Mere Phantasy

by Ashley Lauren

  I felt my lip rise in disgust. “Y-you better start making some sense. You might get me sent to jail again,” I entreated, tightening my arms around me and shaking my head in disbelief. I couldn’t stray again, not twice in one day. They’d send me the loony bin for sure.

  “I can’t tell you everything right now. We have to leave before the cops get here.”

  He grabbed for my wrist, and I opened my mouth to protest, but I was yanked after him before I could. We jumped over scattered food and shelves, pushing past the crowd that was growing around the cash registers and out the front door. When we made it beyond the doors, I reached down for my bike, but Peter pulled me away from it.

  “There’s not enough time. We have to go.”

  With a longing last look at the piece of crap I called transportation and quite possibly the last personal possession I’d ever see again, he started running, and I was forced to follow as he towed me along behind.

  Drugs were very, very bad.

  Four

  LINES OF TRAFFIC FILLED THE STREETS, THEIR HORNS blaring like a jittery choir practicing for regionals. I stumbled a few times, trying not to hit people, because I wasn’t as agile as Peter. He moved swiftly, like he barely had any bones, and I had to try to match his movements so I wouldn’t fall or trip into others. Out of shape, yes. Running at full speed, yes. Able to handle all of this? No.

  We heard more sirens and ducked into an alleyway, following it to Fourth Street. This city, I knew it by heart. But when one thinks of traveling, never in their right mind would they believe this was the way to do it—being dragged by a random stranger who had just saved your life yet could still quite easily end it as well.

  The cold bit at every part of me and the icy wind made my teeth chatter. “Peter, enough running. W-we’re safe!” I tried, but he kept moving, and I had no other choice but to follow. All of this was crazy, just crazy.

  “We’re not safe. Give it three more blocks, and then we’ll be all right.” He promised, glancing at me, and then didn’t look back the rest of the way to our destination.

  What would my dad think when I didn’t come home on time?

  And more importantly, and more than likely, what would he think if I didn’t come back at all?

  Coming up to the last block, we turned into another alley and finally stopped. Bending over, I tried to catch my breath and squeezed my eyes shut tightly, my hands on my knees. Jeans weren’t exactly the most fitting attire for running a marathon, and the tightness around my waist from the wrapped button in the front wasn’t helping me feel any better.

  Peter, on the other hand, seemed fresh as a flower, pulling out his sword and blinking at it a few times. “All right,” he said, sheathing it again. “It’s just around the corner.”

  “What?” I panted, letting my head fall back toward the ground after glancing at him incredulously. I didn’t want to take another step. “What’s just around the corner?”

  “Just an old friend’s shop. He’s been here for as long as I can remember, the old bloke.” Peter laughed to himself and started down the alley. “C’mon, L—” He stopped suddenly, making me look up to see what he did.

  Beside us was one of my murals. I’d been in such a rush I hadn’t bothered to take into consideration what part of town we were in. But nonetheless, here we were, right in front of one of my largest and longest-lasting depictions.

  Peter gawked in amazement, running his fingers down a silhouette of a woman wrapped in layers of suffocating ropes and two matching children beside her. I painted this one a long time ago, and due to the downtown’s love for art, they kept it. Besides some water lines dribbling down from the rafters to the right, the painting was still intact, and the terrible images it contained forced me to look away.

  I hated remembering any of my dreams.

  Peter’s eyes were wide. “You painted this, didn’t you?” When I nodded, he touched the woman’s quivering chin with a sad expression on his face. “So you do remember.”

  My gaze traveled from my red Converse to the signature Lost Boy in the corner of the mosaic and then back to the real thing in front of me. It was mind blowing, as if my own creation had come to life.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” My voice sounded weak, scared. I was so scared.

  Peter’s gaze flashed to me, now intense. “When was the last time you dreamed, Lacey? And what was it about?”

  I stopped dead in my tracks. “Y-you know about my dreams?”

