Dreamwalker

by Russell James

  “Oh, God, no,” Simon whispered in horror.

  The hooded man was Simon.

  “Simon, no!” Karen sobbed. “What are you doing?”

  Simon’s smaller version raised the steaming dual poker to Karen’s eyes.

  “This orb does not hold just a figment of my imagination,” Cauquemere said. “Or yours. This is a vision. A vision what my reality here will force you to become. That creature has been incubating within you since your arrival in Twin Moon City. What a treat to share its birth with your wife.”

  Simon sagged with the weight of despair. “My Karen!” he moaned at the orb.

  In the orb, two burning prongs burst the eyeballs of the only woman he ever loved. The liquid inside sizzled into steam.

  “You see, Simon,” Cauquemere cooed in his ear, “I can’t return you to her. After all, you are dead. So, I’ll bring her to you. I’d guess about two weeks of this show would scare her to death. And there is room for her here in Twin Moon City.”

  Cauquemere sensed the hope that sprouted in Simon’s mind burn back into ashes. It was the end of Waikiki Simon.

  As if he finally got the joke, Simon spouted hysterical laughter, an uncontrolled rolling cackle, the sound of the release of unbearable stress. He sank to his knees and looked around in wonder at a new world, the one seen through the rotating prism of psychosis.

  The door at the end of the chamber opened and the two hunters returned. They assumed positions at Simon’s sides.

  “Go with your brothers, Simon,” Cauquemere commanded.

  Simon rose and the three left the room.

  Another soul had joined the Twin Moon City payroll.

  Cauquemere ascended the throne. He placed his hat back on his head, the brim again low over his eyes. He sat and the orb with Pete’s image floated down and hovered before him.

  “Young Pete,” Cauquemere said. “Where would you find work in Atlantic City on short notice?”

  Casinos required background checks. Major corporations would do the same. This young dreamwalker would try to stay low profile, unsure of the situation he had thrust himself into. St. Croix would have the resources to check the right spots, where workers were paid in cash and few people saw their faces. Finding Pete was well within his grasp, even if he had to do it in the tactile world.

  The girl was something else, though. Walking Twin Moon City, she was no hazard. But if she taught Pete of his dreamwalker skills…

  He reached out telepathically to the reserve squad running rings around the palace wall and sent them on a search for blonde female teens. If he hacked at both ends of this invading pest, with neither head nor tail, it would be no threat.

  Within the glowing orb in his left hand, Hooded Simon punctured the thigh of his pretty wife again. Cauquemere smiled. One task to complete before he returned to the shell of St. Croix.

  He had a date with Karen.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Pete finally drifted off to sleep that night and arrived neither in Twin Moon City (he was grateful) nor in the midst of an epic adventure (for which he lacked the mental energy).

  Instead he stood on a crystal-white beach beneath an azure sky. Scattered cumulus clouds refracted the bright sunlight into shades of silver and white. Behind him stretched a tree line of coconut-laden palms. A warm breeze caressed the fronds into a hypnotic, swaying dance. The bay’s faded turquoise waters lapped the beach with tiny, languid crashes. He wore shorts and his favorite Buffalo Bills T-shirt. Two wooden lounge chairs faced the sea. Each sported deep, soft cushions and a scallop shell awning that shielded them from the sun and one of the chairs from Pete’s view.

  Pete gave his subconscious kudos.

  Warm sand squished between Pete’s toes as he walked to the chairs. He rounded the awning. The lounge on the left was occupied. To the right, at first he just saw a willowly pair of beautiful legs, but he knew who it was before he saw the rest of her.

  Rayna.

  Her lustrous, blonde hair was down and she was wore a smart, black one-piece that accentuated every curve perfectly. No worse for the wear from last night’s foray into Twin Moon City. Pete couldn’t help but smile.

  “Rayna,” he said. Her name flowed off his tongue.

  “Isn’t this place beautiful?” she said, looking across the bay. “It’s like the Florida Keys.”

  “I think it is,” Pete said. “I remember reading about them.”

  “It’s a universe away from Twin Moon City.”

