by T. L. Bodine
He was staring down at Zachariah — or, at least, at what was left of him.
When Adrian was eight, he had spent a few weeks of the summer at a youth camp up in the mountains. He hadn’t realized it at the time, but he and William had both been shipped away for large chunks of that summer to allow time for their parents to negotiate the divorce — to scream, and sling accusations, and wallow in guilt and drink too much, to threaten and make up and tear each other apart from every angle until they were certain, beyond doubt, that the only solution was to leave each other.
But he had enjoyed summer camp, while it lasted.
One day, he had met with a forest ranger who told them about all manner of interesting things — radio tracking collars, tranquilizer darts, bear cages, relocating animals by helicopter. Then she had passed around a number of items for them to hold: a coyote skull, a huge pair of elk antlers, a bear claw, and, the most fascinating and disturbing to Adrian, the skin of a badger. He had held it far longer than anything else, running his hands over the rough pelt, the smooth line connecting the white and black markings. The eyes were two partially-opened slits, and there was a hole where its nose would have been. It still had its claws, long, heavy, vicious things, but otherwise it was completely flat, and heavier than it looked like it should be.
Looking down at Zachariah’s remains, Adrian remembered the badger skin.
Zachariah looked as though he had been gutted, deflated like a balloon. His skin, unblemished, was folded up within the blankets, ashy pale and bloodless. His face, misshapen and deformed without a skull to hold it up, was contorted further with terror; his nose was sunken into his face; his mouth hung slack into a wide, toothless gap, and his eyes were gone from behind the fleshy slits of his eyelids.
Adrian screamed.
A long, loud, primal cry of terror tore from his throat and carried across the room with a force of its own propulsion, hanging on the air and resounding as one endless note. He scrambled to get away, all coordination lost in his blind fear, and he fell over himself, landing hard on the swept dirt floor and clawing into the strata, crawling on all fours to escape.
The scream woke Sonia, and in a single, deft movement she leaped from her rocking chair and dove across the room, wings fluttering. She landed deftly, like a cat, beside Adrian and swept him into her arms, holding him to her chest, cradling his head to her bosom like the mother of a terrified child. “Shh,” she whispered, holding him, rocking gently back and forth, the fluttering of her wings creating a quiet breeze against his face. “Shh. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
He felt himself quiet, after a moment, his body too exhausted to maintain the horror; he felt his heart slow down as the painful thudding subsided to a more manageable beat. He took a long, deep breath, and, suddenly aware of his proximity to Sonia’s warm, supple body and the sweet, flowery smell of her, he pulled away.
“What…what the hell….”
“The Darkness,” Sonia said.
He struggled to stand, and realized he couldn’t, and resigned himself to leaning back on his hands. He gaped at her. She smiled, if shakily.
“I told you yesterday,” she began, folding her legs beneath her, arranging herself comfortably on the dusty floor, “that if you survived the night, I would explain. So…I guess I have a lot of explaining to do.”
IRRATIONAL BEINGS
“You might have heard stories of changelings,” Sonia began, watching him with uneasy eyes, as though afraid he might lash out at her. “Of children, stolen by the faeries, taken away and replaced with faerie children in their place.”
“…Okay.” He cast a nervous glance at the corner, where Zachariah’s deflated body was lurking, just out of sight among the blankets, and shivered. “Go on.”
“Oh. Here.” She stood and moved to stand over Zachariah’s remains. She ran a hand over one wing, and Adrian realized that the wings had a fine dusting of some odd, glittering substance, like the dust of moth wings. She gathered this in her palm, held it over the blankets, and muttered an incantation in a language Adrian didn’t recognize — the same language she had been singing in, in the woods — and sprinkled the wing-dust over the body.
Adrian expected the body to disappear.
It didn’t.
