___
We saw many terrible things on the way into town. There was the dented school bus, flipped completely over on its roof. That was pretty bad. Blood was smeared against the side, and a single tiny pale arm hung limply from one of the broken windows. There was the police car half in a ditch created by caved in pavement on Main Street, and the bloated police officer flung over the hood. A severed tentacle the color of dead skin was wrapped around his neck, and its suckers were still weakly working to draw out the last drops of blood from the officer's jugular. We saw downed trees splintered like toothpicks, houses caved in, gouges in the street. It reminded me a little of those old Godzilla movies I used to watch as a kid. It really did look like something huge had come crashing through, kicking cars aside and stomping through buildings.
We saw a lot of dead people. Other than my grandfather's and my great aunt's funerals, I had never seen real dead people before. And these dead weren't washed, drained, manicured, combed, and made up for public viewing. They were bloody, rotting, torn apart or twisted into unnatural angles. Their faces had grown stiff in expressions of shocked horror and pain. Some were curled up in fetal positions, haloed in pools of blood and muck. Others had broken arms thrown up in useless defense probably seconds before something crushed them into the pavement. There were hands, arms, legs, even a head amidst the rubble of the residential homes. There was broken glass. And there were fires, just like it said in that book that Natalia had given me.
Just like she had told me about the arrival of the Sleepers.
The most terrifying of all, of course, where the vines. They were black and jointed like splintered twigs but incredibly strong, given the way they seemed to bore through wood, glass, metal, flesh and bone alike. They were coated with a kind of shiny, slimy substance that smelled vaguely of acetone and gasoline, a cloying smell that turned my stomach sour. And the vines were everywhere – along the curbs into the storm drains, wrapped around the wheel wells of cars, along the sides of buildings snaking in and out of windows and doors, around telephone poles, speared through trees and even the sides of brick and stone buildings. I have found out since that day that they are drawn to sudden movement and heat, and resistant to axes, weed killers, and fire. They waver when attacked, becoming something less substantial, and it's only then that maybe, maybe, you stand a chance of escaping their grasp. But they're fast. They move fast and they choke and puncture and kill fast. It's not often that I've seen a victim of theirs move faster.
I'm not sure why I thought Natalia's house would look any better than the others we had seen. Maybe it was because of the desperate hope in her eyes and the nervous way she soft-chewed her nails as we made our way across town. I saw tears in her eyes, but she wouldn't let them spill onto her cheeks. It made my heart ache for her. I wanted to say something, wanted to block out the world again with her, now more than ever, but one horror after another took the wind out of any words I tried to say. So maybe it was as much for me as for her that I pictured her house untouched, her aunts okay. I guess I needed to believe we were working toward something, toward someone who could fix it all, or at least stop it from getting worse.
But her street, her whole neighborhood was torn open and torn down. Raw wounds in the street exposed sewage and gas lines, telephone wires from downed poles sparked and writhed in the street. We couldn't drive the whole way, but instead, had to skirt around the mess to make it to her front lawn.
Her front door was caved in. We could smell the blood even from the front porch.
Even now, I get a lump in my throat thinking about Natalia finding her aunts, all three of them stabbed all over, with throats slashed and symbols carved into their foreheads. No gods or monsters had done that. She didn't cry, but every time I picture that look on her face, it breaks my heart over and over again.
I made Natalia stay close behind as I went from room to room with a knife from her kitchen. I wanted to get her away from the terrible sight of those bodies' cloudy eyes, the way the linoleum floors crackled under our feet from the sticky, drying blood. But I also wanted to make sure that whoever had done those things was gone now. We found no other trace of the cultists.
As I stood there in the upstairs hall, panting and clutching that kitchen knife, Natalia dragged me, silent and serious, to the library. She showed me a safe hidden behind a fake section of the bookshelves. It had not been discovered by the cultists, and for that, she seemed relieved. She spun the tumbler lock back and forth so fast I couldn't quite catch the combination, then flung open the door and pulled out the contents.
"Here," she said, thrusting two thin, very old books into my hands. The covers looked sort of leathery, but that wasn't exactly right. I had the inexplicable but sure notion that they were made of some kind of skin, but not from any living thing I had ever seen. There was no title or author name stamped on either book, nor were there title pages.
"What are these?" I looked at her, confused.
"Knowledge. Information. My aunts' most prized grimoires."
I turned the yellowed pages in the first book with care, afraid they'd crumble to dust between my fingers. "I...I can't read this. I don't understand what – " but then I did. I honestly don't know how, but suddenly the lines and squiggles made sense to me. When I looked up, Natalia was gesticulating with her hands, her eyes closed, her lips moving in quick, silent words. When she opened her eyes, she said to me, "I can feel them coming, Dec. If they find me – "
"They won't," I told her.
"If they do," she insisted, "then what is in those books is the only thing that can protect you. I cannot teach you what's in those books; there is no time. But I did the same incantation to help you understand them that my aunts did for me. Do you? Do you understand that language?"
I nodded.
