IF: Bad Dreams

by Clayton Smith

  The Stranger sighed and shook his head.

  “We can help you reach the lintel,” Pepper interrupted. “We’ve been working on a way past the signfield. We can get you to the other side, but you have to do something for us.”

  The Stranger squinted and tugged down the brim of his hat. “Like what?”

  Johnson grinned. “We need a diversion.”

  “I’m scared,” Emma said, peering into the small, earthen tunnel. “I don’t want to go.”

  “Aw, come on, you baby! It’s fun!” said Willy. He demonstrated the extreme level of fun by diving headfirst into the tunnel. But he misjudged the opening by about six inches and smashed the crown of his skull into the hard earth. He crumpled into a ball over the opening to the tunnel. “Ow...”

  “It’s okay, Emma,” Cole said, squeezing her shoulder. “It’ll only be dark for a little while. Then we’ll come out on the other end, and we’ll go find Polly and Broken.”

  “This tunnel is bigger than the ones in the nightmare, and we know where it ends,” Etherie said helpfully. Emma didn’t look convinced.

  “Like it or not, it’s got to be done,” said the cowboy simply. He hefted the packet of explosives the army men had given him. “The sooner, the better.”

  “Remember,” said Pepper, pulling his cap down onto his head, “you’ll know you’re halfway through when you see the white marking on the tunnel wall, in the shape of a star. That’s the sweet spot. Set the explosives, unwind the fuse after you, light it when you run out. Then you’re home free on your end. Got it?”

  The Stranger gritted his teeth. He was ill-used to answering to others. “Yeah,” he forced himself to say through a clenched jaw. He turned his back on the soldiers and ushered the children closer to the tunnel entrance. “Ready?”

  “No,” Emma blenched, her face as white as dough. “I don’t want to. I can’t!”

  “It’s not that far, Emma,” Cole lied, glancing out at the field. It seemed to stretch on forever.

  Etherie smiled at the group. “The darkness is an opportunity for us to experience a taste of Nirvana. Light, colors, motion...they’re distractions. I, for one, am looking forward to spending the time melting into the subconscious of the universe in the safety of a well-purposed tunnel.” She slipped past Willy’s prostrate form and snuck into the tunnel, disappearing into the darkness.

  “See?” Cole said uneasily. “It’s...good.”

  “Good or no, time is short.” The Stranger tightened his gun belt. “We need to move.”

  “What’s in Reaper’s Gulch?” Cole asked. “Is Polly...? I mean, is she going to be...okay?”

  The Stranger grimaced. “I ain’t been there in a sight. But the Reapers ain’t a people to trifle with.” He grabbed Cole by the shoulder and led him a few steps away from the other children. “I won’t lie to you. Truth is, the Reapers live to collect souls. That’s their purpose.”

  “What do you mean?” Cole asked, the skin on the back of his neck pricking up in goose bumps. “They kill people?”

  “That,” said the Stranger gravely, “would be a nice way of putting it.”

  Cole took a deep breath. He didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he knew it wasn’t good. “Next time, feel free to lie,” he said.

  Over by the tunnel, Willy was collecting himself and standing up on wobbly legs. “I missed,” he moaned. He did a quick count of his group. “Where’s Etherie?” he demanded.

  “Inside,” Cole said, rejoining them and nodding at the tunnel.

  “What!” Willy turned wildly back to the tunnel. “You let her go in there first?! I’m supposed to go first!” He dropped to his belly and slithered into the hole, disappearing into the darkness.

  “Come on, Emma,” Cole said, swallowing hard. “It’ll be over before we know it.”

  Judy sat at her desk, arranging her sizeable stacks of papers into neat, organized piles for perhaps the twelfth time. Tidiness is next to nurseliness, after all, she thought. And Judy had her eye on a nursing position; for too long, now, she’d been little more than a secretary. But if she carried out this new task with grace and efficiency, Mandrill would surely hand her a promotion, and she would finally be a real nurse. She didn’t have formal medical training, of course, but none of the nurses in Mandrill’s office did. Even Mandrill himself had no medical training, now that she thought about it. It was of little importance, or perhaps of great unimportance, when it came right down to it. No; all that mattered what that she did her job well. Part of that job was keeping the paperwork straight.

