Where Nightmares Ride

by R A Baxter

  The area had grown darker, and Jack looked up. “The fog dome is gone.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of yourselves,” Lynch’s voice said. “You may be strong, but you are Material beings in an unpredictable, chaotic dream world. At my command, Derek could shower your vulnerable bodies with needle-sharp daggers and pierce your feeble hearts.”

  Derek looked at Katie, made a face, and shook his head. “I didn’t sign up to murder people.” He turned to Clara in time to see her launch a stone block over her head at him. He raised his arms, but the stone connected with his left shoulder and he disappeared.

  Lynch laughed. “Are you not even wise enough to recognize your allies? We don’t want to harm you. One of you has an ability that allowed you to Dream Run. If we can save you, you’ll be invaluable to us.”

  Katie kicked aside a stone block. Clara picked one up and swung it aside, letting it crash through one of Derek’s block walls.

  “We’ll never work for Intershroud,” Jack said.

  “More powerful men than you have made such claims. I already know Katie’s power, and Clara’s. So, it must be you, Jack. I watched you defy Damien’s verger power and transport me and my companions to the ground. No doubt, you did something similar when you caused yourself and these girls to Dream Run. You’re unique in the world and it would be a crime not to make use of your skills.”

  “Show your face, coward!” Jack clenched his fists. “I’ll show you my skills.”

  Lynch laughed again. “Surely, you know you won’t survive here without my help. No one has ever survived a Dream Run. Even if you continue to survive, you’ll need a haunt soon, and there are no more haunts around here. Ironic that you blew up your only hope of escape.”

  “We’ll find a way out,” Jack said.

  Katie grabbed Clara’s wrist, pulled her to Jack, and she leaned into his ear. “We need to get to that haunt, fast.”

  “But we don’t know where Mr. Lynch is,” Clara said. “We can’t let him find out where we’re going.”

  “So, you do have a haunt,” Lynch said. “How could you? The old miner! Of course. That old ghost has been hiding his haunt from us for so long, I forgot about it. I wondered why he was defending you.”

  “You better not hurt him!” Clara clenched her fists, searching for any sign of the man’s location.

  “I keep telling you, I have no desire to harm anyone. I want to help you, and if you were smart, you’d realize that you need my help. If you continue to fight me, your Material bodies will waste away in this place. No one will ever know what became of you.”

  “We don’t need help from a coward that won’t even show his face,” Jack said.

  “You know nothing about this world! There’s no real Material air here. How are you even breathing? You only imagine it. You’re dying of oxygen deprivation as we speak!”

  Katie’s eyes widened. She gulped several deep breaths and held her throat.

  Clara ran to her. “Don’t listen to him. We’ve been breathing fine all day.”

  Katie nodded and breathed softer.

  Lynch chuckled softly. “Let’s not play games, Mr. Park. We both know what is going to happen here. Even if you do escape Essentia, we’ll never stop pursuing you. We’ll track you down. You may sleep, but you’ll never rest. Join me now or you’ll be forever consigning yourself to a life of fear.”

  “Leave us alone!” Jack picked up a block of granite and tossed it in front of himself, hoping it would find Lynch. It crashed through the concrete wall and knocked down a ten-foot wide section. The steeple of a church in Silverton became visible through the cement dust.

  “Your just wasting time,” Lynch said. “Go ahead. Go to Silverton and find the old man’s haunt. Just be aware that we’ll be watching your homes and your friends’ homes. Everybody dreams, Mr. Park. You cannot hide. Work for me, on the other hand, and you’ll live like royalty.”

  “Shut up!” Jack grabbed another block of concrete and threw it.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Lynch said.

  A block of stone sat precariously on the edge of a block wall next to Clara and she looked up in time to see it teeter and fall. She jumped aside and it crashed into rubble at her feet.

  Jack knew Lynch had shoved it. He clenched his teeth. “Show yourself!”

  “Be reasonable,” Lynch said. “Katie, you’ve lived the high life since your parents joined the company. Tell your friend to see reason.”

  “I said, show yourself!”

