[crow]

Blake had been feeling restless for a while. It was a ghost, in all likelihood--- it almost always was. This one was unusual though. Normally he got reports about hauntings to investigate from his contacts, or was approached by the ghost itself if they were bold. A side effect of his power, as Alain had pointed out with amusement, was that ghosts seemed able to sense him at least as well as he was able to sense them. It said good things about Blake's progress that he was able to laugh at it now.

But this ghost was different. He didn't have word of it, or any real sense of its presence. Instead, he would wake up in the middle of the night having sweated through his nightclothes, with only a few impressions left of what he had dreamed: a dark, sinister place; the feel of leather straps holding him fast to a table; male voices speaking in low, detached tones to one another somewhere over his head.

[crow]

It was only their repetition that had made him revise his initial dismissal of the dream as a one-off nightmare. The details that he could remember stayed so much the same that he suspected something must be amiss.

The nightmares had been going on for weeks now, and his health was starting to suffer for it. Alain had handed him a mug as they settled down to dinner, and when Blake had looked up at him, there had been concern in the barrister's eyes. “For troubled sleep,” he had said, and closed Blake's hands around the mug. Its contents swirled, dark and murky--- one of Alain's herbal brews, concocted from goodness knows what.

[crow]

For the most part, Alain's home remedies did what they were supposed to. With this, however, Blake doubted it would do him much good. Nevertheless, he murmured a quiet thanks, and drank it dutifully, even though the taste made him want to gag. Under the expectant, beatific look that Alain was shooting him, there had been no choice in the matter.

That night, the nightmares came, and he could not wake no matter how hard he tried. Blake had plenty of his own nightmares, and one of the things Alain had taught him was how to take control of his own dreams, to force himself awake if need be. None of those tricks worked here. He remained strapped to the table, struggling and trying to make some sense of the voices. They spoke in a language he didn't know, and after a while he gave up, content to lie limp.

[crow]

That was when things got strange. The men paused in their discussion, and Blake craned his head to try and get a look at them. One held a pendant aloft, and they all grinned at each other. Blake could read the tone of the nightmare well enough to know that he didn't like where this was going. Shortly afterwards, runes began to light up around him. They had drawn some kind of... magic circle, as far as he could tell. Despite himself, Blake began struggling again in vain. Around him, the men gathered, and began a chant.

[crow]

The chanting reached a crescendo, and then everything was lost to pain. It arced through his body like a bolt of lightning, and for a moment he wondered if he had been struck by just that. Dimly, his mind registered someone screaming--- a woman's voice. Then everything went cold and dark.

When you died in a dream, you were supposed to wake up before the fall. Blake wanted to laugh. Fortunately for him, he couldn't. He was sure he would sound downright mad if he did. But he was trapped in the dark for an awfully long time, unable to see, to feel, to hear; nor was he any more able to wake up. Worse than death, he was now trapped in the blackness, with only his own thoughts for company.

[crow]

Just as he thought he would go mad, something appeared to him at last out of the darkness. At first he didn't realize that he was actually looking at something, but the figure seemed to solidify, so gradually that he didn't register the change (or her presence) until she had become quite clear. And it was a she, a young woman... or, then again, maybe not. There was something about her that seemed at once ancient and timeless, and yet her face was smooth and unmarred by age. She could have been beautiful once, he imagined, but now she was not anything at all. All the things that made up beauty were there: delicate features, an elegant build, a grace and fluidity to her movements. Her smile should have been radiant. He knew it should have been, and yet it wasn't. In his heart, not a single feeling stirred at it, not even relief for her presence.

If she was a ghost, she was unlike anything he had ever dealt with before.

[crow]

It made him uneasy, but he was also dreadfully curious. He smiled back at her, and asked, “How can I help you?” It was a courtesy he paid to all ghosts when he met them, to try and assure them that he meant them no harm, but most of the time he meant it. This case was no exception; in fact, the sentiment might have been more heartfelt than it had been in some time.

His words led to a reaction he hadn't expected. The woman's smile faltered, and tears filled her eyes. Blake was about to apologize when she smiled again, through her tears. She dabbed at her face. “Excuse me,” she said, taking a few deep breaths to try and get her voice under control. “I'm sorry. It's just been... It's been so long since anyone has spoken to me, you see.”

