The Waking Dreamer

by J. E. Alexander

  CHAPTER 28

  As he opened his eyes, Emmett felt the soft tickling of something touching his nose. Hair. No. A leaf? A leaf wound in hair. His eyes struggled to focus, and as darkness separated, he saw a face half-hidden by a mass of unkempt, wild hair staring silently at him.

  The Archivist’s Attendant.

  The world responded as if it had been paused, and there was a sudden rush of movement as the two Druids and Bards who obviously did not know her identity and thought she was attacking Emmett leapt with a flurry of coordinated attacks.

  Amala’s swinging serpents were the first to reach her, and though the Attendant did not move off of Emmett, she ducked to the side just as Rhiannon brought her iron stave down across a spot where the Attendant’s head had been only moments before. Oliver and Keiran followed with bellowing attacks of concussive sound that the Attendant dodged as she rolled away and scuttled across the ground on hands and knees before bounding up to the limbs of a tree nearly twenty feet overhead.

  Emmett’s mind started into action as he jumped up with his hands above him and bolted in the path of the Archivist’s Attendant between the attacking Children.

  “Wait! Stop! She’s the Archivist’s Attendant!”

  As one, all four paused mid-attack, and had he not seen the look of utter disbelief in Keiran’s eyes he might have forgotten that he was standing so easily on his own, waving his hands wildly in a pattern that should have been painful.

  “Emmett?” Amala asked tentatively, her hand reaching out toward him as if to see if he were truly standing on his own.

  Emmett looked down at his chest as he pulled his coat aside. He knew what was happening before he saw it, but he had to see it with his own eyes. Ripping apart the buttons on his shirt under his coat, he exposed his skin to the damp Appalachian air. His pale skin was still mottled and black with the Rot’s disease. He knew something had changed, because the suffocating tightness and throbbing pain was completely gone.

  Amala reached him first, staring at his exposed chest. She raised a finger toward the Rot. When her finger grazed the edge near the center of his torso, the blackened skin seemed to crumble away like a fine dusting of soot. With a clean breeze rich with pine, the Rot’s final remnants blew away from his torso to reveal healed flesh that was whole, pink, and supple.

  “Praise her,” Rhiannon breathlessly whispered as she lowered her stave and fell to her knees.

  “She did it,” Amala whispered, kneading her fingers along Emmett’s chest and feeling his heartbeat. “She said you would make it.”

  “Brilliant!” Keiran said, and Emmett saw that tears had come to his eyes. Even Oliver was nodding to Emmett with an expression of satisfaction.

  Emmett felt a moment’s reprieve, wishing he could embrace each of them. He wanted to take Amala into his arms and celebrate the life that had nearly been taken from him. He wanted to scream out into the night with the freedom that he had from the Rot.

  But he could not. They did not have time.

  Purpose and knowing, the kind of confidence Emmett had never known before, suddenly focused him. He walked toward the Attendant. Amala and Rhiannon were behind him, along with Keiran, and Oliver seemed to be standing a respectful but noticeable distance back.

  “Attendant?” Emmett called out, unsure how to properly address her. “Can you come down here, please?”

  Emmett watched as she tilted her head, silently staring at him crouched on the large tree limb high above them. Her motions were feral, primal, and Emmett wondered if she could even understand what he was saying to her.

  As if in response, she leapt down, falling easily within feet of them on her hands and feet like a feline. Her face arched up and her eyes regarded Emmett beneath the mass and tangle of hair.

  “How long has she been in the wilderness?” Keiran asked.

  “I thought you were dead,” Rhiannon whispered. She drew close with obvious familiarity, but the feral, unrecognizing look in the Attendant’s eye caused her to slowly back away.

  “Not dead,” the Attendant croaked as if she had not spoken for years.

  Emmett was beginning to understand everything now. How, he could not say. But things that the Archivist had said were beginning to make greater sense.

  “You’ve been in hiding, haven’t you? You’ve been waiting?”

  The Attendant nodded, and Emmett knew without saying aloud that the Attendant had been waiting for him. To serve as the conduit to the Archivist, the Elder who for reasons known only to her could not be present for what was coming.

