by Therin Knite
It’s the digital picture frame that rests on top of my old wooden nightstand. The same set of photographs has been on repeat for the last ten years. I sit my neglected Ocom on the nightstand and grab the picture frame as it resets to the beginning of the queue.
I’m four, and it’s Halloween. Mom’s dressed me up like a Pterodactyl, and she hoists me high into the air so I can pretend for ten seconds that I’m flying when no other child can. That I’m special. I’m five, and it’s my first day of fifth grade. I’ve got a lunchbox filled with goodies, and Mom stands beside me—reassuring hand on my head—as we wait for the school bus to come by. I’m six, and it’s Christmas Eve. There’s a holograph tree and a ton of brightly wrapped presents. There’s Mom with her Santa hat on, tickling my nose with the white fluffy end.
Then there’s the next morning (which is not in the set).
When I find Mom dead on the floor.
Chapter Four
I go to sleep in my bedroom at eleven forty-five and wake up on Pennimore Street at midnight. My first thought? This is the old gods’ Hell.
It is utterly devoid of all that creates joy. It is silent like the Earth Post-Fall of Man. Streetlamps cascade filtered light onto empty sidewalks. Insects skitter across the car-less road. Cracked pavement bites at my toes as I stand on the corner of the nondescript block across the street from the convenience store. Its sign reads Larry’s Shop and Save, but Larry is not inside the darkened building. No one is. I’m alone in a suburb two hours from home, no clue how I got here, no clue why I am here.
There’s a frigid chill crawling up my spine like a wounded centipede, and I feel as if I’m half of myself. But whether I’m a body without a soul or a soul without a body evades me. And it’s the not knowing—it’s the inability to know—that makes it Hell. For the first time in many years, a spike of true fear clogs my throat, and I spin on my toes, searching for answers to questions I can’t even grasp.
Then it’s gone. I scramble away from the verge of a panic attack, and my brain makes sense of the world.
This place looks and smells and feels of Pennimore Street. A mid-September cold front has settled in the ground, freezing out the warmth and laughter of a summer holiday. Scents of freshly mowed grass and barbeque smoke waft through the air. All the buildings are the same, brick for brick, shingle for shingle. Seventy-two homes, a nursery school, fourteen commercial properties, and a children’s play park.
But something isn’t right. This is not Pennimore Street. It oozes the sensation of birth by an omnipotent hand. Like one of my reconstructions but tangible. The missing link between my mental maps and the realities beneath them.
My feet retrace their steps from the store to Manson’s house and come to rest on the same concrete sidewalk block where I watched the IBI march away with their heads hung low. Manson’s fence is in one piece, Jin’s soiled hunk of wood nowhere to be found. Green grass grows where ash had long settled. The gouge in the white siding of the lawyer’s home—the result of a spiked tail swipe by a dragon fleeing the scene of its crime—has been erased. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say no one died here last night.
“Well, this is unexpected.”
Umbrella girl appears next to me in between blinks. She’s dressed in a heavy-duty field uniform, guns and knives and unidentifiable pieces of technology strapped to every practical place. It strikes me as the getup of a hunter, but what would someone hunt in Pennimore Hell?
Besides dragons.
“You.”
“Me,” she says. “You were hoping for someone else?”
“I was hoping for someone who’d answer my questions. You won’t.”
“How do you know I won’t?” The jab is a hot poker in my side, reminding me of my dismal failure at reading her this morning. Now, she isn’t acting (as much), and her details are clearer. “What’s that? You don’t?” Her arms are crossed, and her fingers dance against her ribcage—the sign of someone who lives and breathes adrenaline. It’s an impatient habit. It’s why she had the umbrella, why she spun it every few seconds. “I’ll answer every question you have and every question you haven’t thought of yet.”
She is sarcastic and haughty.
She is experienced and fearless.
She is breathtakingly intelligent.
“Will you? Or will you repeat today’s little humiliation session?”
“Humbling session. I suppose you’re not fond of them, given your level of arrogance. It sucks having to admit you’re not a perfect genius, doesn’t it? You can be fooled. You can be tricked. And you will be.” A glance at Manson’s pristine lawn triggers an eyebrow raise, and she begins to pace the perimeter. “Interesting. He reset the level three damage.”
“The what?”
“The damage to the property caused by the dragon.”
“No, level three of what?”
“The dream.”
It’s funny how fast Hell becomes Heaven when ignorance is booted out the window. “We’re in a dream. That’s how I got here. I’m not here at all. This is a mental reconstruction, only in a different sense than I’m used to.”
She plucks a few blades of grass from the edge of the yard and minces them with her fingers until they’re nothing but fragments of green. The hunch of her shoulders is reminiscent of a scientist bent over a microscope, searching for signs of life in what should be a barren rock. “You don’t sound flabbergasted. I like it when they’re flabbergasted. Why aren’t you flabbergasted?”
“Why would I be?”
“The average person is pretty shocked when he finds out something like this,” she says, gesturing to the air around her, “isn’t real life.” Her feet take her farther down the cul-de-sac sidewalk, and she examines the homes of Manson’s nearest neighbors, who refused to be interviewed by the IBI without a lawyer present.
