The Darkness of Dreamland

by T. L. Bodine

  “We’ve caught one,” she half-gasped, tossing her head back. She grabbed the knight’s head in both hands and shoved him to his knees. She stood with her legs apart, hands on his head, fingers tangled in his hair. “Your kind — pixie folk — from…Crossroads.”

  Lorelai’s brow rose. “You think a pixie is responsible for the dreams that have gone missing?”

  The queen didn’t respond for a moment. She tossed her head back, eyes closed, her skin alive with the electric tendrils of dreamlight. Her limbs trembled. She pushed the knight away, and he slumped against the wall, looking faded and spent. “No, I don’t,” she said, finally, rubbing her hands up and down her forearms, as though rubbing the excess dream energy into her skin. “But it feels good to have someone in the dungeons.”

  Lorelai shrugged. “I suppose.”

  The queen ran her fingers back through her own thick black hair, a soft smile on her full lips. “Now then. Run down and choose your payment. And bring in that poor servant girl from the stables.” She met Lorelai’s steel grey eyes. “I’m going to rest a bit, and then we’ll see what this human of yours is capable of.”

  * * *

  He had a strange dream.

  In it he was sitting in Angela Weaver’s kitchen. The walls were made of rocks and trees and strange things moved in the shadows, but the table and chairs and stove and cabinets were all Angela’s. There were scuff marks on the tabletop, long scratches and grooves in the wood that almost, but didn’t quite, spell out words.

  She was smoking, taking long puffs of her cigarette through puckered lips. When she exhaled, the smoke was wispy and multi-colored and dreamlike. It gathered in a low-lying fog around the foot of the table, so thick that Adrian couldn’t see past his knees.

  “I can’t stay here,” Adrian said, but he didn’t speak in words — he spoke in gesture and emotion and nuance. “I have to go. I have to find him — his sister is looking for him.”

  Angela shook her head and smoked and the curling blue smoke filled their strange room without walls. It was almost up to the tabletop now. It pinned Adrian in place, and he knew that if it got up over his head that it would suffocate him.

  “Let me go, please.” He wanted to get up, but he didn’t, he couldn’t. “I have to find him and say I’m sorry. His sister is looking for him.”

  “He never had a sister, Adrian,” Angela said. Her voice was Sonia’s voice, and it came from everywhere.

  A giggle — a shriek of laughter.

  A flash of golden curls in the shadows, among the slithering creatures.

  “Wait!” Adrian cried.

  The room dissolved and he was running. The golden curls bobbed ahead, out of reach. The laughter was everywhere and the air was thick with smoke. He brushed the smoke aside, swimming through it, but the more he ran the thicker it became. He realized he was not alone: There was another figure in the smoke, someone tall and thin and skeletal. The smoke around it shimmered and solidified into a long, tattered black cloak, and a pair of empty eyes stared out at Adrian from the gloom. Its gaze was terrible, full of loathing and accusation, and Adrian cried out and tried to get away but the smoke pressed in around him like a smothering blanket…

  Adrian awoke, his body damp with sweat. He wrestled with his blanket, which had twisted itself around his lower body, and struggled to the basin of water at the foot of his bed to wash his face. A low fog of dreamlight curled around the foot of his bed, sparkling like fresh dew. It faded, soaking down into the floorboards or dissipating into the air, gone without a trace within moments.

  Beside his bed, there was a change of clothes — fine clothes, not like the simple things Sonia had given him to wear — and a short note requesting his presence at dinner. He realized someone must have come in while he slept, to leave these for him and change out the water basin, and that they would have seen him wrestling with blankets as he wept in his sleep. He wondered why no one had bothered to steal his dreams.

  The smell of spicy foreign food assailed his senses when he opened the door, and he followed his nose into the dining hall. Inside there was a long table, set with candles and platters of food; the candlelight danced and glinted off the platters and goblets, sending multi-colored flashes of light up onto the ceiling. Seated at the head of the table was the queen, dressed in a long gown. At either side of her stood the twin attendants. The knight stood at attention just inside the door. The table, though massive and covered in platters of food, was set for two.