Nothing happened, actually; at least, not as far as Adrian could see. Sonia stood over the body a moment, head bowed as if in prayer. Then she bent down, lifted the body in her arms — it flopped, uselessly, awkwardly, like a partially-deflated blow-up doll — unbolted the door, and, with a clumsy heave, flung Zachariah’s rubbery remains out onto her door step. She whistled, a long, low note, and a unicorn stepped from between the trees. Gleaming with all the brilliance of the sun, it lowered its head over the deflated corpse, and opened its mouth.
Sonia closed the door, rather hurriedly, and dusted off her hands on her short skirt.
“Unicorns eat dead bodies?”
“Well, yes,” she said, a little uncomfortably; her wings fluttered, humming quietly in what Adrian now recognized as extreme unease. “What else would they eat?”
Around the cracks of the door, Adrian could see a faint, multi-hued glow — the brilliant, gleaming white of the unicorn, but other colors as well, greens and pinks and blues, all of them star-bright and mingling in blinding, prismatic brilliance outside, suggesting that other unicorns had come out to join in the feast. He could just make out the faint sound of many creatures breathing and shifting outside the cottage, and, beneath that, a very quiet, wet noise, much like a hungry dog hurriedly slurping up table scraps.
Anxious to cover the noise, he turned back to Sonia. “Right. Anyway. Changelings. Go on.”
“Well,” she continued, a little uncertainly, looking at him with concern as though not entirely sure if she should comfort him or ignore his distress, “The stories were sort of true. Faeries have always lived in a world parallel to human kind, beside it and just touching, but never overlapping. And sometimes, faeries would steal children away, although they wouldn’t normally trade them out for anything. Just take them.”
“Why?”
“Faeries have a particularly dear relationship with children. We need them.”
He looked uneasily at the door, beyond which the unicorns seemed to have ceased feasting; at least, they sounded as though they were moving away, their hoofbeats quiet on the earth.
“Not to eat,” she said, with a twinge of impatience. “Listen. We are Irrational Beings.” The way she said it suggested capitalization, as though Irrational Beings was a taxonomic definition. “Like the unicorns, outside, like dragons and trolls and all that. We cannot live in a world governed by logic and reason — there is no room for us, there.”
“Dragons and trolls,” he echoed, but there wasn’t much left in him that could still be surprised.
“When humans were young and superstitious, and all the mysteries of the earth were unsolved, our worlds were closer, and we could travel freely between them. Then, as humans became more industrious, as they learned science and technology and abandoned their own faith and superstition, they started to pull away from us. There weren’t as many wild places, where things were still unknown, that Irrational Beings could use as doorways. Our world became smaller. And darker.” She stood, fidgeting, and again Adrian was struck by her need for constant motion, the way she grew uneasy when left stationary for too long; she turned to the hearth, and busied herself with re-building the fire, her back to him.
He watched the glittering, constant motion of her wings for a moment, thoughtfully, before he asked, “Darker. Like…last night?”
She nodded. “Irrational Beings are, by their nature, chaotic and prone to self-destruction,” she said, and her voice was tinged with sadness. “We do better when closer to the mundane world. It has a calming effect. And the same is true in reverse — without our presence, the human world becomes too introspective and takes itself too seriously.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Depression, I think you call it.”
&
nbsp; He considered this, and nodded.
“Anyway. As I’m sure you’ve figured out already, Irrational Beings have a particular love of children because they are endowed with this fantastic, beautiful capacity for accepting all sorts of unreality as truth. They are the last safe haven of nonsense in a logical world, and we need them in order to flourish, and keep our world close to the human world, maintain as many open doors as we can. They…help provide the light of our world. So faeries take a particular interest in the safety and well-being of children.” She smiled, turning away from the fire, which was now alive and crackling merrily. “From what you told me, you do, too. So this should be something you can understand”
He nodded again, and began to think he understood where this was going. “So you kidnap children who are unhappy,” he said, slowly. “And bring them here, where you can keep them safe.”
“The children come when they need us, and they leave when they’re ready. We don’t force them into anything. We just show them the door.” She shifted her eyes as she said this, carefully avoiding his gaze, and the thought crept into Adrian’s mind that she might be lying — about any of it, or all of it, there was no way for him to know.
