By the time Josh realized that Kerry, or someone else, was in the apartment, it was too late. Josh had already stuck his key in the lock and the noise was easily heard from any corner of the tiny apartment. If it was someone robbing the apartment, they’d have probably chosen that point to run. If it was Kerry, Josh suspected that nothing obvious would happen. But then something very obvious did happen.

The door opened before Josh could unlock it.

“Dude, where have you been? I’ve been worried sick. I almost called the police.” Kerry was there, door open, calm and sober as if nothing had happened.

“I’ve been over at Sara and Connor’s. I haven’t been sleeping very well and they let me crash on their couch. I think it might be a noise thing.” Josh said the first excuse that came to mind and went with it. “It’s a lot quieter up there.”

Kerry pulled Josh into the apartment by the elbow in a way that that made Josh mildly uncomfortable, even though he knew that was just the way Kerry was; though it was uncomfortably similar to their last encounter. “I must have just missed you. I crashed there the other night, and then I got back and you weren’t here… and then like a whole day happened and I didn’t hear from you…”

“I’m sorry, I should have left a note or sent you a text or something. I’ve just been really out of it. I nearly slept all of yesterday.” Josh tried to push past Kerry and towards his own bedroom, but his roommate wasn’t budging.

“No, hold on.” Kerry had shifted from passively blocking Josh’s way to actively blocking it. “Josh, I’m sorry. I was drunk and I overreacted. I’ve been acting like a real fool, like I own your friendship. But I’m glad you have more friends, even if they’re weird.”

Josh looked up to meet Kerry’s eyes and noticed a slight discoloration of his face. Like a bruise was nearly gone. But it wasn’t just one bruise, it was a few. Mostly around the jaw and nose. And based on how tightly packed the blotches of slightly yellow skin were, Josh wagered Kerry was probably covered with them.

“I…” Josh let out a sigh, but he really meant what he was saying. “I forgive you. And I’m sorry for being so mean to you. You didn’t deserve the crap I said about you being over emotional…”

“And I forgive you dude, because you were totally wrong. I’ve been hella stupid about telling people how I feel. I don’t need to get drunk to be honest.”

That took Josh by surprise. His whole attitude did. He saw Kerry standing in front of him, but it was like an invasion of the body snatchers situation. He wasn’t acting like himself at all. If anything, he was acting nearly the complete opposite of how he normally did.

“How hard did Connor hit you?”

“Pretty hard.” Kerry said with a laugh. “He’s kinda terrifying. But he knocked some sense into me… I think. That or maybe it was just how nice they were after I treated them like trash. That didn’t have any reason to do that, but they did. They made me breakfast, gave me a fair fight and an ice pack for the consequences, and they treated me like a person. It was the sexiest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”

That sounded more like Kerry. Maybe a little like he’d had some kind of gay awakening after Connor beat the crap out of him, but still like Kerry.

“I’m glad you got something out of it.” Josh stifled a laugh as he said it. It was good progress for his roommate and it definitely eased some of the tension he’d been feeling between them. “So no hard feelings?”

“No, I think we’re square.” Kerry said with a huff of a laugh. “I’m about to head to the gym, you interested?”

“Nah. I need to shower.” Josh gestured to his appearance and Kerry caught on. “Like I said, I basically slept for a whole day.”

“Well, if you change your mind…” Kerry moved aside to let Josh pass.

Despite the importance that Kerry had apparently ascribed to the interaction, he left the apartment almost immediately after. Which was a relief for Josh. He wasn’t sure if he could handle actual conversation or close proximity with other people for a while. Everything he had heard and learned at the penthouse was still swirling in his head like a vortex, and though running into Kerry had temporarily disrupted it, it hadn’t lost any of its force. The second Josh found himself alone in his room it went right back to spiraling.

“Okay. Dreams good, nightmares… bad.” Josh found himself letting the thoughts out of his head out loud and he wasn’t going to put a stopper on that, holding all the thoughts in was only going to make things worse. “Obviously. But they don’t cancel out. At least… they probably don’t. The mark I woke up with didn’t fade, and if Margot was right about it being a defense mechanism… maybe it would help?”

Josh had to shut up as he left the apartment with clean clothes and toiletries. The halls were no place to talk to yourself. And the showers were definitely not the kind of place you wanted to be caught talking to yourself. All the same, his mind carried on the conversation very clear as he extracted information from the vortex of words in his head and tried to place them in a coherent order.

“If I try and trigger another dream, and I wind up with an incomplete mark like last time… would it stay around long enough to help prevent a fourth dream? Or would it peel off on its own? Is a barely physical symptom of some mixture of insanity and magic water soluble?”

