Forest of Dreams

Forests of Dreams

By C.L. Bevill

Published 2016 by C.L. Bevill, LLC

©2016 by C.L. Bevill, LLC

Forests of Dreams is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Fictitiously used characters are utilized without intent to defame or denigrate.

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The order of the Dreams novels is:

Sea of Dreams

Mountains of Dreams (Dreams 2)

Forests of Dreams (Dreams 3)

and

Ruins of Dreams (Dreams 4), coming soon.

Chapter 1

In the Beginning, There Was Louise…

The Past – San Francisco, California

My name was Louise Ambrosia Bronson. I say was because I haven’t used that name for a very long time. For the most part, I haven’t been called by Louise or Ambrosia (which only my mother used in times of rage over something I’d done) or even Bronson since the night everything changed. If I never heard any of them again, I probably wouldn’t care. The truth is that it doesn’t matter. It didn’t matter then either, but I didn’t know that until later.

I was twenty-five years old that night. I lived with my parents because I was single, and within six months I was getting married to Richard Bennington III. What was the point in living in an exclusive condo in the marina neighborhood of San Francisco when I could bunk with Mumsy and Daddy for a half a year? They didn’t care, particularly since they spent most of their time in Barbados and on the Med. It hadn’t been like I was sleeping on the couch; there was an exclusive en suite that was mine and had been since the house had been purchased. The housekeeper didn’t mind. Neither did the maid. The chef was oblivious because I almost never ate at the house.

Yes, I came from wealthy parents with a privileged background. My grandfather often said that the Kennedys and Rockefellers were common trash compared to our line. (Even the folks coming off the Mayflower were Johnnies-come-lately.) Having met several Kennedys and Rockefellers, I wouldn’t necessarily have agreed, but Poppops had a lot of money, so I had nodded obligingly. Inherited money didn’t fall off trees and agreeing with Poppops had been a small price to pay.

My mother was the really filthy rich one; my father was wealthy on a lesser level. He’d actually had a career. Twenty-six years in the United States Navy, having retired as a Vice Admiral. Some President had made noises about him becoming Chief of Naval Operations, but Mumsy wanted to leave the life of military spousal duty. (She really only spent half of the year with him and the other half wherever the seasons took her.) In truth, I didn’t know because I was shipped off to boarding school on the morning of my eighth birthday. I had cried, and only the housekeeper had been there to see it. (The housekeeper’s name was Cybil. She wrote me letters that helped me through the twelfth grade. When she died of ovarian cancer much later, I attended her memorial service and told her adult children how truly sorry I was. To my shame, it was one of the few selfless acts I can remember doing before the change.)

Rich and egotistical. Those were my trademarks and traits I didn’t spend any time considering. I went to a prestigious university. I graduated with honors. I did the sorority thing. I made friends who were as shallow and selfish as I was. I worked periodically because it was expected. Mumsy would have been happy if I had simply volunteered at a soup kitchen once a month. (I believe my exact thought of that notion had been, But what about my manicure?)

I met Richard when I was twenty-two. He was a trey, and his family was equally stinking rich. We got along on a shallow level that bespoke of having the same kind of life as our parents. I planned an extravagant destination wedding. Not only would we be married in a 15th-century-medieval castle on the banks of Lake Bracciano in Italy, but we would spend nearly six months touring Europe and then islands in the South Seas for our honeymoon. I had already purchased the gown from a major designer. The gown was a lacy couture affair with a thousand pearls handstitched onto the bodice. Who cared about the cost? Poppops was happily taking care of that.

As for Richard, he was handsome, blonde, blue eyed, and broad shouldered with the right pedigree and bank account. He was the perfect accoutrement. Later, I would realize that I didn’t even know what his favorite color had been, much less when his birthday was.

There I was the night before, unaware and unsuspecting. I ate a bowl of lemon sorbet and briefly worried about the extra calories going directly to my butt. I vowed to do an extra ten minutes of Pilates with my trainer the following day, and I went to sleep. I slept the sleep of the truly ignorant. There had been a strange dream where I stared into a large black door that pulsated oddly and wondered if I should go in or not, but it transmogrified into dreams of wedding finery and fripperies that made me giggle.

I woke up to silence.

Silence wasn’t the ordinary scene in Pacific Heights. Even in the palatial house that was the Bronson home, there were the distant sounds of trucks, horns, birds, and whatnot. I roused myself enough to look at the clock on the nightstand. It was dark and blank, and I understood that the power had gone out for some reason.

I blinked and reached for my cellphone, which sat on the nightstand next to the clock. The cellphone was dead, too. That wasn’t a surprise, since I had forgotten to plug it into the charger.

