Echoes

by Therin Knite

  My room is in the stale apocalyptic state I left it in during my morning rush, and I kick a few stray articles of clothing from my path. My shirt and pants and socks go in the hamper, my project board is returned to its inconspicuous home behind a suit I haven’t worn since my last PhD graduation ceremony, and then I flop down on my unmade bed, staring at the ceiling. I mumble, “Lights off,” and the entire room goes dark save for something to my right.

  It’s the digital picture frame that rests atop my old wooden night stand. The same set of photographs has been on repeat for the last ten years. I sit my Ocom on the nightstand and grab the picture frame as it resets to the beginning of the queue.

  I’m four, and it’s Halloween. Mom’s dressed me up like a Pterodactyl, and she hoists me high into the air so I can pretend that I’m flying when no other child can. That I’m special. I’m five, and it’s my first day of fifth grade. I’ve got a lunchbox filled with goodies, and Mom stands beside me as we wait for the school bus to come by. I’m six, and it’s Christmas Eve. There’s a holographic tree and a ton of brightly wrapped presents. There’s Mom with her Santa hat on, tickling my nose with the white fluffy end.

  Then there’s the next morning, which is not in the set.

  When I find Mom dead on the floor.

  Chapter Four

  I go to sleep in my bedroom at eleven forty-five and wake up on Pennimore Street at midnight. My first thought? This is the old gods’ hell.

  The neighborhood is utterly devoid of life. Silent like I imagine the world was in the aftermath of the Fall, when we destroyed ourselves and left nothing behind but ash and ruin. Streetlamps cascade filtered light onto empty sidewalks. Insects skitter across deserted roads. Cracked pavement bites at my toes as I stand on the corner of the nondescript block across the street from the convenience store. Its sign reads Larry’s Shop and Save, but there’s no Larry in the building, or anyone else. I’m alone in a suburb two hours from home, no clue how I got here, no clue why no one else is here.

  There’s a frigid chill crawling up my spine like a wounded centipede, and I feel as if I’m half of myself. But whether I’m a body without a soul or a soul without a body, I can’t discern. And it’s the not knowing, the inability to know, that makes it hell. A spike of absolute terror clogs my throat, and I spin on my toes, searching for answers to questions I can’t even grasp.

  Then it’s gone. The fear. Just like that.

  I scramble away from the verge of a panic attack, and my brain makes sense of the world.

  This place looks and feels like Pennimore Street. A mid-September cold front has settled in the ground, freezing out the warmth of a summer holiday. Scents of freshly mowed grass and barbecue smoke waft through the air. All the buildings are the same, brick for brick, shingle for shingle. Seventy-two homes, a nursery school, fourteen commercial properties, and a children’s play park.

  But something isn’t right. This is not Pennimore Street. There’s an undercurrent to this world that feels artificial, like it’s a virtual simulation and not the genuine article. It reminds me of my own mental reconstructions, accurate down to minute details but still a few miles short of reality.

  What the heck is going on here? Where am I?

  My feet retrace their steps from the convenience store to Manson’s house and come to rest at the same spot on the sidewalk where I watched the IBI pack up and leave when EDPA took over jurisdiction. There are some obvious differences to the scene compared to this morning.

  Manson’s fence is in one piece. Green grass grows in the yard where there should be black char. The gouge in the white panel siding where the dragon’s tail struck the house as it flew off has been erased. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say no one died here last night.

  “Well, this is unexpected.”

  I jump and wheel around to find umbrella girl behind me. She’s dressed in a heavy-duty field uniform, guns and knives and unknown pieces of tech strapped to every practical place. It strikes me as the getup of a hunter, but what could someone hunt in Pennimore Hell?

  Besides dragons.

  “You,” I say.

  “Me,” she replies. “You were hoping for someone else?”

  “I was hoping for someone who’d answer my questions.”

