A midnight so deadly, p.1
A Midnight So Deadly, page 1
part #1 of The Lumin Archives Series
Copyright © 2024 by Wren Handman
All rights reserved.
First published in November 2024
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
E-book ISBN: 978-1-956136-79-1
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-956136-80-7
Parliament House Press
www.parliamenthousepress.com
Cover by: Maria Spada
Edited by: Malorie Nilson and Sabrina Terry
Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, Characters, Places and Events are products of the author’s imagination, and are used factitiously. These are not to be construed or associated otherwise. Any resemblance to actual locations, incidents, organizations, or people (living or deceased) is entirely coincidental.
contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Acknowledgments
About the Author
1
MAEVE
When Maeve decided to record her dreams and post them online for everyone to see, she had imagined it all—the glitz of a rooftop party, VIPs turned out in style, the flash of cameras and the call of crowds. The thrill of baring your soul for the world and having them say, “Yes, yes! We feel the same, and we love you for it!”
What she hadn’t imagined was spending three hours trying to edit together some semblance of entertainment from a surreal nightmare about giant slugs.
Rolling the footage back for the eighteenth time, she watched as her foot, with pale ankle skin peeking out above a bright yellow sneaker, came shlucking backward out of a pile of gleaming, gelatinous slug goop. It was disgusting. Hilarious, but disgusting—and definitely not on brand. I really need to stop watching gardening shows before bed.
She chuckled and cut that section, then leaned back to watch the clip she recorded the night before. It had been a weird one. In the dream, she and her best friend Josie had been kicked out of a bar only to discover that the world had been overrun with yellow gastropods the size of buses. The ridiculous scene culminated in an even more absurd game of chicken between a blue minivan and a slug, after which the narrative sort of fell apart. When she woke up the dream lingered, like cobwebs she couldn’t get off her fingertips.
Maeve knew the footage wouldn’t be that popular, but she could play it for laughs. She stopped editing to take a long pull from an energy drink, rubbing an itch on her ear as she did. Absent-mindedly, she scooped a spoonful of cereal into her mouth before spitting it out in disgust as the soggy mess reminded her of how long it had been sitting.
She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, then groaned as she kicked herself back into gear. Just finish this and then you can go, she promised herself. It would all be worth it someday, when her channel took off.
Maeve liked to joke that she’d become a dreamer because she loved the commute—right from the bed to the computer in her tiny bachelor basement suite. The truth was that she’d always felt like an artist, but with no particular talent. She loved to listen to music but couldn’t sing in key. She could spend hours wandering through art galleries and maker spaces, but when it came time to put brush to canvas or hands to tools, she didn’t have the skill to bring any of her half-formed ideas to life.
In high school, everyone called her dramatic, and she embraced it. A gifted kid with consistently good grades, Maeve wore printed scarves, quoted her favourite literature, and filled her electives with novel studies and art classes. Most of her friends were theatre kids, and she briefly toyed with the idea of being an actor. But she knew her chances of success were slim, didn’t want a schedule where she worked eighteen hours a day, and hated the pressure of live performance.
That left her mired in the kind of deep existential crisis that only a teenager can truly appreciate. A life without a creative outlet felt like a prison sentence. There had to be something she could do, something she was good at! Then, a few years after she left university with a Bachelor of Communications and no real goal, the technology to record dreams was invented.
Suddenly, Maeve’s fertile imagination and quirky attitude had a purpose. When she started to share her dreams with the world, she finally became the artist she always imagined herself to be. People actually liked her stories, and she felt like she was finally contributing something. When she died—hopefully on some far instance day—she would leave a real mark on the world. If she could crack the popularity code and make a name for herself in the saturated field of dreaming.
That meant putting in the work. Maeve tapped the air to navigate over to Zzz+ and uploaded the teaser trailer, reminded viewers to like and subscribe, then did the same on her other social media platforms. She would finish editing the whole story tomorrow, but for now she was done—and done in.
She rubbed her eyes again and checked the views on her last video. Oof. Her manager wasn’t going to like that. Most of her content was highly narrative, but she had tried posting a surreal piece to draw in new viewers... with dismal results. Maeve was two years deep into her career, just six months into becoming a full-time streamer, and every day felt like a struggle to keep up with the mad pace of the industry.
A vibration at her wrist indicated a call was coming in, and Maeve flung her fingers up and forward to accept it through her computer. For a second, she thought she might have summoned Laura, her angry manager, just by thinking about her.
When the box appeared, it was Josie’s laughing face that took over the screen instead, her silky black hair falling across her perfectly made-up face as she mugged at Maeve through the camera. Josie had the classic good looks of a 1930s film star. She should have been walking into an office in an expensive fur coat to fire a jaded private eye to solve her husband’s murder, not going out for cheap beer on a Friday night. Maeve made sure the camera on her end was dead; she didn’t want Josie to know she wasn’t dressed yet.