Josh couldn’t help but laugh out loud at that last thought. But it also stuck in his head. If he could endure another dream he could begin to experiment somewhat, perhaps even learn for himself what he had gotten himself into. He didn’t necessarily want to separate himself from Sara and Connor and Margot, but if he could do it himself he would feel safer and more confident about whatever he eventually chose to do with the information he’d been given.

So, when Josh finally ended his nearly half hour long mid-day shower, he sent a message to Sara.

“I think I want to give sleeping on my own one more shot. If I can’t handle it, I’ll come over first thing.” It didn’t sound as confident as Josh felt, but it conveyed what he wanted it to.

Sara’s response came quickly, almost as if she had been waiting with phone in hand—which Josh really hoped was not true. “Are you sure? You’ve been really bad after both dreams, and if it happens again you might not be as prepared as you think.”

“I know it’s going to suck, if it happens, but if I’m prepared for it I want to see if I can defend myself.”

“I don’t think that’s how it works. But good luck.”

A moment later, after Josh had started pacing his room and digesting the information stuck in his head once again, a different text message came across his phone.

“Hey. Salted lemon wedges.”

Josh was extremely confused at first, but then he saw the contact information on the text and the syntax began to make sense. It was Connor. And his follow up text put the entire thing in perspective.

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“It helps you dream a little lighter after you eat them. Easier to wake up or have a lucid dream.”

“Oh. Thanks. That might help.” It was all Josh could manage, and there wasn’t much else to say.

Connor must have thought so too, because he didn’t send another text. Josh was just left there, mid-pace in the middle of his bedroom with the knowledge that salted lemon wedges would help him in some manner. Josh didn’t exactly want the already extremely lucid dreams to become more lucid, though he doubted that salted lemon wedges would help with that. But being able to wake up easier from a dream might be nice in case things started to get even worse than they already had in the past.

In the first two dreams, the trauma had been enough to shock Josh to a wakeful and alert mind set. Though the bar for what amount of trauma would wake him up had shifted between them. Just being pulled into the other bubble by the marked arm had been enough to wake him up the first time. But the second time, Josh had been pulled through to whatever place the marked arm wanted him to be. And that place had been much much worse. And the longer he thought about getting pulled back into a space like that, the more Josh wanted to text Sara back and tell her he’d changed his mind. Amid his agitation, he’d already packed an overnight bag; but he was determined not to use it. At least not yet.

Once Josh had forced himself to eat a light dinner, that included some very painfully eaten salted lemon wedges, he continued to pace. The anxiety he had cultivated by thinking his plan over had driven the hunger of the day of sleep into a balance; he wasn’t starving, but he wasn’t satisfied either. It was like a brick was sitting in his stomach and his body knew it wasn’t food. His pacing path was now the length of the small apartment.Kerry had come and gone while Josh had hid in his room. Different though he was acting, Kerry was still Kerry and a Saturday night meant hunting for a booty call. And that was great for Josh. If he was really lucky Kerry would wind up in whatever girl’s bed and wouldn’t hear it when Josh…

It was around that point that Josh had to sit down. He was determined to go through another dream; for science if for no other reason. But whenever he thought of the consequences his stomach turned and his fingers went a little numb as his circulation cut back. It was an odd and uncomfortable sensation to say the least. And nearly every time it ran through his body, Josh found himself aiming for the apartment door. He was ready to go and give up on a moments notice. Just one realization too far into the reality of what he was about to do would have been enough to send him packing.

But that thought, that perfect alignment of ideas that would have sent him running for the hills, never came.

Instead, Josh found himself laying flat and stiff as a board on his back in his bed. The light was off, his phone was just out of reach, and the dorm was strangely quiet. Out of fear that the dream had already started without him realizing as it had last time, Josh frequently lifted his arms and let them drop by his sides to check if the sensation was correct. It was, every time. His eyes were shut and he was doing his best to relax and sleep, but it was nearly impossible to manage. Nearly impossible.

After well over an hour of trying and failing to sleep, Josh resorted to more desperate tactics. He loosened his neck, tipped his chin up every so slightly, and began to take more shallow breaths of air. Gradually, as his breathing became more shallow, he also did his best to space out his breathing. Only deep breaths in and out. Not held for long enough to send him gasping, but just long enough that he didn’t have to flex his muscles to keep his diaphragm in place. It was the edges of his natural breathing patterns, the furthest he could go without doing direct damage to his body. And it worked.

Gradually, as the oxygen in his body began to thin, his consciousness began to wane. And as he slipped into a sleep, his neck tipped back down to a comfortable and easy to breath . His limbs went slack. And without fully realizing it, for very very few who sleep have the realization that they are falling asleep when they do, Josh began to sleep. And as time passed and his mind stirred in unconsciousness, he began to dream.

