“How peculiar,” she said, expecting her voice to echo, or come out low, or do anything that would make her realize that she was, in fact, lying in her bed. Her sanity had already taken too many hits recently, and she felt like she was one crack away from using a crayon to write legal briefs for dead celebrities. Turning in place, she realized that the garden itself was a giant floating island. After walking to the edge, she frowned at the large amount of sky underneath. Whatever ground existed was somewhere below the distant mists. Squinting, she thought she saw the ripple of waves through the gaps in the fog.
Smoothing out her nightgown, she turned to the garden.
“Okay, dream logic. Clearly the gazebo is meant to be my destination. Probably reminiscent of my latent sexual frustrations or my father’s inability to express his love.” Beth turned toward one of the nearby hedges. A small statue of a bird with a top hat turned its head to face her. “What do you think, Mr. Bird?”
“Nevermore?” The statue shrugged its wings.
Beth saluted the bird statue, which returned the gesture in kind. Beth wandered through the shorter hedges, stopping to smell the crimson flowers that sprouted above their clipped tops. They smelled of lavender and sulfur, the scent burning Beth’s nostrils. Other small statues of animals in top hats greeted her, removing hats or waving pleasantly when she walked past, her nightgown catching on some of the thicker branches.
The hedges had no discernible logic, but Beth was content to drift between them. After all, she would probably wake up the moment she reached the center, no matter when that happened. She greeted more of the statues, which had become larger and more intricate. An elephant used its trunk to tip its hat to her before resuming its gentle spray of water on the foliage.
Beneath the gazebo, a picnic-style lunch had been spread out on a red blanket. Wines, cheeses, and a tray of meats awaited her. Soft red cushions surrounded the picnic, and Beth sat down on one of them. After grabbing a bottle of wine, she poured herself a drink.
“I see that someone has joined me.” His voice was thick with an accent that reminded her of every Russian character she had ever seen in a movie. Taking the cushion opposite her, he lifted the tails of his jacket before sitting. He wore a bright-white button-down with a purple coat and a matching top hat. His skin was a dusky purple with hints of red in the shadows of his eye sockets, and when he removed his hat, a tangle of black-and-red hair spilled around his shoulders. Two large horns protruded from the upper part of his forehead, and his toothy grin was full of daggers. His bright-yellow eyes glowed in the shadows of the gazebo. “I am always in the mood for some good company.”
“Ah, shit.” It all made sense now. Between the demon and the ominous sky, she was clearly in hell. Determined to play along with the dream, she set her cheese back down on the blanket. “That’s just fucking great. Now I can’t eat any of this.”
“Why not? I assure you that the food here is very good.” To demonstrate, he popped a piece of cheese in his mouth. “Delicious.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s delicious but not immortal-soul delicious.” Beth crossed her arms. “I’m guessing that if I eat the food, I get stuck here. Simple as that.”
Her host never broke stride, his smile fixed. “Come now, why would I want to trap you here?”
“Duh.” Beth held up a finger on each hand and stuck them to her forehead. “Demon. Maybe you’re bored or you have a quota to meet.”
The demon laughed. “You really must try this food. I picked it out just for you.”
“Well, maybe just a bite.” Beth lifted the glass in a mock salute and paused. Logic dictated that this was a dream, but it all felt so very real. A lucid dream, perhaps? A breeze tousled her hair, and she shivered. She had been playing along, but now she wondered if she should play it safe. “After all, it isn’t every day that a demon makes you a meal. What’s the occasion?”
“Oh, I wish I could tell you,” the demon replied. “Frankly, I am a little surprised to see you down here. Generally I am informed of my guests prior to meeting them. Your arrival was a bit of a shock.”
“I see. Yet you have quite the spread.” Beth spilled a bit of wine on the back of her hand and wiped it off on her gown. The stain blossomed throughout the fabric, and she did a quick mental count of her fingers. She had read somewhere that a finger count was a good test of a dream. With all five fingers accounted for (and no extras), the situation had failed the dream test yet again. “Doesn’t strike me as uninvited company.”
“It does take you roughly half an hour to fall through the portal,” the demon said. “That gives me some leeway.”
“So why a garden?” Beth asked. “This place seems like it was ripped straight from Victorian England or something. Hello, the 1800s called; they want their garden back.” The longer she was here, the more rooted in reality she felt. If she really had fallen through her mirror into a demon’s garden, then she needed to find a way out.
She lifted the wine glass to her lips and paused when the demon grinned in response.
Fuck. Dream or reality, it was time to play it safe.
“Oh, it was. I was trapped here some time ago by a very powerful man, but I managed to bring some real estate with me.” The demon leaned forward, suddenly vanishing and appearing at Beth’s side. He placed a hand on her wrist and pushed the glass away from her mouth. “I’m afraid I avoided your question earlier. You definitely don’t want to drink that. Otherwise, your soul becomes trapped here.”
“I wondered.” Beth set down the glass. “Does this have to do with the man who sent me here?”
“That would be Master Sebastien. I’m afraid that per the terms of my imprisonment, I often must do things I do not particularly find pleasant, such as trapping humans in this place.”
