Fear Club- A Confession

by Damian Stephens

  “This one’s for you, Jules!” Steve said. “’Member this? Santo & Johnny. ‘Sleepwalk.’”

  Julie returned to the main room. “I’m going to try a different approach,” she said, and walked over to a curtained wall at the other end of the room. Steve was now reclining in a little booth by the wall, flipping nonchalantly through what appeared to be a copy of Detective Comics #27, oblivious.

  She drew the curtain aside. A glass shop-front door stood behind it, through which she could see a small, brightly lit parking lot, empty of vehicles. A pitch-black night sky, ornamented with a calm, full moon, obscured the reaches beyond, just past a verge lined with pine trees.

  When she stepped out into the cool, pleasant night, a little bell above the door jingled, blending neatly in time with the music from the jukebox.

  Julie left the Dreamkeeper’s Emporium with the only plan she felt she could reasonably enact, given the circumstances: do something different.

  She decided that, no matter what she felt like doing, she would simply do something different, and see where that led. Since none of this really made any sense anyway, it seemed the last thing she could dependably rely on would be consistency.

  “Okay,” she said aloud. “So, I want to find Charley. Which means: I’ve got to try to avoid finding Charley at all costs.”

  Step one had been to leave the Emporium entirely. The most “reasonable” thing to do would have been to try and find Charley by “guessing” which way he went, weaving her way through the maze of halls and rooms.

  “The only place you can get back to is the front room of the Emporium?” she surmised, speaking aloud. “Because that’s where the checkout counter is?” She frowned, noting the little asphalt parking lot she stood in. The storybook moon seemed almost to grin at her bewilderment, having started its downward turn to one horizon. To her left was a larger, two-way street; past that, a vast parking lot with what looked like a strip mall at the farthest end of it.

  “To not find someone, I’d need to avoid where they would be,” she said aloud. “So where the hell would Charley go?”

  Julie suddenly realized the extent of her real relationship with Charley. Besides his insipid adoration of Molly Furnival, the constant stream of second-rate fiction he was reading, and his association with the Bhairavi Society, she had no idea what he was really like.

  They hadn’t been friends before Mike’s death and resurrection. Hell, she wasn’t even sure if they were really friends now—they chatted like acquaintances, but never really about anything except Fear Club stuff. Not like with Steve—who was a bastard, but still managed to get her birthday presents every year without fail, and Christmas gifts, and was somehow able to cheer her up whenever she failed a test or fell into one of those black moods... So was that why she had confided in Charley about Foxend? Because, basically, he was just a stranger? A fucking therapist, even?

  She turned around. The giant pyramid that appeared to take up the entire city’s center hovered against the backdrop of night sky. Go that way? she thought—and quickly realized that that is exactly where Charley would head.

  She reversed direction again and started walking, exiting the parking lot and heading away from the pyramid along what appeared to be a main street. The city unfolded, miraculously more beautiful and intricate than even she had initially suspected. After a time, the street widened, revealing alleyways leading off to either side in between the various buildings, which had begun to take on a slightly more modern cast in some respects.

  Shop windows began to appear, advertising all sorts of items, which in the dim light illuminating a number of them on the inside appeared to be deeper and taller than they could possibly be, given their dimensions taken from outside. The variety seemed endless and nonrepeating: clothing in fabrics that looked like hybrid variants of silks and cottons and woven threads with jewelry composed of unimaginable varieties of stone, crystal, metal, and even organic materials like feathers, all decked out on finely wrought mannequins; every possible number and type of doll and toy and boardgame and playing-card deck in stacks and on shelves, scattered over tables or arranged in neat rows; a shop that appeared entirely devoted to different kinds of flowers in an impossible-to-categorize degree of variety; a tobacconist’s paradise (which Julie fought the urge to investigate further); something that looked like a little convenience store, with shelf upon shelf of chocolate bars and candies...

  Everything, everywhere, proved utterly and completely devoid of people, just like in the Emporium.

  A strange breeze picked up. Julie, shaken from her reverie, realized she had been walking down the middle of a thoroughfare with a mall on one side of it. It appeared as if she was entering a sort of “downtown” region. A tire place announced its presence well before she saw it with the pungent smell of new rubber. A goddamned used car lot sprawled out past the mall. A gas station with its lights on, up ahead, followed a string of little hole-in-the-walls with Chinese lettering for signs, all apparently “closed” at the moment, though the scent of fried rice and egg drop soup wafted by briefly.

  “I should get a car,” she said. “Oh, shit! Yes. I should get a fucking car!”

  She sprinted over to the car lot.

  Where is it...where is it...where is it...

  By the glaring light of handfuls of thousandwatt bulbs overhead, Julie wove her way through old Toyotas and Volvos, Fords and—yes, Hondas, but not quite—yes!

  There it sat, keys in the ignition, full tank of gas, her unpainted 1981 Honda Civic—the “Little Fist,” Steve sometimes called it, due to Julie’s tendency to punch through intersections during the last few seconds of a yellow light. Or the first few seconds of a red one.

