The Darkness of Dreamland Read online

  But the pain and the dazzling light hadn’t been enough to block his vision entirely, and, standing alongside the burst of color in his mind, there was the retinal burn of something else, something he could make no sense of. He forced his eyes to crack open again.

  Through his narrowed eyes, he could barely make out the shape of a vast, white beast that seemed hazy around the edges. It felt too bright to look at, and Adrian winced, wanting to turn away but wanting, just as badly, to see it clearly. Slowly, his eyes adjusted to the light and he stared blearily at the creature, which stood a few feet from him and stared back at him, quizzically, with large pale blue eyes.

  It was, without doubt, a unicorn.

  A slender white horse, its pelt the color of the core of the sun, a whiteness that flashed and dazzled and was impossible to gaze upon without going blind. It glowed like the sun, too, a brilliant ring of white-gold fading into a pale haze, shifting and shimmering around the horse’s flanks as though the creature itself were made of light, or of heat, or a combination of the two. It had a long, golden mane that fell forward into its expressive blue eyes, and its spun-gold tail streamed behind. A horn, at least a foot long, woven from a substance that looked remarkably like diamond, rose between the eyes in a gentle upward curve. Adrian blinked. The unicorn continued to stare at him.

  Adrian started to laugh, then, unsteady laughter that rocked his body and bubbled out of him uncontrollably. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He laughed, and sobbed, and hiccupped, and his whole body shook. The unicorn tilted its head.

  “Oh, this is rich,” he said, addressing the unicorn between hiccupping sobs of laughter. “A unicorn.” A desperate giggle leaked out of his throat again, then he fell silent, his sides hurting worse than they had ever hurt, a lifetime worth of laughter spent, depleted, indefinitely. “The psychic’s going to love this.”

  And still, the unicorn stubbornly refused to disappear.

  Adrian, emptied of laughter, felt the beginning of fear clench uncomfortably in his gut. “Where the hell am I?” He asked, his eyes going unfocused as he attempted to look at the unicorn without being dazzled by its beautiful white-hot visage. If he expected the unicorn to respond, he was disappointed; it only gazed back at him, quiet and curious, and whatever was left of Adrian’s sanity rushed out of him like air escaping a balloon.

  Distantly, he heard music, a lyrical, beautiful, wild noise. The way Apollo’s lyre must have sounded, the way whale-song must sound at the bottom of the sea. The unicorn’s ears perked up and its head rose, whipping around to look over its shoulder. Adrian struggled to his elbows. The sound came nearer, drawing closer and louder, and he could make out words, although they made no sense; perhaps, he thought, they were being sung in another language, or maybe they weren’t even words at all, but a series of strung-together sounds, beautiful without meaning. Whatever they were, they filled him, and he felt a sense of peace, of quietude.

  He caught a glimpse of the figure: small-statured, and feminine in its silhouette. It drew near, and the unicorn rose to block his view, and Adrian collapsed back against the earth in exhaustion. He closed his eyes and silently urged the music to clear away the awful, resounding pain in his skull and body. And perhaps the music heard his plea, because sleep — true, deep, peaceful sleep — overtook his him, and for the first time in the months since Jessica had walked out of his life, he felt utterly still as sleep washed over him.

  * * *

  He was no longer outside; he could feel the softness of a bed beneath him, and felt a stillness around him that suggested that there were walls. I’m back in my bed, he thought, relieved; I’m back in my own, warm bed, and I’ll open my eyes and realize that I just had a long, crazy dream and then I’ll get up and go to work and won’t have to worry about anything anymore.

  He smelled something, a delicious smell that was simultaneously intensely familiar and totally exotic, and as he became aware of the odor his stomach became aware of its hunger and gave a loud rumble of protest at its mistreatment.

  This wasn’t his house. Nothing that smelled that good had ever been made in his house.

  He struggled to pry his eyes open. He lay in one corner of a single-room cottage on a soft bed made up of burlap bags stitched together. A lumpy pile of rags was piled in one corner atop another burlap mattress. Shelves lined the walls. Some of these held pots and pans. Others were filled with jars of all different sizes and shapes that seemed to be filled with different colors of smoke.

