IF: Bad Dreams

by Clayton Smith

  Cole gave her this information as the left arm of the chair broke free of its base and reared up like a cobra. Cole cried out in surprise as the free-roaming metal arm whipped itself across his midsection, pinning him to the chair. “What’s happening?” he cried, his voice tight with fear.

  “Hush, now,” Judy reprimanded, looking sorely disappointed in her patient. “Once you’ve started the paperwork, you can’t stop until you’re finished. But we’ll be through it soon enough.” Somehow, looking over at the looming stacks of crisp, white paper, Cole doubted that. “The only way out is through, as they say!” Judy sounded awfully cheerful. “Social Security number?”

  “I don’t know,” Cole answered truthfully, squiring against the metal arm.

  “Hmm…we’ll have to assign you a new one, then,” Judy said. She scribbled some numbers onto the sheet. Then she rifled through her stack of papers and pulled out an additional sheaf of fifty forms clipped together. “These are the Social Security number assignment forms,” she said with a smile. “You’ll need to complete these before we can continue. Better get to work.”

  The Stranger closed his eyes and willed his heart to slow. If it kept up its current pace, it would burst in his chest.

  “What do we do?” Emma whispered. “They’ve got Cole!”

  “I know,” the cowboy said through gritted teeth. “Just...let me think. And stay away from that stuff,” he said, nodding over at the dental composite gushing down through the hole the wenches had drilled from above ground. The viscous goop plopped down onto the earthen floor and spread slowly and lazily toward them. It seemed to harden as soon as it hit the ground. A wall was forming before their eyes, shutting them off from the halfway mark where they were supposed to set the charges, from the exit at the far end of the tunnel, and from whatever awful nightmare they’d dragged Cole into up above.

  “Turn around,” the Stranger said, annoyed. “We’ve gotta go back.”

  “I say we plow through!” Willy shouted, running forward toward the slow gush of composite. The cowboy stuck out a hand and grabbed him around the waist, hauling him backward.

  “Now’s not the time,” he growled.

  He ushered the children back down the way they’d come. He tried to plot out their next move, but it was hard to think in this confinement, with the warm, damp air growing stale and heavy. The cowboy was sweating, and it was getting harder and harder to breathe. His lungs labored, and he wheezed short bursts of hot, dank wind into his chest. Cole was up above, undergoing who-knew-what sort of torture at the hands of the dentist’s servants. The only way out of this imagining was over at the far side of the field, on the other side of the high fence; short of digging a new tunnel, the only way through now was to storm the signfield itself, to use the explosives to destroy the fence, and to give a full charge. But even with the help of the soldiers, they were outnumbered 50-to-1, and the secretaries above ground had already proven themselves to be cunning and resourceful. He expected they’d be dangerous to tangle with under the best of circumstances.

  And these were far from the best of circumstances.

  Cuss it all…why was it so hot down in the tunnel? The Stranger urged the children on faster. He wanted to be out in the open air, where he could think.

  But as they crawled along the dirt, something odd began to happen. The cowboy actually started to feel...good. The air took on a sudden chill, and it felt sweet in his lungs. He closed his eyes and heaved in a deep breath. His chest expanded with the crisp, clean oxygen, and his head tingled with the sensation of fresh air. “Etherie,” the Stranger said, grinning slightly, “your breathing trick is working on me.”

  Etherie giggled. “Nature’s breath invigorates the mind,” she agreed.

  Willy burst out laughing. He didn’t know why, exactly…had Etherie just told a joke? He wasn’t sure. But he just felt like laughing. He felt like doubling over and rolling around and smiling and giggling and chuckling his way across the tunnel floor. So that was exactly what he did.

  “What’re you doing, Willy?” Emma asked, holding a hand over her mouth and giggling bashfully. “You’re crazy!”

  “He is crazy!” the Stranger exclaimed, bursting out in a full, throaty laugh. He hadn’t felt this merry in a long time, not since that night so long ago in Parson’s Tavern back in Devil’s Canyon when he celebrated the capture of his first cattle rustler. He’d woken up the next morning in the horse trough, wearing nothing but his long johns, and blast if that hadn’t been a fun night. He felt that levity again now.

