Astor House

The walls have eyes.

Planks of uneven pine wood line the halls of this old house, and even through my half-lidded, obscured night vision, I can tell that these faces I see in the knots of the walls are anything but welcoming. I roll onto my stomach and cough thickly, wincing as I keep my gaze on the eyes. They smile, they leer, because they know that between the cracks and ridges, my blood paints the empty room. And they also know, in some twisted way, that I will realize this in about another thirty seconds.

I wake as I always do – to my sunlit curtains and the back of my hair matted with sweat. I sit cross-legged at the side of my bed with my phone instinctively clutched in one hand. Every morning, after I manage to snap out of it, I can only describe the dream as a slideshow. It flickers through my head, overlapping images of the wood and the blood, the stained carpet, my trembling hand reaching for someone. It slows down after a few deep breaths, and I am back to the first step of my morning routine: calling Laine.

Her light, rhythmic knock falls upon my front door before I even hang up. I swing the door open, gnawing on my bottom lip.

She looks me up and down and declares: "You look terrible."

Laine's always been observant that way.

"Same dream?" she asks, settling onto my couch.

"Same dream." I sigh. "I think there's something wrong with me. That house, the wood...they're so visceral. Like an old memory."

"You know what I think?" she says, flicking a lock of red hair over her shoulder. "I think you're overthinking things. It's a dream."

"A recurring dream." I tear into the flaky layer of last night's lipstick with my teeth.

"Be as it may," she continues, "but it's hardly anything to be worried about. Do you even know why you die in your...vision?"

She brings up a good point. I don't. All I know is the cold of laying on the floor, aching in my bones. "I don't think so."

"See? Don't stress yourself out." Laine glances at her phone and curses under her breath. "God. There's Jerry. Apparently I had the morning shift today."

I suck air through my teeth. "Better get on that."

"We're going out for coffee tomorrow evening – don't forget," she says, gathering her things into an ugly red purse hastily. Laine catches my eye and a small smile spreads across her face.

"Take care of yourself," she says softly, and leaves a shallow kiss on my forehead. I shiver the same way I did the first time she did that.

* * *

I have to set an alarm to remember the time of our coffee shop date – and even then, I nearly forget. This morning's iteration of the dream doesn't fade. The remembrance of fiery, stinging pain in my throat stays with me as I sit at our usual window table, craning my neck every few minutes in anticipation of Laine's rose-flushed flame of hair rushing through the open door. I wait patiently, but the hands on the sticky clock on the wall above me turn a half-circle, and she is still not here. A waitress with kind eyes takes pity on me and walks over to ask if I'd like to go up and order.

"I'm waiting for someone," I tell her with a tight smile.

"Oh, yes, that's right," she murmurs to herself. "You come here with your friend...Laine, isn't it? I have to thank her. She remembered my birthday last week and got me this lovely necklace." The waitress leans down, holding the thin gold pendant between two fingernails. I pretend to inspect it, but when she turns to answer some other customer, I bite on my lip until I feel the metallic taste of blood.

Friend.

She wanders back to my table, and this time I really do find my eyes on her necklace.

"Can I see that again?" I ask. Her eyebrows turn upward, and I add, "I think it'd make a great gift for my sister."

She unclasps it from her neck and places it in front of me. "Strange pattern, right? It's a flower bud, I think, but I can't tell which."

A sharp, familiar pain needles its way into my stomach, and I know this is the same jab that wakes me up every morning.

* * *

Laine's voice snaps me out of the next day's dream, a voicemail of apologies and claims of Jerry being the devil himself when it came to extra shifts. I pass it over like I always do. As much I adore Laine, she's never been one for punctuality.

I meet her the next morning at the end of the pier, where she's standing in one of my thick cardigans and rapidly typing texts that ding on my phone like an orchestra.

I don't get a word in before she sticks her phone in my face and announces, "We have to live here."

I zoom in on the photo she shows me. Astor House. It's a nice coastal home, a little on the older side, with colored shutters I can tell were once the brightest color in this dismal town.

