Waking Nightmares Read Free Page A

from one corner of his mouth. His throat rattled with every exhalation and his neck looked swollen, and for a second, Octavian thought of plague . . . he’d seen more than his share of such sickness since his childhood, but that had been centuries ago. And there were no welts or sores or even the sort of inflammation that might suggest plague. The sight of the young man and his constricted breathing reminded him of hideous memories, but this was no plague.
    Still, even if the professor hadn’t already said so, Octavian would have known at first glance that this was no ordinary flu or infection. The smell offered the first clue. The man’s complexion provided the second. No healthy human being had flesh of that particular hue—not so much a jaundiced yellow as a slight greenish tint.
    “His name is Michael, you said?” Octavian asked, glancing at the professor.
    “Michael,” Viviane confirmed from just inside the open bedroom door. She hung back, arms crossed, fretting and tense as though she might flee. “He hates being called Mike.”
    Octavian nodded. “Michael it is, then. How long has he been like this?”
    “Two days that we know of,” the professor said.
    “The sink was leaking,” Viviane said, her voice cracking with emotion, her gaze haunted, as though she blamed herself for her brother’s condition. “The landlord kept promising to fix it, but he never showed up, so Michael came over to take care of it. He didn’t . . . well, I mean, he wasn’t . . . green. Just a little pale. But he didn’t look well and he kept coughing and he was short of breath and he seemed a little weird—”
    “Weird how?”
    Viviane shrugged. “Like he’d been smoking something, y’know?”
    Octavian nodded and moved closer. Something was strange about the unconscious man’s arms and legs, his body hair. Bending to take a closer look, Octavian saw that amid the hair were tiny growths that looked almost like sprigs of something growing there. Something green.
    “He thought he was getting a cold or something,” Viviane went on. “I told him to come in here and lie down and when I checked on him a little while later, I couldn’t wake him up.”
    He investigated the man’s hands. Similar sprigs grew from beneath his fingernails. Unsettling as these things were, the most troubling of Michael’s afflictions were the tiny leaves visible in his right ear and both nostrils. Octavian cursed inwardly, wondering how much time had elapsed since he had gotten in the car with the professor, and how much time he had before Nikki took the stage at The Red Door.
    “It’s awful,” the professor said.
    Octavian shot him a hard look. Of course it was awful. Did he think Viviane needed him to confirm that her brother going catatonic and growing twigs and tiny leaves out of his orifices and pores was something other than a joyous event? Asshole.
    With what he hoped was a comforting glance toward Viviane, Octavian turned back to her brother. The thick rattle of his breathing turned into a choking noise, and Michael twitched several times before he began breathing through his nose and relaxed again. The rattle hadn’t vanished, but lessened.
    Octavian reached for his face. Gently, he pulled back one of Michael’s eyelids. Tiny plant roots had grown across the eyeball like the miniature wiring on an old computer circuit board.
    “Oh, my God,” Viviane whispered.
    Octavian glanced at her. “His eyes weren’t like that before?”
    “I didn’t look at his eyes,” she said. “But check his throat. I thought . . . I wanted to see if I could clear his breathing or do something to help him, so I got a little flashlight and had a look. I would’ve taken him to the hospital, or called an ambulance, but once I saw that, I knew there was nothing a doctor could do for him. When Derek said he knew you . . . Please tell me you can help him?”
    Her smile was brittle, as though she were teetering on the brink of hysteria.
    Octavian did not