I dreamed I watched a girl - copper hair, pale green eyes, freckled, skinny, pert breasts and delicate throat, not more than sixteen.
I can't remember her name. She had one in the dream but it escapes me. Update Around halfway recounting this story, I think it was Clara. I'm going to use that name
She was wandering through a decrepit lot in the center of a city. The area looked to be like around Main Street Station in Toronto, to the northern suburb area, around 72 Barrington. Except the lot where Secord Public School was a giant crumbling cathedral with pool that was the size of the cathedral itself, rife with water lilies and algae and crumbled stone and mud.
Across the cathedral was a newer church building, almost barrel-vaulted, gargantuan. This one was in much better condition, russet-bricked with dark, intimidating windows.
The girl was an exchange student from Europe; I recall distinctly that I knew she was a foreigner. Exploring her new neighbourhood, she wandered to the cathedral and didn't realize she was about to fall into the pool with the overgrowth around her. When she fell in, she gave a sharp, ricocheting gasp, and I was plunged in with her.
She flailed in the water. I watched through her eyes as she tried to find the surface, except she kept swimming deeper. Through the green fog of water, she suddenly came across the corpse of a brunette woman.
The woman had been murdered - she was chained up, and a heavy ball chained to her ankle. She must have been thrown in. The top of her hair barely reached the surface of the water, so she was invisible from above. Clara let out a frothing scream, trying to get back up to the surface, when a pair of arms yanked her to shore.
She was dragged by the hair, sputtering and choking, into the newer church.
The man who rescued her was the pastor of that church. He looked a lot like my Bartholomew - Silver and Valor's father - but skinnier, older, more intimidating. He had silver hair slicked back and dark, foreboding eyes set in a heavily-wrinkled face. He seized Clara by the throat and snarled, "You think I wouldn't see you snooping in my domain? This is my land."
The rest were a blur. Clara was forced to stay inside the roof rafters of this church - a catacombic series of rooms. The Pastor was a pious Christian man by day, but a hellish, dictatorial cultic leader by night. He had killed the woman in the pool, and roped up all the children who had ever discovered her - stolen them away.
Eight children including Clara:
Luke - 16 yo, pale blonde hair swept to side, sharp blue eyes, eagle nose, protective and fierce
Oswald - 8yo, also ginger, small boy with chubby cheeks, blue eyes, and generous smattering of freckles on his nose. I remember Luke calling him Ozzie in the dream.
Mira - 6yo, small Indian girl with short, curly black hair, nonverbal, traumatized
There were five others but their faces/names elude me. Two other teenaged boys Luke's age, a middleschool-aged girl with brown pigtails, and two others that are only shady silhouettes in my mind now. All were dressed in white clothes - the boys in white wifebeaters and white shorts, the girls in white daisy dresses. They were a little grimy, a little underfed, but they were a cheerful, tight bunch.
Clara stayed with them for an indeterminate amount of time. To the point where she was clearly broken, and clearly no longer trying to escape/get help/reach out to her family. There were hooded figures, followers of the Pastor, who would catch her when she tried to escape. The Pastor would do things to condition them, cruel and debasing types of torture. Depriving her of sleep. Forcing her to stand on the exterior roof area of the church on a stormy night. Breaking her fingers at one point. Different punishments for different children - different rewards, too. One thing he'd let Clara have was her own bed and room, away from the others - a place she could have quiet and soft covers. He'd also let her have paper and pencils, and Clara began to teach the younger children, like Mira, how to write.
They'd participate in rigorous religious readings and rituals, though I do not remember what those rituals were. Candles, singing, slitting the throat of a lamb, soot drawn on forehead and cheeks.
She grew very close with the other children, and they considered each other family. Even the Pastor eventually became a distorted father figure for her, one she was terrified of and one she aimed to please. The scenes passed in a blur:
Mira crying and screaming, climbing a couch to get away when the Pastor came in, and Clara comforting her in the corner.
The boys sitting on the torn-up couch, laughing and making jokes with one another on an afternoon. They were playing on an N64. The other younger kids peering around the window at the world below, telling stories of make-belief about what the passersby were doing.
