Nightmare Ballad

by Benjamin Kane Ethridge

  “Yeah,” Johnny whispered. He ran a hand over his hair and then looked at the dried blood on his palm. “How did I snap out of it?”

  “That two-dollar bill. It’s your—”

  “Lucidity touchstone?” Johnny asked, wincing in confusion. “Just popped into my head. I think the music put it there.”

  “Same thing has happened to me, and now Dara.”

  A screech made both men’s backs go rigid. Down in the small valley, Mandy straddled a moldering corpse, her face inches above a rotted area that at one time had been a pelvis. She swiveled away and started vomiting and sobbing at the same time. After her fit of retching subsided, she threw herself away from the dead thing in the field, and Mandy screamed again.

  Johnny put his hand to his mouth for a second. “How is Mandy really here? How was that not a dream? That happened? That fucking happened? Holy shitting motherfucking fuck!”

  Waves of chills passed over Luke. “It must have brought her… both of them… here.”

  Johnny grabbed his long, wild hair in fistfuls and made like he was about to push them through his skull. His face was still clawed up, and blood doused the white neckline of his t-shirt.

  Mandy came forward through the weeds, stumbling and crying, ridiculous in some black and red lingerie that didn’t fit her and probably wouldn’t have for some time now.

  “Oh my God, Mandy—what, why are you here?”

  Mandy, a squiggle of vomit dancing on her chin, found Johnny and seized him as her target. She ran forward and hammered him with her fists. “How did I get here you son of a bitch? Did you drug me? How the hell did I get here?” Her fists started slowing. “This is the desert… This is where you live. What scheme are you up to this time, Alberto Cruz? You better tell me right now!”

  Johnny sought help from Luke. “I don’t know what to tell her.”

  “We found you Mandy…,” Luke said, trying not to make it come out as a question. “It must just be…one of those things?”

  Mandy started to nod. Tears dried on her face as she clutched her half-naked body and contemplated something that seemed to become increasingly easy to understand. Finally she muttered with a sniffle, “Yeah I guess so.”

  Tears hung heavy in Johnny’s eyes as he glanced at Luke. “Really?”

  Luke shrugged. He really needed to get home to Dara and Maribel. They were probably worried out of their minds by now.

  Johnny gently reached over and touched Mandy’s hand. “I’ll take you home, clean you up.”

  “No,” Mandy barked at him. “It’s not my home. I’m not going anywhere with you.” Her dark eyes flitted to Luke. “Or you. Take me to my sister’s house.”

  “Your sister’s at the same house?”

  “Mmmhmm,” said Mandy, looking down at her torn lingerie. She glanced over to the corpse. “Oh my God. That isn’t a real body is it? Who was that?”

  “It’s fake,” Johnny responded dully, a please-don’t ask again expression crossing his face.

  “Sick-ass people.” Mandy glanced over to the plant. “I need a jacket or something to wear.”

  “I’ve got something in my car,” said Luke.

  “Halleluiah. Is it far? I’m barefoot here. Where’s it parked?”

  Luke searched around. He was normally great with direction, even at night, but when it came to where he’d parked the Volt, just before stepping into Johnny’s dream space, he couldn’t say.

  He’d honestly lost track.

  Chorus:

  People dream; Gods create.

  Colors and shapes bewitch the play-set. Most often, it is easily seen, but through a nightmare, it’s purposely overlooked. It. Is. A form of survival. He did this. Them too.

  A rocking horse on a spring wobbles without a passenger. Practiced inspection reveals a painted word on the saddle: Whorse. Their spirit whispers, ride it to dirty glory, whatever lathers you and makes you holey, ride it to dirty glory. Turning from this sight is a must. Undoubtedly.

  Not the sitting guy, though. Can’t hear well. Can hardly move. Can’t see a damn. But it’s his tableau to admire. Under the play-set is a clown tunnel into the bowels of the earth. Was it there before? The perpetual song plays beneath a merry xylophone accompaniment and the raw laughter of children fighting from inside. No answers, many questions, his mind feels about to break. He sees troubling, yet suspiciously unreal images in the darkness of the tunnel. He gasps. Predictable. They all do that.

