The Stuff of Dreams

by Hideyuki Kikuchi

  “What the hell . . . are you doing . . . Sheriff?” Basil gasped, his hoarse words falling with his sweat.

  “This is Sybille’s room,” the lawman repeated. “For thirty years, I’ve been coming up here to see her. You, me, this village—we all got older, but this right here never changed because Sybille was always here. Where’d you take her?”

  “Don’t . . . know . . . ask the director . . .”

  “Where’s Dr. Allen at?”

  “I’m right here, Krutz. You’d best set Basil down. Another three seconds and he’ll suffocate.”

  After the briefest hesitation, the sheriff released the man. “Don’t try anything funny. I don’t care how tough your boys may be, they’re not in my league. That’s why you need me.” There was something about the last thing he’d said that lingered in his heart, but the sheriff soon put it out of his mind and asked about Sybille.

  “She’s been transferred to someplace safe.”

  “And what was so dangerous here?”

  “Now, don’t get all hot under the collar,” Dr. Allen said. “There’s no immediate danger, however, we have to be prepared in case something crops up suddenly. You should come with me, Sheriff.”

  The director turned then and stepped out of the room, motioning for the sheriff to follow. Out in the hall, a number of nurses and patients had formed a semicircle around the doorway. Just as the sheriff was about to turn around and leave the room, he lost consciousness and collapsed to the floor.

  .

  D walked through familiar woods in darkness devoid of sound. It was such a quiet night that it almost seemed possible to hear the thin fog whisper as it drifted about. Even in this dream world, D wasn’t sure if the fact that his footsteps failed to make any sound as he stepped on the grass was his own intention or not. In any case, he supposed Sybille would be waiting for him at the mansion.

  The iron gate stood in the moonlight as it always had.

  D halted. This particular evening, he might be an unwelcome guest.

  The man stood at the gate. Garbed in raiment like the very darkness, with his face covered from the nose down by a black scarf, he wasn’t entirely unlike D. Two eyes set in skin redolent of bronze held D’s reflected image. If the powerful emotion they were loaded with wasn’t something special directed at D, then surely all he gazed upon must’ve been touched with fear.

  “Don’t intend to let me in?” D inquired softly. “There’s no point fighting here. Any duel decided in a dream can’t be called a duel at all.”

  His opponent stood there, looming like a wall of iron that had no answers for him.

  “Like the mansion itself, you’re just another one of the girl’s creations. You led me here. You saved me. Now get out of my way.”

  “Go back,” the man in black said, his scarf trembling slightly as he mouthed the words.

  The two of them gazed at each other. Both of the man’s black-gloved hands went into motion. Bringing together a bow and a single arrow before his chest, the man drew the steel bowstring back with tremendous power and determination. It was clear that no matter how fast D might move, they were too close for him to evade a shot.

  “Go back,” the man in black ordered him once again.

  “Is there already another guest at the mansion? Or is another one on the way? If you use that bow, there’ll be no taking it back.”

  The tension swelled. The moonlight froze, and even the fog stopped dead. In a world choked with a thirst for killing, the youthful Hunter was the only thing of beauty.

  The steel flew.

  D stopped it with his empty left hand, and as he caught it, that same hand blurred with activity. An instant later, D felt another presence off to his right.

  Both D and the man in black kicked off the ground simultaneously and ran toward the presence. It came as no surprise that both of them sprinted forward in an attempt to discover the identity of whoever had invaded this dream. In the next instant, black lightning shot from the treetops at the two men as they sprinted toward it, side by side. The two figures quickly split to the left and the right of the lightning bold. Still holding the arrow that he caught with his bare hand when the man fired it at him, he hurled it again in the direction of the presence he detected. Apparently, that foe then hurled it back again. There was no blood on it. Did those who lived in this world of dreams even have flesh and blood in the first place? No, this was the dream of a young lady who slept ever on.