  Regarding the wall again, Peter dropped his hand from the surface and frowned. “Of course I know about your dreams. I’m always in them.” His comment made me stumble, my legs threatening to buckle under me. Seeing this, Peter stepped forward to steady me by grabbing my forearm. “Whoa, you all right?”

  The panic attack and exhaustion I’d been trying to suppress earlier was slowly coming to the surface, and my breathing picked up rapidly. Peter must’ve noticed, because he steadied me with his arm wrapped behind my back and his other supporting us both with the help of my mosaic wall. When he realized I was probably not going to make it much longer, he pushed me up with his shoulder and started to walk us both down the alley.

  “Okay, hold on, Lacey. Let’s just get you inside.” His eyes, filled with all the colors of the ocean and sky, seemed to grow heavy with worry as he blinked over my drooping expression. “Hold on.”

  Hold on.

  Another nightmare found me while I was out.

  But unlike the ones I’d experienced in the past, this dream didn’t feel as heavy with evil. It began with the sound of crashing waves filling my ears and blinding me with its light. I blinked against the burning sunset, using my hands to shield my face. When my eyes finally adjusted, I was looking out over open air, the wind buffeting my skin and hair all around me. Gazing down, I noticed I was wearing the outfit I had on before sleeping: my familiar red high-tops, jeans, and T-shirt. I also saw my feet were perched closely to the edge of the cliff that loomed over the unsettled sea below.

  I jostled back in surprise, my back scratched suddenly by a dead, twisting tree that fingered up into the sky like a skeleton hand. Crumbling bark fell after I pulled away, trapped between the tree and small patch of earth below my toes.

  “H-help!” I cried out, but my voice sounded distant.

  Looking out over the shining ocean, my eyes found what seemed to look like a large island covered in forest and mountains.

  Suddenly, there was a shout to my right, and I jerked to see where it’d come from, falling onto my knees and grabbing onto the edge of the cliff.

  Down below, another point of rock held a brunet wearing a glistening leather jacket. His hair scrambled around his head and in his eyes as he shouted again, cupping his hands around his mouth.

  I tried to cry out to him, “Hey! Up here!”

  But he didn’t even glance my way.

  I didn’t have much time to think about this before there was another large gust of wind and my locket caught it, jerking completely off my neck. Thankfully, my hand reached out just in time to clutch it. I’d never let it go.

  Never again.

  Then a shadow fell over my face and forced me to squint. I covered my eyes with my free hand in order to see the figure flying my way.

  “Lacey,” Peter—the Lost Boy—hovered before me. For some reason, I felt myself fully relieved now that he was here. He could save me, get me off this terrifying cliff and away from here. Then I could figure out why the other boy was stuck as well, who had put us here.

  “Help me! I’m going to fall!” I exclaimed into the wind. Beside him, an illuminated ball of bright-orange light circled him in a constant swirl of glitter. It was mesmerizing.

  “I can’t help you. You’re the only one who can do that,” he said, but his mouth didn’t move to speak the words whatsoever. It was like I could hear him speaking to me in my thoughts.

  “Please, please help me. I-I can’t do this without you. I can’t get out of here,” I begg
ed, stepping closer to him, only to have some of the soil crumble away at my feet again. I stumbled back into the tree and held on to it behind me with every ounce of strength I had.

  “You have the power to defeat whatever monsters you face, Lacey. I taught you that,” Peter told me, hovering in open air.

  “But I can’t fly right now. I don’t have any pixie dust.” The words coming from me are not mine, I thought. Sickeningly, though, I realized I recognized my own voice saying something that made no sense to me.

  “I learned to fly without it, Lacey. You’re more powerful than them.” Peter sounded angrier now, like it was some huge burden to save me.

  I felt myself crying in fear, but no tears fell.

  “That’s impossible!” I spat, but his figure was already backing away toward the island.

  His tone was fading farther and farther away. “Hope can be dangerous, Lacey. Watch out for hope.”