  “How do you know I won’t?” She smirks, rubbing it in my face that she tricked me earlier, intentionally skewed my ability to read her motives. Now, she’s not suppressing her body language, and her details are much clearer. “Go on. Run your mouth. I’ll answer all your questions.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Mhmm.” Her arms are crossed, and her fingers dance against her ribcage, the sign of someone who lives and breathes adrenaline. It’s an impatient habit. It’s why she had the umbrella, to occupy her hands. “Including all the questions you haven’t thought of yet.”

  “How do I know you won’t humiliate me again?”

  “You don’t, but I won’t.” She glances at Manson’s pristine lawn and raises an eyebrow. “This morning, I was just teasing you—and proving a point. That you aren’t a perfect genius. That you can be fooled. That you will be fooled. A lesson best learned in a neutral setting and not a dangerous one.” She begins to pace the perimeter of the lawn. “Interesting. They reset the level three damage.”

  “The what?” I trail behind her a couple steps.

  “The damage to the property caused by the dragon.”

  “No, level three of what?”

  “The dream.”

  It’s funny how fast hell becomes heaven when ignorance is booted out the window.

  “We’re in a dream,” I say. “That’s how I got here. I’m not here at all. I’m still in my bedroom.”

  She plucks a few blades of grass from the edge of the yard and minces them with her fingers. The hunch of her shoulders is reminiscent of a scientist bent over a microscope, searching for signs of life in what should be a barren rock. “You don’t sound as astonished as I would like.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “The average person is pretty shocked when they find out something like this”—she gestures to the air around her—“isn’t real life.” Her feet take her farther down the cul-de-sac sidewalk, and she examines the homes of Manson’s nearest neighbors, who refused to be interviewed by the IBI without a lawyer present.

  “I’m not the average person, as I’m sure you know.” I increase my speed to keep up with her. “The dream explanation makes sense. I hadn’t considered it because I didn’t know it was an option. But something felt off to me about this place, and now I know what it is.”

  Her head tilts to the side at a severe angle. “Did anyone ever mention that you are emotionally stunted?”

  “Pretty much everyone, actually. Should I apologize for being traumatized as a child?”

  “Were you now?”

  “Like you don’t know. You’ve read all about me, I’m sure. Researched me. And you’ve probably been spying on me too. You’re not the kind of person who interacts with people you know nothing about. You only go in for the kill when the other side has no secrets. That’s what today was about, right? The crime scene. The club. Proving that you can crush me with your intellectual pinky finger? That I am an ant and you a colossus?”

  She bobs her head in agreement. “Nice metaphor. And about the trauma thing: I was just testing you, to see what you’d reveal. I’ve heard you’re not fond of talking about the day your mother died.”

  “Would you be?”

  “I have much worse things I’d rather not talk about, and—”

  A faint, animalistic screech resonates through the bones of Pennimore Dream. A light breeze whispers through the trees. Abandoned swing sets creak on rusted chains. Shutters quake.

  Umbrella girl comes to a staccato halt, eyes scanning the area with a mechanical accuracy that makes me feel, for the first time in my life, the more human of two people.

  “That’s the dragon,” I say.

  “Indeed. The killer wants
to play tonight, it seems. Last time, I was here for three hours, and you know what happened?”

  “Nothing?”

  She loops an arm through one of mine and starts pulling me alongside her. “The bastard that killed Manson wouldn’t show their face during the last occurrence of the dream, wouldn’t even show their toy again after they roasted their target. I think they were hoping I’d call it quits and leave, but after a while, they got fed up and ended the dream. So here I am again tonight, walking around in a dream version of the most boring neighborhood in North America, waiting for a killer to pick another victim or decide it’s time to pack up the show and skedaddle. They could have at least made the dream exciting.”

  “Hold on.”

  Another screech rebounds through the neighborhood.

  “Yes?”

  “If we’re in a dream,” I say, “and the dragon is in the dream, then how did it kill Victor Manson?”

  “Who says dreams can’t kill?”

