by Jack Worr
“You’re leaking again.”
Mason looked at the man. He sighed. “I was almost out of this dream.” He stewed for a moment, then said, “So, dream oracle, what are you here for?”
“As I said, I’m here to help you.”
“Oh, to help huh?”
“And to ask for your help in return.”
“Sure buddy, what kind of help?”
“I should remind you this is not a dream.”
Mason nodded. I’m in complete blackness and silence, yet I can see and hear you, he thought. Definitely not a dream. Nope, not at all.
“Your sarcasm leaks from you like a faucet.”
“You’re not helping your case here.”
“I need you to get me out of here.”
“I don’t know how you got here. I don’t even know where here is. I’m not even sure how I got here.”
“No, not this place. Where I physically am.”
“You’re not actually here?”
“No.”
“Where then?”
“Joffrey Columns. I don’t imagine you’d know it, seeing as you’re beyond the Fog.”
Mason felt a tug at this, a sense of realness. If he believed in an afterlife, that’s what he’d think this was. He didn’t though. But if energy doesn’t die, does it have memory? The whispered words inside his mind spun in the darkness.
The man looked oddly at Mason. “What?”
“How?”
“Excuse me?”
“Getting you out.”
“You’ll need to be able to cross over—”
“To the other side,” Mason finished.
“To a side; you can’t just go willy-nilly. No telling where you’d wind up.”
“And how do I do that?”
“Do you recall the first time we met?”
“You mean, just now, like, minutes ago?”
“Days.”
“Right. Days have passed, of course. We’ve been talking for days, and look at all we’ve accomplished!”
The man pursed his lips. “We spoke once, a span of days back. Do you not recall this?”
“I do not…” But there was something. He didn’t remember, but he sensed he should, that if he were awake, he would be able to. That if he could see—really see—he might recognize this man. Jamais vu.
“Well. There was a door there, a door that will take you somewhere you must go. A door that contains many things. Prevents them from escaping. And this,” he gestured around, “is how you get there.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Of course it doesn’t. If it did, I wouldn’t need your help.”
“I mean, if the door is somewhere else, how is it here?”
“You are thinking too linearly.”
“How else can I think?”
“Geometrically. Or better, topologically.”
“I can’t go anywhere. I’ve got cops after me. In suits. Federal cops.”
“How did you manage that?”
“I ran from a hospital.” He shook his head and muttered, “I’m losing my mind.”
“That is one thing I do know Mr Grey—”
“Don’t, please. Just call me Mason.”
The man nodded. “I know that you are not crazy. This is real; as real as anything can be.”
“You were doing good with the first few words, then you jumped the shark.”
“You need to learn that reality is what you make of it.”
“I’m haunted by the ghost of a philosophy teacher.” Mason fell heavily to the ground. This is what he thought, in any case. He had no physical sensation of it, as he had none of the usual five senses. Or more.
“I’m no ghost.” He was quiet for a moment. “Not in any sense you mean.”
“What do you want from me?”
The man sighed. “I want your help. I’m stuck here. You can free me.”
“I don’t even know where this is.”
The man shook his head. “This conversation is going in circles. It appears your mind is not able to hold memory.”
“What?”
The man sighed heavily. “I don’t mean here.” Mason saw without looking—realized he’d never been using his eyes in the first place—that the man was pointing downward, where ground would be if there were more than just void. “I mean where I am. This is but a projection. As I said, no one but you can come here. Only you can bring things here. Only you can free them.”
“So you’re stuck in purgatory and you want me to rescue your damned soul.”
“Purgatory?” His expression grew thoughtful. “I believe I have heard that before. From Sera’s dreams. The place I am in is called Joffrey Columns.”
“Of course it is. We all have our own hells.”
The man knelt, his suit dirtying with the void. “Will you help me?”
Mason grunted, then groaned. “Stop being so earnest. At least give me a hope of saying no.”
“Do you know where we are?”
“Purgatory.”
The man shook his head. “Think of it as you wish. Do you know how to get here?”
“By dying.”
“No, Mr Mason, that is not the way.”
Mason didn’t even have the energy to object.
“If you believe you can’t get here, you can’t. But, if you believe you can, then… then you have a chance. You have a choice. I’m not asking you to make it now, I just want you to consider it.” His voice grew earnest once more. “Find Sera, she can help you now that you’ve proven yourself.”
Sera. Mason remembered her. The dream that drugged him with hallucinated tea. “Help me drug myself and pass out.”
“That was so you could meet me. That drug, it allowed me to find you.”
Mason looked at the man for the first time in a while. “What?”
The man shrugged. “I’m not sure. Where I’m from, we have a drug we all take. It’s what was prescribed to you. It opens a backdoor. Not for me, for a machine—but I was able to figure out a way to use it despite this.
“Then Sera simply helped you to sleep, so I could find you.”
