IF: Bad Dreams

by Clayton Smith

  “You came to serve your own needs.” The Royal shifts his focus back to Roark. “Why would you choose Odin?”

  Roark is shaking now, from head to toe, and no wonder. It is no small thing to enrage a god. But to his credit, he pushes on. “Odin is dangerous in his own right. He’ll be difficult for Zeus to best. If he could destroy Odin, he would have, long ago.”

  “Clearly,” Odin said, puffing out his chest.

  “The reverse is also true,” the Royal says, speaking pointedly at Odin. “Continue.”

  “Well...I think, lord, that Zeus wouldn’t dare harm Odin. Even if he is able. Odin has the whole of Asgard who would descend upon Zeus and his pantheon if they harmed their king. And the Norse still reside in their place of power, while the Greeks have been transplanted to a wasteland that saps their strength. I do not believe Zeus and his family would be successful in an against the Norse, and Zeus cannot think so either. They wouldn’t dare attack Odin.”

  “But I cannot defeat the Olympians, not alone,” Odin fumed. “They will not destroy me, and I will not destroy them. What is the point?”

  “The point would be the message,” Roark says cautiously. The Royal gives him a slight nod of encouragement. “The message is that Asgard stands with the Pinch. It says, ‘Give us the child, or we shall pair our forces and rally against you.’”

  The Royal is pleased. His servant has done well. “There you have it,” he says to the Norse god. “You will be my envoy to Reaper’s Gulch.”

  “Do you really expect him to hand her over?” Odin asks.

  “Zeus will know that if he doesn’t, the Asgardians will have my support in destroying him and his people. He will make the right decision.”

  Odin glowers, but he does not dispute his king. He knows his place in the order. “Yes, lord,” he growls. He sends Roark a look that turns the man’s bowels to water.

  “Then it is decided,” says the Royal, tenting his fingers in front of his chest. “You will leave in the morning, and you will bring us the girl.”

  Chapter 6:

  On the Instability of Terra Firma

  The soldiers saluted the children as the Stranger led them along the edge of the signfield toward the lintel on the far end. He still felt lightheaded and a little giggly, but his mind was beginning to clear, and his sense of duty had resurfaced. He had to get the children through the lintel before the receptionists freed the head nurse and came after them with full force.

  “‘Signfield,’” Etherie giggled as she skipped across the grass. “I get it. What a delightful joke.”

  “Breathe in the air,” the cowboy instructed. “Clear your head of the gas.”

  “It tasted like gingerbread,” Emma said, looking back over her shoulder at the hillock where the nearly empty canister lay.

  “It was bad for you, Emma,” Cole explained.

  “It made me forget that I was scared for a little bit,” Emma pointed out.

  Cole frowned. “Yeah. That’s pretty much how you know it was bad for you.”

  The Stranger motioned for them to stop. “What is it?” Emma asked. Before he could answer, the ground began trembling beneath their feet.

  “Earthquake!” Willy yelled. He knew what earthquakes were–his mother was constantly accusing him of being a living one–but he’d never experienced a real one. The excitement was almost too much to bear.

  “The tunnel!” Cole gasped, looking down at his feet. “It’s collapsing!”

  But the Stranger shook his head. “It’s not the tunnel,” he growled. “Move!”

  The cowboy sprinted forward, and the children followed, all the giggles and laughter from the gas now forgotten in the midst of panic. The ground began to buckle. Cole stumbled over a berm that rumbled up, but he kept his feet beneath him. Willy wasn’t quite so balanced; he tripped over the hump, landing hard, his face taking a full swatch of grass. Etherie leapt gracefully over the hillock and helped Willy to his feet.

  “Faster!” the Stranger cried. “Move!”

  The receptionists at the other end of the signfield began to panic. The earth split open around them, swallowing desks and chairs and endless piles of paper. Unable to pry Judy loose of her bonds, a group of them simply picked her up, chair and all, and rushed her across the field.