  The queen smiled encouragingly at Adrian, who hesitated before sitting down. He looked up the length of the table, staring past rows of serving platters. “Lorelai isn’t coming?”

  The queen laughed. “Lorelai has business to attend to, I’m sure.”

  Adrian glanced down at his place setting and was surprised to see that his soup bowl was filling itself. He blinked. The ladle hovered over his bowl and tipped out a creamy bisque before returning to the tureen, where it lay quite still.

  “Help yourself,” the queen said, with an air of amusement. She did not eat. “I imagine you must be starving.”

  His stomach gurgled. He looked again at the food. “Forgive me for being rude,” he said, addressing his soup bowl as the intensity of the queen’s gleaming black eyes made his stomach churn. “It’s just, the last time someone I didn’t know gave me something, I ended up being trussed up and carted halfway across the world.”

  She laughed. It was a throaty, good-natured laugh that didn’t quite match the cold gleam of her eyes. “Apologies. You have every right to be suspicious.” She raised her glass — a crystal goblet filled with something that might have been a sparkling white wine, or possibly a liquid form of moonlight — and tipped her head. “I promise you, I have no interest in either destroying you or re-selling you.” The soup bowl levitated and crossed the table, the ladle spooning soup out into the queen’s bowl. She took up a spoon and sipped it demurely. The twin faeries watched her with identical expressions of longing, but the queen did not look at them. “So, human. I imagine you must have quite a story.”

  “Adrian,” he said, reluctantly. “My name is Adrian. And didn’t Lorelai tell you all about me already?”

  “I’ve known Lorelai for many years, so I know better than to trust her word about anything — and most especially a financial matter. I think it best to hear it from the source.”

  He took a tentative spoonful of soup. It tasted like tomatoes and opportunity and the first day of summer. He ate more, and, between mouthfuls, he began to tell his story. He hadn’t intended to tell her anything, but as he ate he felt a comfortable warmth spread through him and the words began to tumble out faster until his brain no longer seemed to be in control of his mouth.

  The soup bowls were cleared and a salad tossed itself and piled greens high onto his plate. It was assembled from a strange assortment of greens, many of which weren’t even green but deep purple, or pale blue, and all of them leafy or spiny or wrinkly. The queen said nothing, but listened as Adrian poured out the story. He told her about Lorelai and Rosalie and his long journey tied up in their wagon. He told her how his dream had been stolen and he was taken captive, and the long-dead dream he had seen tied to the wall in the storeroom.

  Subsequent courses filled themselves onto his plate. He ate roasted lamb and potatoes, tiny poached quail eggs over toast, ratatouille and cassoulet. Adrian talked about Sonia, and balefire, and how Zachariah had been destroyed by the Darkness. He talked about home, and the portal, and Nathaniel, and the Nightmare Man.

  Adrian finished explaining all of this as he started tucking in to a rather large, steaming bread pudding dotted with dried fruit and glistening with butter. He stopped, realizing he had nothing more to say (he had managed, with some effort, to avoid bringing up any of the subjects he kept under locked doors in his mind, but only just) and peered past the now-empty serving platters to the queen. She had listened in silence while he spoke, but as soon as he had mentioned The Nightmare Man she leaned forward, e
yes glittering with sudden, sharp interest.

  “Well,” she said, at length, when he didn’t say anything further. “A thief, you have? An unfortunate coincidence. We have a thief of our own.”

  Adrian wasn’t quite sure what she meant by this, but didn’t ask. He cleaned his plate, and waited for her to continue.

  The faeries at her elbows looked bored and quietly detached from the proceedings, but the knight at the door stood at sharper attention and kept stealing sidelong glances at Adrian. His expression was not entirely friendly.

  The queen rose from her seat, delicately dabbing at the corners of her mouth with a napkin, and waved aside the attendants, gesturing toward the table. “I believe we have some business to discuss, then. If you will follow me?”

  She nodded toward a doorway and Adrian rose from his seat, feeling the large quantity of food in his stomach shift a little as he did. He wanted very much to curl up for a nap.

