“He can come here?”
“He has.”
I shivered. I was not anxious to see him again.
Ebenezer looked me over.
“You’re even more beautiful than the first time I saw you,” he said. Even in the dream world I felt the heat of my response.
“I didn’t know who you were,” he said, “when we first met. I thought our love making was a sweet gift from the god of dreams.”
Now that was interesting. Was it possible that it wasn’t Elbaz but my father who had orchestrated our meeting for some purpose of his own? All those years ago? I tried calling out to Morpheus mentally but met nothing but a black velvet void at the edges of my consciousness.
“Neezer says you’ve met Morpheus.”
‘Yes,” he said. “And you’ve met my inner child.”
“Yes.” I said. “Where does he go when you’re awake?”
“Obviously, he doesn’t exist because he’s grown up.”
“Obviously,” I said, although it was not all that obvious to me.
“But when I dream, he’s here, living an alternate version of our childhood in the dream world he created when he was a little kid” He looked around at the bedroom. “This is actually part of it. A room in our grandmother’s house.” A smile crossed his face. “She loved us very much. We were always happy to spend time with her.”
“What else is here?” I asked, thinking that if I were a scientist like my mother and sisters, I could get a book out of this conversation. But I’m me and what I was getting out of it was a sense of total and profound sadness that as a child Ben had needed to create a dream world for himself because he felt so unloved in his waking world.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. And I leaned over and kissed his mouth as he’d leaned over me once and kissed me.
“I looked for you for years,” he said.
I laughed at that. “Really,” I said. “Ekene? Citlali? Dhyana? You haven’t lacked for company.”
He smiled at that, apparently quite pleased with myself. “You’ve been keeping track?” he said.
“You’re pretty hard to ignore,” I said. “Tearing up hotel rooms. Really? How 70s rock star can you be?”
“I get bored easily,” he said, a little too cockily. A little too like his father.
“We have to leave,” I said, more harshly than I intended.
“I’ve tried,” he said. “I’m a lucid dreamer. Usually I can walk in and out of my dreams like I’m opening the door to a coffee shop.”
He sounded frustrated. I knew the feeling. When I realized the door behind me had disappeared, I’d been furious. Dreams are my playground and people don’t get to come onto my playground and change things.
“Neezer said your father poisoned you.”
“Yes,’ he said simply.
“Why?”
“To get to you.” He looked at me earnestly and for a moment, he looked exactly like Neezer. “I had to let him trap us here so that I could protect you.”
He sounded sincere but I still had some doubts. No matter how much I had idealized him after our magical first encounter, his behavior since then had not been particularly selfless or sincere. Why would he care about protecting one girl out of the dozens, maybe hundreds he’d bedded?
“It would have been a lot easier to send me a warning email,” I said. “We really need to go.”
I turned away and he caught my arm. “Reve—”
“There’ll be time to talk later,” I said.
Chapter 8
“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
Ebenezer pushed aside the coverlet draped over him and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He was wearing a V-necked white undershirt and drawstring cotton pajama pants. He staggered just a little as he stood up and I moved to catch his arm. He grinned down at me. “Can’t keep your hands off me, can you?” he said.
“Banter?”
“It’s how I deal with anxiety.”
“Find another way.”
“She’s really bossy isn’t she?” Neezer said. He’s somehow reappeared in the room without my noticing.
“Sometimes it’s fun to have women boss you around,” Ebenezer said. “Especially if they spank you.”
“Euw,” I said, mostly because while I might be up for it and had a sudden, very vivid flash of what it would be like to have Ebenezer smack me lovingly on the rear, it seemed like an icky thing to say in front of Neezer. Fortunately, the boy was distracted by the landscape that had suddenly appeared outside the cozy bedroom.
“Wow,” he said. “It looks like a game of Fallout.”
“You play Fallout?” I asked, wondering when the game was invented.
“No,” he said. “But Ben does. He finds it relaxing to shoot zombies.”
I flicked a glance at Ebenezer. He shrugged sheepishly. “It’s true.”
“Do you ever dream about the game?” I asked.
“Not that I know of.”
That was not good news. It meant we were still inside whatever construct Elbaz and Alexander Quarles had put together to trap his son. Which meant dark dream magic was involved. I really, really, really wished I could contact my father but you probably only get one deus ex machina moment in your life and I’d already had mine.
I stepped through the door. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Neezer take his older self’s hand. Ebenezer said something to him that I didn’t hear but the boy’s body language relaxed. I suddenly felt a rush of protective tenderness for both of them. I was glad that they’d had each other’s company.
And that was the last coherent thought I had for a while because we’d no sooner cleared the doorway when we were assaulted on all sides by a freezing wind that seemed to have the voices of a thousand damned souls trapped in it.
“Benny,” I heard Neezer call out and when I turned back, I saw Ebenezer had picked Neezer up.
I reached out to touch Ebenezer’s shoulder and some sort of molten golden energy shot through me into him, like lightning grounding itself. He shuddered but did not drop the boy. The windstorm died to a breeze.
‘I’m sorry,” I said, baffled. “Are you all right?”
“We’re fine,” he said. “Not cold anymore.”
