🐺 Within and Without

by Kellee Kranendonk

At first I thought it was the coyotes singing their song to each other, or howling at a bloated moon. But the time was too precise—every morning at 3:33 AM I awoke to the sound. Singing, somewhere in the distance. Some nights I rose, padded around my house barefoot, dressed only in a nightshirt. But the sound never grew louder, never became fainter. My house was not haunted; at least I had never known it to be.

I thought maybe it was all in my head. But the doctor’s reports claimed me to be normal. Well, cleared of having any mental disorder that might have caused me to hear non-existent singing anyway.

I began to fear it would drive me crazy, that I would end up in some hospital’s psych ward. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think the people there were nuts. I just felt like I was.

Then one night it all changed. I woke up at exactly 3:30 AM. I sighed and waited for it to begin. It didn’t. Instead, three minutes later, someone shook my shoulder and said, “Let’s go, Ebony.”

Adrenaline shot through my body, shocking my heart into overtime. I turned. No one was there! Sleep did not come easy after that. 

Now, instead of waking up to distant singing, I woke up only to have someone scare the bejesus out of me every single night! 

I grew to expect it, but still, it was unnerving. Sleep became restless and full of nonsense dreams that haunted me throughout the day, filling me with a sense of dread. Like something bad could happen at any moment.

Just before I fell off the edge of my impending insanity, it changed again. I entered my dreams. At least I felt I had when I woke up. I remembered them as if they were fading memories of my past.

Malls and houses full of halls and rooms. It didn’t take me long to become comfortable with these places, to want to see more, to understand where I was. It became an obsession. Then I realized she was always there. The lady in grey.

She had long silver-grey hair and a long, velvety, dark grey cape. Even her skin was a shimmery grey—only a shade or two lighter than her hair. Her feet were bare.

She was leading me through these dreams, through the corridors and hallways and into rooms. There were people there I only knew in the dreams. Faces I could neither name nor recall upon waking.

Then the singing started again. Except now when I searched for it, I searched deep into the maze of dream buildings. It grew louder—and fainter—with every turn, but I still couldn’t find the origin of the voices.

For a time I became a recluse, taking to my bed every chance I got, trying to return to my dream world. But it never happened. The magic moment was 3:33. Then I realized—I woke at 3:33, dreamt at 3:33, and returned to sleep at 3:33. Whatever was happening to me took mere seconds of my time in my reality. Or was it reality? I began to doubt the things I thought I knew.

“Ebony.”

I opened my eyes. 3:33 AM.

The lady in grey held out her hand and I took it. Immediately I heard the singing. She led me through the familiar mazes, only this time the songs were in every room. Every detail vibrated and shimmered with the music, every piece of furniture elegant and ornate, the walls glistening with pale pastel colours. Notes of music danced delicately through the air, touching each voice, and I knew them all, marveling at the sound of them.

She took me outside where the singing continued. It was coyotes. They sat on virgin-white snow, their grey-brown fur silky and gleaming as they sung to a white, haloed moon.

“What is this place?”

“This is your mind,” the grey lady told me.

It couldn’t be! There was nothing in my head so vibrant and beautiful as this. So perfect I never wanted to leave.

“Thought can be deceiving,” she said when I voiced my opinion. “One must be careful.”

Severe disappointment and desire captured me when I woke, only to return to sleep. How I managed it, I don’t know, but I always did.

Anxious to return, I mindlessly rushed through my day, mostly unaware of my actions, unaware of the people around me. Nothing mattered anymore, only that place inside me where beauty and harmony lived.

When we arrived once more at the place where the coyotes were, I sat down with them, pulling off the coat I only now realized I was wearing. Or perhaps a moment ago I wasn’t wearing it—such is the stuff of minds and dreams. I placed it on the ground and laid among them as they sang their song. The voices from inside drifted out to join them. As I closed my eyes I wondered where sleep would take me. Would I go back to my other reality? 

My eyes snapped open. Would I die?

The music and singing stopped. The coyotes started growling. Clouds scudded across the moon. I jumped to my feet. Where was the grey lady?

“I am here, and you have not heeded my warning.”

I turned toward her voice. But it wasn’t her. Her beautiful hair was snarled and hung in dirty ropes. Her cape blew around her body in tatters. Her feet and hands were blackened as though a plague had touched her. Behind her all the people I’d known stood in crooked shadows, wrapped in thin strands of spider silk.

“But I only wanted what was beautiful and peaceful,” I told her.

“And you had it,” she said, her voice rough with age. “But you forgot to find it without as well as within. Now you are trapped here with what your thoughts have become.”

“But—” I didn’t understand.

The coyotes began to howl and the people began to sing, but it was no longer harmonious. I began to shiver and the tears I shed froze on my cheeks.

In a bed in a hospital there lies a girl with long chestnut hair spread out over her pillow. Her hands lie still at her sides and though her eyes are closed they bounce as though in rem sleep, and sometimes they leak. She does not see the rainbow shards of sun pass through the glass of her window. She doesn’t see the flowers on the sill or the cards lovingly signed by friends and family. She doesn’t see the strappy summer dress in yellow—her favourite colour—that her sister bought for when she wakes up. The sounds of singing birds, and the choir from the church across the street, and the children playing at the school next door are all cut off from her ears.  The hum of silence, of off-key singing, and eerie howls are all that she can hear until…