Read Online Waking Nightmares by Christopher Golden - Free Book Online Page A

her and flow through her. She felt it in her bones and relished it, even as she enjoyed the sound of the autumn breeze rustling through the apple trees. The scent of the rotting, fermenting apples already fallen mixed with the sweet smell of those still hanging from the branches, and this was the smell of life, and of the earth.
    Contented, she opened her eyes and walked to the center of the clearing, her shoes making impressions in the freshly turned soil. Closing her eyes again, she faced eastward and whispered blessings to the air and earth, then turned and repeated the blessings facing west, then again south, and finally north.
    As she spoke, the wind rose around her, buffeting her gently with breezes both warm and cold. The air caressed her, her silken black hair whipping around her face, and she breathed deeply. She felt Gaea, the earth mother, the goddess, there with her. At all times, Keomany felt a small buzzing in her mind, a warm shiver in her flesh, a power that lay mostly dormant within her, but that connected her to Gaea. She could summon that magic at will. It connected her to the elements, to all of nature, and she had called the wind that surrounded her now.
    She opened her arms and let that magic flow from her, down into the ground. The soil began to shift and the clearing to tremble as the chemical impurities in that patch of land were destroyed or rendered inert as if they had been burned away. Grass began to spring up from the soil, growing quickly. She could hear the wind singing from the blades and could feel the grass underfoot and brushing against her legs.
    Keomany took a bite of the apple, opened her eyes, and dropped it to the ground. She stepped back to watch as the seeds inside the fruit sent shoots down into the soil. In the space between eye blinks, a finger-length sprig emerged. Smiling, feeling the harmony of earth magic, she moved farther away to give it room to grow, and as she looked on, the sprig stretched upward with a whisper of life, branches forming, leaves growing, blossoms appearing and then flowering into being as gleaming, green, Granny Smith apples. The tree—nine or ten feet tall now—seemed almost to sigh and settle its roots more deeply, and then the wind subsided and only the smallest breeze remained to gently sway its branches. With its leaves turned toward the sun, this newborn fruit of the earth thrived.
    During the celebration there would be at least one apple for each of those in attendance—Keomany would make certain of it. They would partake together, and in years to come, other trees would grow from this one, and so the purity of the earth and the peace of Gaea would continue to spread through Summerfields and to all of those who ate of this tree, and those that would grow from its seeds.
    “Blessed—” Keomany began to say.
    The pain made her cry out, surging up through the magical umbilical that tethered her to the goddess. It made her muscles contract and her legs give way, and she fell in the newly grown grass. Spikes hammered into her skull and the shadows cast by the trees at the edges of the clearing reached knife-blade fingers for her, forcing her to close her eyes. But she couldn’t hide from the pain, or the nausea that roiled in her gut, or the images that rose in her mind of waves crashing against a pier, of unnatural things scuttling onto the shore, and of dark mist flowing through the streets of a small town, swallowing it up.
    The mist enveloped her, pain and darkness suffocating her, and she sank down into herself and oblivion claimed her.
    For a time, Keomany knew nothing. The darkness coalesced, eddying around her as though she lay in some midnight tide pool, pain subsiding and her breathing returning to normal.
    A voice whispered her name. For just a moment, she thought it might be the goddess herself. Then, as consciousness returned, she winced away from the brightness of the sun. Slowly, she opened her eyes to slits, and saw Tori Osborne