  Pete arched an eyebrow. Characters that bridged his dreams never acknowledged that they did. They only existed in the present reality, like an actor doing a guest shot on two different TV shows. He perched on the edge of her lounge chair.

  “You remember Twin Moon City?”

  She turned to face Pete.

  “And petting the bear at the zoo, the trip to the Grand Canyon. All the welcome breaks from hell. You have no idea.”

  Pete rubbed his temples. “What part of all this is real?”

  “It’s all real,” she said, “and it all isn’t. I don’t really understand everything, even though I live in it. Near as I know, in another dimension beneath the one we were born into, there is a place we dream into. The psychic energy we take into it creates our dreams. When we awaken, and remove that energy, that place and time we created vanishes. Sometimes we bring back a bit of that dimension with us, trailing in our slipstream, and remember our dreams. Most of the time we don’t.”

  Rayna gave Pete a knowing smile.

  “But not you,” she said. “You dream every night without fail, and it’s always real as real life. It’s always been that way, not just the few months that you’ve seen me.”

  Pete never told anyone about his dreaming, and certainly never thought anyone could explain it back to him even better than he understood it.

  “It’s the same with you?” he said.

  “I wish. There are only a few special people with your gift, people who can slip between both worlds equally. They are called dreamwalkers.”

  “Wait a minute,” Pete said. “You aren’t part of my imagination, are you? You are from the real world, the one I live in, right?”

  Rayna flashed an enchanting, dazzling smile.

  “Straight from the old US of A.”

  “And you know all this stuff how?” Pete asked.

  Rayna’s smile wilted. Sadness filled her eyes.

  “From my sister. She was a dreamwalker and was in touch with others like her, like you.”

  “How are you here, then?” Pete said.

  Rayna held her breath. She shifted her position on the lounge chair, her eyes unable to meet Pete’s for a moment.

  “Our dreams fade away when we leave them, but one nightmare place does not. Twin Moon City. Cauquemere, some kind of evil spirit, lives there. He crosses over into our world temporarily at night.”

  The puzzle snapped together. The man with the dreadlocks and the peaked Nazi cap. The man whose flowing, black leather duster flashed in the streetlights of Twin Moon City. The man whose essence tried to destroy Pete’s mansion.

  “He’s a sick, twisted creature,” Rayna said. “He travels to the tactile world, stalks victims with nightmares. Twin Moon City’s a creation of his screwed up mind.”

  “Well,” Pete said, “I was going to blame my subconscious.”

  “What’s worse,” Rayna said, “because of his power and his gift to transition, the dreams he inspires and the events in Twin Moon City translate over into our dimension.”

  “That’s why you cut my arm,” Pete said.

  “Sorry,” she apologized. “You needed proof. If I just told you, you’d write it off as dreaming, and if I didn’t tell you, you might have been killed on your next trip back.”

  Next trip? Pete thought.

  “My sister had seen Twin Moon City a
number of times over the years. It was growing. New blocks created out of nothing and then torn to shreds by those rotting corpses in the 4X4’s. Cauquemere draws power from people’s terror as his zombie warriors hunt and torture them. They eventually become Jeep-riding members of the walking dead.”

  Pete thought of Simon. More than halfway along that trip from soul to soulless. The poor bastard.

  “Cauquemere discovered Estella, that’s my sister, and haunted her with horrible nightmares all spring. Fear and anxiety drained her, until she was a wisp of who she used to be.”

  A tear rolled down Rayna’s cheek. She wiped it away and sniffed.

  “I watched her die from the inside out.”

  Pete’s heart withered for her.

  “I stayed with her in her apartment in Philly for months,” Rayna continued. “She was too scared to sleep alone and made me wake her up every hour.

  “Then one night I missed my cue. I fell asleep right next to her. I swear it was only for minutes. But when I woke up, it was too late. She was gone. Her body was stone cold.”

  Rayna barely choked out the last few words. She took a deep breath to compose herself.

  “So I followed her.”

  “You followed her?” Pete said.

