The Darkness of Dreamland

by T. L. Bodine

  These drew his eye and he made his way toward them.

  As he came up to the bar he caught a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye — a gleam of silver that caught the dim light in the tavern. He jumped in his skin, reeling away from the bar, and nearly tripped over one of the stools.

  Lorelai, who had been kneeling behind the counter to fuss with something in a low cabinet, stood. She shook her waist-length hair back over her shoulder. “Don’t need to be so jumpy,” she said, at a volume that seemed inappropriate in the hush that fell over the room. “Where’s your babysitter, human?”

  “The name is Adrian,” he said, but he didn’t feel much bravado. Maybe because it was accurate: Sonia was his babysitter, or surrogate, or at least his guide. He tried to think of something witty, or at least confident, to follow with, and came up short.

  His eyes, moving without his permission, fixated again on the jars.

  “Sonia hasn’t told you what’s in them, has she?” Lorelai asked, following his gaze. A smile touched on her lips. It was hard and cold, and her eyes glinted like burnished steel. “I’m not surprised.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But he thought back to the time in the carriage, when he had asked her about them and she had sidestepped the question. At the time, it hadn’t seemed important — not when at any moment his stomach was going to do a barrel-roll — but now he thought back on it and was certain that she had changed the topic on purpose.

  “Sure you do,” Lorelai said casually. She ducked back down under the counter and returned with a damp cloth, which she began to absently smear over the top of the bar. Her eyes glanced up, just once, and she gave him the sort of hard, appraising look he had often seen on his grandmother’s face during the months she came to stay with his mother after the divorce: the look that said “you’re going to wear that, are you?” in a way that was both piercingly insightful and completely derogatory. “I imagine you were up all night keeping a balefire burning.”

  The statement — and it was a statement, not a question — caught him off-guard. “Well…yes.”

  “I hope you had fun.” Lorelai’s eyes dropped back down to the bar. She scrubbed at a sticky patch, scraping at it with a thumbnail through the damp cloth. “It’s a waste of energy, but entertaining enough.”

  “You’re not really explaining what’s in the jars,” Adrian said. “If that’s what you meant to be getting at.”

  “Nothing gets past your notice,” she replied, without looking up. “Dream-energy, is what it is. Dream-energy that your little Sonia siphons from the doomed and dying.”

  “…Dream-energy?”

  “You’re not so bright, one-who-remembers or not.” Lorelai, finally satisfied with whatever stain she had been picking at, moved down to shine another part of the bar. Adrian’s reflection stared up at him from the now-glossy surface. “Do I have to spell it out for you? Dream energy. A hundred times more powerful than balefire. A thousand, if you can get it from a child…but slim chances of that on this side of the lake.”

  He tried to make sense of this. He remembered the “Used Dreams” sign he had seen the day before. He could also swear he had heard something about dreams in a story, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember; everything had jumbled and faded into a haze. A dream had slept with a merchant’s wife, right? No, that wasn’t it. But something like that. “So…in the jars. That’s…a dream? Like, I-go-to-sleep dreams?”

  Lorelai made an impatient noise. “Sometimes. Not always. Any strong, irrational thought forms a dream. The kind we get here,” she gestured at the bottles of languid, viscous smoke, “are weak, torn out of the heads of grown-ups who hardly have anything left upstairs. Just vapors, really. Good for one use, maybe two. But the good stuff, the kind they keep for themselves in the Center Kingdom — that’s quality dreamstuff. Dreams over there are strong enough to actually come alive. They walk and talk and live just like the rest of us, and you can milk one dream for years before it finally disappears. Of course, there’s an embargo on corporeal dreams, nobody will dare trade them at market. They’re too precious.” Something like a snarl curled the corner of her lips, her face temporarily transfigured into something beastly, and then it was gone, her face once more an ageless mask. “But sometimes one… becomes available…through other means.”

  She looked up at him, then back at the rows of shelves behind the bar. She reached out and took a small vial down, popping the cork off with her thumb. “Here,” she said, nodding to him. “I’ll just show you. It’ll make more sense.”

