Somewhere in front of me, I heard a voice. “You’ve left nightmares behind from your last visit, little artist. They’ve grown enormous and terrible in your absence. They would just love to see you again.” Something immediately began pushing into my mind. At the same time, a physical presence drew close to me, reaching out. Before the invading forces had a chance to unveil themselves, my father stepped in front of me. Bellowing, the axe fell, cleaving into flesh, bone, and noxious spirit. His rage elicited some of the most exquisite shrieks I’ve ever heard. My father’s jeering laughter chased the inhuman screams to where they seemed to tumble and die away, deep into the unwaking spaces beyond or merely behind the material world. What a wonderful place, this city of yours! He exclaimed in a voice of steel and thunder. So full of dreams that bleed and scream and die!
With the gloom parted, I could see clearly the most conspicuous contents of the room—the riven body of one of the quartet of women. She had the expressionless eyes of a bird. Her mouth outlined only her last cracked breath. She had been dead for hours, unceremoniously stuffed into a body bag. It was not her that had absorbed my father’s fury, but that which she carried—the woman’s womb was filled with something gigantic and inhuman. Her lower torso was so incredibly bloated that it had burst the thick plastic confines of the body bag. The corpse of the unborn thing was a labor of hideous departures from human anatomy, pushing so tightly against the woman’s skin that the details of the creature could be seen quite clearly.
The unborn nightmare was easily the size of a bear. One of its claws extended out toward me, stretching flesh far beyond its natural limits. Most noteworthy was the creature’s massive jaws, a cavernous maw filled with serrated, dimly glowing hooks. The monster had been severed almost in two by my father, and its mouth, like its mother’s, was frozen around its last otherworldly sound—a scream no human vocal chords could produce. Within seconds, the thing pent behind dead, striated flesh disappeared, leaving behind what looked like an empty sack made of flaccid skin and splattered blood. In the ether, I thought I could hear an invisible descent of something plunging into eternity, its limp body occasionally clapping against the walls encapsulating its journey.
It seemed the rumors I’d heard were correct—when caught sleeping in New Victoria, men were stolen away by their nightmares, while women gave physical birth to them. I grew annoyed at my father’s impatience, denying me the sight of a nightmare breeching sleep. Yet such was my father’s way, always overzealous where killing is required. Still, just before my father had broken the grip of the nightmare, I glimpsed something in the gutted spaces of my mind, through the hole made by the burrowing vision—a lost memory of my childhood.
I’m sure I spied lines of small cages filled with children, all of them pale and staring. As I looked over the hazy fragment, I could feel my family’s collective disapproval burning me, so I gently set the memory down and watched it sink into oblivion. But before the memory had all but disappeared, a voice managed to slip free. It was no more than a sound, really, too weak to intimate words or meanings. I was surprised when it resonated with something deep within me, eliciting a reaction I thought all but conquered—fear. I quickly turned my attention back to the outside world, replacing the unwanted emotion to its place within the fading memory.
The rest of the room was unspectacular, decorated with an assortment of squirming mildew, whirling dust, and creeping shadow—nothing one wouldn’t expect to find in a haunted morgue. With nothing else to command my attention, I reversed my course. Wrapping the newly liberated shadows tightly around myself and stepping into a dense fog of silence, I withdrew up the stairs, possessed of more wisdom than when I had descended.
The solitude of the first floor had come alive with a tangible vigilance, and I could hear the breathing of countless sleeping victims of the dream plague, all of them tucked away into the strangest places—heating vents, under floorboards, and all the smallest places one would never think to find a body. The massive collection of sleeping minds likely merged their dreams to form a great passage projecting beyond the strained limits of human sleep, emptying into lands where the oldest earthy darkness constitutes only the freshest topsoil.
Having satisfied my curiosity—as much as was healthy—I put aside my search for the impregnated women and renewed my quest for insight into my wolf-haunted dreams. I decided to move by rooftop, and so made my way to the top of the hospital.
