Elise and The Butcher of Dreams

by Steven Welch

  She heard Taariq curse. They couldn’t see anything but the sensation was unmistakable. The vehicle had slammed into some sort of subterranean pool or river. The sound of rushing water roared around them.

  We’re submerged, Elise thought.

  Light. They’d been moving into blackness but now there was a blue glow, a trail of bubbles, particulates in the water. The glow grew brighter. Silvery fish dashed past.

  They surfaced with a rush and bobbed on the surface like a cork. Water streamed down from the surface of the glass canopy and Elise saw blue and green light beyond that revealed more of the coquina walls. Their forward movement stopped and the canopy popped open with a rush of gas and a squeal of hydraulics.

  The air was thick. Elise thought the speed of their ride had rattled her because the darkness seemed to shimmer. She closed her eyes hard and opened them again. The shimmer was gone.

  I need food and rest, she thought, but not until this is done.

  A concealed mechanism locked onto the vehicle and there was a great jolt as they were lifted out of the water.

  They were on a dock. Water rushed down its sides and revealed a gangplank that led to the left side of the chamber.

  Elise was out and on her way down the walkway before Taariq was unbuckled.

  He watched her go and thought of the kiss. Then he thought of his mission and wondered if the signal could reach Jack the Dream Butcher from this deep below ground.

  Do I kill her if he’s not here to see it? Do I just kill her now? We were inside. That was his mission. Get inside. Signal Jack. What after that?

  He made his way along the wet, slick gangplank and followed Elise along a path that ran along the coquina wall. They passed through the narrow passage, the water running to the left, until the tunnel curved and they emerged into a vast dome as large as a football pitch and a hundred meters high. The water ran into the lake at its center and then out again into a series of channels that ringed the lake. Zodiac style rubber boats were moored at the different side tunnels.

  The ceiling of the dome exploded with color from the Egyptian hieroglyphs that covered its every square meter.

  The air around them shimmered again, this time clearly and without question.

  THE SECRET THINGS

  The small zodiac boats each sat at the entrance to a different side tunnel of the subterranean dome. The outboard motors would not start, rusted as they were and with old fuel that wouldn’t take a spark, so they used the thick plastic oars to paddle slowly into the dimly lit passages.

  The first passage was narrow and lit by small bulbs, motion activated. There must be a solar generator somewhere above, Elise thought. Clever old Aquanauts.

  The passage ran nearly twenty meters deep and ended in a stone wall. On either side was a walkway carved out of the coquina and limestone. Row after row of ancient objects encased in glass cases lined the walkways.

  The bulbs revealed that the displays held ancient artifacts carefully curated and designated with numbered signs that spoke to their date and origin. Everything in the first tunnel came from ancient Rome, from many centuries ago. Marble sculptures, fragile scrolls, objects of shining gold and dark bronze.

  The bulbs went dark as they passed and then came to life as they approached. It created a strange rhythm to what they saw.

  The oars made soft sounds as they rowed and those sounds became a matrix of chatter, of strange echoes in the chamber.

  “This is weird,” said Elise, “why not just send this stuff to a traditional museum? Why the secrecy and the crazy?”

  She grabbed onto the slick stone to her left and stopped the boat. She pulled herself out and up onto the narrow walkway.

  “I mean, this is just a museum. What’s the point?”

  Taariq sat in the boat and watched her.

  We must be close, he thought, close to whatever he needs. I need to test my signal. I need to get away from her long enough to test it.

  Elise walked along the path and studied the Roman objects.

  Oh, she thought. Oh, I get it.

  A marble statue of two wrestlers in mid grapple on closer inspection was a man grappling with something that looked for all the world like a monster. A werewolf.

  A small tablet with artwork that seemed to show a peaceful village scene. Above the village was a space vessel of some sort. The villagers rode winged unicorns.

  “This is the weird stuff,” Elise said, loud enough for Taariq to hear but really just to herself, “this would have changed everything. This is the secret stuff, the secret stuff that needs to stay that way.”

