Shielding his eyes from the sun’s unrelenting rays, Noah appeared to salute the open ocean from the ship’s helm–yet he was far from a soldier. Baby-faced and grinning at the prospect of the unknown, he had the optimism of a boy who had only glimpsed war in the pages of his school’s textbooks and through his grandfather’s beloved documentaries. The fresh crop of acne blooming by Noah’s hairline made him look younger than his sixteen years. Laid bare by natural light, his dark hair was almost blue. Not blue like the ocean, highlighted by shades of cyan and pale mint, but blue like a midnight sky without a moon, like a heart after breaking. 

When Noah failed to spot New England’s jagged coast settled on the horizon, he knew that he was dreaming. He would never venture this far from the shore; he had learned the hard way that his susceptibility to seasickness made even whale-watching impossible. The sun-bleached boat rocking beneath his scuffed sneakers couldn’t be real. The cotton clouds doused in soft pink and purple hues were only a figment of his imagination. Still, Noah allowed himself to revel in the postcard-esque scenery. He could practically see “Wish you were here” scrawled in the skyline and looped around a seagull or two. In this phantom world, he had no worries, no inklings of dread curling in his stomach. Yet he could feel the door to the Captain’s quarters watching him. Its studded twin windows were eyes drilling into the back of Noah’s skull, lurking in his mind’s dark alleyways and waiting to strike. 

But the affairs of this nonexistent plane were inconsequential. 

That’s what he told himself, at least. 

Spiting Noah’s proposed laws of the land, the door protested against its rusty hinges. A puff of dust permeated the salty air, briefly catching the light before fading into nothing. Yet the wooden slab’s offkey groan persisted, like a widow’s wail weeks after her husband’s untimely end. 

The floorboards creaked. 

Noah sighed. Leaning dangerously far over the ship’s ledge, he was preoccupied by the dark mass beneath the whitecaps. Is that a dolphin or shark? Here, it could go either way. “This isn’t my first rodeo, buddy.” A gnawed fin burst from the waves. Definitely a shark. “I know how this goes. You don’t have any control over this situation. You’re in my dream, and I’m not afraid of whatever monster my brain has cooked up for tonight.” 

Noah expected the intruder to screech or throw something heavy. He wouldn’t have been surprised if The Thing shoved him overboard. He practically expected a bloated, shark-bitten corpse to leap from the waters, latch its skeletal hands around his throat, and drag him to the bottom of the ocean. 

He didn’t consider that he’d be taunted. 

“What are you going to do, wake up?” a hoarse voice replied. “If you do that, boy, then you leave me damned. You want my damnation on your conscience?” 

Noah didn’t expect an intelligent reply. Surprised, he turned to face the speaker: a thin man that slouched under the weight of his dapper jacket and bulky gold rings. A large ruby fixed to one of the ten thick bands leaked blood. The man’s gaunt, sun-freckled face winced, exaggerating the crow’s feet around his pale eyes and the wrinkles etched into his forehead. 

Weird. My visitors usually don’t have this much skin. “Who are you?” 

The man’s black boots creased at the toe when he limped forward, bowing the boards underneath his feet. Noah wondered if there were weights in those shoes; the wood seemed to be on the verge of splintering. “Nobody that your world remembers,” the man rasped, the words further cracking his thin, peeling lips. “I was born Josiah.” Wind ruffled his coarse graying brown hair. Its color and texture reminded Noah of the dead rat he’d found in his dad’s basement. “I died nameless.” 

“Okay.” Crap. It’s never good when they can talk. It’s probably worse if they can reply. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Wake- 

“Coward.” Josiah’s jaw clenched. His ring’s blood dotted the floor, the crimson pools growing, rust eating away at iron. “I haven’t been here for more than a few seconds, and here you are, already plotting an escape. You’re a rabbit, cornered and desperate.” A vein in his neck bulged, the skin straining against a jagged scar. 

“I guess my reputation precedes me.” Noah took a step back. Despite the ocean’s cool breeze, sweat pricked his palms. He was suddenly aware of his tongue, heavy and dry, evaporating the moisture in his mouth. He was a desert; he was a wasteland. This isn’t supposed to happen. Why can’t I wake up? 