Oswald clinging to Clara's hip as she squared off with the Pastor patiently. The Pastor demanded they greet him a certain way, and I remember Clara saying, very sweetly, "Yes, Daddy." Which was what the Pastor instructed them to call him.
Then, the scenes refocused. I saw glimpses of Luke and Clara one night, his hands wandering under her clothes as she sucked on his bottom lip, trying to stay quiet on a far distant rafter on an upper floor while the others slept. He frantically worked off his own clothes and climbed between her legs - then, her fervid moans muffled against his palm as he tried to keep the two of them quiet. Then, her laying against his chest with sleepy giggles, him kissing the top of her ginger curls.
The dream came to a climax after this scene.
The next day, suddenly the Pastor came in and took Clara. The other children watched her go, tense and confused, Luke more than the others. He unlocked the heavy stone door that kept them all prisoner upstairs, and took her down the rafters, down, down, down.
She obeyed, terrified. As he pushed her lower and lower, Clara shivered, clutching herself. They passed the front door - passed by regular people visiting church on the weekday, praying at the altar. Freedom just in her reach, but Clara was cowed. She didn't dare move from him, scream, anything. I watched them go to the basement of the church - a dank, watery dungeon at the very bottom. Almost foreboding, the staircase terminated into a deep, musty pool, as if echoing the first day Clara and the Pastor met.
I watched as the Pastor spritzed something on her hair and shoulders. She flinched. Then she dared to turn, just a little. "Daddy?"
It was gasoline. He lit her on fire.
Clara screamed. She slammed herself against the wall, trying to put it out. She screamed, "Daddy! No!" and threw herself into the pool.
I fell with her to the bottom. Watched the Pastor's cold, calculating eyes as he doused the surface of the pool with gasoline, and tossed a match in. Clara was extinguished, but she couldn't resurface, and I felt her hopeless heartbreak as she sank to the bottom to watch the surface burn.
The dream wavered critically. I followed the group of children upstairs as the afternoon passed. Luke demanded to know where Clara had gone, and the Pastor replied something along the lines of, "We do not keep devilish, sinful women in this church."
There were cries of dissent. The children ganged up on the Pastor, and at last, struck with fear, he locked them, running downstairs.
Meanwhile, I leapt into the viewpoint of Clara once more.
Clara had discovered a broken stone at the bottom of the basement. She swam desperately towards it, emerging in a part of the building the Pastor hadn't discovered since he took over. Gasping for air, she threw herself onto the stone floor of the little enclave room, where there was a white statue of Mary and remains of what used to be flowers and candles, as well as an eerily well-preserved knife. Clara huddled there, breathing as little as possible in case she ran out of oxygen. She periodically ducked under the water again, checking to see if the surface had finished burning - and it did, eventually.
She took the knife and swam back up to the stairwell. Clara looked at her reflection in the knife - she had scars along her face, strange burn scars in the shape of runes. She said, very clearly, "I bear these scars with pride." And then she proceeded up the staircase.
The Pastor met her in the staircase, and he looked like he'd seen a ghost. He couldn't fathom how she was still alive, and Clara took that chance, laughing at him. "I'm the Devil, don't you see?"
And she leapt on him, stabbing him with the dagger. He staggered back with a roar, and that's when the dream broke again.
I took her hand. This was the first instance where I went lucid. I grabbed her and dragged her away from him. The Pastor was still shouting and bleeding, and I leapt over pews, dragging Clara out of the church. We ran pell-mell into the street and I told her to scatter, run towards the Danforth. I didn't see any of the hooded men but my heart pounded frantically as I tried to get her to safety. I heard the wail of sirens and the sounds of a street, the blur of trees and houses as we ran.
And that's when I woke up.
I'm sure she got away. I'm sure she got help for the other kids. This was a wild, satisfying, visceral dream. The taste of water in my mouth, the sting of heat at my neck, the feel of the stone walls, the sound of the Pastor's steps on the stairs... man. It's still so vivid, hours later.
