The Darkness of Dreamland

by T. L. Bodine

  The carriage climbed up the jagged slope of foothills, climbing ever slowly higher as they approached the violet mountain peak. Although they were much closer to the mountain than they had been before, it still appeared as purple as it had from a great distance.

  “We’ll have to leave the carriage soon,” Sonia said, glancing at him sideways to see if he was awake. In the distance up ahead, the path passed through an archway in a large stone wall that seemed to mark some sort of boundary. The opposite side was darker and shadowy. “And go the rest of the way on foot. It’s too dangerous…we’ll draw too much attention.”

  “Attention?”

  “From the mountain folk,” she said. “Hopefully we creep past them and make it to the gate by sundown.” She glanced at the sky, looking where the sun should be if it weren’t hidden behind a thick layer of cottony gray sky. “We should make it, I think.”

  He wondered how she could possibly know that the sun was going down or could even tell that it had, considering the strange quality of the sky overhead. Then again, Sonia had always been able to sense the oncoming Darkness despite the strangely arbitrary length of days in Dreamland. “Why are we avoiding the mountain folk?”

  “They live on nightmare energy,” she said. “Monsters, I guess you’d call them. Their dreams are dark and twisted and they live on fear. Faeries who try to use nightmare energy…it doesn’t work right. It hurts them.”

  Adrian remembered the Queen, the way she had clutched her head as though it were splitting open when she had tasted his own nightmares. It served her right.

  “Anyway. They’re not…very friendly to intruders in their territory.”

  As they climbed the foothills, following the winding path up toward the purple peak, the tree cover became sparser but the atmosphere became darker. The sky was no longer the reflective white of fresh snow; it was thick and black and stormy, the angry sky that preceded tornado weather and hail. Mist seemed to curl up from the ground in places, wrapping in tendrils around stones, moving constantly despite the stillness of the air. Occasionally Adrian caught a flicker of something creeping out of the mist, but when he looked again it was gone.

  “The Darkness is thick here,” Sonia said. She followed his gaze over the misty landscape. “It never goes away completely.”

  Adrian nodded and reflexively scooted closer to her on the bench. It felt safe here, on the carriage. He was afraid of what would happen when they needed to abandon it and walk on the misty ground.

  The gateway loomed ahead of them, set at the foot of the path: a massive twenty-foot stone archway that seemed to have been carved from a small mountain itself. Moss grew up its sides, and the stone was weathered and chipped away in places. No door or gate barred the passage through the arch, but the other side of the archway seemed dark and fuzzy, as though obfuscated by a thick fog.

  “Well,” Sonia said, bracingly, “this is it.”

  The carriage shuddered to a halt. It quivered, slightly, and Adrian wondered if it was afraid. He found that he didn’t want to get off; he wanted to turn around and go somewhere else. Anywhere else. He couldn’t explain exactly why, but the arch filled him with sudden and terrible dread. Sonia climbed down from the carriage, and Adrian reluctantly followed.

  “Do we have to go through it?” There was no reason not to go around; no walls, no fences, no cliffs barring their progress. He could see the mountain clearly past the arch, but through the doorway he could only see the thick obfuscating fog. They stood together in its shadow, inches from the opening, and Adrian peered into the nothingness.

  “We do,” she said, grimly. “It’s…just one of those things.” She smiled apologetically and reached for his hand.

  Her hand gave his a little squeeze, and he swallowed back the sudden fear that had crept up into his throat.

  He squeezed her hand back and together they passed through the arch.

  A MEMORY OF LEAVES

  It was as though he had gone blind. His feet moved forward, stumbling blindly through the archway, but he saw none of the path before him. A cold dampness pressed all around him, a curtain of fog that seemed almost liquid as it washed over him. His breath caught in his lungs, and he heard his heart beating loudly in his ears. Sonia’s hand clenched his, but his fingers felt as though they were a mile away, connected to another body.