"Good," she said, and sighed. "It should last for about a week and a half, two weeks. Study them in that time. Learn the things you need to protect yourself and others. There are ways to send the Sleepers back to the great Dreaming Cities. Maybe some day...."
"Natalia," I began. It was all so overwhelming, and I wanted to ask her about what she was implying beneath her words, the way she seemed to be suggesting I would be doing this alone. I wanted to reassure her again that I would always protect her, keep her safe. I wanted to tell her again that I loved her, because I knew deep down that she believed her time was running out, and that I would be facing this alone, without her. And Natalia had a way of believing something so strongly, so perfectly, that you found yourself believing it, too.
I was going to say all these things, but as she was speaking, she slumped against one of the open windows and put her hand down on the sill. She hadn't noticed the needle-like tip of the vine that had snaked its way up the side of the house and over the broken glass. I hadn't noticed it either until I saw all the color drain from her face, and a look of sick and knowing horror distort her features as she looked down at her hand. The tip of the vine had pricked her finger, while several other tendrils had begun to wrap around her wrist. I ran to the window and began stabbing and slashing at the vine. In the yard below, I saw hooded figures gathered beneath the window, looking up at us, but I couldn't worry about them just then. The vine was snaking its way up her arm now, and my knife was glancing off it. I dropped the knife and dug my fingers in, trying to yank it off her. She whimpered, trying to pull herself free, but it wrapped tighter. Her skin was growing waxy and red, and just before the vine tore off her arm, she finally began to scream.
In that scream, all the fear and pain of her sixteen years of running and hiding and dreaming welled up and out of her. Her face, her beautiful face, was splattered with blood, her mouth pulled open in a scream that was losing steam, losing sound. I saw her love for me in her eyes. I saw her good-bye in her eyes. And yet again, I couldn't find the damn words to give her anything. I held onto her, fighting the vine that wrapped around her throat, digging my ragged little finger nails and even my teeth into that slimy, stinking, bit
ter vine stalk. The burn scar on my jaw is a testament to the failure of that move, but damn if I didn't try everything I could to save her.
The vine that lifted me off my feet and smacked me across the room broke my collarbone. It's healed since, but still aches when it rains. I had the wind knocked out of me, though, and by the time I was able to scrabble to my feet and make it back to the windowsill, she was yanked out the window. For one endless moment of abject horror, I could only watch the robed figures bent over her sprawled and bleeding form. They waited until the escape of her last breath, then turned and left. They left her there, this precious prize they had searched sixteen years to find, left her in a sleep from which she would never wake up.
I knew I had to leave her there, too, but I couldn't quite bring myself to do it. I sat by her body for hours, holding her, talking to her, watching the body I had admired so often change into something that was no longer Natalia. I brought her back inside at dusk and laid her on her bed. I kissed her forehead, her lips, then took the books she had given me and left.
___
It's been eleven years since that day. According to the books Natalia gave me – books I spent a week and a half furiously studying and making notes in English in – the window for casting the ancient endless sleep spell will open tonight, and I'll have eleven days. The endless sleep, which dreamers managed to learn in secret from the masters themselves, is the only way to put the Sleepers back under for good. Eleven days, and a group of about 600 survivors across the world waiting for my go sign.
I never had anyone but Natalia count on me for anything until now. I hope it works.
I couldn't protect Natalia, couldn't keep her safe, but I think she always knew that. She loved me anyway. I think what she did know was that without her, I would throw every fiber of my being into protecting those I could with the tools she gave me, because she wanted it. Because everything she touched became a brighter little piece of an otherwise ugly, twisted world, and what I had learned from those books, what I had spent over a decade teaching others, could maybe bring that brightness back.
If I could give her any reason to love me, to be proud of me, I would. I owe it to her.
I've written all this down in this ratty old notebook, because of all the times I couldn't think of what to say – to Natalia, to my parents, to the well-meaning acolytes and survivors we've helped who have asked me about my scars and my story. I put down in words what I want to remember if I survive long enough to go senile, and that I want others to know if the events of the next eleven days prove a failure. I am where I am because I loved a princess. I was never a true hero, at least not like those in the fairy tales, but made me fight to be a better person.
For her, I will destroy the Sleepers, now the Sleepless, or die trying.
There is no time for sleep now – The others are waiting for my sign.
Good night, dreamers....
Rickman could never quite manage to reproduce the music he heard in his head.
It had been in there as long as he could remember—even when the nursery rhymes and the pop music of his pre-teen years had long since faded into a monotonous background drone, still the music was there. It was alive and vibrant, singing to him from all the dark places in his mind, there as he worked, there as he played—there as he slept, haunting his dreams. Over the years he'd tried almost everything to get it out—guitar at twelve, piano at fourteen, an interesting experiment with drums and drugs in his early twenties, and violin throughout his thirties.
None of them, although each diverting in its own way, had made any difference to his peace of mind. The music had stayed in his head, refusing to take a life of its own, preferring to hijack Rickman at the most inopportune moments with snatches of wistful rhythms and soaring choruses full of longing. The frustration Rickman felt at not being able to share this inner beauty was almost too much for a man to bear.
