The Darkness of Dreamland Read online

  “This is what your life would be,” her mother had said, gesturing vaguely to the young faerie girls who milled around inside the castle walls. Their wings drooped. Their eyes wandered. They carried heavy loads, or washed soiled clothes, or watched with wistful eyes as carts traveled up the cobbled path to the castle. “Standing in arm’s reach of the dreams, unable to feel their warmth. Laboring under others. Is this the life you’re aching for?”

  Sonia, then, barely eleven years old, felt tears sting at the back of her eyes. Something cold and clawed and miserable seized her heart, nesting in the hollow of her ribs like a tiny dragon made of ice. “But why?” She asked. “Why aren’t they happy with so many dreams here?”

  “Because it’s not their job to be happy,” her mother said, with a grimly satisfied smile. “And it’s not ours, either.”

  For years, Sonia had believed it. She had never thought to question the bitter advice.

  It wasn’t until years later that she understood what her mother had been too jaded to say — or, perhaps, that her mother had thought it kinder not to say. Not until her relationship with her mother had been broken beyond repair. Not until she had found a human whose mind was beautiful and whole, a human whose dreams gleamed in the dark and warmed her like her own private sun. But she understood, then, about the look of longing and misery in the eyes of the servant girls in the queen’s court.

  She understood, finally, what the faeries of the court had always known: The children don’t dream for the faeries. The dreams can never be yours to touch.

  That proprietary urge…the desire to have, to hold, to consume. It was an urge that tore the likes of Lorelai apart….an urge that drove Dreamland to the maw of the Darkness. And knowing that, at any moment, she could reach out a hand and snatch the still-living dreams from his sleeping breath chilled Sonia to her core. Because it wouldn’t be enough. It would never be enough.

  And that’s why all the faeries were so sad.

  STIRRING IN THE DARK

  After what seemed like an eternity, Adrian felt the carriage shudder to a halt. He had grown accustomed to the undulation and awful, deafening creaks; in the stillness that followed, his head reeled and ears rang as his senses struggled to adjust. His hands tingled, and when he tried to flex his fingers needles of pain stabbed up through his arms.

  The door opened, allowing rich golden light to flood into the carriage. “We’re stopping,” Lorelai said, addressing neither of them in particular. She stepped back from the door to allow them to get out. She glanced up at Adrian, her expression inscrutable. “I’m going to untie you, so that you can eat. Wouldn’t do to have you looking peaky when I delivered you.”

  “No, I’d imagine not,” he replied, wearily. He tried to think if there was something he could offer her, some bargaining chip, but he came up blank. Lorelai leaned in close, her hair brushing over his arm as she loosened the rope around his wrists, then pushed him away. She gave Rosalie a significant, probing look, but said nothing further and disappeared into her carriage. She emerged a moment later to thrust a small package of cakes into Rosalie’s arms, then disappeared once more. A lock clicked in the door from the inside, and after a few minutes Adrian saw a glow of colored light illuminate the curtains in the doorway, creeping out around the edges and spilling through the glass. The light danced and shimmered, the way sunlight plays on the surface of a creek.

  Rosalie glared at the locked carriage door. “Well isn’t that all well and good for you,” she muttered. “Here. We’d better hurry up and eat. The sun will be down any minute.” She turned back to Adrian, who had been edging slowly away from the carriage, and grabbed his arm in a vice grip. Not for the first time, he marveled at the strength of the faeries. He could feel his arm bruising under her fingertips.

  They settled under a nearby tree to eat. Adrian supposed they might be at a higher elevation than they had been, as the trees were mostly evergreen. Overhead, a pair of brilliantly-colored jewel-toned birds had nestled themselves into the crook of a limb. One had its head beneath its wing. The other was pecking hopefully at a pine cone the size of a pineapple. Beyond the line of trees, Adrian saw a gentle ripple of foothills, rising up into mountains. Past these mountains was the great purple peak he had seen from Sonia’s woods, a peak that seemed to be made of amethyst and gleamed in the sun.