  There was something cooking in a large black kettle in the fireplace, and something else — from this distance, Adrian couldn’t make out precisely what — baking among the coals. A single window, little more than a hole in the wall, peered out across a patch of garden. In the distance, among the trees, he could barely make out the shimmering pale form of an incandescent unicorn.

  Well, so much for it all being a dream, he thought, and closed his eyes again. Unless maybe I’m still asleep. Or possibly crazy. The smell from whatever was cooking in the fireplace swelled and consumed the room, filling his nostrils and causing his stomach to ache in desire for whatever it was that could imbue a room with such a tantalizing odor.

  He struggled to sit up, his arms shaking as he pushed himself. He heard the door open, but he couldn’t see it from where he lay.

  “I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.”

  Adrian collapsed back onto his bed, his trembling arms giving out. He searched out the source of the voice, and his eyes landed upon what was, without question, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.

  She was intensely familiar, although he could say with absolute certainty that he’d never seen her before in his life. At certain angles, she looked identical to people he’d known before, as if someone had pieced her together from snapshots of his memories. Short and wide-hipped, like his first highschool girlfriend. Her lips pouted just like the girl he’d lost his virginity to. And she had Jessica’s eyes — large, expressive, and brilliant green.

  But a pair of pale gossamer wings rose from her shoulder blades, and her hair was a short shock of bright violet.

  “Do what?” Adrian managed to gasp, as a delayed reaction, his voice rasping hoarsely from a throat that felt as though he had been screaming for hours. Perhaps he had.

  “What you just did,” the woman replied, and turned from him to make her way to the hearth. She unloaded the small bundle of firewood she carried onto the floor and dusted herself off, carefully picking splinters from her scant clothing. “You’ll be wanting some more rest. It’s harder to fall through when you’re, well…” she trailed off, and there was a tension in her shoulders that betrayed a degree of discomfort; it also caused her wings to stand up at a rather awkward angle.

  “Fall through…?” He coughed, and felt a horrible burning in his throat, the soreness of over-used vocal cords mingling with the sting of bile.

  “Yes. Through the portal.” Then, with more curiosity than concern the woman asked, “How are you feeling?”

  “Like shit,” he replied and attempted, again, to rise. He managed to make a seated position by leaning heavily against the wall, and stared across the room at the purple-haired, gossamer-winged woman. “Where am I? And who are you?”

  “I’m Sonia.” The tension in her wings seemed to relax, slightly; at least, they drooped a bit and folded over each other a little. “And this is, obviously, my house.”

  She busied herself by stirring the kettle, periodically lifting a massive ladle to sip, then lowering it, apparently satisfied with the taste because she never added anything — but she did not back away from her position at the fireplace. Adrian got the distinct impression that she was trying to avoid staring at him. He wondered how alien he must look to her, and how pathetic — with his hair unkempt, his suit jacket missing, his trousers torn and his eyes almost certainly bloodshot and dulled by exhaustion. Then again, she was the one with the wings and the unicorn, so he didn’t feel too bad for staring.

  �
�Adrian,” he offered, feeling like that would be the polite thing to do.

  She looked over her shoulder, only for a fleeting moment, her emerald eyes glimmering with an emotion Adrian couldn’t identify. It made him sad, somehow, and he wasn’t sure why. “You remember. That’s good.”

  “Remember?” He blinked at her. “Remember what?”

  “Your name.” She pulled away from the kettle to make her way to a neighboring wall, where a tall cabinet filled with pots, pans, and dishes stood; she pulled a small, lopsided clay bowl from the cabinet, carried it back to the kettle, and filled it. “That’s good,” she repeated, as she handed him the half-full bowl of soup.

  It was heavier than he had expected, the solid clay bowl contributing heftily to the bulk of his dinner. The soup itself was as good as its odor had promised; the broth was thick with simmered tomato and onion, and there were large chunks of vegetables that Adrian couldn’t identify. It was hearty, and slightly spicy, but in a way that warmed rather than burned.