  Then, suddenly, the fog lifted and a world materialized around him in full, vibrant detail. But it wasn’t a mountain path that he stepped out onto. It was a suburban lawn, more than twenty years ago, preserved in time. A white three-bedroom house, a lawn bisected by a narrow patch of driveway, a single-car garage, twin old trees rising up at the corners of the yard. The sun beat down overhead, rich golden afternoon light, and he could smell the damp, sweet odor of decaying leaves. He heard an echo of a child’s laugh.

  No, he thought. No, please. Not this. I’m not ready yet.

  He wasn’t asleep, so he couldn’t awaken from the dream. He tried to cry out, but his throat tightened uselessly as though choking on the words. He tried to turn away, to twist out of Sonia’s grasp and run back through the arch, but he had no control over his feet. They propelled him forward agonizingly slowly, moving at the speed of a moving sidewalk, thrusting him into the memory. It washed over him, consumed him. He watched it from above as well as from within, seeing it from every angle as though his own thoughts had been amplified and projected like a film onto the world.

  He was seven years old.

  William was nine. They were at home, playing in the front yard, enjoying the last lingering hours of sunlight of the late autumn afternoon. The shadows stretched long over the driveway, cast deep wells of blackness behind the shrubs. The lawn, which lay along either side of the driveway, had turned yellow-brown. The grass was yellower and browner on the right side, the side nearest the garage, because sometimes Daddy parked his truck there to keep the driveway clear. Each patch of lawn had a large pile of freshly-raked leaves piled in it, a small red-yellow-gold mountain that mouldered in the sun. The boys had helped their father rake them up that morning, but they didn’t have any trash bags to put them in. “Doesn’t matter,” Daddy had said. “I’ll go pick some up.”

  Then, because it made the boys laugh, he had made a point of backing out over the freshly-raked pile of leaves when he left. The leaves scattered, flying up into the air and falling like confetti to the grass. They fluttered slightly, and were still. William and Adrian both laughed, not least because they knew Mommy was watching with pursed lips, disapproving on principle of the undoing of hard work. Making a mess was rebellion. Daddy waved and smiled and pulled out into the road.

  The boys raked the leaf-pile back up at their mother’s orders. It stood now where it had before, maybe even better than it had been. They were pleased.

  Samantha was outside with them. She was wore her new jumper and was busy picking up leaves that had strayed from the lawn-piles and placing them carefully on top of the pile. Each time she finished this, she would giggle unnecessarily and look back at the boys, as though seeking approval.

  William sat in the Y of the large tree in their front yard. He leaned back against the rough bark of the tree, his feet against the opposite limb, lounging without care or concern, the utter image of composure. Adrian wanted up, too, and he stood at the foot of the tree and tried to find a way up. He was too small, and couldn’t find a place to put his feet. His hands were sore and raw from constantly slipping on the rough bark. Samantha came to stand beside him and tried to climb up, too; she stood on her toes and jumped, miming her big brother’s attempt to climb the tree. Her blonde curls tumbled around her cheeks. Adrian felt anger well up in him, anger that was too big for him, and it twisted and burned inside of his chest.

  “Let’s play a game,” he said, pulling away from the tree. He felt a reckless, desperate need to prove himself. He needed to prove something to William, to the whole world, and although he couldn’t find the words for what he needed to prove, he felt its necessity,
and it was enough. The anger in him was dancing wildly with his shame, and made him want to do something impressive. “Come on, William. Come play with us.”

  “What do you want to play?” William sat up, pulling a twig closer to him. He snapped it from the tree and began to strip it of its bark with his fingers.

  At the base of the tree, Samantha’s eyes locked on the object in William’s hands, and after a moment she knelt down and picked up a small, dry twig from the ground, and tried to peel the bark off of it. The twig snapped in half, but she didn’t seem to care.

  Adrian wanted to slap her. He wanted to push her, and make her fall down and get dirt all over her clean new jumper. He wanted to take the twig away from her. “Let’s play hide and seek,” he said. He looked up at William, and wondered if his brother could see the raging monster behind his eyes.

