The Darkness of Dreamland

by T. L. Bodine

  “The Nightmare Man,” he said, finally, tearing his eyes away from the tapestries. “He’s…he’s my dream. That’s what the queen saw when she tried to do…whatever…to me. I…I made him.”

  “You weren’t the only one.”

  “I — what?”

  “He’s your dream because you are the one in Dreamland,” Sonia responded. Her voice sounded tired and strained. “If you were someone else, the dream would be different. The tapestry — the stories — the thief. They would be someone else’s dreams.”

  “So if someone else came looking for Nathaniel…the Nightmare Man would be someone else.”

  She nodded. “Maybe. Or maybe no one else could have come looking at all, or they’d come looking for someone else.” Her wings buzzed uncomfortably. “One thing…can be different things, also, to different people. Is it not that way where you come from?”

  He thought he understood.

  The hallway ended, coming abruptly upon another set of stairs.

  As he climbed, he wasn’t sure if it was weariness creeping into his legs, or the rapidly thinning atmosphere, or another factor entirely — but each successive step was harder, as though he were being pushed back, as though he were walking first through water and then, as he made it further up the staircase, through mud, and then tar. He realized his head was bent down and he was straining, with everything he had, to move at all, as the air around him pressed in heavily with a weight he could not attribute to any physical feature.

  “Time,” Sonia said, beside him, and her voice was both faraway and intimate, like a shout that had been robbed of its voice. “The collusion of time and space and pathways to Everywhere.”

  He wanted to ask exactly what that meant, but found he didn’t have enough breath inside of him to do it.

  Finally, after what could have been an eternity of struggle — but, Adrian realized, as he cast an unwise glance over his shoulder at the thousands of stairs he seemed to have climbed, it didn’t seem like it had taken as long as it should — they reached a plateau He no longer felt as though he were swimming in tar. Instead, the air was alive and crackling with energy, like live electricity moving through the atmosphere, like he was on the inside of one of those lightning balls they sell at novelty stores on shelves alongside lava lamps and beaded curtains.

  All around him, there were tiny paintings, each depicting a different scene in miniature. These were connected, like the spokes of a wheel, like the crossed lines of a massive spiderweb, by bridges to the enormous dais they now found themselves upon. He wondered why anyone would paint such tiny pictures, and why there were bridges to go see them, and then he realized that the pictures were moving, and — he squinted, to see clearer — that the pictures were, in truth, windows, doorways to different destinations. They weren’t tiny; they were far away, distant by hundreds of yards, possibly miles, stretching out forever into infinity, and he realized, after he saw this, that the walls around him were no longer polished purple stone but empty, vast space. He realized that, all around him, stars were dancing and clouds were swirling in a fog of black and purple and dark blue.

  He felt very dizzy, all of a sudden, and swayed on his feet. A delicate hand caught his arm and held him upright, and he could feel himself tremble now that he had a solid, stable body to compare himself to.

  “I have foreseen your coming, as I see all things,” a voice said, from everywhere at once, and Adrian jumped, “and I offer you whatever welcome I can.”

  Adrian’s eyes landed, after a moment of searching, on the speaker, and he discovered that, after all he had seen, he was still capable of being surprised.

  Adrian remembered how, when he was a child, there was a particular spider that had always fascinated him. It lived in the cracks and crevices of his bedroom walls, and had a peculiar appearance, both frightening and somehow loveable — it was a brownish grey color, as he remembered, and had a face with two large eyes and white hairs, like a bespectacled, blind old man with a beard.

  Now he was staring into the face of a person who looked remarkably like that spider — or, perhaps, at a giant spider that looked exceptionally like a human. The figure was old and bent over, hunchbacked by time or disfigurement. His stomach hung, distended like the overlarge belly of a starving child, between two thin, spindling legs. The hunch in his back was large, and his head hung down against his chest, his thin shoulders rounded. His skin was a grayish brown color, and every fine hair on his body was white, standing out in glistening bristles against the darkness of his flesh. His head was totally bald, but he had a full, wiry beard of white bristles. His eyes were hidden behind thick black spectacles and Adrian wondered if he really had eyes at all.

