The Dream Operator

by Mike O'Driscoll

  I enter another room and am assaulted by a ferocious heat surging from a dark forge sunk in the floor. Iron chains rattle and a shadow floats across the ceiling. Sparks fly up from the forge and in the red light above I see an old man suspended by his feet from a chain. His body writhes as he swings in a small circle, twenty feet or so overhead. One sinewy arm lowers a pair of metal tongs into the fire while the other uses another instrument to shape the soft, glowing lump of metal. How can he possibly stand the heat? When he looks at me, it’s clear that he finds neither pleasure nor pain in the task. Only purpose.

  After a minute or two, what he forges has assumed a vaguely human shape. I feel an incipient dread as the world I thought I knew becomes less familiar. Recognition dawns on me as I look at the face the old man has bestowed on his machine. Before I can open my mouth to scream, the metal creature beats me to it.

  Moon woke screaming and heard nothing. I cannot be awake, he told himself. Not without her. He closed his eyes and thought of Shannon. As the dream stirred into being, he saw himself looking for her.

  Another face drifts into view—the one that might lead me to her. I see it in the parade of glass that rushes by like the windows of a metro train speeding through the night. Milo places a sweaty palm against the glass. He is gone but the glass door slides open with a hiss and I get out at the carnival ground where the evening sky is filled with jaunty tunes and coloured lights. The music spills out from the competing attractions and all the rides are in motion. I walk past a herd of riderless ponies impaled on metal spikes, foaming at the mouth and writhing in mute agony as they rise and fall on the bloody carousel. Beyond it, there are driverless bumper cars smashing into each other like rabid bugs. An empty Ferris wheel looms over the carnival, spinning lazily through this dream I can’t unmake.

  I drift into a tent whose walls are painted with arcane symbols I can’t read. A young girl is strapped to a gurney, attended by a man with tools for fingers. He delves wetly into the ruins of her flesh, and looks at me disdainfully, resenting the intrusion. The girl will never speak again.

  I am sucked into the vortex of another dream, where two men dance around the body of a young man suspended naked from the ceiling. Blood gushes from his throat into a silver goblet which one man drinks from, before offering it to me. The tear in the young man’s throat speaks, saying it’s of no consequence, that his whole life was always leading up to this moment.

  The urge to retreat is compelling, but instead I extend a slender thread of lucidity out into the dreamscape, searching until, from deep within the cacophony of nightmares, I hear the feint hum of a familiar presence. Milo is here, one of several shadowy creatures moving with a slow, deliberate purpose I can’t yet comprehend. He is absorbed in some task, intent on helping these others achieve their desires. I am able to close in on him and caress the edge of his consciousness without his being aware. I slide into his mind and plant a seed of curiosity in there:

  He knows where I have her. He will come for her.

  Disturbed at this unwanted notion, Milo moves to the wall where a girl lies chained to the floor. He grabs her head, turning it first to one side, then the other. Dreaming, Shannon makes a noise but doesn’t open her eyes. Milo seizes her throat and demands to know where I am. Shannon can’t speak because he is crushing her throat. Let her tell you, I whisper in his brain. When he lets go, she coughs and utters the word. Orpheum. Milo nods and shortly after I see him emerge from an old redbrick in an unfamiliar part of the city. It’s not until Milo is driving north on Nepend, that I recognise the abandoned warehouses and commercial buildings of Wintertown.

  The room seemed altered somehow, when Moon awoke. The walls had crept closer to the bed and the ceiling had dropped to just a yard or two above his head. It was as though the night had fallen on him alone and it took all his strength not to give in to the terrible sense of panic. He is coming, Moon reminded himself. Be ready. In the darkness he allowed himself to be enveloped by dreams.

  The air is feverish as Milo enters the hotel. The clockwork dreamers downstairs scurry about him like antibodies drawn to some new virus. The frost that cloaks Milo repels them. His stone features are pitiless as he hears my whispered prompt, dressed in the guise of instinct.

  ‘Up here, all the way to the top.’ Milo begins to climb, acting on what he believes is his own hunch.

  I sense his anticipation and tighten my grip. Waves of hatred precede his entrance but he is in my kingdom now. A sudden fatigue falls on him and he slumps to the floor. He tries desperately to resist, as though afraid of the loss of control that dreams entail. But I work on him, seducing him with glimpses of a life in which there are no constraints and no mercy. In the dream that seduces him, Milo is answerable to no one but himself. Everything he desires is right here for the taking and Milo feels no inclination to deny himself. In that moment of falling, the dreams he has witnessed are revealed to me.

  They speak of pain and blood and lust. There are no rehearsals and the rituals are completed in single takes. When it is over, the shell of a young child lies in an ocean of its own blood and a pale, balding man licks the gore from his fingers while his erection withers. A woman is beaten by two men wielding baseball bats. They avoid her head and torso and concentrate on her limbs, delighting in the sounds of breaking bones. Their exertions tire them, but not so much that they don’t have the strength to fuck her to death where she hangs. Instruments of hurt and fear, tools designed for squeezing, cutting and flaying. I see them all at work and behind them, the presence of Milo, watching, providing victims for this meat trade.

