The Darkness of Dreamland Read online

  T.L. Bodine

  The Darkness of Dreamland

  First published by Glass Rat Media 2021

  Copyright © 2021 by T.L. Bodine

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Previously published in an earlier version as Tagestraum in 2014

  Second edition

  ISBN: 1494823551

  Cover art by Claire Stewart

  This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

  Find out more at reedsy.com

  For my brothers, who influenced this book more than they know

  And for David, who helps to keep my Darkness at bay.

  Come away, O human child!

  To the waters and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand,

  For the world’s more full of weeping

  Than you can understand

  —W.B. Yeats, “The Stolen Child”

  Preface

  In 2014, I released a novel called Tagestraum.

  It suffered every problem you might expect from an inexperienced self-publisher: a badly designed cover, messy formatting, and a title that was both hard to pronounce and conveyed no information about the book. When I was first writing the story, the idea of naming my Dreamland something more foreign and exotic seemed appealing. But the problem with making a play on words in a language you don’t speak is that it just doesn’t work very well, as my German readers have kindly and gently pointed out.

  But for all its flaws, I still believe very strongly in the story, and thought it deserved a second chance at finding its readership. The book you now hold in your hands is the result.

  The Darkness of Dreamland is essentially the same as Tagestraum. It’s been reformatted, copy-edited, and given a fresh cover. It’s also had some factual inaccuracies cleared up and a few changes made to the first couple chapters. But heart and soul, it’s the same book, and I’m excited to send it out in the world to find new readers…and perhaps make a few old fans happy to see fresh life breathed into this odd, dark, funny, horror-fantasy book.

  Thank you for reading, and I hope you have as much fun visiting Dreamland as I had writing it!

  THE NIGHTMARE MAN

  The Nightmare Man came today.

  Adrian could still hear the echo of Nathaniel’s words in his mind — the words the boy had said when he’d first shown him the drawing. The sketch now stared up at him from the coffee table, crudely drawn in crayon but clear enough to recognize: A tall, cloaked man with a gaping mouth rimmed in teeth like the maw of some deep-sea fish.

  The first time Nathaniel had shown him The Nightmare Man, months ago now, a cold chill had crept up Adrian’s back, a sense of déjà vu that he could not entirely place. He didn’t know why, but he was certain he’d seen the figure before, with its pale skin and bony hands. That first night, he’d searched online, pulled books off his bookshelf and flipped through them, certain he’d seen the creature somewhere. But he couldn’t find a matching image in any book or movie or video game, and certainly in nothing that a seven-year-old would have seen.

  It bothered him not being able to place it. Now, with Nathaniel missing and no leads on his disappearance, it bothered him a whole lot more.

  The phone clicked in his ear as the voice mail picked up. Adrian waited for the beep, then said, “Hey, Detective Roark? It’s Adrian Montgomery again, from Social Services, about the Weaver case? I’m not sure if my last call went through…you didn’t call me back. I just wanted to —”

  The phone beeped, and the call disconnected.

  Adrian dialed again. It took longer to connect this time. Finally, the line picked up, and a woman’s electronic monotone said, “We’re sorry. The voice mailbox you are calling is full. Please try your call again later.”

  For good measure, he tried it one more time. When he got the same message, he rose from the couch and walked into the kitchen, depositing both his phone and the sketch into his pocket.

  He opened his refrigerator. Light bathed the room, and he stood in the glow for a long time, staring at the mostly-bare shelves. After a minute, he closed the door and walked into his office, sitting down at the computer chair without bothering to turn on the light.

  He pulled up the online Missing Children Registry, searching for familiar names. There were a few; Social Services and missing children tended to go together more often than he’d like. Not like Nathaniel, though. Kids were usually kidnapped by their estranged parents, or ran away from home. They didn’t just vanish from their backyards in broad daylight, with no witnesses, no suspects, no evidence.

  And they didn’t tell their child welfare agent about The Nightmare Man.

  Nathaniel wasn’t the kind of kid to run away. Adrian was confident of that. He’d been working with the Weavers for nearly eight months — ever since Nathaniel’s second grade teacher found out that the boy was staying by himself in a motel room while his mother worked two jobs as a maid and night greeter at Wal-Mart. Things had been bad, then, but they were better now. Angela Weaver had a decent new job, was renting half of a town house. Nathaniel’s grades were improving. Adrian had seen all of it happen, coming as close to a happy ending as any case he’d ever worked on. It didn’t make any sense for things to go wrong now.

  Adrian reached the end of the missing person’s registry. There was nothing new from the last time he’d checked that morning: no other disappearances from the area, no other vanishing children. He spent some time skimming the news, scrolling through Google looking for un-clicked links about the story. There were none. Several pages in, he felt his eyes slide out of focus, and found himself re-reading the same results several times without them sinking in. Realizing, as he noticed this, that he was exhausted, he pushed back his chair and shut down his computer.

  He made his way across the room, unbuttoning his shirt as he padded down the hall into his bedroom, the silence of his house keeping him company. His walls were bare. They always had been, even when he hadn’t lived alone, although Jessica had pestered him about it when they’d moved in together.