  “You know, Jack, the Murdocks will be asleep again at any moment. All you’ve done is delay the inevitable. Fenton will be back with reinforcements. Besides, you’ll have to sleep some time. Who’ll protect you then, I wonder.”

  “You don’t play fair! I said show yourself!”

  A warm wave of energy rolled through Jack’s body. The tattered walls of the enclosure looked wavy in the rising heat. Lynch appeared, leaning against a stack of granite blocks ten feet away.

  The grin on Lynch’s face vanished and he looked down at his hands and patted his chest. He gritted his teeth, tensed his arms, and tried to disappear again. He looked up at Jack and sneered.

  Jack could hardly move his aching muscles, but nothing would stop him from staggering toward the old man. He lunged at Lynch with his fist pulled back and swung at the man’s wide-eyed face.

  Katie and Clara loped down a long, steep hill, each with an arm wrapped around Jack’s back and holding his arms around their necks. Their speed increased with every step.

  “We need to slow down. I’m about to fall on my face,” Jack said.

  “I know. I can’t slow down,” Katie said.

  They reached the foot of the hill at a fast pace and Katie went another twenty feet before she could force her legs to stop. She gulped some air and looked at Clara. They both laughed. Katie walked again, aiming for the back wall of an old abandoned clapboard home. Light pierced the exposed rafters of its steep, half-missing roof. She reached the wall, eased Jack’s arm from her shoulder, and leaned against the home’s rough, sun-bleached clapboards, the peeling white paint tickling her fingers.

  “There’s a dirt road.” Clara pointed to a narrow strip of pitted dirt that ran along the other side of the house, along a field of waist-high, yellow grass.

  “Silverton’s not far now.” Jack winced and gingerly touched his throat.

  “Oh no! What’s that?” Clara ducked behind the corner of the house. A twenty-foot-wide strip of grass melted down flat and turned a deep black. The adjoining dirt road widened ten feet and adopted the same appearance. The new asphalt road turned off the formerly dirt road and curved away from the house to the base of the hill they’d just descended.

  “Someone’s coming! Don’t let them see you!” Katie wrapped Jack’s arm around her neck again and helped him limp to the far side of the house.

  The neigh of horses joined the bumping of hard wheels on the new asphalt.

  “I must say, ol’ friend,” a familiar bass voice said, “these paved roads are far more conducive to the practice of verbal intercourse. The smoothness of its surface greatly enhances one’s ability to carry on a conversation. Ease of conversing is quite necessary for one such as me, you know.”

  “It’s the frog!” Clara darted around the house.

  “Clara, wait!” Katie let go of Jack, ran after her, and smiled, throwing her hands up to her face. Jeb sat on the boxed seat of a long wooden wagon, pulled by two sets of gray horses. The animals were a third larger than any horse Katie had ever seen.

  The frog sat on Jeb’s lap and rolled its eyes. “It would appear, Mr. Colton, that the deceased bodies you were so passionately determined to grant, as you said, ‘a decent burial,’ have not yet heretofore complied with the aforementioned criteria. I therefore recommend that we be on our way before they entwine us, once again, in a most perilous predicament.”

  Jeb ignored the frog and dropped his reins, climbed down from the cart, and ran to Clara, grinning wide.
He embraced her, though Clara only dared pat him lightly on the back.

  “I cain’t believe me eyes. I spent a good ten minutes shapin’ this ’ere wagon in hopes to make it dense enough to take ye lifeless bodies to me haunt. I couldn’t bear the thought o’ ye wastin’ away here in Essentia. Never crossed me mind you’d be standin’ here, free o’ them Intershroud rogues.”

  “We still could definitely use the wagon,” Clara said. “Jack can hardly walk.”

  Jack hobbled around the corner of the house and leaned on the front porch railing.

  “We could use a doctor, too,” Katie said. “I’m exhausted. It’s hard to breath with bruises everywhere.”

  “Let’s get y’all into me wagon. No time to waste.” Jeb ran to unchain the wagon’s backboard and let it drop open.

  Clara and Katie rushed to Jack and lifted his arms around their necks. They guided him to the back of the cart and eased him onto it. The wooden slats creaked and bent under his weight but held firm. Katie climbed in and kneeled next to him, her back against the sideboard.