  The knight made to follow them outside as well, but she laid her hand on his chest to stop him. “No, Valor. Just the human. Don’t worry — I rather doubt he would be able to kill me, even if that were his intent.” She brushed her fingers along his breastplate, and dreamlight flickered and crackled like static electricity, curling around her fingers.

  The knight looked dubious, but allowed them to pass, still standing firmly at attention. Adrian felt the electric crackle of his dream-energy as he passed, and shivered; the pale blue dreamlight peeking out from the gaps in his armor seemed to radiate cold rather than the usual warmth Adrian had come to associate with dreams.

  “So. You’ve felt your share of Darkness,” she said, as they stepped out into an empty corridor. The torches here burned low, casting long shadows along the hall. “And yet, here you stand. It’s remarkable.”

  He shrugged, noncommittal. After talking all through dinner, he could think of nothing else to say. He certainly didn’t feel particularly impressive for the achievement of surviving, especially as he had no idea how he had done it.

  “Well, having seen it as you have, I’m sure you can appreciate the desire to avoid it whenever possible. A society has a difficult time thriving when it’s being terrorized by long nights and chaos. Without our technology, we become…beastly. It doesn’t forgive the way you have been abused, but it does explain it.” She reached a doorway, set into the wall, and paused there. She turned to look at Adrian. “Our world, as you may have already learned, is powered by creative energy.”

  Adrian nodded. “You use human dreams, because they’re more powerful,” he said. “I know. Lorelai told me all about it.”

  She returned his nod, a slight smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Then you know about corporeal dreams.”

  “Enough to know that’s what your knight is.”

  She laughed. “So he is. One of many — a dream of valor, of chivalry and nobility. He was born, I suppose, as someone’s knight in shining armor. Now he’s mine.”

  Something in the way she said this made the hair on the back of Adrian’s neck prickle.

  “But, getting to the point. There is a matter that needs attending, which I believe will ultimately benefit us both. But first, I think you need to see something, so that you can fully understand the way that our world functions.”

  She opened the door and swept through it without further explanation. The doorway opened out onto a balcony overlooking a giant courtyard, a garden that seemed to stretch for miles, so far that Adrian could only barely make out the pink stone walls that contained it on all sides. Along the top of the wall, spread out at regular intervals, were strange crystal basins fitted with curving trumpets like those on an old gramophone.

  Staring down at the courtyard from the balcony, Adrian thought that it defied description: As soon as he thought he had an idea of what it looked like, it twisted and shifted as though the reality of the area were fluid. Trees sprouted where they had not been before; buildings blossomed among the hollow places, then vanished; mountains erupted from the ground, then dissipated. In the very center was a tremendous fire, a bonfire larger than any Adrian had ever seen. It burned a strange shade, and from it great shafts of light rose up into the sky, shimmering and dancing like aurora borealis.

  Around the fire — dancing, singing, playing hopscotch, jumping rope, giving chase — were at least a hundred children. As they played, the air around them shimmered and solidified, reality forming itself seamlessly as they imagined it into being. A little girl lay on her stomach, stretched in the shadow of a large tree; in her hand, she had a small stuffed rabbit. As Adrian watched, the rabbit shimmered and grew, becoming sleek and lean and real. It hopped away from her, then stopped, rising up to its haunches to sniff at the air before giving a thump of its hindpaw and dropping back to all-fours to scamper around the girl. Two young boys picked up sticks from the ground and began fencing with them. The sticks lengthened and flattened and glittered, a pair of swords that flashed and glinted in the light.

  Adrian gaped.

  The queen continued, as though conversation had never ceased. “My forebears devised an elegant solution to the Darkness problem.”

  “A balefire,” Adrian said, voice hollow. “Large enough to light up a whole city.”

  “Yes,” the queen said, looking satisfied.

  They stood on the balcony, and Adrian stared down into it, feeling completely mindblown — but an odd feeling of elation swept over him, against his will. The energy emanating from the fire was different from the jittery rush of bottled dreams; it felt purer, cleaner, and filled him with warmth. “You kidnap children and enslave them here to power your city?”