Oh, for God’s sake, I muttered. I could see light spilling around the edge of the curtains, and I knew that it had to be after seven or eight in the morning. I had umpteen things to do and needed to be going. The wedding planner wasn’t going to do the wedding all by his lonesome no matter what exorbitant figure he’d been paid. Cybil’s replacement should have woken me up, and I couldn’t remember her name to denounce her carelessness. I scrambled up and took care of personal hygiene. Wrapping myself up in silk, I headed in the direction I wanted. Coffee was what I needed, and I knew just where to get it.

The trek downstairs and through the halls was just as hushed as the upstairs. I hesitated at one point because it was that silent. The lack of noise weighed on me heavily. It pressed against me and made my breath hitch in my chest. It’s that feeling that one got when something bad has happened. It curled around my body and squeezed like a vice. I irritably thought, I’m too young for a heart attack.

It eased after just a few moments, and I disregarded it like a simpleminded idiot. I should have listened to my inner senses, really I should have. Of course, it wouldn’t have made a difference, but acceptance would have helped.

Just as I entered the kitchen, I tripped over a bundle of clothing. I looked down and cursed. A black-and-white uniform with a crisp apron lay there. A black low-heeled pump skittered across the tile floor and came to rest against the baseboard of a walnut cabinet. I toed the uniform with my bare foot and couldn’t make sense of it. The maid’s uniform was on the floor, strewn there as if the girl had stripped down and walked away as naked as a baby.

Jillie, I said, calling the maid’s name easily. If you’re bumping uglies in the pantry with the chef, I’m going to have fits. Do you know where uh, whatshername, is? Whatshername was the housekeeper, but damned if I still couldn’t remember her name.

I opened the pantry door, fully expecting to get an eyeful, but finding another space devoid of human beings. There were only canned goods and neat rows of vitamin waters. I stopped to listen and heard more of nothing. There wasn’t a vacuum running nor the tapping of the housekeeper as she made her way through the house. The entire place was simply dead.

Jillie? I called. Maybe you got into Mumsy’s pills again. I know she’s got some good ones in there like Vicodin and Percocet, but really. Come out now, I’ll call the doctor, we’ll forget about it. Not really, but anyone who would strip down in the kitchen and prance away had to be on something illicit.

Jillie? I said again. Then the chef’s name spilled out of my lips. Carl?

No one answered.

I looked around, determined that I couldn’t make coffee without power, and rolled my eyes. I would simply get dressed, apply my makeup, and hit a bistro on my way to meet with the wedding planner and my future mother-in-law. I’d address the whole clothing-left-on-the-floor thing at a later point.

I don’t know how long it took me because nothing was working. The power was undeniably out. My cellphone was dead. I couldn’t find anyone about. I dressed in a simple DKNY blue silk maxi dress and paired it with matching Gucci high-heeled sandals. I swept out onto the long drive and discovered that the garage door openers wouldn’t work, either. I glanced down toward the bay and could see white sails atop boats that bobbed to and fro. I frowned as I realized that there were a lot fewer sails than normal for a typical morning. As I watched, the sails bounced in an oddly erratic fashion as if the person at the helm had taken a brief break. Only a distant ocean breeze guided them to who knew where.

I glanced at Alto Plaza Park and discovered there weren’t any people along the tiered levels of the grounds. Joggers, walkers, strollers, and the like would typically be en masse this time of day. Sometimes I ran up and down the stairs at the park for exercise. Try as I might, I couldn’t think of a single time when I had been the only human presence there.

Since I couldn’t get the garage doors open, I couldn’t take my Benz. Instead, I tottered out to the street, vowing to make the trolley on California Street. It wasn’t ideal, but even a wealthy girl had to know when to cut her losses. The impending MIL was waiting, and it wasn’t a good idea to tick off future relatives.

I walked two blocks down to California and saw three wrecked autos devoid of any occupants. I stumbled over two more sets of clothing on the ground. Someone had left a loaded backpack in the middle of the sidewalk right next to a pair of ragged Levi jeans and a Berkley t-shirt. Even the Birkenstocks seemed to mock me as they sat there. The sun moved from behind the clouds and revealed the glint of a ring. I bent to look closer and saw a simple gold wedding band. It was scratched and well-worn as if handed down through a family. I knew quality when I saw it, and I knew that it was something that had been treasured.

I didn’t touch it. I shivered instead because the devil metaphorically traipsed over my gravestone. I looked around and said, Hello?

No one answered me.

Despite those sailboats on the bay, the wind up the hill was notably absent. The trees looked on in abject muteness. There wasn’t even the intermittent din of moving vehicles and trucks.

