The Darkness of Dreamland

by T. L. Bodine

  They walked down the path, or perhaps the path moved and they stood still, or maybe the world itself moved past them. Maybe all three at once. Pine needles and dead leaves crunched and whispered under his feet. The air smelled like diesel smoke and decay. The sky was black and empty and flickers of white smoke wound through trees and glowed in the sky and on the ground like low-lying fog.

  William was there, standing in the middle of a patch of living room that stood between two trees. He was seventeen and his face was flushed with rage. He screamed at his stepfather, who stood behind a tree, just outside of Adrian’s view. A few feet away, a young Adrian was sitting on a patch of cement in the hollow between the trees, clutching his knee; a young William stood next to him and jeered at his pain.

  A truck ran, over and over, into a pile of leaves. Leaves rained down in a perpetual shower, fluttering in flashes of orange and gold.

  Adrian’s father, shirt soaked with blood, tears streaming down his cheeks, kneeled between the trees. He coddled a misshapen bundle in his arms that could never have been human.

  A big shaggy dog ran across Adrian’s path. It disappeared from view. Tires screeched, and a dog howled and screamed, and then it was silent.

  Ahead, a truck — the same truck — drove into leaves — the same leaves.

  Through all this Adrian walked, pulled unavoidably through his private house of horrors, his personal Hell on Earth. Dark things that were not memories or hallucinations crept through the undergrowth, hidden in the pale fog. He could hear them. They made a sound like termites chewing through a house, like rodents gnawing on wood.

  Sonia said nothing. Tears fell, silently, down her cheeks, but she did not speak. She reached for Adrian’s hand and he took it and gave it a squeeze. Gratitude surged through him — gratitude that she had followed him, that she could stand here now and ask nothing of him.

  A creature scurried across the path. It looked like a rabbit, if rabbits had twelve legs and two mouths filled with teeth. It stopped, sitting back on gruesomely bloated haunches, and tilted its head at them. It had no eyes to speak of, but one mouth hung open with a long, mottled tongue lolling out; the other mouth chomped and slavered. It rubbed together three sets of clawed paws and its long ears swept forward, trained on the two of them.

  Along the side of the road, more beasts turned their eyes toward them. They slithered out from logs and climbed down from trees and lined the path. They hissed and chittered and growled, but did not come any closer — not yet.

  “Enough,” Adrian said, moving to stand between Sonia and the creature in the path. His words sounded dull and muted, like the air was too thick to carry sound. His heart hammered in his chest, but he swallowed back his fear. All around him, his memories and nightmares played like the backdrop of some twisted play, but they didn’t matter anymore. He was done being afraid of things he couldn’t change. “The Darkness hasn’t killed me yet,” he said, more loudly. “And it won’t.”

  The creatures laughed. They circled them, creeping up toward the edge of the path, but they did not approach him. The rabbit-beast before him snarled with both slavering mouths, but it did not come near.

  Adrian squeezed Sonia’s hand in his and took a bold step forward. “I’ve figured you little bastards out,” Adrian said, with more bravado than he really felt, his fingers tightly laced with Sonia’s. “You’re not so scary. You just want me to be scared. You can’t get close to me if I’m not, and if you can’t get close then you can’t do anything to me.”

  Behind him, Sonia let out an unintelligible whimper, but he didn’t release her hand and didn’t allow himself to share her fear. Rosalie had saved him from a creature in the Darkness, once, so he knew it wasn’t impossible to do it again.

  The creatures hissed. Adrian was just a few feet from the rabbit-beast now. He could see the pale things that writhed beneath its shadowy black fur — worms or maggots or something else entirely. It stood its ground, and Adrian held his breath against the stench as he came upon it without veering off course. Moments before impact, the creature vanished, dissipating into smoke with a screeching cry that echoed inside of Adrian’s mind.

  The world flickered and disappeared around him and it was only blackness and emptiness and, rising from the earth before him, the mouth of a cave.

  Some primitive origin stories tell of great caves at the beginning of the world, a dark rocky womb from which the first people of history crawled from the earth. Standing there, Adrian thought this was exactly that kind of cave.