“Sure seems so. Us spirits talk about you, Noah. Remember Melina? She remembers you.” 

Milena. Milena, with the wild hair and eyeless face and knees screwed on backwards, convulsing and hissing and growling as if her very existence were torture. Milena, with the clacking cracked teeth and incessant screeching. Her elongated hands were scratched and bloodied from clawing through dirt and across pavement. She was a stalker with a new victim, dragging her misshapen body after Noah. She followed him from dream to dream. Her presence desecrated his dorm room, his school’s parking lot, even his grandpa’s farmhouse in Maine. He couldn’t shake her. 

Noah could still hear her white dress rustling against various terrains. He could feel her predatory gaze, the dark pits in her skull tracking him, hunting him. And he would never forget her name, or how she whispered it as if it were a prayer laced in someone’s dying breath.  

Milena…Milena…Milena… 

Until Josiah, she was the only one that made Noah think he might not wake up. 

He didn’t know that spirits knew one another. 

“You can’t keep running from us, Noah. We’re just a bunch of doomed animals flocking to you and hoping that you agree to save us from the flood.” 

“I can’t save you.” I couldn’t save her. “I can’t save anyone.” 

“Except for yourself, right?” 

Noah’s fingernails dug into his palms. “You have no right to stand there and call me selfish.” 

A condescending smirk sliced across Josiah’s weathered face, pinching his thick eyebrows together. “This may be your dream, but this-” he limply gestured starboard, “-is my ship. And I can say whatever the hell I want.” 

“What did you do to get this ship, then?” 

Josiah’s stubbled jaw twitched. “What are you implying, boy?” Even Noah could tell that this was a warning, but he was too riled up to care. 

“I’m not stupid.” Under Josiah’s hawklike stare, Noah felt stupid and small. His instincts screamed at him to apologize, but he wasn’t going to back down now. Noah gritted his teeth. “I know you’re not anyone good.” 

A moment of tense silence fell across the boat. Josiah surveyed Noah as if weighing the pros and cons of feeding him to the nearby shark. “You want answers?” Josiah finally croaked. “Then find my bones. Lay me to rest on solid earth.” 

“Bones won’t tell me anything.” 

“Won’t they?” Josiah tilted his head in mock curiosity. “A concave skull won’t tell you that my crew mutinied and beat me until my face caved in?” 

“Did that happen?” Noah’s stomach clenched at the thought. He half-hoped that Josiah wouldn’t answer.  

“You said it yourself: I’m not anyone good.” Josiah stepped forward and winced as his ring spewed fresh blood in punishment. “You don’t know anything about me.” The ruby’s scarlett droplets splattered previously unmarred wood. “I could’ve sent twenty men twice your size to an early grave. I could’ve died for a reason.”

“Maybe you trusted the wrong person.” Avoiding eye contact, Noah stared at the dark pool by Josiah’s worn leather boot. Is that his blood? 

Josiah exhaled sharply, his version of a laugh. “Maybe you did.”  

“What are you talking about?” 

“I’m in your subconscious. I know about your family.” 

“My family is fine.” The response was automatic, spilling through Noah’s teeth before he’d registered Josiah’s words. 

“Your family is dead. This is the only place where ‘life’ and ‘death’ are combined, where there’s only ‘being’, but you’ll never find them here. You’re a moth and this world is a flame–it’ll burn you alive.”

Smoke. 

I can taste the smoke.   

“And you best be careful, boy. Your sanity is already slipping.”  

“My family is fine,” Noah repeated, but conviction abandoned him. His voice trembled. 

“You say that now. Wait ‘til you wake up and reality comes calling.” Josiah removed his ring and tossed it. A distant itch urged Noah to lunge and catch the jewelry, but the message struggled to bypass his clouded thoughts. Unresponsive, his body remained rooted to the ship’s deck. The ring clattered, spinning twice before settling between them.

“Go to the graves, Noah. They want to speak with you.”