Wolf in the Library

Strange nightmare, clinging to him in the late morning hours. He sips his coffee, stares through the newspaper into the dream. A gothic library afloat in a creeping gloam, with guttural growls coming from the rare books section held in the center of book stacks like the core of a rotten apple. Growls pursue him through winding labyrinth of books. He sprints to a spiraling stair, quickly ascends with the predatory breathing close behind him. When he reaches the top of the tower he finds, standing in an open window, his fiancé balanced on the precipice, white nightgown stark and billowing against a stormy sky. He reaches out to her as lunges across the tower room, but too late. With one frightened glance over her shoulder, she steps off the edge and drops into the weightless night.

He holds the stone wall and hangs out the window, looking down to the troubled waters of the mote. Ripples swallowed her whole, like the water creature purported to lurk in the moat waters. She was never found. Lept from a library window into eternity, and why? This question would plague him in the morning hours after sunshine had replaced the dream and his finance was back at his side, obliviously leafing through the Sunday ads. He wondered about the sound that had come from his throat when he tried to shout out to her. Low gutteral growl. The thick black pelt covering his arm reaching out to snatch her from the window. The claws that had only grasped the space from which she had escaped him into death.

He returned to his newspaper. Just a dream. His uncle wouldn’t think so. Uncle Theo, the eccentric of the family, famed parascientist who had written two treatise on dream encounters and their very real impact on a person’s psychic fabric. Maybe he would go out to Hedonshire this afternoon to consult with his uncle, look up the dream symbols in his library of the occult.