With their infantry momentarily diffused into the night, the generals of the nightmare army closed in. I could sense the cold fires of their blue eyes reaching out to me, eager to snuff my solidity. I wasted no time acquiring the dwelling of the man I had come to consult. Strangely, the floating creatures withdrew to the farthest darkness, their blue eyes dying like stars at dawn. I wondered if I’d crossed into a space beyond their power. Whatever the reason for their retreat, I had reached my destination. I sat down for a time to regain my strength, drifting into gentle memories of standing in the rain with my mother.
CHAPTER SIX
Reverence is an interesting word, often applied more discriminately than others of its caliber. So, when the young man I had come to see used it to describe his feelings toward his dreams, I felt inclined to listen a bit more carefully.
“There is wisdom within my dreams,” the Sleep Sage said, “beyond the pull of standard reason and logic. It is crafted from experiences that have not been filtered through the waking senses, and so persists as a knowing without conventional form or substance.” The man barely moved, lying on his bed, looking at the moths orbiting a naked bulb. Where the electricity came from to supply the light, I had no idea. The city was in ruins, but I was sure it wasn’t suffering from a paucity of energy resources, no matter how gruesome or unearthly.
“Moths,” he continued. “They are so much different than butterflies. They recall the difference between waking and dreaming. You see, the butterfly is a beautiful creature, but only and ultimately explicit, wearing its colors upon the dust of its wings. Such a creature can only decorate the world, just a living bow tied whimsically around a gust of wind, fluttering beautifully, pointlessly. Like most things, the butterfly is really just a dried-up dream that has lost its connection to the other side, and so has become an exhibition without substance or source.
“The moth, however, is a great adventurer, a night-thing—it is the custodian of uncommon desires. Not content with only its wings and the open air, it yearns for more, and so drowns itself in the night, every night, looking for something. What it seeks no one knows, not even the moth. It simply knows that what is, is all wrong—and there must be something greater hiding behind the night’s darkness, something more wonderful than even tireless wings and an infinity of night could ever provide.
“It is as if the moth’s entire life were designed for a singular purpose—escape. Or perhaps it was merely designed to believe that it exists in a place that needs escaping from, and that its nightly passions are somehow sufficient to locate a way out. A dream, you understand, takes wing into the unknown as well, traveling and never arriving, always searching for an exit and rarely finding one.”
Obviously, I disagreed with his characterization of the Deadworld, as it could never be decorated—it can only ingest beauty, leaving behind the dry bones of devoured dreams. Yet the man’s expertise lay in dreams and not the waking world, so I forgave the mistake—although his characterization of the butterfly was indeed correct.
He looked away from the whirling moths and stared straight at me, smiling slightly. “But you did not come here to talk about butterflies, did you? No, you want to know about the moths—about those strange dreams you’re having.” I nodded, and his eyes took on a strange energy, as if they were aglow in some other spectrum of light, or darkness. He directed his undetectably radiant gaze beyond the gaping hole in his ceiling, freeing his vision into the wet black sky. The rain was light, its soft patter blending easily with the gentle breeze.
“This place,” he continued, “the entire city, has rested upon the precipice of some hazy and forgotten dreamworld ever since the daemon-sleep arrived from beyond our furthest nightmares. I’ve been dreaming myself closer and closer to that world every day and night, stealing into its pallid, high-walled lanes, eating of its food, spending my living years on dream after dream of a world that is precisely not this one.
“Do you think I leave this bed to eat? Of course not. I sustain myself there—within the grey drifting fields broken only by spindly trees and the ruins of visions long since passed. I partake of the whispering fruit and drink the weird smoldering waters tumbling across the endless sky like herds of rushing ghosts. And what about this body of mine, this youthful weight that lies before you? It is only a point of reference. My mind has spent so little time here that my body has barely aged. But I am far from young, farther still from truly old. I say this only to inform you of the paths that I have walked to learn what I know—and I know what I know quite well.” I said nothing, only waited for him to continue. His eyes returned to the room and back to the wheeling moths.
With no small amount of concentration, he began a new tale. “Quite a few dreams ago, I was wandering a damp passageway constructed from interlocking basements, each one opening into the next by way of a different type of subterranean entrance. I encountered an entity who referred to himself as the King of Cellars. He was an affable old fellow, so I visited with him beneath the weak illumination of old and crusty light bulbs. We were having quite a pleasant time, talking and philosophizing as we drank from our chipped cups of softly sweetened tea, when from deep below we heard the savage bluster of numerous and clearly enormous wolves.
“The Lord of Basements remarked on the sounds only when he saw how frightened I’d become, saying ‘Mine is not the deepest kingdom, for far below us lurks a pit deeper than any traditional spaces—and most non-traditional spaces, for that matter—could ever hope to admit. Those inhabiting that great depression are nearly as old as the machines that gave emptiness its color and numbered the dust. The great company of the pit are generally a quiet lot, but recently, one of them has become quite busy. I can hear the strange sounds of its dark enterprise, occasionally.’