  Suddenly, the man in black pulled out ahead of the Hunter. As he was a part of this world, it was only natural that he raced into the thicket with a speed D couldn’t match. There were emanations of some awesome conflict from the area, and then the presence unexpectedly disappeared. Jumping in scant seconds later, D found a thin mist eddying sadly before his eyes. There was no sign of either the man in black or their unseen foe. Perhaps they’d awakened from the dream?

  Noticing something on the ground, D bent over. What his black-gloved fingers touched was a scrap of cloth sticking out of the earth. It was clear from the jagged shredding at the edge of the cloth that it had taken incredible strength to tear it off—perhaps the man had torn it free in that brief second of battle. After trying unsuccessfully to pull the scrap from the ground with all his strength, D realized that it was going to be impossible. Perhaps in accordance with some physical law of this dream world, the cloth had become one with the black ground.

  Drawing a slender dagger from his belt and cutting off the corner of the cloth, D left the thicket. Where had the two of them disappeared to? Were they engaged, even now, in supernatural battle without end in some other, unimagined world? There were any number of things that should’ve occupied the Hunter’s thoughts, but he seemed aloof as he turned back toward the road. Perhaps the man in black had urged D to go back because he was expecting an intruder. Tonight it seemed, at the very least, that the man harbored no animosity toward the Hunter.

  As always, the mansion towered majestically in the blue light.

  Suddenly, D heard the most bizarre groaning—at first appearing to emanate from the highest heavens and then seeming to originate from the depths of the earth—a sound that stopped him dead in his tracks as soon as it reached him. Human groans. The groans of a woman.

  Without a sound, D leapt back. The thin fog rising around his chest trembled—shook with regret. D surveyed his surroundings. There was no change. A band of white wove plaintively in and out of the grove—only the fog to the fore was clearly heading toward him, in defiance of the rules of this world. Surely he’d be able to elude it. However, if the fog’s purpose was to cut off the area between D and the mansion, it would have to keep pushing him back indefinitely.

  “Was this fog born after hearing the scream in this dream?” D muttered.

  The fog kept closing in on him. D didn’t move. His field of view became obscured by a world of pearly white. Was it coming? Even after the fog receded—trailing tails of white behind it—D continued to stand in the same spot for a short time longer.

  Awash in blue light, the mansion showed no signs of being any different. Neither cautious nor hurried, D passed through the iron gate. Advancing a few steps, the Hunter heard the gate shut behind him.

  “This is dangerous business,” his left hand said in a hoarse voice. “There’s something funny here. You can’t be too careful.”

  Once inside the mansion, D caught sight of a figure in white at the center of the hall and halted. It was Sybille. Along with her white gown, she wore a sorrowful expression that she cast down at the floor. Even a sad dream was still a dream.

  “My travels aren’t particularly urgent, but it’s getting to be

  a bit boring going to the same place every time I sleep. Today you’re going to explain what you want with me.”

  At D’s words, her slim face grew even more pensive and she hung her head still lower. Her shoulders were shaking. The trembling grew more intense. From beneath that downturned face, sobs trickled out. No, it wasn’t sobbing—
it was laughter. With D standing right there, the girl began roaring with laughter as if she were completely deranged. Slowly, the whole mansion warped.

  “Wow! Looks to me like that fog earlier didn’t belong here after all,” the hoarse voice said with what sounded like admiration. “So, is this a dream within a dream, or has some other dream invaded the place? Whatever the case, it ain’t good. Okay, now how do we get out of here?”

  The voice seemed to suggest that the fog might be an illusion powerful enough to drive even the master of this dream mad.

  “Can’t we just leave the dream as a dream?” D muttered, seemingly oblivious to the mansion as it swayed like the whole place was underwater. His tone sounded somewhat weary. “It’s horrifying, so it must be destroyed. It’s beautiful, so it must be destroyed. It doesn’t want to destroyed, so it must be destroyed. At this rate, what will humanity leave behind?”