  “Ye can sidle up here with me,” Jeb said to Clara. He brushed the frog aside and it hopped from the seat and landed next to Jack, its face contorted with indignation. Jeb gave Clara a hand and helped her climb up to the wooden boxed seat next to him. She smiled and bounced up and down a few times after discovering the two bent metal springs supporting the seat. Jeb climbed up, sat by her, and the frog hopped onto his lap and folded its arms.

  “It may have escaped your observation,” the frog said, “but we were most contentedly immersed in a delightful conversation before you three came along and most egregiously disrupted it. It’s most categorically impertinent, you know. Why, I’d have stayed back at the house if I’d known you’d be all alive and interrupting us like this.”

  Jeb grabbed the straw hat off his head and plopped it over the frog, then clamped his right hand on top.

  “This is outrageous!” The sides of the hat bulged out in five different places where the frog kicked at it, but the hat didn’t budge.

  “You keep yer durn fly catcher shut or so help me, frog, ’tis certain I’ll be roastin’ ye legs fer me vittles this very night. These young’uns be me friends and they’ve endured an ordeal I wouldn’t wish on me worst enemy, ’cept, o’ course, that ol’ vermin, but that goes without sayin’.” Jeb grabbed the black pouch dangling from the left side of his belt and gave it a hardy squeeze. A tiny voice screamed, and Jeb gave half a smile.

  “Yah!” Jeb yanked the reins and the cart jerked forward. The horses turned the wagon around and clip-clopped along the paved road at a rapid pace. They rolled past one dilapidated wooden home after another, each designed so simply, they reminded Katie of drawings she’d made with crayons when she was a child: rectangular box structures, steep pointed roofs, one front door, and a window to its side. Flowerbeds splashed bright yellow, orange, and pink along the bases of each porch. They were simple homes for uncomplicated people. Were it not for the constant dread of Lynch and his people returning, Katie would’ve enjoyed the wagon ride.

  Not far ahead, rows of clapboard homes and small businesses lined both sides of Main Street, each painted in pastel blues, reds, and greens. They passed the old white church with the tall octagonal steeple. It wasn’t much different than the homes, just larger and with more windows. They rolled by its adjoining cemetery, dotted with tilted crosses. They reminded Katie of a question that filled her with dread.

  She looked at Jeb and steeled herself, gripping the sideboard. “Is my sister gone?”

  “She was fading fast when I left her, but she may still be there yet. She was durn determined to see ye one last time, be ye live or dead.”

  Katie’s eyes moistened. “When I saw she wasn’t with you, I was sure she’d already moved on.”

  “Forgive me, miss. I shoulda let ye know how things stood. I left her at my ol’ house.

  That rascal in the black suit stole us to a road a ways down the mountain. I fixed to shape me one o’ them flying machines, so I could come back in haste and help ye, but Miss Abagail convinced me it’d be no use. They had ye trapped below a fog dome. Best I could do was take yer bodies to yer material world fer a burying. ’Tis a blessing to be takin’ ye there alive, that be certain.”

  “I suppose Abby didn’t want to come with you,” Katie said.

  “She asked to wait for ye. The jostling o’ me wagon was makin’ her fade faster.”

  “I don’t see the Ghost Knights around,” Clara said.

  “No. ‘Tis certain they took a likin’ to ye, but they fulfilled their mission. They’re surely on their way back to their homeland.”

  The horses clacked down the main street of Silverton. The Aspect of a dreaming little boy, in blue shorts and a red tee-shirt, kicked a tin coffee can and it clunked along the road parallel to Jeb’s wagon. A boy in blue jeans and a drab green tee-shirt stopped it with his foot and kicked it back to him.

  A thin old man in his nineties rocked in a wooden chair on the wide porch of an old gray house, his long white beard swaying with the chair. Next door, a hefty middle-aged woman with a flowered white apron and a navy-blue scarf around her gray hair came out of the screened storm door of her pastel pink house and began sweeping dust into the street from her wooden porch. No one looked at Katie and her companions, or even acknowledged them.

  “Not the friendliest people I’ve ever seen,” Jack said.

