I dreamt that Harry Potter went to Hogwarts, which was a 52 story office building built above Momo's house, on her land near La Grange. There were large lobbies on the upper floors with floor to ceiling windows and galleries looking down on fountains and indoor plants. The Griffindors lived above one of these, on about the 45th floor. Ravenclaws were up above, Hufflepuffs below, and Slytherins in the basement.
At the end of the school year, all witches and wizards born in July, including Harry, Neville, and Luna, went into a bacchanal killing trance for one evening. They hunted the other students, and the final exam was basically staying alive. I, too, was a student born in July, and all I could remember the next day was colluding with my fellow July students on hunting tactics in the very beginning, chasing screaming people toward the stock tank, then walking into the water to wash the blood off of my boots.
I had four pairs of boots. I pulled them all out later to see if any of them would jog my memories. One pair was a light tan ostrich skin. Another pair was a pale buff ostrich skin. There were my black ropers, of course, and then the pair I wore that night, which were cracking and shapeless because of the water. Those were a deep oxblood calfskin, so they didn't show any stains. I gave up trying to remember.
I went home to find that my mom had bought me a new X-Files computer game. I had all the X-Files games now. But my dad had already opened it up and was playing it in the TV room, so I sat and watched. It was a first person shooter with lots of metal corridors and gray aliens. While I waited for him to finish, I patted my sister's dog, who had curled up in my lap. Our other dogs, all black and white in various sizes, came to greet me, and followed me to the grocery store.
In the back of the grocery store there was a big, swampy, sandy-banked river garden. The dogs had a good roll in the damp sand while I talked a bit with the children that all waded around tending the plants in tall mud boots. The children, it turned out, were mentally different, and in some cases quite disturbed, in one way or another. But they could see and talk to ghosts. After chatting with them a while, I realized that I, too, could see and talk to ghosts.
I started to wonder if I'd really seen my father, playing my computer game, or if it was actually his ghost. I learned there were a number of ghosts in my house. There was a round, pretty black woman with shoulder-length ringlets. There was a little blond girl and her blond aunt. There was a middle-aged priest with ruddy cheeks and brown hair, who used to dress up as Santa Claus every Christmas. And there was an evil old queen, with a big, fat round face all chalky pale, glinting eyes, silver gray curls, and at least four chins.
The evil queen had the power to kill other ghosts for good, by pushing them down the sink drain with the disposal running. Once a ghost was sucked completely down, they were completely gone. The rest of us decided she must be stopped. I particularly wanted her gone because I was really afraid by now that it was the ghost of my father I was seeing, and I didn't want him sucked down into the disposal forever. I wanted to keep him however I could.
One of the children from the river garden came to help us find the queen. She was the identical twin sister of the little girl ghost, and she had never spoken since the day her sister had died. But she came and spoke to me now, and told us how to lie in wait and follow the evil queen as she stalked around looking for other ghosts to slaughter. We tailed her into the kitchen and found her trying to force the priest down the kitchen sink. The disposal was running, and only his head was visible. His face was twisted in anguish.
We grabbed him and pulled him out by his hair, and before she could stop us, we began to push the queen down the drain. We held her hands so she couldn't reach out and turn off the disposal. She didn't moan or shriek or show any sort of pain. She cackled and grinned evilly at us all the while, her eyes glittering malevolently, until only her eyes and the top of her head was showing. We struggled to force her all the way in, but then I woke up.
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