  She turned back to Taariq and smiled.

  “I read about this place at L’Académie. This is the Vault of Dreams.”

  The air shimmered so quickly and so vibrantly that Elise thought for a moment she was passing out from exhaustion and lack of food.

  No, not that, she thought. This wasn’t exhaustion and it wasn’t in her mind. The shimmer sustained this time. It didn’t come and go in an instant. The shimmer surrounded them like a wave in the air, a haze then a sparkle then a rainbow of colors, all around them, soundless and without form but so real.

  Elise waved her hand through the strange phenomenon that surrounded them and there was a trail, a ripple, as if she were passing her hand through water. She felt nothing.

  “This gas,” she heard Taariq say, “we need to get out of here. Poison or worse, we might suffocate.”

  She ignored him. This wasn’t a gas.

  There. She focused hard. There. This wasn’t a haze at all. Elise looked more closely, her eyes grew accustomed to the shimmer so that she could truly see.

  There are strings. Millions of strings. As if the room around them was a tightly woven fabric, and it billowed in a wind and was fraying at the seams. She could see fine lines in the air around her, lines of energy, and she thought for a moment that she could see worlds beyond.

  This is like the tornado, the hellnado, this is just like that, she thought. The world is coming apart at the seams.

  And then it was gone. The world was back to normal.

  “We need to explore the rest of this place. This isn’t gas or poisonous mist. This is what we saw in the desert, in the hellnado. We need to find out more.”

  “I think we’ve found out what we need to know,” said Taariq.

  “My mission was to deliver the paintings to The Vault. We’re here. Now I need to find out where I can store it. Then I need to find my friend, the Octo-Thing.”

  “You heard him. The man called the Dream Butcher is coming here. He’ll kill us.”

  “And how is he going to find his way down here? How is he going to find me?”

  Taariq was silent. Does she know?

  Elise turned and walked back to the zodiac boat. She talked as she went and her voice was calm.

  “He won’t. I’ll find him though. When these paintings are safe and I’ve found my friend I’m going to track that son of a bitch down and put him down.”

  Taariq did not pull the Aengus from his backpack. He followed Elise into the boat and they resumed their exploration of the weird underground chamber.

  The air this far below the surface of the city was cold and chilled even more by the flowing water all around. Was this the Nile? Elise suspected that it was, a vast subterranean lake that flowed with the waters of the sacred river, a transportation system as old as the pyramids, perhaps even more ancient.

  In one dimly lit tunnel they came upon stone carvings preserved behind glass that told a tale of a city below the sea. In another they discovered statues ten meters tall of warriors, Aztec or Mayan, Elise wasn’t sure, and they wore odd round helmets with tubes and what appeared to be a jetpack.

  Weird histories were catalogued and displayed throughout the chambers in strange and dizzying abundance.

  And then the passage through which their boat passed opened up into a space of unbelievable beauty.

  “Damn,” said Elise.

  The canal led
them into a vast subterranean lake and a circular dome of crystal a hundred meters high, flanked by stone sculptures, Egyptian gods, holding staffs. Guardians.

  This was constructed by the ancient Egyptians for some purpose Elise could only guess. Her mind raced. Yes, so the canals were transportation and perhaps they had once been above ground as well, thousands of years ago. A vast network of canals both above and below ground that served as a thoroughfare for the Egyptians in the time of the Pharaohs. Sure, and the Aquanauts had rediscovered this network of canals and had transformed it into a vault, a storage facility, a headquarters.

  The wall of crystal was lit not by bulbs but by great beds of glowing, phosphorescent creatures that lined the dome.

  The light danced and played along the jagged edges of the clear shards of mineral. It revealed an impossible thing, a thing that Elise saw but could not believe, suspended to the vast domed ceiling by great ropes as a curator would assign a vertical space for artwork.

  “Oh,” said Elise.