  “They won’t even look at us,” Katie said.

  “They’re Sleepers,” Jeb said. “They aren’t enlightened like you are. When dreamers don’t know they’re dreamin’, they’re only interested in the small world their own minds created fer them. That woman is thinkin’ on sweepin’ that porch, so there ain’t nothin’ in her dream world but that broom and that porch.”

  A distant rumble thundered from the forest, rattling nearby windows.

  “Sounds like a storm’s coming,” Clara searched the sky.

  “That weren’t no thunder. We best be g’tting’ to me haunt.” Jeb whipped the reins up and back down and the wagon lurched forward at a more rapid pace. Jack sat up.

  An old gray-blue clapboard house came into view. He remembered seeing it when he drove past it on the way to camp. It looked just like the other homes, with its raised porch below a wooden canopy, except it had two stories. Its porch columns leaned at an angle and the canopy sloped down to the right, giving the whole house an ominous tilt.

  Katie, however, zeroed in on a woman in a white frilly dress, sitting on a porch swing hanging from a canopy beam, the white slats and thick metal chains of the swing visible through her semi-transparent body.

  “Abby!” Katie threw herself over the wagon’s sideboard and ran to the porch and up its creaky wooden steps.

  “You made it.” Abby’s voice was soft and lifeless. She stood and forced a smile, then frowned again. “I’m so glad. I didn’t think you’d make it.”

  Katie trembled and couldn’t hold back a wide-stretched smile. She felt like Abby was seeing her for the first time. “Why are you so unhappy? You did it. You got your revenge.”

  Abby stared at her with watery eyes. She struggled to speak. “It wasn’t how I thought it would be. It was exhilarating at first. I watched that monster descend into nothingness. But the feeling flitted away like a gust of wind. I feel empty, Katie. I can’t bear it. I just want to be with you and Mom, and even Dad. I want to go home. I had forgotten it all. I turned it all away, and for what?” She dropped her face into her hands and sobbed. Her body faded more with every word.

  “Stop it, Abby! You’re dissipating. You don’t have to go away. You can find another purpose. You could join the Ghost Knights! Fight battles for other ghosts. Please, Abby. Please don’t go.”

  Thunder roared again, louder this time. The boards of the wooden deck rattled along with the window glass.

  “You need to go back to Materia,” Abby said.

  “Not until you tell me you’ll try to stay alive, that you�
��ll try to find a new purpose.”

  “Don’t you see? This isn’t my doing. I could never join the Ghost Knights again. I don’t share their obsession anymore. My eyes are open now. Those knights seek illusions. They fight for emptiness. I’ve wasted all these years.”

  “No, Abby, you brought that horrible man to justice.”

  Abby was barely visible now. She shook her head. “Actually, I’ve finally come to my senses. Justice, too, is an illusion. The mere molecule of pain I caused Farley couldn’t possibly account for a trillionth of the anguish he caused me. It was pointless. I’m empty, Katie. I beg you; don’t do what I’ve done. I’m so sorry you saw me at the depth of my disgrace and shame.”

  “Don’t go, Abby, please. I’m not ashamed of you. I’m proud of you. I’ve always been proud of you.”

  “I’d give anything just to hug you one more time.” Abby’s voice sounded distant. “Find Mother. She’ll protect you. Tell her I loved her.”

  “Abby!” Katie darted forward and embraced her sister, then sensed the warmth of her soul melt away. She was gone.

  Jack leaned against a white porch column and watched Jeb stare at the empty swing where Abby had been sitting, his eyes hinting of a fire awakening in his soul. Tears drenched Clara’s cheeks and Jack looked away, afraid his own emotions might erupt. A thunderous crash shook him out of his somberness, and he turned around and looked down the street.

  A cloud of gray-yellow dust wafted down the road and consumed every vehicle, person, and structure on either side of the street. The bald heads and bare, hairy chests of two massive giants came into view amidst the settling dust, each bearded and snarling, towering above the trees, higher than a four-story building. They stretched shaggy tree-trunk arms a dozen feet forward and sliced straight down through the trees, their enormous hands pounding the forest floor. They swept their arms sideways in opposite directions.