  Tidiness is next to nurseliness.

  She smiled down at the stacks, confident that they were at last in the most efficient piles possible–contact information in the front, medical history beneath that, and the nineteen different insurance forms laid out evenly after those.

  There were more, of course. There were always more. No one had ever counted all the insurance forms...there were far too many for that...but Judy herself had once tallied as many as 1,284,766,930,438,205,677,423,089 before losing count and having to start all over again. Nineteen, however, was the number of forms that fit perfectly on the desk, end to end, but that was just the tiniest molecule of water in the world’s smallest snowflake on the very tippy top of the world’s largest paperwork iceberg.

  Judy glanced over at her lead assistant, Linda, the receptionist who had that soldier trapped in a state of signature agony at her desk. The young man was entering hour number seven with those forms, and he was showing the signs; his face was red, his hair stood out at all angles, dried tear tracks crisscrossed his cheeks, and he was currently in the process of literally eating his hat.

  Linda was doing exceptionally well.

  Judy folded her hands atop her desk and glanced over at the army tent. The children were no longer in sight, so she figured they must be inside the raggedy blanket fort. Well, they’d show their faces soon enough. There was simply no other way out of this particular imagining except directly through her signfield.

  “Are we going the right way?” someone nearby asked.

  Judy whirled around. “The right way to where?” she asked, but stopped short. There was no one there. She looked around, confused. The nearest receptionist was a good four desks away, and she was lost in a magazine. “Huh.” Judy shrugged and turned back to her paperwork.

  “How should I know?” came the reply. Judy whirled around once more, but again, there was no one there. And even more confusing, all her receptionists were women, but this latest voice was that of a male. A young male, by the sound of it, but—

  A young male.

  A child.

  Judy pushed her chair back and stood up slowly. She turned her head to the side, listening carefully. A pair of receptionists off to her left laughed at some joke, and she shushed them. “Quiet!” she snapped. The air hung heavy with silence. The atmosphere practically crackled with quiet. But just as she began to wonder if she was starting to lose her mind, she heard the voices again:

  “I don’t like it down here.”

  “Shh!”

  “The path to Nirvana is paved with quiet contemplation.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Judy’s eyes grew wide. “Susan! Come here, please.” The nearby receptionist put down her magazine and joined her supervisor.

  “What’s up, boss?”

  “I think we have mice,” Judy said, holding one finger to her lips for silence and pointing down at the ground with another.

  Susan raised an eyebrow, suspicious. She bent down, put an ear close to the grass for a moment…and gasped. “Those are people!” she hissed.

  “Children,” Judy confirmed. “The children.”

  Susan squeaked with excitement. “What do we do?”

  Judy thought for a moment, then brightened as a smile crept slowly up her cheeks. “Find me a co
rkscrew.”

  The Stranger wasn’t keen on tunnels, either. It hadn’t always been that way, but some years back he’d found himself holed up in a scrubwolf’s burrow outside of Tomb Rock for eight days while above ground Bonesaw Billy’s gang combed the desert, searching him out over a small matter of fourteen gold pieces, two silver fillings, and one finger joint, all of which Billy had lost when he’d attempted to relieve the Stranger of his horse. The cowboy wasn’t typically one to shy from a threat…but the Bonesaw gang wasn’t a group to trifle with. Billy and his posse had made their names by taking a particularly gleeful approach to brutality. If you crossed them, the question wasn’t if they’d kill you; it was if they’d leave enough pieces of you in one place for your family and friends to identify you afterward. They painted towns with blood and used organs for target practice. And once they started in on their killing, the longer their prey survived the pain of it all, the better.

