IF: Bad Dreams

by Clayton Smith

  “No! It’s just...Look!” He pointed down at the floor, and now they all started crooking their necks again, trying to see all the letters. But they were huge, much bigger than the ones on the walls, and only a portion of each letter glimmered to life at any given angle. “Everyone clear back,” Cole said, shooing the others away. They spread out to the walls, even the cowboy, who was easily annoyed by the instructions of others. Cole jogged over to the far left, where the letters started, and kept his head craned down toward the floor as he crossed it slowly, speaking the letters aloud as he went: “W...R...I...T...”

  Cole continued calling out letters as he crossed the length of the room, spelling out the phrase. When he got to the far end, it all fell into place. Of course! he thought. He laughed, a deep burst that originated somewhere in his belly and exploded out of his throat. The other children looked at him like he was off his rocker, but he couldn’t help it. He laughed harder and louder and like he hadn’t laughed in a long, long time. He laughed until his sides hurt and his eyes watered. He laughed until he was doubled over on the floor, and then he laughed some more. He couldn’t help it. As his father would say, it was just so punny!

  The Stranger did not see the humor. “Enough,” he said irritably, his sharp voice echoing through the room. “What’s it say?”

  Cole sat up on the floor and wiped the wet streaks from his cheeks. “It says we’re in a Writer’s Bloc!”

  Not being terribly good at putting pen to paper himself, the Stranger was unfamiliar with, and had in fact never heard, the term “writer’s block.” None of the other children were familiar with it, either. But of course Cole, son of a famous author, heard the phrase bandied about all the time. “Writer’s block!” Donald Slawson would cry, throwing himself dramatically over the back of the living room couch. “I am beset! I am beleaguered! I am bedeviled! I am begone!”

  Oh, yes. Writer’s block was a very serious ailment in the Slawson household.

  “It’s what writers get when they can’t think of anything else to write,” Cole told them “They’re writing and writing, and the story’s going along fine, and then bam—they can’t think of what comes next. That’s called writer’s block.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” Etherie said. “Or at least it doesn’t sound nearly as imposing as this.” She gestured to the high, white walls around them.

  Cole shrugged. “I don’t know. My dad gets pretty upset when he gets writer’s block. I think it’s pretty serious.”

  “Your old man gets this block?” the Stranger asked. Cole nodded. “Good. How’s he get past it?”

  Cole closed his eyes and tried to remember Donald’s various “remedies” for writer’s block. “First, he bounces.”

  “Bounces?” Emma said.

  Cole nodded. “Yeah. He bounces. That usually gets the ideas going again…or so he says.”

  “I’m the king of bouncing!” Willy cried. “No one else bounce—it’s my turn!” Willy leapt into the air and bounced himself the whole length of the room.

  And yet, the walls of the Writer’s Bloc remained.

  “What else?” the Stranger asked impatiently.

  “Well,” Cole said, “sometimes he spins. Just goes around and around in circles. But I don’t think spinning is going to help us much.”

  “What a wonderful creative process,” Etherie said admiringly.

  Cole frowned. To him, it sounded like lunacy.

  “What else?” the Stranger demanded.

  “I don’t know. Sometimes he takes naps; sometimes he goes for a drive; sometimes he lays on the couch for hours just speaking nonsense. I don’t know, nothing he does can help us. His writer’s block is in his head, it doesn’t look like this. This is a writer’s block bloc.”

  The Stranger nodded once, then turned on his heels and went back to examining the walls for weak points. The whole idea of writer’s block, he decided, was ridiculous.

  “What’s the longest your dad’s block has lasted?” Etherie asked. “Surely we won’t be stuck in here that long.”

  Cole sighed miserably. “He once said he had writer’s block for three whole years.”

  “Three years?!” Emma cried. “I’ll be a million years old by then!” She sat down on the floor and cried.

  Cole went over to her, sat down, and patted her on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Emma,” he said. “We won’t be here for three years. No way.”

