The Darkness of Dreamland Read online

  “I don’t really play dolls,” Nathaniel said. “Can I be the knight instead?”

  She held the knight to her chest and glowered at him. “Be horsey.”

  Nathaniel looked around the room one last time, before settling down to his knees across from her. He set the horse back on the wall of the pink castle, and began to play.

  CROSSROADS

  Sonia hadn’t been to Crossroads since she was a little girl. She had been born there, raised among the fields with the other faerie children, but she had been taken to the cabin at the foot of the portal when she was still very young in order to train for the family trade. “You have to start early,” her mother had explained to her. “Because you won’t be able to last very long. You’ll age fast and die young. That’s just the way these things go.”

  This hadn’t been the most encouraging pep-talk, but then, Sonia’s mother wasn’t a particularly encouraging woman. She had sad eyes and heavy wings and she touched the humans as though they might be riddled with disease — as though they had fleas, maybe, or leprosy. She rarely talked and after she left the farm to retire in Crossroads, Sonia didn’t miss her company. Somehow, the cabin had seemed less sad and lonely without her there.

  Sonia’s eyes ticked over to Adrian. He was slumped over in his seat, head leaning against the door frame of the carriage, clutching his satchel to his chest like a beloved toy. His jaw hung slightly open, but no dreams flickered on his breath. For the best, probably. It wouldn’t do for Lorelai to throw open the carriage door and see the passenger cabin filled up with dreamlight. Not when she’d already bargained the price of their journey as far as she possibly could.

  The shivering, creaky stride of the carriage slowed. The curtains were drawn, but Sonia felt like they must be close. The carriage still swayed up and down, side-to-side, but the motion felt more stable now as though the terrain had evened out — the roads in the heart of the village were better-maintained than those wandering through the wilderness.

  “Adrian,” she said, softly, leaning across the bench to prod his shoulder. “Wake up. We’re nearly there.”

  He muttered something and shifted away from her.

  “You won’t want to miss this,” she said. She shook him slightly. “And if you wake up we can get out of the carriage and walk a little. You’d like that, right?”

  He grunted, but one eye opened. It stared out at her, closed, and then opened again. He struggled to sit upright and winced when he straightened his head. Pain throbbed in his neck, where it joined the shoulder. “Are we there yet?” he murmured, sleepily, like a child.

  “Nearly,” she said. “If you want, we can open up the curtains now. The road’s a little more even.”

  “Alright,” he agreed, hesitantly.

  She leaned over him — she smelled like lilacs and he was suddenly self-conscious of his own odor, and that he had not showered in days — and slid open the curtains.

  Light flooded into the carriage in a warm wash of gold. The sun was low in the sky, a fat lazy mid-afternoon sun that cast deep shadows over the fields. The fields seemed normal enough — puffy white sheep wandered over pastures like low-lying clouds, stacks of hay stood waited to be baled, vegetables grew in tidy green rows in rich brown soil — but the buildings were all strange. Some of them seemed to have been tossed together out of unlikely materials, while others were built haphazardly around the natural features of the land. One house had been carved into the side of a hill, with grass growing over the curve of the roof. Another was built among the branches of an enormous tree, the structure itself mostly hidden by leaves. Beyond that was a house that most closely resembled a beaver dam: a pile of scrap lumber interspersed with rocks and mud, with one large and very stately wooden door standing incongruously in the center.

  “Where are we?”

  “Crossroads,” Sonia replied. “It’s a faerie city. Most of the roads this far out pass through here, so you can’t really get anywhere without traveling through.”

  He nodded. He leaned forward in his seat, craning his neck to peek out at the buildings. The farmland fell away, slowly, as the buildings grew closer together. He guessed they were reaching the center of town. “This far out?” He echoed.

  “From the center,” she said. “Before the mountains, there’s the Center Kingdom. The further you go from the kingdom, the wilder it gets. Crossroads is pretty much the farthest south anybody will go, if they can help it.”

  “Oh. And I guess the road to the Gatekeeper crosses through here?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  Peering outside, Adrian could easily see why they called the town “Crossroads”. The carriage jangled forward toward the intersection of at least a half-dozen streets that all ran together like the hub of some very large, crooked wheel — streets that crossed over each other as though they had been designed by a child scribbling out a maze onto a piece of paper. He guessed that Irrational Beings probably didn’t have a lot of social engineers to build their towns.

  “Well…we’re nearly there.” Sonia’s voice sounded a little strained. She fidgeted in her seat. “Adrian…” she began, in the tone of someone who has been putting off bad news as long as possible, “This might be…difficult…for you.”

  He blinked, caught off-guard. “What do you mean?”

  “The…faeries…that live in Crossroads…well, they’re perfectly nice people, and I’m sure we won’t have any problems, but…” She bit her lower lip. “I don’t know how they’ll react to you.”

  “You don’t think they’ll like me?”

  “No, it’s not that. They’re…” Sonia trailed off, realizing that Adrian wasn’t listening. All motion sickness forgotten, he had pressed his nose against the glass of the carriage window and was staring out at the village center as it unfolded. His jaw hung open, slightly, although he was unaware of it.