“Womaaaaan! You better not still be at home!” the tall Filipina-Russian woman hollered. In the phone’s awkwardly angled image Maeve could see that Josie was in a car; her boyfriend Jason, who was probably driving, wasn’t visible, but there were three large and uncomfortable-looking men crammed into the back seat.
Maeve winced at her best friend’s good-natured scolding. She had known Josie for a decade and had never been able to match her friend’s punctuality. Josie had everything together, from her career as a massage therapist to her beautiful apartment and successful boyfriend. Maeve sometimes wondered how she put up with the chaos that defined Maeve’s day-to-day, but the two friends might as well have been attached at the hip.
“I’m not! I’m on my way,” Maeve promised. She moved the window on her screen out of the way with a flick of her wrist and logged into her bank account. The balance was almost as depressing as the outfit she picked out for tonight.
“You are such a liar. I can see you’re in your apartment.”
Maeve panic-checked her camera, saw it was definitely off, and then realized what Josie had done. “Stop using Find My Friend! That’s for emergencies!” Maeve quickly transferred a few dollars from her savings to her checking account, biting her lip. Could she afford two drinks with Josie before she went out for her dinner date, or only one? And did she really want to go on a date with someone who thought ten p.m. was—
“Stop being a liar and get your butt out here!” Josie hollered.
“Okay, okay, I’m leaving!” Maeve gestured one finger in a ‘come hither’ crook, and the call seamlessly transferred from her computer to her watch. “Give me five minutes.”
“You better be squeezing into some Spanx and putting on your shoes.”
“Bitch, did you just say I need Spanx?” Maeve grabbed the deceased bowl of cereal and the empty energy drink can and ran them into the kitchen.
“No, obviously your curves are perfect and beautiful, and any man or woman would be lucky to have you, but we are literally pulling up now!” Josie turned the camera so that Maeve could see outside the car window, but it was so dark, and the image was so small Maeve had no idea what she was looking at. “You need to come here right now and save me from being the only woman in the group. You’re already leaving early. You’re not allowed to also be late!”
“I know, I know, I’m sorry!” Maeve ran into the bathroom, shrugging out of her white-woman-on-a-budget yoga pants, and grabbed the Tetris-print leggings she had set out earlier. She tugged a loose grey cable-knit sweater-dress over her tank top and grabbed the small, dangling rainbow earrings she had conveniently placed on the edge of the sink. Thank you, Past Maeve.
Critically, she examined the effect in the mirror. Her brown curls were thick and hung a few inches past her shoulders, and the remains of the eyeliner she applied yesterday added a pop of green that brought out hints of hazel in her deep brown eyes. The sweater would probably look better with a necklace, but it complimented her curves enough for a first date with a “maybe” swipe from a dating app. “Okay, I’m dressed, I’m peeing, and then I’m out the door!”
“Don’t hang up on me!”
“What part of ‘I’m peeing’ did you not understand?” Maeve tapped her watch with three fingers, grinning as it disconnected. Josie may not have had the world’s most well-established boundaries, but without her Maeve would definitely have been late. Later.
Maeve waved a hand over-dramatically through the air, almost shouting over the music and the noise of the other tables around her. “No, no, because abstract dreams don’t give you anything! It’s all on you to interpret and try to pull a story out of—”
“But that’s what people like about it,” Matt insisted, enjoying the argument. Matt was a young Chinese man with broad, slightly rounded features and one dimple. He and Maeve had met at club week during university, bonded over their mutual love of board games, and quickly became friends. As a computer science major, his life had taken a different path than hers—a more successful one, some might argue. Despite that, their friendship stayed strong. “They’re tired of being spoon-fed their entertainment! Watching a fic-dream is just watching a movie that isn’t directed by—”
Maeve put down her glass of local craft beer mid-sip, shaking her head. “No no no, it’s way more immersive! A movie is completely flat! With a dream—”
“Immersive? Without a VR rig, a dream is literally just a movie—but it’s a movie with all this context you’re not getting because you don’t have access to the vocabulary of the dreamer!”
Matt, Josie, and Maeve were crowded around a small square bar-top table at Brass Screw, a trendy brewery on Main Street. The walls were decorated with polished wood beams, and the exposed pipes along the ceiling did nothing to dampen the sound of forty-plus people enjoying a night of drink and conversation. The smell of hops and wheat easily overpowered any perfume or cologne the young crowd wore.
Jason and his three friends, who Maeve didn’t know by name, were at an adjacent bar-top having a parallel conversation. They all looked oddly similar: white men in their late twenties, with expert fades and expensive smartwatches, wearing expensive jeans and bright sneakers paired with graphic T-shirts. Jason clearly spent some time in the gym, and his friends were the same, though none of them had the V-shape of dedicated bodybuilders.