“I’m not the average person. The dream explanation is possible and plausible. I hadn’t considered it, but it makes perfect sense. Something felt off to me. Now I know what it is.”
Her head tilts to the side at a severe angle. “Good gods, you are emotionally stunted.”
I make up the distance between us and situate myself two in-sync steps behind her. “Do you want me to apologize for being traumatized as a child?”
“Were you now?”
“Like you don’t know. You’ve read all about me. Researched me. And you’ve probably been spying on me, too. You’re not the kind of person who interacts with people you know nothing about. You only go in for the kill when the other side has no secrets. That’s what today was about, right? The crime scene. The club. Proving that you can crush me with your intellectual pinky finger? That I am an ant and you a leviathan?”
She bobs her head in agreement. “True. I just wanted to see how you’d respond if I feigned ignorance. You don’t like to talk about it, or so I’ve read.”
“Would you?”
The cat’s grin returns with a vengeance. “I have much worse things I’d rather not talk about.”
A faint, animalistic screech resonates through the bones of Pennimore Dream. A light breeze whispers through the trees. Abandoned swing sets creak on rusted chains. Shutters quake.
Umbrella girl comes to a staccato halt, eyes scanning the area with a mechanical accuracy that makes me feel, for the first time in my life, the more human of two people.
“That’s the dragon,” I say.
“Indeed. The killer wants to play tonight, it seems. Last time, I was here for three hours, and you know what happened?”
“Nothing?” The logical option. “You wouldn’t be here again if you’d found what you were looking for the first time around.”
She loops an arm through one of mine and starts pulling me alongside her. “The bastard that killed Manson wouldn’t show his face during the last occurrence of the dream, wouldn’t even show his toy again after he roasted his target. I think he was hoping I’d call it quits and leave, but after a while, he got fed up and ended the dream. So he
re I am again tonight, walking around in a dream version of the most boring neighborhood in North America, waiting for a killer to pick another victim or decide it’s time to pack up the show and skedaddle. He could have at least made the dream exciting.”
“Hold on.”
Another screech rebounds through the neighborhood.
“Yes?”
“If we’re in a dream, and the dragon is in the dream, then how did it kill Victor Manson?”
“Who said dreams can’t kill?”
“Most people. Then again, most people are wrong most of the time.”
“That’s because most people don’t have high enough clearance to know about echoes.”
“Echoes?”
“An echo is a type of dream that extends its existence from the dreamer into a dimension parallel to our own. In certain cases, a type of dream that can become reality.” She’s spoken these words before, at least one thousand times to ten thousand different people. “A type of dream that can kill you and most of the time tries quite hard toward that end. The people who tend to use echoes for gain aren’t the ones dreaming of candy and rainbows, if you know what I mean.”
“So murderers are killing people with dreams now? Not even our minds are safe any—?”
A black shadow darts through the dim-starred sky and collides with a nearby house. It thrashes around, shredding the roof, shingles and solar panels falling like recycled rain. Finally, the dragon gets its bearings. It ascends to the highest point of the rooftop, spiked tail whipping through the air. It is everything I imagined and more. Bones and muscles and scales and claws never conceived by nature. A predator left off the universe’s laundry list.
For a few moments, it sits and waits, a lapdog longing for commands. Then its head snaps to attention, and its eyes lock onto us with eerie precision. It knows who we are.
“Why am I here?” I say.
“I don’t know. Why did you come here?”
“I brought myself here?”
“Sure did.”
The dragon readies itself to pounce, and its mouth seems to pull back into that cruelly innocent smile that accompanies a housecat who stumbles upon his long-lost favorite toy.
“So, what do I do?”
“You could help me.” Her gloved hand grips my bare, shaking wrist. She’s coiled like a spring, ready to dash ten miles and ready to drag me with her, kicking and screaming.
“Help you what? Hunt dragons?”
A sharp shriek pierces the night.
“No. Just the ones who dream them up.”
* * *
The clothing store’s mannequins act as our vanguard while we plot behind the checkout counter. Every few seconds, umbrella girl peeks over the edge, scanning for our reptilian enemy. And every few seconds, another furious cry pummels my eardrums. It’s not getting any closer, however, and by the time my chest has stopped praying for air, the dragon is a phantom in the distance.
“If that thing kills me here, what’ll happen to my body in the real world?” I peer around the long-out-of-style feather boa hanging between us.
“You’ll die. In the same way. In a level two echo—the type we’re in now—your body is connected to the dimension in which the echo exists. Any injuries you sustain will be replicated in the real world.” Her words run together, each one moving a mile faster than the last.
“Is that how Manson died?”
She shakes her head, a stray white lock falling over her eyes. “He wasn’t in an echo when he died. That was a level three breach, when the barrier between dimensions breaks down and the dream temporarily becomes reality.”
“Temporarily? So the reason the dragon wasn’t still flying around this morning is because—”
“The dream ended, yeah. Any and all dream content ceases to exist when the dreamer stops dreaming. Which, of course, given the conditions under which the dragon came and went, can only mean that—”
“Someone created this echo specifically to kill Manson, knowing or believing that his murder weapon of choice would be untraceable.”
