Dream Lover Read online

“I fear that I must. You do not seem willing to do so.”

  Edwina couldn’t help it, a giggle bubbled up from within her. This man made her happy just talking to him. “Is your ego so fragile that it needs constant attention?”

  “There are some who would say it needs constant feeding and stroking otherwise its’ owner runs the risk of becoming an ogre.”

  “You have a decidedly warped sense of humor, von Bruner.”

  “So I have been told. Not always by persons who were quite as amused by my sense of humor as you appear to be.”

  “That, Mein Herr, I can well believe.”

  “Rest well. We shall meet again soon, Edwina. And I shall hold you in my arms then and make you know just how I cherish you.”

  “Somehow, I do not doubt that we shall meet again in the least. Good night.”

  “Are you that eager to bring this conversation to an end?”

  “Not particularly. I should be, but I’m not.”

  He laughed quietly. “I know an all night coffee shop within walking distance of your apartment. Care to come out for a cup of coffee with me?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “What could a cup of coffee hurt?”

  “Probably nothing,” she admitted quietly. “Other than keep me awake when I need to sleep tonight.”

  “They have decaffeinated and herbal teas.”

  “No, thank you. Going to a coffee shop will eat into my sleep time.”

  He laughed. “I shouldn’t care to deprive you of your beauty sleep.”

  She couldn’t help but smile as she teased him. “Why? Am I in eminent danger of becoming a hag?”

  “On the contrary, you are so beautiful that it makes my arms ache to hold you. If you won’t come out for coffee, how about going for a walk? The air is just brisk enough to give me an excuse to hold you tightly as we walk.”

  “You hardly strike me as a man who needs excuses to do anything that he wants to do. I think of you as the type who knows what he wants and goes to whatever lengths he has to in order to acquire the desired object.”

  “As I said before, you are unusually perceptive.”

  “What do you want from me?” she asked again.

  “You do not ask easy questions. Where shall I begin?”

  “At the beginning.”

  “I’ll be outside the door of your shop in twenty minutes. We can talk in your apartment.”

  “Not a chance. First, if I don’t know you well enough to have dinner with you in a fairly public restaurant, I definitely don’t know you well enough to invite you into the privacy of my home. Second, it is far too late for me to be entertaining anyone. I’m tired and need to get to sleep soon. And third, most important of the bunch, I don’t trust myself alone with you.”

  “Because you want me as much as I want you.”

  “There is no sense in denying the obvious.”

  “Edwina, invite me up.”

  “No! Absolutely not.”

  “I’m not a patient man, Edwina,” he warned.

  “Tough. I’m not particularly impetuous, Klaus.”

  “Then we shall balance out the faults in the other’s character quite well.”

  Edwina smiled. She wished that she could believe that. “What do you want from me?” she demanded again.

  “Right now, I can think of nothing I would want more than to have you in my arms, to kiss you, and to carry you to bed. I want to look at your face as you come apart in pleasure while in my arms. I want to hear the little sounds of desire come from your throat as we make love to one another. I want to lie in your arms and listen to you breathing as you fall into the exhausted sleep of a woman well and truly loved. And when you awake, I want to make love to you again.”

  “Is sex all you want from me?” she asked quietly, trying not to let her disappointment color her voice. “A man like you could get sex anywhere he wanted it. I’m sure you could telephone any number of women who would gleefully come running at your request. So, why come to me? These aren’t games I play.”

  “Sex only a beginning, Liebling. Eventually, you will come to love me. Until then, I can make do with the passion I find in you. Through the heat of passion and frequent possession you will come to love me.”

  She wasn’t going to tell him that she already loved him. That would be giving him entirely too much ammunition. “What else do you want?”

  “I want to watch you as your belly blooms with new life. I want to be with you as you give birth to our children. I want to watch you nurse our babies. I want to be with you as you comfort our children as they grow. I want to sit beside you in church as our children marry. I want to hold our grandchildren, and see your features on their faces.”

  “That’s a substantial list of wants,” Edwina replied quietly. The mental pictures that he painted were profoundly appealing. But she knew that time was working against her. “I’m thirty-five, Klaus. Babies are considerably less of a possibility than they would have been ten years ago.”

  “Everyone has a list of wants, Edwina, a list of dreams wanted for one’s life. What do you want? What would make you the happiest?”

  “What do I want? Nothing other than what everyone wants deep down, I suppose. To be loved and accepted for who I am.”

  “And who are you, Edwina Elizabeth Johnson?”

  “Who do you think that I am, Klaus Matthias von Bruner?”

  Now, where did that middle name come from? Edwina wondered.

  He was quiet for a moment. “Ah, you have been curious about me, then?”

  “What can I say, you are a curious man.”

  “Yes. I am. But, I will grow on you.”

  “Like lichen on a rock?” she teased.

  “More like understanding in a mind, expanding knowledge until it meets and perhaps exceeds natural ability.”

  Edwina was silent for a long moment.

  “Are you still there, Liebling?”

  “Do you always make up your mind so rapidly upon meeting a person?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you pushing me this quickly?”