  Rosalie broke off a chunk of bread and handed it to Adrian, her hand lingering as he took it as though she were trying to sneak in another touch. He quickly withdrew the bread and began eating mechanically, hardly tasting it. It was some sort of fruit cake: a crumbly loaf folded through with nuts and chunks of dried fruit. It didn’t taste nearly as good as any of Sonia’s cooking.

  They ate in silence, Rosalie occasionally glancing over at the locked carriage with a dour expression. Adrian took these opportunities to sneak furtive looks around the area, trying to formulate an escape route, but every time he did this she would look back at him with sudden sharpness that he wondered if she had somehow read his mind. When he was finished eating, Rosalie tied his hands back together.

  Adrian gave up trying to escape for the night and settled back into a bed of pine needles, feeling exceedingly sorry for himself. Rosalie leaned back against a tree opposite him, carefully folding her wings so they wouldn’t be crushed against the bark. She crossed her arms over her bosom and stared at him. Adrian had no doubts that if he tried to move she would be on him within the expanse of a second. Her eyes slid closed, but he could tell from her breathing that she was awake and alert. The sun traveled closer to the horizon, spreading a rich orange glow over the tops of the foothills. The carriage windows glowed like tiny nightlights, and Adrian rolled onto his side to keep them in view, drawing meager comfort from the light. He wondered if it would be enough to forestall the Darkness.

  It wasn’t.

  As the light failed, the multi-colored dreamlight from the carriage receded, disappearing as though being sucked through a straw, whirling and shrinking until it was nothing but a pinprick in the distance, a tiny twinkling star. Then that, too, winked entirely out of sight, and the Darkness consumed the hollow where they camped. The night burst into life around them. Adrian realized he had never been outside when Darkness fell before, and now he knew why: It was a thousand times worse here in the open. Things moved among the trees, converging on him from every side. Some sounded small and insect-like; others sounded huge and heavy-footed, and he imagined inky black bears crashing through the undergrowth, coming for him.

  Something skittered over his hand. He heard things, slimy and furry and scaly things, weave through the trunks of trees. Something breathed heavily near him, great rasping breaths that rustled the grass and caused gooseflesh to spread up his arms. He wanted to reach out, to grab hold even of Rosalie for some small comfort, but he was afraid that his hand might close around one of these unseen, shapeless horrors instead.

  Memory tugged at the back of his thoughts, whispering an invitation down the dark corridors of his mind. He struggled, searching for some escape; in his mind, there were memories he desperately wanted to stay away from, but outside there were dark, slithering creatures that wanted to climb into him, destroy him. There was no shelter.

  A door in his thoughts opened, and he walked in. He watched his memories through a distorted lens, like a camera smeared with vaseline, and people moved around in his thoughts like runaways from carnival mirrors. Slowly, though he struggled against it, the images cleared, and he eased down into them, engulfed by them, reliving them once more.

  Adrian was the youngest person at the funeral. His mother had gone into a frenzy the day before, trying to find a suit small enough to fit. He’d outgrown last year’s family-portrait suit (a family portrait that had been taken off the wall and hidden away, the memory was too fresh, a curly-haired toddler smiling at the camera in her mother’s lap, two sullen little boys tired and bored and itchy, the last photo of them all together, a moment frozen in time too difficult to bear) and on short notice t
here was nothing stocked in the stores.

  He remembered his mother dressing him in William’s church clothes. They hung from him like loose skin, like wearing an elephant. William still fit in his last-year suit.

  The morning of the funeral, she’d brushed his hair until it lay flat to his head, and straightened his collar, and smeared his cheek with her saliva-wet thumb. Then she burst into tears and hugged him to her chest and her hand pressed his face into her bosom and she cried for a long time. Then his hair was all messed up so she had to brush it all over again.

  The casket was too small. It looked funny, like a toy — a coffin for a doll’s funeral, not a person’s. The lid was closed.

  Adrian stood beside the toy-size coffin and stared at it with wide pale eyes. His hair was plastered to his head with gel and sweat and his sleeves went down to his fingertips. William was waiting in Grandmother’s car; he’d been sent to time-out for making too much noise during the ceremony. Grandmother had dragged him outside and spanked him and everybody in the church could hear him screaming. Daddy looked embarrassed and Mommy cried some more.