  “I’m a psychopath!” Willy screamed, stomping around through the tunnel on his knees, pawing at the dirt walls, and hooting like a madman. The Stranger doubled over with glee, and Etherie toppled over onto her back and rolled around on the ground with laughter. Emma chased Willy around in his circles, crying tears of laughter.

  This was the happiest that any of them had ever been.

  And something about that fact gnawed and tugged at a little receptor in the back of the Stranger’s brain. That one little receptor sent a few mayday calls to nearby memory cells, and, just as the receptor suspected, not a single one of them could recall a single piece of historical evidence that the Stranger had ever found something as absurd as a child running in circles calling himself a psychopath while trapped in an extremely suffocating underground tunnel amusing. This was all wrong…something was terribly, terribly wrong, the cowboy knew it in the back of his struggling brain. But those cells couldn’t quite put their fingers on it, and the rest of his brain was too busy enjoying the moment to lend its computing power to the cause.

  And so, despite a troubling sense of innate wrongness buried somewhere down deep inside, the Stranger continued to laugh, and laugh, and laugh, until he laughed so hard that he slipped in a puddle of mud and landed on Willy, squashing the boy under his seat. The Stranger looked down at Willy. Willy looked up at the Stranger. Then they both burst into a fit of uncontrollable giggles.

  Something was definitely wrong.

  Judy plopped the Social Security forms down in front of Cole. They landed with a heavy thunk. He looked down at the blank form on top. There were lines for name, for address, for phone number, and for email. There were spaces for height, for weight, for hair color, for eye color. There were spots for the name of his school, the name of his teacher, the name of his principal, the name of his school’s mascot. The form wanted his likes, his dislikes, his diet, his favorite color, and his preferred brand of tea. It asked for the last time he saw the doctor, the last time he saw the dentist, the last time he saw the sun, the last time he saw Santa Claus, the last time he saw through a lie, and the last time he sawed wood. On, and on, and on, the form continued, asking for every bit of minutiae and detail about every little crevice and corner of Cole’s life.

  And that was just page one.

  He set to work glumly, scrawling his responses to each question in his shaky penmanship. Each time he finished writing an answer, the metal chair arm around his waist gripped him tighter. By the time he got down to the section asking for his teacher’s name, the back of the chair had spread and curved, wrapping itself slowly and firmly around his thin shoulders. The more paperwork he completed, the more completely he became the chair’s prisoner.

  And the whole time, Judy looked on with devilish pleasure.

  “Shouldn’t it be getting better?” Cole fretted, shrugging his shoulders away from the encroaching chair back.

  “It will, child…it will,” the receptionist said, her eyes dancing with fire. “Just keep going.” But the more blanks he filled in, the tighter his restraints got. He started to think the chair was designed to never let him go. The true meaning of the word “signfield” settled heavily on his shoulders and pushed him down even further in his seat.

  With the Stranger trapped underground, Cole knew that if he didn’t come up with something fast, he’d be at Judy’s desk foreve
r. He was a prisoner of the waiting room, doomed to fill out paperwork until the world ended…or worse, until this dentist came and put him out of his misery.

  He needed a plan.

  The tighter the chair hugged his waist, the more frantic Cole became, and the wider Judy’s smile grew. She seemed to feed off of his despair. Cole thought for sure the corners of her mouth would touch in the back of her head by the time he reached the bottom of the second page.

  But then…he had an idea. At the bottom of each page was a line for Cole’s signature, and, because he was a minor, there was also a line for the signature of his parent or guardian.

  “How long does this whole process usually take, Nurse...?” He trailed off hopefully.

  “Nurse Judy,” she smiled, tapping her nametag.

  “My parents don’t let me call adults by their first names,” he answered honestly. “They say it’s disrespectful.”

  Judy arched an eyebrow. “Are there really still manners in the world?” she asked. “I simply don’t believe it.”

