The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  Although she had been forsaken – Dennis’s word – by many men in her life, she had never lost the hope that she might find someone worthy of her affections. But eventually every abstinence, whether forced or voluntary, must have a respite, and without that respite things just go from bad to worse.

  So it was, on an evening when she was feeling particularly desperate, Siglinde Erhard hanged herself in her apartment with a pair of her own nylon stockings. She thought it would be a release. But she was wrong.

  The bitterness and resentment and desperation that had so fueled her life continued to run thick and strong even when she was dead. And so she still walked the streets of her beloved Hamburg, looking for someone in whom she recognized a basic goodness. One of her favorite visiting spots when she was alive was the statue of the pissing boy in Neugartenstrasse. The statue still held an attraction for her in death, perhaps even more so.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, “isn’t there anyone here who’s alive?”

  “The percentages are the same wherever you are, whatever country you’re in,” Dennis said. “It’s just…” He seemed to search for the appropriate words. “It’s just that we usually don’t get sent back to the place we left. Too many people might recognize us.”

  Over on the opposite bank, a heron flapped its wings wildly.

  If Dennis Dannerman thought this was supposed to explain things to me, he was wrong. But he would not give any further explanations. “Don’t ask me to say any more,” he said.

  We walked in silence for a while and then Dennis said, “Siglinde is not like me. She’s just a ghost.”

  “And what are you? Can you tell me that, at least?”

  He shrugged. “How about an angel?”

  “An angel?”

  “It’s as good a description as anything. I know I don’t have any wings but they went out with the Ark. I’m just…” He paused, again searching for some meaningful word or phrase. “I’m just doing a job. That’s what Heaven should be all about, doing jobs. A big company, run like any other big company.” There was something in the way he spoke that made me feel a little uneasy. Or maybe it was just that I had worked for a big company, and I didn’t like it. Office politics, backstabbing, lying and cheating…surely the Elysian Fields were above all that.

  “And what job are you doing?”

  “What angels have always done: teaching people how to live for others and not be selfish.” He seemed to consider this for a few seconds and then added, “But it’s not always a popular occupation.”

  As we carried on walking I tried to reconcile such altruism with the grubby self-serving reality of Big Business. I failed miserably. The two concepts seemed mutually contradictory.

  Perhaps sensing my confusion, Dennis stopped and turned to me. Producing from his jacket pocket the piece of card I had seen him showing in the tavern, he held it out to me. “Take a look, tell me what you see.” I frowned and took an involuntary step backwards. “Go ahead,” he said, thrusting the card towards me. “But you may not keep it.”

  I took the card and turned it over.

  It was either some kind of out-of-focus photograph or a painting, dog-eared and stained with use, the image creased and faded. “What is it?”

  “What it is isn’t important. It’s what you can see…that’s the important thing.”

  I shifted around so that the moon’s glow was directly behind me. “It looks like…it looks like some kind of blur.” That was the best way I could describe it. The card was a haze of swirling shapes and shades and tones…maybe in colour, although I had no way of knowing that in the moonlight.

  In fact, maybe it was the moonlight that made the thing seem to move on the card, like billowing dry ice smoke or graveyard mist…and was it my own shadow cast on the card or was there something behind the mist? Something big and…old, though I wondered what it was that made me think that; something which seemed as eager to see me as I was to see it. “I don’t know,” I said, handing the card back. “I have no idea what I can see.”

  Dennis took the card and slipped it back into his pocket. “It’ll come to you, but when it does you must look with your heart, not with your eyes.”

  “And how do I do that?”

  He smiled. “Like I say, it’ll come to you.”

  I started walking, suddenly aware that the night had turned cold. Pulling my coat tightly around me and speaking over my shoulder, I asked Dennis what he had meant when he said that what it was wasn’t important.

  But it was my father’s voice that answered. A dream, it whispered. It’s only a dream.

  When I turned around the path was empty. Dennis Dannerman had gone.

  I walked around for a half-hour or so looking for him, smoking cigarettes and wondering, each time I passed someone, whether they were truly alive or simply shadows of themselves.

  I considered returning to the tavern but decided I had had enough of crowds for one day, and so I went back to my guest house.

  In truth, it was more than a guest house: cozy, pleasant and warm, a spice-smelling reassuring bolt-hole of sheets, frilly table-covers and flocked wallpaper, and, in Frau Maier, a bustling somewhat burly woman who smelled of mothballs and had a habit of making tiny humming sounds when she was listening to me. Her English was every bit as perfect as anyone else’s and this further emphasized my need to learn at least the basic fundamentals before making such a trip again.

  She welcomed me in personally, as though I were a long-lost relative returning from some fabled war fought on horseback and with oversized cutlery. Her hands clasped at her stomach, her back ramrod-straight and her smile tight but genuine, she asked if I would like any refreshment before retiring to bed – so much more eloquent and image-conjuring than simply “hitting the sack”. But I declined. Already the beer I had consumed was making me feel a little woozy…but maybe the conversation I had had with Dennis Dannerman on the banks of the river had contributed to that. I bade her goodnight and went up to my room. Within minutes, I was tucked up in bed. Sleep seemed to come almost immediately.

