This nightmare-under-a-nightmare was a primal mockery of the sane and solid world, where a goblin-night—a shrewder, more enduring incarnation of our waking version—lived without cycle, light, or limit. It provided wakeless things a sky, oceans, shadows, everything they needed to survive and thrive. Whereas its waking incarnation wore the guise of death and desolation, New Victoria’s unwaking counterpart was entirely vital, forged with feelings as much as whatever substituted for matter. Accordingly, every object and place possessed no fixed appearance, but only reflected a wild mutability born of darkest whimsy, free of the laws that prevailed over lesser, solid worlds. All this, and still it was not the world I wanted. While it was a dream in every sense, complete with all the wonder and uncertainty a mind could chase, it was only another iteration of failure—albeit a more attractive failure than the one I’d grown familiar with. Regrettably, its every miracle and marvel were subordinated (weaponized) to the trite business of tyrants—conquering.
I sought shelter from the dizzying sights with equal parts caution and wonder—a difficult act to balance, surely. I entered a building stacked entirely from smoldering coal, and was instantly swept down a narrow arterial corridor, into a colossal chamber. The room was densely crowded with tall, worm-eaten bookcases, some spiraling beyond the shadows that spread wide and empty across the ceiling. Meeting at ungainly angles, the corners of what appeared a library stirred with tiny bits of activity—perhaps mice, but not likely. Light was contained within the room, but it hung in the air without source or consistency, tumbling and dimming wherever and whenever it willed. The rambling illumination maintained a largely subdued presence, yet more than adequate to read by. A nearby shelf heaved with books, and my curiosity grew so strong, I feared it would give me away. When I was sure there was no immediate threat, I took up one of the tomes and started reading
It was a dream journal—as were all the books, I somehow knew. Penned in exquisite cursive was recorded a young girl’s nightly journeys into an exceptionally peculiar nightmare. She dreamed of a giant machine called the Spirit Grinder, a contraption that could distill, via a protracted and quite noisy process, the color of a person’s soul. For reasons she could never deduce, she was obliged to remove the tied-up, squirming bodies of persons—always someone she knew—that dropped from a long, rusty chute and pass them through the strange machine. Once a particular soul’s color had been rendered, she would use it to paint irises on the blank eyeballs passing by upon a shabby conveyer belt. All of this took place in a crumbling barn residing somewhere in the middle of a vast, dark forest.
I was about to withdraw another journal when I heard footsteps. Other than coming from somewhere below me, I was unable to discern their specific trajectory, but they seemed to be drawing closer. I slipped through an open window leading back onto the street. Quickly afterward, I ascended a rickety expanse of stairs wrapped around a gigantic apartment complex. Interestingly, the building seemed to be breathing. The observation only momentarily focused my attention as I opened the door at the top of the stairs and entered with little hesitation—the darkness initially seemed quite welcoming. I found myself in a bedroom with a massive four-poster bed, only slightly discernible from the flowing webs draped across it. The footsteps were getting louder, now emanating from under the huge bed itself. Suddenly, I remembered—I needed to wake up. I was so immersed in the darkling beauty of the city—not to mention the memory-dimming fog of dream—I had forgotten the danger I was in. Something was coming for me, to replace my waking eyes with dull expanses of featureless flesh.
I searched for a door out of the room but found nothing, not even the door I’d initially entered through. I was trapped. The footsteps acquired company as they moved along. But most important to me were the sounds I couldn’t hear—the sweet laughter of my sisters and the terrible rage of my father. My family was gone. I was alone.
The surrounding darkness intensified, forcing me to stand out to whatever ascended the stairs beneath the bed. Fortunately, I sensed weakness in the trailing shadows that limped along with the stronger packs of darkness, turning from my gaze whenever I looked upon them. With supreme effort, I seized these stragglers with barbed thoughts and glaring eyes. I wrapped them tightly around my fists and poured them across my body until they soaked into my blood, conjuring depthless voids from what used to be my eyes. I ripped the alien silence from its hiding places, bending and breaking its body across my will, and when nothing of it remained save for loyalty to me, I draped its carcass over myself—until I was every inch the nightmare that was coming for me.