  “What does that mean? Wait!” I stumbled a little as more rocks began to crumble from under my shoes into the raging blackness below. “You can’t just leave me!”

  Peter shook his head slowly. “Watch out for hope,” he echoed before swirling midair into the sky with the blazing light orb right on his heels.

  The second I took my eyes off him, too blinded by the sunlight blanketing over my vulnerable position, I noticed a figure more horrifying than any I’d ever seen before. A mega-sized monster—a man, a man I recognized—was crawling up and over the surface of the entrancing island, where Peter was zipping to fight with the light and his dagger, blazing across the sky like a vibrant, shooting star.

  The last thing I saw was the mutilated, disgusting image of the gnarled and terrifying man with the poisonous red eyes, coming to tear me apart.

  I woke up in a cold sweat.

  The room around me wasn’t familiar, and I blinked into the dimness, trying to rid my body of the feeling I’d just undergone. I’d never experienced a dream like that, never with specific faces and spectacles. But then again, the Lost Boy and I hadn’t met when those nightmares were around. Now I knew Peter and assumed because of that, my subconscious tried to make up for it by giving him a key role in the new dream.

  With a bad taste in my mouth, I got up to rub the soreness out of my body and take a look around. Anything to keep my mind off the lingering image of the red-eyed man.

  Hazily, I remembered stumbling into a jumbled store, stuffed to the brim with knickknacks and other miscellaneous items, while under the influence of my panic attack. Peter had asked someone to feed me something that would calm me down. And evidently, it had. But only in the form of sleep, which I was sure I’d needed physically but I’d resented mentally. If Peter supposedly “knew” so much about my dreams, then what in his right mind made him believe I needed to be sucked into another like that? I’d just rid myself of their horrors.

  Though still sore, I recognized the scene around me briefly while latching onto my only source of comfort—my mother’s necklace. The blurry items from my memory were crisper now; I was just too out of sorts to notice before. Books, journals, vintage furniture, hanging artifacts, some lamps standing amidst the mess, trinkets and wood carvings, and anything else you could think of as one simple word: crap.

  And it was all here, neatly organized into spilling piles in some corners while practically bursting at the seams in a cabinet or two in others. The warm light from the old-fashioned oil lanterns made me think of how it felt to enter the gates of the Renaissance festival at night, the medieval-themed fair my mother and I attended when I was little—like you’re sent completely back in time, into another realm of sorts.

  And chillingly, there was also some part to the store that reminded me of something much worse than a stupid festival.

  Magic.

  When I was younger and the dreams really began to pick up, I believed in magic. And in some sense, I definitely still did—it was hard to claim something didn’t exist when you stepped into its clutches every time you closed your eyes. For years, I felt the presence of things beyond reality when stepping into my subconscious, and though I tried to reason out that consistently prominent element of them with the world’s psychological rules, or even doctors’ explanations, it all was pointless. Magic had to exist because there was no other reasonable explanation for the familiar feeling in my gut whenever I was around it. And it had only happened one other time in my life, besides in this dusty, dingy hut of a store on a random street in the city—a place I’d never even heard of before: Mere Phantasy. What a dumb store name. It wasn’t even spelled right.

  I was eleven when I felt magic outside of my dreams for the first time, or what I presumed magic felt like. It was during my father’s co-worker’s son’s, Troy’s, Tron-themed birthday party, one that I’d been sympathetically invited to. Nonetheless, I’d slid into my polka-dot two-piece I’d been dying to show off for months (just never had the chance to) and happily wrapped up a nice new Nerf gun as a present/peace offering with superhero wrapping paper, beyond excited.

  The last time I’d hung out with Troy, I’d gotten my first daytime vision, a vision that had landed me wailing and flopping around crazily in the pool, so much that the lifeguard thought I was drowning and dove in to save me. When he realized I wasn’t actually drowning, but in my own mind, just trying to swim away from the large wolf that had been chasing me not only then, but also the night before in my dreams, he was furious with me and had his general manager call my dad to come pick me up. It was just another failed attempt at trying to fit in. But the new birthday party had given me more hope.