  “They say I should only call adults by their last names,” he insisted.

  She sighed. “Nurse Grew, then.”

  “Thanks,” Cole murmured. He put then pen to the paper and began to scribble.

  “Now, what was your question?” Judy asked.

  Cole didn’t respond. He barely heard her, in fact. He was too busy writing and praying that this would work.

  Judy’s brow darkened. “What are you doing there?” she asked, suddenly alarmed. “Let me see.” But Cole slid the paper closer to his edge of the table, hiding it from her view as best he could. “Let me see!” Judy demanded. She slapped her palms on the table and leaned forward, but before she could lift herself out of her seat, the left arm of her chair unsnapped itself from the base and shot out like a whip, coiling its hard, metal frame around her left wrist. Judy yelped in surprise as the right arm of the chair broke free with a gentle clang and seized her right wrist. She cried out and struggled against the metal coils, but they held fast and pulled her back down into the seat. Then the crossbar between the chair’s legs rippled and tore itself loose from its moorings. It curled up over the side of the chair and clamped down on Judy’s lap.

  As Judy’s restraints tightened, Cole’s loosened. The bar around his waist fell away, then pulled itself back across his lap and slipped back into place as the chair arm. The headrest that enveloped his shoulders relaxed and became flat once more, and the seat of the chair leveled itself. Cole shook his head in wonder.

  It worked.

  “What are you doing to me?” the nurse shrieked. She pulled and yanked against the metal constraints, but it was no use.

  Cole knew he had to finish his task, and fast. He gripped the pen and scrawled the last few letters. “My parents don’t exist in this world, which means I’m entitled to a guardian. The Stranger appears to be incapacitated, so I chose a new one,” he explained, a smile spreading across his face. “You.” He turned the papers around and slid them across the desk so she could read the name he had written on the bottom line: Judy Grew. “Now you’re responsible for my paperwork. What was it you said? The only way out is to keep going?” He stood from the chair, grabbed the pen, and placed it on her side of the desk. “I guess you’d better get writing.”

  Nurse Judy actually growled at Cole, a primal, bone-chilling sound that made the other receptionists raise their heads. A few of them stood from their desks and hurried in his direction. “Why, you little—” She strained against the metal bars and rocked back and forth in the chair, but the legs stayed put, as if they were bolted into the grass. “Help! Help me!” she screamed.

  Now the other receptionists were running at full speed across the signfield. Even the one who had been assisting the poor, confused soldier leapt up from her chair and hurried across the pasture. The soldier was only tethered by one chair arm; he wasted no time. He yanked his Swiss Army Knife from his pocket, flipped open the flathead screwdriver, and went to work unscrewing the arm from the rest of the chair. It fell away, and he bolted out of the chair and toward the fence, the metal arm still coiled around his wrist, dangling like a frozen snake.

  Cole decided that running after him seemed like a pretty reasonable next step.

  He hurried after the soldier, skirting the onslaught of receptionists, all of whom seemed much more interested in freeing their supervisor than trapping the boy. Even the two receptionists filling the hole with the gas on the other side of the fence dropped their tank and high-tailed it back onto their side, crawling through the hole they’d cut in the bottom of the chain link. Cole passed them on his way to the fence. They didn’t so much as spare him a look.

  “Come on, son!” the soldier said weakly, pulling up the cut-away fence.

  Cole crawled through easily, and the soldier scrambled breathlessly after him. His face was pale, and he drooped when he walked, so Cole offered his shoulder, and together, the two hobbled away from the signfield.

  “Wait,” Cole said as the soldier headed toward the blanket fort. “We have to help my friends.”

  The soldier nodded as they shuffled over to the hole in the ground. He heaved away the tank, which was mostly empty by now; Cole cleared away the dirt and stones the receptionists had used to backfill the tunnel. He struggled with the last rock, one that was nearly as big as he was. The soldier stepped forward to help. He grunted with the effort, using what energy he had left to help roll it out of the way.

  Cole dove to his knees and peeked in. “Are you guys okay?” he called.