  She got in and patted the steering wheel. “Okay. We’re just going to drive,” she said. “We’re going to head off, and fucking drive until we find the end of this place. Or until we run out of gas.” She started the car. The oddly comforting scent of exhaust smoke arose briefly.

  She reached into the glovebox. Her reserve cigarettes. She lit one, put the car in gear, and took off.

  ~~~

  Roland the Dreamkeeper returned to the front of the Emporium a few minutes after Julie left.

  “Rolls-Royce!” Steve said, tossing his comic book on the table. “Been a while!”

  “Indeed!” Roland replied. “Sorry I missed Julie on her way out. I didn’t offend her, somehow, did I?”

  Steve waved his hand. “Oh, she’s got trust issues. She was afraid to talk to you about Charley.” Roland sat down and began loading a neatly curved black pipe with tobacco from a pouch in his shirt pocket. “That’s unfortunate,” he said. “What did she want to know?”

  “Where the hell he went, man!” Steve said. “And I told her I’d ask you when you got back. So I guess here I am, asking you.”

  Roland smiled and took a few puffs from his pipe. A pleasing aroma of vanilla and honeysuckle emanated from the pipe’s mouth. “Charley went back to Golem Creek,” he said.

  Steve sat up straight. “Are you serious?”

  Roland nodded. “Deadly,” he said. “And Julie’s going to run into him there.”

  Steve stood from his seat. “How—”

  “I am fully aware of all of his dreams, Steve,” he said. “Laban had to have a failsafe in place before he” —Roland coughed, politely— “altered.”

  Steve sat back down. “Laban?” he repeated. Roland nodded. “Laban Black, yes. My maker.” “Huh,” Steve said. “Huh.”

  Roland chuckled. “That pyramid you saw from your room this morning? His tomb. But, gods, what lengths we’ve all gone to in order to try and keep things sane around here.”

  “What do you mean?” Steve asked.

  “Well, if you haven’t noticed,” Roland said, switching to an easy chair Steve actually hadn’t noticed in the room before, “this place is empty. I’m not even really a ‘p
erson’ in the sense you’d normally conceive of it.”

  “Then what are you?” Steve asked.

  “I’m this place, the Emporium,” Roland replied, waving his hand in the air. “I am the labyrinth that holds this world in check. Think about it. How do we know an inside from an outside? Can a world exist without an inside? What’s ‘in’ your head— does that oppose or somehow support what appears ‘outside’ your head?”

  Steve ran both hands through his hair and slumped. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” he said.

  Roland chuckled again. “Of course you do! Ah, Steve—you sell yourself short.”

  “All I know is that we got here after kicking that box—”

  “Ah, yes, the box,” Roland said, raising his eyebrows. “Michael Flowers and his little box. I can tell you this: I’m glad it was you three who ended up here, and not him.”

  Steve spoke hesitatingly. “Why?”

  “Because if Curwen has somehow succeeded in ensuring Michael’s complicity in his plans, then that world of yours ‘out there’” —he chuckled again at this— “wouldn’t last two minutes in the wake of his arrival.”

  “And why in the hell is that?” Steve tried not to sound overly irritated at Roland’s somewhat pedantic manner of speaking. But he was getting tired of all this roundabout nonsense.

  “He forms the balance,” Roland answered simply. “If he were to somehow gain entrance here, the gates could be unsealed. Laban’s entire plan could be relegated to the dustbin. It is Michael Flowers himself, his very heart, that can tip the scales. The only thing, in fact. Reasonably enough, Laban never thought it wise to dream such a possibility and actually test it out.”

  “So...” Steve tried to get a grip on what the Dreamkeeper was suggesting. “This place is—”

  “Safe, is what it is,” Roland finished for him. “‘The Place of Solace.’ That’s what Laban called it. The untouchable place, in between the worlds. Laban found the seeds of it when he first investigated the wishing well in Golem Creek—your ‘Murk.’ But he also found the denizens who dwelt below, and learned of their plans to return to the surface. When the holder of the Silver Key told him, through Curwen, about the perichoresis of dimensions, the places where the worlds overlap, he saw immediately the solution—the means of escape!” Roland started laughing again.

  “Curwen—Curwen Flowers?” Steve rolled his eyes. “Golem Creek town legends? I thought Laban Black went back to England, or whatever?”

  “Not quite,” Roland responded. “He went between. There is a location in your world—several, in fact—from which one can enter the Place of Solace. There are many more ways to get out of here. The creatures he had enslaved to build this place for him were banished, true—from here. But the gates—the places where the dreams overlap, where what you call ‘your’ world and the many others that exist or can be dreamed share ‘space,’ if you will—still allowed for the traversal of some of the denizens of the pit, back and forth. Unless the proper signs and banishings are in place.”

  Steve paced the room. “What do they want with us, anyway? Those creatures, I mean. It’s not that great out there!” Steve waved his hands up and around, unsure where to indicate the location of the “usual” world.

  “Food sources can dry up,” Roland answered. “And...well...let’s just say that they are not averse to human as a meal replacement.”

  Steve stopped pacing. “Right,” he said, and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Right. I get it. So is that what happened to Mike? He got ‘et,’ as they say?”

  Roland’s pleasant demeanor suddenly diminished. “That I don’t know,” he said. “Which means he is beyond Laban’s dreamings. He tried to take his life once. It is very possible that he has done so again—this time successfully.”

  Steve was taken aback. “‘Tried to take his life once’?” he repeated. “When the hell did he do that?”

  “The very night you first encountered him, at the hospital,” Roland answered. “You and Charles and Julie. After enough of Curwen’s instruction, Michael wanted no more of it—the bloody sacrifices, the all-night vigils. When Curwen had first taken him under his wing, Michael thought it the greatest joy. After years of it, though—well, it’s quite possible that anyone with some sense, and certainly anyone with a conscience, would want out.”

  “And the only way out was—”

  “The end complete. Indeed.” Roland puffed on his pipe again. “I don’t do fancy things like smoke rings,” he apologized. “Forgive me.”

  Steve began to pace the room.

  “I should be doing something, then,” he said. “Julie—she left! She’s back in Golem Creek—with Charley?”

  Roland nodded.

  “And I’m just sitting around here, wasting time—”

  Roland shook his head. “I’d hardly call my DMing ‘wasting time’!” he said.

  Steve looked slightly apologetic. “You know what I mean!” he said.

  “I do, and I’ll have you know that there’s no way you could have wasted any of your time here!” Roland said.

  “And how is that?” Steve asked.

  “Time doesn’t pass, here,” Roland answered. “Not in the sense that you normally think of it. Obviously, things are changing in here, but out there the ‘time’ button is basically paused. I mean, it can move ‘the usual way’ in here, if you want it to. But I don’t ever really bother with it. I haven’t wound a clock in—well, I couldn’t technically tell you how long!” He laughed.

  “Okay!” Steve brightened. “Then I still have all the time I need!”

  “For what?” Roland asked.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Steve said. “What do you suggest?”

  “Let things take their course,” Roland answered. “Another game, perhaps?”

  Steve slumped back into his seat.