  For over a week, the cowboy survived in the scrubwolf tunnel on grub worms, crickets, and filthy rainwater that seeped through the mud. The gang had set up camp just above him; at night, he could hear the fire crackling and could smell their desert animal dinners as they crisped and hissed over the spit. On day three, the scrubwolf came home, and the Stranger, unable to turn around in the suffocating space, fought him with the spurs of his boots. The scrubwolf tore through the cowboy’s legs with its claws and teeth, but in the end, the spurs found their mark.

  For the next four days, it rotted behind him and filled the hole with its stench.

  On day eight, the burrow began to collapse under the weight of the small army above. Sandy earth fell in and pinned the Stranger onto his belly, weighing down his hands, piling onto his shoulders, filling his mouth with grit and with writhing, living things.

  On day nine, Billy Bonesaw and his gang noticed the stench of the dead scrubwolf and filled in the hole with dirt and fire ash to seal it off. After that, so little air filtered into the tunnel that the cowboy spent the next day winking in and out of consciousness.

  By the tenth day, his brain was frantic. He clawed through the earth, raving and foaming and spitting for a good three hours before he realized he was digging himself further down. The corpse of the scrubwolf, now infested with maggots, slipped down the tunnel behind him and did its best to smother him from above.

  When he finally clawed his way back to the desert surface by the end of that night, the Bonesaw gang had cleared out, but the Stranger was a stranger now even to himself. He spent the next two months in the Alva Mayfield Sanatorium, where they nursed his physical wounds and did their best with his mental ones. Eventually, after the nightmares subsided and he no longer felt unreasonably compelled to stab at the doctors with their own tools, he was cleared to leave, but he hadn’t been quite the same since. And he’d developed an excruciating fear of small spaces, particularly those under the earth.

  Because of this, the Stranger’s awareness and defenses were not exactly operating at peak levels as he crawled with the children through the tunnel beneath Dr. Mandrill’s signfield.

  The tunnels of the Nightmaring had unnerved him, though he’d done his best not to let the children see; this second series of tunnels, following so closely after the first, threatened to send him to pieces.

  Which was precisely why the receptionists were able to do what they did next.

  Judy examined the three corkscrews laid out on the grass before her. “That one,” she decided, pointing at a massive implement that was the size of a full-grown adult. “Does it work?”

  Susan shrugged. “It comes from the Clouds of the Giants. I’m sure it worked for them.”

  Judy nodded and beckoned to two of her scrappier receptionists. “You two. Pick it up.” They stepped forward and did so, straining under its weight. Judy nodded again, satisfied. “Dig in on my signal.” She held up a hand for silence and listened carefully for the voices seeping up through the ground.

  “Are we going the right way?”

  “This is the only way.”

  “I don’t see a white star.”

  “Keep going!”

  “Ow! Get off my hand!”

  “That’s not your hand, that’s my foot!”

  “Get off it anyway!”

  Judy trailed her eyes after the path the voices made underground. The sounds made a left turn, and Judy pointed to a spot in the grass about three feet ahead of them. “There!” she commanded. “Dig in!”

  The two receptionists hauled off and drove the pointy tip of the corkscrew into the grass. Then, one of them held it still while the other worked the lever, turning the screw. The metal coil burrowed deeper and deeper into the ground, twirling out slivers of grass and soil as it went. The receptionist working the lever huffed and puffed, twisting the coil with all her might, and soon the entire screw was lost beneath the earth. Judy ran up to the corkscrew and motioned for the other receptionists to do the same. “Everyone, grab on!” she cried, grasping a section of the metal just above the buried spiral. “And…pull!”

  The other receptionists rushed over, each of them grabbing a free section of either the metal or handle of the corkscrew. Then they heaved up and back, all as one body. At first, nothing happened…the whispering voices underground just continued their journey beneath the spiral’s point. But the receptionists kept pulling, and the earth slowly began to give.