  He implores, “Hear me now? Don’t let it out. Help!”

  Verse 5: Silence

  Chapter 17

  He walked in with the snout of a pig.

  Sniffing the carpet. Long pulls of air through each tremendous nostril. When she spotted the hooves for hands, Dara scooted back into the alcove under the piano. She couldn’t remember how long she’d been stuck in this house, but up until now the nightmare hadn’t found her. Hopes of hiding from it forever were all gone now. She couldn’t escape through the back. There wasn’t a black curtain that way, and besides that, there were frogmen in the pool. One of them had recently tried to drown a tomcat who’d wandered poolside. Somehow the soaking-wet animal had managed to slip out of the frogman’s gloved grip, scramble up the side of the pool and up the fence, out of sight. Dara wasn’t sure she’d be as lucky. She had to deal with this monster instead.

  “I smell good slop,” the man called down the hall. “They’ll cook you down in their pot for days.” He snorted and laughed. “Ah, good broth. The meat just floats off the bone.”

  Sniff. Sniff.

  Silence.

  I should have just run for it when the man was still in the front yard, Dara thought. She might have been able to deal with the real version of him outside the nightmare, but this….

  “I want you sloppy on my face,” he said merrily, “pieces of you up my nose, and ears to rot and savor for later. Where are you? Under my piano, no doubt.”

  She couldn’t edge any closer to the wall. The snorts and sniffs continued. She tried to think of a way out, even imaginary ways. She envisioned a ladder descending from the ceiling or a hole opening up in the floor. This was her dream, goddamn it, why couldn’t she control it?

  “Because the dream’s not all yours,” a charred voice answered. “Calm your mind a minute, woman.”

  A Bone Man sat cross-legged in the hall, spear across his lap.

  Dara changed position, just in case he tried to haul her out from her hiding spot. She met the man’s gaze. The crazy blue-gray marbles that were his eyes stared up from skin as black as a dead universe.

  “You’ve come to kill me,” she said.

  “I would instead enjoy taking you as our Queen and living out eternity in these lands, but you are no leader and I serve the Mare. Unhappy about that as I am, it is so.”

  “Why are you after me? My husband? Why is this happening?”

  “All reins on the Mare’s Horse must be severed, for otherwise, it cannot gallop across these lands forever making music. Time is short. You and the others will adapt, find ways to move and survive in our world. The Mare won’t let that happen. It likes to drink your adrenaline too much.”

  “You don’t need to do anything to the people in this house,” said Dara. “Please don’t hurt them. They aren’t involved. I didn’t know the music would come back so suddenly.”

  “It will only get worse.”

  “Can you stop it?”

  The Bone Man ignored this and scratched at some dried blood on his fingernail. “The problem is, Dara,” he said her name so delicately, almost kindly, “since you are tied to the Horse, you cannot die here unless you desire it. My people can help you though. Offering yourself will save you and us a lot of effort. The connection must be broken, the reins snapped in two, for you and the others are dragging the Horse down with all your weight.”

  Dara shook her head slowly. “I’m not just going to give up. On myself or the people here.”

  “We cannot control what happens to them.” The Bone Man
gently rested his spear on the ground. The feathers bound on the end looked prehistoric and sharp enough to slit a throat. “Even trying to control our world would be like changing the direction of the tides with your breath. You are a silly one…but the pig man was correct. You will make fine soup for us.”

  Dara swallowed the dread rising in her throat. “What about my husband and wife? What happens to them?”

  “As with you, we will kindly offer them the will to die. Your husband, sooner than later. He has a stronger connection now to the Horse. Its ballad is sweeter in his ears, than ever before.”

  “The Balladeer is the Horse? Not the Mare.”

  The Bone Man pulled himself forward on the carpet, closer. “You are learning. The Mare rides the Horse and its notes are like the splashing of hooves in a poisonous stream, are they not?”

  Dara raised her voice, as though that would stop his advance. “You’re saying the Balladeer is a vehicle.”