  “Um, most people.”

  “Most people don’t have high enough clearance to know about echoes.”

  “Echoes?”

  “An echo is a type of dream that extends its existence from the dreamer into a dimension parallel to our own.” Her words sound rehearsed, as if she’s spoken them as part of a presentation. “A type of dream that can kill you and most of the time tries quite hard toward that end. Because the people who use echoes for gain aren’t the ones dreaming of candy and rainbows, if you catch my drift.”

  “So murderers are killing people with dreams now? Not even—”

  A black shadow darts through the starry sky and collides with a nearby house. It thrashes around, shredding the roof, shingles and solar panels falling like rain. But eventually, the dragon gets its bearings. It ascends to the highest point of the rooftop, spiked tail whipping through the air. It is everything I imagined and more. Bones and muscles and scales and claws never conceived by nature. A predator left off the universe’s laundry list.

  For a moment, it sits and waits, a lapdog longing for commands. Then its head snaps to attention, and its eyes lock on to us with eerie precision. It knows who we are.

  “Why am I here?” I say.

  “I don’t know. Why did you come here?”

  “I brought myself here?”

  “Sure did.”

  The dragon readies itself to pounce, and its mouth seems to pull back into that cruelly innocent smile that accompanies a house cat who stumbles upon their long-lost favorite toy.

  “So, what do I do?”

  “You could help me.” Her gloved hand grips my bare, shaking wrist. She’s coiled tight like a spring, ready to sprint ten miles and drag me behind her, kicking and screaming.

  “Help you what? Hunt dragons?”

  A sharp shriek pierces the night.

  “No. Just the people who dream them up.”

  The clothing store’s mannequins act as our vanguard while we plot behind the checkout counter. Every few seconds, umbrella girl peeks over the edge, scanning for the dragon. And every few seconds, another furious cry pummels my eardrums. It’s not getting any closer, however, and by the time my chest has stopped praying for air, the dragon is a phantom in the distance.

  “If that thing kills me here, what’ll happen to my body in the real world?” I peer around the fluffy feather boa hanging between us.

  “You’ll die. In the same way. In a level two echo—the type we’re in now—your body is connected to the dimension in which the echo exists. Any injuries you sustain will be replicated in the real world.”

  “Is that how Manson died?”

  She shakes her head, a stray white lock falling over her eyes. “He wasn’t in an echo when he died. That was a level three breach, when the barrier between dimensions breaks down and the dream temporarily becomes reality.”

  “Temporarily? So the reason the dragon wasn’t still flying around this morning is because—”

  “The dream ended, yeah. Any and all dream content ceases to exist when the dreamer stops dreaming. Which, of course, given the conditions under which the dragon came and went, can only mean that…”

  “Someone created this echo specifically to kill Manson, believing that their murder weapon of choice would be untraceable.”

  A low chuckle escapes her lips. “So, you scared yet?”

  I rest my head against the cool metal counter, and the sound of my blood pumping overtime pulses inside my skull. “No. I’m not. At all.”

  “Figures.” She kicks a dusty hat farther under the shelf it’s been hiding beneath since a careless stocker dropped it there ages ago. Or since the dreamer put it there to give off such an impression. “For someone like you, I mean.”

  “Someone like me?”

  A dripping sound absorbs my attention, and I follow the noise back to a leak in the ceiling. There’s a puddle on the floor below the damaged ceiling tile, growing slightly bigger with each added drop. Why would someone take the time to construct such tiny details in a dream created for murder? I wonder. It speaks to an almost compulsive need for perfection.

  “When I say someone like you,” umbrella girl replies, “I mean that you’re—”

  A violent quake rocks the store, knocking various accessories off rickety shelves and raising a cloud of dust. Deep growling batters my ribcage, and in the reflection of a mirror that just fell over, I catch an image of the dragon prowling right outside the building. Its nostrils press against the display window, breath fogging up the glass.

  “Better than I thought,” mumbles umbrella girl.

