by T. L. Bodine
Overhead, clouds slowly drifted over the sky. They didn’t just resemble different shapes — they actually took form, fluffy artist renditions of ducks and palm trees and airplanes that scooted across the sky and twisted and formed new shapes before they disappeared over the horizon. In the distance, a low mountain range broke over the tree line. Beyond this a single purple peak rose into the sky, looking out-of-place and self-conscious. The birds in the trees sang and chirped as he walked past, and when he caught glimpses of them they were oddly shaped and improbably colored, as though they were made by someone who had molded them out of clay using a single reference photo and a whole lot of imagination.
He waited for her to start talking, but her eyes had wandered away again to watch the clouds overhead — which, at the moment, had taken the shape of a pair of kittens that raced and gamboled around in the sky. “Where am I?” he asked when he realized she wasn’t going to speak without prompting.
“Dreamland,” she said. “It’s…it’s a place where people come, when the real world doesn’t want them anymore.” She looked back at him, her face obscured by the translucent gossamer of her wing. “And where children visit, when they’re still young enough to find their way here. And, of course, it’s where faeries live.”
He wasn’t sure where to start with the questions. “What happens to them, then? When they get here?”
“Adrian…” she stopped, suddenly, and looked at him with eyes large and gleaming with emotion that threatened to burst out of her. “I like you, a lot. You’re different from who normally comes here.”
Adrian, flattered but confused, couldn’t find words to answer, and she pressed on.
“So I can’t tell you. Just…here. Come see the world, while it’s still light out, and if…I’ll explain it to you in the morning, if you still want to know.”
He couldn’t find it in his heart to argue with her; he had never seen anyone’s expression so earnest, so desperate, and certainly never poised on him with such innocent concern. She tugged his hand and led him out into her yard, and together they walked along the tree line.
Through the trees, he could make out a vague shimmering that he thought must surely be the unicorn. Butterflies as large as his palm fluttered between multi-colored wildflowers growing in patches between trees, and the air was sweet and unpolluted. Ahead, between the trees, he caught sight of a twisted, multi-hued shimmer that coiled on the horizon like a maelstrom made of rainbows.
Together, they completed a slow revolution around Sonia’s cottage, past the trees and the garden, and back up to the doorway. Sonia kept a tight grip on his hand, perhaps afraid that he might try to run if she gave him the chance.
“Night is falling. We’d best be back inside,” Sonia said as she ushered him back through the door.
“Already?” Adrian wondered, aloud, and glanced up at the sun. He must have slept most of his day away, he thought. There was no other explanation for how quickly the sun had moved across the sky. But, hadn’t it been lighter just a few minutes ago?
Sonia’s hand pressed against the small of his back, gently shoving him back into the cottage.
Inside, Zachariah was awake; he sat up, clutching his blankets to his chest, his eyes wide and blank, his expression slack. He stared vacantly at the wall across from him, and looked as though his mind had been thoroughly broken. That peaceful, unbothered expression was still on his face. It had been reassuring — even sweet — when he slept, but it looked wrong on his features now. His short-cropped hair stood up on one side of his skull, and, despite the warmth of the fire spreading through the small house and the blankets he was bundled in, he shivered slightly. “The cat’s got loose,” he said, his voice unsteady but quiet, muttering to himself. “Better run, kitty. There’s too many mice here for you to eat. They could eat you back.” He shuddered violently, his body giving a sort of sideways jerk, and fell silent.
“You can’t help,” Sonia murmured, and wrapped her hands around Adrian’s arm. “It’s always like this. He’ll suffer just a little longer, but then…well, he’ll stop suffering. It’s okay.”
“He’ll…are you saying he’s going to die?”
Her smile wavered a little, and she pushed him down onto his cot, holding either shoulder with her delicate hands, her face inches from his; he almost expected her to kiss him goodnight, but she withdrew. “He’s…” Her brow furrowed. “When people come through the portal — people like you and him — grown-ups, I mean.” She looked relieved, as though it had taken great effort to articulate this much, and carried on, “When grown-ups come through the portal, it does things to them. Like that.” She pointed at Zachariah, who was rocking slightly, arms wrapped around his knees, muttering to himself again. Sonia looked back at Adrian, hesitantly. “Dreamland…isn’t really made for grown-ups.”
“I’m all right,” Adrian said, almost defensively.
“Well, yes, you seem to be…” Sonia looked uncertain. “That’s enough, for tonight. I told you…I’ll explain it all, as best I can, tomorrow. For now, let’s just…” she trailed off, looking uncomfortable. After a moment, she looked up, her eyes hopeful, gently curious. “What’s it like? Where you’re from?”
He stared back at her, wondering why she was so desperate to change the subject, and decided pressing the issue would be unwise, as much as he wanted to. Instead, he leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes, and considered her question. “Well…I live in the suburbs,” he started, unable to think of any better place to begin. “So it’s not…there’s a lot of people, and buildings are closer together, and there’s pollution…” He wondered if he’d have to explain about pollution, but Sonia made no gesture of confusion so he carried on. “And there’s…technology. Cars, and computers, and airplanes…” He stopped, because he met her eyes and recognized the expression of someone whose question had not been answered the way she had intended it to be, and he fell silent, awkwardly.
