Black Wings IV

by Edited by S. T. Joshi

Perhaps he could do better than that; as his hands strayed higher up her body, sliding gently around her throat, he sensed a tormenting part of himself, one newly awakened by circumstance, wrestle to his surface, making his flesh burn with unrest. He recalled his cloistering mother and distant father, the psychopath who’d never actually stalked him in his childhood bedroom, and all the nightmares that had dogged him until later life…And why did he now feel so angry about it? Whatever the truth was, he soon began to speak.

  “I saw it, Lily. I saw every part of it. It was hideous and yet…strangely beautiful.”

  “More,” she said, pulling her arms away from his chest, snapping her hands behind her back, and then running fingers blindly down his pinned-down legs. “More …more …more.”

  “Oh, the way it smiled—it looked like you, but far more insidious, as if it understood everything about the world and so many other terrible secrets.”

  “What? What does it understand?”

  By this time, Glenn sensed himself improvising, abandoning all his usual neutral logic and professional distance. He felt one of his girlfriend’s hands sliding between his thighs, grappling for the sensitive nest below her own pubic area. Maybe the other would soon follow. Then, deepening his vindictiveness, he said, “It knows all about us, Lily. It knows about bestial people.” Now intuition took complete control of him, a combination of both his occupational experiences and every nebulous thing he’d ever suspected since childhood. “It understands that everything that happens to us has consequences and that no significant event can ever be overruled. It knows that functioning in everyday life involves suppression of desire, and that perversion is just blocked engagement. It realises that interaction with others is the most important aspect of our lives, and yet also the arena involving most risk. And it told me—yes, told me—that…that…” Just then, Glenn remembered that terrible noise in the cave, the sound of an earthquake taking grip, and that was when he finished, “… that buried secrets can be released.”

  “At last it’s free,” said his girlfriend, having already tugged his erect penis from his shorts and shoved aside her knickers to enable rough entry. She’d done all this with one hand, and when Glenn jerked up, thrusting her backwards, he used both of his to search the area around them, the chilly groundsheet of the tent.

  But it was too late.

  She already had the weapon.

  “And now I am, too,” she declared, raising the heavy mallet Glenn had used earlier to knock in those lethally sharp tent pegs, before bringing its head down firmly upon his face.

  BROKEN SLEEP

  Cody Goodfellow

  Cody Goodfellow’s novels include Radiant Dawn and Ravenous Dusk (Perilous Press, 2000, 2003), Perfect Union (Swallowdown Press, 2010), Repo Shark (Broken River Books, 2014). Both of his collections—Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars and All-Monster Action (Swallowdown Press, 2009, 2012)—received the Wonderland Book Award. His short fiction has appeared in Black Static, Inhuman, Cemetery Dance, and the Magazine of Bizarro Fiction. He recently edited Deepest, Darkest Eden (Miskatonic River Press, 2013), an anthology of new fantasies set in Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborea, and is currently assembling a companion volume of Zothique stories.

  THE LAST PLACE TRE WAS LOCKED UP, THEY WOULD line up all the new inmates, naked and shivering and dripping chemical disinfectant. The commandant tells you that the first rule is no talking, ever. Any questions? he asks. The next new fish who opens his hole gets his teeth smashed in with a truncheon. Any more questions?

  Tre was swiftly learning to miss that kind of caring human contact.

  This new place seemed better at first. He didn’t even remember being transferred in. He just woke up in this plastic coffin, a solitary cell like a port-o-shitter turned on its side. By his second sleep cycle, he forgot why he was arrested. By the third one, he had to search for the barcode on his wristband to recall his name.

  Pills ground up in his food, gritty Mexican pharmaceuticals in tropical beach party colors. He tripped often enough to know the taste of alkaloids, but this shit was way too strong. Meals came with more pills in a tiny envelope that told him to report any SIDE EFFECTS.

  It was better than any high he ever paid for, most of the time. He’d think of something funny and forget to laugh, or just mumble the word joke over and over, cackling like a loon. But there were moments when he dreamt he was flying, and then he was falling and jolted out of sleep with his heart racing and every muscle tied in knots, every time he started to really sleep.

