by Neil Gaiman
"Hmf," sniffed the Son of Adam. "Now what the hell is it supposed to do?"
"Um," said Abel hesitantly. "Uh ... Look behind you. Not in this room," he added, as his brother started to glance over his shoulder. "In that one."
Cain angled the mirror. Behind him, reflected in the glass, was not the damp confines of his workroom, with its glittery tools grinning from the rough-cast walls, but the dark little chamber in the forgotten crypt of Dream's palace, faded gilt gleaming on the worn marble lintels of the bricked-up door.
"Fascinating." Cain dug around in his workbox for another mirror. "I wonder how much of the room we can see?"
"Cuh-Cuh-Cain, I think ..."
"You think?" Cain's voice scaled shrill as he turned on his brother in fury. "You haven't had a thought in your life, you microcephalic cretin! Now shut up and hold this."
Trembling, Abel obeyed, backing to the opposite wall with a large shaving mirror in his hands while his elder brother moved and shifted the silver dream-mirror back and forth, to see every corner of the hidden room.
"Fascinating," whispered Cain again. "Do you see it?"
Abel saw. Sweat was rolling down his plump cheeks. "Cuh-Cain, I don't think you should ..."
Reflected in the second mirror, there were no bricks in the gilded doorway. Only darkness, and the suggestion of a corridor leading back.
"Shut up!" screamed Cain. "Let's see if we can see anything down that hall."
"No." Abel set the shaving mirror on a nearby bench. "We shouldn't be..."
"Don't you tell me what I should or shouldn't do!" Cain whirled on him, face white with rage. "How dare you...?"
Abel fell back against the wall, raising his hands to protect his head, knowing what was coming. "Cain ..."
A crowbar seemed to spring of itself from the rack into Cain's hand.
"Cain, no... !"
Cain kicked aside Abel's body as he came back down the cellar steps. Even dead, he reflected, his brother was a nuisance, an unwieldy lump of suet always in his way....
He carried the large, camel-backed mirror from the dining room buffet. This he set up on his workbench-- carefully wiping the blood off his hands--and placed a branch of candles where the light would fall clearly on it. Then he arranged the shaving mirror, and finally picked up the dream-mirror, holding it by the frame in both hands as he moved it in relation to the other two, trying to cast the light of the candles down the corridor that stretched beyond that narrow door.
He stopped. A trick of the light?
The movement of the candle flame in the draft of the door.
Had to be.
He went over and shut the door. The candle flames burned straight up. He picked up the mirror again.
No. There was something moving in the dark of the corridor. Trickling along the floor.
Water? He squinted, moved carefully--so as not to disturb the alignment of the reflections--closer. Thicker than water. It glistened with a queer vileness on the stone floor as it trickled out into the bricked-up room where the mirror had been, glimmered a little in the dark.
Cain stepped back quickly, almost tripping over his brother's corpse, and set the camel-backed mirror down. He went and turned the shaving mirror to the wall, then picked up the dream-mirror and looked into it directly.
Over his shoulder, he saw the shadowed doorway still open ... and something oozing in a thick pus-colored stream along the wall and out into the center of the room, where it gathered into a faintly shining pool.
The pool began to stir.
"Get up!" Cain knelt beside Abel's body, slapped the waxen cheeks.
Painfully, agonizingly, in the sagging mess of a broken socket, one brown eye pried itself open.
"We're going to the palace."
Though his jaw was broken and most of his teeth knocked out, Abel managed to say, "Now?"
Oskar Dreyer jolted out of sleep sweating. It wasn't so very late; outside he could hear the buzz of traffic along the Mariahilferstrasse, and the dim, tinny voices of the television in the next apartment. Not so very late at all.
He had had the most peculiar dream. An American film, he thought--Dracula, wasn't that absurd? Dracula, and that little man sitting in his madhouse cell, eating flies and begging for a bird to eat, a bird or a kitten. The blood is the life, he'd said. The blood is the life.
But that wasn't true.
All life was the life.
Oskar Dreyer was suddenly, desperately hungry.
Upon his return from his imprisonment, Dream had remade his palace, the center and heart of the Dreaming, but it was a long process. Much was recreated as it had been--as it had always been--but there were halls and towers that never came back from the dust, and gardens where weed and vine continued to devour, unchecked, the old statues and archways that had once decorated them, much as certain conversations, unremembered for thirty years, return to consciousness embellished with unexpected ramifications upon the rediscovery of old letters, old ticket stubs, old jewelry or scarves. Dream had been very tired upon his return, and later, had had other matters to which to attend.