  The tears in the earth spread quickly, reaching their long, jagged cracks toward the children. The Stranger neared the lintel, where a shopping mall with shelves full of hairballs whirled away and was replaced by a dank, dimly-lit cellar, and a man with a blood-stained hatchet who stood silently under a gently swinging light bulb. If they had to go into that nightmare, the Stranger would manage. He’d rather face a killer with an ax than the thing that was opening beneath them.

  The ground cracked and split wide open, revealing a canyon of pure white light. He skidded to a stop, his boots throwing up dirt and grass as he slid. He turned and reached out to stop the children, but the grass on that side of him split, too, just as the ground under the children’s feet crumbled away and fell into the gleaming white nothing below. Cole scrambled backward toward stable ground, but Willy was running full speed and plowed right into Cole’s back, launching him forward.

  With a scream, Cole fell into the bright white void.

  Then the rest of the ground fell away, and the others tumbled in after him.

  Chapter 7:

  In Which the Children Deal with Some Blocage

  The children crashed to the white floor in a heap, with their arms and legs akimbo. The Stranger dropped to the ground next to them, landing on his feet with one hand poised at the ready next to his gun. He looked around, cautiously drinking in this new imagining through his careful squint. “Get up,” he instructed.

  The children untangled themselves and peered into the bright light of the sun.

  But it wasn’t the sun…it wasn’t even light. The brightness around them was just the brilliant sheen of pure whiteness.

  The bottom of Cole’s stomach fell away. “Are we in the Void?” he whispered.

  The Stranger shook his head. “No. It’s something else.”

  “Are you sure?” Cole asked. Being a relatively new hand at imagination, he was starting to wonder if the process of imagining was always this scary. Pretty much everything he’d seen of the imaginary world so far had been unbelievably terrifying.

  “We’re still here,” the Stranger grunted. “Wherever here is. If it were the Void, we wouldn’t be anything or anywhere anymore.”

  The floor beneath their feet was so white, it didn’t look like there was any floor there at all. It seemed to stretch on to infinity, just an unending plain of bright, pallid nothingness. But as Cole’s eyes got used to the glare, they picked out light shapes in the distance—thin vertical lines rising into the air, crosshatched by straight horizontal lines.

  “It’s Legos!” Willy cried out. “Huge, giant Legos!”

  The lines running vertically and horizontally were the thin, airtight spaces between massive white building blocks. Cole would have called them bricks, but Legos was an accurate description, too. It was hard to tell distance in this place, but it seemed to Cole that the floor they stood on was nearly the size of a football field. The white walls made of humongous bricks bordered all four sides and rose up as high as he could see; the thin, grayish lines disappeared in fuzzy, white static high above their heads.

  “Are we back in the nightmares?” Emma asked cautiously, hugging her arms to her chest. This place didn’t look as scary as the nightmare tunnel, but the emptiness and silence was eerie, and it gave her a chill.

  But Etherie shook her head thoughtfully. She crouched down and placed a gentle hand on the white floor. “I don’t think so,” she said soothingly. “This whiteness has an aura that glows red, mixed with blue.”

  “If it’s not a nightmare, and it’s not the Void...what is it?” Col
e asked. He looked to the Stranger.

  “Something different,” the cowboy muttered. He crossed over to the nearest wall, his boots clicking loudly on the smooth floor. He traced his fingers along the tight lines, feeling for weakness but finding none. He walked along the wall, stopping every few steps to push here or prod there. But the wall was solid, smooth. Climbing it was out of the question.

  Suddenly, the Stranger’s ears pricked up. He pressed his head flat against the wall and listened. He pulled off his hat and tossed it on the floor so he could get a better angle. He placed his palms against the wall on either side of his head and strained his ears.

  “What do—” Emma started, but the Stranger signaled for silence. Cole held his breath. Was there something on the other side of that wall?

  The Stranger, as if picking up his thoughts, nodded and beckoned the children over. “Listen,” he commanded. They mimicked the Stranger and pressed their ears against the wall. “Hear that?”