With seven people drinking, there were beer glasses everywhere; Maeve had immediately forgotten she was only supposed to have one drink, but she hadn’t yet done the mental calculus to decide how that would impact what she could afford to order for dinner later.
Josie, looking effortlessly beautiful in a cropped tank top and skinny jeans, leaned her chin on her hand and cut in. “I’m not sure I buy that you need VR for a dream to be immersive. Sure, if you wear a VR rig you can experience the dream first-person, just like the dreamer did. But not everyone likes that. It puts you in someone else’s shoes, someone you might not identify with. If you watch a dream on a screen, like you would a movie, it can actually be easier to empathize, because that’s the way we’re used to consuming stories. Third-person.”
“Let’s not get off-track,” Matt countered, running a hand through his buzzed black hair. “We’re talking content, not medium. I’m saying that when you have a dream, you have context that’s missing when you watch a dream.”
“Like if the dreamer is in their childhood home, they recognize that fact and it colours the setting and adds emotions for them. But if you’re watching the dream, on Zee Plus or through VR, you don’t get that context?” Josie asked.
“Exactly!”
“Yeah, but both the dreamer and the characters featured in the dream know, and that comes through from the way they respond to the situations around them,” Maeve countered. “It’s subtext for the viewer, not context, but it enriches it.”
“You talking about dreams?” the guy on her other side asked. Maeve turned to give him more of her attention, immediately distracted by the words “Download This” on his shirt, with an accompanying arrow pointing to his crotch. If the idiotic slogan was anything to go by, this wasn’t going to be a promising detour in the conversation.
“Yeah—I’m a dreamer.”
“Oh, cool! Have I heard of you?”
“Maybe—Maevericious?” she offered. He shook his head, unembarrassed, and Maeve shrugged with a “whatcha-gonna-do” smile. “I post mostly narrative stuff. Lots of fantasy adjacent with some action-adventure.”
“That’s so cool. I never remember my dreams,” the guy said. “Except sometimes I dream that, like, I’m trying to get somewhere, but I never do.”
“I’ve always had wild, intense dreams.” Maeve drummed her finger against the tabletop, thinking about the way she felt when she was dreaming. Like she controlled the whole universe. Like she hadn’t been wrong, all those years, to feel a little bit different. “I was so stoked when the tech came out to record them. It was like it was meant for me.”
“Please don’t tell me you believe that dreams are, like, prophecies of the future.” The guy held up a hand like he was warding off bad energy, but smiled to take the sting out of it in case Maeve was into that.
“God, no,” she assured him. “My dreams are amazing, but they’re not giving some deep insight into my subconscious mind. They’re my imagination unleashed. Sure, they’re fed by input from the real world, but having a dream with a frog doesn’t mean that I’m going to win the lottery. Dream interpretation is total fiction.”
“Unless you see a lot of penises. We all know what that means.” The guy waggled his eyebrows suggestively.
Maeve rolled her eyes and glanced at Jason as he hopped up from his seat and came to stand behind Josie, draping his arms possessively around her and taking over her conversation with Matt.
Unimpressed, Maeve drifted back to her own conversation and tried to shift the subject. “I just think it’s cool that we can record brain activity and translate that into visuals. Next up—reading minds.” Not that she needed mind-reading tech to know what this guy was thinking about. Good thing that didn’t exist.
“You ever tried Blank?” He sounded genuinely curious.
Maeve laughed. “No way. If I’m gonna cook my brain, I’ll do it with something that’s been legal for decades and has all kinds of peer-reviewed studies. Like this beer!” She downed the last of the glass, toasting with the empty mug before she dropped it back on the table. She didn’t mention that she was scared of what Blank could do to her. Her dreams were already so vivid, and waking up sometimes felt like she was struggling for the surface of an angry ocean. Taking Blank could turn that ocean into a tsunami.
“I just got some. I wanna see if I remember anything,” Jason’s friend explained. “The dreams you have when you’re on it are supposed to be totally wild.”
“All my dreams are wild,” Maeve told him with a wink. “Check out my channel sometime.”
“Oh my god, you’re incorrigible!” Josie inserted herself into Maeve’s conversation with a grin, half-pulling out of Jason’s arms. He tried to whisper in her ear, but she waved him off.
“I’m an entertainer! I just want to share my creative vision with the world,” Maeve said, unapologetic. She wasn’t getting anything else out of a conversation with this guy. Why not at least get a view-bump?
“I don’t think that’s what most people are checking out on your channel.” Jason’s friend snorted and nodded at her chest, and Maeve’s smile dripped off her lips and vanished.