I realized I wasn’t cold either. If we got out—
When we get out, I told myself fiercely, I was going to have to ask my sisters if they had ever recorded a phenomenon like that while dreamwalking.
Ebenezer moved up until we were shoulder to shoulder. “We need to keep moving,” he said. “In Fallout, you need to keep moving.”
“You won’t die if you’re killed inside a dream,” I said.
“You promise?” Neezer asked. I met Ebenezer’s eyes over the top of his head.
“Yes,” I said, because I was positive that was true.
But what happened next made me question everything.
I heard it coming before I saw it. In Ray Bradbury’s classic story about time travel gone awry, he describes the approach of a T. rex as being like “a sound of thunder.” That’s what it was like, a sound so intense you could feel it in your bones. And then this enormous beast burst out of a falling-down warehouse.
It was a Tyrannosaurus Rex at least 15 feet tall.
And bright red.
“Rexxie,” Neezer and Ebenezer said at the same time. Neezer jumped out of Ebenezer’s arms and ran forward to embrace the dream dinosaur, which bent down to nuzzle his tooth-filled head into the boy’s shoulder.
“Red?” I asked Ebenezer.
He shrugged. “We didn’t like Barney.”
“So this dreamscape has elements of your own dreams in it,” I said, excitedly. “That is really good news.”
“How do you figure?” he asked, watching his younger self pet the dinosaur on its nose. I wondered if Ebenezer had ever been allowed to have a pet as a boy. Alexander didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who wanted animals around making messes. Not that he would be the
one to clean the messes up.
There were tons of animals on the clinic grounds—pygmy goats and a couple of horses, and even some burros Mother had rescued when the Bureau of Land Management announced its plan to slaughter thousands of them. We also had pet therapy cats and bunnies and dogs that patients could “borrow” to sleep with. At one time, there was a pink turtle living in an aquarium in the lobby of the main building, a creature I’d dreamed into existence and housed there for weeks before anyone noticed it. At first, Mother wanted me to put it back in the dream realm, but as it turned out, no one thought it was real, so she let Pinky stay.
A few years later, a zoologist with sleep apnea asked to take her home as his “therapy turtle,” and as far as we knew, scientist and turtle were doing fine.
“Reve?” Ebenezer said, snapping me out of my reverie.
“Any other imaginary friends who might be useful?” I asked.
“Rexxie’s not imaginary,” he said, pointing out the creature’s very obvious reality.
“Bring him with us,” I said.
“Rexxie’s a her,” Neezer said, coming toward us with the dinosaur following like an obedient dog. “This is Reve,” he said to Rexxie. “She’s a friend.”
And glad to be one. Tyrannosaurus Rex means “terrible lizard” and this thing was one of the most frightening creatures I’d ever seen in a dream. Still, the dinosaur bobbed her head at me amiably enough and made a sound that sounded like rocks grating against each other.
“Rexxie doesn’t want you to be scared,” Neezer said. “But stay behind her. If she sees Dr. Elbaz, she’s going to rip him apart. And you might get hurt if you’re in the way.”
I looked at Rexxie. “I like your style,” I said.
We kept walking. I couldn’t help but think of The Wizard of Oz. All we needed was a little dog. Although maybe Rexxie counted.
As we got further and further from the cozy room where we’d found Ebenezer, the landscape grew more and more nightmarish. Rexxie trampled down a massive thorn barrier—we kept running into Sleeping Beauty metaphors made manifest—and crossed something that looked like the Dead Marshes from Lord of the Rings. We saw ourselves floating in the water. Ebenezer and Neezer were creeped out by this but I could only think, Is that all you got? Mirroring and reflecting imagery is common in dreams.
“This doesn’t seem so hard,” Neezer commented, echoing my own thoughts. He looked at his older self. “How come we didn’t just walk out before?”
Ebenezer looked perplexed. “I don’t know. I think we needed Reve.”
He turned to me. “My father doesn’t know about our connection. Dr. Elbaz didn’t know about it until we were inside his dreamworld and he could rummage through our experiences. For whatever reason, he didn’t share that information with Alexander.”
No “dad” for Ebenezer. I wondered how old he was when he first started calling his father by his first name.
“So your father and Elbaz figured that I wouldn’t let a random stranger stay stuck in dreamland?”
Ebenezer shrugged. “Elbaz said your mother was a bleeding heart and had brought you and your sisters up to be softies too. My father wasn’t convinced until he actually brought us to the clinic and met you.”
“We barely exchanged three words,” I said.
“He prides himself on being a good judge of character.”
“I hate that Dr. Elbaz and your father can predict my behavior so easily.”
Ben took my hands in his and squeezed them. “My father made a mistake,” he said. “Our connection is the key to getting out of here,” he said. “My lucid dreaming ability and your special skills. They create an unknown unknown.”
I squeezed back. “We’re in this together,” I said.
“Not the way I pictured our reunion,” he said.
Neezer looked at both of us. “So Reve is your girlfriend?”
I noticed he didn’t say “our,” for which I was grateful. It would have been just too weird.
“Better,” Ebenezer said. “She’s our soulmate.” He looked at me. “All those other women? They weren’t you.”
