Moon Dreams (The Jeremy Moon Trilogy Book 1)

by Brad Strickland

  “S-sorry,” he muttered to the young couple on the beach. They continued in their activities, blissfully ignoring him. Moon turned away, hearing the man's gasps, the woman's cooed endearments, and made his way back uphill, thinking to himself that he was surely going crazy. By the time he noticed that the trees were thinning, they were also becoming insubstantial, and a moment later he stood just outside another dark swirl of fog. Other than that, he was on the gray plain again.

  After a moment's thought Moon reached to grasp the topmost button of his pajama jacket—he never buttoned it—and tore it loose. He placed the button on the ground as a reference point, and began to pace the circumference of the dark, pulsating fog bank. On the eight hundred and thirty-second step, he saw the button again. He picked it up and dropped it into his breast pocket. Then, with a deep breath, Jeremy stepped back into the fog.

  This time he was in a meadow, closer to the couple. No, same man, different girl. Their activity was one which left the man relatively unoccupied but which plainly took up the woman's full attention. Moon managed a diffident cough.

  The man, propped on both elbows, opened his eyes and beamed. “Hi,” he said. “Nice day, isn't it?”

  “Uh, yeah, nice enough,” Jeremy said, finding it hard to ignore the nude young woman and the incredibly energetic thing she was doing.

  “I hate my damn job,” the man said. “I shouldn't be locked up in a bank all day.”

  “You are?” Jeremy asked. The woman had discovered a whole new rhythm.

  “Yeah, Dunwoody branch of First National. I should be an artist. I've got a real feel for the outdoors.”

  “Uh-huh.” How in the world does she manage the whole thing, Jeremy wondered.

  “Birds,” the man said dreamily. “I'd like birds.”

  Birdsong filled the air. A light pressure on Jeremy's left shoulder jerked his head around. But instead of Guest's grip—the thing he had first feared—his shoulder was held in the delicate pinch of a bluebird's feet. The bird, a rather idealized creature in the mode of certain animated films, looked back at him with a bright, intelligent gaze and whistled part of a Brahms sonata. The ruddy little throat swelled with the beauty of the music.

  “I don't understand this at all,” Jeremy said. When he looked back at the man, he found the first girl had been joined by a second, equally unclad and equally single-minded in the attention she gave the man.

  “What's to understand? Just enjoy the beautiful day.”

  “But I don't even know you,” Jeremy said. “Why should I dream about you?”

  The man laughed. “You've got it wrong, friend,” he said. “I'm doing the dreaming, not you.”

  “No,” Jeremy smiled. “I'm aware of my own existence, thank you.”

  With a wicked leer the man said, “Yeah, but are you gettin’ any? Think I'll change the landscape a little.”

  Again the earth heaved beneath Jeremy, toppling him in its unexpected writhings, and he tumbled sideways, but softly, onto a pliant surface. When he got his bearings again, he became aware that he was in a rubber raft, bright yellow and very roomy, bobbing gently on a recurring swell. The bluebird hopped from his chest to the edge of the raft, gave him a backward glance, and flew away.

  When Jeremy got his chin above the edge of the raft, he saw the man and three girls some distance away, on the beach. He himself was riding out to sea on his raft. “Hey—” he yelled in dismay.

  “Get your own girls,” came the faint reply. In a few seconds the beach was lost in cloudy distance; in a few more, the rocking of the ocean subsided to nothing, and the raft itself dissolved away. Jeremy was again outside the swirling fog bank, sitting on the soft gray surface of the endless plain. He got to his feet, grimacing against a twinge from his injured leg. With a mental curse he turned his back on the man and his impossibly nubile attendants and walked away.

  After what might have been an hour of walking, Jeremy had seen at least another dozen of the indistinct, swirling bands of colors that marked—what? Dreams, he supposed, though none of the three he took cautious looks at were remotely like anything he could recall having dreamed before. He found a black child in an alley full of rats and spiders. (Jeremy backed out of that one quickly); a woman gorging herself on pies and cakes and growing visibly thinner as she did so (he took a slice of lemon meringue pie out of that one, only to have it vanish softly away once he was clear); and a thin, bald little man dressed in a tailcoat and white tie, though without trousers, on a dais in front of an impatient symphony orchestra.