  He drank it in long, hungry gulps, and felt strength flow into him, warm and comforting. Silence passed between them as he ate. Sonia sat at the thick-legged oak table by the hearth, elbows rested on the knobby surface and chin laid on her interlaced fingers, and watched him with rapt emerald-eyed attention. Adrian consumed his soup with the desperate appreciation of a starving man, and the silence stretched until he had finished the last of the dregs from the bowl.

  “Glad you liked it,” Sonia said, her voice even, and he looked up, unable to tell if she was serious or mocking him; perhaps both were the case. “Feel better?”

  “A thousand times over,” he said, reluctantly setting his bowl down next to him and feeling that the silence, now that he had finished the soup, was rather awkward. He wanted to ask about where he was, and what was going on, and how he had gotten here, and what would happen now — but he found that the questions died before making it to his throat. Instead, he watched Sonia with the same rapt attention she had given to him, and felt his mind become surprisingly blank. Was this real? Maybe it wasn’t, but it seemed safest to act like it was, at least until it was all over. As mental breakdowns went, this didn’t seem so bad.

  “If you want to sleep some more…” Sonia offered, and Adrian interrupted her.

  “No. No, I’ve slept enough, and the headache’s just started to go away.” And it had. “I…I’m very confused.”

  His eyes caught sight, again, of a dark, lumpy figure across the room — something he had seen, on his initial visual sweep of the room, but not registered as anything worthy of his notice. Now that his eyes could focus properly and the pounding had receded from his brain, he could make out the shape of another person, dressed in tatters and hidden under layers of ragged blankets. It was quiet and still, and Adrian felt a sudden sense of foreboding.

  “Is that…?” He waved his hand, vaguely, toward the pile of rags.

  Sonia nodded. “The person who came through with you? Yes.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Well, he’s alive,” Sonia said, and crossed the room; she had an uneasy, nervous air about her, as though she were used to perpetual motion and confinement was causing her undue worry. “He doesn’t remember, though, like you.”

  “Remember…what?” He tried to catch the faerie’s eyes and found instead only her constantly shifting wings, the tension lines in her back, the occasional flash of purple hair or glimpse of a frown as she paced before him restlessly. “His name?”

  “Yes, precisely,” she said, and stopped to give him an endearing, quietly patronizing, smile. “You’re doing very well. You might even make it into tomorrow.”

  He stared up at her, feeling disconcerted and more than a little baffled. “Make it? Where…I don’t…” He sighed, raising a hand to rub his temples; the horrible, throbbing pain in his head had receded, but it was replaced now by the subtle but persistent ache of befuddlement. “None of this is making any sense.”

  She knelt at the hearth, digging among the ashes before the fire with a pair of long tongs; she withdrew something, tightly wrapped in paper, and blew away the ashes and embers. She deliberated over the parcel for a moment, carefully unwrapping it, and set it down on a platter before reaching back into the ash again with her tongs.

  Adrian watched her, entranced, and caught a whiff of a new odor, warm and yeasty, unmistakably the smell of fresh-baked bread; it sent him back to Thanksgiving morning in the depths of his childhood, and for a moment he was thoroughly transported back to a suspended moment in time. His mother was standing at the counter, kneading bread, her hands buried to the knuckles in dough, the bulge of her stomach visible beneath her apron. He looked at her and wondered if she would still love him when the baby came.

  “Here.”

  He looked up, shaken from his memory, and realized that Sonia was standing before him, again offering food; now it was one of the loaves that she had pulled from the ashes, and he took it, looking it over in his hands. It was small and round; the crust was charred in places, golden in others, and pale tendrils of steam rose from it.

  “Eat it. It’ll help.”

  He wanted to ask, help with what? but he knew better than to expect a straight answer. He nibbled, curiously, at the crust of bread, and his senses were assaulted by a surprising array of flavor and texture. It tasted the way angel food cake would taste if it were really made by angels.

