Elise and The Butcher of Dreams

by Steven Welch

  She screamed but her voice was a rasp and Jack paid her no attention.

  Again he whipped her friend against the stone floor until the Octo-Thing did not move anymore and his lovely old skin was nothing but white. He hung like a wet mop in Jack’s fist.

  The air around them came apart into a million glowing strings and shimmers. A blinding light and then gone.

  Jack studied the battered creature in his hands.

  A freak. The eyes, like the eyes of a cat, were open in a stare. What things you’ve seen, old thing, he thought, and what things you’ll never see again.

  He tossed it into the black water of the passage.

  “That’s one less monster.”

  Elise could not stand and she could not control her limbs but she had strength enough to roll and so she did. Jack turned as she rolled across the stone of the island’s ledge and into the darkness of the water.

  Jack started after her and then thought better of it. The girl disappeared under the surface. He watched for several moments, then several minutes, and she did not surface again.

  “Damn,” he said, “that one has a few lives. Too late, though, right my friend?”

  Jack looked to Taariq and laughed.

  “Didn’t finish the job but that’s no matter. Got what I wanted, really.” He moved to Taariq and sliced away at the binding cords with his knife.

  “Nice work. They told me you were the man for the job. I’m Jack, but you probably figured that out. Taariq, correct? Nice to meet you, my friend.”

  Taariq took time to reply. His eyes were wide. He stared at the dark water of the subterranean lake.

  She’s not dead, he thought. Those passages that ring this chamber go on forever. She’s not dead and he did not know how he felt about it.

  “Well, I understand that events can sometimes confuse even a good man, so whenever you’re ready to speak I’m good. Or, if you want to just take your money and hit the road, that’s cool too. Take the boat if you’d like. I have my own. Hope you can find your way out of here though. Big maze, by the look of it. Damned Aquanauts, always making things complicated,” Jack said as he turned away from Taariq and looked up at the tapestry.

  The Fabric of Eternity.

  He reached out to touch the cloth, the tightly woven art of the fabric, and as he did, there was a shimmer and they stood for the briefest of moments on a street in an African village. Pedestrians and mopeds rushed by. There was noise and chaos and life and then they were back in the passage beneath the streets of Cairo.

  Here and there, a world away and back in an instant.

  “Those moments are happening more frequently here. Something’s happening, son, something is changing and I think we’re all in for a delightful surprise.”

  Taariq coughed.

  “I’ll take my money.”

  Jack didn’t turn at the sound of the voice. His eyes sparkled as he stared at the tapestry.

  “Sure you will,” he said, “man should be paid for his work. Thing is, see, my bag is in my ship so you’ll need to tag along with me till I get some other things sorted out.”

  The knife came up and Jack cut away a swatch of the tapestry the length of his arm. It came away easily.

  “You know, this doesn’t burn. You can cut it but there’s no flame that can mark the threads. Why doesn’t it burn, Taariq?”

  Jack turned back to Taariq and held the yard of fabric up so it could be appreciated.

  “Can you imagine what strange weavers created this thing? What are we going to do with it, Taariq? What are we going to do?”

  Taariq’s skin crawled, and he had a bad feeling in his stomach. There was something strange, stranger than most things, about this man who called himself The Dream Butcher.

  “I don’t know,” he said, his voice barely a whisper, “maybe we can sell it.”

  Jack smiled, and there was something about it that made Taariq turn away.

  Something about him, something about Jack. The teeth were too big. The jaw was too open.

  There was a sound like bones rattling.

  “No, we won’t sell the Fabric of Eternity. Nope. That’s crazy talk, chief.”

  Jack laughed, and the noise echoed off of the walls and down the darkened tunnels to either side.

  “Oh, I know,” Jack said, “I’ll unmake the world. Yeppers.”

  Taariq stifled a scream then because the air around Jack shimmered and what he saw was a horror.

  A horror on two thin white legs, a skeletal thing of tight skin and long bone, with a skull too tall and many eyes that did not blink.

  Jack’s fingernails were knitting needles now and they toyed with the threads of the cut cloth. They found purchase. They gathered threads and began to reconfigure, to separate, and to rend the ancient weave so quickly that the finger needles became a blur.

  “Taariq, I don’t feel right as rain anymore. Not at all. I am not a well man.”

  The thing that had been Jack turned its awful head up and it made a sound like a scream of a child waking from a nightmare.

  THE DAY THEY STOLE THE SEA

  Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Massachusetts - The day the ocean went away.

  Mother bred me to weave and weave I did. My fingers were long and my many eyes could focus on hundreds of threads at once. The nails on my fingers were born for this so there was an eye at their tips and they were slender enough to work the loom. I did not have a name because none of us did, there was only Mother and my kin and we lived to weave from the rise of the moons until the fall of the stars.

  No. That was long ago. I have changed. I am not one of Mother’s children of many eyes anymore. That is just a memory. My name is Jack now and I was Scaphandrier. Not a very good one, granted, but I joined out of the Navy and I fell in love with it for a time. Such silly adventures. Nobody knows about them, not really, and I only found out about the Astonishing Aquanauts from a drunken woman in a bar near the little French town of Villefranche-Sur-Mer. I thought it was a joke. She told me about water-skiing with celebrities and diving the sea for lost treasures and of a secret society that did these things and more.