  “I don’t like this,” Sonia said, quietly, but she didn’t release his hand.

  “Me, neither,” he said, and walked toward it anyway.

  The mouth stood above ground, turning a gaping maw towards the sky. It was at least eight feet tall at the opening. The inside was dark and black and a cold noxious wind blew out of it. It smelled like mildew and disease, like the sick-sweet smell of infection; it smelled like sour breath and dried blood and rotting fruit.

  Hundreds of thousands of shadowy slimy things poured from it. They seethed and trembled and crawled and crept away from the cave, disappearing into the crevices of the world. Adrian hesitated just a moment, standing between a gaping, spewing crater and the sum total of all the misery in his life.

  He went into the crater.

  THE NIGHTMARE MAN REVISITED

  Inside, the cave was damp and slimy.

  Skittering creatures moved all around him, brushing him they spewed out into the world. He recoiled from their touch, but they didn’t seem to care about him, continuing forth to crawl out of the cave entrance to infest the dark places of Dreamland. The cave walls were warm and wet, as though coated in blood; it felt like he was crawling into the body of something that was alive.

  He tried to avoid the walls on every side, but he still found himself quickly coated in slime, like amniotic fluid from hell. He heard Sonia behind him; she was breathing heavily, her breath coming in short, frightened gasps that might have been sobs. He wanted to say something to her that would make her feel better, but there was nothing he could say that could make this any less horrifying than it was.

  The climb down was mercifully short, and he felt a cool draft touch his face before the tunnel opened up on a wide, empty space. He slid forward and dropped down into a crouch, taking in deep breaths of the sweet, open air. Sonia dropped down beside him. He heard the heavy flutter of damp wings; muck splattered him as the wings shook off the film of grime that laid over them.

  It was bright inside. That was the first thing he saw — it was brighter than it should have been, brighter than the inside of a cave could ever be. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. At first, all he could see was white. It was as though he had fallen through the end of the world and landed on a blank sheet of paper that stretched out infinitely in each direction.

  As his eyes adjusted, the room became visible. Or, perhaps, it was forming itself; perhaps some artist was sketching in the details of the room around him. The room around him grew more cluttered and crowded; it was too small to comfortably hold all of the things that it did. A table. Some chairs. An exact replica of the queen’s castle in miniature. A huge dog with shaggy green fur.

  A knight. A figure dressed in robes.

  A wide-eyed, red-haired little boy.

  And Samantha.

  She wore her jumper. It was new and clean. Her mouth was stained purple from something — jello, maybe, or grape jelly. She was solid and beautiful, three-years-old and whole. She tilted her head, staring across the room at him.

  “…Samantha?” At that moment, nothing mattered. The rest of the room was inconsequential. Nathaniel, The Nightmare Man, Valor the knight — he hardly realized they were there. He felt his heartbeat up in his throat and his chest ached as though something inside were straining to get out; his ears filled with a rushing sound. He couldn’t think.

  Samantha drew back shyly, hiding her face. The Nightmare Man extended his thin, skeletal arm and she ran to him, c
lutching to his legs and burying her face in the folds of his cloak. The knight stood perfectly still in the corner, like a decorative suit of armor, the shaggy dog at his feet.

  She doesn’t recognize me, Adrian thought, with tears burning the back of his eyes. Why would she? It’s been twenty-five years. .

  “…Mr. Montgomery?” Nathaniel said, uncertainly. He glanced between Adrian, who was soaked through in mud and slime, and Samantha, who was half-hiding behind The Nightmare Man and peering out at them with one large blue eye, then to Sonia. “Are you real? Or is this still make-believe?”

  Adrian couldn’t answer. His eyes were pinned on Samantha. She still clutched a handful of black robes in her small fists, but her eyes were fixed on him now with curiosity.

  “I was wondering when you would come,” The Nightmare Man said in a voice that made no sound but echoed in his mind. “We’ve been waiting for you for so long.”

  “Are you new friend?” she asked, finally, uncertainly.

  “We’ll be your friends,” Sonia said, kindly. She dropped down to her knees, so that she would be at eye level with her, and smiled. “You don’t have to be frightened. What’s your name?”