  “What is?” I can barely hear the sound of my own voice over the thunderous beating of my heart. My body has reached its monthly allotment of exercise and is dreading another marathon through manicured lawns and well-swept side streets. On the other hand, my brain is gearing up for another leg of the most interesting experience of my life. Dissonance. Yay.

  “The echomaker. To set up a recurring echo as complex as this is hard enough, but to be able to so accurately control your creations is even harder. The dragon on its own isn’t intelligent. The maker is giving it orders. They spent the last several minutes tracking us down, then redirected their pet to come off us.” She pauses, the ghost of a smirk crossing her lips. “Of course, the downside of having such a complex echo is that it’s really hard to change its structure without destroying its integrity.”

  She grips my wrist again. “Which means we pretty much have free rein to do whatever we want without them changing the content.” She subtly nods toward an employees-only door, then counts down from five with her free hand.

  On one, we take off, bounding for the door. The dragon yelps in surprise before inhaling, and my last memory of the shoddy clothing shop is a wave of fire and broken glass devouring every tacky article and accessory. Umbrella girl kicks the door shut behind us, blocking the blast, while I wade through a set of old shipping boxes to reach another door with a broken EXIT sign suspended above it at an angle.

  The night is cold in Pennimore Dream, I think as I stagger out into an alley. My fatigued shakes are replaced by shivers as I scan for an escape route. There are two outlets. One leads to the front of the store, where the dragon is waiting. The other leads onto a secondary street. There’s also a fire escape, which runs all the way to the roof.

  “Up we go,” says umbrella girl, pulling the exit door shut behind her.

  “Why up?”

  “It can fly. We need the high ground.”

  “It’ll pick us off easier.”

  “Not if I shoot it first.”

  “You can kill dream manifestations?”

  She leaps onto a trash bin and grabs the fire escape ladder. “Depends on how the maker constructs them. Given that this guy seems to favor realism, the answer is probably.” A sharp tug sends the ladder clanging to the ground. “So up, up, and away, if you please.” She clambers onto the first landing and sprints up the steps. By the time I make it to her starting point, she’s halfway to th
e roof.

  “Hey, could you slow down?” I struggle my way up to the third flight of stairs, gasping for air. “I really can’t keep—”

  The world collapses beneath my feet. Metal supports tear from the wall, and the entire escape tips sideways. My forehead collides with the railing, and I barely manage to grab hold of something before I roll off the edge and fall to my death. Dazed, I look backward toward the lip of the alley, and find the dragon forcing itself farther into the narrow space, wings beating savagely against the claustrophobic walls. It clings to the escape with all its might, and a nearby claw nicks my ankle.

  I scramble away, ducking as a spiked tail shoots past my face. The dragon cranes its neck to get a good look at me, but instead of seeing an animal, I see the person behind it. A murderer peering through the eyes of an unwitting tool. An errant thought turned into a weapon.

  And then I see the support.

  A single beam holds the fourth level of the escape in place, its abused bolt begging to give way. I roll back and kick it, but my bare foot rips open at the kiss of jagged metal.

  Shoes. Of all the damn times not to be wearing shoes!

  The dragon inhales.

  I need shoes. I need shoes. I need shoes, I think desperately.

  And then I have shoes.

  Between blinks, my work boots appear on my feet, as if by magic. But I don’t have time to contemplate this development—because dragon—so I reel back and kick the bolt with every ounce of strength in my body. The sturdy sole of my boot slams into the weakened support, and it springs free from the wall.

  A solid ton of twisted metal swings around and slams into the dragon’s torso. Bent beams pierce its back and wings. Screaming, the dragon flails, rebounds off the adjacent building, and tears the collapsed fourth-level structure free of the escape. The added weight sends it plummeting to the ground, and an array of warped metal keeps it pinned down. Its next screech sounds like damaged pride and blooming shame.

  But that’s the echomaker talking, isn’t it?