But now he had hope—technology had just caught up enough that he might finally have a chance at bringing his inner music out into the real world. It had taken every penny he had, and the resulting hardware filled most of his already cramped attic apartment—but it was a small price to pay. He would call it “Soundscapes of the City”, and it would make him his fortune, of that Rickman was certain.
How can it fail?
All it had taken to get him on track was a demonstration of a machine from Dreamsoft Productions, and the latest sampling software from MythOS. A mixing deck and a holographic array did the rest. Music and images could be created from the subtle difference in electrical impulses in his brain while he dreamed, and then merged with any sound—or indeed any part of the electromagnetic spectrum—that he desired. Rickman’s visions of bringing his magnum opus to the world were now that much closer to reality.
For the past forty nights he’d sampled and tweaked, taking the raw sounds that streamed into his loft apartment from the city outside and merging them with his dream compositions to form a holographic construct of sound and light and ionized gas in an ever-moving plasma bubble. It now hung like a giant ameba in the array in the center of his room—an ameba that sang and danced to his ever more insistent tune.
It had been a long, hard journey to this point.
During those first few days everything was sharp and jagged, harsh mechanical discordance that, while it had a certain musical quality, was not what he needed… not if he was going to take the world by storm. The plasma had roiled and torn, refusing to take a permanent shape, and Rickman despaired of what the city was telling him. Everything was ugly, mean-spirited. The music of the city spoke only of despair and apathy, and his dreams didn’t make a dent when he overlaid them.
Then he had his epiphany.
Aptly, it came to him in a dream more vivid than any he had ever had previously, as if the mere act of accessing the dream machine had unlocked something within him, allowing the full vision to emerge.
It starts with thin whistling, like a simple peasant’s flute played at a far distance. At first all is black. The flute stops, and the first star flares in the darkness. And with it comes the first chord, a deep A-minor that sets the darkness spinning. The blackness resolves itself into spinning masses of gas that coalesce and thicken, bubbling and foaming before resolving into great black eggs, oiled and glistening, calving, over and over, reaching critical mass and exploding into a symphony that fills the void with color and song. Stars wheel overhead in a great dance, the music of the spheres cavorting in his head.
Rickman jumped from his bed and checked the sampling box—it had recorded nearly thirty minutes of material, streamed directly from his brain as he slept.
I have it. I finally have it.
He hooked the sampling box to the mixer and holographic array and started to play with the resulting sounds. He had hoped for immediate results, but he was to be disappointed again. At first it was still all too mechanical, with none of the grandeur and sweep of his dreams. Then he remembered the stars. He went out onto his balcony and realigned his antennae pointing it, not down toward the city, but up, to the sky and the dome of stars above.
He got results almost immediately. The plasma roiled, rolled, and formed a sphere, a ball of shining silver held in the holographic array, hovering at head height, quivering like quicksilver.
At first it just hung there in space, giving out a deep bass hum that rattled his teeth and set all the glassware in the apartment ringing. Things changed quickly when he double, then triple tracked the sounds from his dreams, adding depth and resonance to them with each new layer of aural complexity. Shapes formed in the plasma, concretions that slid and slithered, rainbow light shimmering over their surface like oil on water.
They sang as they danced.
Rickman soon found that by moving the antennae to point at different areas of the sky he was able to get the plasma to merge or to multiply; each collision or split gave off a new chord, the plasma taking on solid forms in a seemingly infinite variety of shapes. As they swam, his creati
ons sang in orchestrated overtures to the dark beauty of the night. But it still wasn’t right—the song still wasn't what he heard in his head, and nothing else would do but to keep trying until it was perfect.
He turned a knob to see if applying some distortion to his dream samples might do the trick. The array continued to whine and throb is a strangely musical beat, but the plasma burst with a soft pop, spilling like viscous liquid to the bottom of the box, coalescing and congealing.
By the time Rickman walked over to investigate, something lay curled at the bottom of the array.
At first he could not quite believe what he was seeing. This was no plasma—this was a creature—alive and breathing. The thing that had Rickman most worried was that he recognized it—a thing from childhood nightmares. It used to hide in the downstairs closet of the first house he remembered—a beast that had the body of a man but the head of some grotesque misshapen rodent. Its fur was patchy—mange and age had left it showing pale sallow skin in places where it should have fur, with weeping sores running the length of its body. Long yellow teeth hung over a short lower jaw—the left incisor was cracked and broken near the tip, giving the face a lopsided expression that was very far from being comical. Worst of all, a long pink tail rose and fell, swished once then thumped in time with the musical vibration and hum that ran through the array. Red eyes blinked, opened and looked straight at Rickman.
Rickman stepped back, half-expecting an attack, but the thing seemed more interested in the music. It pawed at the air in an obscene parody of an orchestra's conductor, then stood, unsteady on back legs that looked more suited to crouching. To Rickman's astonishment it began to dance, its diseased body swaying softly, almost seductively. Then it surprised Rickman again. It sang along with the beat, nonsense words in a guttural tone that sounded almost like a chant. To Rickman's ears the whole thing was as harsh and dissonant as the city sounds outside the window.
A Mythos Grimmly Page 25