  Adrian tried to make his brain work. This isn’t real, he thought. She’s dead.

  “Samantha,” she said, shyly, without loosening her grasp on The Nightmare Man’s cloak.

  Unicorns aren’t real, either. Faeries aren’t real. Monsters aren’t real.

  Sonia’s brows raised. “I see.” She fell silent, still crouched on the floor.

  She’s not dead she’s just hiding the body wasn’t even real she was hiding she’s not dead.

  “Mr. Montgomery?” Nathaniel said, again, uncertainly. He folded his arms around his chest. “Are…we going home now?”

  “It’s been very lonely,” The Nightmare Man said, as though responding to Adrian’s thoughts. “We kept waiting for you. When you didn’t come, I tried to find you. But you were older.” He ran long, skeletal fingers fondly through Samantha’s hair as she nuzzled against his side. She flickered around the edges, like the glow around Christmas lights.

  “So you grabbed the wrong kid,” Adrian said aloud. “Thinking it was me.”

  The Nightmare Man nodded, closing his wide, blank eyes. “When I realized I was wrong, I thought maybe you would come anyway. If I kept the child, you would come here to look for him.”

  “I’m here,” Adrian said, and his voice cracked. He wanted to go on, to say something more, but he couldn’t find his voice.

  The ground rumbled.

  The walls shook; the floor trembled. Valor’s armor rattled, and he looked up, peering through his visor in alarm. The dog jumped to his paws, growling.

  Sonia stood. “What was that?”

  “She’s coming,” Valor said, dully, from within his armor.

  “What? Who’s coming?”

  But Adrian didn’t have to ask. He felt it, moments after Valor had.

  The wall shimmered and twisted and bulged, and someone stepped out — someone tall and thin, with sagging gray skin and large bloodshot eyes and a curtain of silver hair.

  “Aww. Am I interrupting something?” Lorelai’s voice was cold. She looked monstrous now, contorted. Her skin hung in loose folds along her cheeks and elbows, the way a snake’s skin becomes loose before shedding. She held one hand out before her, fingers clenched, and the room fell utterly still.

  Adrian, like the others, stood frozen, immobilized — as though caught in a spider’s web.

  “Nice trick, stealing my carriage,” Lorelai said, walking closer. Something moved and writhed under her skin, casting pale shadows against her complexion as though something inside were yearning to escape. “Too bad it came back and told me everything.”

  “Lorelai, what are you talking about?” Sonia struggled against the invisible bonds that held her in place.

  “Dreams, Sonia, you silly girl.” Lorelai licked her lips, shaking the long curtain of silver hair over her shoulder as she stalked forward. She looked around, her eyes sliding from The Nightmare Man to Valor, lingering the longest on Samantha. “Stolen dreams. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? So that you can find all of the stolen dreams for yourself — you and your pet human?”

  Adrian let out a hoarse cry, struggling to move. “Get away from them!”

  She ignored him. “A little greedy of you, isn’t it? I’m especially disappointed in you, Sonia. With a human to share your bed, you hardly need all the dreams. Oh, he wouldn’t give anything of quality to me, of course, or that fool Isolde. But I’m sure, given the proper motivation, that he could have served you just fine…”

  Nearby, Nathaniel’s wide eyes were leaking tears. He let out a low, miserable whimper. Samantha merely stared up at Lorelai, wide-eyed and confused. The glow that surrounded her died down like a flashlight that’s run out of batteries.

  “And another human — a child, even.” Lorelai clapped her hands together, looking positively delighted. The things beneath her skin seethed and writhed and strained against her flesh. “Well, isn’t that convenient.”

  “Keep your filthy hands off of him!” Adrian yelled.

  “Lorelai —” Sonia said, straining forward against the invisible bindings. “Please, stop this. You can’t…the dreams are killing you. Look at you! Look what they’re doing to you!”

  “They’re keeping me alive, stupid girl!” Lorelai slashed her hand through the air, and four gashes like claw marks appeared in Sonia’s cheek. “Look at me? Yes, look at me! I need them!”

