Chapter 5

Chapter 5

 

The bags under Liza’s eyes were growing. It was getting harder to hide with makeup. There was nothing she could do though. Every time she fell asleep she had the same dream. Nothing changed. Even though she knew to expect it she still found herself panicking, struggling to breathe, and unable to move. Of course, she wasn’t able to get back to sleep after she forced herself awake.

To make things worse she had her monthly dinner with Mom and Dad. These were murder, but necessary if she wanted them to continue to pay for the schooling she no longer had any interest in. She laughed out loud at that thought. It was so ludicrous that she was pandering to them for an education she didn’t even want. So stupid, but school was the only thing keeping her partially sane at this point.

She’d been spending a lot of time in the library, researching her dream phenom and everything she had experienced in the glen. She had searched the numerous volumes of medical research in the area of dreams and hallucinations and found nothing to support either occurrence. She tried then looking for historical occurences that were reported that sounded anything like what she had experienced and again a strike out.

She then turned to the only other thing she could think of, folklore. There was quite a bit of lore that had similar situations. Most of the lore was outrageous in its observations. Most were uneducated peasants, and their superstitious beliefs. From what she could find most anyone who had similar phenomenon occur were killed in heinous ways. It was believed that they were either servants of the devil or much worse Vampires. Either way they ended up dead. Demons, Vampires, thralls, these things didn’t exist except to entertain the masses, or scare little kids into bed on time. There was nothing even remotely reality based in any of it.

Liza couldn’t just completely discount anything that hinted at what she had experienced but this just seemed too unreal. Something did catch her eye. There was a story of a man who had experienced almost exactly what she had. He had been sentenced to die by burning. As they laid the torched to the pyre and incredible rescue had been made. A woman leapt out of a tree overlooking they pyre and had with one hand ripped the ropes from the man. There was a moment of eye contact and then she had grabbed a hold of him and leapt out into the night. Neither had ever been seen again.

She had latched onto this story. It was said by the towns people that the woman was a vampire come for her prey. By others it was accounted as an epic act of love. Both sides had agreed on only one thing, Vampires. Somehow this rang true with Liza. Maybe she was really just going crazy. Maybe she was having a mental break from stressing so much about school. That was a better possibility than vampires. Right? Just questioning the validity of the thought showed her just how far she was gone. Maybe she would just tell her parents the whole thing tonight so they would lock her up with other people who have stupid delusions.

She wouldn’t though. She couldn’t tell them, couldn’t risk the chance that this was real no matter how crazy she thought she was. There was too much she didn’t yet know to make any rash decisions. She would persevere for now; keep researching until she found something to prove her delusional.

The one thing she had going for her was that she had found a class on occult studies where her research wouldn’t seem as strange. Her parents were going to have a conniption over it but she didn’t really care at this point. When she had found the class, she researched a major she could link it to, Political Science and Treatise. They would have to back down from such a respectable major, and this way she could continue her research into her “dream man” without having to hear what a waste of time it was.