  She tilted the vial and something poured out — a semi-viscous cloud of purple-blue smoke, about the size of a golf ball. It rolled in on itself like a tiny sun, wisps trailing off in all directions. Inside, Adrian thought he could make out a shape in its core, the faintest suggestion of a bird, its wings flared — but then the image was gone, and the smoke dissipated. It hung over the bar in a shimmering haze.

  Without fully meaning to do it, Adrian reached out a hand to touch the smoke. His fingers brushed through it, and he felt a jolt run through him as though he had stuck his finger into a light socket. A sudden rush of energy washed over him, an electric buzz that spread through his body instantaneously. His fingertips tingled. His brain erupted with a sense of hyper-awareness. He had a single moment of brilliant, crystalline clarity where it felt that he could see the answers to every possible question, that everything in the universe was connected by thin filaments and he need only reach out his hand to pluck at the strings and he could play a harmony that united all of creation into one single beautiful song.

  Then it was gone.

  The sensation faded as quickly as it had come, and it left him feeling hollow and shaky, like too many coffees on an empty stomach. His hand trembled as he withdrew it.

  “Like I said,” Lorelai said, with a satisfied little smile. “That’s the weak stuff. You can’t burn it, not until it’s refined. It won’t ward off the Darkness or anything. But the pure stuff has its uses.”

  Adrian tried to sort out his thoughts. His hangover felt a thousand times worse, and now he was pretty sure there was no possible way to run this one off. “…Why not use your own dreams?” He managed. It wasn’t the question he’d meant to ask, but it was the first that made it out of his jumbled, aching head.

  “Sonia really hasn’t told you much, has she?” Lorelai lifted her eyes to meet his. She shook her head. “Look, here’s the thing. Faeries don’t dream. Not like humans do, anyway. It’s hard work to keep a balefire burning. Takes several people working at it and it leaves everybody exhausted within hours. We never could’ve crawled our way out of the Darkness if we hadn’t figured out how to use humans for their dreams.”

  “…Crawled out of the Darkness?” He echoed. He leaned over the bar, suddenly intrigued. “I…I figured the Darkness was a new thing. Poison from the human world and all its rationalism or whatever.”

  She laughed. “You’ve got it backwards. The Darkness has always been here. It was here long, long before there were faeries or humans. It’s the very essence of chaos. You humans have a folktale, I think? It starts, ‘In the beginning, there was nothing’? Well — the Darkness is that nothing.”

  She turned back to the shelf behind the bar, withdrew a bottle of some pale rose-colored liquid and two glasses. She set the glasses on the bar and poured Adrian a glass, sliding it across to him. He took it without protest, although did not drink it. “Humans have a special capacity for refining chaos. Even your dreams, which can be completely ridiculous, have their own internal logic. And hope. There’s no race in the universe — yours or ours — with a more limitless capacity for hope.”

  Adrian glanced down at the glass in his hands and sniffed it. He took a tentative sip. The taste wasn’t alcoholic. It was, however, surprisingly bitter, and he grimaced and set it back on the bar. “So, alright. You use our dreams to…ward off Darkness.”

  “If you want to put it so simply. Yes.” She knocked
back a long swallow of the bitter rose-colored liquid.

  “It affects you? The way it does me?”

  “Well, I myself have worked rather hard to make sure I never have to experience it.” A slight smile touched the corner of her lips. It was not a pleasant expression. “But, no. It won’t kill us, or drive us crazy, like it does your kind. But it does affect us. If we live long enough in the dark places, we go back to being…well…wild. I’ll put it that way. Uncivilized. You want to go up into the mountains, visit the dark places — you’ll see all sort of kin like you’d never meet in the cities. Monsters, you’d probably call them.”

  Something bumped uneasily in Adrian’s thoughts. At some point, he would have to address the fact that Sonia made a living by harvesting dreams from the insane people that fell into her woods. But he wasn’t ready to deal with that yet, so he carefully wrapped it up and filed it away to consider later, when his head wasn’t threatening to split open. “Sonia says this place is just a brothel,” Adrian said, glancing around at it.