"I like it, but..." I hesitate, licking the congealed blood from yesterday off of my lips. "You want to move in together? Won't people talk?"

She gives me a look that tells me I've already said the wrong thing. "We're two young adults with family far away. Even if they ask, well, it's not uncommon to have roommates."

I nod, and when she schedules an open house date two days from now, I nod again.

* * *

They're watching me again.

I grasp some loose threads of the carpet, trying to stand. It works, but not for long. I fall back to the floor about six feet from where I was originally, and crawl to the edge of the wall.

My head lolls to the side involuntarily, and I catch a glimmer of light somewhere in the darkness. Somehow I manage to stumble towards it, my hands grappling forward. A blade. A rather large one, and I assume the cause of my imminent death. I fall back with it in my hands, eyes pressed close. When I open them again, the reflection on the shiny gloss of the blade reveal a ginger lock of hair.

My insides constrict. The walls laugh as I spit blood onto the floor, the red strands of hair grow closer; I claw my way across the carpet until I finally understand it won't help. So I scream until I feel the last of myself slip away.

* * *

I can't look at her.

There was something too real about last time. Laine. Why Laine? I'd never felt any hatred from her. Quite the opposite, actually; I see how her eyes light up when I tap her back on the porch of Astor House.

"There you are!" she exclaims. I give her another one of my tight smiles.

Laine's agent arrives shortly after, and, giving one vaguely suspicious look at us, she turns the key to the house.

The first step inside tells me what I should've realized the moment Laine showed me those pictures. The indistinct, lingering scent of old perfume; dim, filtered light from vintage overhead lamps; the pattern of the wallpaper as it fades into those jagged planks – oh, that wood, the eyes.

I grab her shoulder. "Laine, I'm not feeling so good."

"Are you kidding me? This place is beautiful. Look, the carpet has that pretty rug pattern we saw at Michael's last week."

The carpet. I already see my blood flowing through crushed footprints we make as we walk.

"No, I really–"

"And look at this–" she holds up a dainty necklace laying on the dresser. "An aster pendant. Isn't that funny? Astor and aster."

My heart beats dully in my chest. "What did you say?"

"It has such a charm to it. See, there's more." I watch as she points down to a row of the necklaces. As my eyes cross from edge to edge, the gold aster transforms from a tiny bud to a full bloom.

"Don't tell anyone, but I might've swiped one of them for someone's birthday." She laughs, and it chills my entire body. "A good gift, though."

I feel the light spin around me, a breath hitching before it leaves my mouth as I rush out of the bedroom, flying down the steps and into the muted colors of the sunset outside.

* * *

I know what I need to do.

It is well past midnight when Laine's footsteps thud against the creaky steps of Astor House. She's shivering. Good. Her searching for her jacket in that purse of hers give me time to hide the blade.

"I'm so happy you changed your mind about the house," she says through chattering teeth, "but if anyone catches us sneaking in at this time, we're in for a night at the police station."

"We'll be careful." My voice doesn't sound like my own.

I lead her by hand through the back door, which I remembered through some backwater memory that Laine opened yesterday.

When we are safely in the living room, I finally speak.

"You know why we're here."

"To...scare the living hell out of my agent tomorrow morning? To steal another necklace?" She giggles. "I'm out of ideas."

"I knew it was there for a reason," I continue, "but I could never tell why. Until I pieced it together. The necklace. That's what gave it away. The flower."

"What're you talking about?"

"And the dreams. You never believed in them. I thought that's why you kept dismissing me. But you only did it so I wouldn't find out."

"I don't understand, really–"

"But it eventually came to me. And when I knew it, when I finally knew what to do? The dream left. I woke up like a normal person this morning."

I unearth the blade from my pocket. "It was you."

Laine holds her hands out, a protective measure. "You're scaring me."

I approach her, and something about it; the way she stumbles backward, her ungraceful fall to the floor as she cries for help...I can see. I was wrong – it wasn't her.

It was me. It was me.

The moon disappears and the blade has fallen on us both. I feel the same rush of pain, but a faint smile creeps its way onto my lips this time.

I lay alongside her in a field of asters, free of the eyes.