  But he had no way of knowing if that was true or not.

  Chapter 8:

  “Open Your Mouth and Say, ‘Oh, No!’”

  Dr. Mandrill fit the tungsten carbide bur into the drill and locked it into place. He peered into his patient’s mouth, prodded at her teeth, changed his mind about the tungsten carbide, and swapped it out for a bur with a diamond tip. Then he changed his mind again and swapped that one out for a bit made of stainless steel. “Take a look at this,” he said, holding the drill above the patient’s eyes so she could see the tip clearly. “You see the almost microscopic barbs coming off the tip of this? Hmm?”

  The patient whimpered. With the bite block in her mouth holding her teeth wide open, she couldn’t verbally acknowledge what she saw, and the duct tape securing her head to the headrest made it impossible to even nod.

  “My own design.” Dr. Mandrill tapped his finger against the stiff wires sprouting from the bur. “The main bit here drills into the tooth, of course, but it’s these beauties that do the exquisite collateral damage. You’d be amazed at the destruction that can be caused by something so small.” Mandrill leaned over his patient in order to look her in the eye. “Or I should say, you will be amazed at it.”

  The woman in the chair thrashed wildly, but her bonds held her secure. Sweat began to pour down her face in sheets, dripping onto the green and white tile floor like water from a leaky hose. She gagged against the metal prop in her mouth. It sounded like she was saying, “Hweeeash...”

  “Please?” The dentist sat back on his stool. “Please what? Please untie me? Please untape me? Please let me go?” He turned on the drill. It burst into a high-pitched whine, piercing in the patient’s ears. “Please don’t drill the teeth out of my head?” The patient groaned violently, trying to nod as the dentist grinned. “All of the above, I take it.” He turned off the drill and set it on the shiny metal tray next to the patient’s chair.

  The patient relaxed a bit, but her eyes were wide and wild.

  “Strictly speaking, I could let you go,” the dentist admitted, scratching his beard. “You’d promise to give me anything I wanted, and I’d say, okay, sure, and you’d scamper off with a huge debt on your shoulders, happy just to be intact.” He picked up a periodontal probe from the metal tray with one hand and a file with the other. He ran the file down the tip of the probe, cleanly and evenly, sharpening its tiny, blunt tip. “You’d live out your days in your own small corner of the Boundarylands, and I’d keep to myself in mine, and once the matter of your debt was resolved, well, our paths would never have to cross again, if you kept your head down—which I’m sure you’d promise to do, if I let you go, yes?” The woman did her best to nod against the restraints. “Mm. Of course.” Dr. Mandrill set aside the file and dragged the tip of the probe along the woman’s cheek. She drew in a sharp breath and closed her eyes. The probe left behind a thin trail of irritated pink where it scraped across her skin. The dentist admired the sharp point. “Not bad,” he said. He set the periodontal probe back on the tray and wheeled himself forward. “I could do that, and honestly, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot to me. My sun isn’t going to rise or set on whether or not I drill away every single tooth in your imaginary head. But if I let you go, I don’t think you’d learn your lesson…I mean really learn it. And it’s a lesson that I think bears remembering. Don’t you agree, Judy?”

  Judy Grew shook her head wildly against the duct tape and moaned against the bite block.r />
  Dr. Mandrill shrugged and snapped a pair of latex gloves onto his hands. “Well. Let’s just agree to disagree.”

  He picked up the drill once more and hovered it over her open mouth. Judy strained at the tape holding her arms and legs against the chair, but her thrashing didn’t concern Dr. Mandrill. He’d tested his methods time and time again. He knew the tape would hold.

  He reached out and pulled the bite block out of her mouth. Judy worked life back into her jaw, breathing heavily and bawling. “Please don’t do this!” she gasped.

  Dr. Mandrill smiled down at her, a smile that could have been mistaken for genuine, if one didn’t know better. “I told you not to lose the children, didn’t I?”

  “You did,” Judy wailed.

