by Neil Gaiman
"Is there another way through?" asked Abel.
Mrs. Norton pulled her pink quilted housecoat more closely around her throat. "Perhaps Lord Raven saw from the air which way is safest?"
"Not 'Lord,' " corrected Matthew modestly, preening at his breast feathers. "And yeah. Through the Sunset Terrace still looked safe."
"And with all the trees and plants along there, won't we be in fine shape if it's not?" retorted Cain savagely.
"You wanna stay here?"
The wet door manifested a small intestine and a number of hands, and a woman's face that smiled and said, "But all life is one. We are all really elements of the same thing. It's only natural--it's only right--that we all come together...."
"His helmet," said Abel, as Lucien opened the door dial led through Teddy Bear Hell and thus to the Sunset Terrace.
The others looked at him.
"If Duh-Dream went to the Realm of Order, he won't have his helmet. When he cuh-comes back here, thuhthuh-they'll be waiting for him."
"Let's discuss this in the next room," suggested the Fashion Thing. The walls of the Painted Chamber were plastered adobe, but the massive window shutters and sills were wood, and had begun to pulse and bleed and put forth tongues that wagged drippily, trying to form words. Thick streams of pinkish matter were beginning to creep in under the shutters and beneath the door.
Lucien bolted the door behind them--wood also. The teddy bears had fled. The room held only darkness within its line of candy cane pillars; darkness and a thick smell of peppermint, kapok, and unicorn piss.
"His quarters are on the other side of the library this week," said Lucien quietly. They all looked at each other. The library was, at present, very close to the Hall of the Warriors.
"It has to be done," said Nuala hesitantly. "I mean he ... he won't stand a chance."
"Whoever goes after it won't stand a chance, either," retorted Cain.
"This is serious," said Lucien. "Quite apart from the danger to ourselves, what is going to happen when this thing breaks out of the Dreaming? When it enters human consciousness? At the moment, Dream is the only one who can stop it... if it does not destroy him."
"I... I'll go," offered Mrs. Norton hesitantly. "If you'll tell me what it is that I'm looking for and how to get there."
The tall man turned to her. "It is a helmet wrought of the bones of forgotten gods," he said. "Long, narrow, covering the whole head ... But we would not ask that of you, Madame. You are a guest in this house." He glared at Cain and Abel. "I am manifestly against asking it of either of the two young ladies, for that matter."
Cain said, "We'll draw straws."
Abel got the short one. Abel always got the short one, when Cain was holding the straws.
"Will you cuh-care for Goldie?" he asked Cain timidly, handing him the tiny gargoyle that had clung, all this time, to his shoulder. "Will you muh-make sure nothing happens to her?"
"Sure, sure," said Cain, not liking the look of the bolted door behind them. "Now we'd better get going...."
"Awrk?" Goldie struggled in Cain's grip as Abel cautiously unbolted the door back into the Painted Chamber, peered into the heaving dark. There still seemed to be a way across one corner of the slime-coated terra-cotta floor to the door that led back to the colonnade around the Salt Garden....
"No, honey, you stay with us," said Mrs. Norton, catching the tiny creature as Goldie leaped from Cain's grip, tried to follow Abel through the door. Cain and Lucien were hurrying them along, horribly aware of how quickly the threat was moving through the palace. "Oh ... !"
Goldie sprang down from Mrs. Norton's hands, raced at a fleeting toddle through the half-open door. "Oh, no, come back, sweetheart... !"
Cain grabbed the woman by the wrist and dragged her after him.
Bert Blaine walked the alleys around Leicester Square in the darkness, looking at the girls. Dirty slits, the lot of them; ten pounds and they treat you like they're doin' you a great bloody favor--wasn't a woman in the world who didn't think she had a solid gold wazoo, as the Yanks at the yard said. Well, he'd been paid and he had ten quid, and some was better than another night with Five-Finger Mary....
Thought they were so hot. Well, one night he'd show 'em. Generally he did slap 'em around a little, just to let 'em know who was the boss, but it crossed his mind now that it would be finer--it would be more fun--if... if...
Jesus, what in hell was he thinking! He shoved the thought aside, but it came creeping back.