  “He’s coming now, isn’t he?” In a distant part of his mind, Emmett was confused that the question had come not from the Attendant, but from Amala standing beside him. As his mind raced through Ellie’s story and the Archivist’s visions, the meaning of his childhood dreams suddenly became clear.

  The Grinning Man was coming for Emmett.

  Something crashed into the van, a violent and brutal shock of force that blew it apart and sent burning metal careening in all directions with a plume of fire into the air. They were thrown outward, and somehow, instinctively, Emmett threw his hands over his face as he tumbled like a rag doll through the air and was showered in an explosion of shattered glass. Emmett felt the wind pushed from his lungs as he slammed into a distant tree and fell backward onto the ground, his vision a blur of blinking lights.

  Several moments of unimaginable pain passed before Emmett felt something touching his head. He fell forward limply into a pair of strong arms that dragged him through piercing wreckage into a chilling, foggy air that assaulted his exposed skin. His eyes swam into bleary focus, feeling dull pain throughout his body that was crisscrossed by interlacing cuts from broken glass along the ground. He coughed dryly, unable to stop himself as he continued to violently heave for air. Though the Rot was free from his body finally, everywhere he ached from the van’s explosion.

  He heard a commotion several yards from him. He saw the Attendant, her arms cut badly with deep wounds running down her face, dragging Amala away from the burning wreckage and dropping her next to Keiran’s motionless body on the ground next to Emmett. Emmett could not tell Keiran or Amala’s condition, but he saw in the Attendant’s stagger that she, too, was badly injured.

  Oliver lay unmoving on the ground far away from them, having been thrown in the opposite direction. Rhiannon, too, was crumpled in a heap some distance from him. Burning into the Appalachian night, the van’s fire blazed from its torn engine as flaming rubber and smoking, smoldering metal combined with a toxic cloud of burning oil to blanket the area in a suffocating haze.

  Something in the air demanded Emmett’s attention. He felt it presently. It was grave and oppressive like an immense weight. The hair on his arms stood on end, and Emmett felt something crushing against his ears. There were painfully low sounds reverberating within his mind like a bellow from the deepest point in the earth, gathering strength as it echoed up an impossibly long tunnel.

  Emmett clawed at his ears, fearing he might go mad from the sound. He searched the area for the source and saw nothing but the burning van. Whatever it was, it felt both maddeningly distant and somehow all around him, charging the air with a sort of electricity that could alight a thousand fires if given the dry kindling to do so.

  The Attendant was crouched low to the ground like a wild cat, and though she did not move, her eyes darted around as she seemed to sense the presence. She stood upright suddenly, and with great, visible effort, turned around in wide, sweeping circles. Blood dripped down from her wild hair as her eyes seemed to almost swim in and out of focus.

  “Show yourself,” she growled as if she were still finding how to speak.

  The Attendant was answered with a deep booming sound that was the crashing of waves against unyielding cliffs. There was mocking laughter whose breadth nearly made Emmett’s ears bleed. They popped again under the enormous pressure, and as he feebly tried to cover his ears with his hands, he strained to see where the laughter c
ame from.

  Across from them near the empty cabin, a fog was rolling toward them. Curtains of fog folded over each other in thick layers as the fog grew heavy and low to the ground, soon covering much of the cabin as it stalked toward where the van had exploded.

  Suddenly, the living whorls of fog parted, and a tall figure stepped forward from the darkness itself of the forest beyond. Standing taller than any of them, it was covered entirely in shadow as the fog itself whirled in tendrils covering most of its features. Yet clearly through the mists and shadows, pouring itself into a shape from the fog itself, Emmett saw a pair of glowing red eyes staring from the fog, eyes that lacked any white or black to separate the swimming color of blood that preternaturally illuminated the darkness. Below the eyes was a wide, grinning mouth.

  Emmett saw Ellie and his mother in his mind as their living nightmare, The Grinning Man, stepped forth from shadow.