  “Yah! Hide-go-seek!” Samantha wriggled in excitement, her face erupting into a wide, beautiful smile.

  “You don’t know how to play hide and seek,” William said, matter-of-factly, to Samantha. He looked at Adrian, his eyes narrowed, shrewd, and Adrian was afraid that William could look straight through him, that he had seen through his plan already. William was, after all, the smartest person Adrian had ever met (except for their dad), and surely he would see right through him to the monster inside. But if he saw anything, he did not say it, and instead he frowned a little. “We can’t play hide and seek with her. She’s just a baby, she won’t understand the rules.”

  “Am not!” Samantha protested. “Not a baby.” She thrust out her lower lip in an aggravated pout, and held up three fingers. “I’m this many.”

  “We can teach her how to play,” Adrian said. “It’s easy. You want to play with us, right Samantha?”

  She nodded enthusiastically.

  “See? She wants to play.”

  William gave Adrian an uncertain, reproving look, and Adrian stood firm. They stared at each other a moment and William shrugged, leaping down from his perch with all the cool suaveness of a cat. “Fine. But you have to teach her the rules. I’ll be it, and you two can hide.”

  “Okay.” Adrian nodded, and the beast in his chest purred. “Okay, yeah. Come on Samantha, let me show you.”

  William rested his forearms to the tree trunk, and buried his face in them, and started counting aloud. Adrian took Samantha by the hand; she dropped the stick she had been playing with, and he led her quietly to the hedge, whispering insistent directions to her.

  “He’s going to try to find us,” he said, his voice low. “Because he’s it.”

  “What’s it?”

  “It. The person who’s it.” Adrian’s hand tightened around Samantha’s, betraying his frustration. “You’re stupid. It means the person who looks for everybody else. Understand?”

  “Not stupid,” Samantha replied, and tried to take her hand from his, but he tightened his grip and she stopped struggling.

  “Whatever.” Adrian flattened himself to the wall and squeezed in behind one of the thick hedges that grew along the side of the house, dragging Samantha in behind him. “So he’s looking for us. And we have to hide. And the last person he finds — they get to be it, next time.” He let go of Samantha’s hand, and listened for William; he couldn’t hear counting anymore. “You got it?”

  “Okay.”

  She didn’t understand, he thought; she couldn’t possibly understand, because she was far too young and way too stupid. But it didn’t matter, because he wanted her to be bad at the game. He wanted her to lose, over and over. Thinking about that made him smile, a fierce kind of smile full of teeth and anger.

  They played a few rounds of hide-and-seek. Adrian discovered, quickly, that Samantha made her hiding places obvious by choosing to hide exactly where her brother had hidden last time: Wherever Adrian or William had been, the previous round, would be Samantha’s hiding place this round, without fail. As Adrian had hoped, Samantha was terrible at hide-and-seek, but it didn’t make him feel better at all. In fact, it made him feel worse.

  “Hey, William,” Adrian whispered, grabbing William’s hand and pulling him close; Adrian was at the tree, where he would be “it” this turn, and Samantha had already toddled away to hide even though he hadn’t started counting yet. “I have a fun idea.”

  “Yeah?” William looked skeptical. Adrian’s fun ideas tended to be lame, and both of them knew it.

  “Let’s not find Samantha this time.” Adrian’s face was flush with excitement. It felt naughty, what he was about to do — it felt like a very bad thing to do, and that filled him with excitement. He didn’t do Bad Things very often. Not nearly as often as he thought about them. “Let’s leave her hiding.”

  “Why?” William asked, but there was a devilish hint of a smile on his lips and eyes.

  “We’ll pretend we don’t know where she is. And we give up. And then she’ll be there hiding, and then we won’t have to play with her anymore. Because she’ll still be hiding.” He smiled. The monster in his chest purred louder.

  “Sounds good,” William said, and gave Adrian a high-five, and Adrian’s heart swelled with pride and acceptance.

  “She’s in the leaf pile,” Adrian said, out of the corner of his mouth. “I know she is, because I hid there last time.”