  It was one of the most beautiful, terrible things she would ever see, and on it was told a story in cloth, a tale woven from needle and bobbin and thread.

  A monumental tapestry hung from the ceiling of the chamber and on it were stories without end.

  Elise and Taariq looked up into the shimmering expanse of a curtain of fabric, a tapestry a hundred meters tall and just as long that hung from the top of the chamber from heavy ropes and shining rods of gold. The platform of stone below the tapestry was a few meters deep, the ancient statues to either side taller than that.

  There was a stone island in the center of the lake, directly beneath the tapestry. It was round and jutted from the dark water in a spiral of steps to a point a couple of meters below the colossal fabric. Elise paddled to the edge of the platform and stepped out. Eyes wide, she took the steps two at a time, around and around, until she was at the top and within reach of the tapestry.

  The cloth hung low enough here to touch. Elise reached out, her hand trembling, and felt of the tapestry.

  Soft yet strong, woven from threads of infinite color. The artwork was intricate, tales told in fiber and string, an epic that spanned the width of the chamber and from water to ceiling.

  Elise smiled, her face rippling with golden light reflected from the water and the metallic strands of the tapestry. Taariq reached out to touch the fabric as well but stopped himself. His eyes were wide with fear.

  “Oh my God,” said Elise, “this is the fabric of my blanket, the same fabric that kept me safe at The Turn. A shroud of this saved me on Orcanum. It can’t be burned. It doesn’t age, not in the way we know. This is the Fabric of Eternity, Taariq.”

  She returned to the boat and stepped back in. Elise wanted to push back again to get a better view of the entire tapestry.

  A shove against the island sent them gently back into the stillness of the lake.

  Elise blinked.

  Something in my eye? No. Something is happening. The tiny hairs on her arm were standing straight up. She felt a chill.

  The air shimmered again and they were no longer standing in a small boat on a lake beneath an ancient subterranean dome.

  They were no longer where they were. They were somewhere else.

  Elise and Taariq stood at night on a snow-swept mountain as a storm roared around them. They were instantly cold, the air punished them like an electric shock. Elise did not know whether they had moved into a different world or if that world had come to them. She just knew that they were no longer in Cairo. They were on a mountain at night under the black clouds of a freezing storm.

  And there was a pack of enormous cats as white as ghosts a dozen meters away. They did not look like tigers nor did they resemble panthers. They looked for all the world like common house cats with fur as pale as powder, yet they were as large as wolves. The beasts stalked through the deep snow did not at first seem to notice Elise and Taariq.

  One of the beasts stopped and sniffed the air.

  The thick fur on the back of the great cat raised. It turned and stared at them with eyes as red as wounds.

  Elise was so cold she couldn’t breathe. Taariq dropped to his knees.

  The cats, as a pack, turned and faced them.

  Elise drew her weapon but her hands trembled. The steel of the 9mm stuck to her skin.

  So cold, I can’t think. Can’t lift this damned gun.

  The cats crouched low, teeth bared, and moved on them. They made an awful chorus of deep, rumbling purrs as they came.

  Elise forced the gun up. She counted six cats.

  Better be on target.

  The largest beast, the one in the lead, poised to pounce. Elise fired.

  The air shimmered, and they were back in the chamber. The sound of the gun was a thunderclap, and the bullet struck the far wall with a harsh crack.

  Taariq was still on his knees. Elise joined him. Her skin felt like it was on fire, the temperature difference between the frozen world they’d experienced and the damp warmth of the chamber a shock.

  “I don’t understand,” Taariq said.

  Elise looked up to the massive tapestry.

  “It opens doors, it opens doors to other places,” she said and her voice was so low it was as if she spoke to herself.

  “And when the air shimmers, those tornadoes on the plain, what just happened to us, that’s the cry of another world reaching out to us through this cloth.”

  “Maybe. Yes. But something is wrong with it. Something is making it fall apart. It’s becoming undone.”

  “This is all too much, Elise,” Taariq said and his voice trembled.