  “Most people keep photos of their family in the hall,” she had said in her usual half-teasing, half-nagging way. “You’ve got to have pictures of somebody.”

  “We don’t like family photos,” he had told her. “And besides, I don’t like being watched by my walls.” Jessica had laughed. But it was true. Adrian didn’t like photographs of people, and he never had. He didn’t like the way they caught moments of time in stasis, the way that dead people could stare out of their frame with cheerful ignorance of their fate.

  He gave a shuddering yawn, shrugged out of his shirt, and lay down on his bed, too tired to finish undressing. The bed seemed too big these days. He was accustomed to going to sleep in an empty bed, but knowing that he would wake up in one made it worse.

  Adrian had practiced the same sleep ritual since he was a kid, so long that it had become essential. He’d tried to explain that many times to his wife, without much success. Jessica had always liked to talk in bed. She talked when they made love, and even afterward she would trace shapes onto his chest with her fingertips and ask what he was thinking. On nights they didn’t have sex — which had become more and more frequent as the marriage wound i
ts way towards the inevitable — she would lie beside him in stony silence, punctuated by the sort of questions that had no right answer and would invariably lead to a blazing argument that would carry long into the early hours of the morning. After that, sleeping was impossible, ritual or not.

  To combat this, Adrian had started going to bed an hour earlier than she did, so he would have time for his sleep ritual. She had always taken this as a personal affront despite his continual, weary explanation that she really had absolutely nothing to do with anything that went on in his head. It doesn’t really matter now, Adrian thought, taking another deep breath. You’ve got all the time in the world to do whatever you like. Hope it was worth it.

  With his eyes closed, Adrian visualized the inside of his mind. He always imagined his mind as a cavernous room, like a chamber in a cathedral. The walls were lined, floor to ceiling, with file cabinets, each of them labeled. Every night, before falling asleep, Adrian sorted through his thoughts from the day and filed them away safely into the appropriate place. He imagined himself labeling a fresh drawer with a sticker that said “missing children” and filed away everything away for the night. He would deal with all of it later.

  He gathered up his sour memories and tangled longing and pointless arguments and put them into the “Jessica” cabinet. He hesitated a moment, then imagined himself locking the drawer.

  Adrian’s breath slowed. Darkness crept into his now-empty, peaceful mind. His body grew heavy, liquid, and then dissolved altogether as sleep overtook him and he fell clumsily into a dream. He’d had the dream before. Everything felt familiar, like re-watching an old movie that’s since been forgotten. Adrian knew that he was asleep — knew that he was dreaming — but it didn’t matter. The dream held him all the same.

  He walked along a pathway: a long, straight road that stretched out forever into the horizon. At its end, the trees like tangled bones curved over it to form a roof. The further he traveled, the longer the path seemed to grow, the thatched tunnel ahead of him looming even further away, unavoidable but impossibly distant.

  A figure stood in the mouth of the tunnel, silhouetted against the woods as though it had been cut out of the world with a knife. Adrian started running, wanting to catch the figure, wanting to get closer. No matter how quickly he ran he could not reach his goal, as though he were running the wrong way on a moving sidewalk. He wanted to call out but he had no voice; there was no sound here in this world of roads and trees and darkness.

  The figure at the end of the road turned its face toward him.

  It was incredibly tall, stretched long like a late-afternoon shadow. Its cloak fluttered and swirled around it as though made of something non-solid — liquid, or smoke, or darkness, maybe all three. The figure lowered its hood, revealing a skull tightly covered with pale grey flesh and empty white sockets for eyes, as though two windows to nothingness had opened within its face. It had no nose, and its mouth was perfectly round and rimmed in rows of tiny needle-sharp teeth that flashed and rotated in its lipless, gaping maw.

  Its blank eyes locked on Adrian, the figure raised its hand. Long, spindling fingertips like claws appeared from within the rippling folds of its cloak, and it beckoned to him.

  * * *

  Adrian awoke with a jolt, his skin tingling with cold sweat, his heart thudding in his throat. He clung to his sheets, blankets twisted around his legs, pale sunlight bathing his room, and forgot what it was that had made him so afraid.

  He realized after a moment, as his senses came back to him, that his phone was going off. It buzzed insistently against his leg, and he struggled with his blankets and pants to free it from his pocket. He read the caller ID with a groan. Why in the hell was his mother calling him at 5:59 a.m.? A myriad of frightening possibilities blossomed into his mind simultaneously: someone had died; someone was in the hospital; someone was in town and wanted to visit. Hastily, he turned off his alarm clock before it could have the chance to go off at six, and answered his phone. “Hello?”

  “Sorry. You were asleep.”

  “No, Mom…no, it’s fine.” He yawned and sat up; through the curtains of his window, he could make out the pale haze of the newly-risen sun. “What’s up?”

  “I woke you up. Here, go back to bed sweetie, I didn’t…” She trailed off. Adrian tried to remember when she had started calling him ‘sweetie.’ “I just figured you always used to be a morning person, and I was up early, and got to thinking….”