There was a chap he'd met inside once, a mere in Africa, nobody had messed with him. Big bloke with the devil's own smile. "Ever eat 'long pig'?" he'd asked him once. "Holed up in the bush, or under fire ... it ain't bad."
"What," Bert had asked, "you ... what? Draw straws?"
And the big bloke had grinned. "Not while you got the ladies of the regiment around, you don't," he'd said, and winked. In a whisper he'd added, "Gets your money back, you does."
Why did he think of that?
And why didn't it bother him?
"Dear God." Lucien pressed his hand to his mouth in horror.
The Dream King has many servants. Some he has taken from unremembered dreams of humankind, or has wrought to serve in those dreams; others have been given to him, like the elf Nuala, as gifts by the monarchs of Realms other than his own. Others yet, no one has the slightest idea how they came into his service--perhaps not even they.
Driven from the palace, they had fled to the long terrace that forms its western edge, where the sunset had failed and the sky above lay hard and starless and utterly black as the night at the bottom of the sea. And there they were devoured.
Whitish, glowing, flaccid as dirty mushrooms, the frights birthed by the thing within the palace had taken the forms of that which it had already eaten, but changed and shifting, amoebalike. Rats' heads formed like buboes out of the gelid bodies of spiders, or parts of spiders; skulls bled out of their ears and nostrils as they tore mouthfuls of Morpheus's warriors, serving-women, grooms. Caught in the sticky muck to which all grass, all wood, all fabric had been transformed, the servants could only scream for help as their flesh was torn from their bones, and all the while the dripping tongues, the gaping pock-pits, the open esophagi and veins of the thing around them kept saying, "We eat, and we become one. You are becoming one of us. You'll thank us for this; you'll thank us...."
Like filthy rubber squids, or the gross spawn of the unspeakable deep, the flying frights came sweeping out of the sky.
"Run for it!" screamed Matthew, and Cain, and Lucien, and the women ran.
They reached the door of the Stone Tower at the terrace's far end barely ahead of their pursuers, slammed it, bolted it, only to realize that the door was made of dragon bone and gargoyle tooth ... harder than forged steel, but organic as the wood. "Dream, you pea-brained idiot!" screamed Cain, as they climbed the twisting stair, heard the soft, nasty drip of the door transmuting, the thick trickles of matter seeping under it and flowing, one step at a time, up the stone stairs.
"Slate shingles," Lucien was enumerating as they climbed, "iron bars on the windows ..." The orange light of his torch jolting grimily over the walls, cast huge drunken shadows on the curve of the walls, the spiral of the low ceiling curling ever upward. "Narrow mesh ..."
The window bars were close-set, but the frights that clung to them, gibbering, thrust greedy, probing tentacles through, like tongues, or grasping gargoyle hands. The faint light of them was a dirty phosphorescence in the dark chamber, and glowing slime dripped from them, running in thin streams down the stone of the wall. Lucien strode from window to window, thrusting with his torch, and the smell of roasted flesh, of the charred drops of matter that fell to the stone floor, filled the room with a choking stench. Cain and Nuala kindled other torches from the holders around the walls and helped him, while Mrs. Norton and the Fashion Thing clung together near the dragon horn door of the upper chamber, listening to the sea-surge of voices crying in chorus below.
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br /> We are one. We will be one. All life is one with us, with you .. .
Then the things fell away from the windows. Outside there was a horrible cacophony of wet flopping, a vast stench, and the faint, sickly glow of them shifted over the faces of those within as hundreds of them circled the tower...
And flew away.
Cautiously, Lucien stepped close to the window.
They had merged into a single, monstrous, filthily shimmering cloud, heading in the direction of the Shifting Zones.
Lucien said softly, "He's coming."
"I won't let you take her!" Charlotte van der Berg screamed. "I won't!" She seized her daughter from her crib, clutched her close to her breast, and Boetie--scum, pig, Boer chauvinist that he'd turned out to be under that modern Jo'berg businessman front--grabbed the baby's feet and pulled, trying to drag Renata from her arms. Charlotte clung tighter, the baby screaming in shrill uncomprehending pain.
Charlotte finally ripped her away from Boetie, ran ... ran through the house, which like all houses in nightmare was dark, with impossible numbers of rooms, halls, doorways. Boetie's footfalls thundered on the wooden floors behind her; she heard him blundering against walls, cursing in Afrikaans, "Hoor! Swine! Kaffir-lover!"