  He reached into his backpack and withdrew an Aengus.

  “This is all too much and I’m so sorry but it needs to stop.”

  Elise didn’t understand what she was seeing. She looked at her wrist. Her Aengus was still there.

  He had his own device. What?

  “Where did you get that?”

  Taariq twisted a little knob and jammed his finger onto a button. There was a loud beep. He punched in six numbers. The same code she’d given to gain access to this chamber.

  Month, day, year. Her birthday.

  “No,” she said.

  Then Taariq pulled his gun and aimed it at Elise’s forehead.

  “And now he can find you. That’s why I’m here, Elise. I’m sorry, but he’s coming to stop all of this. It’s like you don’t understand what you did. What you keep doing. He’s coming to make the world right. You’re a monster, all of you, and I’m so sorry.”

  He pulled the trigger and he screamed as he fired because something cold and wet had him by the face.

  THE MOUTH OF THE MUSEUM

  The Aengus on Jack’s wrist made six little beeping sounds.

  That’s the code. Everything is waiting for me now, he thought with a smile.

  This was a child’s adventure story.

  He flew in a living machine high over the deserts east of Cairo on a mission to save the world from monsters. He was an Astonishing Aquanaut ready to do battle against the greatest evil the world had ever known. He was on his way for a final showdown with, what did his son once call the monsters at the end of a game, The Big Boss?

  Yes, he was on his way for a boss battle.

  This was a child’s adventure story, a game, a tale told by a young boy as he played with plastic heroes on a couch. This was wonderful and horrible and he would end it soon. Yes, this will end and we can be reborn pure and new.

  The Aengus displayed the code he’d been waiting for and this meant he could end this game. It also meant the girl was probably dead and for that he was glad. Still, Jack wouldn’t be certain until he saw her corpse or her head in a bag. She was dangerous. But this was a high strangeness still, he thought, as the ship came soaring low out of the clear sky and banked hard near the uppermost tip of Khufu, the great pyramid of Giza. He was above it but Khufu was still a wonder, impossibly huge, and the winds that swirled around it at this height caus
ed turbulence that shook the ship and caused it to drop and shudder.

  Jack could see where the invasion ships had drawn great trenches out of the city for miles and miles. He had seen those ships at The Turn, jet black and even larger than Khufu as they landed and fed. That’s what it had looked like to Jack, feeding, and he wasn’t an idiot. The great ebony war ships of the invasion seemed to feed. He watched with his wife and son from a convertible Mustang on her perch high atop a hill near his home as one consumed great swaths of Carmel-By-The-Sea, tilling the ground beneath and then drawing the earth up and out again, sucking up everything in its path, consuming what it would, and jettisoning the rest. He did not know if these great ebony ships had used our cities for food, for fuel, or for treasure. He suspected it might have been for all three. Jack didn’t care.

  By the time he realized that the world was ending he understood if we were to survive there would need to be changes.

  The programmed coordinates were for the city of Cairo and the code he’d received only moments before was for something else entirely. The Aladdin Vault. He’d never been to the Vault, but he knew of its existence. Jack hadn’t had the rank or the trust so of course they’d never given him the code or the true location.

  Now he had both.

  The ship hit another wall of turbulence as Jack brought it swooping low down between the pyramids and to the west, through buildings that still stood and above great flattened paths of dust where the ships of The Turn had passed. The instrument panel showed him the location. It was not the newer museum, no, it clearly indicated the one founded a century or more before.

  Of course they built the vault beneath the oldest city on the planet, under a museum that held some of the most ancient of all things known to man. That only made sense. Les Scaphandriers had been an organization for hundreds of years. They reveled in ancient things. In his training he had learned of the Aladdin Vault hidden deep somewhere in the Earth, the vault that held precious treasures too dangerous or too valuable to be made public.

  Even as a young man he had wondered if he had what it took to loot such a sacred place. Now as an old man at the end of the old world and the rise of the new he came to burn it to the ground.