get rid of him.

Now that Tom thought about their relationship, he was fairly sure his grandparents thought Carol was Lily’s gay lover and Ellie’s other mom in some kind of free love, new-age polycule, and that was why they tolerated her.

Or maybe they just couldn’t turn down free babysitting.

Tom freed Ellie from the demon’s clutches and held the little meatball against his chest, bouncing her gently in place.

There was just something so calming about holding his daughter. Tom felt like he was literally recharging from sheer cuteness.

“Oof, you’re getting heavy. You’re a little chubster, you know that?” he asked, inspecting Ellie at arm’s length. His baby had fantastic eyes, part of them being a pale grey like his own, while there was a wedge of her iris that was green like her mother’s.

She reached her tiny hand up with malicious intent.

Tom sighed as he deftly moved Ellie away from his hair in order to avoid a bald patch. “I know, pretty soon you’re gonna start learning words, and I’m gonna have to stop body shaming you.”

She smiled at him with an uncomprehending gaze.

Man, I need more of this.

“But at least right now the verbal abuse slides right off. You forgive me, right?” he said, tweaking her nose.

Ellie sneezed.

“Hey, Carol…” The next words felt like pulling teeth. “Can you watch Ellie for another couple days? I need to take care of some stuff.”

“Of course,” Carol said.

“Really?” Tom asked as he gave Ellie back, frowning. Carol had been watching the baby tirelessly every day for weeks now. Didn’t she have a job, or a family, or something?

“If I allowed you to raise Elenore, she would grow up to also be a spineless peasant. This little one is destined to crush the enemies of house Ku’leth. Isn’t that right, my little unheard-of freak of nature?” She blew a raspberry on Ellie’s tummy, causing the baby to shriek.

“I don’t care about your LARPing,” Tom said. “But if you try to steal my baby, I will break your neck.”

“Tom!” Gramma shouted from the kitchen.

Shit. Tom winced.

“Is that any way to talk to Lily’s...best friend!?” Gramma demanded. “After she agreed to watch Ellie, even?”

Carol’s demonic smile grew inhumanly wide while she maintained heavy eye contact.

Tom apologized. “I’m sorry, Carol, that was incredibly rude of me.”

“Better,” Gramma said.

“I meant to say, I’ll hunt you down and respectfully sever your spine.”

“Tom!!”

Tom sat down at the breakfast table while Gramma gave him the stink eye. Despite the glare, she overloaded his plate with enough bacon and eggs to feed a small army, sliding it directly off her skillet onto his plate.

“You’ve got to be nice to girls, Tom.”

“I’m not convinced that is human. Let alone a girl,” Tom said, thumbing towards where Carol was bouncing Ellie on her lap, her neck turning nearly a hundred and eighty degrees to watch them.

“Lord help me. It’s Suzie Collins all over again,” Gramma said, crossing herself.

An intense feeling of formless guilt washed over Tom, and he paused, fork full of eggs halfway to his mouth.

“What happened with Suzie Collins?” Tom asked.

“You don’t remember?” Gramma demanded, looking very disappointed in him.

Tom shook his head.

“One year when you were eight, you decided you didn’t like that little girl, and you bullied her mercilessly. You spread rumors about her, about her parents. We kept you away from her family while you were home from school, but somehow you kept at it, coming up with new things to embarrass her with.

“And somehow or other, all those mean lies you told about her turned out to be true. Her dad really was having an affair, and her mom was drinking most of her dad’s money.”

Gramma paused, her gaze distant.

“Her family split up and Suzie went with her mom. Last I heard, the woman lost custody and that little girl went into foster care.” Gramma sighed, rubbing her temples.

Tom took a slow bite of eggs, processing that.

When he combined it with the inexplicable sense of shame he’d had when deviating from the course his dream had set for him, a half-remembered picture started to emerge. His grandmother’s testimony filled in the blanks.

I think I might have a superpower, Tom thought idly, taking a bite of eggs.

He half remembered going over to Suzie’s house and snooping around in his sleep. Then when he woke up, no one knew what he’d done, except for him. Then he’d used that information to hurt a little girl.

When her family had gotten divorced and she’d moved away, he’d had a life-defining realization of how much of a complete asshole he’d been and had basically shut down the what if aspect of his dreams entirely, exclusively repeating the day before in his sleep for eleven years.

Until now.

Tom was still on the fence about possibly being psychic. Any rational person wouldn’t immediately jump to the superpower conclusion. They would try to find a more logical explanation for what was happening, and Tom was a fairly rational person.

Maybe his brain was so stressed that it had flipped some kind of switch and he’d dreamt about gold coins as a way of giving him some temporary relief.

Tom reached into his pocket and pulled out a key with a dinky little plastic badger dangling off of it.

Badger Self-storage.

Well, I guess there’s one way to find out for sure, Tom thought, dropping the key back into his pocket.

“Thanks for breakfast, Gramma. I gotta go start moving Lily’s furniture. End of the month’s coming up quick.”

The steel-haired woman nodded, dismissing him from the table.

Tom slipped on his coat, snagged his wallet and keys, and gave Carol a parting glare before tromping out into the afternoon sun.

After a short drive and entering the code from his receipt, Tom was standing in front of the rolled-up door of the storage unit. The light barely penetrated the unit, casting all of Lily’s furniture in a dim glow from the street’s reflected sunlight.

He scanned the dim enclosure for a few seconds before he found what he was looking for.

There. Tom cleared a path to the dresser he’d broken open in his what if dream. He hauled the cabinet forward until it was in the cleared-out section, then he began tapping on the back of the furniture until the sound turned hollow.

Tom pulled his knife out and stuck it behind the thin plywood painted to look like solid oak, then he started prying.

A minute later, the back of the cabinet popped off, and a flood of gold coins washed out onto the concrete floor of the storage unit, like he’d just hit triple seven.

…Tom stared.

“Holy shit, I think I’m psychic.”