  There was a scuttling sound as the Stranger and the children clamored forward on their hands and knees. “Look!” the cowboy said, pointing up at the boy. “It’s Coal Mine!” And he fell onto his back, laughing. The other children giggled along with him.

  “They’ll be all right,” the soldier said, nodding at the canister with the words Nitrous Oxide stamped onto the side, “once the laughing gas wears off.”

  An Interlude

  The Royal taps his long fingers impatiently on the arm of his throne. If Roark doesn’t appear in the next ten seconds, the Royal decides, he will lock him in the burning coal pit for the rest of the week. But then Roark bursts into the hall, out of breath and sweating.

  “Yes, my lord?” he wheezes, clutching at his side.

  “Zeus and his archaic pantheon are harboring one of the children,” he says testily. The Greeks are quickly outstaying their welcome in the Boundarylands. He has decided that he will force them into the Nightmaring, where they will likely be consumed by the creatures of horror. But first, he will have the child.

  Roark screws up his face in consternation, and the Royal knows he is considering the best way to word a question. “With so few resources, how could—er, did,” he immediately corrects himself, flushing red, “how did Zeus manage to capture one of the children?”

  The Royal glowers. “Do you doubt what I say?”

  “Not at all,” Roark squeaks, shaking his head vigorously. “It’s just...the Gulch is so far beyond clear sight, that I–”

  He is interrupted by a loud cawing overhead. Something huge and black swoops down over Roark’s head, battering him about the face with gigantic black wings. The servant squeals and falls backward in surprise.

  The Royal smiles.

  “Huginn; Muninn: to me.” The ravens wheel around and fly to the Royal’s throne, where they perch majestically, one on either side. Roark sits up on the floor and actually rubs his eyes, like one of the cartoon creatures that dwell in the Boundarylands beyond Aged Hill.

  “Odin’s ravens!” Roark says, incredulous. He turns his astonished eyes to the Royal. “Here? In the Pinch?”

  “They’re on loan,” says a gruff, raspy voice from the shadows. The owner of the voice steps forward, a humongous mountain of a man, made even larger by the huge white werewolf pelt draped over his shoulders a
nd the thick dragon-skin boots on his feet. He has long, silver hair and a furry beard that falls past his chest. One eye is crystal blue in color; the other is naught but leathery scar tissue. This is Odin Allfather, and he has aligned himself with the Royal. By all accounts, he is just as obsolete as his Greek counterpart, probably more so. But he is a willing ally, and those are always welcome. For a time, at least.

  “They have seen Zeus’s treachery,” the Royal says, stroking the raven on his right with a pale finger. “He is hiding the child in his cave. He would use her against me.”

  “Treachery’s the right word for it, lord,” Odin says. “The Greeks would stop at nothing to regain their former station. Even, it would seem, at the cost of the Royal himself.”

  “I grasp the situation,” the Royal says irritably. He turns back to his faithful servant. “We must obtain the girl. Whom can we send?”

  Roark furrows his brow in surprise. For all intents and purposes, the title of advisor has been largely ceremonial until now. The Royal has never actually requested his advice.

  “Well,” Roark says, buying time while he thinks. “That’s a sensitive situation.” If the Royal isn’t mistaken, his servant is sweating. “Zeus will immediately suspect anyone you send as a threat from the Pinch. He’ll launch an attack.”

  “Yes, yes, obviously,” the Royal says, waving away this most basic logic. “He’ll want to draw me out from the castle. Do not disappoint me, Roark. All of this, I know. What I do not know is who to send as my envoy.” The raven on his left caws angrily. The cruel sound echoes through the throne room.

  After a time, Roark speaks. “Honestly, my lord...I would send Odin.”

  This answer surprises the Royal. It surprises Odin as well. “Me!” the old god blusters, his rage tinting his cheeks violently pink. “Surely you would not send me.”

  “I would do as I would,” the Royal says sharply.

  “I came here to help you,” the Norse god insists. “I give you precious information, and this is how you return the favor?”