  None of them were recognizable to Jeremy, and none gave any sign of having recognized him. He had left the last one behind, had turned back to the endless walk across the infinite plain, when he became aware that someone here, outside the swirling fogs of dreams, had joined him: a man, running toward him from the right, with long, loping strides. Jeremy stood still as the fellow approached.

  He was young, Jeremy saw, probably twenty-two or -three, with a shock of red hair in untidy disarray, and he wore the strangest outfit Jeremy had ever seen, in or out of a dream. The boots were lustrous, soft-looking, but a peculiar shade of blue, the iridescent blue of a skink's tail; the trousers were white, what there was of them, but slit from waist to midcalf down each side, held together by an intricate webbing of gold lacework (the same material decorated and held in place a codpiece in the shape of a delicately whorled pink seashell). The shirt bloused out magnificently, a multicolored, shining garment like a mad costumer's idea of pirate garb for an especially gaudy production of Penzance. At the man's left hip a pouch, apparently of the same azure leather as his boots, bounced comfortably as he approached. The man came to a halt a dozen paces away from Jeremy. “Za Sabastin,” he barked in a loud but thin voice. “Hai dsahdgen tel unteyinoth!”

  Jeremy stared at him. “What?”

  “Theganrah heddel coshtrato,” the other insisted. “Besh pom mirganst.”

  Jeremy shook his head. “Hold on. I don't understand you.”

  The red head tilted to one side, its posture eloquent of suspicion. Finally the newcomer beckoned to Jeremy, walked off a few steps, stopped, beckoned again. A thin finger pointed at the swirl of color from which Jeremy had stepped just moments before. “Ka theganrah!” the red-haired man said with great clarity and emphasis. “Nizhanti felanit pishto zehn. Teshti, teshti.”

  “Hey, Dad,” Jeremy said aloud. “I think Lassie wants us to follow her.” To the man he said, “Go on, I'm coming.” When he had taken a few steps forward, the other seemed satisfied and set off at a trot over the plain. Grunting at the throb and sting of his injured thigh, Jeremy broke into a half-hearted jog after the man. Every so often the other would pause and let Jeremy catch up, or at least come to within twenty feet or so; then he would lope away again, leaving Jeremy cursing and limping along behind.

  The trip seemed to take forever. “Damn it,” Jeremy told himself for perhaps the twentieth time, “I should be awake by now.” But he wasn't, and in the oppressive dream he followed the beckoning man farther and farther. At last he became aware that the countryside had actually changed: it was no longer completely featureless. Ahead was a low mound, like a dome not quite finished. It seemed at first to be smooth, but as they neared it, it took on the appearance of rough stonework, with all the stones as gray as the plain. Indeed, they seemed to be pieces of the plain, with the same color and texture, but cut into blocks. Jeremy's leader circled to the right of this—it rose so gradually from the level that Jeremy wasn't quite sure whether he was walking beside the dome or on its fringe—and then ducked into a low-arched passage leading into the dome.

  Jeremy paused at the entrance, looking ahead with caution. The redhead stood inside in a sort of arena. Beyond him Jeremy could see the inner wall of the dome. The man gestured with every sign of impatience.

  Stooping to avoid bumping his head and holding onto the right wall—the feel of the stones, Jeremy noted, was the same yielding, plastic texture as that of the ground—Jeremy went for
ward for five steps and came into the circle of the arena. “All right,” he said. “Now what—”

  Something hit him from behind, hard enough to buckle his knees. He landed on his stomach, felt someone on his back, felt his hands snatched and the quick whirl of cord around them. Before Jeremy was fully aware of what was going on, he had been kicked over, so that he lay on his back. A woman straddled him, her knees in his armpits, her buttocks on his stomach. Her dirty blond hair was hacked indifferently short, and from her he caught the reek of sweat. “Wevelos inat, Sabastin,” she said in a harsh caw of a voice. “Tilbet heddel kelantho!”

  The grinning redhead appeared over her shoulder. “Kestah lomoch isdros,” he said. “Visto ha'charra inzosh takira.”

  The woman slapped him, hard. “Ow!” he yelled. “Look, I don't know what you're up to, but get off me.”

  She scowled at him. “Centos destaba!”

  Jeremy looked up at the man. His teeth were very bad, dead white next to gray next to black next to yellow. “Tell her to get off,” Jeremy said. “I can't breathe.”

  The woman chanted something quickly and in a breathless tone. “Better now?” she asked abruptly.