No trolleys waited for me on California, so I trudged over to Fillmore where I knew there were coffee shops with people inside. They were right next to miles of clothing stores in which a girl with an American Express Centurion Card could get lost for a significant amount of time. There would be lots of phones there, too. A girl only had to bat her eyes and promise not to use too many minutes in order to borrow one for a moment. Then Richard’s mother would be placated, and coffee could be obtained to soothe my frazzled nerves.

All would be good.

The problem was that most of the shops were still locked and closed. The one that was open had no power, and, more importantly, a decided lack of human beings. Furthermore, the phones were dead. I even dug through an errant purse left on a counter and snagged an iPhone to discover that it too was dead.

Hello? I called into the darkness at the back of the store. Hello! I took a sharp gasping breath. HELLO!

It’s difficult to describe the time that came to pass. It was the hint of madness that swirls through one’s brain at the thought that everything one knows and understands is no longer. The city was there. The evidence that once what was, was no longer, was petrifying. The image of a twinkling gold wedding band in the balmy breezes of late summer swirled around in my head to emphasize the point.

The name for it was hysteria. I became desperate to find someone, anyone. It could have been the smelliest homeless person about, and I would have been happy. But there wasn’t a soul around.

Not…one…single…soul.

I checked doors. I knocked on windows. I kicked the side of a car. I saw more sets of empty clothing. There were piles of them around the exit doors of a theater. There were cellphones galore. There were jewelry, purses, and wallets strewn about as if someone had simply dropped them. There were eyeglasses lying on the ground and some watches. A few cars had crashed into the sides of buildings.

What there wasn’t, was people. Bodies, alive or dead, or even otherwise.

I was it.

Yesterday there was a city with a population of over 900,000. Today it was a ghost town. Population so far was a whopping 1. Me.

I walked until my feet began to bleed. I ended up at the Palace of Fine Arts. The Greek and Roman architecture appeared so normal that I nearly collapsed with relief. Then I realized that all the ducks and geese were gone. The pool in front of the palace was as dead as everything else.

Abruptly I lifted my head because I could hear something, and I began to walk toward the marina. I reached the Golden Gate Yacht Club before I knew what the haunting, echoing noises were. As I looked out across the bay toward Alcatraz, I came to realize that it was the Wave Organ at the end of the spit of land that separated the marina from the bay. It was an acoustic sculpture built decades before by the Exploratorium, a public learning laboratory that every school-aged child in San Fran was forced to visit. (It was created by Robert Oppenheimer’s young brother. I had seen it before, but it had barely registered with me. The tourists seemed to like it. Once the Exploratorium had moved to the Embarcadero, the Wave Organ was a little known oddity that only the locals knew about.)

Now it was a series of melancholy sounds that reverberated and called like indistinguishable ghosts seeking out the attention of anyone.

The PVC pipes reacted to the rise and fall of the waves, creating a cacophony of eerie, splashing vibrations that jerked at the heartstrings of my soul. Beyond the Wave Organ was the expanse of the bay revealing Alcatraz and Angel Island. Treasure Island was visible off to the east. Even Richmond was visible to the north. It was a crystal clear day, but my brain felt far from clear.

I stood there at the edge of the Yacht Club with my feet bleeding and my mind fogged like on drugs, and wondered if I had gone insane. I stared outward, focusing on nothing at all.

Then a sailboat came cruising past, headed for open sea by route of under the Golden Gate Bridge. A lone man at the helm waved at me from no more than a tenth of a mile away. I could see his features and his dark brown hair. His shirt was white, and his pants were khaki. He adjusted the trim of the sail and steered the boat’s wheel directly for the bridge. He’d seen me, but he wasn’t going to stop.

I waved back, but my hand gesture was lackluster. I wasn’t mad, no matter what the Cheshire cat liked to say.

Wait, I said to the man on the boat, even while I realized he couldn’t possibly hear me. Come back. I don’t want to be alone.

But I was alone. All alone. Who was going to make coffee for me and take care of the things that needed to be done? Who was going to protect me? Who was going to make sure I had a little something to eat?

I trudged up the hill to the mansion in Pacific Heights and waited for Mumsy and Daddy to show up. Poppops had been in Europe, so he wouldn’t be coming soon. I even walked to Richard’s Nob Hill condo and discovered my card key wouldn’t work because it was electronic. I broke a window in the building’s front door and then I broke a sidelight on Richard’s front door. The alarm system didn’t go off. It didn’t even blink.

I found a pair of Emporio Armani boxer shorts in his king-sized bed. Ironically, there was also an Agent Provocateur slip lying next to the shorts. It was midnight black silk and not Richard’s size at all. There was also a sterling silver bracelet with a set of nautical theme charms. It had belonged to my best friend, Marissa, who’d apparently been closer to Richard that I’d previously known.