  Crawling toward her now, the Bone Man smiled, his jagged teeth dark grey and yellow. “The Mare makes all of this possible. Once it only rode through your minds, but now it rides through your world.”

  “Bullshit.” Dara said this more to stall than anything else. All her experience with strategy games and she was at a loss to find a way out of here.

  The Bone Man stopped his advance with a bewildered snarl. “The Mare has always been inside everyone. All of you!” His nose swelled and turned up, piggish. The body mutated, fingers gelling into hooves, skin bleaching and going pink, mud rising from new flesh stiff with ugly hair.

  Dara balled her fist. “You won’t touch my family!”

  “Who? Your husband, the infidel? Or your wife, who now is the same?”

  The pig thing lunged for her. Dara kicked but it pinned her ankle under a hoof. She grabbed for something to wield, to push it off, to pull, and her fingers grazed the wall, caught a handful of it, like gelatin.

  “You can’t escape! Give it up, prepare for real torment,” the pig thing shouted.

  Focus. Get yourself out of here. Take yourself home.

  She reached through the wall and grasped the edge of a heavy object. Using it for her anchor, Dara pulled straight through the wall, feeling the hoof peel back a layer of her skin.

  It worked.

  She left that house.

  How had she done it though?

  Prone on their kitchen floor at home, her skin felt clammy and blistering. It was quiet and dark. Maribel’s purse was on the counter. Luke’s toolbox still sat near the pantry where a large hole led straight through the wall, a translucent sheet of plastic gently vibrating. Nothing seemed nightmarish, everything appeared as she’d left it earlier.

  It was still happening, though. Spots danced at the far ends of her vision, telling her so. She’d not seen them before touching that purple bug, but now, with every Lifemare, the spots showed up. Reality peeking in from the sides?

  “Maribel?” she called out.

  A bubbling sound rose from the sink.

  “Mari, are you home?”

  Oh put it in me!

  The plastic tarp rippled as a strong breeze passed.

  “Luke? Anyone?” Dara’s voice dropped. She was alone. Or being made to think so.

  Another blurp came from the sink. Dara pulled herself up, the spots dancing fiercely in her peripheral vision. She used the side of the counter to brace herself. Down in the sink, curled in a fit of purple-blue flesh and suction cups, rested a dead octopus. Something constricted in Dara’s chest. It was nonsense. She knew it was nonsense. Absurdity. Dream absurdity. So why was her blood pressure rising? A stabbing pain started at the bottom of her throat, the idea that a task needed to be completed, that life and death depended on that task, that if she didn’t discover what it was and soon, everything dear to her would be lost.

  Put it in me….

  Cock.

  “She’s going to leave you both,” a hatchet voice cut through her eardrums.

  Dara spun around.

  The kitchen was still empty. Just her and the dead octopus.

  She looked out the window to the backyard. The black curtain fell behind a house catty-corner to theirs. She’d never been over there, for all the years she and Luke had lived here. That was strange but not completely surprising. Dara and the octopus had a lot in common, so many options for something to cling to and instead they were inert, rubbish, dead and unaccountable. She’d spent a lot of time in front of the computer, wasting her life on war games, never building a battle plan of her own. All those hours logged on social sites and not a real friend to show for it. That was where the anxiety stemmed from—this place, her home, was a trap, a pit of lethargy if given the chance. That’s why she’d chosen this as her destination of escape.

  Staying here would only make things worse. She’d have to hop that fence, get over to the neighbor’s yard and through the curtain quickly before she gave up all hope and pulled the chair out to play computer games again.

  In the living room, thin smoke drifted off the couches, the TV, and even the bricks in the fireplace. Nothing looked burnt, but everything was smoking.

  A loud whirring kicked on and Dara jumped around, banging her toe on a leg of the coffee table. “Son of a…!”

  She squinted, processing the impact, those spots in her vision doing the two-step with black flakes of pain.

  The whirring echoed back and forth.

  Hairdryer.

  Maribel was taking an evening shower.

  Made sense.

  Dara turned to go to her, trying to explain to herself why Maribel would need to take an evening shower.