  “It’s all right,” Sonia said, reaching out to take Adrian’s hand. “He’s going to help us, remember?”

  “My presence alarms you,” the spider-man, the Gatekeeper, said in a voice that was neither deep nor booming but still somehow managed to fill the room — if a dais in the void of space could be considered a room. “I apologize.”

  Adrian wanted to tell him not to apologize, but he discovered he still had no words. Part of him believed that if he opened his mouth, whatever oxygen was in his lungs would escape and he would be depressurized and lost to the infinity of space.

  “You have come to request something of me?” The Gatekeeper pressed, and he moved forward in an uncomfortable swaying, scuttling motion. He stopped before Adrian, and fixed black eyes on him, reaching out a thin hand with sagging, grey flesh to touch Adrian’s cheek with one skeletal finger. His touch felt like the dried-out shell of a dead moth brushed against his skin. “Ask me your favor, so I might grant it.”

  “He wants to go home,” Sonia said, quickly, before Adrian could speak.

  The Gatekeeper smiled; his thin lips were barely visible through the scruff of his white beard. He stood uncomfortably close to Adrian, whose heart was thudding hard enough that he was afraid the Gatekeeper could hear him.

  “I — what? No, I don’t —”

  The Gatekeeper withdrew his hand from Adrian’s cheek and reached up, into the air, closing his fingertips around a small, invisible thread. He gave this a long pull, hand-over-hand, as though operating an invisible pulley crafted from spidersilk. With each pull, one of the doorways came closer.

  The doorway sped through the darkness, growing brighter and larger as it approached, and Adrian stared at it with morbid fascination. It stopped, a few feet from him, giant and glowing. He could smell car exhaust and fresh-cut grass. He could see his own house, vacant and wonderfully inviting, and — through the contraction of time and space, the special effects of perception, he could see his workplace, and his desk, and Angela Weaver’s dilapidated farm house, and the woods that had shown him a portal to some Otherworld an eternity ago.

  He reached out, as if to touch it, but felt only air, grasped only smoke, and the image before him rippled; he looked up, seeking with his eyes where the image had come from, and saw it reprinted in miniature far from him, and he understood. It was a hologram, a simulation, a tempting view — not the doorway itself.

  “Is that it?” Sonia asked.

  He saw Angela Weaver, sitting at her kitchen table, smoldering cigarette in one hand, can of cheap beer in the other; she was staring out the sliding glass door into her backyard with a look of emptiness and resignation. Nathaniel’s discarded toys were still on the floor, coated with a fine layer of grey dust.

  Adrian could see Jessica. She was in the shower, exquisitely naked, rivulets of water rushing down her body, outlining the supple curves and lines of her form. A man Adrian didn’t know was standing behind her, also naked, soapsuds gathering in the short black hairs on his chest. The man tenderly lifted the hair from the nape of Jessica’s neck and kissed it, a hand reaching around her, touching, caressing.

  Adrian saw his desk, the papers neatly arranged, pens gathered neatly in their holder, the handwriting on his legal pad small and immaculate. He could read the text on th
e legal pad, and made out the list of names, facts, coalesced data.

  He could go home. He could walk through this door and it would all be over.

  He shook his head and raised his eyes to meet the black spectacles of the Gatekeeper

  “The tapestries, downstairs. The man in them — who is he?”

  The Gatekeeper was silent for a moment, regarding Adrian with sightless, blank eyes, expressionless as buttons. He swayed back and forth on his spindling, improbable legs. He rubbed his beard, and it made the same dry rattling noise as dead leaves. “I do not answer questions,” he said, at length. “I only open doors.”

  “You have to know who he is,” Adrian pressed, and could hear a note of desperation in his voice. “You have to know.”

  “I open doors,” the Gatekeeper repeated, firmly. “I can send you home. I am the only person who can.”

