Silent Fall

look out for me."
    She took a few steps backward. She was getting awfully close to the edge of a very steep cliff. He wanted to warn her to stay back, but he couldn’t get the words out. The landscape took another wild spin.
    She’d drugged him, he realized, suddenly remembering the overly sweet taste of the champagne. Why? What the hell did she want? Before he could ask her, his legs gave way and the world went black.
    * * *
    Catherine Hilliard awoke in the middle of the night, her heart racing and sweat dampening her cheeks. The digital clock read four-forty-four. Every night for the past two months she’d woken up with terror flooding through her body like a tidal wave threatening to take her under. The screams of the past ran through her head, a maddening refrain that she feared she would never forget and yet never fully remember.
    The events of one night had been lost in her subconscious for twenty-four years. And every few years the nightmares came back, torturing her for weeks at a time and then disappearing as quickly as they’d come. But this time was different. The dreams were getting worse, and the fear was relentlessly increasing with each passing night, as if something were coming for her, something horrific.
    Scrambling out of bed, she did the only thing she could do to take the fear away. She painted.
    On the easel a blank canvas waited. She picked up her brushes and opened her mixed paints, finding comfort in the familiar actions. Dipping her brush into the paint, she paused for a second and then put the brush to the canvas. The nightmare in her mind took shape with bold, dark swaths of color, red, green, black, blue. She barely breathed as the fear seeped out of her with each swipe of the brush. She never knew what would come out of her subconscious. Finally, shaken and drained, she set down her brush and backed away.
    The picture she’d painted would make no sense to anyone. It was a mess of lines and shapes, collisions of color, but in the abstract images she thought she could see a face haunted by fear, dark eyes filled with terror, a mouth pleading for help. And deep down she believed she was supposed to help, but she didn’t know how.
    Sitting on the edge of the bed, she let out a sigh as she studied her picture from afar. Calmer now, she tried to analyze what she’d done, the way she did every night, but the turmoil in her brain was as confusing as always.
    She’d been six years old when her life had changed forever, when her reality had become a nightmare, when the bad dreams had begun. The police had wanted to know exactly what she’d seen that night, but she couldn’t tell them. A therapist had given her paper and crayons and told her to draw, so she’d drawn, but the images hadn’t made any sense then, nor did they now. And since that day she hadn’t been able to stop drawing. Art had become her refuge, her passion, and her way of making a living. If she couldn’t paint, she didn’t think she could live.
    During the daylight hours she could draw beautiful pictures, landscapes, flowers, happy people -- but at night, after the dreams came, her paintings became monstrosities as she was driven to put brush to canvas in a desperate effort to free herself from the endless nightmares.
    She’d tried changing her environment, but that hadn’t worked. As a child she’d lived in eight different foster homes, and the nightmares had always found her. As an adult she’d tried three different cities and rented more than a few apartments before settling into her current beach cottage, but the dreams always returned.
    Of course, there were months when she slept undisturbed. She wished for the relief of those dreamless nights. The longest she’d gone without a nightmare was six years. She’d thought they were over. Then they’d returned, and she’d realized she would never be free until she did something....
    She had the sense that she was meant to act in some way -- only then would she be able to escape. But what was she supposed to do? She didn’t know. Nor did she recognize the abstract faces of the people she painted. They called out to her, but she couldn’t answer, because she didn’t know who they were.
    Although tonight she couldn’t help wondering if the face in her picture belonged to the woman who’d approached Dylan in the bar. There was a faint resemblance, wasn’t there? Maybe she