  “You are entirely too strong a person for anyone to push around. If I am to influence you to come along with me, in any respect, it will be because that is what you want to do, Edwina. We both are all too aware of that fact.”

  “I’m very tired now, Klaus. Goodnight.”

  “Sleep well, Liebling. God give you gentle dreams.”

  She returned the phone to the charging cradle after he disconnected. The man wasn’t going to take ‘no’ for an answer. She rather liked that. And it frightened her more than a little bit, especially coupled with the long history of having dreamed of him.

  “Whatever else Klaus von Bruner is, kitty,” she said to Heather, “He is obviously resourceful. My private phone number is unlisted.”

  Heather, ever wise, simply replied with a “Meyouw.”

  “You know, Heather Cat, I bet that I could find out who this man is,” she said mostly to herself.

  Again, Heather said only, “Meyouw.”

  Edwina put down the cat and crossed over to her den, a room that did triple duty as her library, computer room, and guest bedroom. It was a large room she used all the time, and one that she had “wasted” a lot of money on. A vented gas fireplace with a white stone façade was a feature of the room. It was flanked by bookcases. Her computer desk sat in the corner nearest the door. A conversation grouping of furniture, including a sleeper sofa, sat cozily before the fireplace. Over the fireplace, she had hung a large framed canvass she had bought from a street artist in Paris. The scene was of a park. Children were playing. It wasn’t a work of exceptional artistic merit, but it was full of joy and that was reason enough to hang it. The painting made her feel happy just to look at it.

  She powered up the computer and connected to the Internet. She did a search for him. What she found was quite interesting. He was the CEO of a multi-national pharmaceutical products company. He held both a M.D. and a Ph.D. in b
iochemistry. He sat on several boards of charities funding research for genetic disorders.

  She had interviewed with his corporation after she had finished her second doctorate. When the recruiter would not promise her in writing that she could pursue her own interests in research, she had walked away from the interview, giving them a polite “thanks, but no thanks” as an answer to their quite amazingly generous contract offer.

  Catherine faded in. “He’s been keeping track of you since he read your first dissertation, Edwina. You fascinate him. He thinks you have answers for him.”

  “What kind of answers?”

  “He desperately wants you to work on a health problem that he has. And he’ll do anything in his power to get you to do that, and I mean anything. He’s not a creature to underestimate. He’s both wealthy and powerful. Powerful in ways that you can’t even begin to imagine. He could hurt you terribly, Edwina. Be careful.”

  “What problem could he have that he would need me to work on? He has an entire staff of people working for him who are just as qualified as I am, if not more qualified.”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Just be careful, Edwina. You are a nice woman. I don’t want to see you hurt by him,” the shade said.

  “Right now,” Edwina said. “I’m going to bed. Sunrise will be here before I know it.”

  “Don’t forget to say your prayers,” the shade replied in a tone of warning. “If you are going to deal with that creature, you’ll need all the help you can get. I cannot interfere in this. I’ve broken so many rules as it is by warning you about him.” Then she faded away.

  Edwina went to her bathroom. As she undressed for her shower, she felt her face grow warm as she remembered how he had taken her panties from her. She took a long hot shower before she headed off to bed.

  She awoke screaming from a nightmare a few hours later. Klaus von Bruner was in the lead of a pack chasing her through the night. There was something malevolent about him, and about all the others who were chasing her, something sinister, dark, unholy, inhuman. She was left with impressions of fangs and giant bats.

  That was simply crazy. She had never dreamed of him as malevolent before. This dream wasn’t of the same detail or feeling as her other dreams about him. This dream was shadowy, uncertain, and surrealistic.

  Thinking of it, she couldn’t grasp the dream in concrete detail. It was not at all like her normal dreams. She always remembered the details of her dreams.

  All she really knew was the dream had frightened her, terribly.

  Edwina switched on the light.

  As she did, she noticed that Catherine faded in and the room grew cold. “It’s not just in your dreams. Von Bruner’s dangerous. His kind are dangerous,” the shade warned. “He won’t be satisfied with less than possessing you completely—body and soul. And when he’s done with you, you will be empty inside, just as every other woman in his life has been. I cannot warn you about that strongly enough. He’s not an entity to be trifled with. For the sake of your life, your soul—your very essence—keep him at a distance.”

  “Good night, Catherine.”

  “Don’t ignore your dreams, Edwina. Truth comes out in dreams as your mind processes the things that you haven’t been able to consciously accept.”

  “Even Freud said that a cigar was sometimes just a cigar, Catherine. Go away.”

  “Freud never studied your dreams. He had no acquaintance with a true prophet.”

  “Go away, Catherine,” Edwina replied sharply.

  “For now,” the shade agreed. “But be very careful around him. He’s extremely dangerous for you.”

  “I wish that you would stop being so cryptic and just say what you mean.”

  The spirit shook her head negatively. “I cannot. You would not believe me. There are times that you don’t even believe that I am real, even though you see me quite clearly. I know that you sometimes believe that you are losing your mind when I appear to you. You definitely wouldn’t believe me if I told you what sort of creature that entity is.”

  “Go away, Catherine.”

  “Listen to me, Edwina. I wasn’t sent here for my good, but for your sake.”