I looked at him and saw the sincerity in his eyes. Out of all the women in the world, he chose me. I leaned forward and kissed him. “Soul mate?” I said. I’d meant to sound flippant but the words had come out breathy.
Ebenezer turned to me. “Would you call it something else?”
He looked so serious I couldn’t even think of teasing him anymore.
“No,” I said. “Soul mate just about covers it.”
“Cool,” Neezer said and tugged at a long leash that had suddenly appeared in his hand. It connected to a huge collar around Rexxie’s neck. The dinosaur grumbled but followed him.
It was impossible to keep track of time. We passed through terrible places—battlefields where wolves fed on dead bodies, genocidal massacres of whole villages, more modern horrors like the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing with firefighters carrying out the bodies of dead babies from the daycare center. But somehow we seemed to be in a little bubble of protection. It was as if we were walking through a horror movie set and nothing could really touch us. Until we came to the door that looked like the opening in a bulkhead of a steampunk submarine.
The dinosaur shied away from it, the way a dog will sometimes balk at getting near something they don’t trust. I brushed past Rexxie and put my hand on the door.
It was hot to the touch and hissed like snake when I turned the knob, although it did not burn my hand.
“Rexxie doesn’t want to go in there,” Neezer said.
“She doesn’t have to,” I said. “This is the last room between us and the waking world. Rexxie can leave us here.”
‘Okay,” he said and his voice was very small.
He patted Rexxie on the nose and said something that sounded like, “You’re a good girl,” then turned around and walked back to Ebenezer and me.
The red dinosaur simply vanished.
“I don’t want to go in there either,” Neezer said. Ebenezer knelt down so that he was eye-level to his younger self.
“Thank you for coming this far,” he said. “Do you think you can find your way back to Nana’s house?”
The boy nodded. “Okay,” Ebenezer said. “The doctor knows Reve and I are coming out. He won’t keep you from leaving. He thinks he’s won.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
Ebenezer looked at me. “We’re sure,” he said. He hugged the boy and whispered, “I love you,” and then stood up. Neezer vanished like the dinosaur had.
It was suddenly very, very quiet.
Ebenezer took my hand and kissed it. He was still holding my hand when I stood on my tiptoes to kiss him back. He responded hungrily, devouring my lips with his own. It was like we were giving each other soul to soul resuscitation and when we pulled back, there was an aching feeling as we disconnected.
There would be time for connection in the waking world. But first, we had to get there.
Ebenezer had been right. We were soul-mated. And whatever was on the other side of the door, we would face it together.
We opened the door.
Inside was an abattoir. The man who had haunted my dreams since I was four years old was standing in front of the longest wall, finger painting strange designs in blood pouring from his fingertips. He had giant tarantulas on each shoulder, like living epaulets. Otherwise he was naked.
There were other substances smeared on the wall—a pinkish froth, something that looked like bile, and heavy smears of what could only be his own shit. He turned his head completely around when he heard us, so he was staring backwards.
“Hello Reve,” he said. “Aren’t you pretty.”
Beside me, Ebenezer tensed. Dr. Elbaz laughed. Often in dreams it feels as if your mind has slowed down, that you’re processing things at half of your normal speed. But my brain was going into overdrive, analyzing all the input. I noticed that he was handsome, something I had never thought about whe
n I was a child. His features were hawk-like, his gray eyes hooded and mysterious. His dark hair, only lightly flecked with gray, hung below his shoulder.
His arrogance rose off him in almost tangible waves. He thought he had the upper hand. He knew what I could do but he wasn’t worried I’d unleash my powers. Why not?
As if he could read my thoughts like Morpheus, he said, “If you use your dream magic against me, I will kill your love.”
I heard Rexxie roar from somewhat close by.
Deus ex anima, I thought wildly and almost laughed.
The doctor saw my reaction and scowled.
He doesn’t like it that I’m not afraid, I thought. I can use that.
“If you’re so powerful, why are you still here?” I asked him and it was an honest question. He’d obviously been able to reach beyond the limits of his dream prison to contact Alexander Quarles. If he could do that—something he should not have been able to do—why couldn’t he simply leave?
The doctor ignored me, however, and focused on Ebenezer. “Your father is a greedy man but he has no idea what this girl is capable of.”
Ebenezer stared right back at him. “My father is no longer a factor,” he said.
That got an even bigger laugh from our captor. “Your father was never a factor,” he said. “I orchestrated this. All of this is my plan,” he said. “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”
He looked at me with a gleeful smirk I wanted to smack right off his face. “You never wondered how many coincidences it would take for one particular dreamer to walk into your dream?”
He bared his teeth in a grimace. “I did that.”
He spread his arms wide like the Christ the Redeemer statue on the mountain in Rio. “You are the offspring of a god,” he said. “And yet you are mine to command.”
“I don’t think so,” Ebenezer said and Squeezed my hand.
Elbaz suddenly let loose and we were being pelted with sharp objects and rocks the size of turkey eggs. The entire room seemed to liquefy and I felt myself drowning.
“You’ve always believed there are rules in the dream world,” he shrieked, “but I am beyond rules. Your father thought to contain me here. What he did was amplify me.”
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