Bridge Between the Worlds (Dreamwalker Book 1) Read online

  With the assistance of the sunglasses she was able to see what was around her again and was surprised to notice Martay on the other side of the road, heading into the park. Given that he was carrying a lot of equipment with him, she guessed that he was heading off to do some painting. She decided to follow him. Seeing someone, particularly seeing a friend at the moment was a great relief after the uncomfortable emptiness of the school. As she tried to move however, she tripped on the torn hem of her own jeans and fell heavily towards the concrete. She braced herself, throwing her hands out to block the fall but the impact never came.

  Amy woke with a start and an instant pang of unexplained fear. Then she realised what was going on and lay still, breathing slowly to calm herself down. Everything in the dream had been so real and so detailed. She even remembered having tried to check whether or not she was sleeping in the dream itself and still hadn’t woken up then. It wasn’t just that the dream had seemed real, it was the fact that the details were so accurate to real life. Everything at the school had been in exactly the right place, the cracks and unevenness in places along the floor, the heaviness of the front doors, even the scratch on her lock. She wasn’t sure what to make of it. She took the novel she had been reading and placed it back where it belonged on the bookshelf, stuffed her workbook into her backpack and made her way to her actual bed where she sank into the soft, inviting mattress. She fell asleep again and wasn’t visited by any more strange dreams.

  Chapter 2

  Morning broke to a crescendo of bird voices while the sun rose brightly over Pest. The air was chilly and crisp with a true autumn bite. There was a thin mist scattered over the hills on the Buda side of the Danube and this softened the fiery light created by the sunrise. It would have been a perfect morning for strolling casually up into the forests west of the city Amy thought but regrettably it was another school day. She groaned audibly as she checked the day’s weather forecast on her phone. Currently it was negative two degrees outside. She lay in bed awake for a little longer, trying to muster the determination to get up and forsake the warmth and comfort of her bed. The sun was starting to level with the height of the windows, streaming brightly over the mists below and straight into the bedroom. With a vigorous movement Amy threw back her blanket and swung her feet out over the side of the bed.

  She showered quickly, or at least meant to shower quickly. The problem with cold mornings like this was that she never really wanted to get out of the shower once she was in there. The thought, ‘just a little bit longer’ passed through her head more than a few times before she got out and started to prepare for the day.

  She carefully brushed her hair before spending a much longer portion of her time picking out her clothes. Thankfully since it was going to be so cold today she would need to wear a warm coat and therefore didn’t need to be too picky about what she wore underneath. Still, she made sure to match her shirt with a nice scarf before heading downstairs to the kitchen where she set about making a small and rapid breakfast.

  The walk to school was chilly and slightly damp courtesy of the weather but Amy didn’t really mind. Dew hung suspended on what leaves still remained on the trees and the mist filtered between their trunks with an almost ghost like quality. Although she was running slightly late she walked slowly to savour the time. Not many students travelled through the park. The noise of nearby traffic did waft on the air but it wasn’t particularly disturbing. Amy tuned it out altogether as she mulled over ideas for her philosophy essay, thought about what she would organise for dinner, since her parents were coming home tonight, and eventually considered the strange dream she’d had when she fell asleep in front of the fire.

  “It was just a strange dream” Amy thought in the end. Upon consideration, brooding over her essay along with the atmosphere of the lounge room had probably brought it on. She let it go at that and tried not to think about it any further. Besides, she had reached the end of the park and was now swept up in the noise and activity of a multitude of other students all arriving for the day.

  “What classes do we have this afternoon?” Amy asked her friends towards the end of lunch. Along with Martay, their friends Richard and Michelle had joined them in the warmth of the library.

  “Chemistry then political studies” responded Michelle since the boys were playing chess and in no state to answer. It wasn’t a bad afternoon by Amy’s standards.

  The four of them made their way briskly to the lockers and grabbed their books. Amy stopped for a moment and looked a little closer at the lock itself. She had forgotten about the dream through the day but the scratch on the dial reminded her. It was exactly as it had been last night. She shook her head slightly in disbelief. It was amazing what things the mind remembered and could recall vividly later. She quickly moved off after the others and they proceeded back down the corridor and through the entry hall towards the chemistry classrooms.

  Chemistry passed very quickly. It had been taken up by one long practical experiment which allowed them plenty of time to chat and muck around. The work itself wasn’t overly complicated and as a result they didn’t pay all that much attention to it. Mostly they were discussing plans for the weekend. Amy had to spend tomorrow at home because her parents were returning from Switzerland and always put aside time to catch up after a trip. Nevertheless, the friends agreed they would all catch up on Sunday and do something together. Before they knew it, they were making their way upstairs to their political studies class.

  They all shuffled inside and Amy groaned immediately as she entered. The room was unusually warm. Someone had clearly turned up the heat in the last class and this was her last class of the day meaning she didn’t have much focus left. This class was going to be a struggle.