  “And what did you do?”

  “I lost the children.”

  “You certainly did.” The dentist sat back on his squeaky stool. “It should be one of them in my chair right now, but instead, all I have is you. Now, here’s what I’d like you to tell me,” he said, lifting the drill and holding it over her mouth. “Where did the children go?”

  “I don’t know!” she insisted. “The ground broke open, and I was in the chair, and I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see!”

  “Your fellow receptionists tell me they fell into the White. Is that true?” He lowered the drill and clicked it on. The screeching whine filled the room.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know! There was white, but I don’t know if it was the White!”

  “If the children fell into the Void, they would be lost to me. Forever. Do you understand that?”

  Judy whimpered.

  “The fact that you don’t know where they went means I don’t know where to find them. And since I don’t know where to find them, I have nothing but time on my hands. And I hate having time on my hands, Judy. I truly, truly do. Especially when there’s so much work to be done.” He sighed. “Now I have to grind your teeth out until I feel better.”

  Judy screamed as he lowered the screeching drill into her mouth.

  “Dr. Mandrill?” The sound crackled out from the speaker above the door.

  “Oh, for the love of–” The dentist closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He clicked off the drill and tossed it onto the tray. He reached over and pressed a button on the wall. “You’re interrupting, Marcy.”

  The speaker clicked to life, and a voice of static buzzed through it: “I’m sorry, sir, but it’s important.”

  Dr. Mandrill sighed. “There are very few things that are more important than what I’m doing right now.”

  Then the door to the exam room opened, and through it walked a tall, spindly creature from the Nightmaring. “Thissssh isssh one of thosssssh thingsssssh,” it hissed.

  The nightmare had to stoop to step through the doorway, even though its back was already hunched and curved like a question mark, cutting its true height down by several feet. It folded its leathery black wings into themselves, their tips scraping the doorsill as it passed through. From head to foot, the creature’s skin—if it could indeed be called skin—was the color and consistency of ash. It flaked away from its body, leaving a dark, dry trail of soot as he walked. Its curved spine was knobby, and it strained against the skin, each vertebra threatening to burst through. Its hands and feet were cracked, but hard, as if the skin-ash had solidified into dark shale at its wrists and ankles. Its claws were huge and black, sharp as blades and gently curved, more like mutated canine teeth than talons. Its torso was impossibly thin; sinews flexed and strained just beneath the surface, pulling the flaky ash taut. Its shoulders were exaggerated knobs of pure bone, protruding beneath either side of its hairless head. It had no eyes to speak of; where those should have been, there were just smooth, ashen dents in the surface of his skull. And its mouth stretched wide across his face, so wide that the corners of his lips nearly touched at the back of his head. Its open mouth revealed three rows of brackish teeth, each as long and as deadly as a hunting blade. The teeth were far too long for the creature’s wide, hungry mouth, and when it closed its jaw, the razor points of its teeth sliced into the gums, drawing blood in small trickles down its teeth that foamed pink on his lips and dribbled down his chin.

  “What have you found?” Dr. Mandrill asked, all interest in his patient lost. He peeled off his gloves and tossed them into the wastebasket. Judy breathed a sigh of relief.

  “The cssshildren,” it rasped. “I have sssssheen them.”

  “Where? Where did you see them?”

  “Flying to the gateway. Over the Land of Liessssh, I sssshaw them. They are in the Writer’sssh Bloc.”

  Mandrill jumped to his feet. The three-wheeled stool beneath him went rolling back and crashed against the wall. “How long ago?”

  The creature stretched its lips and bared its massive fangs. It hissed from the back of its throat, a dry death rattle from somewhere deep inside its chest. “Not long. Three turnssssh of the dial, maybe four.”

  Dr. Mandrill grinned. “That is an important thing. Very important, indeed.” He leaned back over his patient and patted her head. “I apologize for the interruption, old friend. We’ll finish when I get back, hmm?”

  Judy took several deep breaths, but said nothing. She was safe, for now.