  These remarks likely weren’t directed at the young lady before him. The girl’s voice had already become something inhuman, and D noticed that fragments of it moved around her like a white cloud. Every time the girl opened her mouth, more sound poured out. This was truly a dream world, with clouds forming from her voice. Part of the cloud suddenly stretched out. A silvery flash sliced it in two.

  Longsword in his right hand, D ran straight for the figure he now knew was a fake Sybille. Retreat was not in this young man’s nature, yet clouds besieged him from all sides. As his longsword mowed through them, they wrapped around the steel like silk floss, one layer after another.

  With the girl right before him, D made a swipe with his longsword. The blade should’ve taken her head off then and there, but it met stiff resistance and bounced off—the work of the clouds, no doubt.

  Someone pushed the rebounding blade behind the Hunter’s back. This person that even D hadn’t detected was none other than Sybille. With one movement of her slim arm, she snapped D’s sword in half. Taking the portion of the blade that remained in her hand, Sybille hurled it at D. The Hunter caught it with his left hand. The piece then stretched out between the fingers that gripped it, penetrating deep into D’s chest.

  Sybille grinned deviously, but her face stiffened, and surely at that very instant she was witnessing D’s left hand slowly extracting the bizarre shard of his blade. Perhaps this young man wasn’t subject to anyone’s control, not even in their dreams.

  Having extracted the shard that’d been poking all the way out of his back, D made a leap at this foe in the form of Sybille. In midair, his pose was disrupted. The floor he’d been standing on stretched like rubber, clinging to him and pulling him back.

  Scattering clouds of white from her smile all the while, the fake Sybille turned from D and retreated toward the far reaches of the mansion.

  Still in that awkward pose, D hurled his fragmented blade in her direction. Howling through the air, it went into the slim figure through the nape of her neck and jutted out through her windpipe, nailing the girl’s body to the wall.

  Feeling the pulsing of the floor beneath his boots like the beating of some vile heart with his every step, D walked toward the fake Sybille. Red bloodstains were quickly spreading across the back of her white dress. Almost like predefined shapes, the stains welled up from the very fabric of the gown like roses opening their petals. No, they actually were roses. And her gown wasn’t the only thing that was blooming crimson buds. Red roses welled up on various parts of her body until each and every one of them blossomed in a riot of huge roses that covered every inch of her.

  D didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow at these weird proceedings, but surely his eyes caught the next eerie transformation to the girl’s flesh. A number of black lines burst out of her body

  in different places, stretching out in all directions, sinking into the floor, walls, and ceiling. Yes, they sank in—everything in the mansion lost its shape, growing soft as watery paint and swallowing the vines that grew from the girl. But did D realize what it all meant? As he calmly looked over his shoulder, countless vines were sprouting back out of the walls and ceiling, intersecting and forming a fine lattice that, in the blink of a human eye, managed to completely contain the Hunter.

  Tearing his boots free of the sticky floor, D went over to the closest lattice, put his left hand and both feet against the center of it, and then leaned his body against it. His brow crinkled ever so slightly. The lattice of thin vines had grown needle-like thorns that pierced his hands and feet.

  “Oww . . . This is the real thing!”

  Though the Hunter’s left hand may have overstated the case, it was clear the pain from this was real. The blood running out of him was real, too—the dream’s reality. In which case, a death in a dream might be a death in reality.

  The walls began sliding closer, the ceiling lowered, and the floor slowly rose. As the walls reached the body of the fake Sybille still nailed to the wall, she melted away. In less than ten seconds, the three-dimensional jaws of death would make contact with D.

  The dagger glittered in D’s right hand. The blade was brought down with all the power he possessed, and sparks shot out as it bounced off the surface of the vines.

  “Looks like we’re cornered,” the Hunter’s left hand moaned almost nonchalantly.

  “Why don’t you try swallowing the ceiling or one of the walls?” D asked softly. Although he sounded as if he was talking about having a cup of tea, this was, of course, a grave matter that could mean the difference between life and death.