  But Adrian had sat the whole service in silence (“he’s always been such a good boy,” people commented and his ears burned with shame because he knew he wasn’t a good boy, he was the worst boy of all) so he got to stand here at the coffin and say goodbye.

  “You’re not in there,” Adrian whispered, just loud enough for the two of them in his very best make-a-wish whisper. “You’re hiding. You’re playing hide-and-seek with me and some day I’m going to find you.”

  He smiled then, a little bit, and he didn’t ever cry about Samantha anymore except sometimes when he slept.

  The edges of the memory began to blur, to fade. The colors faded, the way color had faded from his dream when Lorelai had stolen it, and suddenly he was no longer living the memory but watching it, no longer watching it but staring at a still photo, not a photo but a pen-and-ink drawing…

  Outside of the dream, in the world where it was dark and cold, something screamed. It wasn’t a human sound, or even an animal sound: It was unearthly and primal, the sound a soul would make if it could scream. Adrian jolted awake, shaking and shivering.

  He could see nothing in the stifling darkness, but he could feel it: something many-legged and furry crouched on his chest, like the overgrown child of a cat and a tarantula. Tiny hair-like claws pricked his skin through his shirt. Hot, sour breath invaded his nostrils and Adrian realized the thing’s face was inches from his own. He tried to call out, but realized he couldn’t: The thing was crushing the breath out of his chest, and he couldn’t get enough air. He flailed his arms, trying to push it away, and his hands brushed against the bulk of other creatures in the darkness. They seized onto him. Something long coiled itself around his arm, like an overgrown centipede, thousands of needle-sharp legs piercing his skin.

  The thing on his chest hissed, a breathy sound of escaping air that rushed over Adrian’s upturned face. It ran a long, scruffy feeler along Adrian’s cheek, and clicked together what sounded like three sets of pincers.

  Something else moved, treading on enormous, quiet paws. Adrian felt the air above him stir, felt the brush of fur against his face, and the weight lifted from his chest as the thing was knocked loose. The creature screamed, not the cry of elation that had woken Adrian but a cry of pain and terror that echoed inside of Adrian long after it cut off. The things on his arms released their hold, backing away from him. Adrian could make out the muffled sounds of what seemed like a hundred feet brushing and rattling over the undergrowth. He imagined a horde of cockroaches scattering away from a kitchen light, a dozen rats shuffling through the trash, a nest of snakes coiling and slithering away from a hand plunged into their midst.

  Someone said something. The words didn’t make any sense, or else Adrian’s brain had lost its ability to understand. The creeping things in the dark did not return.

  In the Dark, he couldn’t see Rosalie standing over him, but he felt her proximity. He whimpered, despite himself, and she lowered herself to her knees beside him and groped for him until she caught his bound hands between her own fingers, and held them until he went back to sleep.

  * * *

  Sonia slept fitfully. She woke often, startled by noises in the dark, and had a difficult time settling back to sleep. Her cat left, slinking away into the Dark to hunt among the shadows, and she was cold and lonely without its company. Things crawled in the underbrush near her and rustled in the tree limbs overhead. In the distance, things without names called to each other in shrill, incessant screams. After waking several times in the night, she decided finally to sit up and wait out the Darkness.

  It was then that she saw the light.

  She disregarded it, at first, as a hopeful figment of imagination. Then, as it refused to disappear, she thought perhaps it was a unicorn: It glowed with the same incandescent radiance. It wasn’t a unicorn, though. It was a dream.

  She rose to her feet, following the trail of light as it wove through the Darkness. She wasn’t sure why she followed the dream. She hadn’t seen a corporeal dream since she was very young, and its presence filled her with simple elation — but that wasn’t why she pursued it through the dark. She followed it because something about it felt familiar, like a person she had met in another life, like an old friend returning home after a long absence.

  “Wait!” She whispered, urgently, as she ran through the dark, pursuing the retreating light. “Don’t go yet!”