The library was one of those places that had been refound, after being lost for decades. Even years later, Lucien, the librarian, was still counting and recataloging the books, making sure they still said what they had said before Dream's disappearance and making note of the ones that didn't. When a knock sounded on the library door he was lecturing the shade of a stout white-haired woman whom he had encountered in the stacks--
"Disappeared, sir?" she was saying. "When disappeared? I've been coming here reading every night for the past sixty-two years. You're not going to send me away?" Her bright blue eyes filled with tears. "I haven't finished Plato's comedies!"
"No," said Lucien soothingly. "No, of course not, Mrs. Norton. Er--You don't happen to remember where Lennon's novels are shelved, do you? I can't seem to find... Yes?"
"It's me, sir," said a voice from down the long aisles of shelves. "Cain."
He had Abel with him in a wheelbarrow. Abel showed every sign of having been recently dead, but was slowly reviving and trying to sit up. In the wheelbarrow also were Goldie, the daffodil yellow baby gargoyle, and a silver-backed mirror.
"I think--er--I'm afraid there might be some trouble, sir." Cain jerked a nervous little half bow. "You see, I found this mirror--uh--on the road between my house and the Shifting Zones, and when I looked in it I saw a room here in the palace and--well, I thought you ought to know about this."
He handed Lucien the mirror. The whitish, gleaming pool had widened until it touched the feet of the small table on which the mirror had originally lain, and the table now lay, half-melted, in its midst. The patches of black mildew on the wall had changed, swollen and thick, their dark bristles beaded with what looked, in the shadows, like blood. The ooze had trickled out among the broken bricks in the corridor, and a tiny night-fright--of the kind that ran squeaking through the bottommost foundations of Dream's realm--had become trapped in it, struggling frenziedly as the flesh was eaten from its odd-shaped bones.
It took a lot to scare Cain. He was scared now.
The tall librarian's pale eyes skewered him from behind the round spectacle lenses. "And how do you know this room is here in the palace?"
"Uh ..." explained Cain.
"Do you know where it is? How to get there?"
Abel was looking up at him pleadingly but didn't say a word, possibly because his jaw hadn't healed yet.
"I've seen it on maps," said Cain. "I think I can locate it again."
"Awrp?" said Goldie.
There are, of course, no maps of the palace of the Dream King. This is because the vast halls, the colonnades of porcelain and glass, the gardens where it is always sunset, or summer night, or the eighteenth century, move around. Dream never gets lost. If others do, it is not his concern. Sometimes new halls, new chambers, new gardens appear. In the vaults of the palace it is worse.
Reptile dreams.
Hindbrain dreams. Eyes-in-the-darkness dreams.
"Didn't we come here before?" whispered Cain, as Lucien held his torch high. Pillars radiated in all directions, pillars of different marbles, different stones, their time-eroded capitals cut in different patterns where they supported the brickwork of the vaults. Silty dust stifled their footfalls, and the darkness was like a miser's greed, all-encompassing, swallowing even the torch's red light. The sound of feet, frenziedly running; a thin giggle dying away in the dark.
"We came down those stairs before," said the librarian in his chilly voice. "Not the same thing at all. We ..."
"Lucien!"
The girl's voice sounded terrified. Lucien turned, a very tall thin man in prim blue livery, spectacles shining like moons in the dark. Between the pillars in the direction in which they had come the doorway was just visible, a narrow slit high in the darkness of the wall, and like a firefly a seed of light bobbed and shivered down the long steep drop of the rail-less stair. Lucien, Cain, and Abel-- now on his feet and carrying Goldie on one still-dislocated shoulder--were at the bottom of the stair when the little brown elf-girl reached it.
"Lucien, it's--there's something terrible happening in the Hall of the Warriors!"
"The Hall of the Warriors!" cried Cain in alarm.
Lucien said a word Cain hadn't thought Lucien knew.
After you've had a fight-dream, pounding or clubbing Them--usually with maddening impotence, or weapons that break, or blows that don't connect... Ever wonder where They go?