  Cole could hear something. He wasn’t sure what it was...voices, maybe? Not like any voices he’d ever heard before—they were mechanical sounding, sort of like robots—but yes, he decided: they were definitely voices.

  “There are people!” Emma cried. She knocked on the wall. “Hello? Hello!” she called. There was no response. “Maybe they can’t hear us,” she said to the rest of the group. “Or maybe they don’t want us to come through, and they’re ignoring us.”

  “Well I’m going in anyway!” Willy decided, taking a few steps back from the wall. “I’m gonna smash these Legos!” He lowered his head and ran straight at the wall. Cole yelled out for him to stop, but Willy didn’t have time for caution. He dove forward, collided with the white surface head-on, and crumpled to the floor in a heap. “I did it,” he declared weakly.

  The Stranger sighed and picked up his hat. “Must be a door somewhere, or a weak spot,” he said. “Spread out. Look for a way through.”

  They moved along the wall, the Stranger and Etherie searching to the left, Cole and Emma exploring to the right. Willy, shaken and dazed, seemed perfectly content exploring the bit of floor directly underneath his nose for the time being.

  Cole and Emma moved slowly along the wall, inspecting each line, pushing against every block as they looked for weakness. They made it the full length of the first wall and started down the second. The Stranger and Etherie didn’t seem to be having any more luck than they did, and Cole was beginning to lose hope. Whoever had stacked these blocks knew what he was doing, and apparently he wasn’t interested in offering people a way out.

  The more they searched, the more Cole’s throat threatened to close up, and the more claustrophobic he began to feel. If there was no door, there was no way out, and if there was no way out, they’d be stuck in this box forever…and if they were stuck in this box forever, they would die here, and no one would ever find their bones. Or maybe nobody died in the Boundarylands; he’d noticed that they didn’t seem to need food or water. They’d gone a long time without it, and he wasn’t hungry or thirsty.

  What if he just kept existing?

  What if he spent the rest of infinity in this white box?

  What if he never saw colors again? What if the walls began to close on them? What if the big, blocky room shrank to a small, white prison cell? What if it squeezed them to death? What if their air ran out?

  What if they suffocated?

  “Cole? Are you okay?”

  Cole snapped out of his panicked thoughts and looked at Emma. She was frowning up at him. “Yeah…why?”

  “’Cause you’re all sweaty.”

  Cole felt his forehead. It was covered in a thin sheen of perspiration. He scrubbed it away and ruffled his hair. “I’m okay,” he said. “We just need to find a way out of here.” The world was going a little swimmy, so he leaned against the wall for a moment. But his hand was slick with sweat and went skidding off the smooth surface. Cole went with it, crashing to the floor.

  Willy laughed from across the room. “Smooth move!” he cried from his own spot on the floor.

  “You gotta be careful, Cole,” Emma said, reaching down to help him. His cheeks flamed with embarrassment. He took her hand and was about to pull himself up when something on the wall caught his eye. Nearly-invisible strips glistened above them. When Cole moved his head, they disappeared, fading into the flat whiteness of the wall. When he moved his head back, he could see the glistening strips again.

  Not strips, he decided, squinting up at them. Letters!

  He leapt off the ground and moved himself around on the balls of his feet, trying to recapture the right angle from a standing position. He wiggled left, then right, then left once more, until he caught the gleaming letters again. It was like someone had painted words onto the wall with varnish, or the clear nail polish that his mother sometimes wore for reasons that Cole couldn’t quite fathom. They could only be seen when the light hit them just right and made them shine against the blank white surface. “Come here!” he yelled over his shoulder. “Come look at this!” The others ran over as Cole pointed up at the words. “Can you see them?”

  The Stranger squinted suspiciously down at the boy. “See what?” he asked. He knew the isolation and the sterilization of this place could have a harmful effect on the kids’ minds, given enough time, but he thought they’d last longer than this.