  The dream turned a corner, and Sonia pursued, oblivious to the rising sun and the pale grey light that spread over the path. She followed it down the hill toward the castle.

  * * *

  In the white room, Nathaniel was having a hard time concealing his fatigue. He didn’t know what time it was; the room was exactly as bright as it had ever been. But it felt late, and he was very tired, and extremely bored.

  Nervously, he glanced at the smooth white wall, expecting it to open at any moment. The Nightmare Man was gone again. He kept coming and going, leaving at odd times only to return with some new source of amusement for the little girl.

  If she was tired, she didn’t show it. She seemed to play with boundless energy. When she grew bored of their make-believe at the castle, she had tugged Nathaniel away and forced the moldy teddy bear into his arms. She chattered some directions to him. He didn’t understand much of it; she talked fast, with the heavy lisp of a small child, and he was fairly certain that some of the words were nonsense anyway. After a few minutes, when he just continued to stand stupidly with the bear in his arms, the girl had snatched it away from him and proceeded to start a new game.

  Nathaniel was about to refuse — to explain that he really, desperately needed a rest — when the wall opened and The Nightmare Man entered. At his heels came a massive dog, unlike any Nathaniel had ever seen before.

  The dog was the size of a bear, with shaggy fur the color and texture of moss. Tightly curled hair fell over its eyes, obscuring them from view, and a long purple tongue hung from its slack maw. The rear end of the dog was completely bald, its grey-green skin mottled with dark patches. A long, slender tail like a lion’s swished behind it; there was a large tangle of curly green fur at its tip.

  “Puppy!” The little girl squealed, delightedly dropping the moldy teddy bear and running to throw her arms around the dog’s neck.

  The dog nosed against her cheek, tail wagging behind.

  Nathaniel had no desire to go near the thing. He felt The Nightmare Man’s eyes on him and he was careful not to look up to meet them.

  “More friends. They can stay forever, like you.”

  As before, The Nightmare Man’s words formed directly into Nathaniel’s thoughts. They sent a chill up his arms, and he wondered where the dog had come from, and what might come through the door next, and if he was really stuck here forever.

  * * *

  Lorelai woke before the others, and when Adrian opened his eyes he saw her standing ove
r them both, hands on her hips. Her lip curled in a sneer. She looked older than she had when he first saw her: The wrinkles around her eyes and mouth were deeper. “Rosalie,” she said, with a voice like ice, “What, precisely, are you doing?”

  Rosalie, whose mouth had been slightly agape as she snored, jolted suddenly awake. She blinked up, unseeingly, at Lorelai, then let out a squeak like a frightened field mouse. “We didn’t do anything!” she said, releasing Adrian’s hand as if it burned her. “It just…it got dark, and these things were trying to get at him, so I…”

  Lorelai’s brow raised, cruel and ironic. She said nothing.

  Adrian burned with shame. They ate breakfast and they turned their backs so he could use the bathroom behind a tree. When he was finished, Lorelai pushed him into the carriage once more. Rosalie followed, and they took care not to look at each other.

  “So. Um. Thanks for saving me, last night,” he said, finally, as the silence stretched between them. The carriage rattled and undulated and threatened to drown out his words.

  She shifted in her seat. “You’re welcome,” she said without looking at him.

  Adrian waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. After a while, he tugged open the curtain, fighting back the nausea so he could look outside.

  Ahead, there was a break in the trees, and through it Adrian could just make out a shallow valley that was cast completely in shadow by a giant building at the far end — a castle, he could see, now that they were drawing nearer. The castle filled up most of the visible horizon, blocking out the sky. It was like no building Adrian had ever seen before, although it held a certain familiarity for him, as though he had seen it somewhere. A children’s storybook, perhaps, or an animated film — except that wasn’t quite it. It resembled the large plastic Princess Doll castle that Samantha had gotten for her last birthday; Adrian could see it now, in his mind, the pink plastic bricks and the blue and white accents and the stable full of pure white smug-looking plastic horses. The building ahead of him looked exactly like that, only larger-than-lifesize.