“But what the hell are you thinking, bringing children here, with that…that…those things that came last night?”
She shook her head. “You misunderstand me, Adrian. Listen.” She held up a hand, to silence him. “I’m not explaining this right. The Darkness…they’re not…Dreamland isn’t built for grown-ups!”
“So whenever an adult comes here, you kill them to get them out of the way?” He regretted it, as soon as the words left his mouth.
Sonia looked at him, coldly, her eyes narrowed, a deeply wounded expression forming on her beautiful face. “After everything you have seen,” she said, with a voice like cold steel, “you can ask me that? After I brought you into my home, and fed you, and held you when you sobbed like a terrified child — you have the nerve to ask me that?”
“No — no, I didn’t mean — “
She continued, in a cold, curt tone. “No. It’s not Dreamland that has a problem with adults. It’s the adults who can’t handle Dreamland. It does things to them. You saw, with your friend, what it does — before the Darkness even came. You felt it, the fall through the portal, and again last night. The rational mind reacts badly to this place, and tears itself apart, like…like a violent allergic reaction.” She shivered, and again Adrian caught a flicker of something in her expression, something she wasn’t telling him.
“So…it drives people mad?”
She shrugged. “For the most part, they’re already insane when they get here, so I couldn’t tell you for sure. You’re the first I’ve ever been able to have a real conversation with.”
He wondered what it was that she was hiding from him, but he knew why she was hiding it. She was trying to protect him in some twisted, overbearing way. That much was obvious from the way she looked at him: she thought he was safest not knowing the whole truth. He recognized the look. It was the look Jessica had given him so often when they tried to talk about the problems with their relationship
“The theory — although, as I say, I’ve never been able to prove this — is that they can only become aware of the portal when their minds have become suitably irrational. And, unfortunately for adults in your world…a suitable degree of irrationality seems to be the defining symptom of insanity. Once they’ve found the portal, and fallen through, and been subjected to the chaotic fabric out of which Dreamland was woven…well, it usually breaks them completely.”
“And eats their guts out,” Adrian muttered, unable to contain himself.
“Well, yes, sometimes.” Her brow furrowed. “But it’s not…it’s not what you think. Things work differently here, that’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you. Dreamland, it’s…”
“Chaotic?” he suggested.
“…Very literal,” she finished, violet brow furrowed. “Imagination is very, very real here. Metaphors aren’t just words. Feelings are reality. The world is always changing and adapting because it gets created whenever anyone interacts with it.” She looked around the room, a little desperately. “Have you ever felt…empty inside? Completely spent, and hollow, like nothing mattered and you didn’t even really exist? Like you were…uh…deflated?”
He nodded.
“Well, there you go.”
“Ew.”
“Yeah.” Behind her, the fire had died down to a hot, clear flame over the glowing embers, and she replaced the cauldron on its hook above the flames to warm it for breakfast. “Anyway. That’s everything, then — I told you I’d tell you everything in the morning, and now I have.” There was a subtle note of defensiveness in her voice.
“…That’s not everything,” he replied. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the info but…I don’t understand….” He wanted to understand; in fact, he wanted rather desperately to understand, because it suddenly seemed of utmost importance. A thousand questions came up at once, each seeming equally important, but what made it out of his mouth was an indignant statement instead. “I’m not crazy.”
He almost didn’t want to admit it. Being crazy — believing that everything he was seeing was a hallucination — seemed like a much cozier explanation. But he felt in his heart that it wasn’t true.
“Well, no…you seem to be doing very well.”
He shook his head, and heaved himself to his feet, finally trusting his legs to hold him upright. “That’s not…no. I mean, that’s not why I fell through the portal, or whatever. I’m not some lunatic who lost his grip on reality and started seeing faeries. No offense.”
“None taken.”
“So…what the hell am I doing here?”
