Dream A Little Dream of Me
She was floating, somewhere up in the purple sky. Weightless. Happy. She didn�t have a care in the world. Everything was perfect. She was perfect... Until she felt the piercing pain in her stomach. She looked down and saw the dagger that had been thrust into her. The blood was running down her silky dress...
Kat Carlson woke up breathing rapidly. She was scared, of course, but relieved, because it had all been a dream. The dagger, the pain, the blood... She shuddered. This was not the first time she had seen this dream. Ever since she finally broke up with Vince she had had these dreams. Over and over again, for a litle over two weeks now At first everything was perfect, but then... Pain. Just like her violent romance with Vince.
Kat, born Katharine Deborah Alyson Carlson, was a full blown movie star. Cinema Weekly had named her cinema�s most glorious star twice, both in 1928 and 1929, and all signs indicated this year would make her a winner three times in a row. She was Hollywood�s favourite cover girl. You couldn�t pass a paper stand without seeing her angellic, doll-like face, framed by her shiny platinum blond curls. Her films kept getting played over and over again in cinemas all over the country. Everyone loved her. Everyone worshipped her. She was invited to all the parties with all the people who were anybody. The public thougth her life must�ve been so great, filled with champagne, wonderful parties, exciting romances and beautiful people. People thought her life was easy. In more ways than one, it wasn�t. She had gotten all of it, the glory and the fame, through hard work, by going to countless auditions before becoming a big enough star to get scripts sent to her. She had made 27 movies in the last five years. Some of them were of course small roles, but there was quite a handful of movies that relied only on her natural charisma. Those were the ones that brought the fame and people�s admiration. Those were the ones Kat really had to work for.
It was all hard. Kat�s life was hard. She was working hard and at the same time she partied a lot. She had thought it was expected of her; she was a Hollywood star, and Hollywood stars get to go to fabulous parties with other stars. And it hadn�t been just what was expected of her by other people, it was what she had expected from herself. She wasn�t from Hollywood, she wasn�t even Californian by birth. She was just a farmer�s daughter from a small town in Iowa. When Kat had left to become a movie actor, she had burned some bridges behind her. Her father had disowned her. He had said that she was just going to end up as a hooker on the streets of Hollywood, that she was going to disgrace the family. Officially, Kat had been erased from the minds of the people who had been her family. Her own flesh and blood. She still kept in contact with her mother. They wrote letters to each other. Kat�s father didn�t know about it. Her mother hid all her letters in their attic so he would never find out. To him, Katharine Carlson was no more.
Kat wasn�t such a good girl anymore. She had got hooked on all sorts of stimulants. She had needed them to handle the work and the partying. The two things had left hardly no time for sleeping, so she had had to replace the sleep with something. �It�s alright�, she had thought for long, �everybody does it. Nothing to worry about.� It was Vince who had first given her the pills. Had told her they would help her cope. Had said they would do no harm. Kat had just recently started to think she had lied to herself for a long time now. She had known she was an addict ever since she first felt the need to take more pills just to feel normal, but she had tried to tell herself otherwise. After all, her career was more important than... Than what? Her life? She had realised it wasn�t. For the past three days she had stayed locked inside her expensive apartment, just walking around in her nightgown, thinking about what she had become, and what she wanted to be. Two weeks ago she had broken up with Vince. It was right after she had realised she needed to change the way she lived her life or she would lose it. She needed a new lifestyle, and Vince wasn�t a part of it.
Ah, Vince. Vincent Roth, a bonafide gangster if there ever was one. It didn�t take much for this suavely talking, dark, mysterious criminal to charm Kat, an innocent farmgirl fresh out of Iowa. They had looked like the perfect couple, he with his devilishly handsome looks and dark hair, she with her angellic appearance and her blond curls. Everyone had been under the impression that Vince and Kat were madly in love. And for a while they had been.