  They shocked him awake with microscopic electrodes embedded under his skin, and if he didn’t forget what he was doing and fall asleep again right away, he would scalp himself with his bare hands, trying to dig them out.

  All his life, Tre barely remembered his dreams. Something was chasing him, or he was chasing something. It almost had him or he almost had it, and then he woke up. But now he was aware he was dreaming, aware that he was asleep—if he was anywhere, it had to be a dream—but he couldn’t remember being awake. They drugged him out of his mind and shocked him out of sleep, channel-surfing him with their remote control. He had to go somewhere…

  They’re trying to drive you crazy, said the smartest part of him, the part that he beat down inside himself, whenever it dared to speak up. They’re trying to drive you out of your mind so they can follow you like a marked rat, so they can track you back to the nest.

  It got worse when they stopped feeding him.

  The dreams got uglier. Chasing him and pushing him into a pit and he was drowning in battery acid. He pinched himself to wake up, but it didn’t work. He bit himself, tearing skin and God he was delicious. He ate half of his own hand and was gnawing on his wrist when he woke up and saw his cell was open.

  A big black thing waited in the corridor, crouching between him and his food. It lifted a leg and pissed on the tray, but it was nothing like a dog.

  He pinched himself. It didn’t hurt like hunger, but it felt real enough. Without another thought, he lunged at the thing, drove it back on its hind legs, slammed it into the wall, and ripped out its throat in his teeth.

  He ate everything, even the bones. He grew so full that he expanded right through tinfoil and cardboard walls.

  It was another dream, but more real than anything he’d ever experienced, awake or asleep or on any drug. The light was like wine, the air was alive with music and perfume, and the wind felt like the skin of a woman against him.

  He floated among thousands, millions of human bodies, mostly naked or in varying states of undress, in a bottomless sky of glowing clouds and gentle, embryonic warmth. He was the only one awake, the only one who was real.

  A beautiful redheaded woman floated by and he tried to grope her, but she popped like a soap bubble. Others crumbled like ash or dissipated like smoke. He raged at them, tumbling through clouds of bodies like a bullet until he encountered one that hit him back.

  Her hair was blacker than shadows, and it covered her milk-white face like a living veil, but flashes of green submarine light spilled out of her eyes. She asked his name.

  He hesitated, wracking his brain. He wasn’t wearing a wristband or anything else, and neither was she. “Andre K—Tre, just Tre. Who’re you? How come you’re not like everybody else?”

  “My name’s Ariadne here,” she said. “And we’re inside the Orgasm.” Drifting from one body to the next, she sought out a woman wrapped in a dove-gray fur coat and turned her over to go through her pockets. Some of them were entangled in the heat of sex, but most were alone with their eyes rolled back in their heads. “You know what this is, right? How old are you?”

  His mind was a sieve. His body changed or dissolved when he tried to look at it. He guessed, “Sixteen…”

  “Maybe in a couple years, player.” Jumping into a tangle of young faceless men in fraternity sweaters, she took wallets and drug stashes and tiny gray firefly things out of their heads. “You’re lucky. Most inmates in the solitary program break down and lose it w
ithout ever finding their way out of their own heads. Some inmates will maim themselves or go crazy to get out of work detail, you know? Knocking on Joe, they used to call it. But the really crazy ones are the ones who do the real shit work in here. If you lose your name, you forget who and what you are. They use you completely. That black dog-thing on your breath…that’s what you turn into.”

  Nausea made him start to feel solid, start to fall. “Whatever,” he said. Already bored. “This is a dream, right? We should do it.”

  She shook her head, so tired, though he still couldn’t see her face. “Thanks, no. You look like a Francis Bacon painting of someone he really hated.”

  “But this is my dream, and you—”

  “This isn’t your dream. Right now, we’re in an artificial communal dream-space created with drugs and guided hypnotic imagery. Everyone sleeping in its broadcasting footprint experiences the same wet dream, brought to you by Burroughs-Wellcome, Bechtel and Wackenhut.”