A low chuckle escapes her lips, and she slides down into an exhausted slouch. “So, you scared yet?”
I rest my head against the cool metal counter, and the sound of my blood pumping overtime pulses against my eardrums. “No. I’m not. At all.”
“Figures.” She kicks a dusty hat farther under the shelf it’s been hiding beneath since a careless stocker dropped it there ages ago. Or since the dreamer put it there to give off such an impression. “For someone like you, I mean.”
“Someone like me?” A drip, drip, drip absorbs half my attention, and I follow each drop as it trails its predecessors down the chic gray wall to a pool on the floor with a permanent border stain that suggests it’s mopped up every morning but never choked for sustenance. Why would someone take the time to construct such tiny details in a dream created for murder? “Dare I ask what you’re imply—?”
A violent quake rocks the store, knocking half-priced costume jewelry off gaudy shelves and raising a cloud of dust. Deep growling batters my ribcage, and in the reflection of a fallen-over vanity mirror, I catch an image of the dragon prowling right outside the building. Its nostrils press against the display window, breath fogging up the panes.
“Better than I thought,” mumbles umbrella girl.
“What is?” I can barely hear the sound of my own voice over the thunderous beating of my heart. My body has reached its monthly allotment of exercise and is dreading another three-mile run through manicured lawns and well-swept side streets. On the other hand, my brain is gearing up for another round of the most interesting moment of my life. Dissonance. Yay.
“The echo maker. To set up a recurring echo so complex as this is hard enough, but to be able to so accurately control your creations is even harder. The dragon on its own isn’t this intelligent. The maker is giving it orders. He spent the last several minutes tracking us down, then redirected his pet to come off us.” She pauses, the ghost of a smirk crossing her lips. “Of course, the downside of having such a complex echo is that it’s really hard to change its structure, especially without destroying its integrity.” Her hand grips my wrist again. “Which means we pretty much have free rein to do whatever we want without him changing the content.” A subtle nod points toward an employees only door, but since we’re the sole inhabitants of Pennimore Dream, I suppose that means we can work anywhere we want.
We take off on the same unspoken cue, bounding for the door. The dragon yelps in surprise before inhaling, and my last memory of the shoddy clothing shop is a stream of fire and glass devouring every relic of the past it held so dear. Umbrella girl kicks the door shut not a second too soon, and I wade through a set of old shipping boxes to reach another with a broken EXIT sign suspended above it at an angle.
The night is cold in Pennimore Dream. My fatigued shakes are replaced by shivers as I scan for an escape route. There are two outlets—one of which leads to the front of the store, where Mr. Dragon is waiting, another which leads onto a secondary street—and a fire escape.
“Up we go,” says umbrella girl, pulling the exit door shut behind her.
“Why up?”
“It can fly. We need the high ground.”
“It’ll pick us off easier.”
“Not if I shoot it first.”
“You can kill dream manifestations?”
She leaps onto a trash bin and grabs the fire escape ladder. “Depends on how the maker constructs them. Given that this guy seems to favor realism, the answer is probably.” A sharp tug sends the ladder clanging to the ground. “So up, up, and away, if you please.” She clambers onto the first-story landing and starts sprinting up the steps. By the time I make it to her starting point, she’s halfway to the roof.
“Hey, you could slow down, you know? I—”
The world collapses beneath my feet. Metal supports tear from the wall, and the entire escape tips sideways. My forehead collides with the third-story railing, and two
sweaty hands that act of their own accord are the only things that prevent me from rolling off the edge. The dragon forces itself farther into the alley, wings beating savagely against the claustrophobic walls. It clings to the escape with all its might, and a too-close claw nicks my ankle.
I scramble backward, ducking as a spiked tail shoots past my face. The dragon cranes its neck to get a good last look at me before it roasts me well done, but instead of a superior animal, I see an equally inferior man. A murderer peering through the eyes of an unwitting tool. An errant thought turned errant existence.
And then I see the support.
A single beam holds the fourth flight of the escape in place, its abused bolt begging to give way. I roll back and kick it, but my bare arch rips open at the kiss of jagged metal. Shoes. Of all the damn times not to be wearing shoes!
The dragon inhales.
I reel back again and kick with every ounce of strength I have left. This time, the sole of my work boot hits the bolt, and it springs free of the wall. A solid ton of twisted metal swings around and slams into the dragon’s torso. Bent beams pierce its back and wings, and it screams in wretched realization of the kind of pain only a dream can feel. It flails, rebounding off the adjacent building and tearing the collapsed fourth-story structure free of the escape. The added weight sends it plummeting to the ground, and an array of warped metal keeps it pinned down. Its next screech sounds like damaged pride and blooming shame in a single tone.
But that’s the man talking, isn’t it?
A whistle splits the air. Umbrella girl, peering over the rooftop, points to a windowsill low enough for me to climb onto. My body surges with another short burst of action, and she’s pulling me over the roof’s edge a few seconds later. Only then do I feel the dull throb in my foot and the warm, pulsing gush of blood in my boot.