  “Sonia lives alone in a cabin, listening to things scrabble around in the night. There are many things she does not understand, and all the better for her I suppose. But, myself…” Lorelai spread her arms, inclining her head in a “so what if it is” sort of gesture. “Lots of things make creative energy, help to keep the fires burning at night. Who am I to judge?” She nodded toward the glass in his hands. “But, never mind just now. You should drink up, it’ll make you feel better, counteract the dream-withdrawal a bit. I imagine you’ve got a big journey ahead of you that you don’t want to spend all day feeling as bad as you look just now.”

  He knocked back the bitter-tasting liquid in two hard swallows, and waited for it to kick in. Warmth spread over him, instantly soothing the pulsing ache in his head. His muscles relaxed. “So,” he struggled to order his thoughts, which seemed suddenly more sluggish. “If all that dream-energy can keep Darkness away…why can’t my dreams keep me safe? …And why can’t Sonia, if she’s been…?”

  “Sonia doesn’t have the technology to use what she harvests,” Lorelai said. “But, something’s keeping you safe, all the same.” She finished wiping a table and crossed back to exchange her cloth for a broom. “You’re not dead or insane, so that’s something.”

  She snapped her fingers, and Adrian’s glass replenished itself. She nodded at him to drink up, and he did so, swallowing it quickly. The bitterness coated the roof of his mouth, an alkaline residue that tasted like chewing alka seltzer tabs.

  “Oh.” Fuzziness crept in at the edges of his thoughts. His lips started to feel heavy, as though they’d been shot with novacaine. His fingers felt blunt and clumsy. He looked down at the empty glass in his hand. “You lying bit —” he started to say, but the words came out thick and jumbled, and before he could finish the thought the world swam away from him entirely.

  * * *

  When Sonia awoke, the sun was already fat and golden — a late-morning sort of sun, the kind that berates you as it streams through the windows, a sun that says, in the voice of your mother, you have wasted your day away, and nothing you do now will make up for all these lost hours. The sun illuminated a wide patch of floor, and Sonia lay stretched within the square as though a spotlight were shining upon her. A jolt of worry ran through her, sharp and jagged; the shock was visceral, like a rough rod rammed through her chest, dislodging her heart and replacing it with a sort of aching void.

  She was worried about two things. The first, that the sun was much lower in the sky than it should have been, which meant she had certainly overslept. The second was that when she had fallen asleep, Adrian was laying directly in front of her; now he was gone, leaving a wide stretch of nothing between her and the door. This second realization caught her by surprise, and for a moment she was paralyzed, unable to force her body to catch up with her rushing, panicked thoughts.

  Finally she managed to get her lungs and mouth and brain all working in tandem, and she let out a few unintelligible cries before forcing out the words, “Wake up! Wake up, he’s gone!” She struggled to her feet, her wings fluttering haphazardly, her eyes darting around the room without taking in many of the details. All of this took up the expanse of a minute, probably less — but it felt like an eternity, the world far too slow to keep up with her thoughts which screamed and flew by in a blur.

  He’s gone, she thought, and her heart ached even as she thought this.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, over and over, as the others found their feet and stretched and yawned and occupied an eternity with their waking. Sonia stood transfixed on the spot, battling with the desire to scream. “He stayed inside the light! He should have been fine!”

  “I’m sure he’s alright,” Laurel said, stifling a yawn. She said this several times, but the words never seemed to get through. “He probably just wandered off. We’ll catch up with him.”

  Sonia was inconsolable.