  “Go away, Catherine. I don’t believe a word of this. Leave me alone,” Edwina said wearily. The last thing that Edwina considered herself was a prophet. She had dreams. Period. Some of which later came true. Some of which did not. Dreaming did not make one a prophet.

  The shade winked out, but there was a defiant, ugly, expression on her face as she did so.

  Edwina climbed out of bed and went to the kitchen. She looked at the clock. It was four forty-five in the morning. Her alarm clock would be going off in a little over an hour. She got herself a glass of cold water and went back to bed.

  But she couldn’t get back to sleep. She lay there thinking.

  Who was Klaus von Bruner? Why had she dreamed of him for years? What did this all mean?

  The rational part of her brain told her that this was all coincidental. Perhaps seen his photo once somewhere and had fixated upon him as the subject of her romantic fantasies. That’s what any competent psychotherapist would have told her. Of course, they would have also told her that it was a sign of insanity to believe one’s dreams. She didn’t stand convinced of the truth of that position. Too many of the things she had dreamed had later come true.

  Sighing, she rolled over on her stomach, hit the pillow a couple of times and forced herself to relax. If she couldn’t sleep, she’d at least rest. But she couldn’t even do that.

  She arose and went to the computer. Before she had put her dream journals into the safe deposit box at the bank, she had scanned them into the computer and uploaded them to the same area of a remote computer that she used for the storage of her research records. She had kept a copy of all the images on CD-ROM.

  Downloading all the images from the remote storage site would take too long. She wasn’t patient enough right now to do that. So, she took the first of the CD-ROMs and placed it in the drive.

  The dreams about Klaus had gone back to her late childhood. The first drawing she had made of him had been when she had been ten. Her sketching skills then had been rather primitive. Yet the face was clearly Klaus’. She’d been dreaming of him for twenty-five years. He would have been in his late teens at the time she began drawing him. But this was not the face of a boy, but of a mature man. There were thousands of drawings of Klaus in her journals. Then there were drawings of places. There was an old Bavarian castle, a new Norman style stone house she thought was in an executive bracket U.S. subdivision, a villa she thought was in Italy, a pied a terre in Paris, a manor house in rural England, as well as a collection of other houses and apartments, all around the world.

  She paused at a drawing she had made fifteen years before. It showed her in a lab with Klaus. Both of them were in lab coats. Klaus’ sleeve was rolled up. There was a hypodermic in his hand. He was about to inject himself.

  She read her notes about the dream. “Klaus has a substantially reduced ability to withstand UV radiation and a low ability to repair the damage from UV. Consequently, he only goes out at night or when he can be fully covered, especially his eyes, which are most sensitive. He has a severe iron deficiency warranting periodic units of blood to be given. Yet, he has an amazing ability to resist disease. His physical strength, endurance, and an ability to heal himself, in most situations, is beyond anything that I’ve ever encountered. The solution to the UV tolerance requires augmenting what little natural ability he has. The solution to augment his ability to repair the UV damage is more complicated. But, I believe it can be solved.”

  Then she had made three pages of research notes regarding potential solutions. All of which had been beyond her ability at the time of the dream. Much of what she had written—notes of her research journals in the dream—was then barely comprehensible to her given the scope of genetic engineering necessary to solve his problem. While she now understood the science, she was not at all sure i
t would work. She knew it to be a profoundly desperate act to even begin such research. The solution would either cure him or kill him. She wouldn’t feel comfortable giving odds on which outcome would occur. It was dangerous to even think about creating a retrovirus to reprogram his DNA.

  Edwina had long since forgotten about that particular dream. Yet, all of her research since then had been aimed more or less in this direction. She hadn’t even realized that she had been preparing herself to undertake this work.

  The question was: could human resistance to UV radiation be augmented through genetic engineering? She had begun similar work in plants, modifying the DNA controlling their UV tolerance in order to increase yields. If the work could be translated from plant to man, what would the ramifications be? Could the cure be worse than the disease? Or was she simply going off the deep end?

  Even if the research could produce a solution to the problem, the work would take years, possibly decades or even a century. She suspected the solution would be that complicated. In the sketch, neither of them appeared much older than their current ages. It didn’t make any sense.

  She continued to click through the images. Several images later, she saw an image that she did recall. It was of a wedding, her wedding. The image label read “Mardi Gras wedding with Klaus’ cousin, Father Wilhelm from the Vatican, as officiant.” The groom was clearly Klaus. And the church was her current parish. However, until just before Thanksgiving of last year, she had never stepped foot in that building. Yet, this drawing was dated a good fourteen years prior. The sanctuary and nave had been remodeled only five years ago. The drawing clearly reflected the current decor. This sketch sent shivers down her spine.

  A larger external chill at her back told her that Catherine was once more present.

  “He’s been invading your dreams for years, Edwina,” the shade said quietly, “preparing you to accept him. Conditioning you, brainwashing you, so that you see him only in a favorable light, trying to influence your mind so that you are willing to do his bidding.”

  “No one can invade someone else’s dreams,” she dismissed sharply.

  “But, then again, until you met me, you wouldn’t have thought that spirits were real, either,” Catherine offered and then faded away.