“And eating would trap me here?”
The demon nodded. “It would.”
“I don’t see anybody else here,” Beth noted.
“Oh, that’s because most people don’t last very long here.” The demon frowned and took Beth’s glass from her hands. He sipped at the wine, his thick lips spread thin on the crystal glass.
“You kill them.”
The demon nodded. “Usually. Or I wait until they throw themselves off the island. Whatever I find more entertaining.”
“But why not me?” Beth asked. “Isn’t it your job?”
“Not technically. The exact language involving my imprisonment here dictates that I must answer my master or his associates any three questions once every lunar cycle. Naturally, I try and get out of it if I can. I only have to answer yes or no. However, Sebastien has been gracious enough to provide me visitors on occasion, and I keep them alive as long as they interest me.”
“So you can answer three questions? Any three questions?”
“Well, I can answer any question, actually, without limitation. I could give the society all the details they want, but someone forgot to put that in the language of the spell that bound me here.”
“So I could ask any question and you could answer it?”
“Only if it pleases me.” The demon grinned. “Go ahead. Try.”
“Who was my first kiss?” Beth asked.
“Human or nonhuman? Family, nonfamily?”
“Are you stalling?” Beth leaned back on her cushion, her breasts pushing up against the fabric of her nightgown. She saw the demon’s eyes flick down at her figure and then back.
“Hardly. Your mother was your first kiss. When you were three days old, she kissed you on the mouth. Out of reflex, you tried to suck her lips. It counts. Nonfamily and human was Victor beneath the bleachers in the seventh grade. You did it on a dare. Nonhuman was Mr. Beary, the teddy bear. You kissed him several times as a child, but when you were eleven, you planted a kiss on that bear in the hopes that he would turn into a prince. You even tried to use tongue because you saw it in a movie once.”
“Holy shit.” Beth stared at the demon. She hadn’t thought about Victor in years, and she had completely (or deliberately) forgotten Mr. Beary. “This isn’t a dream, is it?” She spotted a fork by one of the plates and picked it up. She had to know for certain, and a pinch wasn’t going to be good enough.
“Hard to prove,” the demon told her. “No matter what I tell you, you could argue that the dream made up the memory. In a way, maybe you could think of your actions here as—DON’T DO THAT!” Beth jabbed the fork into her leg and screamed, then pulled the fork free. Blood flowed freely through the fabric of her nightgown, and she put her hand over the wound. Her palm was now damp with her own blood, and a chill ran through her body.
“Holy fuck, ow,” she swore, then looked at the demon. She had fallen into a bad situation, and now she needed to find a way out. But how?
“Well, that settles it.” The demon shook his head. “Not dreaming.”
“No kidding.” Beth balled up her fists. “This really hurts.”
“Yeah, well I prefer you intact.” The demon waved a hand over her leg, and the burning stopped.
Beth lifted her nightgown and wiped away the blood with a cloth from the table. Four tiny dots had scarred her legs.
“And definitely much quieter.”
She stared out across the garden, the gears of her mind turning. If this was real, the thing in her room had been real. What did Sebastien want with a copy of her? Was he some kind of witch? No, maybe a warlock. Shit, so many years of monster movies and fantasy novels and she still couldn’t piece it all together.
Beth thought of Mike. This whole mess was related to him, but how? Looking at the demon, she smiled politely, a feeling that was only skin deep. She was going to find a way out of here, and she thought she had a pretty good idea how to make it happen.
“Alex!” Dana sat up, scattering an array of metal tools onto the floor of her apartment. The sound they made upon striking the ground was deafening, causing Dana to put her hands over her ears. It had been the life support dream again, the sound of Alex’s last breath being drawn, watching the nurses leave the room with looks of defeat on their faces.
“Fuck,” she whispered, staring at the mess on the floor. Hours of painstakingly crafting gears, modeling them on her computer, and then using the 3D printer at school to make them. She had brought home several prototypes, hoping to find the proper combination that would allow the clock to work again. She had even visited an antique clock repair business downtown, letting the octogenarian owner show her how they ticked, but to no avail. None of the obvious patterns fit, and research on the clock itself yielded nothing, which made her think it was a one of a kind creation. She stared at the random assembly in front of her, the strange stack she had formed that now lay scattered across her floor.
She needed a drink. She went to the fridge to grab a beer, her eyes instead settling on the bottle of vodka tucked in the vegetable crisper. A beer sounded nice and cold, refreshing even.
She didn’t want refreshing—she wanted something with bite. She pulled the top off the vodka and sucked greedily at the bottle, wondering how long it would take for fire to fill her belly, for the edges of the world to blur. Staring over the railing at the motorcycle on the floor of the garage, Dana poured a tiny bit of vodka over the side, watching it splash on the cold concrete.
“For Alex.” She drank again, stopping herself before she took it too far. She knew better than most what would happen if she kept drinking. The vodka would catch up with her, and who knew where she would wake up. After picking up her keys and wallet, she tossed them in the back of her sock drawer. She didn’t need to go anywhere, and she didn’t want to be tempted to.
