The Multitude, стр. 13
She had a handle on these people by the time she climbed to the second floor. Happy, hard-working, middle class, Christians. A likeable family.
Upstairs in the bathroom, fluffy blue towels hung from racks. The ceramic floor was handsomely arranged in a herringbone pattern and the walls were papered with seahorses and coral. Everything gleamed—the basin, the tub, the faucets. These trappings added color to the portrait she’d sketched downstairs. The man of the house was a carpenter who kept up his castle. The woman was tidy. Nothing in the room suggested anything but a modern American family. Nor had she seen hints of other worlds in the living area downstairs.
The woman, Bethany, tossed and turned alone in the bedroom to the left. Gabriella probed her mind and found trouble. A new construction project in Buffalo kept Bethany’s husband away for days at a time. Alone at night with her worries, she focused on his health. The doctors had been reassuring about his cancer remission, but she stressed over whether he’d live to see their daughter grow up.
Gabriella made a mental note to do something, perhaps leave a prayer card for her. Prayer was the best solace during hard days.
She headed to the bedroom on the right.
“Oh my,” she whispered.
Bethany must have been influenced by hazy Sanctimonia memories when decorating her daughter’s room. A forest-green quilt covered her sleeping daughter. The wallpaper displayed woods and log cabins and Hansel and Gretel wandering where they didn’t belong. On the top of a bookshelf, where one might expect to find a Pinocchio figurine or a wax Snow White, an Amazon warrior stood guard with a spear in her hand.
Carla stirred. “I want to sleep with my mommy.” She looked up with drowsy eyes, unfazed by the unexpected appearance of a visitor standing just outside her bedroom.
Gabriella didn’t need to look inside the girl’s mind to realize the world of any three-year-old presented a steady stream of surprises. Small ones such as the random appearance of a vaguely remembered ponytailed friend didn’t necessarily evoke a response.
She approached the bed and ran her fingers through the child’s hair. “Your mommy’s proud of a girl so brave she sleeps alone in her own room.”
“Is she proud of Cassy, too?” Carla held up the typical, well-worn child’s doll. A stuffed deer.
“She’s mostly proud of you. Now close your eyes and take me for a ride.”
“Where?”
“The forest would be nice.”
Carla snuggled tighter into her stuffed deer and drifted off.
Gabriella stole into her mind.
* * *
Minutes later
From her prone position on a cot, Gabriella looked down at a dirt floor and across a small room to a rough wooden table and two chairs. Embers glowed in a stone hearth off to the left, the remnants of a fire that had burned three logs to dark chalk. Blackened pots hung above the mantel. On the right, a crescent moon and stars shined through an unfamiliar half-open window—not the one in her cabin and not the window in Carla’s bedroom.
She could have burst into song. Not only had the dream portal worked, leading her into Maynya’s head, she now beheld a place beyond the boundaries of her Sanctimonia cabin grounds.
Gabriella gathered her essence and prepared to leap from a dream to reality, just as she’d done countless times before.
But she couldn’t move.
“Pssst. Maynya.”
The girl offered no response.
“Maynya, let me out!” As much as Gabriella hated to admit a mistake, she couldn’t deny overlooking a critical supposition. Since she’d never had any powers on the Sanctimonia side of the portal, why had she expected to play the supernatural angel and leap from Maynya’s dreams into the waking world?
Gabriella gasped for breath. She’d gotten stuck inside the head of a young child.
The room went black.
Was this how the inside of a closed coffin felt? For the first time in her life, Gabriella knew claustrophobia. She trembled at the thought of the worst-case scenario. After forty years of purgatory, God had banished her to Hell for her sin. Perhaps He let Maynya die in her sleep, trapping a wayward angel in her lifeless head. They’d turn to dust together.
But no. Wait. What was that?
A snore?
Maynya’s breathing steadied. She hadn’t died. She’d closed her eyes and fallen asleep.
“Wake up!” Gabriella tried to calm herself and think. “Carla?”
Two eyelids fluttered open, revealing a beautiful sight—a modern American bedroom once again. She couldn’t scramble out of the girl’s head fast enough.
“Can I have a drink of water?” Carla gazed at her with sleepy eyes.
“Give me a second.”
“Why are you crying?”
“I had a bad dream.”
“Monsters?”
“Worse.” Gabriella escaped to the bathroom and buried her face in a towel. After a long moment, she gathered enough strength to fill a Cookie Monster cup with water and bring it into the bedroom.
The girl accepted the offering with two small hands, stole a sip, and shifted her gaze to her stuffed animal. “Cassy’s thirsty, too.”
“We don’t want a mess. Let me help her drink it.” Gabriella took the cup and made a show of holding it to the deer’s mouth before setting it onto the bedside table.
By then, Carla had closed her eyes again.
The courage to plunge back into the girl’s mind didn’t come easily. Many minutes passed before she took the leap.
Maynya must have gotten up, for Gabriella now stared out the window through the eyes of a girl whose nose pressed against the glass. The child stood peering into the darkness alone but with no sign of fear. Odd for one so young. Then a hint of motion in the gray light of early dawn provided the reason for such fortitude. Maynya’s mother, Carmella, held a position outside, guarding the girl from twenty yards away.
More likely than not, the woman protected an entire village. She stood with a spear in one hand and a crossbow slung across the opposite shoulder, sporting the leather tunic