Rake - Prologue

Rake - Prologue





Claire was dreaming.

It wasn’t unusual, dreams came and went and were fathomless bits of indescribability to her.  She couldn’t have told her father what she saw if she wanted to anyway.  She lacked the words to explain what she saw, lacked the ideas to express a world of strangeness.

Still.

Claire dreamed.

Once her dreams had been filled with emptiness.  She would dream herself at the bottom of the ocean surrounded by water on all sides, struggling to dream as she treaded water.  Drowning slowly.

She would dream herself in the middle of a windswept plain, echoes of her voice carrying back to her on an uncaring wind.

Sometimes she would be in places she remembered, a grocer’s store, or a classroom.  Her father’s condo in downtown, or their house further out of the city that was up for rent.

Always there would be no one else, in her dreams she had walked alone and quietly, lest the bad things stir and take notice.  She would pick her way on her own odyssey across the strange dreamworld, no fixed destination in mind.

Now though, the dreams were different.

She couldn’t say exactly when they changed.  It hadn’t happened all at once either, but gradually by small steps perhaps.  People began to fill the emptiness.  They never spoke, and they stared straight ahead like statues.  They were in ever posture possible, sometimes standing, sitting, lying down, it didn’t matter.  They stared straight ahead, uncaring and unseeing.  Unless she was passing by, and then they would watch her.  Keeping her in their sight as long as they could, until she passed by.

They were scary at first, just a handful of people here and there, street corners, under her ocean, standing like scarecrows in her forgotten windswept plain.  She wept at the thought of crossing their path, and would try to find ways to avoid them where she could, extending and pushing the realms of her dreams out a little further each time to circumvent their sight.

But those areas became filled with the people as well.

Eventually she gave up, and with tears stinging the corners of her eyes he eased her way through them.  The unseeing things, these people who never moved, stared at her with feelings she could never give words to.

And so Claire’s dreams went, sneaking through her own world of the unfathomable.  While it slowly filled with bodies.