~~~~~
Billy started awake. The first thing that came to him was a sour taste in his mouth. His head was throbbing as if the veins had narrowed and the blood was being pushed through forcibly. He sat up and regretted it immediately. His vision blurred as the head rush created swimming noises in his ears. Eventually it dissipated. It was dark. He realized it must be night. How long had he been asleep?
Had he really been asleep at all?
The strange interview flashed across his mind in fragments and dissected images. It was already fading. Just like a dream. He scratched his head and looked around. The walls were white and the carpet red and neither bled into the other. It was just a dream. The phial was just alcohol, or a drug for sleeping. Jake had never been there.
Billy stood up. His face felt like it was grimy somehow, like dirt had sunken into its pours. He staggered to his feet and went into the bathroom. It took him a few moments to notice what was wrong. But when he did, he screamed.
The cabinet was reattached to the wall as if it had never been broken.
A yellow sticker with a child’s impression of a face on it was stuck on the mirror, smiling out at him. He reached up and dug his nails under it. He pulled it from the mirror. There was more. Under the sticker were words written in what looked like black marker pen.
"CHANGE THE WORLD"
Billy ran back into the living room. No one was there. He went to the front door. It was locked and bolted as he’d left it. He went into the kitchen; he checked Jake’s old bedroom, but found nothing in both. He went to the window and found it locked.
There was a split second where so many thoughts rushed through his head he felt that to concentrate on one of them would be like trying to jump onto a moving train and pick a carriage while he was at it, but then something seemed to click into place. He picked up the phial and went into his own room. He lay down on the bed, and lifted it to his lips.
"Change the world," he echoed, before draining another sliver of the black ichor.
When he opened his eyes it was all warped once again, and Jake was standing next to his bed, still with his strange rigidity.
Are you ready?
Billy sat up.
"I’m ready."
He blinked. Jake was gone. He stood up.
"Where ... ?"
Come through the wall.
He turned and looked at his bedroom wall. There was a desk drawer littered with countless science fiction novels, their paperback covers bent, frayed, and smudged. In the subnormal atmosphere, the pictures on their covers seemed to shift, the characters smiling widely at him. He grinned back. He was in on their secret now. He was part of his own fiction.
He reached out and touched the wall. Ripples extended away from it as if he was a stone plunged into a volume of water. He smiled wider. In one stride he pulled himself through the once-solid formation and felt the universe re-atomize around him. It was delicious. Painful, but delicious. Jake was on the other side, creases at the edge of his eyes suggesting that he was smiling too.
"I want more!" Billy said.
Jake looked down. There was a young, lithe girl on the bed. Billy recognized her vaguely: a neighbor he’d seen occasionally in the corridor, or coming back from a night out. A duvet was draped around her and her head was nestled into the pillow. Jake reached out and touched the covers. They fluttered away airily to reveal the rest of her. She was naked. Jake's eyes creased further. Billy looked down and felt a pulse inside of him.
He reached out and was alarmed when he felt how real her skin was: soft, warm, and yet yielding. She stirred at his touch but did not wake. Billy looked up at Jake. The face was static, but the words resonated invisibly in his mind.
You can have anything you want in this world Billy. When she wakes, all it will be to her is a dream.
Something was shaking inside of Billy. He withdrew his hand. The delirium of power coursed in his chest like an electric bolt.
"Is this why you killed yourself, Jake? So you could stay here forever?"
Slowly, eyes never shifting from Billy, Jake nodded. The sticker’s smile bobbing up and down, somehow expressive though fixed — expressive of a gleeful triumph.
And you can have this world forever too, Billy. You can alter whatever you want and no one can stop you because you’re just a walker in a dream. You can change how many votes are on a register. You can go into a convenience store and take what you want. You can possess any woman you want and she’ll never stop you.
"But it won’t be real," Billy said. For a moment a shadow seemed to pass over Jake’s face. The eyes glared. When the shadow vanished, it left Billy feeling even colder than before.
What is real, Billy? Is the numbing repetition of delinquent conversations at the check-out till real? Does that make you feel anything? Or is reality really in your books? Don’t you feel so much more in them?
"Or in your video games," Billy said, quietly. "Is that why you were so locked into that damn console?" Billy grinned. Jake didn’t respond. The eyes continually stared, but there was something glassy about them, as if Jake was thinking fast.
You can have anything you want, Billy.
Billy frowned.
"You’ve said that. But what do you do? What do you do in this place?"
Jake jerked violently, so violently that Billy flinched. Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong with everything and he had no idea how he hadn’t been able to see it before.
"You’re not Jake," he said, walking back. "Who are you?"
Jake was shimmering, parts of him disjointing, as if he was a malfunctioning graphic on an artificial screen.
Billy turned to run but halted when he saw the wall behind him had morphed into a sea of terrible faces, lurching, writhing, seething beneath the plaster. Who were these people?