She threw herself into a closet, the little girl clutched to her breast. "I won't let you take her," she whispered frantically. "I won't let him take you from me, my darling, my darling. You're mine, all mine.... You'll forever be mine...."
And slowly, deliberately, she pulled the arm off her child, and began to eat.
"NO!" Charlotte van der Berg convulsed, sitting up, gasping as she fumbled at the bedside lamp. Damn him, she thought, damn Boetie for invading even her sleep with his damn divorce settlement, his damn custody battle. She sank back on the pillows, trembling. She couldn't--she couldn't let him take Renata. Not her daughter. Not and bring her up to be as closed-minded, bigoted, vicious as he.
The child was hers. Hers.
She got to her feet, stumbled across the hot, stuffy little apartment bedroom to where the infant lay sleeping.
Before I'd let him take her, I'd... I'd...
Mad thoughts flitted through her mind. Insane thoughts that made sense. She'd keep her. Always. They would always be one.
She stayed standing by the crib, staring down at the child inside, for a long time.
* * * *
In the dark of the Shifting Zones, Dream floated like a rag of midnight borne by the winds.
He was tired. Kilderkin, the Manifestation of Supreme Order, was predictable and ostensibly not to be feared, but the endless intensive legalism, the meticulous pilpul of splitting rules into finer rules, definitions into yet more exacting definitions, exhausted him, and in his heart he understood intuitively that the Manifestation of Supreme Order did not approve of him. Kilderkin would not, on its own, attempt to imprison or destroy Dream. But he was aware that the Manifestation--or any of its numerous sub-Manifestations or sub-sub-Manifestations--might at any time be manipulated in some complex game played by one of the younger Endless, by Desire or Despair.
And then he would have to beware.
He let the night carry him on its back.
A glow in the sky, a swirling lift, like the Milky Way surrounding him.
Far ahead of him he saw the Gates of Horn and Ivory, the boundaries of his realm, and knew, suddenly, that something was amiss there. Amiss in the Dreaming ... voices crying his name ...
And he was enfolded in the stench of a thousand deaths.
He made one dropping plunge through the air to avoid them, but for all their--its--many-bodied clumsiness, it was fast. It was all over him, clinging, sticky, vile, burning his robes, chewing the flesh of his bare arms--acid, ants, rats. The weight of it fell about him, smote him out of the air and they plunged together, it mouthing him as they fell, and they smashed into the dry rock of the Shifting Zones with a force that would have crushed a human's bones.
It was huge, bearing him down when he tried to rise. He clawed the stuff out of his eyes when it gnawed, digging, at the sockets, tore it from his mouth and nose as it covered him in a suffocating wave. He saw the bones of his own hand, his own arm as he tried to thrash free of it, tried to summon his power to him through the hissing yammer that clogged his mind. We are one, we are one, all life will be one.... It seemed to him that he was being buried under half a mountainside of maggots, each maggot opening its little brown-red mouth and whispering, We are one ... and the next second he was ripping the half-rotted, chewing skull of one of his own dream-warriors off his hand.
It wasn't his flesh it wanted but his mind, his being-- the mind that was ripped, scattered, invaded by the seasurge of the voices....
"My lord!"
A voice that was not one with those others. A shape in the crowding chaos of shapes, a fleshless skull in which one eye still remained, blood streaming down the eaten bones...
"My lord!"
Torn hands falling apart held out to him his helmet.
Abel had had a lot of practice being dead.
A squeak like the note of a high-pitched bell. As he put on the helmet, through the curved cabochon eyes Dream saw Abel--what was left of Abel--turn, hold out one hand, cry despairingly "Goldie!" as the tiny speck of brightness fluttered awkwardly toward him....
Then a gluey skeleton fist shot from the muck, caught the flying speck of gold, and crushed it like a ripe strawberry in a crunching of bone.
"Goldie!"
"THAT IS ENOUGH! "
With the helmet on his head, the hard cool curving bones of gods who had been worshiped by the races preceding humankind protecting his mind, the hellish charivari of the attacker ceased. Dream's mind focused, his power focused, to cold laser light, sloughing all that had been done to his flesh ... gathering to him the immense and terrifying power of the Dreaming. He rose up among the glowing slime, the clawing tentacles and talons, and cried again in the voice of power, "THAT IS ENOUGH!"