Josh found himself lying on a hard stone slab in the dark. It was silent at first, but eventually, as his senses awakened to the internal world of his mind, a white fuzz of noise began to grow and fill his mind. Before Josh could see and realize what that sound was, he tasted salt and lemon. And then he opened his eyes.

There was water rushing down towards Josh’s face. A torrent that quickly became a waterfall. In fact it was a waterfall, a cold blanket of water than had already begun to fall over Josh’s form as he lay on a stone alter of sorts. Josh startled and stumbled off the stone and to his feet for fear of getting wet, but he quickly realized that the water was falling off him like an oiled canvas and slipping to the ground and forming a placid mirrored floor.. Moreover, it didn’t feel like it was hitting him at all. If anything was touching his skin it was a sensation of a light breeze. Beyond the torrent of water, there was nothing. There was only an endless curtain of falling water, heavier than rain, but lighter than a solid resting body.

As the water washed over him, Josh felt a shift. A change in the emotional atmosphere that surrounded him. The water continued to grow louder into a deafening roar, overwhelming his senses. All Josh could hear was the water. All he could see was the water and the stone he had woken up on. But there was a smell, a taste in the air of something else. It was rotten and clawing at Josh’s mind, invading and taking a space for itself.

For fear of becoming lost, Josh didn’t stray away from the stone he had awoken on. But he was beginning to circle it in an attempt to observe anything that had changed. And it seemed like minutes had passed with nothing but a growing smell of death, before something did physically change. A shape formed from the falling water, not coming from any surface but from the water itself. A hand, as Josh had expected, but incomplete. Almost incorporeal, soft. It didn’t feel as though it had any means of actually grabbing anything. And there were no discernible markings on it.

Josh looked down to his arm, but noticed no change. It was still the same arm it had been when he fell asleep. And when Josh looked up from his hand, it was not him but the world around him that had changed. The waterfall had stopped running and the sound of rushing water came to a sudden and eerie stop. The hand that had formed before him, only a matter of feet away, began to reach out to him. Other smaller and more corporeal hands reached out from the fingertips and that was when Josh saw the mark. The horrible sensation of dread that had filled him every time before returned, doubled and doubled again. It made his body tremble in horror. The water shook around him, which was the only indicator that Josh was now at the bottom of a resting body of water.

“Stay back!” Josh managed to shout. Or say loudly. He could not quite bring himself to really shout. “Stay back, I don’t want this!”

And, oddly, the hands stopped. They stopped when Josh raised his own hand to ward them away. There was still fear quaking through his form, but less than Josh had anticipated. It was more chemical than psychological. Or at least it was before he saw his arm outstretched before him, completely changed. A mark of four tight spirals wound up not just his forearm but up to his shoulder and down to his fingertips. The skin had changed in tone, to a lighter flesh color. And the shape was distorted from what it had been before. And as the hand before him, ominous and hungry, began to grow closer again, Josh could not help but scream out in fright as he turned to run.

“Wake up, wake up wake up!” He shouted the order to himself, but the voice he heard was not his. It was garbled and completely unfamiliar. It may as well have been the voice of a stranger.

”Wake up… wake up… wake up…” A second voice warbled through the water in a deeper echo. If the voice that had come from his own mouth was strange, this one was completely alien.

In a fit of desperation, Josh turned again. He faced the hands that had begun to accelerate the speed of their advance and he looked to the stone slab where the dream had begun. The hands interposed between him and the stone, he had no other logical recourse. Josh dove forward, half leaping half swimming, and collided with the hands. He passed through, colliding with the grasping hands like a rock thrown into a column of foam. And for a moment, Josh saw a space arranged unlike anywhere he had ever seen with his waking eyes. A room aligned with tall pillars of white metal that stretched from a floor to a ceiling, both made of a smooth black stone. There seemed to be no walls apart from the floor and ceiling. Among it all was a thick and viscous blue gel or fluid, almost like gelatin. And in the middle of the space, was the silhouette of a human figure. It was standing upright, arm outstretched to Josh.

And as quickly as the vision of that space came, it faded and Josh found himself collapsing against the side of the stone slab. It was cold under his touch, though the sensation of touching anything felt wrong.

Josh turned to see the hands reforming after his breakthrough. And, as he witnessed that bloodcurdling sight of translucent and opaque flesh coalescing into a shape once more, some previously unfelt instinct took hold of him. He turned back to the stone slab, reeled his head backwards, and pulled his brow towards the rock as fast and as powerfully as he could.