  The corkscrew came up and back a bit, lifting the grass into a small hillock around the gleaming metal. “Keep pulling!” Judy commanded, and the receptionists did, heaving and hauling harder than ever. They gasped and wheezed with the effort, and the corkscrew came back faster, ripping the grass right up and excavating a wide cylinder of mud and stones as it came. With one hard, final pull, the corkscrew came free of the ground with a loud POP! and the entire bunch of receptionists went toppling over, sending the corkscrew and its piece of earth rolling across the field.

  Judy scrambled to her feet and stepped up to the new hole that had been bored into the ground. She smiled down into the tunnel at a surprised, dirt-covered boy blinking up at her into the sunlight.

  “Well, well, well,” Judy said, reaching down and grasping Cole by his armpits, heaving him out of the hole. “Looks like we have a new patient!”

  Cole frowned as he sat in the hard, metal chair. The receptionist with red and purple scrubs sat down on the other side of the desk. His elbows rested uncomfortably on the chair’s cold, steely arms.

  Things weren’t exactly going according to plan.

  “Welcome to Dr. Mandrill’s field office,” the woman said in a voice that was kind, Cole supposed, but in a steely sort of way.

  “My teeth are fine,” Cole said, distracted as he turned his eyes toward the hole where the woman, whose nametag said JUDY, had snatched him up from the tunnel. Other women in brightly-colored scrubs were filling the hole with dental composite that was being pumped out through a giant hose.

  “And it’s our job to keep them that way,” Judy beamed, her joyful voice edged with stone. “Now,” she said, plucking a piece of paper from one of the many stacks on the desk, “before you can see the doctor, we need to clear up the small matter of paperwork. What’s your name?”

  “My name?” Cole asked nervously. He looked over his shoulder and saw two receptionists hovering near the far opening to the tunnel, over on the army’s side of the fence. They had dragged a large, metal canister over to that hole. Cole had seen a canister like that once, at his cousin’s birthday party earlier that year. A ridiculous-looking clown in garish make-up had used it to fill balloons.

  But something told Cole that this canister wasn’t full of helium.

  One of the receptionists twisted the handle on the top of the canister, and they shoved the nozzle of the big cylinder into the tunnel mouth. “What are they doing?” he asked uneasily.

  “Their jobs,” was Judy’s quick reply. “Now. Your name,
please. The sooner we get through this, the sooner you’ll be on your way,” she promised.

  “Colemine Slawson,” he sighed.

  “Ko-lah-meen,” Judy said, clicking her pen and jotting down on the form. “With a K?”

  “With a C. C-O-L-E-M-I-N-E.”

  “What an unusual name!” Judy gushed as she wrote it down.

  Was it Cole’s imagination, or did his chair sink a few inches while she jotted her notes? The seat of the chair seemed to collapse slightly, just enough to send his stomach into a jolt.

  “Colemine Slawson,” Judy said. “Wonderful. And your address?”

  Cole felt completely helpless. His friends and his guide were trapped in the tunnel, and they were about to start inhaling some sort of gas. The blanket-barracks soldiers were nowhere in sight (hiding, probably, since realizing their plan had gone belly-up), and there was a whole army of receptionists watching him closely from their corners of their eyes. He remembered the soldier’s warning about getting stuck in the signfield, but what could he do? If he tried to run, they’d certainly catch him, and it didn’t look like help was coming any time soon. If he wanted to get out of this, he’d have to use his own wits. And what was more, if the gas they were pumping into the ground was toxic, he only had a few precious minutes to unseal the tunnel and save his friends from certain death.

  All in all, it was safe to say that Cole was a little flustered.

  “Address, please,” Judy said, more sharply this time.

  He rattled it off for her automatically. His brain had gone into problem-solving mode, but his mouth was in survival mode. It would tell her what she needed to know, but he had to think of a solution, and fast. As soon as he gave her his address, the seat sank down a little more, this time he was sure of it. But it wasn’t the whole seat. It was only the back end; the front edge where his legs dangled was now tilted up, and his behind was nestled down in the rear of the seat. His chair was definitely buckling.

  “Telephone number,” Judy demanded. “With area code.”