  Mr Szábo entered the room with an arm full of papers. He proceeded to hand these out to all of the students before seating himself back at his desk. Amy’s heart sank a little further. They were to spend the class reading and taking notes from the handout.

  The classroom went very quiet aside from the sound of pages being turned and the scratch of pens and pencils. Amy began to feel drowsy and was not remotely surprised. The quiet, combined with the warmth of the room was intoxicating. Even Michelle let out a long yawn beside her which didn’t help Amy at all. She tried to focus and scribbled another few lines of notes down but it was no real use. Her hand was drifting slowly down the page and her mind couldn’t keep track of what she was reading let alone process the meaning of it. Her thoughts kept drifting and soon she was lost in a stream of subconsciousness, barely aware of anything that was happening around her.

  Amy was walking down the senior student’s’ corridor with a philosophy book in her hands, making her way towards the entry hall. Nobody else was around and her footsteps echoed off the walls and ceiling. She wasn’t aware that she was dreaming and didn’t remember her previous dream right now. But like before, she felt strangely and inexplicably that something was out of place.

  She tried to speed up but found that her legs couldn’t move any quicker. The more she tried to force it, the slower she seemed to go. Something wasn’t right. She made her way through the empty entry hall and out of the heavy front door. She tripped on the hem of her own jeans and stumbled forward trying hard not to fall.

  Martay had just disappeared from sight into the park. She steadied herself and then tried to follow him as quickly as she could. This wasn’t easy at first and before she had gone very far, she slowed and looked around. There were no cars to be seen or heard anywhere nearby. The road was dead. Little details stood out at her and caught her attention. A crack in one of the paving stones where she crossed the road. The lamp post on the other side had an odd lean to it. One of the branches in the tree on her right as she entered the park had a curious shape. It wasn’t that she simply noticed the details. It was as if they stood out from everything else, more real than the hazy background that surrounded them.

  She shook herself a little and concentrated on moving forward
. She started to stride meaningfully down the park path which seemed to stretch out in front of her forever. She never managed to catch sight of Martay. The path twisted and wound through the trees too much and he must have been a good distance ahead of her considering his head start. The sensation of every step Amy took seemed to be heightened. She noticed the different feeling through her feet with every footfall and yet, none of this seemed strange to her. The sense of unease that had been growing inside her was coming from something else that she couldn’t yet see, hear or feel.

  She carried on as fast as she could before she stopped for a moment. She swore she had heard someone calling out. “Amriel!” The voice was ahead of her but very faint, half lost on the breeze which was pushing the branches around making them groan. It called out again a little louder, “Amriel!”

  Amy snapped back to reality with a start. Her friend Richard was shaking her shoulder quite roughly. He stopped when he saw her stare about blankly with wide, hazy eyes. The rest of the class was already packing up their things and leaving.

  The class hadn’t been engaged in any discussions, so no one had noticed that Amy had fallen asleep in class yet again. This was the least of Amy’s concerns anyway after her brain finally caught up with what had happened and where she really was. She quickly grabbed her things and left the room with her friends. The end-of-day chatter was already filling the corridors, making them loud and tumultuous as all the students made for their lockers or headed straight for the exits to get started with their long-awaited weekends.

  Richard and Michelle at least were mirroring the thoughts of their peers and immediately continued on with their conversation where they had left off earlier. Amy on the other hand was running over the dream she had just had. She thought through it over and over again. Now that she was awake she was fully aware of the similarity between it and the dream from last night. To be more precise, she realised that it had started exactly as her earlier dream had ended. The other strange thing was how real both the dreams had been. Was it a coincidence that both of these strange, hyper-realistic dreams had also been like one longer dream split into parts?

  She left through the front door of the entry hall with her friends and they made their way across the road. Amy glanced down and saw, just as it had been in her dream, the cracked paving stone. She quickly looked up and searched for the lamp post and sure enough, there it was leaning off at an odd angle. It always had done… hadn’t it? Amy had never noticed before. She turned to Martay with an idea. She didn’t explain why because she didn’t want to come across as strange but she asked him if she could look through his sketch book.

  Martay looked at her with an odd expression before slowly taking it out of his backpack and handing it to her. She flipped briskly through the pages until she eventually found what she was looking for. If there was one thing she could rely on Martay for, it was that he drew pretty much anywhere that he sat still on a regular basis. There was a sketch of the entrance to the park, lamp post included, and in his drawing it was skewed slightly to the side as if it had been hit and bent.

  Amy felt strangely relieved. At least this explained why the dreams felt so real. She was dreaming about places that she knew intimately, down to minute details, even though it had never occurred to her before just how well she knew them. Why she was having these dreams she didn’t know but stranger things had happened and she simply put it down to the stress of the oncoming final exams. Clearly, they were playing with her head, which would also explain why she had dreamed about needing books for an assignment. With that, she turned her thoughts back to dinner plans.

