The next morning I woke to a room full of blazing yellow sunshine. Craig was in the chair next to me. He smiled when I looked at him..

“How are you this morning?”

“Fine. Did you stay there all night?”

“No. I came in early this morning, finished my rounds in record time so I thought I should check in on my star patient. Did you sleep well?”

“Uh-huh.”

“The night nurse said you were having nightmares.”

I looked away.

“Do you want to talk about them?”

“I want to wait for Chief.”

“I don’t blame you. Your father seems to understand a lot more about these things than I.”

“Craig?”

“Yeah, kid?”

“That nurse lady...”

“What about her?”

“I don’t like her. She scares me.”

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know for sure. I just feel it. Don’t let her come back in here, Craig. Please.”

“Don’t worry. I had your duty nurse changed. Donna will be taking care of you from now on.”

“Is she nice?”

Craig smiled at me. “Yeah, she is.” Then his smile died and he looked at me. “I want to show you something, Kelly.” He reached behind him and pulled out a guitar he'd stashed against the wall. I didn’t see it before on account of the way he blocked it. “I learned to play on this here guitar when I was about your age. My grandfather gave it to me after my parents were killed. I was feeling alone and afraid– powerless against my own fate. He told me that when you have music, there is no need for fear. That there is a power to music and that power can give you the strength to fight even the worst of demons. Through the cords of this guitar I drained my fear and found my own power.”

I looked at the guitar, then up at Craig. He seemed to be somewhere else, like the guitar itself put him somewhere else. Then he came back to me. “I’m going to give you this guitar–”

“But I don’t even know how to play.”

“I’m going to teach you.”

“Why?”

“So that you can reach your own power. So that you can drive your fears away, along with the nightmares… so you can feel safe again.”

“That will do it?”

“Only if you truly believe in the music it will.”

He handed me the guitar and I took it, still staring at him–sharp. “Do you believe it?”

“I do, kiddo. But it doesn’t matter what I believe. In order for you to reach your power, you have to first believe in yourself. Hopefully the music will help you do that. It will give you focus.”

“Focus?”

“A focal point– A way to reach your power and direct it at what frightens you and protect yourself. Do you believe?”

I slipped my fingers over the wires on the front of the guitar and heard the song. I did it again, frowning. There was something. 

“What's the matter?” Craig asked.

“That’s what Sam said. He said, ‘believe in your power child and learn the way.’ He said it in the dream. Do you think he meant the music?”

Craig stared, his eyebrows low and his mouth slightly open. “Last night?”

“No, sir. It was the first dreams I had, back when the tiger was hunting me. Last night’s was different. It was way worse.”

Craig lost some of the color in his face. “I see.”

“It’s okay, Craig,” I told him. “You gonna teach me now?” I asked him nodding at the guitar.

“If you want.”

He reached over and showed me what he called the basic cords. We practiced for over thirty minutes on those first. At eight-thirty a nurse came in and called Craig away to look after another patient. He told me to keep practicing before he left. It wasn’t so bad that he left. The music gave me something to do.

At nine my family stopped by. I showed them what Craig had taught me and could tell Chief was impressed. They stayed just long enough to hear all my cords before Craig came back.

“Chief Broden,” he said reaching for Chief’s hand. “I see you’ve heard the prodigy. She’s a natural.”

I don’t know why he said that, it sounded more like when the movers dropped Miss Hawthorn’s piano from the second floor window last year, than like any kind of actual music.

“She’s doing real well,” Chief said.

Craig turned to me. “Are you ready to talk about that dream now?”

“What dream is that?” The old worry came back to Chief’s eyes. I wasn’t sure now was a good time.

I felt them all staring and told Chief. “Just you and Craig.”

Chief barely nodded, then he turned to the others. “Could you all excuse us?”

“Sure,” Miss Elly said. “We’ll go down to the cafeteria and get something to drink.”

“If you don’t mind, Miss Elly, I think I’ll go down the hall and talk to Hank,” Maggy said, as they all left together.

Chief waited for them close the door, then asked. “What’s this about, pumpkin? You still having nightmares?”

I tried to decide if I wanted to tell him or not. The look on his face had me worried. I didn’t like Chief to be scared for me.

When I didn’t answer him right off, he said, “It’s all right, honey. We’ll be here for you. I promise nothing will ever hurt you again, but I think we should get what is frightening you out in the open. So that we can see it for what it really is.”

