Ex-Purgatory by Peter Clines (best book club books TXT) 📕

stared at the posters, then at her hands. He let her sit for a moment before he asked again. She nodded once. “Yeah. Every night.”

“Exactly the same?”

She straightened up as best she could. “Not always. Sometimes I remember different parts of it. Different places, different people. But it’s all the same. It’s all …”

He tapped the pencil one-two-three-four times. “It’s all what?”

“You know.”

“It’s important for you to say it,” Sylvester said.

“Why?”

“Because how you remember things and how you describe them are little clues to what’s going on in your head.”

She sighed. “It’s all real,” she said. She waved her hand around the office. “The stuff in my dreams feels more real than all of this.”

The pencil rapped three-four-five-six times against Sylvester’s knee. “Your parents think it’s because of this obsession you’ve developed with horror movies.”

“I told you, the dreams came first.”

“That’s not what they say.”

“They saw the movies first. I didn’t tell them about the dreams until later.”

The pencil spun twice between his fingers, then tapped against his knee. “And they’re still suicidal dreams?”

“No,” she said. “No, they’ve never been, I keep telling you that. They’re just … I’m just dead in them, that’s all.”

“But not suicidal.”

“No.”

“If the dream is so realistic, how can you be dead? How are you experiencing it?”

“I’m supposed to be dead,” she explained, “but I’m not. Not in the normal way.”

“Buried alive?”

She shook her head. “No, not like that. I’m dead, like a vampire or something. But I’m different than the others.”

“Others?”

“Well, most of the undead just want to eat you, right? I’m still me, I’m just … dead.”

Sylvester’s pencil paused in the air between taps. “Okay,” he said. “Let me ask you this. In these dreams, can you still walk?”

She looked at her legs. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I can.”

“So, you’re having a dream that feels incredibly real where dead things walk around. And in this dream your legs—which have been ‘dead’ for ten years now—work again.”

“Sort of. Is that a normal dream? It isn’t, is it?”

“I have heard of it once before,” he said. “Something a lot like it.”

“You have?”

“It was in a movie. You’ve been watching a lot of horror movies, right?”

“Some of them, yeah.”

“Did you ever see one called Nightbreed?”

She thought about it and shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“It might be before your time. It’s an older one by Clive Barker.”

“The Hellraiser guy?”

“Yes.”

“I met Pinhead at a convention in Seattle last year,” she said. “The guy who played him, I mean. He was really nice, even though he seemed pretty bored.”

“I think he’s in this one, too.” Sylvester drumrolled his pencil against his knee. “It’s a film about a man who has dreams he’s dead, and then he ends up becoming one of the undead. And parts of him that had stopped working start working again.”

“Is that a sex thing?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “It’s not like that.”

“That’s good,” he said, smiling. “The psychiatrist in that one turned out to be a homicidal maniac.”

“No,” she said. “You’re not a maniac.”

“I’m in the dream, too?”

She paused and weighed the question. “Lots of people I know are in it.”

He tapped the pencil against his knee two-three-four times. “So, if I’m not a maniac in the dream, what am I then?”

She stared at her legs for another moment. “You’re dead,” she told him. “Everyone is. The world is dead.”

“Was there a war?”

“It was a disease. A virus.”

“Ahhh. A virus that made the dead walk?”

“Yeah.” Madelyn bounced her fist on the arm of the wheelchair, breaking the beat of the pencil tap. “And I don’t know why it’s all different now.”

I’M FALLING.

I’m not sure where I’m falling from. That’s not part of the dream. I just find myself plummeting through the air toward the crowd below.

The crowd looks up at me. Men and women, young and old. It just seems to be random people. They’re all talking. I can see their mouths moving but can’t hear any words. The dream is silent.

My body tenses up as the ground flies up to meet me, but at the last minute I slow down. It’s like coming to the end of a dive in a deep pool. My body just sheds momentum into the air. I step down onto the pavement as if I’m hopping off a bus.

The crowd surrounds me. They’re all still talking. I still can’t hear them.

No, not a crowd, a mob. A horde. They claw at me. Grab at me. Tug and pull and yank. One of them has my hair, because in the dream my hair is long and shaggy, like the hero on the cover of a romance novel. A pair of arms wraps around my neck like a bony scarf.

They want me.

The people are not well. They’re lepers or burn victims. They have gray skin, like sand at the beach. Many of them are injured.

There’s a woman with curly blond hair who looks like she’s been throwing up blood. One man has a long gash across his bald scalp and is missing an ear. A teenage boy holds up an arm that ends in a dark stump. An older, well-dressed woman is coated in blood, as if she works in a slaughterhouse.

And then, even though I’ve been looking at all of them since the dream began, I suddenly notice their eyes. All of them have the same dull, chalky eyes. Blind eyes. Their gazes don’t settle on anything. I see one man whose eyes drift off in two different directions.

The people keep grabbing me and I realize—in that way you sometimes realize the painfully obvious in a dream—that this is a bad dream. A very bad one. I’m not surrounded by hurt people. These are things. There are monsters all around me. Sightless, sickly things.

A woman with a battered face opens her jaws wide and bites down on my arm. I can feel it and I wince, but her teeth can’t make it through my leather jacket. Her mouth opens again and two of her teeth drop out.

I know I’m in a