But then Vince had started to change. He had started to meet strange people that scared Kat. Weird statues had appeared in his home, along with the books covered in black that Vince had kept in his safe behind the oil color portrait of Kat he had on his wall. He had become paranoid and jealous. He had become violent. The same thing had kept happening over and over. He would rush into her apartment in the middle of the night stinking of booze. Sometimes there had been blood on his hands. He had accused Kat of cheating on him. When Kat had denied that anything had happened, which was true, he would attack her. He was bigger than she was, and she could rarely have done anything to prevent him from harming her. Mostly she could just try to run and hide from him. Sometimes Vince would be so drunk he�d pass out in her apartment and other times she had managed to knock him out with something for long enough to call the police. Sometimes she had managed to run out of the apartment and hide outside. She would run quite a few blocks bare feet and dressed in her nightgown and then wait in a dark alley until she thought it was safe to go back again. And sometimes she hadn�t been so lucky. Those had been the nights after which she showed up at the studio trying to hide the fact that she was bruised black and blue. She had made up ridiculous stories about falling down stairs and slipping in the bathroom. Everyone had known Vince was hurting Kat, but no one said anything because she didn�t talk about it. They had wanted to spare her from the shame.
And every day after Vince�s attacks the same thing would happen over and over again. Vince had called Kat, had said he was sorry, had begged her to forgive him. It wouldn�t happen again, he had sworn. And every single time Kat had forgiven him, truly believeing he had meant it. This time he had meant it. But of course he hadn�t. Maybe a couple of days, a week, a month would pass before another attack would happen, but it always did. Finally she had decided she would take no more of it. She had been so afraid of him she hadn�t got the courage to meet him, so she had called him and told him it wasn�t working. She didn�t want him hurting her anymore. Of course, Vince had been furious. He had yelled and Kat could hear him throw something through a window. She had felt more afraid than ever.
For a week Vince had called her every night, at times begging her to take him back and at others threatening her. Every time Kat had told him no. Then, suddenly, Vince had stopped calling. This had been a week ago.
Vince had called Kat the evening before. With his silky voice he had asked her to take him back. When she had said no, he hadn�t gotten furious like before. �Oh well, it�s your choice�, he just said, calmly, humming a little tune before hanging up, �dream a little dream of me...� His calmness had sent a chill down Kat�s spine, but she still had thought that maybe Vince had come to his senses. Maybe it was possible for him to stop acting like a lunatic and let her go.
Kat got out of her bed, still shivering at the memory of the dream. She went to her little kitchen and made herself a warming cup of coffee. She didn�t want to go back to sleep, not right away. She knew she should have tried to get more sleep, but didn�t care. She was planning on going out the next day. She didn�t want to stir up any gossip by not showing her face in public for over three days. She was finally starting to feel confident about herself again. She was slowly getting rid of her addictions. She felt she wasn�t strong enough to kick the habit all at once, but she had made her doses smaller and was already feeling a bit better. She was still a bit scared of going out, because she was afraid of getting back into her old life, but she was getting better.
Sitting on a chair by her kitchen table with the coffee mug in hand Kat thought about her dream again. The nightmare. She remembered now that it hadn�t been exactly like the previous ones. There had been... someone else. A man. Like a voodoo priest, like the ones you saw in horror films. He was the one holding the dagger. Her eyes widened. All the images of the nightmare were getting clearer in her head. She could remember every single thing. She remembered things she could have sworn she had never even seen in the dream. She remembered a third presence. A familiar one. There had been her, the voodoo priest and... someone else. She remembered someone muttering in a weird language, ancient language. Something she didn�t really understand but which she knew wasn�t anything good. The voice sounded familiar. It filled her with fear.
Suddenly there was a piercing pain in her head. She winced. Another blinding stab of pain made her lose her balance and fall off her chair. She blacked out for a moment but when she woke up her head was clear of pain again. Then she heard the sound of glass shattering. It was coming from the living room. Her eyes widened and she got up as quickly and silently as she could and went to the cupboard under the sink. She found her gun. She had bought it and hidden it there after one of Vince�s attacks. She checked it quickly. It was loaded. With the gun in hand she stayed still for a while, trying to listen to the sounds from the living room. There were none. Kat wanted to get to her phone, but there was no way she could to it without going through the living room. She was on her own.