  “Adrian, please,” Sonia said, beside him, in an insistent whisper; he heard the promise of tears just below the surface of her words. She groped for his hand. “They’ll destroy you, Adrian. This place will tear you apart.”

  He looked back to his house in the door. After everything — all the nightmares — the Darkness — the cats and the journey and Lorelai and the queen and the impossibly long climb — he could go home.

  He looked back at the Gatekeeper. He wished he could see what was behind the black glasses: the blank, expressionless face did not fill him with confidence. Legs shaking, he walked past the spiderlike old man, toward the bridge. He could just cross it, step through the door, and go home. It was that easy.

  In the corner of his eye, something moved. It was another door, hung suspended in space. Although the image inside was small from distance, he could make it out with shocking clarity. There was a cave, rising up from the earth. Inside the mouth of the cave, he caught a flash of red hair…and a flash of gold. The sound of laughter pealed from the doorway, child’s laughter, the kind that pierces and shrieks and carries across rooms. He ran for that bridge.

  “Adrian, no!”

  Sonia reached out for him, tried to stop him. Her fingers brushed his skin, but he didn’t stop. Someone yelled something. His heart was thudding too loudly in his ears to make out what was said, and he didn’t look back. He ran across the bridge. It creaked under his weight, swaying dangerously. For a moment, he thought it would flip over, throw him to his death on the stone floor a hundred feet below — but then he was over it, he was on solid ground again. He heard footsteps behind him, creaking on the suspended bridge, and felt someone approach from behind.

  He threw himself through the open doorway.

  THE WITCH

  If Lorelai never climbed another stair in her life, it would be too soon. The terrible ache in her chest, centered above her heart, grew in intensity with each step. It felt as though something were gaping and rotten within her. She trembled. Her wings fell, tired and limp, over her shoulders, and her long hair felt as though it weighed a thousand pounds.

  The dreams were wearing off already. The more she ate, it seemed, the shorter they lasted. If she had been at full strength, she could have flown up the steps. Oh well, she thought, holding her head down and pulling herself forward out of sheer determination. Soon enough, it won’t matter. You’ll have all the dreams you need.

  There were tapestries on the walls, but they were heavily moth-eaten and smoke-damaged. She paid them no heed and continued climbing.

  At some point, the sky overhead opened into space. She stood, shaking, on the solid stone platform and sought out the Gatekeeper. He was crouched in the center of the stone, hunched up like a spider in its web, his distended belly sweeping the ground.

  He lifted his head, staring at her from behind the glasses over his blank dark eyes. His bristly white beard twitched with a smile. “So you’ve finally come.”

  Lorelai was in no mood for games. “I’m looking for the human,” she said, approaching the center of the dais. All around, a thousand rope bridges led to a thousand tiny, glowing doorways. More hung over her head, dotting the sky like stars.

  “No,” the Gatekeeper said, with a soft smile. He scuttled closer, still crouched low to the ground. His bony knees were bare and knobby and tiny wisps of wings still hung limp from his shoulder blades. He had been a faerie, once, but the power of dreams crackled around him; Lorelai could almost smell it in his veins. “You’re looking for the dreams.”

  “So it’s true? They’re really there?”

  “You will not find what you seek here,” the Gatekeeper said, raising his hands. He pulled at something invisible, as though tugging a thin strand of web through his fingertips. “You will not find it anywhere. You would be best to abandon your quest.”

  Lorelai laughed. “I didn’t come for advice, old man. Show me the door and I’ll leave without any trouble.”

  “You walk a dangerous path, child,” he said.

  “Not as dangerous as yours,” she growled, losing her patience. The throbbing pain in her heart was overwhelming. It spread to her head, dimming her vision; the world began to swim around her. She struggled forward, standing close to the Gatekeeper. “You’re just the same as me,” Lorelai rasped, groping for him. Her fingertips brushed his dry, papery skin and closed around his arm. She could feel the power of dream energy in his veins, flowing just beneath the surface of the skin. “Don’t tell me you’re not.”