  He finished in a few bites and tried to remember what he had planned to ask before he had been waylaid by the overwhelming power of sensation; his eyes followed Sonia again, almost out of habit now, as she paced the room like a tiger in a zoo. “You said…you said I might ‘make it’ until tomorrow?” He pressed, at length, gingerly. “What did you mean by that? Am I in danger?”

  She paused, and shifted a little uncomfortably, avoiding his eyes. “I…you should be, yes,” she said, with the air of someone caught in the uncomfortable position of explaining something inappropriate to a small child. “But as I say, you are doing very well. Maybe you’ll be all right.”

  “…Okay.” That hadn’t helped; that hadn’t done anything at all, except for bring a feeling of panic to the forefront of his mind. He pushed that away forcefully and carried on. “But if I’m not all right…what…?” He couldn’t quite form words to explain his fear, because he wasn’t entirely sure what he was afraid of. His eyes wandered to Zachariah, asleep or worse in the corner, and his brow furrowed. He tried a different tact. “What’s wrong with him, exactly?”

  Sonia bit her lower lip in a way that forcefully reminded him of Jessica. The wings on her back fluttered rapidly, buzzing faintly like the hum of a bumblebee. She didn’t answer him, and looked away awkwardly; she cast a look around the room, as though searching for some other morsel of food she could distract him with and finding nothing.

  Adrian pushed himself off of the cot. Every inch of him ached, but the pain wasn’t unbearable, and he tentatively stood for a moment on the hard dirt floor. He wrapped his arms around himself, protectively, and then, with effort, headed across the room to Zachariah. If Sonia wouldn’t tell him what was going on, he would find out for himself.

  The faerie didn’t stop him, and he crossed the room in a half-dozen small steps. A jar of colored smoke sat on the floor beside the cot. The contents were gray-blue and moved with the languid churning of a lava lamp. He watched the smoke — or was it some kind of liquid? — for a moment before searching the lumpy bundle of blankets for Zachariah.

  The psychic’s weather-worn features were peaceful; he was deep in slumber, apparently untroubled, dirtier than he had been but otherwise unscathed. “He looks okay,” he said, uncertainly, examining his features with interest. If anything, he looked more peaceful than he should, as though in his sleep he had lost all the hard years that had etched into his face. “What’s…what’s wrong with him?”

  Sonia sighed, her wings sagging, and she looked at him sidelong. “I’m…I don’t do this, much,” she admitted, finally, resignedly.
“I’m kind of nervous, actually.”

  “Nervous?” He blinked and looked up, startled.

  “I don’t…I don’t know how to explain,” she said, her hands behind her back, staring at the floor. “I’m…I mean, I don’t know…it doesn’t happen like this, you know.”

  He smiled a little; now that he looked at her, she seemed quite young — little more than a teenager. He gave her an encouraging nod, and remained silent; asking questions seemed to make her more uneasy, judging from the way her wings would sag or flutter and her eyes would dart around to avoid him.

  She seemed to recognize the encouragement in his eyes, and smiled back at him. “I’m not sure where to start.” She bounced on the balls of her feet, her hands rolled into fists, swinging at her sides. “Here…are you steady enough to come outside with me? I think it would be easier if I could show you, rather than try to explain. And,” her eyes strayed to Zachariah on the floor, “he’s not going anywhere.”

  He nodded, perhaps a little too enthusiastically, realizing as he did so that he was intensely curious to see the outside world. Part of him thought that, maybe, he would walk outside and the illusion would shatter, and he could go back to a mundane world where he was just crazy. He knew most of the people who worked at the mental hospital. They’d be kind to him there.

  Outside, the world was wild and strange; not so different from any other forest, in appearance, but the feeling of it was different — hyper-real, as though it had been painted in watercolors. The trees were regular trees, in the regular colors, and the sky was the same shade of blue as skies everywhere, but there was a quiet humming energy to the place, a subtle vibration of strangeness. Adrian’s brain may have tried to make sense of the things he saw, to catalog them as normal — but there was nothing normal here.