She looked up from the cupboard, her arms full of fresh vegetables, and shrugged. “I don’t know, Adrian. I don’t know why you could see the portal, and I don’t know why your friend came with you.”
“Well, he might have been crazy,” Adrian said, reasonably, and then shook his head violently before he had the chance to think about Zachariah’s remains. “But I’m not. I’ve been…Sonia, I’ve seen that place before. The portal, or whatever. I’ve dreamed about it.”
She didn’t say anything, but seemed to consider this, biting her lower lip in that way that reminded him so forcibly and so painfully of Jessica. Her wings hummed.
“I don’t usually remember my dreams — but when I saw it, I knew I’d seen it in a dream. Only when I dream about it, I think there’s someone standing inside, and he’s waving…no, beckoning. He’s asking me to come with him. And…Nathaniel saw him, too, before he disappeared — the Nightmare Man.”
The realization was sudden and powerful. Maybe the psychic had been onto something after all — or maybe his presence had just been a coincidence, and the doorway had been here all the time. Adrian turned his eyes hopefully toward Sonia.
“There’s this man — or monster, or maybe he’s a faerie — but he’s tall, and he wears a cloak. And his eyes are big white empty sockets and he has a round mouth full of teeth.” He looked up at her expectantly. “Have you seen him? Or maybe a little boy, about this tall, red hair like mine..”
“Adrian — “
“He’s wearing these Spiderman sneakers, and his name is Nathaniel —“
“Adrian!”
He stopped, startled by the exasperation in her voice.
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
He opened his mouth to try and explain again, but she shook her head and held up a hand for him to be quiet.
“Every morning, I go outside and check the woods around my house for some poor lost soul who’s wandered into my life, and I nurse them and I care for them and I ease the last hours of their suffering. And when they die, I say a little prayer and dispose of their body and I wait, wait, wait for the next one. That’s it. That’s what I do.” The cold, hard gleam had returned to her eyes, and her voice lowered in volume bu
t rose in intensity. “First you start accusing me, now you’re asking me about things I can’t possibly know. What do you want from me?”
He shivered, and shook his head, his eyes downcast, unable to answer her. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might be lying to him because she, herself, didn’t know the answers to his questions.
“Then don’t start accusing me, or threatening me, or acting like you’re entitled to answers that I don’t have. I can’t help you, Adrian. I don’t know anything. I’m a nobody. And the only thing I’m good for is keeping you happy until your last waking hour, and hoping the Darkness takes you away in your sleep to some place happier than here.”
“I didn’t mean…I don’t…I’m sorry.” He looked up, seeking out her eyes and her forgiveness.
She glowered. There were tears in her eyes.
Tentatively, afraid to upset her further, Adrian ventured, “But…I mean, of course you couldn’t know for sure, but…Sonia, I’m kind of scared.” The temporary gust of excitement about the portal and The Nightmare Man was long gone, replaced with the terrible memory of Zachariah’s limp remains and Sonia’s desperate outburst. “What’s going to happen to me?”
She shook her head; the tears in her eyes shimmered. “I don’t know,” she said, and sighed. “I’ve had…I mean, sometimes people last the night. A few days. Sometimes they’re okay, at first, before…”
She looked down, whatever she had been cooking utterly forgotten on the fire, and said nothing for a while. When she spoke again, it was very quiet.
“Whatever happened last night, in your head — that’ll keep happening. Every night, when the Darkness comes, that’s where you’ll go.”
He shuddered at the thought. He didn’t want the Darkness shoving him back into the panic room in his mind any more than he wanted those creatures to eat him away from the inside. “There has to be a way out,” he said. “I mean…no offense, you’ve been very kind to me, I like you a lot actually. I just…”
“No, stop. I understand.” She glanced at her forgotten stewpot of vegetables and wrinkled her nose. “I want you out of here too. This place will destroy you.” She paused, a moment, thoughtful, and then looked up at him, with a sudden light in her eyes. “The Gatekeeper.”