  It is all too much for a rational mind and mine has not been that way for a long time. Appalled by what I see I strengthen my grip on Milo’s brain, urging him towards somnambulism. He stands, and I sense his reluctance, his confusion at being pulled away from his dream. He stumbles unwittingly towards the moonlight and parts the curtains. For a moment he resists the temptation to open the sash window and when he feels the night air on his face he struggles bitterly against the urge to climb up onto the sill. It is no use. Not until his centre of gravity has passed beyond the point of imbalance, do I relinquish my hold. But that’s still more than enough time for Milo to see the spiked railings rushing up to tear his body apart.

  *

  Moon woke with the stench of despair seeping from his pores. In the dream Shannon was still alive. Whatever it was Milo had planned for her hadn’t yet taken place. With an effort of will he recalled what he had seen in Milo’s head. Fifteen minutes later, he stood outside the Wintertown redbrick. The building was dark and still as he searched for an entrance. He found an unlocked door in an alley at the side of the building. Inside, he moved along a narrow, dimly lit corridor. At the far end an illuminated sign above another door said, Studio O.

  A faint, machine-like humming emanated from the room. He turned the handle and pushed the door open. The noise came from a generator, powering up an array of electrical equipment stacked along a counter. He followed power leads to a switch that activated a couple of spotlights mounted on the walls. A body lay face down on the floor. Moon turned it over, saw the knife wounds in Lucas’s chest and the gash in his throat. He shuddered, realising that he had not seen this in Milo’s head. He held Lucas’s body and tried to connect with a strand of his last dying dream. But Lucas was empty, the vessel of his body wiped clean of every last trace of who he had been.

  Moon examined the equipment. Two laptops, cameras, speakers, a pile of discs. He ran a finger over the track pad of one of the computers and saw an icon like a reel of film. He clicked on it, and white noise came on screen before it faded to black. Something emerged from the darkness. In the dim light, the form coalesced into the shape of a man in black, PVC pants. More lights came on and in the background there was Lucas, a Mitty grin on his face, trying to undress.

  “I hope my ma never gets to see this,” he said as he fell.

  The client laughed. “I don’t think so, boy. In fact, I’m positive.�
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  Lucas lay on his back, struggling to remove his trousers. “When are they bringing Shannon?” he asked.

  “They didn’t say.” The client moved into shot, a small, well-groomed looking man. Quite ordinary. He closed in on Lucas. “They tell me she’s not for you. Not anymore.”

  The camera panned in close on Lucas’s face. Moon saw the first sign of fear in his eyes. Sharp light flickered off a long, thin blade that had materialised in the client’s hand. Lucas’s eyes were drawn to it as though it were an object of utter fascination. “They said it won’t hurt,” he said.

  “They tell me it’s not that bad,” the client said, placing one hand on Lucas’s head. “I do so hope they were lying.”

  When Lucas began to scream, Moon stopped the film. He found the external hard drive, ejected the disc and saw what was written on the label. Jackson+Lucas # 3. He put the disc on the table and looked through the other discs. They were all unlabelled. The other laptop had a disc drive. He saw the disc’s icon on screen and pressed eject. His heart missed a beat or two as he read the label on the disc: Milo+Shannon # 1.

  He left the studio and returned to the Orpheum, taking the disc with him. In the dreaming room, he removed his clothes and held the disc close to his chest. It didn’t matter what it contained because it no longer had any reality as far as he was concerned. All that was real now was right here in this room, inside his head. All that you have, all that you ever had, was an illusion. She never existed outside these four walls. The truth, such as it is, is that you dreamed her into being. And having done so before, you can dream her back again.

  Garrett Moon closed his eyes and…

  …fell out of this world.

  About the Author

  Mike O’Driscoll lives in Wales. When not writing he works with adults with mental health problems. His books include Unbecoming and Eyepennies. His fiction has been published in TTA publications Black Static and its predecessor The 3rd Alternative, Interzone, and Crimewave, as well as in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Albedo One, Back Brain Recluse and a whole bunch of long since deceased small press magazines, may they rest in peace. He’s also had stories in numerous anthologies including Black Feathers, Inferno, The Dark, Lethal Kisses, Off Limits (all edited by Ellen Datlow), Gathering the Bones (edited by Ramsey Campbell & Dennis Etchison), Darklands and Neonlit (both edited by Nicholas Royle), The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror #17, and two volumes of Stephen Jones’ Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. His essays on David Cronenberg and David Lynch appeared in The 3rd Alternative, and his writings about all things horror, Night’s Plutonian Shore, featured until recently in Black Static. His story ‘Sounds Like’ was adapted and filmed by Brad Anderson as part of the Masters of Horror TV series.