As the days began to creep past, I found no one else. Even the man in the sailboat had not returned. Who knew to where he had sailed?

One day I sat in Alta Plaza Park across the street from the mansion. I had a bag of crumbs for the pigeons and the sea gulls, but I had only attracted a meager number of sparrows. My mind was in a deep funk, and I wasn’t certain if I could ever climb out of it. A great shadow passed over me, and I automatically looked up expecting a cloud to be blocking out the sun. Or even better would be a plane, showing me that life wasn’t completely absent.

It wasn’t a cloud. I’m not certain what it was. My initial thought was bald eagle? But the feathers glimmered in the light, and it was the size of a bus. The whoosh of air against its flesh sounded briefly as it passed overhead. It was greenish-gold in the late summer light. The gigantic wings expertly caught the air, and I dimly perceived its immense size. I registered the sharply pointed end of his snout and the horns that twirled backward. The second thought that went through my head was dragon. Yep. That’s a…uh…dragon.

As it twisted about, it headed past Nob Hill and Chinatown. Only a few seconds passed before I saw the shape alight on the very tip-top of the P. The P was one of the most recognizable buildings in the Financial District. The Transamerica Pyramid was the tallest building in San Fran, and clearly the point of choice for a great flying beast of dubious origin. As its claws clutched its perch, great chunks of glass and quartz fell away. Moments later the sound of debris hitting the streets below came to me.

I’m not sure why I wasn’t more surprised. It sat on the P for a while, then it crouched and dove, taking a heart-wrenching amount of time to catch the air currents again before it flew away to the south.

I stared for a very long time, knowing that I had just seen something incredible. I couldn’t have said what it was or why it was important, but I couldn’t dismiss it no matter how shell-shocked my mind had become.

It was then that I heard a bell ringing. It was distant at first, probably a few blocks away, but it grew stronger. When I saw the man walking down Steiner Street ringing the handbell, I thought I was delusional again. (The man in the sailboat had to be some wishful delusion I had decided. If he had been real, he would have stopped for the cute blonde in the blue silk maxi dress, wasn’t that right?)

I was so grateful that I ran to the man, which was another mistake I made. I even told him my nickname in addition to my name, and I didn’t even like my nickname. My name is Louise, I said to him as he grinned at me. I mean it’s Lulu, I repeated. I thought I was all alone.

And I wasn’t alone, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

The funniest part was that when I told my name to the stranger with the bell, I abruptly remembered the housekeeper’s name. It had been Stella. I was Lulu, and she had been Stella, and I don’t know what happened to her.

But, as I discovered, I wasn’t really Lulu then. No, I was still Louise, and I would be Louise for quite some time to come.

Chapter 2

Lulu and What She Encounters

The Present - Colorado

Binoculars good, I thought. I would have thumped my chest for emphasis but didn’t feel like putting forth the effort. Even after a bizarre apocalyptic event and the sudden absence of all things electrical, the binoculars still worked just fine. From a secluded position on the side of a mountain and well within a copse of trees, I looked through them and sighted the entrance to the underground facility. Once upon a time it was part of the headquarters of NORAD. That’s what the little brass historical marker down the road had helpfully informed me. The whole area was also a place of heavy technology and was well known as part of Cheyenne Mountain. Sure, the movies portrayed it as the end all of nuclear command stations. Big mountain. Deep tunnels. Giant metal doors that would protect people until the sun came out again. I can see the doors slowly closing in my mind’s eye. I could hear the deafening clank as the mechanisms slid shut their bolts.

But that was the other part of Cheyenne Mountain. This place was a few miles away and was its less famous cousin. Cheyenne Jr. was what it had been nicknamed, and that part wasn’t on any brass plaque.

When they constructed the whole facility, I don’t think the American government ever counted on 99.99% of the population disappearing and fairy tale animals appearing. Earlier in the day, I saw a herd of centaurs that didn’t really care if the North American Aerospace Defense Command previously hung out in their neighborhood. (The top half of the centaurs might look human, but I can assure you they didn’t act human. They didn’t act like horses, either. Their mouth open and reveal multiple rows of teeth that would make a Megalodon envious. Furthermore, the jaws detached like a snake’s, so they can swallow a larger mouthful. Apparently, they’re carnivores and meat is meat. Fortunately for me, they didn’t like to chase down humans. I liked to think of it as the bee principle. If you can outrun a mass of pissed-off bees for a half mile, then you’re okay. Same exact thing with centaurs.)

I tapped the side of the binoculars. I had a list of places to look at, and this was number 62. Sure I had looked at Cheyenne Mountain first, but then last year, one of the researchers had found some references to this place in a magazine for