  “I ran to her bathroom and pulled out every anti-anxiety medication doctors had prescribed her. I mashed them into one dusty mess, added water, and drank. My heart stopped minutes later.”

  Pete’s jaw dropped. He’d assumed his dream girl was, like him, alive, somewhere.

  “When I died, I sensed a kind of trail her spirit left,” Rayna continued. “I was pulled hard in another direction, but I followed Estella. Her trail took me to Twin Moon City.”

  “Did you find her?” Pete asked.

  “No, but I sense her in Cauquemere’s palace. She’s weak, but she’s there. I can’t get in there to save her. Not alone.”

  “How do you get out of there and into my dreams?”

  “I don’t know,” Rayna answered. “Honestly, a window kind of opens, I’m drawn through it, and here I am with you somewhere wonderful. It started soon after I arrived in Twin Moon City. I can’t say when exactly. Time is hard to measure.”

  “I don’t see you every night though,” Pete said.

  “Some nights you aren’t there. Well, you’re there, but it’s as if you’re far away. No, that’s not it. You’re still close, but it’s like there’s just an outline of you wrapped in fog. Like before you came out of the tunnel in Twin Moon City. Those nights I can’t find you.”

  The mansion dream location must have hidden him from her and from Cauquemere.

  “But the nights I can open windows to you,” she said, “so can Cauquemere. When you sleep, you play in his sandbox.”

  “How can I help you?” Pete asked.

  “Come back to Twin Moon City,” she said. “Help me find a way to rescue my sister. Only a dreamwalker has the power to confront Cauquemere.”

  He recalled the nightmare of Twin Moon City, the real risks he took in that dark reality. He looked into Rayna’s eyes. Alive or not, across any dimension, he’d do anything for her.

  “I’ll go back,” he said. “We’ll rescue your sister. Somehow.”

  Rayna’s green eyes sparkled like the sun on the sea behind her. She gave his hand a quick squeeze.

  “I knew I could count on you.”

  Pete opened his eyes. He lay in his bed above DiStephano’s. A ruddy dawn tried to force itself through the window. He closed his eyes and felt Rayna’s warmth settle over him again. He fell back asleep in her memory’s sweet embrace.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A ray of hope finally shone in Twin Moon City. With Pete’s help, Rayna dared count Estella’s rescue as a possibility. Not guaranteed, but far closer than it had ever been since her arrival on the wrong side of reality.

  Rayna peered out from over the hood of a burned out car. The moons, as always, hung low in the clear black sky, reminders that time had no meaning. A damp, nameless street of Twin Moon City stretched out silent and still. The looted wreckage of a furniture store lay strewn across the pavement. Shredded covers and padding reduced a set of mismatched chairs to ragged skeletons.

  Silence in the city could never be taken at face value. Hunters could arrive in a flash astride their Jeeps, spewing a fountain of glowing lead. A foot patrol might lie in ambush feet from where she stood. She never knew. It all came down to wait, listen, and run.

  Her gut check signaled “go.” She dashed across the street in a choppy slalom between recliners and couches. Each second she awaited a hunter’s lunatic laugh or the assault of some resident finally driven past reason. She reached the other side and ducked into the alley that led “home.”

  Home. Where you shared meals with your family, stored your possessions, invited neighbors into your life. None of that made sense anymore. Residents of Twin Moon City were always hungry, but rarely ate. Family members were still, blessedly, in the tactile world. Possessions were what you could carry when the hunters arrived. Friends were rare since a gathering of two drew attack Jeeps the way an open can of tuna drew cats. But even stripped of all rational reasons, the primal urge to own a piece of physical space, to mark some territory, to have a center of life, still lurked within her.

  At the base of her building, she leapt for the lowest rung of the fire escape’s retractable ladder. It slid down in a grinding, clicking metallic dirge. She scrambled up the two flights to her landing, to her anchor in the Twin Moon City universe, to home.

