Bedful of Moonlight by Raven Held (audio ebook reader .txt) 📕

any problem.
Although there were still some problematic nights.
Once, I don’t know how, but I woke up in the bathroom with the water running. I was only woken up, spluttering, when my father burst into the shower and shoved the shower head in my face.
Dad made me take my medication in front of him from that night on. But sometimes, he forgot. Those were the nights he locked himself in his room and I heard him working feverishly at his computer. The next morning, the floor would be strewn with papers, crushed or torn, filled with public relations jargon that I didn’t understand. It just reminded me, whenever I smoothened out a stack of crushed papers, how far apart I had become from him.
I told myself I would not go crazy with the pills tonight, that I would just take the prescribed amount and not a grain more. It would, after all, not help if I ended up doing something crazy in my new house. Caleb and Jade seemed nice, but a psycho tenant would still be unwelcome no matter how nice people were.
But as I stared at the extra pill sitting in the palm of my hand, a million excuses ran through my mind. No-one knew if things would go out of hand, right? I needed more than the prescribed amount tonight, that I knew for sure. Nothing would happen. It was just that one time that the pills messed up my head.
Besides, I thought as I popped the pill into my mouth, new estate, new house, right? Surely I needed something extra to get to sleep.
I almost dropped the glass of water again when a knock came at my door.
Jade stuck her head timidly in. “Hey.” A frown grew in her brows when she saw me start at her voice
“Hey,” I said, shoving the bottle of pills in my lap.
Her frown deepened.
“It’s to help me sleep,” I told her, waving the topic away.
She nodded. Taking a deep breath, she said, with a hint of reluctance, “I just wanted to make sure you’re settling in for your first night here.” She leant against the door frame and went on, “First night in a new place and all. Are you sure you’re okay? You were acting a little weird downstairs.”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling the familiar onset of calmness take over me. But I could still hear another pill calling out to me at the back of my mind. Should I give in? I forced myself to concentrate on the conversation. “I’m fine. Thanks for today, by the way.”
She stared at me for a while, before slowly backing out. “Okay,” she finally said. “If you need anything, I’ll be in my room.”
After she left, I realised I had already drawn another pill from the bottle. It stared up at me from my palm.