  I’d gotten immensely better at controlling myself when the small visions took me over, and I wasn’t having nearly as many panic attacks. So I went to Troy’s Tron party with my head held high—and then left it three hours later with the Nerf gun in pieces and my father’s stern frown set toward me the entire ride home. Evidently, during an uncontrolled blackout, I’d shot his Nerf gun present and began breaking all the nice things in Troy’s house while trying to defend myself from the gluttonous ogres staggering in my vision.

  But the thing was though I’d blamed it on the nervous and socially inept loser I’d always been—an outsider, a freak—I’d noticed a difference in this vision unlike any of the others before. Because I’d actually fought back for the first time in my daymares (because the nightmares weren’t enough, apparently), and the feeling had resonated with me even as I was grounded for two weeks post Tron party meltdown.

  And now, for the second time outside my dreams, I felt that presence in the lining of my stomach, like anticipation and excitement all shoved into one giant, queasy feeling.

  I needed to find Peter.

  Somehow that boy had a part in this and always had. I needed to get some answers before I went crazy overthinking it. But as I determinedly stepped toward the small room’s entrance, removing the loincloth of a door with a disgusted huff, I was met face to stomach with an old man. But not just your typical, retirement home, Jell-O junkie, only slightly toothed grandpa. This oldster was the most hideous thing I’d ever laid eyes on. And he was only four feet tall.

  Startled, I stumbled back and somehow managed to bring the dingy door with me, releasing a mess of disturbed books and other hoarded items onto the ground in the process. I saw the old guy shout huskily and throw his tray of unrecognizable things before the sheet covered my face and I flailed wildly to get it off. When I was finally able to snatch off the cover—a cloth that distinctly smelled of mothballs and vinegar—I searched around the room for the disfigured man again, but I only saw his dropped belongings rocking to stillness on the ground.

  If not for the shaking mound of clutter—papers, books, magazines, a puppet, and even expired beauty products—I might’ve passed over the thing’s, its, his hiding place amidst the trash.

  Wide-eyed, I shuffled back on my butt and tried to catch my breath. What on earth is that thing?

  After a few seconds of stunned silence, the breathing mountain of j
unk shifted again, and the appearance of a potato-like, wrinkly nose sniffing the air came into view.

  “Je viens en paix!” he whispered forcefully, voice deeper than he first led on. He sniffed the air again, and I blinked in shock. “Ne pas attaquer!”

  “I-I have no idea what you’re saying,” I said, backing up on all fours to get away from the thing. As I watched in anxiousness, he quickly popped up one large, ugly eye from the rubble hiding spot to ogle at me.

  “English? Boy didn’t saying anything about English,” the thing grumbled, scrunching his potato nose. When I stayed frozen in place, ready to run at a moment’s notice, Mr. Thing, like a scurrying animal, crawled out from his hiding space to reveal himself fully again. His body was hunched, a large deformed mass expanding behind his head, and he moved on his knuckles like a monkey toward me, continuing to sniff. I flinched as he snapped his fingers, bringing a strand of my hair with it, and ignored my cry of pain as he shoved the piece from my scalp into his mouth to chew thoughtfully. “Mmm. Yes, yes. Very good. Strong, pretty hair.”

  There was a shuffling sound from beyond the now open doorway, in the shop, and then a much more familiar voice called, “I’m back!”

  “Um.” I studied the thing in disgust. “Peter?” I asked uneasily into the store, hoping he’d have some inclination as to why this misshapen French guy was swallowing a piece of my hair and moving back to me for a second helping. “Hey!” I spat, startling it again. He jumped back toward his hiding spot, jostling more of a mess onto the bedroom floor and grumpily cursing at me in words I couldn’t understand.