Wanting to deny my stalker the benefit of a dramatic entrance, I seized the ghastly bed and sent it crashing into the wall. Beneath lay a trap door, leaking cold air and laughter. Again, I would spare the nightmare none of its props and fetishes. I tore the door from its moorings and sent it to join the ruins of the bed. The stink of graveyard rot and old death drifted from the gaping hole, attempting to engulf me. Within moments, my killing thoughts crushed them of their ambitions and their corpses joined the dead silence that dripped from my shadow-haunted body. I stood at the edge of the hole, smiling as I spoke into the darkness. “Soon, I will wear your flowing skin, my dreadful friend. I will smile from the dark hollows that once held your face.”
The footsteps were close now. I could hear only the coldest quiet where once there was laughter. A voice the size of the room exploded through the hole, sending me flying backward into the pile of debris I had created. “Oh, what bravado! What teeth! What spirit! I shall fill you with visions so fat and foul you will weep fire! But first, your soul will travel with me, under all the beds in the world, through every closet, and down where the whispers crawl upon you like spiders, where the darkness tastes you with a thousand terrible tongues!”
The near-solid words broke off, filling the room with an equally palpable stillness. Finally, and with a sort of comedic stumbling, rose a great shape. The thing was massive and ridiculous, like some infant devil’s plaything. It was candy-striped and bug-eyed. A grinning hatch filled with mismatched teeth served as its mouth, and each of its movements were dramatically over-emphasized. It smiled at me with so much sweetness, my mouth filled with the taste of sugar.
Though difficult, I suppressed the impulse to laugh. “I think I will miss your whimsical smile the most, creature. I will think of it from time to time, long after you’re dead.”
The distance between myself and the grinning demon-doll began to shrink, but before we met, the wall beside me exploded, scattering nightmare like shrapnel. Something huge had broken into the room—it was my father, in all his former living glory. Froth and fire leaked from the corners of his mouth, and his eyes blazed like blast-craters. With his bloodless hands burned onto his axe, he intercepted the creature, throwing his massive shoulder into the stumbling toy from hell. The creature was lifted from the floor and sent crashing into the darkness. My father lifted his axe to the roar of his own laughter. Though glorious, the intrusion irritated me—this was the second time he had come between me and a nightmare.
Somehow, my sisters were behind me, their curving knives up in front of their grinning mouths. I wouldn’t have guessed their next move for the life of me—they gleefully punctuated the length of my body with their happy knives, laughing all the while.
As I approached a waking awareness, still caught somewhere between dream and a slightly sturdier reality, I heard the sugary squeals of something inhuman, followed by the sounds of something wet falling down a long flight of stairs—perhaps in many small pieces. Then came the laughter of my entire family, fading into abandoned sleep. I sat up and looked around, finding myself prone upon a bed within the glass penthouse. A cold breeze lifted the edges of the oversized sheet that had been draped over me. My family lay carelessly scattered next to the bed, on the floor. The thought of someone else touching them stoked a rage almost beyond my control.
I retrieved my family and sought ou
t the man with the ridiculous hat and blue-glowing eyes. He was easy enough to find—I could see him through the glass walls, where he lay upon a strange demonic bed, only a room away. The black bed was slathered in a membranous substance, which did not react to the breeze’s touch, despite its apparently delicate construction. While he retained his hat, his otherworldly eyes were lightless and inactive, apparently sleeping beneath thin sheets of pale flesh. He appeared to be resting, but if I understood these creatures at all, the possessing entity was merely away somewhere, tending the wicked business of harrowing.
I waited for the creature to revisit its vehicle of flesh and bone, hoping my vengeance could reach beyond its stolen body. More specifically, I hoped my sisters were able to bleed a nightmare. I waited with the patience of stone until finally a glow began seeping from behind the barriers of flesh and blood. I hunched down behind the bed, not wanting the eyes of the thing to gaze fully upon me, lest I return to the deeper nightmare throbbing under the city. The creature began to stir, rising from the bed and into the air, borne aloft upon strange winds that never left the creature’s side. I followed the light of its eyes to where it discolored the bed upon which I’d been reposed, to be filled with others of its kind. I lunged, my arms rushing beneath the creature’s delicate neck, squeezing with all my strength. My sister slid into the nightmare’s back, only whispering distance from its heart.