  Amy was actually behind schedule with her cooking but she managed to have everything ready just in time for her parent’s arrival. Shortly they were all seated together comfortably at the table, some Vivaldi playing in the background. Amy’s parents were great music lovers, a passion which Amy had definitely inherited.

  Her parents were the kind of couple that complimented each other so perfectly in habits, behaviour and appearance that they could have been, and were often confused as, brother and sister by strangers. They spoke with the same soft accent in all the numerous languages that they spoke, a factor which made it exceptionally difficult to work out where they were originally from. Amy had become accustomed to the various languages, mostly spoken with colleagues on the phone but she had also heard them speaking together rapidly in languages she couldn’t identify. One language in particular they never seemed to speak with anyone else, almost like they had invented their own private language. Both her parents had dark brown hair and slim features which had been passed on to Amy, and for their age both of them were exceptionally youthful and fit. Perhaps the most obvious clue that they were not related was their eyes. Amy’s father, Laszlo, had deep brown eyes shot with flecks of green. Amy’s mother, who was also called Amriel, shared her eyes as well as her name. They were blue, but with such a light hue that they often appeared to be a melancholy grey. Because mother and daughter shared a name, Amy was always referred to using her nickname, whilst her mother was referred to as Amriel to avoid confusion at home.

  Amy’s father was a very open and vocal person whereas her mother was much more softly spoken. Their travel filled lives meant that neither of them had many close friends but rather, an impressive network of international associates. The trip they had just returned from had technically been a holiday but in reality, they had met up with some of their contacts in Switzerland. Amy couldn’t remember whether these were contacts of her father’s or her mother’s. She had given up trying to keep track of those details because there were simply too many people to remember and they didn’t particularly interest her.

  The conversation at the table, which only began properly after a good sized first helping, was immediately steered away from the work of Amy’s parents. They were much more interested to hear how Amy had been in their absence and how her school work was going. It wasn’t long before Amy was in full swing talking about her various pieces of upcoming assessment, her thoughts, ideas and frustrations with them. After having ranted for some time Amy started to explain how she was feeling about her final semester overall. She had always been able to open up freely to her parents about her feelings. She explained how apprehensive and stressed she had been about it all and that it was getting to her. She was about to tell them about the strange dreams but something held her back. She didn’t know why but she didn’t want to discuss the dreams with anyone yet. Her mother sensed, seemingly telepathically, that Amy wanted to move the discussion in another direction so she suddenly asked after her friends.

  One thing Amy greatly respected about her parents was their ability to seem just as interested in her social life as they were in her schoolwork. What was more, they were incredibly good at keeping track of the events and social politics of Amy’s little group of friends. They made a point of asking how each of her friends was going and followed up on points mentioned the last time that friend had been discussed. They remembered every detail of all their personal happenings. However, this discussion unintentionally led Amy back to talking about her philosophy essay, which she simply couldn’t get out of her head.

  Her parents soon made their way into the lounge room, offering Amy grateful remarks for the dinner. She had also started a fire earlier that evening and it had now settled to a very cozy and warm level where the slow burning logs were glowing red and only giving off wistful, slow looking flames. Both of her parents had made hot chocolates and brought them in, settling gently into the armchairs arrayed before the hearth. Amy followed suit, tucking her legs beneath her as she always did. At first, all three figures sat in silence, sipping their drinks thoughtfully. The only real sound was the recording of the Four Seasons which was now into the autumn movements. Eventually though, Laszlo spoke over the music.

  “So, Amy, how have you been aside from your school assessment. Not feeling too lonely while we have been away?”

  Amy shot her father a questioning look in
response and hesitated before answering. This was actually an odd question coming from her parents, the sort of question that they had only started asking her around the time she reached her mid-teenage years. They knew she was perfectly capable of looking after herself and that she was accustomed to being alone for long periods of time. As a result, Amy concluded that the question must have been more loaded than it first seemed. She had the feeling this was their way of trying to keep tabs on whether or not she had taken an interest in any boys. She tried to dodge this perceived hidden purpose by replying that she had been generally well, though feeling a little fatigued. This didn’t work quite as planned. As it happened, this answer seemed to spike her mother’s interest.

  “Have you not been sleeping well Amriel?” her mother asked. “Been having strange dreams?”

  Now Amy knew her parents were looking for some kind of specific detail. They only called her Amriel when they were either angry or very worried. Nevertheless, she couldn’t decide what it was they were trying to fish out of her. This question clearly had nothing to do with boys, or at least if it did it was outrageously indirect. She was thrown. She had indeed been having odd dreams but how could her parents possibly know that? In a split second she decided that she wouldn’t admit to them. Whatever her parents were worried about, it was probably unfounded and admitting that she had been having strange dreams would just exacerbate that fear.

  “No, no I think all the upcoming assessment has just stressed me out and that’s why I’m feeling a bit fatigued, that’s all.”

  Her parents exchanged a glance then relaxed. They were still looking closely at Amy with soft expressions but if they still felt any degree of concern they hid it well.