  He said nothing.

  It happened quickly. She plunged her hand into his swollen, distended belly. His blood, warm and filled with dreams, flowed over her hand. It shimmered like an oil slick, prismatic and gleaming in the semi-darkness.

  He laughed. A dry, shaky laugh that sounded like the rustle of dead corn stalks.

  She closed drew his shriveled old body toward her with her free hand and buried her teeth in his neck and the laughing stopped.

  When she was finished, she dropped what was left of the body. It fell to the ground, mostly deflated, as empty as the shed skin of an insect. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand and felt the glow of power within her. It was warm and filled her, pouring beneath her skin like a protective coating. Not just power — knowledge as well. It felt as though everything that anyone had ever known had been deposited into her mind, as wholly and simply as if she had received a gift.

  She licked her lips.

  Now…some business to attend to, she thought, with a twisted smile, and pulled on an invisible thread, feeling for it with the new power that coursed through her veins. The doorway sped closer, hurtling through space to stop at her feet.

  Around her, the mountain shook. Bridges rattled, and great stones broke free of the mountain and began to crumble. The Gatekeeper’s magic had died with him, and doorways began to open and close at random. People and faeries and monsters ran, panicking, within the frames of the tiny windows to their worlds as the gates were torn asunder. Lorelai gave them no heed; it mattered little to her what happened now. The door she needed was open, and she entered even as the mountain crumbled behind her.

  DARKNESS AT THE EDGE THE WORLD

  Adrian stopped celebrating Halloween the year that Samantha died. He couldn’t stomach scary movies or haunted houses. He didn’t even like the candy. All of the joy had been leached out of the holiday for him and he mostly spent his Halloween nights holed up in his room.

  Except for one time in college. He’d gone to a haunted house one Halloween, one that claimed to be the very image of Hell on earth. His friends had cajoled him into coming, and he had tried to be a good sport about it. Jessica had been there, before they’d started officially dating, and it was worth suffering through some stupid haunted house for the evening to be around her. He couldn’t even really remember why he hated Halloween anymore, anyway.

  At the time, he’d thought the execution was clever enough; if there were a Hell, he supposed, it would probably be something like that. The tour had led them through winding corridors set up in an old warehouse showing various scenes of costumed people being tortured. It w
as warm and smelled like gunpowder, and the crew that created it had built lots of clever special effects for fire and demonic laughter and anguished screaming.

  Now, climbing to his feet on the other side of the portal, Adrian realized that the haunted house had been wrong. Hell wasn’t like that at all.

  This was Hell.

  Sonia climbed to her feet beside him, dusting herself off. Her chest heaved with the effort of following him.

  “You didn’t have to follow me,” Adrian said. “…But I’m glad you did.”

  She smiled shakily. “Where are we?”

  It was strange having her be the one to ask him that question. It was stranger that he knew the answer to it. “The Darkness,” he answered, starting forward. “Or…my Darkness, anyway.”

  It was dark, but bright also, as though the sun had been replaced by a giant blacklight bulb. Things flickered and glowed and shivered, shadows moving within shadows, blurs streaking through the sky. They were in a forest, but not just a forest. There were trees and asphalt and parts of living rooms and city parks and basements and cemeteries. There were filing cabinets and doorways and safes scattered among the trees. All of them were smashed and crumpled. It was like walking through the wreckage of the place he had once created for himself in his mind, the place that had been torn apart and laid bare.

  “This is where you go? In the Dark?”

  He nodded mutely. He started walking faster. He didn’t want Sonia to see everything, but there was no way of shielding her from it. There was no way of shielding himself from it, either; it all seemed to be here whether his eyes were opened or closed.

  People walked through the trees, sometimes clear and in-focus, sometimes blurry, sometimes mere flickering shadows. They spoke in voices like thunder and cracking twigs and screeching tires. It was like a dream, a hallucination — but it was real. Adrian knew that, if he knew nothing else: This was real, or at least as real as anything could be in Dreamland.