Along the way, I snatched small glimpses into the hospital rooms on either side of the hallway. Each space succored the pain of its former occupants as a mother nurses her child, and nowhere was there an inch of wall, floor, or ceiling that had not known fluids better kept within the human body. As I neared the top of the building, I foolishly loosed a smile, causing my sisters to erupt into terrifying laughter. They had always found my face, when broken by a crooked smile, a most amusing sight. No doubt inspired by my sisters’ insistent laughter, a pounding rhythm of heavy feet began to shake the floor beneath me as something closed from behind. I tried to quicken my pace, but my sisters’ laughter was contagious. Soon I was so heavy with mirth that I tumbled to the floor. The joy of running through a solid nightmare raised from the depths of alien dreams was simply too much for me.
My father, however, was not amused. This is no monster born of nightmares, but a patient wolf come to cross your name off its list! Rise up and kill, idiot boy! My father was right. The footsteps quickly vanished into silence as flashing blades began hissing through the shallows of my body. Still, I couldn’t stop laughing.
Given my rather foolish, if not entirely ridiculous condition, hiding and stalking were certainly out of the question, so I decided to simply meet the wolf head-on. The decision was apparently mutual, as the Wolf took no care at all in his approach, but only launched himself at me the moment he appeared. Whoever he was, he was on the larger side of the spectrum, wore all black, and brandished ornate daggers. He was upon me in a second.
My fist exploded across lips and teeth, ruining all, sending their owner soaring into a nearby wall. My family enjoyed testing my mettle from time to time, and so were content to stand back and watch as the wolf and I joined battle.
I rather admired this killer, following me as he had into a city far deadlier than his quarry. I almost thanked him, but my name blazed across his kill list, and he would only stop after my death or his own. Unfortunately for him, my death wasn’t a feat he could manage—not even in a city where dreams have the preternatural tendency to come true.
I caught the killer by his forearms and squeezed. The bones of his arms snapped like dry twigs, and his knives fell from his vanquished hands. The wolf was unfazed however, somehow breaking free and thrusting his heavily-booted foot squarely into my face. But my body was chiseled from unfiltered purpose, and blows from even the greatest beast would not immediately prevail against it. Suddenly, the wolf wrapped his shattered arms around my midsection, and in a display of exhilarating desperation and strength, lifted me into the air and smashed us both through a nearby window. The cool wind, the bottomless night, the weightless blood and glass that caught the moonlight, the raging wolf himself—gifts, all. Our descent ended violently atop a large rooftop. Debris and blood rained down around us, the fallout from a beautiful dream. I rose to my feet, but the poor wolf would never rise again. The sight cut me deeper than his knives. Finally, I stopped laughing.
The din of battle melted away, and I inherited the remaining names from the dead hunter’s list. I looked into the night—it was thinly pierced by the tiny amber lights of distant glowing windows. What power or device illuminated the rooms behind those windows, I couldn’t say. They shined like gentle stars made from the calm of autumn. And the moon, while visible, seemed restrained by the city’s presence—only the dimmest light drifted down to the world below. As I took in these exquisite sights, the wind grappled with my coat, snatching at my hair and beard. I took a deep breath, wondering if I inhale
d air or darkness.
A slightly elevated rooftop hovered nearby, well within range of a spirited leap, so I climbed into the night, soon reaching the apex of my ascent. My destination was visible at this vantage—a distant and nearly collapsed apartment high-rise. Traveling the open streets was too risky an alternative, so I decided to find another way across to the next building.
After I quietly laid my shoulder into it, the rooftop door opened gently enough. The muted sound flitted down the narrow stairwell and would have gained the hallways below, had it not been for my expanding silence. I descended to the first stairwell door, entering the hallway of the fourteenth floor. The passage was dark and cobwebbed, so I crept along like a spider, plucking at the shadows and silence, testing the way ahead. Suddenly, the sound of a cracking whip exploded into the hallway. A few seconds later, a pulsating amber light made its way into the corridor, emerging from an open doorway several apartments away.