  “You’ve gotta be joking. You think you can just drink a dream? If I did that, then everything would just turn to dreams.”

  “Okay, then,” the Hunter replied.

  “What’ll you do?”

  “What happens if you die in a dream?”

  “I don’t know,” the left hand said. “And wouldn’t you know it, there’re no dead folks around to ask. Why don’t you try asking the one who made all this in the first place? You-know-who.”

  Giving no reply to that, D reached into his coat with his right hand. “Dying in a dream? That would be an interesting experiment—but we can’t do that.” As he spoke, his right hand was thrust toward the sky. Something like a scrap of paper flew up into the air. It was D’s dagger that then pierced the scrap. And then both items were driven right into part of the floor that was rising like muddy water, though the substance rang like something solid as he stabbed into it.

  Suddenly, everything went black.

  D opened his eyes and found himself in the middle of the lane that ran to Sybille’s mansion. Waking from a dream within a dream, he’d returned to the first vision. Not saying a word, he looked down at his left hand. There wasn’t so much as a scratch on the back or the palm. As for his longsword, it remained in its sheath.

  “Hey! What did you do?” the Hunter’s left hand asked in a surprised manner.

  Bending over, D reached for something that glittered on the ground by his feet. This was the spot where he’d thrown his dagger, and what he’d picked up was that very same blade. To the tip of it was stuck a piece of brown cloth—the cloth that the assassin in the thicket had left behind. Because the twisted, melting mansion was some nightmare spawned by the assassin, a strike to the piece of cloth that linked it to Sybille’s dream was all that was needed to deal a lethal blow to that dream within a dream. Nevertheless, waking from one dream into another was quite strange.

  “What’ll you do now?” the voice asked.

  D began walking. In his dreams, just as in reality, the young man’s steady pace was always the same.

  .

  III

  .

  As soon as he awoke, Sheriff Krutz opened his eyes and realized he was lying on a bed in an examination room in the hospital’s internal medicine ward. When he tried to get up, something tugged strongly at his head. Bringing his hand up to it, he felt countless cords there. Some kind of pliable substance covered his scalp, and cords were stuck into it. It must’ve been the conduction paste they used when taking electroencep
halograms.

  Just as the lawman finished prying the whole mess off his head, the hospital director appeared in the doorway on the far side of the room. The speed with which the old man stepped aside belied his age. The gooey mass the sheriff had hurled slammed against the wall, cords and all. The only thing capable of marring his face any further at this point was retribution.

  “I’d say our friendship has had it,” the sheriff said as he got off the bed.

  “Would you just wait a minute?” Dr. Allen said, raising one hand.

  Though the sheriff had been about to uncork some choice vocabulary, the thing that kept his tongue in check was the depth of the pain the old doctor wore on his face.

  “After having done this to you, it’s only fair that I explain all the circumstances. The truth of the matter is, I don’t want to tell you, and I believe you’ll probably wish you’d never heard it, either. You see, I’ve come to a conclusion—a most unfortunate one.”

  “Where is Sybille?” Sheriff Krutz asked, as if brushing aside everything the hospital director had just said. He felt around his waist to make sure that his gun was still strapped

  to his belt.

  “She’s this way. Come with me.”

  “No more sneak attacks,” the director said in a sarcastic tone.

  “What did you do to me?” the sheriff finally inquired after a few minutes of walking in silence.

  “We checked your brainwaves for abnormalities—although

  I doubt you’ll believe that. Come with me and you’ll find all your answers.”

  The two of them got into a wooden elevator and descended into the basement.

  “Hey—we’re in the emergency ward. Is Sybille’s condition more serious now?” the sheriff asked, his voice echoing down the cold corridor. Before it had entirely faded, the two of them were greeted by a white door. Tough-looking male nurses stood to either side of it. The sight of one of them carrying an old-fashioned rocket launcher and the other cradling a photon-beam rifle made the sheriff’s eyes glow with quiet determination. Whatever was going on with Sybille, it was extremely important.