  Mandrill fished a piece of chalk from his white coat pocket. He tapped it thoughtfully against his gleaming forehead. “We can’t pass into the Bloc itself. Too fortified. We’ll have to find a way to break in. Should have plenty of time, though, shouldn’t we? They won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.” He tossed the chalk into the air and caught it, tossed it and caught it again. “We’ll pass into a neighboring territory,” he decided. “What did you see surrounding the Bloc?”

  “An ocssshean on one side,” the Tooth Fairy hissed. “A warehouse on another. A lodging on the third. A cassssshtled kingdom on the fourth.”

  “Lodging? What sort of lodging?”

  “A motel. The Batesssssh Motel.”

  Dr. Mandrill smirked. “That’s where we’ll enter from, then.” He patted his coat pocket and felt the reassuring shape of the vial inside that contained the human child’s tooth. Soon, the seeds of an army, he thought.

  “Anytsssshing else?” the nightmare whispered in its sandy, scraping voice.

  “Just your presence,” Dr. Mandrill said. “And your skill set, of course. When the time comes.”

  The Tooth Fairy threw open its mouth and snarled. Little red flecks spat out from its tongue, covering the room in a fine, pink mist. The creature’s wings unfurled angrily, knocking over a container of dental probes and another filled with cotton balls.

  “Calm down,” the dentist said sharply.

  “I haven’t ssssshtarted my work,” the creature whined. It held up its hands so Dr. Mandrill could see its palms. Each had a gaping mouth set into it. Both little mouths were currently toothless, as they always were in the Boundarylands. But in the Real World, the Tooth Fairy crept into the rooms of sleeping children and placed his hands over their lips, and the mouths in his palms chewed any loose teeth from their gums. Between those and the lost ones left under their pillows, the Tooth Fairy began to fill the tiny mouths in his palms. But each new dawn, when the morning sun banished him back to the world of dreams, he crossed the threshold, and the real children’s teeth melted away from his hands, running down his palms in thick, gray drips.

  Every night, he set out again to fill his palms, and every morning, he returned unfinished and was stripped of his progress.

  “Your work will keep,” said Mandrill coolly. “You can go out to the real world and fail again tomorrow.” The nightmare snarled, less forcefully this time. He was resigned to his master’s instruction.

  Dr. Mandrill traced a rectangle onto the nearest wall with the piece of chalk. The lines glowed blue, and when he’d finished the box, the inside shimmered into a battered red door with t
he number 188 stamped onto a gold plate high in its center, right under the words “Bates Motel.”

  The dentist smiled as he opened the door and gestured to the Tooth Fairy of the Nightmaring. “After you.”

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  The IF series will continue in Part V: Colemine, the Prince

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  A Note From the Author

  If you’re enjoying the IF series, I would greatly appreciate if you could take a few seconds to leave reviews for the books on Amazon! The more reviews a book has, the more marketing opportunities it has. Just tap here to go to the IF series page, where you can leave reviews for the books.

  Also, if you like IF, you may enjoy some of my other books, especially Apocalypticon and Na Akua! I hope you’ll check them out!

  And finally, if you like FREE books, tap here to sign up for my reader’s group, and I’ll send you a free copy of Pants on Fire: A Collection of Lies, my short story collection of humor and horror stories.

  About the Author

  Clayton Smith is a Midwestern writer who once erroneously referred to himself as a national treasure. He has been described as “too tall to live,” which hardly seems fair.

  His work includes the novels Apocalypticon, Post-Apocalypticon, Anomaly Flats, Na Akua, and Mabel Gray and the Wizard Who Swallowed the Sun; the plays Death and McCootie and The Depths; and the short story collections It Came from Anomaly Flats and Pants on Fire: A Collection of Lies. Some of his short stories have appeared in such publications as Canyon Voices, Write City Magazine, and Dumb White Husband.

  Clayton would like very much to hear from you. You can find him on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as @claytonsaurus.