  “Words! Look! Stand here.” He grabbed the Stranger by the hand and pulled him over to his spot. “You can only see it if you look the right way. Just...wiggle around a bit.”

  “Wiggle?” the Stranger said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Well, you don’t have to wiggle,” Cole corrected himself. “But move your head around until you see it.”

  The cowboy sighed impatiently, but he did as he was asked. He looked up where Cole pointed and swiveled his head a few times. “I don’t know what I’m—” he began, but just then he craned his neck to the right, and the letters on the wall appeared. “Holy smokes,” he said with a low whistle.

  “Words!” Cole said. “And arrows.”

  “What’s it say?” asked Willy, jumping around and trying to see the letters.

  “It says ‘Western Bloc’ with an arrow pointing that way,” Cole said, pointing over to the left, “and ‘Eastern Bloc’ with an arrow pointing over there.”

  “That ain’t how you spell ‘block,’” the cowboy said, lighting a new cigar between his teeth. Cole thought smoking in what may be a closed room with no ventilation was an exceedingly bad idea, but he decided it was probably just best to let the Stranger do as he saw fit.

  “It’s a different word,” he explained. “Block with a ‘k’ is like a building block, like these things,” he said, tapping a piece of the wall. “Bloc without a ‘k’ is like a grouping. The western group, and the eastern group.”

  “Group of what?” Etherie asked.

  Cole shrugged. “Group of blocks?” he guessed.

  “A bloc of blocks,” Etherie said with a smile. “A block bloc.”

  Cole smiled, too. “Or it could refer to the people on the other side of the walls. Listen here.” He pressed his ear to the wall, and the others did the same. “There are voices still, but they’re different. They change every few feet. Did anyone else notice that? It’s like…it’s like they’re segmented. Like there are individual rooms on the other side of this wall. Like an apartment building.”

  “Or an apartment bloc,” Etherie said, now with a full-on grin.

  “Exactly,” Cole beamed.

  “That’s great and all,” the cowboy muttered, knocking a bit of ash from his cigar, “but I’m not sure it helps us any.”

  Cole frowned. The Stranger was right: there was still no way through to the other side. “Let’s spread out again,” the boy suggested, “and look for more words. Look carefully.” And so they resumed their search, taking the walls more. They crouched and stooped a
nd jumped and craned and wiggled and swiveled, trying to find the right angle by which to see words that may or may not have been written on the walls in a high gloss.

  On the wall opposite where they’d started, Willy found another set of words, “Northern Bloc” and “Southern Bloc,” each with arrows pointing in their respective directions. But that was it. They crawled over every inch of all four walls, looking for hidden messages, but there was nothing else to be found.

  The group met back in the center of the room. “The rest of the walls are clean,” said the Stranger, stubbing his cigar out on the heel of his boot.

  “And there really are no doors,” Cole added miserably.

  The Stranger cleared his throat. They were in a bad spot, no mistaking it. But there had to be a way out—there always was. They just couldn’t see it yet. “Keep looking,” he instructed. “If there’s no door, there’ll be a crack, or a split. There’s got to be something.”

  “Yeah,” Cole agreed, nodding slowly. “Someone imagined this up, so there has to be a way to get in and out. No one would just think up a solid, empty box. Right?” The rest of the children looked unconvinced, and even the Stranger had to work not to let his doubt show on his face. Cole took a deep breath. He had to stay positive. He had to believe there was a way out, or the walls would close in on him, and he’d be lost. “We’ll find it,” he said. “It’s probably right under our noses.”

  Which, of course, was when he realized that he should actually look under his nose.

  He peered at the floor beneath their feet, and there it was: the fifth and final message, gleaming up from the smooth white surface.

  It had appeared as just a series of reflections on a shiny floor, but now that Cole knew how to look, he saw the shiny markings for what they were; gigantic letters painted onto the floor. It was so obvious that he actually slapped his forehead with his palm.

  “Why are you hitting yourself?” Willy demanded. He held his own hand up threateningly. “Do you want some help?”