“You. What are you like where you’re from?”
“Oh.” He considered this. “Well, I work with families who need help. Kids. Like if they’re being mistreated, or their family’s having trouble, I help them. I have a wife…well, I mean, an ex-wife. Sort of. So I live by myself now.”
Sonia nodded encouragingly, watching him with liquid eyes.
“And…” Emboldened, he pressed on. “Every morning, I go running, and after I shower I drink a protein shake and sometimes eat a piece of wheat toast. Then I go to work, and when I come home I eat a TV-dinner because…well, actually, I don’t really know how to cook, and if I eat a TV-dinner all the nutritional information is on the box.” He felt himself blush; somehow, in light of the strange and alluring food he had eaten since arriving here, admitting he ate TV-dinners seemed really pathetic. Actually, when stated so baldly, all of his life seemed pretty pathetic. He looked up, eager to change the subject. “How about you? What do you do?”
“This,” she said, and then, brow furrowed, “…Well, not this, exactly. That, actually.” She pointed at Zachariah. “That’s more like what I do.”
“I don’t understand?” He was starting to feel like a broken record.
“The portal,” she said, patiently. “It opens onto my land. I’m sure you must have seen it out there. I…find people who have fallen through, and I tend to them until…well…until they don’t need me.”
From across the room, Zachariah looked up, for a moment, and said clearly, “No, mother, I will NOT.” He looked defiant, and for a moment appeared ready to stand; then he collapsed back into his bed and resumed nonsensical muttering.
Adrian looked back at Sonia. “So it’s the fall through the portal that does….that?”
She nodded. “It shows up differently, in different people. Sometimes it’s very fast. Sometimes they seem just fine, and then….” She trailed off, looking at Adrian sadly. “Although, there’s some who think it’s not the portal that makes them crazy. That they find the portal because they’re already crazy. But either way
…that’s how they end up, eventually.”
Silence descended between them, and after a moment she glanced up, over her shoulder, at the darkness falling outside. Her wings, which had been fluttering gently, stood stiff and upright, like the hair of a frightened cat. “It’s coming,” she whispered, breathless. Her green eyes locked on his. “Listen. You seem strong. You remember. Maybe…maybe you have a chance.” She reached out, touched Adrian’s shoulder, and his flesh erupted into goosebumps beneath her fingertips. “Stay away from the floor. And don’t let them see that you’re afraid.”
“Don’t…”
She touched a finger to his lips to silence him. “There’s no time for questions. I’ll explain everything, in the morning, if you make it through the night.” With that bit of unnerving, obscure advice, she moved away from him, across the room to Zachariah.
What she did after that, Adrian had no idea — because, before he could react, before he could think, the world was immersed completely in darkness.
THE DARKNESS
Total blackness enveloped the cottage as though someone had thrown a blanket over the house, blocking out all hints that there had ever been light. Suddenly blinded, Adrian cried out, groping around himself for his bed, the wall, anything to give him a sense of place in the void. Where the overwhelming color of the tunnel had been disorienting, nauseating, this was worse — it felt like drowning, as though the darkness was a tangible substance pressed down on him, smothering him.
Claustrophobia, he thought, desperately; fear of being buried alive, fear of being consumed, deepest terrors of the human psyche.
Zachariah shrieked. Adrian heard him thrashing, struggling, his legs tangled in the blankets like an insect caught in a spider’s web. “Oh my god the cave the fucking cave please don’t make me —”
He stopped abruptly, as though someone had hit the ‘mute’ button.
In the darkness, Adrian heard whispers, scuffling, the movement of dark crawling things that breed in the night. The noise made him think of spiders, long-furred spindling legs carrying them across the floor; he thought of bats, the silken whisper of their wings on the night air; he thought of rats, chittering and scuffling quietly in the black. He pulled his blanket close to him, drawing it to his chin like a child. He huddled against the wall and felt himself tremble, feeling the brush of terrible creatures moving around him in the dark.
When he was a young child, before he had started his sleep ritual, Adrian would draw himself into his blankets each night. The posters around him would watch him with black, vacant eyes, and the branch outside his window would tap and scratch at the glass. He would wrestle, each night, with the certainty that something terrible lurked just beyond, in the utter darkness of sleep — something that wished to do him grievous harm.
He felt that now, the certainty, the terror. Something warm and oozing moved across his hand, and he let out a cry that was stifled by the blanketing dark.
He squeezed his eyes tightly against the darkness, as though he could block out the night with further dark — and then realized, as his eyelids slid closed, that he was no longer in the dark, but in the brightly-lit theater of his own mind. Feeling a sense of unease, he tried to open his eyes again, to escape the vision he had found himself within — but it was no use; his mind had surrendered the use of his body, and he was paralyzed, trapped within the familiar room he had built in his thoughts.
His thoughts traveled, against his will, to a door, which opened and swallowed him into the space he had always imagined as his mental panic room. This was the place where he kept things he had no intention of ever thinking about again. He had always imagined that the room was fitted with a large, steel safe, the kind with the big round wheel for a handle, and now he saw that with astonishing clarity as though he were really standing in a room that existed somewhere other than his own mind.
