Disaster Follows

2 - Nightmare

She could hear the Elgar Cello Concerto in E minor on the background. It was her favorite. She could literally spend days just listening to the first movement. Yo-Yo Ma had this great recording of Great Cello Concertos from 1989 that she kept like a treasure under her bed, along with some other classical records. Her parents had always thought she wasn’t an admirer anymore, but that she was clearly obsessed with all things regarding cello. Ironically enough, she didn’t play it. Piano was her thing—it always had been.

The Adagio was playing while she walked in between the plants. The garden reminded her of the Palais de Versailles’ gardens. She followed the white flower petals that had been spread on the grass, marking a sort of road for her to follow. The music went louder. She stopped, closing her eyes to fully enjoy the music. She knew it by heart—after all those years of listening to that particular piece, she couldn’t expect any less.

And then something happened. She felt it even with eyes closed. The air changed. It no longer felt like being outdoors, but the opposite. She felt imprisoned. Valentina willed her eyes to snap open but nothing responded. Elgar was growing stronger, and it was hurting her ears now. She wanted to move, to scream—anything—but her body wouldn’t answer to her. She could barely breathe, but it felt as if all the oxygen was being sucked up by some invisible force.

An invisible force that out of a sudden pushed her to the grass. Except it was no longer grass underneath her feet, but metal. She was somewhere else. Finally her eyes obeyed her and she was able to see around her. If only. It was so dark there was no telling where she was. But someone—rather, something else—was in there with her. She knew it, because it brushed her left arm and she instinctively backed away from it. And then she felt it breathe in her neck, sending chills throughout her body.

She opened her mouth to scream, and something immediately covered it. She’d have thought it was an arm, except it didn’t feel like one. And the smell… The smell knocked her out into reality.

The first time she’d ever had that nightmare, she was only eight. She’d woken up screaming for help, to startle all the household except her parents, who were still out celebrating New Year’s Eve. Her nanny had almost gone mental trying to calm her down. Valentina could barely say one word in between her whimpering: devil.

She should have known better. Or perhaps not. No eight-year-old kid would understand why that word could unleash so much terror to a catholic nanny. Whatever the case, it brought her parents home in a whim. Her parents and a priest.

Looking back, she could understand why she was so afraid of religions. One single priest had managed to traumatize her for life. She was lucky to have music. Music and books. Those were the two things that had actually helped her overcome her fear of ever sleeping again.

The nightmare, however, kept coming back. A few shrinks and therapies later, her father gave up, giving her a bottle of pills to swallow if the fear ever came back. She’d never touched them. Her friends had had better ideas. Eating a lot at night was the best one. She’d keep throwing up all night and when she was finally feeling sleepy, morning was already there, so she’d drink several cups of coffee and simply exist through her day.

That worked, until they moved again. She was barely ten, in a city she’d never visited before, where people spoke in spanish and she could barely understand a few words. If that was not feeling like a fish out of the water, then she had no idea what was. Her father had stopped talking in spanish to her after the first nightmare—one of the psychologists had told him she’d recover faster with only one language in her brain. She’d always thought that was a stupid idea, and she’d refused to give up her french classes.

Looking out through her argentinean window for the first time, she wondered if she should’ve asked for spanish lessons instead. Her father—ever the problem-solver—took no time in finding a right school for her. Apparently moving all the way across the Atlantic also meant he no longer thought home-schooling was the best choice for her.

She felt betrayed, thrown out to the sharks. The kids in her classroom didn’t seem to be thrilled by her arrival. She’d forever be the new girl, the one who didn’t really speak their language, couldn’t understand their jokes, the one who would always be left out of everything.  She’d told her father maybe home school was a better idea to blend in but he’d waved the idea off without trying to listen.

She’d learnt to do things on her own by twelve. She never did group homework, and in sports she’d only pick those who would allow her to play alone. By fourteen, she’d found some people she could call friends, the only problem was they didn’t attend the same school. They attended Northlands, the school that was actually known for being the one that brought up the queen of Netherlands.

Her mother shined by her absence. They shared the same house, but they never really saw each other. Valentina had scheduled her days so that she would never have to share a meal with her parents. At first she felt horrible—as if she were a monster for behaving like the angry brat she was being—but then she got used to it. She felt better. Everything felt better.

And the nightmare kept coming back. Sometimes it would strike with such force she wasn’t able to wake up from it, and her father would come into her room to shake her up until she could snap her eyes open out from the hell in her head. He’d then stay with her until she had swallowed the new sleeping pills he’d gotten from some doctor and would make small talk to her until she fell asleep.

By fifteen, the pills stopped working. Her father had declared he wouldn’t be coming back again to wake her up because some shrink had told him it was the worst thing to do. That was the first time she ever tried drugs. Charles Meggili, one of her friends, knew a drug dealer who always provided him with whatever he needed. She loved tobacco and could think of nothing worse than inhaling something, so the three of them agreed on something she could inject herself: heroin.

Heroin helped like nothing had ever done before. Even her mood on the mornings after she had the nightmare improved exponentially. Until her father found out why. He’d threatened her with rehab, not wanting to listen that she’d only use heroin for when she had the nightmare—that had gotten from once a week to once every two months or so. Without the drug, the nightmare came back on full intensity.

She’d learned to control herself, though. She no longer cried for help or screamed in horror. Whenever she felt terrified, she’d keep her mouth shut. Probably that was one of the very few things she could ever thank her father.

Between constant travels around the globe—towards what her father said once about building a larger cultural background—her decision to have a fashion career at college and later, her work, the nightmare hadn’t come back that often.

And then she’d woken up one week ago feeling like she couldn’t breathe anymore. She didn’t remember having the nightmare, but all the same, that was the only thing that crossed her mind. One day later at work she heard the Elgar Concerto with so much clarity it scared her, but when she enquired around as to whom was listening to classical music, everyone told her no one had been listening to music. She heard the same Concerto again at home, when her parents had been hosting some dinner she didn’t even care about.

Again and again, the signs were all too clear. At first she’d thought she was becoming paranoid and had considered calling Charles for a round of heroin. Finally, she’d decided she wasn’t going to fall into that again and willed herself to sleep.

And then, someone had caught her by the arm, pulling her out of whatever dream she was having and threw her through the window into a black hole.