  They brought me onboard and I became one of them.

  So, I was there the day they killed my wife and son.

  I came to the monitoring room in the sonar station in a building disguised as a grocery store near the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts. Jennifer was home with Hunter and they lived only five minutes away so sometimes I could even sneak away for lunch if I was quick. Today the mission was scheduled to hit the target at the bottom of the trench. Some strange anomaly, another weird adventure, so a handful of Aquanauts were in a special Aquaboggin ten thousand meters below the surface of the Atlantic. I would monitor the CO2 scrubbers although there were two other people doing that as well.

  They didn’t trust me for the important things.

  I had a photo of my wife and son taped above my monitoring station. It was taken when we visited London. I would stare at the photo and dream because monitoring CO2 scrubbers was boring and that day, the day of The Turn, I fell asleep.

  The alarm woke me up. Terror. Did I miss something? Was it my fault? No. Something had gone wrong. The others were screaming into microphones, trying to communicate to the team in the submersible.

  It was the end of the world.

  As the hours went by it became obvious that they had opened doors that should have never been approached.

  We saw what was happening on the screens. A blinding light at the bottom of the sea. Then another, then there were more phone calls and we learned that there were portals opening on the seabed all over the world. The Aquanauts had been curious and curiosity killed.

  I ran to my car. I hurried home. I watched the world end from my living room window with my wife and son in my arms. Then we saw the things that moved in the street, going house to house, and they were creatures from somewhere else but they seemed so familiar. They were things from my nightmares.
/>   In my dreams the monsters were me.

  I fought. They took my Jennifer and my Hunter and I saw what they did to them. I saw when they took my son apart and I felt myself change as I watched.

  Four of them stood over me and looked down at me with their many eyes that did not blink.

  They made a chattering sound I think was only in my head. I understood what they told me. They were surprised and honored.

  Then, they left me to clean up the mess that had once been my family.

  I was left alive because in my dreams my name was not Jack. I was one of Mother’s brood and I was born to weave but now I will unweave this tapestry and I will make everything my own again.

  I will unmake this terrible reality and make it new.

  LES SCAPHANDRIERS

  Elise took a deep breath before she slipped into the lake but the air was gone now and she didn’t dare surface, not yet.

  Her neck was stiff. Eyes open but blind in the blackness and stinging from the water. Desperate, looking for her friend the Octo-Thing, but seeing nothing. Spinning and rolling in the current as she drifted. Her clothing felt heavy and the surging water pulled and twisted her in every direction.

  Can’t surface yet. Need to go as far as I can and then even farther before I take a breath.

  Need to get away.

  She slammed against stone. The wall of one of the canals that extended from the lake. Air shot out of her mouth in an explosion of bubbles. The water was cold and salty.

  No choice. Elise lifted her head out of the water and took a breath as quietly as she could. The water carried her along and she bounced again into the brick wall of the canal.

  She gripped the side of the passage, fingers digging into the slime along the rock, and stopped her momentum, then pulled herself up and out onto the pathway that ran along the edge. Her eyes scanned frantically for the Octo-Thing but she saw nothing in the dark water.

  The man had beaten her friend to death. In front of her. He had beaten her friend until he turned white and sprayed his life ink. In front of her. And she could do nothing.

  My friend.

  Elise could run no more. She dropped to the ground and pulled her legs up to her chest and her body shook. She had no control over her muscles. They spasmed and shook. She felt sick. There was pain from her wound but she did not care.

  Minutes passed. The shaking subsided but didn’t go away entirely. She forced herself to breathe deeply and slowly. Elise looked around. She sat on a path that meandered along the side of the canal for as far as she could see to the left and right. She’d drifted downstream, so she stood and continued that way, touching the wall for support.

  The air was thick and smelled of the sea. There were spots of bioluminescent fungus here and there, glow worms, and every dozen or so meters there was an electric wall sconce powered by the Aquanaut’s unknown source.

  Elise checked for her weapon. Gone. There were a few small things hidden in her vest that might be useful but her gun was gone. She touched the gash on her face. It hurt, and the skin was open.

  Elise stood, legs weak, and walked towards the first wall sconce.

  She turned a corner as the passage meandered and nearly bumped into a collection of Japanese samurai relics. Glass display cases of costumes, swords, and other items were set into a chamber carved into the passage. Deep and dark, lit by the little emergency lights, the chamber was big enough for a bus.

  I’m lost, she thought. No idea how to get out of here. Place could go on for miles.

  Wait. It’s their museum, their reliquary of weird objects.

  She stared at the swords.

  It’s their museum. The museum of Les Scaphandriers.

  Weapons.

  She snapped her wrist up and activated Jules.

  “Map of the Vault of Dreams,” she said.

  The green light of the screen jittered and then a series of lines came up. She adjusted the scale, zoomed in and out.

  “Would you like to listen to the audio guide?” asked the voice of Jules Valiance.