  She wasn’t there that long. Stop being an idiot. You misheard her. You had to. Maribel doesn’t talk dirty like that.

  Put it in me…oh that fucking cock!

  Dara halted. She’d made it to the hallway and realized that the longer she lingered the more she was endangering Maribel. Just like those poor people she’d gone to visit. Would they be dead or, in the man’s case, deformed, when this dream ended? What had the Bone Men done with them? Dara was responsible for bringing a nightmare into their house. She should have done something more to stop the Bone Men.

  Now’s the time. She headed for the slider and walked out onto their small patio.

  The back fence didn’t exist any longer. Instead, aquatic-looking blocks had been stacked fifteen feet high. In the center of each seaweed-encrusted Atlantean cube, a large bloodshot eye rolled around to look at her. Dara found an opening through the blocks, an entrance to the labyrinth. She made out the almost indistinguishable shape of the curtain against the night sky on the other side.

  She stepped inside. The ground was muddy and smelled of kelp and dead fish. The salted air made her think of that day at the beach when she had met Maribel. So much darkness up until then, and finally she’d found light.

  The eyes in the bricks followed her through every turn of the maze, keeping her in sight. She tried not to think about what they saw. What were they looking at? Her body? Or were they looking at her, thinking about how dumb she had to be? A woman with only retail experience. Worthless. Couldn’t even handle the body God gave her. Cowardly. Couldn’t approach Maribel and tell her everything that terrified her. Sad. Couldn’t get it out of her head that one day she would lose Luke and Maribel, just like she’d lost her parents, just like she’d lost her uncle Sal.

  I will survive, so that I can be made to suffer.

  You don’t have to suffer, a fluid sounding voice dripped inside her mind, just let it end.

  With all of this pressing on her, the maze didn’t seem that difficult. Though it was too dark to be sure, the curtain seemed to loom overhead now. She was getting closer. Maybe a couple more turns—

  The opening before her closed as two blocks slammed together, the fronds of seaweed quivering, the eyes rolling around and going cross-eyed at the impact. Dara retreated the way she came, but two more blocks crashed together, trapping her in a small vestibule.

&nbs
p; Nowhere to go.

  Eyes all watching quietly.

  A coarse hand snatched Dara’s right wrist. Another enclosed her left. A Bone Man forced her to the muddy ground and put his sandaled foot onto her back. She cried out, but the foot pressed down, squeezing the air from her lungs.

  The bubbling sound from earlier forced her to raise her eyes.

  A large cauldron with several Bone Men standing around it.

  One of them casually dropped the dead octopus into the pot. The other flared his wide nostrils, delighting in the scent.

  “Bring her,” ordered a Bone Man with bleeding eyes and swollen, infected cuts along the left side of his face.

  “The pot is too small for her, and she will crawl out,” said the Bone Man standing over her.

  “Portion her, then,” said bleeding eyes.

  “Yes yes,” sang her captor. The pressure on Dara’s back was immense now as the Bone Man knelt on top of her. The silver edge of a long machete came into view. She squirmed and struggled to grasp the ground, make it pull away like dough or gelatin like at the house before, but those eyes were still on her, those damn, hateful eyes, and they stared through her, right into the doubt smothering her mind, lounging on it like she’d lounged on a couch, jobless, brainless, a leeching strumpet in the eyes of the do-gooders of the world. There was nothing else she could do. The blade was touching the flesh of her shoulder. It was sawing. Blood spilled from the stinging injury. Nerves severed. The machete rose up and hacked through the bone, splitting it cleanly—

  Her right arm dropped off.

  The Bone Man breathed heavily above her, exhausted from his work. He tossed her severed arm to the others manning the cauldron. They dropped it in with a heavy glunk. One put his spear into the broth to stir.

  Dara was astonished at the small amount of blood running from her stump. She might have been in shock, for all she knew. It didn’t matter; the Bone Man had begun work on her left arm, and it hurt worse than the right, and it gave him more difficulty to detach. Through her shock, she realized she was sobbing deep belly-sobs. She didn’t know what to think or do.