*

It was a different dream this time. I somehow knew it the moment it began. Somehow, I was anticipating it.
No-one was there. Not my mother, not Blake. I couldn’t even see myself. All I could register was the intense darkness all around. I could barely see anything, but I knew it was dark. I could feel no solid ground beneath my feet, like I was weightless, unanchored.
Suddenly, a flame was struck, a warm orange glow in the hollow blackness all around. It was entrancing, the shades of orange and yellow burning in the quiet nothingness.
Then I saw his fingers at the end of the match.
Blake had a nervous habit. He would light matches whenever he was antsy or worried. I know it sounds crazy – scary, even – but he even carried a box of matches everywhere he went. It was like an addiction, a natural reaction to sooth his frazzled nerves.
It used to scare the hell out of me whenever he did that. I was afraid he would burn the place down one day, wherever we were, or set himself on fire. He never did – he would let the flame creep closer and closer to his fingers before finally dropping the match. Sometimes, I would blow out the flame when it got too close to his fingers for comfort (the way he liked it), and that would annoy him.
This time, though, I let it burn, watching it eat up the stem, leaving behind blackened wood. It was the only way I could see his face. I feared the moment when the match would be dropped, when I would never see his face again.
The match was never dropped, the flame never extinguished. But Blake handed the lit one to me wordlessly and struck another.
I could not take my eyes off his face. In every one of my dreams, I feared it would be the last I ever saw of him, so I tried not to blink every time, hoping to commit his features – everything about him – to memory.
He struck another match, and I stared at the dancing flame in his eyes. He smiled and handed me a match to strike.
We stuck all the matches we had in the ground around us. They burned for what I hoped was eternity, as we kept striking more and more and placed them around us. We kept our eyes on each other the entire time we were doing that.
His gaze was sad, as though he knew the light would be extinguished soon and that would be the end of that.
The heat from the flames sat upon my skin, so real that it hardly felt like I was dreaming, but I ignored it. This felt scarily like my last chance to see Blake again, and I never wanted to wake up, if that was the case. I would go willingly into the good night from whence he came. Time was the ultimate force of nature, and I could either abide by its rules while living – or be free of it when I was not.
“Kristen,” he said, but his lips did not move. It was the only word he had spoken since the beginning of this very strange dream. And then it became more urgent: “Kristen.”
I could feel tears – as hot as the flames around us – on my face. Was I was going to see him leave again?
“I don’t want to wake up. Blake, please, don’t make me,” I kept saying.
He didn’t respond to what I was saying; he just kept saying my name, until finally he yelled, “Kristen! Wake up, dammit!”
“I don’t want to!” I screamed as I felt someone shake me – hard. “I don’t want to! Blake, please!”
He drifted further away from me, and his silhouette, now fuzzy, melted into the blackness.
A searing pain rippled through my arm, and I screamed again as the circle of flames collapsed inwards and flooded the ground. A pool of fire gathered around my feet, monstrous and alive, licking at my flesh.
And then I could see nothing else but the fire that had now risen to an astounding height. An ever-encroaching wall was erected and I could hardly breathe, much less try to look for Blake. There was the acrid smell of smoke and something else burning, and the heat hurt my eyes so much I couldn’t open them. How was I going to find Blake now?
“Let’s get out of here,” someone yelled.
And I felt myself dragged away, away from the wall of fire separating me from Blake. My sobs and screams were barely heard over the roar of heat chasing us, me and the voice.
“Get downstairs!” another voice bellowed.
Soon, I was forced to a refreshingly cool spot, but my arms hurt as I tried to tear away from the grip on them. The glow of orange and red was retreating, dying. It reminded me too much of how Blake slowly died on that road, slowly retreating every time in my dreams. I screamed and thrashed some more.
It was not until I felt myself trip over something and felt a burst of cool air on my skin that I began to recognise the voices around me.
“She says she doesn’t want to wake up,” Caleb said. I could almost imagine him rolling his eyes.
“The fire’s put out,” I heard my dad say.
That was when I opened my eyes.
“Thank goodness,” Reilly sighed. I didn’t know if she said that because the fire was put out or because I was awake.
“What is your problem?” Jade demanded, but she stared at me with what seemed like concern as she helped me sit up on the porch.
“I’ll get her a glass of water,” Caleb said, and he went into the house.
The smell of smoke was still strong, and my eyes watered.
Dad appeared in front of me, distraught but tired-looking. “Kristen,” he said. “Can you hear me? Kristen.”
“Yeah, dad,” I croaked. “I’m not in a coma.”
“Well, you were sleep-walking,” Reilly said. “That’s almost as bad.”
“Sleep-walking?” I echoed. So the dream was … real? Was that why Caleb was re-emerging from the house with a first-aid kit? Because my arm was – I checked – singed?
“Just like the previous time,” dad said, his gaze heavy, sombre.
A lump that had suddenly grown in my throat hurt. “So did I…?” I swallowed. “Did I just burn the house down or something?”
Caleb chuckled as he handed me the glass of water. “You only burned your room down. No harm done.”
How nice he was made me feel even more terrible. I had been so rude to him, but here he was treating my wound and handing me a glass of water. After I had almost burned down his house. There was a difference between being taciturn and being an outright bitch.
“Really, Kristen,” Caleb said, bending down slightly to look me in the eye. I froze, trapped in his gaze, but now found that there was nowhere else I wanted to look. “Don’t sweat it. It’s fine.”
“What exactly happened?” Jade asked, shaking her head.
Caleb stopped dabbing water on my arm. He frowned and stared at the wet towel in his hand. “She’d lit – I don’t know how many candles, but it was scary. They were all over the place, like a preparation for some kind of dark ritual or something.”
My dad made an involuntary noise.
Caleb looked at me again, and this time I didn’t look away. “You were still lighting up those candles when I got into your room. I smelt the smoke so I went up to check. The curtains had caught fire. I kept calling you and shaking you, telling you to wake up and get out of there, but you just kept saying you didn’t want to…” He shook his head. “And – you called me Blake.”
I let out a sharp gasp. No-one else had uttered that name in my presence since that day, since I avoided everyone and everything that might have reminded me of his absence.
My father’s gaze fell heavily on me; I could hardly breathe just feeling the weight of its sadness.
A sharp pain shocked me out of my reverie, however, and I gasped. Caleb cringed and apologised.
“Wait a minute,” Jade said. She stared at Caleb. “You mean you woke up in the middle of the night to find her lighting candles in her room?” She turned to stare at me, her eyes bright and reproachful in the night. I could not hold her gaze for very long.
“I’ve heard of sleepwalkers who do weirder things,” Reilly said, shrugging rather stiffly. “Raven told us about this one girl who woke up in the mi –”
“I think we should all go back to bed