Mason thought of the ocher powder. “She put me to sleep, so I could meet a ghost in my dream.” Then he frowned. “Wait, the doctor’s in on this? I knew I didn’t like him.” Of course, that’s what hallucinations would make him think. Conspiracy. It was seeming more likely that he really was in his death throes at this moment, splatted on the concrete. Look before you leap, he thought, and laughed bitterly. That doctor though…
“The drug, prevents you from dreaming. It allows—”
“I must not be taking enough.”
“No. That’s what it does where I’m from. Here… Here it does something else. It allows you—” he shook his head, expelled breath. “It frees you, frees your dreams.”
“Where you’re from? What do you mean? Where are you from?” Mason realized his assumption, that the man was a man. That he was from, here. But now, Mason wondered, was he something else? A devil? An alien? Both those seemed idiotic and ignorant. Neither likely existed.
“You are letting your thoughts leak again.” He stood. “We’ll have to work on your memory.” Then the man looked past Mason, and Mason felt a sense of confusion, of wonder, arise in the man. “An alien. Interesting. I would never have thought of that.” He chuckled. It was not an amused one. “Even now, off that vile drug, I still lack imagination.” He looked at Mason again. “Sometimes I wonder if it was stripped from me. If taking it as a baby, as a child, irreversibly altered me somehow, took something away that I’ll never get back.”
Mason wondered if the man was referring to the same drug he was taking. But seeing as how this was a dream or the last moments of his life—or purgatory—it didn’t really matter. “You didn’t answer my question.”
The man smiled. “So I didn’t. But at the same time, I did.”
Mason waited.
“I told you where I was from, your faulty memory is not my co
ncern.”
“It is if you want my help.”
“You have a point.
“Let’s try something new, shall we? I am from Alterra. I don’t know if you’d be aware of it, or where it is in relation to here, or what you’d even call it. It’s—I suppose from your perspective anyway—beyond the Fog.”
“Beyond the fog? Is that some euphemism?”
“I suppose it is. But it is also literal, and that is the sense in which I mean it.”
When Mason looked blankly at him, he asked, “You do know of the Fog? I mean, you must. Unless…” he trailed off, thinking. “I will have to ask Sera about that. She is beyond it now, here with you.”
“Maybe you should ask her to help you.”
“It doesn’t work with her. Not that I expected it to, she’s from the same place as I am.”
“Is she who drugged me?”
“Oh, dear, your memory is going to be an issue. She helped you. You should—” The man looked upward, quickly knelt.
“Mason,” his voice was frantic, urgent. “I must go. I— Look, find Sera again. She will help you.”
Mason distinctly heard the sound of a door. Heavy and metal. In echoed in what sounded like—what he knew was—a stone room. There was a smell of steam.
“Please, find—”
Then the man was gone.
22
Mason was lost once the man disappeared. He thought it meant he was dying, fading away. That his internal dialog had ceased, and so, soon, would he.
But there he sat, for an unknown amount of time. Except that time did pass, and it was more than a while.
Finally, after hours that could’ve lasted minutes, he stood, and began searching the void for some way out.
If this truly was his place, as the man had said, then he should be able to find such a way.
But when Mason did finally find a door, and turned the knob, and it opened, he could not enter it. He tried, but it was as though he were dreaming, and stuck in one place. The door was there, and it was open, and Mason could move, but despite all these, passage was still denied to him.
But if he’d found one door…
He headed toward the opposite end of where he was, for he felt there should be symmetry.
He was right, and there was a door, somehow misting into awareness as he got near it, like eyes adjusting to dark. He grasped the knob, applied force.
Nothing happened. The handle didn’t turn and the door remained shut. He tried harder, leaning into the twist.
Then he kicked it in frustration.
It thudded against its frame, silently.
Then something slammed into it from the other side, and he fell back. Again, a pounding, and this time he felt it shake.
Defeated, frightened, he ran at the other door, began kicking at it and beating on it.
Eventually, he collapsed to the ground and leaned against the wall.
A thousand things banged on the doors around him.
Then the door he could not pass exploded and in that gaping darkness he saw a face he would never forget, large and impossible and terrifying. It began pushing its way through, distorting, what passed for flesh twisting and catching as it shoved its way in, as the doorway itself bent to allow, for even it couldn’t resist, and Mason knew it was over for him, that he had no chance, and he gave up, let go of hope. And fell.
23
Then - 19 Years Old
Summer is over, and school is almost begun. Mason is moving into the dorms, to the chagrin of his mother and huge grin of his father. His sister seems indifferent.
She tosses his bag at him. “Here.”
He grunts and catches it. He can feel the ache beginning in his stomach. “Thanks.” He almost drops it on the dirt of the in-progress parking lot, but manages to keep ahold of it.
She smiles, that little demon smile, and says, sweetly, “You’re welcome big brother. But I’m still taking your room.”
“Sure.”
“You still okay with that?”
“Dad,” his sister whines.
Mason grins. “It’s fine. I won’t be back.”
“It breaks my heart to hear you say that,” his mom says.