  The Attendant still had not moved, her head tilting back and forth as if assessing The Grinning Man. Emmett did not know what her powers and strengths were versus the Old One. She was certainly more powerful than four Bards and Druids, which meant that if she could not defeat the creature, none of them could.

  He heard a moaning next to him and saw Amala beginning to slowly stir, struggling to lift her head.

  The unnatural rows of white teeth seemed to chatter as the creature laughed again. It was scornful, hateful laughter as if it delighted in the suffering of a mother weeping over the loss of her own child. It abhorred all manner of life; indeed, it loathed and reviled all of them. It laughed cruelly at the fear it engendered in them from which it drew and wielded its great power.

  Emmett and Amala both ground their teeth and clutched their hands over their ears. The laughter was maddening, penetrating Emmett’s mind and forcing its way through him as if it would literally tear him apart.

  A Bard’s call, at once plaintive and pleading with the tenor notes of a mourning lament, dimly reached over the cacophonous laughter, suffusing Emmett with momentary courage. He looked over, expecting to see Keiran struggling to hold his note, lifting his voice to channel energy and strength to his friends. But Keiran was still collapsed in an unmoving slump beside Amala.

  Oliver staggered up to his knees as he bellowed over The Grinning Man’s laughter. Struggling to stand just at the edge of the rolling fog, his hands were spread wide as he channeled the core of his being into a desperate, final song; a healing song that had already roused Rhiannon from her stupor and was beginning to stir Keiran, too.

  The figure’s laughter ceased long enough for its red eyes to cast their preternatural glow toward Oliver. A single, gloved hand rose out of the mist and made a sort of shooing gesture with two fingers in Oliver’s direction. At once, an invisible force lifted Oliver easily into the air and sent him flying backward a dozen yards away, slamming him against a tree and crashing down to the ground motionless.

  “No!” Rhiannon screamed. With stave in hand and her hawk circling overhead, she exploded into a flurry of motion that Emmett’s eyes could scarcely follow. Sprinting forward, she was steps from the figure before it raised its gloved hand again and made the same gesture, sending Rhiannon hurtling backward into the air before she landed in a heap of charred metal.

  The laughter was elevated now as the figure glided forward on the rolling fog. Amala was fighting bravely to stand but was still unable to do so. Emmett struggled to right himself, to resist or to fight for his friends’ lives. The creature was coming for him, and too often already these people had bravely stepped in front of him to defend him, giving their lives to protect someone that they had barely known. If it meant his own death, he would die trying to save his friends, to call out with some power or do something.

  “No,” the Attendant growled finally as the creature came within yards of them. The fog surrounding it continued to billow and swirl as if alive and responsive to the being that it enshrouded. The rows of bone-white teeth trembled again under its maddening laughter.

  A voice intruded into their minds. It was a sound of parents raping their own children. The words burrowed painfully beneath his skin like maggots, as if carved into his skull with a dull, rusty blade wielded by a madman who delighted in the suffering that he caused.

  Stand aside, monkey.

  “No,” the Attendant repeated with greater force in her feral voice.

  The Waking Dreamer shall now serve his Master.

  “No.” It was not the Attendant’s voice this time. It was Emmett’s.

  Emmett forced himself to his knees, grinding his teeth against the pain. The Grinning Man’s mouth turned sideways as if evaluating Emmett for the first time.

  Little baby boy, you still stink of your mommy’s insides. I can smell them on the wind. Perhaps you would permit me a taste.

  Emmett remembered the terror in his mother’s face staring into the corner of her hospital room. He saw the child Amala trembling as she held Emmett in her arms in the abandoned basement.

  The meddler will no longer deny me.

  The Attendant leapt through the air at the figure, landing atop him just as a pair of gloved hands reached up from the fog and snatched both of her arms. Both struggled as the ground beneath them trembled with the force of their combined powers.

  “Emmett?” a voice weakly called out. Amala was struggling to lift her head, beckoning Emmett to her. He knelt beside her, cradling her head in his hands just as she had once held him in her arms. He lowered his head to her so that her hand was touching the side of his face.