  ~~~

  Five miles in, passing neighborhoods sprawling off in either direction, two parks, and what appeared to be the ruins of a manor house—but still not a single human or animal—Julie tried turning on the radio.

  A few twists of the dial, fuzz, static, and then, a voice.

  “...all dreaming the same dream.” It was a male voice, a little nasal, a little affected. “Whereas we are merely inlets of the One Consciousness—oases, if you will—a temporary respite from Nothingness. When hungry, we eat—the hunger itself is a void, the void triggers the hunger. Emptiness is the case— always. And matter is an escape from nothingness, from emptiness.”

  The voice paused for a moment. There was a sound like an old TV set tuning in.

  “If I may suggest something,” the voice went on, “I think you might find it most enlightening. Because there is a place where time stops, where dreams overlap. And I think, if you can see where I’m going with this, you might want to take the next left at the light.”

  Julie started. Did he just—

  “Yes,” the voice said. “Next left coming up here... See that side road? Perfect! Take that one down past the stone pillars.”

  Julie did as the voice suggested. “What if a god was a key?” it said.

  “What?” Julie said out loud. Suddenly, the road up ahead begin to quiver and tremble. No, it wasn’t just the road—it was the air, the sky, the trees— Once past it, Julie blinked and shook her head.

  She was back on the main road. Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” sounded faintly from the speakers.

  She began to slow as she noticed a car stopped on the shoulder of the road up ahead. Charles Leland stood behind it, slamming shut its trunk.

  interlude

  THAT WHICH REMAINS

  TWO YEARS AGO.

  “The things of childhood are not childish, necessarily,” the figure said, its voice a mass of whispers and shadows. “Things become childish when they start getting sold. You can always see through the
lies of adults. They don’t know anything, because they think they know everything.” The figure shifted, intermixing with the darkness.

  “And you start to become one of them,” it continued. “Why? You start to believe their lies. There are no explanations for anything. Just more convincing fictions.”

  Something like mathematical equations began to appear shimmering in the air around it.

  “You believe that?” it laughed. “So if I change my name to something ‘more consistent,’ I am somehow more me? If I decide this moment to play a different role, but I do it with perfect believability, perfect consistency, that new role is somehow...truer ?”

  The silvery numbers and other figures became blurry, misty, and faded back into the darkness.

  “Ah, they simply make things up, just like we do,” it said. “But their lies only serve to make things less wonderful. They make up money...then they make up burdens to make the money seem more believable. They make up jobs...then they make up school and degrees to make the jobs seem more believable. They make up knowledge, they make up ‘facts,’ they make up truths...then they make up argumentation and debate, they make up conflict, to make all of their facts seem less like fiction.” It seemed to sigh momentarily. “But the world you live in depends entirely upon you, on what fictions you choose to believe in. That is the secret. That is the key.”

  I projected an image of myself into the darkness.

  The shape within it laughed again.

  “The most basic lie of all,” it said. “What is a person, anyway? What is a place? What are things? Except appearances, never seen from all possible angles at once, and therefore always mostly mysterious, whether we recognize that Mystery within them or not.”