“You’d know that?”

“I can only try.” He took my hand into his and looked at it. He squeezed it tight. “We can deal with this together, pumpkin.”

“All right.”I all of a sudden felt sad. I knew my father wasn’t going to like this dream. I looked at him some more, then turned to Craig, who was staring at me too. “It’s long,” I told him. “You should sit down, Craig.”

I took a deep breath as Craig pulled up a chair. “It starts off like before. In the Dead Place. It’s still foggy. The fog is real hard to breathe. It burns my lungs going in. Then Hoove comes running out of the fog, his lips are all foamy and his stomach is tore up; he leaves a trail of blood. It leads to the house–our house. He goes runnin’ under the porch. I follow him, Chief, but he’s mad. Crazy mad. I tried to get him out- that’s when he bit me right on the ankle. It starts to puff up really bad. And it hurts like the devil, it does. After he bites me he runs out the other side of the porch and then the bird comes. The big black one. 

“It tries for my eyes, cuz it knows I’m pinned. I try to dig my way out but I can’t. Off a ways I hear a gun go off and Hoove screams. The bird laughs and turns to me. It starts under the porch, real slow. And it starts to go for my eyes again, its wings flapping. It bites off a piece of my cheek just below my right eye. It goes for the other but I throw up my arm in its way, trying to keep it off of me. But it rips off chunks of my arm, its black wings drilling me into the ground. 

“I scoot away, backwards but it keeps coming. It’s like I push out from under the porch forever, but it just gets longer and longer. The bird gets bigger and bigger. I can see the things that crawl on it between the feathers. They all have eyes too and they all stare at me. I turn and start crawling for the other side of the porch, all the while the bird keeps biting at my swelled leg– it hurts something fierce, Chief. There’s blood all over me from where the bird is biting. It makes it slippery and I keep sliding to the edge of the porch, but by the time I get there its not there– instead it’s a huge lock– with five keyholes in it. 

“The bird keeps coming and I can’t get past the lock– that’s when I remember I have the key chain–”

“Key chain?”

“Around my neck. I pull it off and start pushing all the keys in the holes, but I keep getting them mixed up– then I get it– and all this light pours out of the lock and it falls off and I go with it, into a huge hole filled with blood. I’m drowning in it- it goes down my throat and chokes me. When I look up, I can see them.”

“Who?” Chief said, his voice edgy.

“The white people. They’re all dancing around in their bed sheets, blood splattered all around them. They dance in the blue and red smoke and sing to themselves as I start to go under.”

I stopped. Chief's face was set hard. I turned and noticed Craig was turning white.

“The smoke helps them to see me,” I told them.

Chief took a measure of air into his lungs. He let it back out real slow all the while his eyes bore into me. When he talked next his voice was quiet, and deep. It came out in a breath. “Why do they want you, pumpkin?”

I thought about it for a spell. “Because I can see…” I started to tell him but a piece shifted. I looked at him and felt the blood drain from my head. “Because,” I whispered to him. “Because I can get past the Dead Place, and they want to. The way the tiger tried. Because of the lock and I have the key. Chief I’m scared. I don’t understand it.”

Chief got out of his chair and sat by me on the bed. He pulled close and I held on tightly. I started to shake from the cold fog of the Dead Place, but Chief warmed me with his hug until the shaking stopped. We stayed that way a while, until I was finally able to let him go.

 He turned his head to look into my eyes. “I’m going to get you out of this, pumpkin. Whatever it is. We’ll do it together, okay?”

* * * * *

“What the hell do you make of that?” Chief asked Dr. Miller  after they left the room. “My god.”

“Sounds like she’s created an alternate universe. A place where these fears live.”

“The ‘white people’ represent her fears?”

“I think so. I’ll run the dream by Dr. Geats.”

“Dr. Geats?”

“He’s the staff psychologist. He’s one of the few who’ve worked with children.”

“Perfect, he’s familiar with her case. He’s been treating her since last fall. . You really believe she’s making it all up? Placing personalities on her fears?”

“The alternative scares the hell out of me, Chief. Maybe the fact that you have been investigating a cult practicing in this area, and their practices, has added credibility to her images. Perhaps she’s taken these perceptions and manifested them.”

“And they are taking life in her subconscious?”