The lights were quenched in that big, smelly barroom when Lucien threw open the door. The only illumination came, hideously, from the walls themselves, from the tables that were sinking already into the appalling softness that was the floor; even the paneling on the walls was beginning to run, trickling sickeningly from beneath the bare-breasted pinups and old motorcycle shop calendars.
The screaming was hellish, the smell beyond belief.
They must have been watching one of the dancers on the narrow mirrored walkway behind the bar, and not seen the walls begin to bleed, and shift, and change. They were, mostly, half-drunk. The suddenly mollient floor gripped their boots, tripping them if they tried to flee, holding them when they tried to rise, drinking them, drinking them, pulling the flesh off their bones as they tried to rip clear their arms and legs....
Someone at the bar who hadn't checked his weapon was firing a semi-auto wildly, bullets spattering everywhere; a Crusader was hacking at the gelatinous bands that held him to the wall and shrieking as they bled and he realized it was his own flesh, his own veins, he was cutting....
Under Lucien's hand, the doorknob turned suddenly soft and warm. Lucien jerked free and leaped back, palm bloody--the whole wall on the outside of the Hall of the Warriors was starting to drip, shapes bulging and blistering from it.
"Where's the Master?" cried the elf-girl Nuala. "Earth?"
"Worse. The Realm of Order ..."
"I hope he packed a sandwich," said Cain. "Even Hell has better food."
"MOTHERFUCKING NAZI PIGS!" shrieked a voice from within the Hall, and there was another spattering of gunfire.
A thousand tiny pockmarks puffed in the wet gorp that had been the corridor wall, and in unison they shifted, moved.... "We'll all be one. We'll all be one. The time will come and we'll all be one...."
Near them the wall bulged out suddenly into a huge shape, like one of the ugly little dust-bunny frights that hide under children's beds, but blown up to almost man-size: squid, roach, orchid of one of the more repellent varieties. ...
"All life," it said, from a woman's red lips in its belly. "All life is really one great continuum."
Lucien and the others backed hastily away. "Matthew," said Lucien. "Matthew will be able to reach him." Nuala ran across the hall to the long window, leaned out, and cried the raven's name. "In the meantime we must... we must take steps to isolate this wing of the palace...."
"And just exactly what steps are those?" demanded Cain sarcastically.
Jamilla Beyaz wondered what in the name of all Creation she was doing dreaming about going to the mosque. Since she'd moved up to Istanbul from Ankara and gotten a job in the Postal Ministry she'd visited a mosque maybe half a dozen times--she tried to be a good Moslem, of course, but she considered it possible without wearing veils and letting some imam tell her how to run her life. This was the twentieth century, after all.
But here she was, kneeling in the women's section of the Blue Mosque, crowded shoulder to shoulder with those veiled women in the black polyester chaddurs she saw in the markets in the old part of the city....
And the place was jammed. Filled, as if it were Ramadan ...
She couldn't see who was reading, up in the mimber, under the rings of low-hanging lamps. But she could hear him, hear what he was saying, his voice filling the tiled swell of the domes.
"We are all a part of one another," he was saying. "All life is all life, one great continuum. We are all of one another. We must become one another if anyone is to be happy."
And to her horror, all the men packed, kneeling, on the carpets before her turned to one another and began to bite one another--eat one another--tearing off bleeding hunks of flesh. Jamilla sprang to her feet, sickened, appalled; the women in the little boxlike alcove were falling on one another, tearing with their teeth, their hands.... Bloody mouths, bloody fingers. One man a few feet from the railing twisted, ripped the head off another. Blood fountained forth and the head said, "We are all one. We are all one...."
Jamilla woke, gasping, trembling in the dark. Beside her, her husband Pierre rolled over, blinked at her. "What?" he asked.
She didn't know why she had the words on her lips as she'd come out of her dream, but she repeated them now. "We are all one," she said.
"Can you muh-move the rooms?" asked Abel. "Puh-put the bad ones all in one place?"
"The bad ones are already all in one place, fatwit!" Cain backed another few hasty steps down the hall as the softening wall bulged and blistered again, birthing in a kind of obscene bas-relief more frights, big ones, this time: closet-mutterers, cellar-groaners, attic-knockers. The first fright, still whispering about all life, all life, was slowly drawing out from the wall, veins bulging in the bands of flesh that still held it to the wood of the paneling.