Something advanced beneath the silence, displacing shadows as it moved. Sidestepping into an adjacent apartment, I disappeared into the null of forgotten places. Music of some sort began to melt out of the air, blowing softly across the hallway and into my hiding place. The lights in the hall turned on, dimming to the weakest orange glimmer, soon followed by the lights inside the apartment I occupied. Eager to see what would come next, and with my silence wrapped securely around me, I took the most comfortable seat in the room and waited.
The music became almost tangible, forming a kind of transparent membrane that settled across the room, enveloping everything. The light itself blended into the mysterious composition as the wax and wane of the tender illumination transitioned into floating, glowing notes. The cadence of my breathing merged with developing harmony, and the movement of my very thoughts dissolved into nothing more than an accompanying rhythm. I was being consumed by the music, digested into a string of notes within its trilling bowels.
I tried to think past the horde of deadly sounds, but my every thought became a note within the widening theatre of melodies. My only hope was silence. I could feel the hungry music trying to master and devour it, but it was unyielding. That area of the contest became the focus of my attention. I listened as never before, to a soundless song only I could hear. Suddenly, the rapacious sounds vanished from the room, moving past me down the hall, still eating away at the world by means of the music and melody.
With the nightmare music gone, I slipped from the room and reentered the hallway, approaching the apartment where the unearthly music seemed to have originated. I took to the deepest shadows, minding my every movement, yet I couldn’t resist peering as far into the room as I could. The apartment was filled with rusted musical instruments, suspended from the walls by large hooks, strung with glistening webs of what seemed to be saliva. Sitting in the middle of the room was a man sharply dressed in the dusty apparel of an orchestra conductor. Instead of a conductor’s baton, his right hand held what appeared to be a lion tamer’s whip. He was apparently sound asleep, bearing the signature features of a man afflicted with the advanced stages of the infamous sleeping sickness. His eyes were completely sealed shut, so much so that there was no distinguishing the fact that eyes had ever occupied the unbroken expanse of smooth skin that now lay placid and pale above his cheeks. He sat disturbingly still, only occasionally whimpering in his sleep. The pathetic sound seemed to come from an impossible distance buried somewhere deep within the man—as if he were crying out from the yawning depths of a deep pit.
After squeezing myself carefully through a large window and onto the fire escape, I paused to survey the night air and the dank alley below. I pondered my chances of getting out of the city alive—or more accurately, awake. My eyelids had already gathered more weight than was normal, and exhaustion closed upon me like a vice. But to sleep was to die, at the very least.
A seperate fire escape clung to the building across the alley. The distance was outside my comfort zone, but not my ability. Another determined leap saw me to the other side, my movements precise and unsounding. I climbed to the roof, ever aware of things eager to catch me off guard. Yet I also felt my family’s vigilance surrounding me like smoke, seeking to feast upon the screams of whatever would take me for prey. Having reached the top of the building, I caught sight of a glassed-in penthouse, replete with a spacious veranda. A large telescope sat affixed to its outermost rim.
The worlds that wheeled overhead were pale alternatives to the sights I hoped to glimpse by aiming my magnified gaze at the concrete forest around me. With any luck, lighted windows might grant me further insight into the delightful nightmares pretending to be an abandoned city. A lingering curiosity concerning the quartet of women caused me to turn the glass toward the east, the direction from which they’d entered the city. Their original number diminished, I sought out the remaining three, curious as to their contents.
