Exceptional Sleep Would Be a Bad Thing THE TRINING Book Three : Creatures on the Ceiling by Jay Squires

DOCTREX'S JOURNEY RECOMMENCES THE FINAL FEW PARAGRAPHS FROM LAST CHAPTER             The hand I pressed against my ribcage was wet. I held it in front of me. The blood trailed from my palm down my wrist, into the sleeve of my jacket.           This was not a new experience to me.           Zarbs gasped and slid away from me on the seat. “Sir,” he cried, “your uniform—it’s all bloody! Oh, Almighty—” Despite the scorching pain, I think I giggled at his misplaced priority, and then I crumpled and scraped my back down the seat on my way to the floorboard. Anything else he said was garbled, and I felt like I was lying in the basement and aware of the muffled voices on the level above me.           Soon even that awareness dissolved.   BOOK III Chapter Twenty-Two (Part 1)     The conflagration on my right side dragged me to my back on the floorboard and rendered me distantly aware of a blurred Zarbs, sliding away from me, crablike, across the seat and up against the sideboard. At the second onslaught of searing pain, I scrunched my eyes and blotted out Zarbs with the rest of the visible world; through the blazing miasma, I could still hear him, from some faraway place, jabbering unintelligible syllables, though the word “uniform” loosed from the verbal tangle. And then a cottony lull fell over me. I waited, my eyes clamped shut. I knew it would return, furiously and without warning, and I wasn’t sure I could endure it. I was panting. My mouth was open, my throat raw. “Here ...” While I tried to figure out what “here” meant, cold liquid stabbed the back of my tongue. I swallowed reflexively, gagged, and swallowed again. I was about to reel off a spate of invective against Zarbs when something slammed like a torch against my ribcage. An exhale seemed to go on and on, until, like a window forcibly closed against the storm—it was over.   The presence that most recently had been the general, and before that Viktor, was now encapsulated in a mere floating fragment of self-awareness that could only watch from above. That awareness knew, though, with profound desolation, the body of the general was dead. So, this was how it ended for him. How sad. How stupidly wasteful it had all been. No final heroic battle against Glnot Rhuether. No embrace with his Axtilla—no last kiss. From my station somewhere above, I watched his body being elevated from the wagon and swept along above the plains loosely cocooned in a white, whirling mist of the most serene variety. He immediately yielded to the envelopment of peace. The mist wrapped him in its wispy shroud as he continued to be wafted high above the plains where the wagon was the tiniest of dots on the brown ribbon of road. Still observing, but connected as by an invisible cord of awareness, I watched the fine lines of sadness and worry being smoothed away, and an incredible tranquility settle over him, onto him, into him.   No! No! This cannot be. How can I be this awareness, separate from his body? How can I be aware of his comfort and peace and tranquility and still be an entity apart from him? I am not separate. I am Doctrex. Wherever I am, I am not dead. I would provide the general’s body and myself the proof of it. With an incredible act of will, I forced open the general’s eyes. “Ah ... There you are. So the pain is gone?” Tired-looking, veiny eyes, not three inches from the general’s—from mine—squinted now, studying, moving side to side across my face. “Dilated, yes. Excellent.” Clearly, I was not on the floorboard of the wagon. Who was this person? His breath was not unpleasant. Some kind of mint. “Where is ...” I began, and pushed through a curtain of fog for chunks of words. “Colonel ...Supreme Colonel ...?” He straightened up, grimaced, and turned slightly. While his breath had been minty, mine was apparently another matter. I sensed this. The social part of me struggled with the need to apologize, but another part became occupied trying to recall the missing part of the question I remembered being in the middle of asking. As though I were releasing my grasp on a vanishing dream, I tried to hold onto the notion there had been something of vague importance I was supposed to remember. Thus unmindful, and mentally free-floating, I found my eyes grazing through the space that had been occupied by the doctor’s face one elastic moment or hour ago. Through a glittery, sparkly mist, the domed ceiling was squirming above me, undulating with a whole society of creatures that I couldn’t blink away. I pulled an arm from under the sheet, never taking my eyes from the ceiling, and raised my index finger. The doctor followed my finger with his head and eyes. “Yes. Creatures of the realm. Before the Almighty Master subdued and banished—” “They’re—moving.” My arm, with its pointing finger, seemed to float