  She’d picked this spot for its egress. With her view of the streets below, this vantage point gave her fair warning if hunters were on their way. In seconds, she could be down the ladder and hidden in the warren of decimated buildings. She had ripped out the entire window frame to the apartment beyond as an alternate route. Condensation dripped from Escape Route Number Three, a steel wire that ran across the alley to another roof. Only with so many paths to freedom could she stand down for a few moments.

  A lumpy, dingy mattress lay across the landing’s grating, just a cushion for sitting in a world where no one slept. She dropped to the mattress and slid a shoebox from the corner. She pulled a crumpled magazine page from her pocket.

  She’d scavenged the ad for a cruise line from a decimated bookstore. In it, two dozen stories of white floating palaces bobbed on an azure sea. In the corner foreground, a smiling couple sat on folding chairs beneath a swaying palm. She tore that corner from the page and tossed the rest away.

  Memories fade without mementos. With no measure of time in this world, no sleep to set a rhythm of existence, all events blended into one seamless, murky stream. Just as Rayna found a home to anchor her body in Twin Moon City, she found a way to set moorings for her mind as well.

  She opened the shoebox. Scraps of pictures filled it one-quarter full. A bear, like the one from Pete’s zoo dream, stalked prey in one shot. Another was of a rope bridge across a chasm. Each reminded her that places still existed outside this hell, that Pete lived separate from the horde of the damned. She set the palm tree picture on top with the reverence of hanging great artwork.

  She pulled a curled, scavenged snapshot from the box. She twisted it to best catch the moon’s low light. The two pre-teen girls in the faded picture sat on a park bench, arms around each other’s shoulders, all bright smiles and colorful clothes. Similar hair and noses said they were sisters.

  Just strangers in a strange city. But who they were was less important than what they symbolized, stand-ins for her and Estella. Those girls’ sparkling eyes bespoke the best the tactile world once offered and the possibilities the future held.

  Rayna held the picture to her lips.

  “It’s closer now,” she whispered. “Much closer.”

  She returned it to the shoebox and closed the lid.

  In the distance, the two towers of C
auquemere’s palace rose above the city, round top floor windows lit like the eyes of a wicked watchman. Estella was in there somewhere. For now.

  Rayna would finally repay the debt she owed her sister.

  Estella was five when Rayna was born, but Estella’s sisterly instincts were already fully formed. She cared for Rayna with a maturity beyond her years and reveled in the responsibility. In return, Rayna idolized her older sister.

  When Rayna was four, the family went on vacation to Tahiti, a windfall contest win from their father’s employer. They spent five days on the island’s less developed side. One morning, as their parents lounged at the pool, Estella supervised Rayna on the hotel’s private beach.

  “Stay out of the water, Little Sis,” Estella called from her blanket on the sand. She wore oversized sunglasses and a floppy hat with her bathing suit, a copy of the “adult” beach look her mother sported. She even had a book to read. “Stay inside the markers and on the sand like Mom said.”

  But to Rayna, the mesmerizing Pacific spoke louder. The clear, blue sea wasn’t the murky green of the ocean at home. The warm water that washed her toes was an invitation, unlike the Atlantic’s cold warning. And oh, the waves! The towering rollers swept in off the sea and dwarfed all others she’d seen.

  More distractions lay beneath her feet. The brightly-hued shells of the Pacific, so different from the Atlantic’s dull clams and mussels, poked from the sand like buried treasure. With a four-year-old’s tunnel vision, she searched the sand, stooping and scooping as the retreating waves left their offerings.

  Rayna passed the edge of the hotel’s property. White sands gave way to an un-groomed beach. Black volcanic rocks jutted from the sea, dark warnings of the sharp coral and swift currents below. All Rayna saw was a prize in the sand ahead.

  The tiny pink trophy lay exposed on the beach. Rose-colored spikes stuck out from the side. This was no common clam, no scallop. It was a whelk shell the size of her palm. Unique. Beautiful. Amazing.

  Rayna dropped her inferior examples and sprinted to the shell before the next wave could rescind the previous one’s offer. The tip of a wave rinsed her feet and the shell. As the water retreated, the wet whelk sparkled in the sunshine. Its pinks took on a deep irresistible luster.