  The velvet ease of her dismissal sent him into a childish fury. Thrashing another knot of orgasmic ghosts into sparkling ashes, he turned on her with azure fire drooling out of his fists. “I’m old enough, and I’m more real than you can handle, girl.”

  She turned away, daring him to come at her. Floated above him and her hair fanned out, giving him a glimpse of her face. Light came out of her mouth. She had no eyes, only holes alive with television snow.

  “Listen, dummy. The people who run the prison are using you as guinea pigs. They’re keeping you in a lucid dream state…jolting you with electrical shocks until you’re dreaming while you’re awake….That’s just the primary conditioning. They’re trying to find and control dreamers who can go into other people’s dreams.”

  He still didn’t understand why she didn’t want to hook up, but she must be someone else, not a figment of his exhausted imagination. “Why are they doing this to us?”

  “Why? To sell things. To run everybody. They want to create a universal dream-space that they can control…or to discover the real one, so they can plant a flag in it.”

  She kissed him, and the shock was greater than the electrode jolts. Her words were too heavy to hear; they sank into him like lead.

  Something blocked out the sun. The air turned cold and slimy and too thick to breathe. Any second they were going to shock him awake and he wanted to hold onto her, but the thing was so huge it exerted its own gravity. It sucked him down, away from her, and all the empty vessels fell after him like rain.

  “Run!” she cried. “Run back to your body! Choose the right door—”

  He fought to stay with her, climbing and leaping over tumbling bodies, screaming her name, but she floated always out of reach. He hit the bottom and the bodies kept piling up. Thrashing, clawing, biting, tearing, and crawling, but they buried him alive. Crushed under their weight and stink and waste, unable to breathe, unable to die. When the lightning in his head finally jerked him out of the dream, he awoke clawing at the walls.

  At the first place they locked him up, when he was eleven, you could go to the yard after lunch, where it was too hot for anything but fighting, or you could go to the library. There were no good books to read, but if you wanted to stay, you had to do puzzles. The pictures on the boxes were sun-bleached or mismatched or just missing. Many puzzles were just in coffee cans, with no hint of what they should look like. You had to move the pieces around and try to put them together, knowing none of the pieces might even be from the same puzzle.

  He had gotten quite good at puzzles, at spotting things that did or didn’t belong, at making things that didn’t belong fit together. It helped him to cope now, when every morning he woke up in a different prison.

  The rules were always different, but always the same. It was a dream-prison, a shared imaginary space. The other people around him were not figments of his imagination, but other drugged prisoners. Sometimes they were giant, toddling, bawling babies. Other times they were skeletons riddled with ghostly parasites the size of pythons. In the worst of them, there was only blackness, sickness, and tubes going in and out of his arms and down his throat, and choking himself to death the only exit.

  Tre figured out the rules soon enough. When a boy with a huge black-red starfish for a face jumped him in the shower, Tre cut him from nipples to navel with a knife that came out of his mouth. The wound yawned and everything but blood poured out. Before the guards gassed them, he tore the hole in the inmate wider and climbed into it and escaped.

  He wandered in and out of strangers’ fantasies like a runaway bogeyman, crashing forbidden love trysts and eternal birthday parties and shredding gossamer ectoplasm in his dreamteeth, always looking for another door. When the familiar CLICK CLICK of alien voltage shot through his brain, he welcomed it and rode the lightning down into deeper sleep.

  It looked like an ancient, ruined amusement park—Six Flags over Atlantis—drooping arches and crooked towers infested with rusting, hyperbolic ribbons of rollercoaster track, endless empty arcades, deserted shopping malls and echo-haunted pavilions the color and texture of fossilized bones. The pavement was slick, grimy ice; beneath it, he could see a black, rushing river. Drowning people and things both foreign and familiar pounded at the ice and screamed bubbles at him until the current ripped them away.

  Mobs of undead scavengers with featureless green hamburger faces climbed out of the gutters. He ran like a drunken puppet as the street turned to taffy. “Get back, you bastards!” he roared. “I’m the last man!”

