Vessel, Book I: The Advent Read online

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  Exactly twenty days before Ghi found himself smashed to pieces on a filthy basement floor, he existed in two places at one moment in time: both in the Boston dry cleaners shop where he worked, and on the star-shaped platform surrounding the Statue of Liberty, which was inside the sudden epiphany of Corin Charles Livingston III, who happened to be breakfasting somewhere in Australia at the time.

  That might actually qualify as three places, but no one's counting.

  It's important to note that Corin didn't know he was thinking about Ghi. Not then. He simply could not have known, even though the dream which shocked him with sudden recall that morning was not a new one. Even though it had always played out the same, with him ascending the wide steps to the statue platform alone on a gray, frigid day. Even though Ghi and the others were always at the top, waiting for him.

  He didn't know he was thinking about Ghi because he had never met Ghi. Even if he had, even if he had been familiar with Ghi's shrugged stance and his twisting, ink-black hair, Corin wouldn't have had enough time to recognize him in these dreams. Because always, the moment he dream-jogged to the top of the dream steps and saw those dream strangers, the dream changed.

  It changed to water.

  A great torrent of water always replaced the statue and the strangers, instantaneous and inescapable. It rushed to immerse him, fill his stomach, pound into his ears. The water drummed and bubbled in its own fathomless language, sounding to Corin like frenzied singing, like a liquid opera reacting to a bomb threat. The feeling was fleeting and primal and terrific, both panic and pleasure in one single moment. Always just one moment.

  And then he would be awake in his bed, or sometimes on the plane or in the hotel suite, heaving for air and feeling confusedly foreign among the crisp, dry sheets. Why should the sheets be anything but dry? Why were his ears ringing? And how had that pillow wound up against the far wall?

  He was never sure when they'd started, these dreams. For such a long time, they simply dissolved into the subconscious murk, side-by-side with other dreams. Dreams of his mother, of Bangladesh, of walking into his old prep school totally naked. The usual. He would just catch his breath there in bed, wiping sweat and damp hair off his freckled forehead, and marvel at the implications. Stress, he would say to himself. All this stress. I really ought to get myself to Barcelona for a week. Christ. And all would be forgotten.

  But that shiny morning in the Sydney Hilton, just as Corin was spreading jam on his toast, the dream from the night before ran―screaming and guns blazing―into the quiet saloon of his thoughts, thoughts which had been minding their own business and reviewing the day's upcoming conference schedule.

  The dream butted aside the noon executive meeting, body-slammed the budget committee conference, and physically disrupted the routine of his butter knife. By the time a full coat of jam had been laid, the dream and all its clones had hijacked Corin's total attention. And so in the time he would have normally used to scan the Wall Street Journal, he stared at the tablecloth instead, chewing toast, straining to remember all of the dreams, or at least one of them, from start to finish.

  Rushed and only fleetingly interested, he keyed the scant details―the statue, the waiting strangers, the water―into his trusty Sabre smartphone and then moved on to arrange the report materials. Cryptic, recurring dreams would simply have to wait. It was his last conference day on the coast, every hour of it packed, and he would be damned if it didn't end with a lengthy evening of surfing to cure all his troubles.

  To be sure, Corin got everything he wanted that day. Oh yes, he got that five-figure annual donation secured for his partners in Burma. He got the finest snapper sashimi he'd ever tasted and vintage shiraz. And he got his evening of memorably splendid surfing.

  That night, however, the four people on the platform got faces.

  The torrent came too late. Corin had time to look, to see who was waiting for him before the waves took him under, and from the moment he awoke, he couldn't get those blasted faces out of his head.

  All the way to the airport in the morning, all the way through the flight, Corin felt fuzzy and out of sorts. He questioned the sashimi and suspected the wine, but they were not to blame. It was those four faces which kept bubbling up to the surface of his thoughts, demanding to be noticed and named.

  These were not people he knew or people he recognized―minus one queer exception. With a sense of horrified reluctance, Corin confirmed beyond a doubt that one of the figures was Russian-born pop sensation Jesse Cannon.

  Which was not at all helpful. Unsettling, but not helpful.

  The notion that he was dreaming repeatedly about some air-headed celebrity was just as troubling as the anonymity of the other three. They weren't public figures or forgotten business contacts or anyone else he could imagine slipping into his subconscious. And yet there they were, familiar in a way that was downright weird, borderline spectral.

  Luckily, Corin was not a man of superstition. If he had been, the presence of Lady Liberty would have been just as alarming as the familiar strangers and the famous pianist. Because the next flight on Corin's agenda, less than three weeks away, was taking him to his eighth consecutive New York City Marathon.

  If that particular connection crossed his fevered mind that day, then he didn't give it much thought. Again, Corin was not a man of superstition, not at all. He was a man of logic and deduction. Which is why in the weeks to come he avoided most sushi, all Australian wines, and any music made by Jesse Cannon.