In a singsong voice of scarcely restrained laughter, my sister’s words glided into the open air. “I wonder what color you will turn my radiant teeth, my light-eyed friend, after I’ve chewed you down to the echoes of your last scream!”
The thing spasmed as if electrocuted, its eyes becoming twin suns of cold blue light. Anything they shone upon became liquescent in appearance, indefinite. I could still hear my sister’s laughter, dimmed somewhat by layers of intervening tissue. Ever-so-slowly, she moved closer to a killing depth. Somewhere on the other side of the creature’s flesh, I could detect a living nightmare frantically attempting to flee its sinking ship. It raced toward an exit, hoping to attain the freedom lurking just beyond sleeping skin before its stolen host became its tomb. My sister corkscrewed into the creature’s heart, freeing the death that lived within, ultimately denying the miserable creature its much-sought freedom. Instantly, the monster’s dream-light became as confused as the matter it fell upon, becoming both illumination and sound—a glowing scream that shattered the glass of the penthouse. My father was absolutely right—the Wakeless screamed magnificently well.
Within the fading glow and dying echoes of the light-sound, there appeared a hideous shape straining the limits of its arms, like some desperate bird trying to gather the winds of a vacuum beneath its wings. Finding the solid world disagreeable to whatever life-sustaining systems it possessed, the creature slowly died, disappearing into a mist of drifting, freezing light.
My art had always been intended as a gift—an attempt at liberation, reunion, and completion. Certainly, these attempts have failed at their ultimate purpose, but while the Deadworld has yet to be invigorated by a single reincarnate dream—of the human variety—I have crossed many souls over into revelation. Perhaps when they are again renewed in fashions of skin and stupidity, they will be one life closer to the dream they left behind. However, at that moment, standing before the body of my family’s defiler, I chose a new, if only temporary purpose for my art. I would craft a warning, simple and sincere—trifle with me, and you shall learn precisely how my art makes corpses of dreams.
Quite adept at the speedy reorganization of the human body, I fashioned my effigy of warning in short order—a dreamcatcher made from the emptied shell of the living nightmare. My wonderful work was held together by a damp geometry of broken bones, strung with red webs of vein and artery, feathered with a dripping scalp of flowing hair. The webbing I embellished with the thing’s stolen teeth. Unfortunately, I could locate only two burned-out cavities where the thing’s alien eyes should have been, otherwise the brilliant spheres would have made for excellent decoration. With my warning complete, I walked to the edge of the rooftop and tossed the creature’s foolish hat into the dark.
Shortly after, I stood upon yet another rooftop, watching as a twisting bank of angry clouds descended on the city risen from sleep. The drifting storm settled between the winking belfries and crooked spires, presenting a rolling field of muttering thunder. Merging from without the storm came the clamor of pointed activity, from nearly every quarter of the city. New Victoria was slowly coming alive. I could hear the rustling of unearthly things congregating into unwholesome crowds. Sighing, I wondered if my cobbled warning had been a bad idea.
Recessed deeply into the night, moving within the tumbling grey, I could see small shivering points of blue light. I knew very well what they were—the Wakeless had taken to the skies to find me. I looked down from the edge of the rooftop to where the windows beneath me turned the bright color of sleep. I watched the cold blue move ever upward, searching, room by room. The sounds of a second storm began howling from the streets below—inhuman gangs of nightmares born from living women trampled the earth upon countless hateful limbs, creeping, crawling, flying, leaping.
I couldn’t afford the laughter that mounted as surely as the storm. I swallowed my amusement, wrapped myself in silence, and leapt to the roof of an adjacent building. I waded into the thick cloud cover swirling in front of me as a nearby rooftop door exploded outward. A gang of evil things landed around me like a downpour from hell.