Realizing that, panic rose up in him, and he tried to think of something else — tried to envision something else. He tried to think of an elephant. It didn’t work. He tried not to think of an elephant, and that didn’t work either. Trapped in a room of his own making inside of his brain, Adrian glanced around uneasily at the things he had stored here, and found himself plunged suddenly into a memory.
He was four years old, and his mother had come home with the new baby, a little girl they had named Samantha. She was beautiful, and perfect in every way, with rounded, cherubic features and soft, downy blonde hair and huge green eyes.
Adrian hated her.
William had encouraged this hatred, had fostered it with careful jabs at Adrian’s meager sense of self. “Mommy won’t love you anymore, now that you’re not the baby.” That’s what William said. “I’m the oldest, so mommy will always love me, but now there’s a new baby, so she’s the youngest and you’re not anything. Just watch — mommy and daddy are going to forget all about you, and you’ll have to move out in the garage like a dog.”
It was cruelty of the kind only young children can wreak upon each other, and rooted only in William’s insecurity and desire for whatever power he could have. Adrian recognized that now, understood that, even forgave it — but some wounds cut too deep to ever heal, and Adrian could still feel the scar as it was laid open by the vision before him.
He had woken in the middle of the night and crept soundlessly into his parent’s bedroom to peer into his sister’s crib, to get a good look at her face-to-face, look his demon in the eye. He had slept in his parent’s bed until a few weeks ago, when they knew the baby would be coming any day; then he had been unceremoniously dumped in the terrifying darkness of his own bedroom, alone and scared, his position of honor usurped by the tiny being now before him, sleeping so soundly in her crib.
He looked down at her, and hated her, and wanted her gone from his life forever.
Consciousness touched the edges of his mind, and he realized that he again had feeling, control over his body, and he reached out in the dark, groping for something, anything, to reassure him of the reality around him, to reassure him that there was something outside of his mind. His hand brushed the rough wood grain of the wall, and slowly the world around him faded back into being.
It was dark, but not preternaturally so; he could see, in the gloom, the vague hint of the sunrise in the distance, lingering beneath the horizon. Sweat clung to his pores like the after-effects of a nightmare. His heart thudded in his chest, up in his throat, and there was another feeling, deep in his gut, a feeling of burning shame. Terrible guilt, intense and unshakable, wracked him, and he trembled; because a part of him had never stopped hating his sister, had never stopped resenting her…and it made it all his fault, what came next. He braced himself for it, but no further visions came, and he fell back against his bed, shivering and sweating.
Desperately, he fought to reconstruct the careful walls in his consciousness, the mental barriers that contained his demons. His mother had taught him, when he was very young, how to contain his emotion — she had explained to him how, when things became overwhelming he could put everything that he was unable to deal with into a box in his mind, seal the box and shut it up in a closet to deal with later. He found, in later years, that it was most effective if he locked the closet and never opened the boxes again. He’d imagined a bigger room, to contain all the boxes he needed. Eventually, when thoughts began to overflow the boxes, he had imagined file-cabinets; then he imagined the panic room, and the industrial-strength safe in the corner, and the padlocks on the door.
He felt tears on his cheeks, and total, complete exhaustion. His head lolled to the side, his muscles too weary to control it, and his eyes fell on Sonia, who was sitting up in a rocking chair, her legs folded beneath her, her chin in her hands, staring across the room at him with intense, blazing curiosity. He attempted to make some sign to her, to call out, to speak, but he was too tired; she said nothing, made no movement towards him. Slowly, uncontrollably, Adrian felt himself slipping off to sleep.
* * *
Whe
n he awoke again, the sun was streaming, bright and aggravatingly happy, through the window and over his face. He felt the warmth burning against his eyes and stared, a moment, at the red backs of his eyelids, and tried to remember why he was hurting so badly, and why his insides were trembling.
He sat up, slowly, tenderly, and cast a look around the room. He expected it to have been ransacked by those creatures last night — to have been torn apart by skittering claws, or stained by crawling ooze. It hadn’t been, and everything was as it was, where it should be. The fire smoldered low in the embers at the hearth, and Sonia dozed in her rocking chair, her knees pulled up to her chest and face buried in her knees, curled up like a wild mouse. Adrian’s eyes wandered to the corner, to Zachariah’s pile of rags, and found that they were empty — Zachariah was gone.
Intrigued, he rose from his cot, casting a furtive glance at Sonia’s sleeping figure, and crept forward to examine the rags and blankets. Perhaps Zachariah had risen from his sleep and wandered off, he thought; maybe he had crept away in the darkness. Or maybe the darkness crept off with him.
He had just started to convince himself that the whispers in the dark had been no more than a dream, an unpleasant hallucination created by darkness and exhaustion. There had been no real threat, he thought — not really, just smoke and mirrors and unpleasant childhood memories, that was all.
And yet, he thought, looking down at the nest Zachariah had slept in. He looked back up at the door, still bolted from the inside — and then down, again, his eyes sliding into focus on something which had not registered for him before, something impossible and horrifying.