  “Human depression is destroying us — and them,” the queen said, pointedly. “This is our only hope, for all of our sake.” She raised a hand, gesturing to the far side of the corridor, where another doorway stood open. It was a tremendous door, arched and filigreed around the edges, the sort of door made only for castles and cathedrals and buildings of great importance. The view through the door was obscured with a twisting, shimmering blue-green mist. “Besides, they are free to come and go as they please.”

  Adrian leaned over the balcony, shrewdly scanning the sea of faces, searching for someone familiar within the crowd. A few girls, dressed as princesses with tall, pointed ribbon-trailing hats, sat around a table having high tea with what was unmistakably a shaggy brown-furred bear. It perched precariously onto its chair, one claw of a massive paw curled daintily around a teacup. They passed around trays of cookies and hors d’oeuvres and chatted animatedly among themselves, a low-lying multi-hued fog of dreams curling around their feet. Nearby, a boy drove through the clearing in a monster truck, buildings and trees crashing down in his wake, but no one paid him any heed and the rubble behind him shimmered and reformed, good as new.

  “This Dreamland…isn’t the same as the one you’ve been in,” the queen said, her eyes trained on Adrian. “It’s different, for them, than it is for us, or for grown-ups. They come and go through the doorway whenever they want. When they dream. When they play. When they hide beneath the covers of their bed and pretend to sleep. They find their way here, and go home when they’ve had their fill.”

  Below, a dream danced in circles around the fire. It was roughly human-shaped, but there was something animal about it as well, although Adrian couldn’t pin down exactly what. It shifted and flickered and seemed oddly transparent and worn, like a threadbare blanket that allowed light to pass through. It wore layers of purple and black feathers and a headdress with wide, many-pronged antlers. Watching it dance filled Adrian with an immense, simple joy that he could not explain. It recalled images of running, of a light breeze scented with spring blossoms, of rolling in fresh grass and drinking from streams, and a dozen other things Adrian had never done, but suddenly felt as though he remembered.

  The dancing figure turned a slow revolution and then, very suddenly, leapt into the fire.

  The Balefire swelled, the flames turning a deep violet for a moment, and
the smoke above flickered with images, half-formed thoughts that burst through the borealis and fluttered in the sky like so many birds. These images soared toward the trumpet-shaped bulbs along the stone wall, swirling through the pipes and settling into the basin as though they had been sucked up by a powerful vacuum.

  Adrian jerked.

  “A dream,” the queen said. “Who had outlived its capacity to maintain a body. Nothing more.” A wry smile touched her lips. “In other, less civilized corners of the world, dreams may meet a less dignified end. Those under royal control, however, sacrifice themselves thusly.”

  “I don’t understand…” Adrian couldn’t move his eyes from the courtyard. Below, no one seemed affected at all by the event. If anything, a certain uncontrollable joy seemed to have spread among the children. Many seemed to laugh for no reason, halting in their play to lean back their head and cry out in jubilation.

  The queen followed his gaze. “When the children come here, to play…they can be whatever they want. They build this place, when they imagine it. Their thoughts, their wishes, their fantasies, it’s all real here. They see what they wish to see. Most, I think, don’t even realize that there is anyone around them. It’s hard, as a human, but try to understand — Dreamland is created as it is experienced. It’s different for everyone.”

  Adrian’s brain hurt. He was too sleepy from the feast, and too bewildered by the immensity of the courtyard full of dreams, to wrap his head around any of this. “So, if I came here, and I was someone else, none of this would be the same.”

  “Probably.” She shrugged. “The stuff they make, that they leave behind…it’s their dreams.”

  “…Some kid dreamt that a person dressed as a purple bird would dance into a bonfire?”

  “Dreams, once created, take on a life of their own,” the queen said, her voice strained with barely-contained laughter. She came alongside Adrian on the balcony, standing very close to him. Now that she was near, he could see signs of age on her, slight wrinkles on her hands and about her eyes, slivers of grey among the fine dark strands of her hair. She touched his elbow, and her touch was cold, as though it were leeching the warmth from his skin. “When the children are long gone, back in the mundane world, or grown never to return…their dreams still linger here, living a life of their own. Many of the children you see down there, are their own dreams of themselves playing with them.”