“Possibly. I think the answer for your daughter is to prove to her it doesn’t exist- this alternative universe- this Dead Place, or what’s beyond. That way there is no reason for her to be afraid. That way she can heal, emotionally as well as physically.”

They had been talking on the way to Dr. Miller’s office. At the door, Miller paused just long enough to open it and allow Chief to pass through.

“Doctor, I know it sounds crazy. These dreams of hers, she’s been having them all along. Ever since she came out of her autistic state last summer.” Chief looked at the younger man intently before saying deliberately, “They come true.”

“What do you mean?”

Chief sighed ponderously. “They are heavily cloaked in symbolism, but the gist of them comes true. She dreamt that Sergeant Moss had his throat bit off by the tiger...Blackney had him in his hands and was choking the life from him. She knew the instant Blackney escaped earlier this Spring and about the men killed in the attack. She described my deputy’s stabbing by a pole in the woods. And yesterday, she literally described what happened to my family at home while she was here at the hospital. She claimed to have left the tiger because she was afraid and went home. I don’t know how she does it, Dr. Miller, just that she does. If this dream is anything like those other premonitions, then I’m worried. Very worried.”

It was ten o’clock and the end of Donna Trever’s shift. She only had the last of her fourth floor rounds to make. When Donna gently pushed the door to room 421 open, she found it dark. There was a new moon out, and no light to filtered through the window. However, even in the dark, Donna felt a presence. She sensed movement to her side and quickly reached for the light switch.

“Blanch?” she said, recognizing the older nurse. “What are you doing here?”

Nurse Scholeman turned from the child. Her face flushed behind the heavy prescription glass in her tortoise-shell frames. “I thought I heard the patient cry out.”

Donna made her way to her to the child asleep on the bed, brushing past the older nurse. She took the child’s wrist in her hands and searched for a pulse. It was steady, but not hurried. Her brow, though warm, was not damp. There was no evidence that she had suffered any nightmare of the caliber she had been suffering at the beginning of the week. The only thing out of place in the room was a faint aroma Donna could not place.

She turned to Nurse Scholeman. “Thank you for seeing to her,I can handle things from here.”

The older nurse hesitated briefly before nodding and disappearing through the door.

* * * * *

The week in the hospital went by a lot faster than I thought it would. Craig stopped by whenever he could to show me new stuff on the guitar. Chief and Miss Elly came each day, bringing Joe and Maggy with them. I showed them what I learned and Miss Elly showed me some songs she used to play on the guitar. It turned out that Hank was just down the hall from me and he’d wheel himself over to my room once in a while to play checkers or to read to me. 

I never saw that nurse lady again. Craig made sure. And I liked the nurse I got in her place. Donna was real nice, just like Craig said. Her voice was soft and it rose and fell much the way Miss Elly’s did. She was pretty, too. She wasn’t that much older than Maggy, but her hair was light brown, where Maggy’s was dark. Her eyes matched her hair and she had a goodly amount of freckles plastered across her nose and on her arms. And her smile was big and it made you want to smile when you saw it. I could tell she liked Craig a whole heap, only he didn’t seem to notice.

“So how are you doing on your last day?” Donna asked me, coming through the door. Her smile stretched across her face and pulled up in the corners and her eyes sparkled.

I smiled back at her. “Fine. Does it still look like I’m gonna get out of here tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow about 1:30 all your tests will be complete. You’ll be free to leave after that.”

“Good, I’m starting to go nuts sitting in bed all day.”

She held out a thermometer. “I know it sounds loony, but we need it for your chart.”

She stuck the thing under my tongue and looked at her pocket watch.

“So how did you sleep last night?” she asked me still staring at the watch.

“Fmm,” I mumbled around the thermometer stuck in my mouth.

“Really? No nightmares?”

“Hmmmm--mmm.” I hadn’t a single one since Craig showed me the trick with the music. The music kept them away.

“That’s strange,” Donna said still looking down.

Craig came into the room just as she said it and asked, “What’s strange?”

Donna smiled and turned to him. “Good morning, Doctor.,” She backed away to let Craig up to my bed.

“Good morning nurse.” Craig sat down in the chair by my bed. “Let’s take a look at you.” 

“Her temperature’s ready.”

Craig took the thermometer and stared at it, fowning. His eyes flicked to me, then turned to Donna. “Let me see her chart.”

“What’s the matter?Ain’t I all right?”