“When I asked about the demonic wolves, he said only, ‘The industrious one that I mentioned is lean and voracious, and the wolves are its voice. It speaks stolen breaths into hungry sentences made from packs of frothing wolves, wherein each ravening word can hunt and kill. It is speaking now, but to whom, I cannot say.’
“My host would say no more, and I was relieved to move past the topic at the time, as the deep sounds nearly startled me awake. However, after I departed the Kingdom of Cellars and its charming ruler, I resolved to learn more about this creature, the thing with a voice filled with wolves. Eventually, this entity became a point of some fascination for me, and so I dreamed as deeply as I was able, trying to find some trace of this pit of which the Cellar King made mention.
“After many dreams of unsuccessful questing, I finally located an ancient nightmare drifting alone in a sea of muted screams, replaying its bloody history over and over again. The apparent dreamers of this nightmare had been many and monstrous, but long dead. Strangely, as I explored the contents of the abandoned vision, it seemed that the dreamers had not only shared the same dream, but had actually killed one another within it, their battles still echoing in blood and memory. I returned to the dream often, and every time I sank beyond its cold membrane of shiftless sleep, setting foot upon the shores of its old death, I would feel eyes upon me, amused it seemed at my revulsion for the many evils it once contained. The sum of my many stolen glimpses would suggest that the dream is not the property of what I first took to be its dreamers, but rather a creation of another being entirely, likely the Unbegotten entity the Cellar King and I had overheard, so many dreams prior.
“It seems to me to be a construct, forged from powers that partake from no earthly source, functioning much like a dream—it joins with sleeping minds, granting such souls passage into its secreted spaces. And still it is not a dream for true—it holds the potential to be much more, something else entirely. You see, the thing starts out quite empty, just the potential for a dream, but as it blends with a sleeping mind, it begins to fill up, taking the shape of its contents. Yet even these attributes wouldn’t visibly set it apart from any garden-variety dream. No, it’s magic re
sts with the thing’s ability to grow beyond sleep, to master the inferior world of waking. Further texturing its composition is that it is highly selective, choosing only the ripest, reddest dreams—those whose bloody vision might be sufficient to fuel its capacity to overcome reality.
“It is this last point that explains why the monstrous dreamers had been assembled—to claim the honor of embodying the Red Dream.
But this also reveals the cruelty of the thing, for the dream is not fitted to merely a single dreamer, but to many—monsters all dreaming the same dream. And it is through that red facility the dreamers will come to know one another, find one another, and finally, kill one another.
“However, on the last occasion I visited the dream, all was not quiet but for the baying of dead beasts. The nightmare was filling up with the voices of fresh wolves, growing hot with hunger and blood. These new creatures began falling upon one another, rending flesh from bone, and the dream had been removed from the depths of forgotten silence, lifted into red pools of terrible sleep. As I departed, familiar eyes watched me go, something whose age was nearly as deep as the pit itself. When its sight had fallen entirely upon me, I felt my dream-self nearly explode from the heat. I awoke that night to blankets of fire.”
The man threw his gaze at a hump of burned sheets piled crudely in one corner of the shabby room. “But before I awoke, I caught a passing glance at the thing that could cast fire from slumber. It wore the likeness of a darkened shepherd, and it bore in its hand a bleeding crook.”
I recalled the Crucifier’s yellowed journal. “You speak of the Shepherd of Wolves, do you not?”
The man looked a bit irritated, as if I’d disrupted the rhythm of his carefully planned sermon. “Of course. He is the thing that calls to you—and all the rest of your kind.” He waited for the words he knew I would speak.
“I have no ‘kind,’ dreamer. I am no wolf. I am a repairer of dreams, an artist. Everything else is merely parenthetical—nothing more, nothing less.”
“Are you an artist, indeed?” the man said. “I will say this for you—you are different. But you have no idea what you are, do you?” Some of his words were like the distant notes of a weakly remembered song. His latest words were offensive, but his was the knowledge of things that walked the distant shores of dream, not of matters concerning the business of firmer worlds. He was again forgiven, or at the least ignored.
His smile returned to light up invisible worlds. He was quite pleased with himself. “You have no choice but to play the Shepherd’s Game, and you have every reason to play it well, my giant friend. You see, the Shepherd is one of the Unbegotten. His will, even from down within so deep a hole, is simply inevitable. He cannot be denied his sport. He wrote you an invitation in blood and twilight, and he means for you to join him and all the others in a game that can displace stars and conjure worlds from whispers.”
“And should I win, the Red Dream is mine for the wielding?” I asked, my curiosity rising.
“Who is to say? The Shepherd is as mysterious as the nightmare that dismembered Boston and raised New Victoria from its riven corpse. The wills and ways of such things are not for us to know. We simply symbolize their power, in the same way ink symbolizes our thoughts on paper—though we are not the ones holding the pen.”
I took a moment to consider the man’s words, imposing them atop the Game and its players, sifting for a theory, if not the facts. Might the Red Dream itself be the prize? A thing made whole in the winning, a power for the taking by the last wolf? It was an appealing thought, one worth further exploration—and killing. Which led me to my next question.
“I have one final query for you, dreamer,” I said, sensing the answer stirring within him. “What do you know of the dreams of Sara Kane?”