"What the firetruckin' hell... ?" Matthew the raven swept in through the window Nuala had opened, saw the things--the movement, the shifting farther down the hall--and veered to land on Lucien's shoulder. Lucien and his party had backed a considerable distance from the door of the Hall of the Warriors. The door itself was melting now, flowing down to join the squishy, flocculent mass of the floor, and from the putrid-glowing dark within came only the mutter of men's voices, "We are all one. We are all one...."
"Get Lord Morpheus. Quickly."
Feet thundered past them--no bodies, just running pairs of feet. Those dreams about footsteps in the dark have to live somewhere, too. With them fled the Lightswitch Thing, pausing only long enough to extinguish the torch Lucien still carried in his hand.
Matthew flapped for the window again. With a wet snap and a spattering of blood, the roach/squid fright pulled free of the walls, manifested a pair of rubbery wings, and sprang in pursuit, far faster than one would have thought such a thing could move.
The other frights pulled free a moment later. Eyeless, they turned as one and lunged at the little group in the hallway.
"This way!" yelled Cain suddenly, turning and plunging down the hall.
Of course the Lightswitch Thing had locked most of the doors.
The frights were boneless, amorphous, but they moved fast, with the veering scuttle of mice and roaches across bedroom floors, the juddering bounce of enormous crickets, and they muttered and squeaked and hissed as they came. Cain and the others veered through a bank of school lockers, where the gym clothes and books and final exams sealed in those combinationless cubbyholes were melting, flowing out u
nder the cracks, to form pulpy white spiders that crawled in a devouring mass over the screaming archetype of a math teacher, and even as they fled past, Cain heard the man's screaming change... "OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD WE ARE ONE LIFE IS ONE..."
"The Salt Garden!" cried Lucien, understanding.
The squeaking, grasping frights were on their heels as they plunged through the cold white rock of the colonnade that surrounded the place. The fugitives' shoes keened thinly on the combed crystalline waves of the salt, the dunes shaped around the bare black bones of coal. It was always day in the Salt Garden, hard and cruel and hot, and the ground smelled of bitter sterility, of the death locked up in every necessity of life.
The frights fell, wailing, to the ground, and began to shrivel.
"Fill your pockets!" yelled Cain, ripping off his coat and throwing it down. "Fill your clothes, damn it... !" He knelt to scrape the bitter crystals in piles onto the cloth. "Take off that stupid scarf of yours, bitch...."
Nuala looked up, startled, as shadows crossed the burning noon sun and Matthew plunged down toward them, shrieking, "Get under cover!"
Flabby, flapping, dripping as they flew, the dirty-colored things followed him in a clumsy, deadly swift horde.
Cain tried to spring to his feet and tripped on his coat; Abel caught him by the arm, dragged him after them as the foul, pinkish creatures dropped out of the air toward them. Cain hurled the whole coatful of salt at them, but they parted like a flock of bats to let it through, regathering to strike ...
The frights hit the door of the hall on the far side of the garden with a soggy splat as Lucien slammed it, shot the bolt. The heavy oak panels immediately began to soften.
"Organic," panted Lucien. It was night here in the rest of the palace. He produced a match to rekindle his torch. "They--it--can absorb anything organic."
"That's what they've been saying, isn't it?" demanded Cain, brushing the salt from his knees. "And let go of me, birdbrain." He pulled his arm free of Abel's steadying grasp. "So what's your story?" He cocked an eye at Matthew.
"Too many," panted the raven. "Coming out of every window--Jesus, take a look at the palace! It looks like the whole southern side of it's caving in...."
"The Stone Tower," said Lucien. "We can go through the stables ..." He turned toward a door at the far end of the Painted Chamber, but even as he spoke it was opened, and the Fashion Thing came through, panting and scared, with old Mrs. Norton from the library, still clutching a book, in her wake.
"It's in the stables," said the Fashion Thing, shaking all over at what she had seen there. She was into neo-sixties these days, a Cardinoid ripoff made of clear vinyl and slabs of brushed steel, probably the only thing that had saved her, black hair (this week, anyway) brushed slick against her skull, lipstick now no whiter than her frightened face. "It's ... the things from the Hall of the Warriors ... They're tearing up the horses. Eating them. Eating each other." She shuddered, and pressed her hand to her mouth. "They caught... some of the other servants. ..."