[crow]

Blake nodded understandingly. That, at least, was not such an unusual thing. The ghosts that he found in abandoned places often shared that sentiment. Humans weren't made to be solitary creatures, and those unable to pass on felt the pain of isolation no less keenly than their still-living counterparts.

“How can I help you?” Blake repeated, careful to make his voice as kind as it could be. “I'm not sure how much of this I'll remember. I am still dreaming, I think. But I'll try my best.” She didn't seem hostile, and that made things easier on him. She could turn out to be dangerous at any moment, but he didn't think it likely, based on how she looked right now.

[crow]

She nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “I realize this must be a shock--- I am sorry for it, but I didn't know how else---” She had to pause again. When she next spoke, her voice trembled. “I have a son... I'm afraid I don't know where he is. I've been looking for such a long time...”

At this, Blake stiffened. “How long, exactly?” he asked cautiously.

Her answer was as he feared, and perhaps a little worse: “I don't know how many years, but he was born...” She listed a date that placed his birth at several decades--- no, over two centuries ago. People were longer-lived than they had been, but not this long.

[crow]

He frowned. This was always the worst part, breaking the news to them. Sometimes the dead just didn't realize how long ago they'd really died. Ghosts had a bad time with time. “I could try and help you find his relations,” he said carefully.

She froze, then smiled stiffly at him. “You mean to tell me my son is dead, of course,” she said. He hadn't expected her to catch on so soon, and Blake was wary now, but he nodded slowly. She shook her head. “No. He'll be alive, unless he was killed. He---” Abruptly, her form flickered, like television static. Her voice became garbled, then cut off entirely.

[crow]

Blake stayed suspended in the darkness for a moment, then she half-formed in front of him again, but her expression was desperate now. “Quickly, I don't have much time! Please, come to the---” Her voice cut out again. He could sense, rather than see, her frustration. The next thing he knew, his mind was being flooded with half-blurred images. Some were of a location shrouded by fog, thick with trees. Others were of a young boy with dark curls and sad grey eyes, not unlike her own. There was a fineness to his features that was visible despite his chubby toddler's face.

[crow]

It wasn't hard to see the resemblance. These impressions flitted through his mind one after the other, almost too quickly to follow, then cut out just as abruptly as the woman's presence. When they were gone, he was left to the darkness again, but this time oblivion of true sleep claimed him at last.

He woke with every memory of the dream intact, even those parts which he would have been unable to remember had the events of the dream happened when he was awake. It was a strange feeling to have such perfect recollection. Blake did not often remember his dreams, even the nightmares. He suspected it was all the woman's doing.

[crow]

However, there were certain things he only realized after waking. One of these was that the woman's voice was the same as that scream he heard, right before everything went black. The first portion of the dream must have been some memory of hers. She certainly seemed capable of some kind of telepathy, within the bounds of that dream, so it wasn't unlikely. The second was that the location she had shown him must have been in the Whisper Forest. There was no other wood he knew of that looked quite like it. That, more than anything, looked likely to explain why he hadn't heard of her earlier from reports by the living. If a ghost took up in the Whisper Forest, it wouldn't even cause anything to change. That place just about haunted itself. Not that this was the first spirit he knew who had been found there.

[crow]

He sat up, and noted with displeasure that he had sweated through his clothes again, and that, unable to wake, he had slept in it til it dried and stuck to his skin. His shirt would have to be washed immediately, and he would likely have to change his bedsheets too. With a groan, he heaved himself to his feet and walked to the bathroom, where he ditched his clothes and turned on the shower. He washed his hair twice for good measure, and stayed under the hot water for much longer than usual before he finally stepped out and towelled himself off. He didn't bring clean clothes with him, but Alain had anticipated him and left some on the counter next to the sink. Blake smiled, shook his head, and reached for his shirt.

[crow]

After he was dressed, he headed out into the small kitchen within their living area. Alain was already seated at the bistro table, and inclined his head at Blake's approach.

“What did you give me last night?” Blake asked conversationally, then immediately regretted it as Alain rattled off a list of plants. It didn't help that most of the names Alain knew were archaic. Even if Blake knew the plant, he wouldn't know it by what Alain called it, and interrogating him in detail about the properties of each wasn't something he felt up to at the moment. Instead, he sat, and drank from the mug that Alain offered him. Thankfully, this time it was filled with coffee.