As if chance had answered my unspoken wish, I caught sight of something moving through the hallways of the hospital I had previously visited. It was indeed one of the women. She was strapped to a hospital gurney being conducted down a poorly lit corridor. The gurney was propelled by a creature that was largely imperceptible, as I could only discern its presence by the effects it exercised upon the shadows it touched—they seemed to adhere to the invisible thing, clinging to it like tar, supplying only a minimal suggestion of shape and size. From what I could make out, it was a thing of nonsensical construction—an organism that begrudged nothing to the traditional symmetries of earthen biology, partaking its shape solely from purest chaos. The unorthodox creature continued to push the gurney down the hallway, occasionally plucking the clinging shadows from the amorphous swelling that rose high and hideous from the woman’s abdomen. From under her distended flesh, the dim outline of a germinating nightmare was scarcely visible as a mass of shifting shapes, twisting and flipping as if trying to assemble itself, one inhuman limb at a time. Suddenly, the head of the thing obtained a terrible definition as it pressed hard against its cage of flesh. It seemed to turn its attention toward the captured woman, leering into her panicked face. The unborn creature projected its hungry glare beyond its gilding of human skin, laying a cold glow across the dull and sightless eyes of its mother, eyes long since lost to the world beyond and behind them.
The woman was finally delivered into a large room lit only by a small collection of thin candles. After placing the woman in the middle of the room, her guide waddled back down the hallway by which it came, leaving wet shadows in its tracks. The woman struggled against the bonds that secured her head, arms, and feet to the gurney. However, after careful observation, I realized the movements were not her own, but the actions of the thing inside her. Her body—nothing but a pulsing gestational sac—began to rapidly swell beyond the scope of the gurney, her bulging mass spilling to the floor and rolling across the dirty tile like thick tides of mud. All the while, the woman’s terrified expression never changed. Her mind and body were nothing but debris, broken dolls in an abandoned house—but she was aware.
The thing that was once a woman suddenly burst apart from the inside, releasing a septic spray of inhuman fluids that drowned all the candles, save one. By the solitary glow, the infant nightmare stripped off its mother like wet clothing, dropping what was left of her in a steaming heap of molted flesh. As the light played over the thing, trembling as it described what should not be, I beheld what seemed a demonic toddler dressed in the vintage garments of a mortician. The breathing dream waved its dainty inhuman hand before its eyes, inspecting the solidity of its new world, wondering perhaps if it might vanish back into the nightmare from which it came. Evidently quite satisfied with its new accommodations, it smiled with a thousand tiny teeth and walked off into the fade of the outer hallway, vanishing like a secret.
“They’re our brides, called home from the distant cities we’ve secretly visited, if only in dreams. Our reach is only growing, despite the paltry fences your kind have put up to const
rain us,” the mysterious voice said behind me. “Our breeders of fittest nightmare, those women. Men like you—why, you’re our beasts of burden, naturally.” I spun around to find a man floating above the floor, a ridiculous stovepipe hat on his head, eyes like hidden moons. A thin covering of flesh marked the space for normal eyes, yet behind that seal of skin glowed alien-blue lights, bright enough to backlight the tiny organic networks of the intervening tissues. The radiant blue of his eyes-behind-flesh was the color of sleep, and it washed over me like gentle water, sweeping me out to strange seas. It was one of the Wakeless—the true denizens of the City that Never Wakes, wearing whatever hapless dreamer it snatched from sleep—and I knew I had to escape its light. They possessed a depth far deeper and more dangerous than the distance from the balcony to the ground—so I leapt from the building.
I tumbled far longer than necessary to complete my descent, and the further I plummeted, the lighter my body felt. By the time I reached the streets below, I was nearly weightless. When my feet finally touched the ground, I looked up at the city—it had changed considerably. It was the dread face of New Victoria I had witnessed only once before. I suddenly realized my mistake. I hadn’t actually fallen from the building, but had suffered a far worse fate—I had fallen asleep.
CHAPTER FIVE
Emerging on the other side of New Victoria, I confirmed everything I had suspected from my first visit—fear is the temperature at which dread solidifies, and conversely, the point at which stolid reality dissolves. A scream can become the glass of a window, frozen into place like a wicked memory, conducting blood-dimmed light through its invisible body. Sleep is a place where worlds spin atop the heads of pins and oceans gather into nutshells, and New Victoria is only the most visible part of a nightmare prowling the unclean depths of humanity’s collective unconscious.
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