The man’s grin spread wide. “You mean, of course, Black Molly Patience. She is a poisonous one, a cannibal who walks under the world, serving her darkest appetites. Her underground tunnels, sweet venoms, and secret trapdoors are the very stuff of children’s nightmares. She has stalked the underbelly of humanity since the close of the Great Darkness, chewing the courage of an entire generation down to its rubbery gristle.”
The information transformed another name on my kill list into a wickedly wonderful thing. The thought of finding her darkness and making it my own was exhilarating, though I couldn’t help but imagine the toll such an act would exercise upon my conscience. How could I forgive myself for such a thing? And why would this “Shepherd” want me to do the Mother of the Deadworld the favor of removing one of her greatest enemies?
“You are like a feral angel—powerful, pure, and deadly. But you are likewise ultimately beholden to greater powers,” the Sage said. “I envy you, though—I must sleep to find my dreams, yet here you are in the middle of the solid world, hunting and hunted by them. But my envy goes only so far before it is replaced by pity. While you have the good fortune of being wrapped in wildest visions, day and night, I have walked between the headstones of that crimson nightmare, and I know—it does not end well.”
“Graveyards can be gardens, dreamer,” I replied, “and death can be as fertile as the blackest soil. Perhaps you wandered a garden that had been poorly planted, one only waiting to be sown with better seed.” My insight indulged my best hopes. I knew that dreams were tricky beasts, and even the most seasoned dreamer is likely to misinterpret them. As any good dreamer knows, dreams make promises carved in smoke and speak in the hissing sibilance of snakes. “While we’re lingering upon this issue of grim inevitability, I would very much like to know how you’ve come to be ignored by the things that inhabit this city.”
“That is a particularly interesting topic, given your previous mention of gardens,” the dreamer said. “You see, I too am being cultivated. This very bed I sleep upon is invaluable to the creatures that dwell here. Every time I return from dream, a little bit of my journey is left behind within its sheets, its rusted frame and creaking headboard. These creatures possess a kind of technology that harvests it for their own strange purposes. I learned all of this upon the close of the first day I entered New Victoria, just weeks after the plague began. After making my way through the silent crowds of shambling sleepwalkers, past screeching birth knells of infant nightmares, I finally took shelter in the spacious rooms of a derelict house, set gently afloat in the untended hands of a small meadow.
“At that point, I had become far too familiar with the unearthly sounds of nightmares risen from sleep, and so failed to immediately investigate the metallic droning that vibrated the ceiling. Eventually, the sounds of something creeping toward my bed renewed my exhausted curiosity. When I gazed into a small patch of moonlight falling from the bed to the floor, I could see the creeping machinations of a curious industry—throbbing, semi-organic tubers slithering across the floor and crawling up from beneath my bed.
“Of course, I was quick to leap from the bed, and just in time—a ganglionic tangle of smaller tubers descended the unseen corners of the dark room and seized my pillow within a death-grip of extruded hooks and needles. Shortly after the creeping lengths of flesh and steel had all but cocooned my previous sleeping arrangements, the collective apparatus of varied organics began to pulsate with a kind of sickening rhythm, composed of an orderly exchange between slurping and chewing sounds. It took no great amount of thought for me to deduce the strange technologies were extracting dreams from the materials of the bed. In fact, anything in routine contact with dreams was susceptible to the power of the alien devices.
“As perhaps you are uniquely positioned to understand, any dream that can survive waking—even in the minutest amounts—is a quantifiable victory over all of this intractable waking foolishness. So, these things have smartly devised a means by which no amount of residual dream is suffered to waste. Since that night, the things have left me to my own devices—so long as I dream in the right direction and do not distract them from their work.
&
nbsp; “And with that, I can offer you no further insights. Eyes are upon me, and I am only tolerated here as long as I remain a quietly ripening fruit, not a vulgar flower that gathers stinging pests.”
As a parting gift, the dreamer granted me one last bit of insight—a secret route allowing me safe passage beneath the city. I walked through the damp blackness of a long hallway toward the elevator. The dimmest of lights shone from above the vintage conveyance, its illumination little more than a glowing darkness indicating the direction of its travel.
As I boarded the lift, and just before its doors slid shut, I heard the piercing screams of the man I’d left to his demanding sleep. Apparently, the Wakeless had made a calculated decision concerning their pursuit of me, its execution boding poorly for my insightful friend, waxing resource or not. I knew there was nothing to be done for the man, so I hoped the better part of his mind somehow managed to escape into the weightless and rushing waters of his precious dreams. Sadly, the colder, more rational part of my mind knew better.
The doors opened into a basement, and I took a moment to look for entities who might preside over it in some official capacity. Yet, as much as the city partook in dreams, it seemed not to include the pleasant company of Cellar Kings and their subterranean sovereignties. This was not to say that some echo of the Kingdom of Cellars was entirely absent—a wonderfully wide hole occupied a wall, opening into a labyrinth of earthen tunnels. I quickly moved beyond the opening into the meandering maze of widely hewn stone.
The Red Son Page 7