He looked at me over the clipboard. “Just a little warm, but you run warm normally.”

He scribbled on the paper, handed it back to Donna and took out one of those wooden sticks from his pocket. 

“Open up,” he said and I opened up my mouth as wide as it would go. 

Craig stuck the wood thing down on my tongue and stared into my mouth. When he was through, he pitched the stick into the basket next to my bed. He pulled a metal thing – it looked a lot like the socket wrench Mr. Douglas had at his garage – from his pocket. Craig screwed a fresh tip on it and after angling my face away, he stuck it into, first my left ear then my right. When through, he handed it to Donna. He then pulled up my eyelids and stared at my eyes. His stare never left me, nor softened as he pulled his flashlight from his pocket.

“Turn to me.” 

I did and he flashed the light into my eyes and flipped it out to the side. He did each eye about three times. It stung at first and then a bunch of dots danced around. The light made my head feel worse than it did when I first woke up. Craig put the flashlight up and took my wrist. He searched out my heartbeat and timed it to his watch. After a minute he set my arm down on the bed.

Then Craig put the ear ends of his stepa-scope in his ears and took the metal part at the end in his hands. 

“Lean forward,” he said when he had the metal warmed up enough. I did and he slipped the metal disk part between the slit in the back of my nightshirt. “Take a deep breath, Kelly, and let it out as slow as you can.”

I did. It felt like someone was standing on my lungs at the time. He moved the metal disk along my back and told me to breathe deeply again. He went about doing that several more times. 

“All right, lie down.”

Craig pulled up the nightshirt and put the metal on my front. “Just like before,” he said. “Deep breaths.”

I sucked in the air as he moved the metal thing around.

He finished up and pulled the plugs from the end of his scope out of his ears and stared at me. He noticed I was staring back and smiled. He rubbed the sides of my throat.

“Does this feel tender?”

“No, sir,” I told him in spite of the way it hurt. I didn’t want anything standing between me and getting home.

Craig stared at me; then he nodded. “Tell me something...”

“What?”

“Do you have any dizziness?”

“No, sir.”

Again he nodded. “Headache?”

“I feel fine, Craig,” I told him just as a lady in candy-cane stripes came through the door with my breakfast tray. The stench of it started my stomach wrenching up. I felt the blood leave my face all at once. Craig noticed and stared at me even harder. The jig was up.

“I’m not hungry.”

“I ordered your favorite foods for your last day. You sure you don’t want to eat?”

“I don’t.”

Craig gave me a hard look. “Does your stomach hurt?”

“No,” I lied. “I’m just not hungry is all, Craig.”

“I see.” Problem was, I think he really did see. “I think you should eat something, Kelly. You need to keep up your strength.”

“But I don’t want it.” What I wanted was for him to take that smelly tray away.

“I’m going to leave it here and I’d like for you to try and nibble on it a bit, okay? You don’t have to eat it all.”

He gave me the stare Chief used a lot. “Yes, sir,” I told him and figured I’d try.

Craig stood off the chair. He gave me a smile and turned to Donna. “Nurse Trevor, have a urine and blood sample sent to the lab for a complete analysis.”

“Blood sample? But–” Donna started. I caught the trouble in her voice. Craig’s eyes cut her short. They were cold and stern. “Yes, doctor,” she whispered under them.

“I want to see you in my office when you’re through,” Craig told her before shutting the door.

“What’s going on?” I asked. She was still facing the door and had to turn to answer. Her face was a bit red.

She smiled but I could tell she didn’t mean it. “Nothing. Just routine testing.”

“Doesn’t seem that way to me. I never had to give up any of my blood before.”

Again she smiled. The red in her face was gone. “That’s because you weren’t one day away from leaving us before. We just have to test out everything to make sure you’re okay. We don’t want for you to get all the way home and have to come back for anything.”

“So I have to give up my blood for that?”

“Oh, you’ll have to give up more than that.”

“What else?”

She raised one eyebrow. “I’ll be right back and you’ll see.”

She wasn’t gone long, but in the time she was gone the pain in my head got a whole heap worse. It was pounding. I pushed on my eyes and it helped a little. I even tried squeezing my brains together. I stopped when I heard the door open.

Donna came in with a tray set on a little cart no bigger than my Radio Flyer I had stuffed into the shed back home. Only this cart was heaps taller.