The storm obeyed me as well as any shadow, and I disappeared into its coiling mists. There were a great many of the caterwauling things, so both of my sisters stood eagerly at the ready. The fiends flooded into the storm, heedless of the danger within. Within seconds, several of the things had been effectively multiplied—or divided, depending on how you wished to perform the math—before the rest of the horde became even faintly aware of the death moving within their ranks.
As I killed under cover of storm cloud, I could only make out the slightest details of my adversaries. When an arc of blinding light poured into the bloodied spaces around me, my eyes deferred to my ears for instruction. And when the crashing thunder robbed my ears of the world, I moved by the silence —beneath the thunder, between the night, from within the shadows that danced and frolicked to the music of the storm. The collective confidence granted them by the force of their numbers diminished by the second, and I could detect more than a few scrambling feet making for escape. The devils were certainly powerful enough, yet they were new to the world of stable things and could not fathom the strategies of a solid opponent, much less one who was unafraid. They came at me with claws, fangs, tentacles, and hooves, and I conducted each to my sisters’ reddening smiles. One nightmare—likely an older iteration— proved wiser than the rest, waiting for my fury to abate. When the last of the creatures had been slaughtered or driven off, and I had returned my sisters to their sleep, it struck.
The creature secured itself to my back with flashing talons—organic hooks with searing, chitinous barbs. It tried to tear me in two with a passion rivaled only by my sisters’ bottomless depravity. As I struggled to rid myself of the creature, it hissed sulfurous words into my ear, its breath the carcass of a dream. “What wonderful teeth and claws your kind’s dreams have given me. Am I not a splendid thing, ripping the flesh from your bones? I swear to cherish your screams for as long as I care to remember them.”
The creature was an undeniably exceptional member of its kind, deserving of my compliments. “You are indeed splendid, creature. But I’m afraid I have no screams for you today. Perhaps my sister’s laughter will suffice.” Already in hand, she shined a jagged grin into the creature’s cavernous mouth. I could feel my enemy’s teeth scrape my knuckles as my sister dragged my hand behind her, down what seemed an endless, convulsing hole.
I drew close to the monster’s ear and whispered, “Is she not splendid as well, creature? Tell me, will you scream fo
r her?” The thing had apparently lost its taste for conversation, which was forgivable, as its mouth was suddenly without tongue. It seized my arm with incredible strength, tearing my hand from the sucking wound of its face.
I felt my other sister slide into my free hand, her laughter infectious. She tore across the claw that held me, springing a honeyed howl from the bleeding trench of a mouth. “I knew you would find your singing voice, eventually!” she squealed. The thing reeled backward of my shoulders, screeching and bleeding from my sisters’ joint assault.
Before I knew it, my sisters had been replaced by my father. “And your last scream shall belong to me!” my great benefactor roared. My father fell with such power that the very air around him warped and crackled. Unbelievably, the inhuman thing absorbed the blow, refusing to fall. Never had I witnessed a creature capable of weathering such direct exposure to my father’s power. Regardless, the creature had been sorely wounded, its claws busy trying to stem the flow of strange fluids that sprayed from its broken body. It backpedaled until it found a wall and turned its furnace-eyes upon me, silently promising a death beyond comprehension.
My father’s rage had grown beyond steel and bone, sending waves of purest hatred rolling through me. He roared toward the glaring monster with a fury that nearly burned through my hands. I should have been impressed by the speed and monstrous strength demonstrated by the creature when it leapt sideways onto a distant rooftop, but my attention was stolen away by the unearthly collision between the wall and my father. Where once there was concrete, steel, and monster, there was now only debris and a dreadful echo. My raging father suddenly went quiet and fell into fitful sleep, my sisters’ laughter unwinding into the night. The mixing of dream and reality had certainly bent the physics of the physical towards the metaphysical, but my father’s recent display of power was beyond any demonstration I’d seen before, in or out of New Victoria. Yet it was definitely a dream I suspected of enlarging the fury of my father, save that this one was red, and filled with wolves.
The Red Son Page 6