He shifts the bag on his shoulder and gives her a hug. “You know what I mean. Come on, I’ll see you at Christmas.”
“And Thanksgiving.”
“Honey,” his dad says to his mom.
“We only get a few days off,” Mason says. “And we already have plans.”
“With who? The one with long hair?”
“Jeez Mom. Yes, Travis.”
“Anything but the long-haired one,” his dad says, waving his hands, and they all laugh. Except his sister. She feels this kind of discrimination is wholly inappropriate.
“We’re going to miss the show,” his sister complains.
His dad looks at his watch. “She’s right.”
“We can always see the next showing.”
“Mom,” his sister says, drawing out the word.
“It’s okay,” Mason says, and goes to his sister.
“What are you doing,” she says, raising her hands.
He picks her up in a bear hug, then kisses her on the mouth.
“Ugh you’re so gross! Put me down.” She leans her head back as far as she can as she beats on his shoulders.
Mason does. “I don’t know if you’re ready for a PG-13 movie.”
“Thirteen is just a suggestion,” she says wiping her mouth.
“Seven does seem a little young,” their dad says.
“Oh this is ridiculous.” She spits, then kicks the dirt. “I’m waiting in the car.”
“You really should go,” Mason says after his sister slams the car door.
“Oh,” his mom says, and hugs him.
“It’s okay Mom, you’ll see me soon.”
“We have different definitions of soon,” she says, releasing him. “Four months is an eternity without my baby boy.”
“Ugh.”
His dad laughs. “Now you know how your sister felt.”
They load up in the car, and Mason stands there, hand in the air.
They disappear out of sight, and he feels sad despite his excitement at being on his own for good.
But he makes his way into the dorm, and the two girls shooting Nerf guns at a guy with a squirt gun lighten his mood some.
By the time he reaches his new room, the melancholy is almost gone. He knocks, and it dissipates completely when Travis opens the door. “Dude!” He hugs him manily. “I hope you brought beer.”
“Enough for all of us,” a girl’s voice says, and Mason’s spirits rise even higher.
Then he looks in and sees the voice belongs to a little kid. Freshman, maybe. Of high school.
“The dweeb’s my sister,” Travis says, pointing.
She waves at Mason. “Taylor.”
Her brother ignores this. “And that,” he says, pointing at the other girl in the room, “is her crazy friend that she’s not supposed to be hanging out with.”
“No,” Taylor says, “that’s Alice. That”—she points at her friend—“is Emily.”
“Whatever,” Travis says.
Mason waves at them both. “Hey.”
“Hi,” Taylor says.
The friend, Emily, just stares at him, and all he can think is, Oh great, a freshman has a crush on me. Maybe she just thinks I look scary or something.
He pushes past them uncomfortably and sets his bags on the obviously unoccupied bed and sits down.
The girl keeps staring at him. She puts the lie to both of his assumptions by saying, “I know you.”
Mason looks at her. “Really? Have you seen my mov—”
“I asked you to buy me cigarettes.”
“Ew, you smoke?” Taylor says.
Emily ignores this, staring at him. “Remember?”
He does. The cigarette detail brings the memory back, and for some reason he thinks of condoms. “You look different.”
/> “I’m older.”
“Yeah,” Travis says suspiciously, “how old are you? Even if you’re not… whoever—”
“Alice,” Taylor says.
Travis waves his hand. “She should have friends her own age.”
She does look older than Travis’s sister, Mason thinks.
“Just turned fifteen.”
Despite this seeming about right to Mason, he says, “You don’t look it.”
“Thanks.”
“No, I mean you look like you’re twelve.”
“I would be upset if I didn’t know that I in fact look like a college junior. Ms Adams says so. She says I look like a college junior instead of a high school one and that I shouldn’t be running around with makeup like a little harlot. I love her, but sometimes I think she’s too old fashioned.”
“I don’t think she was entirely serious,” Taylor puts in.
“No, probably not. But not entirely joking.”
“True, true.”
“You don’t look twenty,” Travis says, then studies Mason’s bags. “So no beer then.”
Mason laughs. “I know a place.”
“What’s-her-name?”
“Huh?”
“The chick from the roof.”
The roof. He and Travis met at orientation, and hit it off, and spent that night drinking beers on a roof of some shop. But they weren’t alone up there. The one who got them the beers was with them. She was a senior, and both Mason and Travis tried to make out with her, their attempts growing bolder as their beer supply shrunk. They both eventually got to make out with her, but to Mason’s disappointment, and he was sure Travis’s as well, neither got any tongue. Which just seemed juvenile for a college senior.
Mason laughs. “Bro, I told you, we never met up afterwards. She probably graduated by now.”
“Sure. Where’s this place.”
“The Deli Mart.”
“Really?”
Mason just smiles. He stands from the bed, dumps his backpack out on it, then slings the empty bag over his shoulder. “Okay kids,” he says, “the grownups are going to go play. Keep an eye on things.”