I dreamed that a friend and I worked at Angel Investigations. My friend was in charge of IT, and I did planning for the detective operations. I was also Angel's ex-girlfriend, which made things kind of awkward, even though the split had been amicable, since the reasons we couldn't be together were obvious.
My friend was out on an assignment where she was trying to lure an evil warlock to fall into his own trap. She was pretending to be enthralled, following his every command. We knew that he wanted to send a "message" to Angel, since we were getting close to capturing him, so chances were he was going to try to kill her, so we were all very on edge, as we watched through hidden cameras.
To prove that she was fully under his power, the warlock commanded my friend to do things like strip off her clothes, shave her head, and place her hand in a candle flame. She was so brave, she did all of these things. As we watched, he finally commanded her to touch a poisoned needle. She smiled, and immediately touched the needle on its side, not its point. He told her again to touch the needle, so she did it again.
He grew angry, as he tried to tell her in every way he could think to actually prick herself with the needle, and she, seeming upset and confused, continued to touch it on the side. Finally, he grew so frustrated that he came up to her and took her hand to guide it onto the needle's point. With a swift jerk, she pulled his hand down, jabbing the needle deep into his palm. He shuddered and died with a look of utter surprise on his face.
We were jubilant at my friend's success, and Angel pulled me into a celebratory hug that started to last too long, and then he tried to kiss me, and I pulled away, telling him this was a very bad idea and he knew it. I began babbling about improvements we could make to our servers, but before he could express how angry he was with me for rejecting him, there was a knock on the door.
I don't know how he knew it meant trouble, but he pushed me into a secret, hidden room inside a column. He went to the door and let in two beautiful, blond, twin vampires. Apparently they were part of a plot he had known was on to turn him evil again. They did their best to charm and allure him, and he certainly acted charmed and allured. I watched from my hiding place as he led them upstairs, and later, when they came back down, he was pretending to be evil. At least I hoped he was pretending. Either way, I knew what that meant, and knew that this was partly him wanting to pay me back for shutting down his advances.
The women were overjoyed at their new accomplice, and began to lay out a plan to wait until Angel's colleagues came back to the agency, and kill them off as they came in. Angel gave a wicked grin, and said there was no reason to wait, and for a moment I was terrified that he really had turned evil, and was going to pull me out of my hiding place and kill me.
Instead, he turned to the nearest woman and tore her throat open with his fangs. I hid my eyes, and tried to stop up my ears, but I couldn't help hearing the screams and thuds and other sounds of a huge struggle, sometimes growing fainter, sometimes slamming right up against the wall I hid behind. What seemed like hours later, when all had fallen silent, Angel came and took me out of my hiding place. All the anger had drained out of him, and he looked weary and sorrowful. He was not evil, and there was blood and gore everywhere. In silence we set to work cleaning up.
As I was scrubbing blood off of the ceiling in a corridor, I noticed there was a small shell fixed into a corner. As I watched, a small, green worm wriggled out and hung, like a drop of viscous fluid. I was worried that it would fall, and such a long fall would kill it, so I looked around and grabbed another small shell that I saw lying on the floor. As I held the shell beneath the little worm, the worm split in two, and one half dropped into the new shell, and the other half pulled itself back into the old one.
Where the worm had split, there was an orange liquid that I took to be its blood. But when I laid the shell I held gently onto a table, on a piece of paper, the new worm poked its end out and let the fluid drip onto the paper. The drop began to spread and darken and change colors, and words and pictures bloomed into life across the paper. The words formed a letter from a young man named Andy, but I could only read the signature, because the rest was in Chinese. The pictures were of lovely Chinese houses, in red brick and gray stone with gleaming marble ornamentation.
My friend got back from her heroic mission then, and, after gazing at the mess Angel was scrubbing up in the entry way, came to find me. I told her a very abridged version of the story, then showed her Andy's letter and the pictures. My friend was from China, and could read the letter. She was very moved by the story, and shared it with me.
Andy, it appeared, had died several years ago. He had been in his last stage of reincarnation, and had been granted admission into the blessed state, but had asked to go back for one last life, to share the beauty he had learned. So he had been reincarnated as the teaching snail, spreading the history of his last life. We who found his message were asked to appreciate it, and to add to it, if we would, by taking our own photos and fixing them onto the paper where he had written. The learning half of himself would absorb them, and, if we would reunite the two halves, the next person to encounter his lesson would see the beauty we had shared as well.
We thought we recognized the houses from a neighborhood in Dallas, so we wanted to go there and see if we could find Andy's family, and share his new story with them. We also thought hard about what we would add to the paper. We called some other friends together, and we all set out. It was a sort of pilgrimage.
We found ourselves in a quiet neighborhood tucked away in the bustling city of Dallas. There were no cars on these roads, and it seemed almost deserted. Some of the houses were obviously still maintained and lived in and loved, but every fourth house seemed to have been abandoned, and was falling into decay. And these were not small houses. Each one on the street was like a mansion, surrounded by lush gardens. They graying stones of the collapsed houses were covered in creeping ivies, as jungle growth sprouted in what had once been lavish halls and broad rooms.
We found the house that had been in the first picture. We thought it might be Andy's own, and we sat down to wait for the family to come home so we could ask them. Then I woke up.
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