Welcome home, son.
The scream raced free of Lance’s throat and rebounded off the walls of his bedroom. His stomach muscles cramped from the effort of bringing himself upright off the bed and his chest heaved with the exertion. Lance brought one shaking hand from the mattress and rubbed the back of his sweat-slicked neck. The skin was smooth, unblemished, and uncut. His eyes searched the dark room as he regained the sense of being in the waking world, and his mind began to brush away the clinging miasma of the dream. Something different had happened this time. He pushed at the boundaries of the memory that inched its doors closed to his prodding thoughts. He had seen something just before he woke. The light had come on fully this time, but the figure before him hadn’t had a face. Instead, it was nothing but shadow.
Lance swung his bare feet out and put them on the coolness of the floor. The sensation brought him fully awake, and he rubbed his eyes to clear them. The clock on his bedside table read 3:31.
Without thinking about what he was doing, he stood from the bed and crossed the room to his door. The landing outside his room gave him a great view of the darkened house. He imagined for a moment that he could see shapes moving in the shadows and hiding behind couches and chairs below him, but he shoved the images away. He didn’t have time for imaginings that weren’t on paper.
As he made his way through the house, flipping on the occasional light here and there, he tried to remember all the details of the dream so he could repeat it when the time came. His study glowed with the dim ambient light of his computer screen, which he left on constantly, and when he entered the room, he didn’t bother to turn on the overhead fixture.
The black folder of business cards sat right where he had left it, in the top right drawer of his desk. He flicked through the small pages and panic began to creep into his chest when the card failed to reveal itself. On the second, much slower, inspection, the card was there. The taupe lettering on the gray background was a familiar sight that filled him with conflicting memories of fear and comfort.
Turning the card over, Lance picked up the phone from his desk and dialed the number written in sloppily scrawled blue ink. Beneath the number Lance could see the words day or night written in the same looping hand. The line began to ring and he almost hung up, but before the receiver had left his ear, the phone on the other end was picked up.
“Hello?”
Lance froze, his mouth half open, as he sat in his boxer shorts with the phone pressed to his ear.
“Hello?” the voice inquired again, and Lance could almost see Dr. Tyler’s lanky form hunched on the side of his bed—probably a mirror image of himself at the moment—his eyes beady from the lack of glasses that Lance had never seen him without.
“Dr. Tyler?” A beat of silence, and Lance winced as he read the clock’s accusing hands on his desk.
“Lance. What’s wrong?” The 650-odd miles that separated them did nothing to conceal the concern in the doctor’s voice.
Lance exhaled and rested his forehead in his palm. “Nothing … I mean, not nothing, I wouldn’t have called you at this hour for nothing. I just …” His voice trailed off and he pressed his lips together until they became a white line.
“It’s okay, Lance. Are you hurt? Are you in trouble?”