  “Uh—yeah.” Jeremy said, surprised. “Look, would you please get off? You're kind of heavy.”

  She slapped him again, making his ears ring, and drew back for another blow. The man stopped her. “Here, enough. We got him. That's all we need worry about.”

  “Sebastian, you slime-born carrion eater,” the woman said, “we have you at last.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jeremy said, though he had the unpleasant sensation that his diaphragm was being forced up toward his Adam's apple. “I'm not Sebastian. I'm—”

  Another slap exploded on the right side of his face. “Shut it!”

  “Get off!” the man ordered.

  “You too, Niklas,” she said. “Shut it, now!”

  The man spat something nasty and low at her, then grabbed her hacked-off hair and yanked back viciously. She screamed, whether in anger or fear Jeremy could not tell, and rolled off him. She aimed a kick at the redhead—she wore cut-off pantaloons too big for her and another shimmery blouse like the man's, but she was barefoot—and he easily caught her foot and dumped her back on her rear. She scrambled up again, stiff-armed his chin, and scratched his cheek. He hacked his arm sideways at her, caught her neck, and knocked her into a cartwheel.

  Jeremy had gained his feet by then, though his hands were still tied behind him. “Hey!” he shouted.

  She had risen to one knee and was cocked and ready to spring on the man. He had thrust his hands out and wore a snarling, bad-toothed grin of welcome for her. Both of them looked at him. The tension flowed out of their muscles, and warily the woman got up.

  “What's going on?” Jeremy asked them.

  “Save it for him,” the man told the woman, and she nodded.

  To Jeremy she said, “Shut it, filth. Shut it now. When we want you to talk, we'll make you talk. Then—”

  She broke off and a kind of grim pleasure came into her face. It wasn't a pretty face, narrow-chinned and broken-nosed, with heavy eyebrows straight above washed-out gray eyes, crowned by the untidy shock of dull blond hair, but it was a good face for showing grim pleasure, Jeremy thought.

  “Then what?” he asked.

  Her whole body relaxed, subsided into an easy posture like that of a woman who has just had a satisfying sexual encounter. “Then,” she said, and now her voice was lower, with a chesty thrill in it, “then we will kill you.”

  Chapter 3

  "I'm not going to wake up, am I?” Jeremy asked for the twentieth time. “I'm really here.”

  Niklas File—the man Jeremy had followed to the crazy fortress in the rubbery gray desert—bit a chunk from a particularly unappetizing slab of meat, wiped his greasy fingers through his red hair, and said while chewing, “Stop up, you. Cut you throat soon as think. Tell me the stuff we dream-snatched gone get us outa the Between, then sneak to take off on your own. Where that mirror, that other stuff?”

  “I never had a mirror,” Jeremy said, squirming to ease the rough vine biting into his arms and thighs. He lay on his left side against one concave wall of the enclosure, and, he noted, the yielding surface seemed hard as concrete after one had been forced to lie on it for some hours. He had no feeling at all in his left arm now. Except for one quick latrine call, scowlingly supervised by Niklas, he hadn't been allowed to move. Hadn't even been given a drink of water or a mouthful of food. Actually, considering the bizarre look of the victuals his captors ate, that wasn't too bad—but Jeremy supposed that the time would come when even the maggoty meat would seem appetizing. The thought was not a cheerful one.

  Niklas growled to himself, gnawing at his meal. He had removed the blue boots, but the rest of his outfit remained in place, from the multicolored shirt to the pink codpiece. “Where's Kelada?” Jeremy asked, just to take his mind off the tingle in his arm.

  “Never mind,” the redhead muttered, but after a moment of chewing he elaborated: “Gone dream-hunting. Try to find a nearby whorl, then she call me, I go snatch us out some goods. Takes two to feed two, in here. What happened you? Get your brains knocked out good in one dream-whorl? You different. Not just—” Niklas slapped his own chin and cheeks, the sound flat in the still air. “Talk different, too. Kelada had to use an understand spell on you. You get brain-scrambled in one dream-storm?”

  “I don't know what happened to me,” Jeremy sighed. “Could you help me turn over? My arm—”

  “Turn over, turn over. Hah. Kelada come back, we find where you stash stuff, we kill you, turn over soon enough then, huh?” Niklas grinned his bad-toothed grin at Jeremy. “Slice you right, drop you in one person's nightmare, hah? You bloody-scarey, one boogeyman all bleedy on somebody's nighttime dreamhead, hah?” Niklas scaled the last of the bit of meat over the low walls of the fortress, then sat back and laughed. After a spell of that, he wiped his nose—it was running freely—with the back of his hand, snuffed, and said, “You gone soft in one head, I think. I counterspell you, counter you good, kill your magic talk. But you not even try. Ought to try, Sebastian. Ought to try.”