He raised his hands, fleshless to the elbows, and the stars flashed through the bones of them. The alien power swirled around him, tearing at him, a whirlpool of shining mist, and through the eyes of the helmet he was able to see how much of its substance had been taken from his servants, his realm, his creation. They had been turned against him. Reaching out, he called forth his strength, to wrest them back.
Very quiet, he said, "Cease."
The glowing muck surged as if with the release of gas, then fell still. He stood for a long time, brown ooze clinging, dark and dirty as old blood, to the rags of his robe, to his body, to his hands which hung now whole and healed at his sides.
The entire world was silent.
Dream reached up, took off his helm, and shook the slime-dripping hair out of his eyes. Under starlight the hard earth of the Shifting Zones looked like a place upthrust from the floor of the sea, inches deep in a layer of primordial filth through which rocks and dead trees projected like broken bones. There was no movement anywhere. No howling voices. No greedy, all-absorbing pseudolife.
Dream walked over to where a tiny chip of white lay.
The bones of a baby gargoyle, broken, the flesh stripped away.
Dream took them up in his hand, stroked with his forefinger the curve of the little skull. Then for a time he stood, a tall pale man robed in torn rags of black, looking down at the perfect, golden creature sleeping in his hand.
He went to kneel by the gummed wreck of Abel's bones, passed his hand across them, and said, "Abel?"
"Muh-My lord?"
"Meep?" said Goldie.
"Profanity is not going to help us, young man!"
It had been so long since anybody had called Cain "young man" that he only stared at Mrs. Norton in furious shock, unable to reply. Pressed to the stone of the wall between the two windows, Lucien, Cain, and Nuala had alternated in stepping forward and thrusting with their torches at the ever-thickening tentacles of glowing ooze that crept in under the sl
owly dissolving door. Twice they'd had to burn out the pools that were forming, taking shape into knots of things that might have been serpents or entrails, and the room was thick with smoke. Wet, heavy, like filthy curtains, the frights clung to the window bars again, reaching in with glowing tendrils, and Nuala slashed at a groping tube with a mouth and eyes that wriggled toward her along the stone of the wall.
"Any suggestions as to what to do when these brands are exhausted?" The torches had burned short; the flame on Lucien's was almost touching his hand, and his sleeve was charred. Sweat plastered the librarian's gingery hair to his face; he pushed up his spectacles more firmly onto his nose, and added, "Technically speaking, Mr. Cain, I might point out to you that the mark you bear on your forehead protects you from any man's hand raised against you.... I doubt it will save you from this."
"I think I want to wake up," said Mrs. Norton unsteadily, as a glowing spider leg the length of a man's arm groped inches from her face. "This is the most extraordinary going-to-the-library dream I've ever had in my life, but I think I'd like to go home now."
"Will it... er ..." Nuala gulped. "If that thing were to ... to devour Cain ... would it then be Protected? From everyone?"
The door softened, shifted. Running with blood, a woman's face appeared, smiling, and a hundred tongues lolled out from the puckering surface around her. "We will all be one," she said, and smiled. The flesh ran down off her face; her eyes fell out and turned into thin creepers of fluid trickling toward Lucien's feet. "We will all be one."
Lucien bent and seared the creepers into stinking worms of ash, gasped and tried to maneuver the few inches of burning wood in his hand to something that wouldn't scorch him every time he bent down.
"I fear, Miss Nuala," he said, "that we are about to find that out."
The door dropped off its hinges in sodden chunks. A great ground swell of pus heaved through, then spent itself, flaccid, on the floor only half a yard from their feet.
It lay still. It was already turning dark, rotting and settling into a wet residue of harmless slime. With an indescribable sound, the frights plastered over the windows released their hold, and fell.
Silence filled the room. The stench was unbelievable.
"I trust," said Dream's voice from the doorway, "that there is an explanation for all of this?"
His boots made no sound in the rotting muck of the floor. His robe hung damp and torn on his thin frame, and under the filth-streaked black tousle of his hair his eyes were very angry indeed.
"Boss!" croaked Matthew's voice from the window. "Damn, I'm glad to see you--"
Dream snapped his fingers. Matthew fell silent at once.