Jake is dead. The voice said, cutting off his thought. He threw himself out of the window. He couldn’t handle this world. He was afraid. But you’re better than him, Billy. You know you are. He was a failure. He killed himself because he couldn’t face the world. I offered him everything he could want but he refused it out of fear.
Billy turned. The figure was still in Jake’s shape, but now the darkness in the hood had somehow expanded, and looked like it was seeping out in small blindly sentient tendrils. The eyes were gloomier.
"If you’re not Jake, then who are you?"
It paused for a moment.
I am the darkest dream you yearned to dream again.
Billy shuddered. In this one thing he was sure it was not lying.
I have power. So much power, Billy. I want to give you this world. But first you have to do something. You have to unblock my mouth, and you have to give me the elixir.
"If you drink it in this world, what does it do?"
You have to hurry Billy. Your dose is running out. You won’t be asleep for much longer. You have to let me drink the elixir.
"Who says I want this world, anyway? You still haven’t answered my question."
The thing in Jake’s shape raised a hand. He mimed clicking a button on a remote-controller and the TV in the room crackled into life. Mesmerized, Billy walked closer. The TV was playing his whole life through on fast-forward. He leapt from toddler to child to teenager in minutes. When it reached him sleeping on the bed it cut out. Billy found himself crying. Not a single scene had made him happy to see. Not one clip was a joyful memory.
"I’ll do it."
The wall was no longer writhing with faces. He passed through it and into the other room. The shape of Jake was waiting for him as he stepped into the living room, standing like a black line against the table and staring down at the small little bottle.
Open my mouth.
Billy reached out and put one hand on the sticker. The flesh was clammy, almost frost-like, and hard as enamel.
Do it.
He pulled and the sticker fell off. He swallowed. There was nothing but a circular hole of blackness lodged in the face. Inside th
e hole, two points of red glittered like dying stars. The rigid body jerked and its hand shot down at the phylactery. It poured all of the black liquid into its weird maw.
Billy felt sick. His heart was beating abnormally slowly, as if clogged with tar.
Jake lumbered forward through the door and into Billy’s bedroom.
"What are you doing? What’s supposed to happen now?"
The thing in Jake’s shape wasn’t listening. It leaned down, and placed the terrible hole over his sleeping body’s mouth.
Something passed between the two, and Jake’s shell fell down limply. Billy’s sleeping body writhed and the face twitched; something black lay beyond its lips.
The realization of what had just happened left Billy dumb for a moment, and then everything swam into horrifying clarity. He could see his body’s eyes flickering as if he was about to awaken. Beneath the pale flesh, two horrid red points were shining. Everything around him started to flicker and warp even further.
He ran forward and picked up his own body in his arms. It was moaning and gargling in its sleep. His physical self was about to wake up. But Billy knew he wouldn’t wake up with it. He was going to remain here forever, or worse. He staggered to the window, his sleeping corporeal self starting to flail as if its nightmare was deepening. The red inside it was glowing brighter and brighter. How could he have been so stupid? It had all been a trick. Whatever it was that had been in Jake’s shape would cross into the real world and leave him in this broken dimension.
Unless Billy did something about it.
He flung open the window. The lids of his corporeal form’s eyes were drifting apart, and the whites shone like gems. The whole world was now flashing through colors of the spectrum as if everything was constructed of multitudinous prisms.
He breathed.
And then he jumped.
As he plummeted, hugging his own form tightly, a scream of frustration soared out from his corporeal body’s lips. It rippled outwards into the cycling spectrums of color with a vibrancy that made them jar and falter. There was a vicious snap as his physical body hit the pavement underneath him, seemingly greater than any sound he had ever heard. He felt his body’s own limbs snapping and crunching, and then all the wind was knocked out of him. He rolled off onto the pavement. The scream had abruptly ended, and the two glowing red points vanished.
Dazed, Billy looked around him. The horizons of this world were closing in, swallowed up as the dimension crumbled. Veins of blackness were flickering through everything. Soon, Billy supposed, all would be swirling blackness.
As the darkness came, Billy had time for a few last thoughts. If the blackness that was coming was oblivion, then he had to leave something for them to find in the real world. He pulled up the shirt on his corpse, and extended his index finger.
He ran his finger along his skin. In its wake, tattoos etched themselves into the flesh. The thing inside Jake had been right in one thing then: He did have power in this world. A fat lot of good it would do him now.
He began writing, conscious of the deconstructing plane around him. He had no idea what to say. Eventually, it came to him, like a random memory.
We are only walkers in someone else’s dreams.
Tread softly.
Strangely proud, Billy looked up to see that the colossal dark had almost reached him. He had no idea what would happen when he touched it. Unsure whether this was the end or the beginning, whether he had won or lost, he stood, the silent consumption of the universe hurtling like a tornado towards him. He stretched out his arms.
He was ready not to wake up.
Fiction Vortex - August 2013 Page 10