  “No, it’s really okay. What’s up?”

  “I just haven’t talked to you for a while. Is everything okay?”

  That was an interesting question. He paused to think it over, not sure quite how to answer it. It was more complicated than he was comfortable with. No — who was he kidding. It was a conversational landmine. He thought about Jessica, and the haunting emptiness of his house without her; he thought about Nathaniel Weaver; and he thought about the Nightmare Man, and how ridiculous he felt for being scared of a child’s drawing. “Yeah, I’m fine. Mom, is everything okay?”

  “Yes. Everything’s going great up here.” There was an uneasy pause. “Do you and Jessica have any plans for Thanksgiving?”

  Adrian’s stomach rolled over uneasily, and he wondered how it was that, somehow, in three months, he hadn’t mentioned to his mother that he was getting a divorce. Had he really not spoken with her in all that time? “No, not really.”

  “I was just thinking…it would be nice, wouldn’t it?” His mother’s voice sounded hopeful, pregnant with the whispers of passive aggression that had been a staple of his childhood. “To have a Thanksgiving together as a family again? Like we did before…” She trailed off.

  “Um, sure. Yeah, it’ll be fun. I can take the weekend off and everything.” He could, too, if he wanted; he could have taken off the whole month, with all the stockpiled vacation time and sick leave he had never used. “Jessica might not make it,” he added, and wondered why he was even bothering to lie — especially when being caught was inevitable. “But I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Oh, Adrian, that would be wonderful! You don’t know much Dad and I —” She stopped dead, as though catching herself saying something profane, and her voice creaked a little from trying to suck the words back into her mouth before they got away.

  All these years later, it still bothered him to hear his step-father referred to as “Dad.” It bothered him that Evan’s name seemed to have been permanently changed, that “Dad” was a proper noun, even though the only person who ever called him that was Adrian’s mother. No one should ever call the person they slept with “Dad,” especially not in polite company, especially not in the company of adult children who didn’t share any chromosomes with “Dad.”

  And most especially not when Adrian’s own father had never been called “Dad”; he had been “Daddy” when Adrian was little, and then he had become “Your Father,” another proper noun, a title or maybe a pejorative. “Your Father” was spoken with implicit accusation. “Your Father” meant that ownership of him had passed hands, that he might belong to Adrian but he certainly didn’t belong to the rest of the family.

  She was silent a moment, and then, briskly, “Well, I guess I’ll let you get going. I’m sure you have to get ready for work and everything. Talk to you soon.” And she hung up, sparing him the awkwardness of a sentimental farewell. If she was calling him “sweetie” now then she might start saying “I love you,” and Adrian wasn’t sure he could actually say that out loud to his mother. Not because he didn’t love her — he did — but because it seemed a little late in their relationship to be trying new things.

  He cast a glance at his alarm clock. Exhausted, feeling the grit of tiredness in his eyes and the low dull pain of a headache starting behind his right temple, he rolled the alarm forward an hour and went back to sleep. He’d forgo his morning run in favor of a little shut-eye, he decided.

  This proved to be the wrong choice.

  His alarm woke him from a hazy half-daze an
hour later, and he opened his eyes even more wearily than the first time. It threw the rest of his morning off, no matter how hard he tried to follow his normal routine. He couldn’t get his shower at the right temperature. He had no clean pants and had to put yesterday’s pair back on. The toaster burned his wheat toast, leaving deep, ashy singe marks in the bread. By the time he finished getting dressed for work, he wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed and start all over, like he could just keep hitting ‘reset’ until the day felt right.

  But there was no time for that now. If anything, he was running late.

  He checked his phone as he started out the door. He hoped that Detective Roark would have returned his message while he was getting ready, but there was no missed call from him. There was a call from Angela Weaver, though, and he listened to the message as he made his way out into the driveway.

  “Hey, um, Adrian. I mean, Mr. Montgomery. It’s Angela. Listen, I was wondering…this is so weird, I don’t even know what to do, but I got this call last night from this guy. He said he was a psychic and he knew where Nathaniel was. And…shit, I don’t know, I don’t want to talk to the cops about it because they’ll think I’m nuts, and I probably am nuts, but what if he knows something? I can’t just….well, anyway. Give me a call, if you’re not too busy, I want to know what you think. He said he was going to come by this afternoon. Thanks.”

  He placed the phone back in his pocket, writing himself a mental sticky-note to call Angela back when he got a minute, and climbed into his car to drive to work. His eyes burned with sleepiness and that low, pulsing ache had spread to both temples. He felt an odd detachment, as though part of him were still asleep. Going back to bed was looking more and more appealing with every minute he stayed awake.

  He thought he saw things moving in the shadows along the sidewalk: hulking creatures, bony creatures, wide-eyed creatures, giant fluttering creatures made out of smoke and darkness. But when he looked again they were gone, leaving just trees and trash cans and stray cats behind. After a while he forced himself to stop looking for them, though his eyes did stray to the rearview mirror more often than necessary. Sleep-deprivation induced hallucinations, he thought. Your eyes playing tricks on you. There is nothing following you, so stop it.