“Was there anything,” asked the young priest, “that kept you awake at nights?”
The old priest frowned and looked the young priest in the eye. He said, “The enemy wants your church more than most of your congregation.”
The young priest swallowed. “How did you overcome this?”
The old priest looked away. “When I realized the enemy wanted our Lord more than we do, and he still gave himself for us, I gave myself to them.”
He penned her name on a name tag and handed it to her.
“Our villain is a somniambulist,” he said.
She snickered. “A sleepwalker? Well that should be easy for once.”
“No, not a somnambulist – from somnus, sleep. A somniambulist. From somnium. Dream.”
“A… dreamwalker?”
He nodded.
“Aren’t we all? I mean big deal he walks around in his dreams.”
“Not his dreams,” he said. “Ours.”
She frowned. They stepped into the conference room.
“A dreamwalker,” he said, “can only be defeated by someone with absolutely no imagination whatsoever.”
She processed this.
“Fine. Okay. So why are we wasting time at the…” She read the header on the printed agenda, “The 137th semi-quarterly meeting of the Southeast Sunnydale Homeowner’s Association?”
She looked up. “Oh!”
“Perhaps we’ll find our hero here,” he said.
They took their seats and hoped for the worst.