What time was it anyway? Picking up her phone, she frowned at the time. It was almost one in the morning. There really wasn’t anywhere for her to go after all. She saw that she had a voicemail so put the phone on speaker and set it down on her desk.
“Hey, Dana, it’s Rick!” The voice from her phone was friendly but tired. Rick was a college dropout who was trying to support his mom and little sister by working sixty hours a week at multiple jobs. He spent most of those hours slinging pies behind the counter at the pizza place where she worked. Dana stripped out of her pants and tossed them on the bed.
“Hi, Rick,” she muttered in response, though it was just a recording.
“Hey, look, so the reason I called was some guy came in here tonight asking about some deliveries we made. It was to that creepy old house, the one everyone says is haunted. I think you did a delivery there last week, maybe?”
Still listening, she picked her pants back up and checked the pockets. She found the tube of ChapStick she had been looking for and set it on the desk. She threw her pants even farther, the legs catching her comforter just right so that her pants now dangled over the other end of her bed.
“Anyway, he wanted to speak with you, but I wouldn’t give him your info, told him it was company policy, but he did give me twenty bucks to give you his number, so here it is.” Rick then recited a phone number for her, making sure to carefully pronounce each number.
Dana paused and looked at her phone. Why would somebody want to talk to her about Mike’s house?
“Okay, so I’ll see you when I see you. Take care.” With that, Rick had hung up his phone.
Dana took off her shirt and slid into a tank top. Looking at the bed, she found her gaze drawn once more to the clock.
How many hours had she lost already trying to fix the damn thing? She moved closer, tugging gently on the minute hand. The clockface swung open, revealing the complex machine inside. When properly assembled, there would be nearly no room for anything else. Dana had devoted hours to carefully removing the cracked and broken gears, documenting where each one went on a large piece of butcher paper she had taped to her desk. Her protractor, triangle, and compass had received more use in the last forty-eight hours than they had through high school and college. There was something soothing about the diagrams, imagining how all the pieces fit together, wondering what sound the chime would make.
“What the fuck?” Dana ran her fingers along the edge of the paper. Several lines had been drawn on the side, tiny arrows that pointed off the page. She untaped the butcher paper and flipped it over.
An exploded diagram of a clock assembly had been drawn on the back. It was expertly shaded and heavily detailed to the extent that Dana couldn’t tell if she was looking at a drawing or a photograph. In awe, she put the paper back on the desk, the new image toward her, and taped it down.
Breathing heavily, she knelt to the floor and picked up one of her new gears. Hovering it over the image, she found its counterpart. When she set the gear in place, it was a perfect fit.
Had she drawn this in her sleep? After grabbing some more parts from the floor, she put them in the correct places. Older parts were shaded differently, slightly darker than the rest. She set her vodka to the side, then moved the pieces around, figuring out which ones worked and which didn’t.
Though she sat in silence, the steady ticking of a clock filled her mind as she continued tinkering into the night.
“So what should I call you?” Beth asked. “I’ve read enough books to know that you won’t give me your real name. Or at least that you shouldn’t.”
The demon sipped at his wine and smiled. “You can call me Oliver. I once had the fortune of working with a man by that name and have been fond of it ever since.”
“Okay, Oliver. I was hoping we could play a game. You see, I noticed that you said you would answer any question but only if it pleases you.” Beth picked up a piece of cheese and deliberately bumped the wine bottle with her hand, causing it to fall. Wine spilled, casting a crimson stain on the spread of food.
“Fuck, I don’t even know why I did that. I can’t even eat this anyway.” She lifted the bottle back up with her thumb and forefinger, then
stuck her unstained middle finger in her mouth as if licking it clean. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Oliver flash his teeth in excitement.
The bait was set. Now it was time to reel him in. From everything she had read, demons were supposed to love games, and this one seemed particularly enamored with her. “You see, I get the impression that you don’t want me to leave here. However, I do not wish to stay. So there must be something I can offer you in return for your cooperation.”
“You mean other than amusement?” Oliver set down his wine glass and pulled off his gloves. The palms of his hand were red, and his fingernails were black and glossy. He traced a line down Beth’s chin, across her neck, and then along her bare shoulder, toying with the strap of her nightgown. “Hmm. Give me a minute to think about your proposition.”
She shivered in response. “While you think, may I look around your garden?”
“Please.” Oliver smiled, his horns glistening. Beth stood and wandered out into the small maze of hedges. She lightly touched the foliage, greeting the statues again as she passed.
Once she was away from the demon, she wiped her fingers clean on her gown. Oliver was clearly interested in her sexually, and if her plan had worked, figured she was already stuck here. There would be no harm in telling her how to get home, but he would toy with her first, maybe even take advantage of her.
Good. She kept the smile off her face. Beth had had a monster fetish since she was a teen and a collection of weird dildos currently at home to prove that it had never faded. Freaky monster dick got her off, and though the demon himself sent chills down her spine, he also lit a fire in her groin. She wondered if he had a tail and if his horns were sensitive. Something about his skin made her want to taste him, to explore every inch of his body, find out what he liked. His attitude wasn’t unpleasant, and she was sure he was bored out of his mind waiting for something to do.
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