away from me, toward the ceiling. “Yes ... It’s the light, you see ...” He made a sweeping gesture to the right where at least the three torches I could see were inclined out of their sconces at about a thirty degree angle toward the ceiling. “... and another four over there on the far wall. The light can catch the carved figures just so ... that, and the effects of your eyes being dilated—yes I can see where you might ...” I shook my head and tried a smile. “No. These are moving.” I withdrew my other arm from under the sheet and wormed the fingers of both hands together in a tangle. He watched me, grinning and bobbing his head. “It’ll look different when you wake up.” “No, look! There.” I floated an index finger to the right. “And there ...” Though the creatures were without prey, they were incipiently violent, their eyes gigantic, roaming, searching; their mouths, which were enormously elastic, elongated their jaws when open. When closed, blood smirched their lips and pooled in the corners of their mouths; wounds might have been self-inflicted, brought about by slamming their mouths against their preternaturally large and incredibly sharp-looking teeth. “You should bring your arm down now, sir. You might make your injury worse.” I didn’t notice the hand he placed on my arm until I stopped looking at the ceiling long enough to see him guide my arm to the bed. “Perhaps if you close your eyes, sir.” But I couldn’t keep my eyes off them. Their population seemed to be growing. There must have been thousands. Some had their wings spread, but because of the sheer numbers, most were forced to tuck their wings to their sides; still, some were open, unfurled behind them, segmented and joined at each peak by needle-sharp spikes. The winged creatures were stirring up a memory in me. But what? Most were monkey-faced, but in a hideous, frightful way, with pointy ears and fiercely snapping jaws. Unmistakably, there were Pomnots among them, with their dead eyes. I counted three, no four, toad or frog-like creatures, clearly in the minority, wary and with smaller eyes, but more bulbous, always jerking left and right. And serpents, tongues darting, wound in and out between the creatures, glistening onyx and amber, the colors shimmering together and separating as they slithered. All the creatures, along with the snakes, were in continual micro movement, as though they were uncomfortable in their tight environment. “You’ll feel better if you close your eyes, sir.” “Why?” There was more I wanted to say, to let him know there would be no feeling better with those creatures wriggling and writhing above my head; they were waiting for me to sleep. They wanted me. The moment I drifted off, the winged ones would soar down, take me away in their claws like before—like—something about a head, a severed head! And with that, the memory flooded me. The giant birds that attacked our camp, dropping fireballs. And one of the birds carried in its talons the head of our missing Advance Intelligence Man, Arz Makel. But those were phantoms; as frightening as they were at the time, they were magical phantasms, the product of Glnot Rhuether. The creatures above me, though ... All I could manage as I turned my head to him was, “Why?” I couldn’t even be sure what prompted my question. “Because it’s the narcotic, sir.” His eyes drifted to the ceiling. “Those aren’t—” “Narcotic?” I repeated it louder than I intended, and the word echoed back to me. “A narcotic, sir, for the pain. It—” “The root?” The words didn’t come out right. I wanted to tell the doctor that Garvin gave Jed the root, but instead my mind was fretting over the correct positioning of my tongue and lips when I enunciated those words. I repeated them under my breath, but it wasn’t getting any better. “The root, you say? Well, yes, but rendered down, distilled. You coughed so violently after I administered it, I was afraid you hadn’t swallowed any.” “Because ... I wasn’t ...” I forgot how I was going to end the sentence. He waited. Seeing I wasn’t going to finish, he smiled. “Ah, yes. You weren’t expecting it? See, you had just gone through one bout of pain, sir; I hoped to give you the narcotic before the next. I failed.” I blinked at him. My eyes wanted to stay closed. I dared not sleep. Jed. The coma Garvin feared. No, I had to stay awake. “Fine. It’s working. You should sleep soon.” He started to turn. “But you didn’t ...” I exhaled my frustration; “I asked you ...” He turned back. “I beg your pardon, sir?” He smiled. His eyes carried a gentle kindness. “I said ...” I stared at him with no thought coming. He waited a moment longer, smiled again, and told me he would be back after I slept. His footsteps crossed the room and the door clicked shut. I opened my eyes. I didn’t remember closing them. Zarbs. That was it. Something about ...     Recognized

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