Kat started to make her way toward the living room. Suddenly she stopped and listened, again. She recognised a voice. It was Vince. He was talking to someone, but Kat couldn�t make out the words, he was talking so low. Except that he wasn�t. That wasn�t the reason she couldn�t make out what he was saying. It was because he wasn�t talking in English. Kat got furious. How dared he come to Kat�s apartment like this, just after she had thought she could move on? This was it. Kat wasn�t putting up with this anymore. She held the gun with both hands, her grip tighter than before. She had made up her mind. He was going to die. Now. Tonight. Kat took a step forward. The living room was silent. She took another step toward the room. There was a muffled sound behind her back, but she didn�t get a chance to turn around before she felt something hit the back of her head hard. The gun fell from her grip and just before she fell into sweet unconciousness, she heard the gun go off.
Kat was floating, again. Perfect. Happiness surrounding her from all sides. She looked around her and saw that she was lying on clouds in the purple sky. Someone had colored the clouds baby pink. Kat smiled at the idea of someone painting the clouds and closed her eyes. She felt safe. Nothing could hurt her here.
She was wrong. She came to when she felt the pain in her stomach again. Her eyes opened quickly. The back of her head wasn�t throbbing anymore, so she knew she had been out for quite a while. She was tied to her bed. Someone was muttering something. Just like in the nightmare. When Kat�s vision cleared up she saw there was a black man standing next to her. The voodoo priest she had seen in her nightmare. He was holding a bloody dagger. Kat�s disordered mind couldn�t figure out where the blood had come from. Had the man cut himself? He wasn�t the one speaking in the odd language. It was Vince. He was standing at the end of Kat�s bed. In his hands he held one of those big books with the black covers, the ones he had hid in his safe. He noticed she was awake. �I�m sorry, darling... You could have been a part of this�, he said, softly. There was something wrong with his eyes. He looked like he was out of his mind. Kat could feel the voodoo priest do something somewhere around her stomach. An idle thought crossed her mind: �They have ripped my perfect cream-colored nightgown...� The thought got pushed away quickly, as she finally understood what was going on.
Some of her so called friends, other celebrities and high society people had been saying dabbling with the occult would be the next big thing. Lately she had been to a lot of parties which used a session around an Ouija board as entertainment. Every time that had happened, Kat had laughed at the people gathering around the small piece of cardboard and left. She had made it seem like she didn�t believe in the whole thing. In reality, she was so superstitious she thought you shouldn�t mess around with the occult. She now saw she had been right. Vince was in too deep.
Like on cue, Vince stepped closer to her, book still in his hands. �You could have been a part of this. I could have had someone else to give their blood for my power... But you gave me no choice�, he whispered before giving her a kiss on th cheek. Kat couldn�t talk. Tears were forming in her eyes. She took a deep breath, couldn�t even scream when the voodoo priest stuck his dagger in her stomach again. She had lost a lot of blood. She had just noticed the cuts in her stomach weren�t the only ones. There were cuts all over her. She couldn�t see, but she guessed they formed patterns. She was blacking out again. For good. She knew that, and didn�t mind. She wanted everything to stop.
�It�s funny�, Kat thought to herself while Vince was muttering those weird words again, �how everything seems so clear when you�re dying...� Like the fact that Vince had gone over the edge; he should�ve been able to spot it earlier on. The books, the statues, the weird behaviour... And now she remembered, that before she broke up with him he had told her his gang was in some trouble. That he was in trouble, but that he was going to get his power back. Whatever kind of power Vince thougth he would gain through Kat�s blood, Kat believed he would succeed...
And she could now look at her life from a completely different perspective. She had been so stupid. She hadn�t grown up even the tiniest bit after moving to Hollywood. Her fame didn�t seem so important now. She just wished she had figured some things out before it was too late.
Kat felt her limbs go numb and heard Vince�s muttering become louder. His �incantation�, or whatever it was called, was nearly over, Kat could tell. This wasn�t the right way to die. Kat knew that, but it didn�t matter, not anymore. �Well, at least I�m going to be a real Hollywood star... The real stars have to die young so they never stop shining�, she thought. For some reason she knew she was going to be one of many �real Hollywood stars�. She heard Vince shout something and felt - no, just knew the voodoo priest thrust the dagger through her heart. And after that there was nothing.
Somewhere in Iowa Alice Carlson woke up and felt tears start to run down her cheeks. Her daughter was dead.