  Colours were everywhere, swirling around me, so deep and dense they were taking my breath away. The shapes billowed and withdrew, wafting suddenly one way and then the other, and all the time there were other shapes – real shapes, shapes of people – just behind the haze, standing there watching me.

  When I opened my eyes again the room was dark. But not so dark that I couldn’t make out the shape sitting in the chair by the window. I knew right away who it was.

  I wanted to ask how he had got into my room but such questions seemed a little redundant when asked of an angel. And anyway, maybe I was still asleep. I reached for the pack of Salem. “Forget something, Dennis?”

  He sighed. “We’ve stopped dreaming for others,” he said. “All I wanted to do was put things right…or, at least, make them a little better.”

  “Dennis,” I said, blowing smoke and hiking myself up in bed, “you’re going to have to bear with me a little here. What do you mean about our stopping dreaming for others?”

  He got to his feet and walked across to the window. “It’s a cyclical thing, Charles,” he said. “Most of the time, people care for each other pretty well but things tend to get run down.” I could see his head turn around to look at me but I couldn’t see his face. “And it starts when they’re asleep.

  “People don’t know it’s happening most of the time,” he said, “they’re just reacting to the way things are around them. Times get tough, and the people get tougher. It’s a fact of life. They dream for themselves…they dream of success and wealth…about winning the lottery or being promoted; they dream of nice clothes and great vacations; about making out with people they’ve always wanted to make out with. They stop dreaming about the other poor shmuck who’s maybe got even less than they have because they want it for themselves…and they want it all. Then, when the dreaming gets selfish enough, they stop even thinking about other folks.” He looked back out of the window. “And tha
t’s where things are right about now. The collective dreaming for others stopped a long, long time ago. Collective thinking will follow soon.”

  I didn’t say anything for a moment. “If you think that explains things then you’ve been away too long,” I said at last.

  “I’m not through,” he said.

  He walked back to the chair and I switched on the lamp by the side of the bed. The dim light gave the room a slightly surreal tone, as though everything that could be trusted was here within the parameter of its glow…and everything beyond it was hard and cold and dangerous. I shivered involuntarily, even though I was still fully clothed, and hoisted the sheet up to my chin.

  He settled deeper into the chair. “Got a cigarette?”

  “But you’re an angel?”

  “So?”

  I tossed the pack across and followed it with the matchbook.

  Dennis lit up and blew out smoke, sighing dreamily. “Good,” he said. “Okay, let’s say I’ve been a little economical with the truth. I’ll take it from the top. Two things: first, the Dream.”

  He waved a hand. “Oh, I’m going back hundreds – thousands – of years. Back to the beginning, almost. In the beginning, there wasn’t The Word…or even a word. There was only a dream, a dream for mankind. It was God’s dream. He felt that men should bond amongst themselves, look after and out for each other. But what works in theory doesn’t always work in practice. Where individuality exists – and individuality is the essence of existence – there will always be strife, struggle, and envy.

  “Of course,” he went on, “there was no way he could give a collective intelligence to men – that stuff only works in science fiction…and not always even then – because there were too many distractions. But only too many distractions while they were fully aware of them.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “He figured that if he could stop those distractions, just for a while, he could get them to bond…become almost a sentient multi-multi-headed creature. And so he hit on an idea – two ideas, actually. The first was to remove the diversions and the distractions, and the second was to place something – one thing – in their stead.

  “And so,” Dennis Dannerman said as he stubbed out his cigarette, “God invented sleep, and he created something to fill that void of existence…a dream of togetherness to bond people together.”

  “Jesus Christ, Dennis, what are you telling me here? I feel like Spencer Tracy in Inherit The Wind. What happened to Darwin in all this?”

  “Oh, evolution happened just the way that Darwin said it did. But God gave us sleep, and the ability to dream. What we’ve lost over the millennia, is The dream…the one that God gave us to bond us all together.”

  Dennis explained that God had over-stretched the dream idea. What had worked when the entire world population was but a few hundred thousand didn’t work so well when it numbered into the millions. There were now too many people for the collective dream to be effective.

  “So God decided that the original concept of the dream had to be recorded somewhere as a physical entity, and that it must then be shown to people, unlocking the seed and the ability he had planted in the first of mankind at the beginning, and which had been passed down – genetically’, if you will…albeit in an increasingly diluted fashion – as a kind of race memory. After a lot of work, he finally did it. In other words, he managed to give substance to the insubstantial.”

  Dennis produced the piece of card from out of his pocket and held it up. “And here it is.”

  I stared at the card and made my single biggest mistake of the evening: I said…

  “You said there were two things. What’s the second?”

  He looked at me, smiled tiredly and said, “The second thing I wanted to tell you about is the Devil wants the Dream.”

  I was probably expected to say something there but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  Dennis Dannerman stood up and walked across to the window, leaning on the sill like a man who had run a marathon. “When Lucifer was expelled from…from the other side, he took something with him. Just one thing.”

  “Why do I think I know what that was?”

