The Calling

The Calling Read Free Page B

Book: The Calling Read Free
Author: Alison Bruce
Tags: Mystery
Ads: Link
picking up thoughts and ideas, discarding the flotsam and hanging on to the interesting finds; turning them over and deciding where to take them next. He guessed most unwanted dreams were forgotten; the others he could walk through, investigate, explore and resolve. Colours and conversation and even images were conveyed second-hand, like hearsay, but always within his control.
    All the dreams he could ever recall were that way – except one.
    This had been the rarer kind, the first visit, for months, of dead eyes and waxy skin. He’d tried to stay in the dream, to step back and pan the scene but had woken instead, to stare into the dark. It was 2 a.m. He didn’t bother to check, it just felt like 2 a.m.
    He had slept soundly until then: for six months, give or take. Long enough to think that he’d left it behind, or exorcized it or out-grown it. He wasn’t sure if there was a term for being twenty-six years old and conquering a recurring nightmare, but if one existed it was irrelevant now.
    And so were the possible reasons – big and small – that he’d acknowledged for breaking this pattern. He’d been developing the ability to take an emotional step back from cases, and he reckoned he’d balanced that with an emotional step forward in everything outside work.
    Life/work balance: so much for amateur psychology.
    He had felt that a lot had happened during those six months, but the reappearance of that dream told him that nothing much had changed at all.
    He lay still, listening to the faint sounds of sparse traffic coasting through the empty streets. In his imagination, he passed through the early hours of a Sunday morning in the centre of Cambridge, with scattered groups making their various haphazard trails towards home, the drunkest being herded on by the police, while a few continued on foot; the rest dispersing via cars and taxis. He concentrated on the warmth and life and the real world outside his own imagination, until he felt awake enough to consider his dream in a less emotive way.
    It was a single, unmoving image. Not graphic or violent or threatening even, just simple and repetitive but disturbing enoughto throw Goodhew from the deepest sleep and kick him into a cycle of insomnia and exhaustion.
    He saw a close-up of half a face tilted to one side, so that the right eye was in full view and the left was partly in shadow. The eyes were fixed beyond him, and he knew the skin would be cold to touch. It was impossible to see more: a shot so closely cropped that even the forehead and lips weren’t visible. But, in his nightmare, it wasn’t a photo. The face was real, and just inches from his own, and no matter how many times he tried to reach out – or move – that was all there ever was.
    This dream had first come to him on the day he applied to join the police force, and most recently occurred on the final day of his last murder case. In fact it had been with him during each of the small number of murder investigations he’d ever tackled.
    Not for the first time, he wondered whether it could be some kind of omen and he noted, as his eyes had jolted open, that the feeling accompanying it hung uneasily between fear and helplessness. Neither of these were emotions that he ever considered sharing, and now, tired though he felt, he stayed awake until the room paled to grey. Then, with his day-off beckoning and normality slipping back in through the gap in the curtains, he allowed himself another hour of sleep.
    It was his phone that woke him. He grappled around on the floor beside his bed and simultaneously checked the time and the caller ID. He was surprised to see it was already 10.10.
    The display read ‘DI Marks’.
    He rose on to one elbow and tried to sound fully awake. ‘Morning, sir.’
    There was no preamble. ‘Gary, how soon can you get here?’
    ‘Straight away.’ It wasn’t possible to see out of his window from where he now lay, but he still turned his head in the direction of

Similar Books

Across the Universe

Raine Winters

5 Tutti Frutti

Mike Faricy

That Which Should Not Be

Brett J. Talley

Emma Who Saved My Life

Wilton Barnhardt

Dangerous Spirits

Jordan L. Hawk

Huntsman

Viola Grace