  Evangeline, who had the most patience for emotion, laid her hand on her back and gently steered her out the door, murmuring something about how they would start looking for him straightaway, how he couldn’t have gotten far, how he was probably a field over. Sonia barely heard her. In her mind, she could only picture Adrian being swarmed by the things that lived in the Darkness, the things which she heard scrabbling against the dirt floor of her cottage at night. She saw them clearly, like dark furry clouds, giant dust mites converging upon him from the feet up, gnawing and gnashing and biting until they had consumed him completely. She imagined the snickering voice that crept in the depths of the Darkness, the voice that sounded like the rasp of dry leaves in the wind. The voice was always there, at night, piercing through the blanket of Dark and speaking into her mind: they’re all doomed…there’s no use in saving them…do the merciful thing…you’ve taken their dreams, just a little further and you can take their life…

  She had always pushed the voice aside. She would never — could never — do the things that it asked of her. But now she imagined that voice snickering with grim satisfaction at a job well done. He’s gone now, the voice would say, the next time she heard it. All your scheming and hoping, your fruitless rescue attempt — it was all for nothing. The humans belong to me. Every one of them comes to me in the end.

  “Sonia!” Laurel said, giving her a rough shake. “Did you hear her?”

  “What?”

  Exasperated, Laurel gripped her arm and twisted her around to look at something. She pointed. After a moment, Sonia realized that the ginger-and-white cat was curled up in the shade of a nearby tree. Evangeline, who had the gift of speaking to beasts, stood at its head, and conversed with it in the low rumbling language of felines.

  “She said,” Laurel continued, impatiently, “That the cat saw the human leave this morning. Running up the path, to the main road.”

  “…The Swaggering Spider,” she said, realizing that if he had run up the path, he would have almost certainly ended up at the tavern. Her heart, which had been pounding away with the velocity of a hummingbird’s wings, suddenly seized in her chest.

  If Adrian had gone to Lorelai, he would have been better off consumed by the Darkness.

  CONVERGING PATHS

  Adrian dreamt about cats. Except they weren’t really cats — they were cars. Fur-covered cars with glowing yellow headlights for eyes. Tabby-furred Buicks, their bodies large and muscular. Short, compact black-and-white patched Volkswagens. Dainty, slick-furred black Corvettes. Their engines rumbled like monstrous purring, the heavy idle of diesel engines, and they moved so fast that their tires were a dark blur under their crouching bodies. They circled around Adrian, whirling around him in a dizzying frenzy.

  He watched, paralyzed, as they ran circles around him. At any moment, they might veer off course and collide with him. He wanted to get away from them, but there was no way out. He was surrounded, and any direction he stepped would lead him into their path. So he stood frozen and hoped that the cats would stop soon, or alter their course, s
o he could escape.

  Something was wrong, though. They whirled around him at the same dizzying speed, but they seemed to fade, slightly, as though someone had turned down the saturation in a photograph. Vibrant oranges became dull, dusty tan. Slick glossy black became sooty charcoal. They looked more like cars than cats now. The fur retracted back. The slant of the headlights shifted.

  They shimmered like a mirage. Adrian could see through them. The dizzying speed slowed. Highway speed. Neighborhood speed. School zone speed. Now they crept along on tired wheels, boring gray ghosts of cars that lumbered in slow-motion circles around him.

  He heard something. Not the sound of engines or wheels on cement. A jumble of voices, from outside the dream. He reached for it, tried to make sense of it, and suddenly it broke through in perfect clarity as though he had surfaced from deep water.

  “Is that…is that a human?” The voice originated somewhere over his head.

  “Well he’s sure not a bunny rabbit,” another voice snapped back. “Stop staring at him like that. I’ve got a buyer lined up already.”

  “You’re selling him?” The first voice sounded completely shocked. “For how much?”

  “What for? So you can stand around and ogle him instead of working?” Something rattled, like heavy chains. “As if you could afford him. Stupid girl. Now, come over here and help me with this.”

  Adrian forced open his eyes. He lay on a dirty floor — or maybe a floor made of dirt — strewn over haphazardly with straw. Empty jugs and bottles lay scattered around the floor, littered among other junk he couldn’t quite make out. His shoulder ached terribly. He suspected he might have fallen onto it. He saw two sets of bare legs near his head. He blinked, followed them up to their bodies.