  Sonia grimaced. Her skin sizzled where it had been sliced open. Light tendrils of smoke curled away from the flesh. “You don’t. I know what’s happening to you. We can stop it. I’ll help you.”

  Lorelai circled Sonia, stopping to stand between her and The Nightmare Man. The things beneath her skin writhed so it looked like her skin was bubbling like water in a cauldron. “Help me?” she responded, laughing a hard cold laugh. “And how do you plan to do that? Tuck me away in bed with some warm tea? Do you really think there is anything you can do that can reverse this?” She raised her arm, holding it inches from Sonia’s face. The dark things under the skin writhed and bulged, like bugs crawling under the flesh. The skin itself was mottled and pale, like damp paper.

  “It’s not too late,” Sonia said.

  Across the room, the spell’s effects seemed to waver. Valor lifted an arm, slowly, painstakingly; his armor creaked. Something broke, and he stumbled forward, suddenly freed of his bindings. He lunged across the room, drawing a sword from its scabbard as he did so.

  Lorelai caught his wrist as he lifted the sword over his head. She twisted, and he let out an anguished cry. He flailed, clawing at her with his other arm, but it was useless. She lifted him easily, and his feet waved in the air like a bug that’s been caught by its shell. Lorelai squeezed, and he crumpled in on himself like a discarded can, dreamstuff oozing from the cracks of the ruined armor. His sword clattered uselessly to the ground and disintegrated.

  “What a waste,” Lorelai said. “There was hardly a drop left in him. The queen saw to that, I suppose. No matter — the rest of you look quite fresh.” She smiled a cold, ruthless smile and turned her eyes back to Samantha.

  Adrian struggled. He was still caught in the bindings; his shoulders ached with the strain of fighting. “Stop it! Leave her alone!”

  She lifted a hand, the fingers now curled and sharp like claws, and held it over her head.

  Sonia screamed.

  The Nightmare Man broke free; he clumsily whirled around, throwing his body fully between Lorelai and Samantha. He outstretched his arms, hiding her behind the smoky folds of his cloak.

  Lorelai plunged her hand into his chest.

  The enchantment that had caught them all released. Sonia fell to the ground on her hands and knees. Adrian stumbled forward; he met with Nathaniel, who clutched at him in a sort of desperate terror. Sonia struggled forward, crawling toward Samantha, who had backed away from Lorelai
and now sat huddled in a corner. Everything happened too fast.

  The Nightmare Man said nothing. Blood poured from his chest — blood saturated with dreams, a gleaming prismatic substance that shimmered like starlight, but there were long strands of Darkness in it as well, ribbons of black that gleamed like oil. It engulfed Lorelai’s arm, and everywhere that it touched sizzled and popped. The skin tightened.

  Lorelai pulled him closer with her free hand, the one not buried in his belly. Dreamstuff oozed from his eyes like tears. She bent over his throat and opened her mouth wide. It was all over within seconds.

  Sonia hunched, curling protectively over Samantha. Samantha buried her face in the hollow of Sonia’s neck. The dog whimpered and huddled close to them.

  Adrian pressed Nathaniel’s head to his torso, trying to cover his eyes and ears. He looked away. But he could not block out the sound from his own ears — the same wet gulping sound that unicorns made when they ate flesh. He tried to find the strength to run, or fight, or do something but he was shaking too hard.

  No — wait. He wasn’t shaking.

  The ground was shaking.

  A deep, low rumble sounded from above, the sound of the earth giving way, of rocks cracking. The sound of a mountain being torn asunder. The dreams that had held the place together were dying along with The Nightmare Man.

  Lorelai dropped what was left of The Nightmare Man and stumbled backward, clutching her chest. Her skin was clear and tight and young again, but things still writhed beneath her flesh and she made a desperate choking sound.

  The room dissolved around them. The cave melted, the memory-filled forest flickered and faded like a rear projection that had been shut off. They huddled together on a small island of stone surrounded by stars and vast stretches of blackness: What had once been a platform at the top of the Gatekeeper’s mountain, though now it was crumbling and diminished. Nearby, the center raised dais sat cold and empty, with a crumpled body leaking dreamlight over the floor.