  He dashed their hollow heads open, and pumpkin seeds and circuitry spilled out. They forgot him, swinging listlessly at each other and gasping, I’M the last man! And maybe each of them was right, he thought, when he looked into a funhouse mirror and saw his own rotten, bloated face.

  A paralyzing shock jerked him by the silver cord that bound his soul to his body, growing to a grand mal seizure when he fought it. Sweltering fever-heat poured out of him. The ice melted and cracked. He plunged into frigid blackness and was swept away.

  The next dream was beautiful: endless blood-red jungle, rolling valleys, eternal tribal war. Tiny, twig-boned jungle pygmies prowled the crushed velvet undergrowth, blasted or blessed with strange mutations that made each tribe a species unto itself. He waded into internecine feuds and picked a side at random and stomped the enemy like ants, and they carried him to their village like a living god of war. They offered him what little food they had, sang his praises as they starved, as their fragile fairy daughters withered, blackened, and burst at his touch.

  He stayed through three seasons and burned through ninety-two tribes like a plague and it was hard to leave, but he could find no peace. She haunted his dreams within dreams. This is a labyrinth, not a maze, she told him. There are no dead ends, no alternate exits. The only way out is through …

  She was the only real thing, the only one who could remind him this was a dream. The mere thought of her brought the shocks, as if to punish him or deliver him deeper, but they could barely reach him, here. He was almost happy…

  And then the real gods came, and he was only another scurrying insect looking for a rock to hide under.

  They ate up the sky with their obscene, insane parade of shapes, but there were no shadows when they held up lenses that magnified the blood-red sun into slashing white tongues of fire.

  Burning down to his bones, he ran for hours through the inferno, and it hurt more than anything he’d ever felt in waking life, but he couldn’t wake up, he couldn’t even die.

  He came to a ruined temple adorned with sleeping stone faces and bug-eyed, bloody-tusked angels. Before the temple lay a long, narrow pool that perfectly reflected the tower, but the sky in the reflection was a star-mad winter night with a bloated blue full moon impaled upon the tower’s silver spire.

  Tre threw himself into the water, but when he broke the surface he only fell faster into the airless void on the other side of the mirror. Screaming only sucked cold fire into his lungs as he plummeted past the darkl
y luminous faces of the mirror-temple and fell burning into the starry dark of deepest dreams.

  Swimming through eternal night, the stars grew larger, more numerous…swelled until they surrounded him and swallowed the darkness. He hid his face from their unblinking glare, flinched from the snail-trail touch of naked eyeballs on his goosebump-prickled flesh. In the place where everything was made of eyes, he finally found her.

  Her matted hair was made of rusty knives. “Jung said dreams are the ‘voice of Nature,’ but She stopped talking to us a long time ago. Did you ever read old books and wonder what they were all smoking? Their dreams were so much deeper, more real. Even you can tell that our dreams are broken.”

  “I don’t need you—” His words came out as stillborn bubbles, turning belly-up and floating away. When they finally reached his ears, he heard himself say, I don’t know how to read.

  With a sad, rusty nod, she said, “You can’t just wake up, because you’re not in your own dream. These are the gutters of the collective unconscious, which they’re trying to colonize, because something went wrong with the real lands of Dream.”

  He tried to speak again and almost drowned. Her silencing finger was like a sword on his lips.

  “When the first proto-humans started to achieve true consciousness, the disconnected hemispheres of the brain started talking to each other, and we met gods in our dreams. They taught us hunting and farming and art and war. They raised us up, but we came to believe it was just us, talking to ourselves in the dark.

  “Somewhere around the middle of the last century, the human race had kind of a collective nervous breakdown. We were kicked out of our dreams, the real ones, the shared space where we once touched the infinite. Long before either of us was born, we lost the Realms of Deeper Sleep…the door closed, the temple fires were put out, and now something blocks the way. That’s what you’re trying to find. Somewhere deep inside us is the door to the dream more real than waking life, the dream of the universe itself.”