“First we’ll do your blood. Now I won’t lie to you, it will hurt a little at first, when the needle goes in, but after that, it won’t hurt at all.”

I nodded and gave her my arm. Her eyes darted to me. “You feel awfully warm, are you all right? Maybe I should get the doctor–”

“No, I’m fine,” I told her fast. “It was just under too many blankets.” 

My head was feeling really hot and the room started spinning; my chest started hurting and each breath felt like I was pulling pure smoke into my lungs. But I didn’t want her to know. 

She smiled and nodded, but I could tell she wasn’t buying it all. I just hoped she bought enough. I really wanted to go home.

She tapped the middle of my arm until a vein popped up. “You might not want to look.”“Yessum.” But I watched anyway.

When she had the tube filled completely, she took out a cotton ball that was buried in a jar full of alcohol, and put it to the tip of the needle. She pulled the needle out, wiping the little hole with the cotton. It stung a might.

“That wasn’t so bad,” she said taping the cotton in place over the hole. “You’re a very brave young lady.”

I smiled back but the pain in my head and chest was getting to me faster than I cared to admit.

“Now the other thing,” she said and she held up a glass cup.

“What’s that for?”

“Your urinalysis.”

“What’s that?”

“We’re going to take this glass into the W/C over there,” she said pointing to the door at the side of my room. “And fill it up.”

“With what?”

“Pee.”

“What’s he want my pee for?”

“They need to test it, honey.”

“For what? To make sure it’s good pee?”

“Something like that,.” She moved the bars out of the way that kept me from falling on my face in the middle of the night.

“But I don’t have to go pee.”

“They don’t need very much, honey. Do what you can. You’d be surprised how much you can go when you don’t have to.”

Donna helped me out from the blankets and into the chair with wheels. I did the whole maneuver without even once landing on my bandaged feet. Then she wheeled me to the bathroom. Once there she did the same actions to get me out of the chair and onto the pot.

“I’ll be right outside if you need anything.”

I waited for her to close the door before trying to fill the glass jar. It was kind of mortifying, if you know what I mean. There was a trick to it. You had to do it just right or else you ended up peeing all over your hand. Donna had been right, by the time I’d finished I had half the cup filled, and that didn't even count what all spilled over on my hand.

I sat there holding the jar and yelled, “I'm done, Donna!”

She opened the door and took the jar, wiping it down with a towel. 

“I’ll be a second,.”

I watched her go back to the tray, stick a sticker on the side of the jar and set it down. Then she came back with a second cloth and wiped off my hands before helping me back into the chair. We wheeled back to the bed where she lifted me up and set me under the covers. By the time the blankets fluttered over me I was completely out of breath. It was like I’d just run around the bases full out for fifteen solid minutes. Too bad for me, Donna noticed it too.

She put her hands to my forehead. “You’re burning up And you’re out of breath.”

“I’m okay.”

“No you’re not. What about the rest of it?”

“What?”

“What Dr. Miller was asking you? Did you fib to him?”

“I want to go home,” I told her. I felt the tear at the side of my eye. It stuck there calling me a baby.

“I know you do, honey,” she said sitting by me on the bed. “But if you aren't well, it wouldn’t be a good thing.”

I looked at her a long time before admitting,  “I lied. My head hurts sorely and it feels hot. And my chest burns every time I take a breath. And if you don’t get that breakfast out of here I’m gonna puke.”

Donna brushed the hair from my forehead. “When did all this start?”

“This morning, when I woke up. It wasn’t so bad then, just a bit of pain behind my eyes. It’s getting worse, though, really fast.”

“Well, don’t worry, I’m sure whatever it is Dr. Miller will be able to help you out. He’s a fine doctor.”

I smiled at her. “You like him a whole heap, don’t you?”

Her smile fell away. “What makes you say that?”

“You show it.”

“I guess I’m not very good at hiding my feelings.”

“He told me you were nice.”

She smiled at that. “He did?”

I nodded.

“Well, I better get these samples to the lab for him before he has me fired, nice or not. I’ll see you in a little while, okay?”

“Okay.”

She stood from my bed and started for the door.

“Donna?”

“Yes, honey?”

“I’m not going home tomorrow, am I?”

Her smile stiffened at first. But then it came back. “I don’t know. It depends on how fast we can make you better. But don’t worry. You’ll be back home soon.

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