  “You told me he would return for us and you would banish him.”

  “When?” Emmett asked.

  “In my life’s dreams,” she answered, the light in her amber eyes growing dim.

  Emmett felt panic as he watched life drain from her face. He was neither an Elder nor a Bard, commanded no measure of power to summon and wield.

  “How?” he pleaded. “How do I banish him?”

  She raised a hand to his face and cupped his cheek. “Look at the sky, Emmett.”

  The last piece of his life’s mystery fell finally into place. The painting. The dream. The words. He knew what he had to do.

  Completing finally what he had never done in countless dreams, Emmett raised his hands and placed his open palm to hers just as Keiran had done at Silvan Dea.

  “I know the words,” Emmett said before laying Amala back down.

  He looked over at the fighting, and he saw that the Attendant was losing. The Grinning Man had her nearly pinned to the ground, pummeling her with rage against all life. The Old One was coming for Emmett just as the Hag had come for him. Emmett was the only one who could defeat him.

  He saw Keiran, near death, lying on the ground. His heart swelled with righteous anger, looking to each of the four who had defended him: Oliver and Rhiannon, once Companions separated by dogma yet reunited briefly to ensure he was healed; Keiran Glendower, the Bard who protected Emmett as if he were his brother; and Amala, the Druid who had told him she would return for him and had.

  There were other faces in his mind. Emmett saw Emaline Carmichael and Derrick Williams, people who had somehow found purpose in the face of great loss and tragedy. He saw the Children who rose to defend Silvan Dea, an attack that Emmett now understood was for him. He saw Ellie Brooks, who unlike Emaline and Derrick had been consumed by her pain and sought freedom offered by the dark, unknown Master.

  Then the other faces in his mind receded, and Emmett saw his mother. The mother he had never known. The mother who studied art history and had been slowly driven mad carrying him. The mother whose unborn child had plagued her dreams with the same cryptic words that, in desperation and madness, she had defaced her favorite painting with. The mother who was made to forget his birth and yet could not forget that she had once carried a child within her. The mother who was haunted by The Grinning Man and driven to despair and finally death.

  Their faces all flashed in his mind’s eye. Their lives had been given so that
he might live.

  For this moment.

  For moments yet to come.

  For the Children of the Earth.

  Emmett Jonathan Brennan stood.

  “Bezaliel,” he called loudly.

  The Grinning Man’s gloved hands paused mid-swing, the Attendant near death. The red eyes turned up to stare at Emmett.

  Your Master awaits you, Waking Dreamer. You will attend the Rugged Mountain and watch the Children burn.

  “You will leave this place and never return,” Emmett said.

  Laughter erupted in their minds. You cannot banish me, child. I am Old as the unknown universe is old. I exist as the profligate and depraved fetishists who seek power exist. I am beyond the whoring meddler as I am beyond you.

  “I am telling you to leave this world,” Emmett repeated, his voice nearly shouting.

  You have inherited the meddler’s weakness. I would dine on each layer of your skin if you did not belong to the Master. I may not kill you, but I can taste your despair. You will watch as I kill these monkeys. They can die like your mother did, desperate and pathetic. Dead like the rotting corpse of Silvan Dea. Futile, meaningless death will visit all those you care for.

  “They died to protect me!” Emmett roared, seeing their faces in his mind again. “Their lives have meaning because I live! I live for them! I know the words, because I’ve been weighed and found worthy. ‘All this from year to year forever and ever and ever like the bottomless sea and the endless rivers that lead to it.’ That means they live on within me! It’s for them that I name you, Bezaliel, and tell you to leave this world and never return!”

  The sky rumbled as if a star had been rent in two. A shaft of silvery light poured down from overhead from some distant, unseen point in the night’s sky, encircling The Grinning Man in a beam of the purest light that Emmett had ever seen.

  The Grinning Man threw its gloved hands before its face, its wide mouth thrown open in an expression of unmitigated pain. A horrible sound filled with the voices of countless people, old and young, male and female, some cursing, others crying, erupted in Emmett’s mind.