  “Right. He took the dream. And he’s kept it all these thousands of years. Kept it ‘down below’ to use the theatrical term for Hell.” Dennis turned around.

  I was frowning. “But you’ve… So how did you get hold of the Dream?”

  “It’s like nothing you could imagine, Charles,” he said. “Down there. Nothing in your wildest nightmare can prepare you for that place. Just…just a void, an empty space filled with crags and rocks and tunnels, hot…hotter than – and I know I’m repeating myself- hotter than you could think hot could be. No sky, no ground, just rock everywhere, dark tunnels which glow with some kind of half-light, and all we do is crawl through them, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, looking for a way out.”

  “You crawled through them? But I thought…

  “That’s where I went. When I died. I wanted to keep it from you but there’s no way to do that.”

  “Why did you want to keep it from me?”

  He looked down at his tightly-clenched hands. “Because I was ashamed.”

  “Is that why you gave me all that other stuff…the ‘angel’ stuff? Because you were ashamed?”

  He nodded. “Partly.”

  “And what was the other part?”

  “I want you to do something for me and I didn’t think you’d want to do it if you thought I was bad.”

  “Do what?”

  He waved a hand. “When I died, all the things I’d done caught up with me. I won’t bore you with the details but suffice to say the scales were weighted against me. I accepted my lot with some reluctance, but I did accept it. When you hear the list of charges, it’s difficult not to be contrite.” He shook his head and let out a small laugh, though it was entirely without humor. “Some of those things I didn’t even remember. But there was no arguing against them. And anyway, most of them I did remember. So…

  “The rumor of a way out of Hell has been circulating down there for as long as Hell has existed. As has the rumor of the Great First Dream, the blueprint for humanity’s goodness, lost to the Gods since the time Lucifer was sent packing. It was held, the stories went, in some inner sanctum looked over by the Devil itself.” He waited for that to sink in for a few minutes and then added, “And I found it.

  “There were three of us, a mercenary from 8th century Antigua called Paul Theolomides and a heroin dealer from 1960s Madrid -Salvatore something-or-other.

  “We came across the small cave separately, dropping into it from three different holes in the wall pretty much at the same time. There’s no sleep down there – although you’re tired all the time… I mean dog-tired, falling down dead tired. And there are no meals, no coffee breaks, even though you’re always thirsty and always hungry – thirsty like a man crawling the desert for days, hungry like someone who hasn’t eaten for weeks. But not sleeping and not drinking or eating doesn’t harm you in any way. You just go on…tired and thirsty and hungry.

  “Anyway, we dropped into the cavern and there it was, sitting on an outcrop of rock.”

  “The dream? That piece of card you carry?”

  He nodded. It was glowing like fairy lights, casting shimmering shadows around the walls, throwing hues of colour across the ground like light ripples on a still lake. And the whole cave was hissing, a permanent state of anger and mistrust, and maybe even fear.

  “Paul recognized it pretty much straight away. Sal didn’t know shit about anything, even though he’d been there years longer than me.”

  “And where was…” I hesitated: what the hell was I talking about? “Where was the Devil?”

  Dennis shrugged. “Taking a dump? Checking the furnaces? Who knows? All I know is that when each of us took this thing in our hands we could feel it, you know? We could feel the power of it, feel the light and the warmth, feel…feel the goodness.


  “They – Paul and Sal – wanted to use it as a bargaining chip…strike up a deal with ‘the authorities’. But I wanted to take it away from that hateful cave, wanted to take it away from Hell forever, maybe restore it to its rightful owners. There was a scuffle – we all have bodies there, bodies which cannot be inflicted with pain from each other, but which are in pain every minute of every day…bullet-wound pain, back pain, chest pain, headache, gut ache, nausea, pancreatic cancer, gout, hangnails and Tequila hangovers…all rolled into one. All the time. God, you wouldn’t believe.

  “Anyway, there was this scuffle and I got the Dream. I scurried back up one of the tunnels and, though they followed me in, I soon lost them, turning first this way and then that, then another, keeping going all the time, the card jammed into my mouth. Pretty soon I was alone, or as alone as you ever get down there…occasionally coming up on some other guy’s bare backside swaying to and fro in front until you take a different path.

  “Then, without any warning – I have no idea how long I was crawling that way, crawling with the card – there was a light up ahead, and the crawlspace was getting wider.” He raised his arms in the air. “And I was out, bare-ass naked, but out. In a cave in Rheinisches Schiefergebirge – the Rhenish Slate Mountains: I didn’t know that at the time, of course, only later.

  “I made my way down the highlands into Hunsruck, through Taunus, Eifel and Westerwald, down through the wine-growing region, until at last I came upon houses. Under cover of darkness I stole clothes – still don’t need food, still don’t need sleep…but the pains have stopped, and the tiredness and the hunger and thirst – and eventually I made my way to Hamburg and, eventually, here to Meissen. By the time I found out what day and year it was, I’d been out for four days, sleeping out in the fields and the woods. It was the fourteenth of July 1995 – 10 days after my death. Which meant I had been in Hell for five or six days.” He gave an involuntary shudder. “And I thought I had been there for years…years and years.