  Jeremy sighed and closed his eyes. He was so damned tired. “I'm sleeping,” he said aloud, knowing the words for the lie they were. No, he was not sleeping. This was, somehow, madly real. He was here, in this—this place, whatever it was, wherever it was. He was really here, really trussed like a turkey, and really the prisoner of blue-booted Niklas File, thief, and his helper Kelada North. And the vine ropes really cut into his wrists and his legs, and he thought he would really begin to scream in about half a minute from the insanity of it all.

  But he didn't. Instead he fell asleep, for the first time since his trek across the barren plain. For a time, perhaps two hours by his old measure, he slept soundly but in oblivion, mind shut off, voluntary muscles lax, breath and heartbeat regular. He sank into the depths of sleep, all unaware. Then the electricity of his brain altered sharply: the long delta waves faded and jittery alpha waves began to perk along a little more insistently than they had before. Like a rising swimmer, he made his way up from the depths of unconsciousness. Beneath their lids, his eyes began to move, flicking left, then right, as if watching something. The movements became more and more rapid. Jeremy was dreaming.

  In the dream he stood beside himself, moved with pity at the wretch he appeared to be. All tied up, clad only in an unbuttoned, tomato-red pajama top and matching bottoms, stuck there against the wall, hands useless behind him—he really looked very pathetic to himself. What he needed was a knife, he decided. Cut the cords and free the arms, and then deal with Niklas and his helper. So—dream a knife.

  That wasn't as easy as he thought. His first trial, a straightforward attempt to remember the big butcher knife from the set that his brother Bill had given him on the occasion of Jeremy's getting his first apartment, back in college, veered off somehow into a recollected day in high school, back when the other gu
ys still called him “Germy” and taunted him with his failure to be as good a football player as his brother. Red Fowler danced in and out again, slapping Jeremy alternately on his left cheek and his right one, and laughing, “Cry. Go on. Cry, Germy!” He almost sobbed in frustration when he remembered the cords on his arms and legs. Red and the others faded away.

  Jeremy, still asleep, considered how to go about the business of dreaming a knife into reality. He cleared his mind. All right, he told himself, I'll construct a knife. That should be possible. And somehow he knew, or at least he intuited, the way to begin.

  One started with the shine of the blade, and it had to be just right. This knife had a curved shine, suited to the blade it would have, a crescent-moon shine a palm's breadth from tip to curved tip. Jeremy almost hummed to himself as he visualized the gleam of the blade, cool and brilliant, like the new moon of a crisp, deep winter's night, just as sharp and just as pitiless. And under the shine lay metal, good steel, hard, tempered. Jeremy tasted the blood-tang of iron in his mouth as he dreamed the metal beneath the shine, as he sensed the molecules clumping to form particles, the particles grouping to form the shape of the blade. Next he needed something to hold onto. At one end a round wooden handle, comfortable to the hand, smooth. And now the hard part, the edge.

  For what seemed like ages, Jeremy tried to put an edge on his dream blade. He made the cutting part shinier, brighter, but to no avail: it still was dull, he sensed, and would not answer his purpose at all. He wondered if he had begun wrong. Perhaps the way to dream a knife is to begin with the cut and then move to the edge; perhaps the way there is backward, ending with the shine. No, he decided, he merely needed a closer look at the blade—a much closer look.

  In order to get it, Jeremy allowed his dream-self to dwindle to a foot high, smaller, to Swiftian tininess. Then he paced off the perimeter of the blade, dreaming, shaping, making the steel thin and keen. The metal was so real by now that it resisted the reshaping, fought to keep its original form, but Jeremy, stubborn as the steel itself, forced it to take on the edge he needed. He had to be careful that the metal behind him, still malleable from the dream, did not sag or bulge back to unwanted thickness; at the same time, he had to look ahead, to concentrate on pushing the metal back evenly, trying not to ruin the curve or the thickness. It took a long while and all his attention, but at last the task was done. Then, exhausted, the dream-Jeremy tried to wake the real Jeremy up.