  William nodded, and the two parted ways and started searching everywhere else in the yard. They made a big show of it, peeking behind hedges, turning over rocks. The leaf pile giggled, and both boys ignored it.

  “This is too hard,” William said, in a loud stage voice as he stood in the middle of the driveway turning in a slow circle. “Samantha just disappeared!”

  “She’s not hiding anywhere,” Adrian said, in an equally loud stage voice. “She’s too good at hide and seek for us. We’d better give up.”

  The leaf pile giggled again, and shook a little.

  Up the road, the rumbling of a diesel engine broke the sleepy silence of the neighborhood. A familiar silver truck appeared, coming around the corner, moving smoothly up the road to the house.

  Daddy turned into the driveway.

  Adrian realized, too late, what was about to happen. There was nothing he could do. He screamed, but Daddy couldn’t hear him over the rumbling of his truck engine.

  Daddy revved the engine. The truck jumped forward, over the driveway, driving at an angle toward the lawn nearest the garage. The engine purred. The truck bore forward.

  The truck thrust its blunt nose into the leaf-pile.

  William dove forward to stop their father, but it was too late — too late, because the truck had plowed over the mound of leaves. The truck rocked as though it were going over a speed bump at too high a speed. Gold and orange and red flew up in the air, fluttering down around like dying butterflies.

  And under the insistent rumble of the truck engine, Adrian heard another sound, a wet crunching sound like a watermelon being smashed.

  “Boys?” Their father was out of the truck. The engine was still running. His door hung open. “Boys, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  Adrian was screaming, incoherently. William was standing, struck utterly still and dumb, his eyes locked on the undercarriage of the truck.

  Mommy burst out the front door, yelling at both boys to stop screaming. She stopped, suddenly, staring shrewdly around the yard. “Where’s Samantha?”

  Neither of them could answer.

  Their father stood stiffly, like he’d been caught in a game of freeze-tag. His eyes darted between the boys. “Where is your fucking sister?” But he knew. Already, he knew.

  He got to his knees. He crawled under the truck. It was still running, its engine still roaring. The truck trembled, just slightly. Their father disappeared under it, and Adrian imagined the truck roaring to life and rolling backwards, taking their father with it, and he choked on his terror.

  Their father reappeared cradling something small and broken against his chest. Adrian could just make out a blood-smeared new jumper, and a rumpled shape of something that wa
sn’t — could not be — his sister.

  Their mother screamed.

  Adrian sobbed.

  William stood, utterly still, frozen, wide-eyed and firm-jawed like a statue.

  And their father cradled the broken, bloody something to his chest. “Call 911!” he called, desperately. “Somebody call the goddamn ambulance!”

  Nobody moved.

  THROUGH THE ARCHWAY

  Adrian felt a piercing cold, first — a cold that burned. It washed over him as though his body had been blasted with liquid nitrogen, and he was certain that if he moved, his body would shatter. Then, just as soon as the cold had come, it was gone, replaced by a fuzzy emptiness that spread over him, a numbness like the tingle of a sleeping limb. His vision faded, replaced first by darkness, and for a moment there was nothing: no pain, no sensation, no thought. Then he broke through the opposite side of the doorway, like breaking through water, and he fell forward, his legs suddenly refusing to hold him upright.

  He felt the hard, rocky ground beneath his knees, the pebbles biting through the fabric of his trousers. His hand held the memory of something soft and warm, and he groped for it, aching for what had been lost. A rushing sound filled his ears, and nausea welled up in him. With effort, he forced it back. He wasn’t sure if his eyes were open or closed: no matter what he could, he could see traces of memory, of fluttering leaves, golden ringlets matted with blood.

  The rushing in his ears subsided, and he began to make out words from it. He tried to make sense of them. He felt something touch his arm. He reached for it, hoping for Sonia’s hand, but his fingers brushed against something slimy and cold, like the inside of an oyster. He drew back his hands, repulsed, but felt the slime cling to his fingertips. Something many-legged skittered over his leg.