  “No,” said Elise. She studied the map. There was a key, a way finder, a detailed list of the relics on hand.

  She stopped, then zoomed in on one spot that caught her interest.

  Yes.

  Elise ran as quickly as she could along the narrow passage. The shaking stopped as she ran. She glanced down at the map as she went. To the right, up ahead, there should be a collection of Victorian carriages. Yes, there it was, just as indicated. She went on. According to the map she was practically underneath the great pyramids of Giza.

  There were several empty boat slips with signs and labels in different languages. Elise scanned the signs as she ran. The slips were designed for Aquaboggins. The signage showed where to fuel, how to engage the docking system, and other information.

  So there was a way for the ships to enter this space, thought Elise. Maybe tunnels built into the ceiling? Doesn’t matter.

  Elise stopped in her tracks. The passage opened into a chamber hundreds of meters deep and wide, a vast dome of dripping glow fungus and countless incandescent bulbs that flickered on as she entered, aroused by her presence through motion sensors, revealing something so horrific and strange that Elise stopped cold and stared.

  The walls were tiles, a mosaic of hieroglyphs, ancient and Egyptian. Towering statues of some unknown pharaoh flanked either wall while a carving of a great bird as wide as an airplane was hewn from the quartz and limestone dome of the ceiling.

  Not a bird. Something awful, like a dinosaur, but with great teeth and claws.

  And below the bird was a sphinx a hundred meters long, resting with the body of a lion and the great, impossible head of a monstrous hooded cobra.

  The mouth of the sphinx was a door carved a dark wood with great molded fangs of iron.

  The guide on her wrist made the path clear. Walk to the mouth of the monumental sculpture and enter.

  Elise lifted the heavy copper handle in the door’s face and the ten meter tall wooden mouth of cobra sphinx opened with a roar not unlike that of a living thing.

  THE SWARM

  The Aquaboggin’s sensors were overwhelmed.

  There were so many of the creatures and they appeared too quickly, from too many places.

  The ship scanned one of the aliens. Bipedal, almost three meters tall, slick black carapace like a beetle, two legs, two arms, almost skeletal in appearance, a disproportionally large head, thirty-six unblinking eyes scattered over the face, undetermined needle-like teeth set throughout a mouth that featured a hinged jaw, tremendous speed and quickness.

  Deep in its records there was a video log of an encounter with these creatures, many years before, on Earth before The Turn. Elise had been there, along with the one named Jules Valiance. On a rooftop in Paris.

  Bullets can kill them. The video showed that bullets were lethal to the creatures.

  So, the Aquaboggin activated its engines and swiveled its twin exterior guns into place.

  Radar, laser, and sonar locks are on but could not track the creatures. Too many to target. System is confused.

  They were a swarm of black, a wave of monsters, and they descended on the ship.

  It felt the great weight as they clambered and skittered along its surface.

  Soon there will be too much weight and I will be unable to achieve lift.

  The engines rotated into the downward position and fired to life. The ship shot up, the engines whining in protest at the extra weight.

  Spin. I must spin. The Aquaboggin was maneuverable, and it spun on an axis, shaking some of the things away. Other creatures grasped bits of the ship’s exterior and held on with long, ebony fingers.

  The Aquaboggin went vertical and fired the engines. She shot upward at speed. All but two of the things fell away. The ship came to the starboard side and began a fast spiral back down.

  Sensors showed that the swarm was entering the Pyramid of Bones.

  They would find Elise insid
e.

  The ship trained guns on the entrance plaza and opened fire. The remaining creature that clung to the hull began frantically scratching and clawing but the ship’s skin was too tough.

  The tips of the guns glowed white. Tracer bullets scorched red glowing lines in the air.

  There was carnage below the ship as the bullets torn the creatures apart. A yellow ichor that seemed to pass as blood sprayed in great gouts. Hard black skin flew like confetti.

  Still, the creatures could not be stopped from entering the pyramid. Too many. Far too many.

  The guns whined and shrieked as the chambers went dry. No more bullets.

  Sentient beings problem solve. The Aquaboggin swooped down and smashed through the doorway and frame of the bone pyramid, of the door to the museum, through an explosion of dust, wood, and gore. She was jammed hard between the door frame.

  She settled in front of the door, blocked the entrance, and fired the engines. The heat melted dozens of the creatures and a great cloud of steam and smoke billowed up.

  Sensors told her that there was not enough room around her hull for the creatures to make their way inside. She blocked the entrance. Nothing approached, the heat from the engine blast having scared them off for the moment.

  Scans were ineffective but told The Aquaboggin that at least ten of the Men of Many Eyes had made their way into the museum.

  And I have no weapons with which to attack them, thought the machine.

  Perhaps the signal of the homing device imbedded in the communication wrist devices of Les Scaphandriers would be of use.

  Yes. Wait. There is more than one signal. More than one Aquanaut? There were four signals, but only three were from communication devices. There was a fourth signal, a faint one.

  Oh. An imbedded tracking chip. This was in the body of the one they called the Octo-Thing.

  But the other signal, the one not assigned to Elise St. Jacques. What code is this?

  An old one. A code and a device from before The Turn.