  Where the farmlands had seemed mostly deserted for the evening, the village center was alive with activity. A tremendous building that looked to be made from salvaged bits of enormous clockwork released regularly-timed puffs of smoke from amidst a cluster of smokestacks. The sign out front read: “Crossroads Dream Refinery.” The refinery gave way to other buildings as they neared the center of town: shops, taverns, homes, markets.

  Faeries moved among the buildings, going about their daily lives with the same air of routine as people in any other city. The women were small-statured and beautiful. Some had dragonfly wings like Sonia, while others had large butterfly wings, or heavy moth wings, or buzzing bee wings. None of them wore very much. The men were smaller, and held themselves in a hunched manner that made them seem even shorter than they were. Their wings were long and leathery, like bat wings, and their faces were narrow and pinched. There seemed to be five women for every man.

  Some looked up as the carriage passed, but many just continued with whatever they were doing — chatting with each other, or sweeping out the entryway of their building, or locking up doors with heavy padlocks. Two hunched faerie men stood in the doorway of a shop, smoking pipes; the smoke curled over their heads in an alarming shade of green and formed shapes like thought bubbles over their heads.

  The carriage shuddered to a halt. Once more it creaked, a terrific metallic groan that sliced through the air with an awful shriek, and then it set itself down hard on the ground. Adrian fumbled for the latch to open the door and spilled out, nearly falling over in his rush to put some distance between himself and the spidery carriage. He hugged his satchels to his chest, the way you’re supposed to hug your seat cushion if your airplane crash-lands in water, and stumbled out onto the road. He stood in the shadow of a building that seemed to have been built predominantly out of river rocks and mud. A few twigs stuck out haphazardly from the mortar. Some still had leaves clinging to them. A sign over the door read Depository of Illusions: Discount Used Dreams at Competitive Prices. Across the street, a pink-haired faerie dropped the rug she had been shaking out and ogled him.

  “Have a fu
n ride?” Lorelai asked. She shifted in her seat, looking down at him. Faint amusement tugged at the corners of her mouth.

  “Thank you, Lorelai,” Sonia said, climbing out of the cabin and standing — purposely, Adrian thought — between them. “We’ll be going, then. I’m sure you have business to attend to.”

  “I always do,” she replied. “Say, you know where you’re staying tonight? The Swaggering Spider’s always got an open room.” Her eyes flicked from Sonia to Adrian, where they lingered.

  “I’ve made arrangements with friends,” Sonia said. She started toward Adrian, taking slow steps backward as though unwilling to let Lorelai out of her sight. “But I do appreciate the hospitality.”

  Lorelai laughed. “I’m sure.” She ran the tip of her tongue over her lips. “Well, anyway. I’d best get going myself. You let me know if you change your mind.” She hesitated, then turned her eyes back to Sonia. Something fierce gleamed there. “You should stop in and give your poor old mother a visit, before you head out.”

  Sonia muttered her response, but it was drowned out by the nails-on-a-chalkboard shriek of the carriage legs coming back to life. Lorelai, once more facing forward on the driver’s seat, snapped her fingers, and the carriage lurched forward and shambled down the path, its pointed feet leaving pockmarks on the dirt road in its wake.

  “…What’s the Swaggering Spider?” Adrian asked, when he was sure Lorelai had passed out of earshot. The faerie across the street had picked up her rug and was back to shaking it, but she continued to stare at Adrian as though not quite believing her eyes.

  “Tavern,” Sonia replied. “Just another of Lorelai’s business ventures. At its best it’s little more than a brothel. Folk come down, from the other cities, to…spend time…with the locals, and they pay Lorelai well for the privilege.”

  “Oh.” He couldn’t imagine a less appealing name for a brothel. “She said something about your mother…?”

  Sonia was suddenly very interested in the pock-marked dirt road. Her wings sagged.

  Apparently, awkward family relationships were the same no matter what world you lived in. Adrian found the thought oddly comforting. He glanced back up at the building, and wondered what exactly a “used dream” was, and why anyone would want to buy one.

  Before he got the chance to ask, however, he was distracted by something coming up the path opposite the direction he and Sonia had come: two faeries, sitting astride two giant cats.

  Not giant cats in the sense of lions or leopards — but regular, domestic housecats, blown to immense proportion. They padded silently over the pockmarked road, cats the size of ponies with huge round paws and long, twitching tails trailing at least three feet behind them. The right-most of the party was long-haired, steel-grey fur tipped in white across the toes, chest, and two dots above its eyes, which were enormous gleaming pools of bright yellow. To the left was a short-haired ginger tabby, its cream fur patterned with bands of orange; this one had amber-colored eyes.

  Adrian stared at the spectacle, completely dumbfounded, and realized precisely what Sonia had meant when she had warned him about the effects of Irrational Beings on the reasoning mind of a human adult. Faeries wandering along a city street closing up shop for the night was one thing. Faeries riding into town like characters in a Western on the back of impossibly huge cats was something quite different. He gaped, and was too shocked to feel embarrassed for staring.

  The grey-and-white cat halted a few feet away from Sonia, and its rider dismounted; the other followed suit, fluttering easily to the ground and moving to greet her fellow faerie. The cats, apparently recognizing that they had been discharged from service, wandered disinterestedly away from them. The ginger tabby flopped down in the middle of the street, rolling around in the dust. The gray one lifted its tail against the side of Depository of Illusions and marked its territory in a reeking wash of urine; it dripped down the side of the mud-and-stone walls as though the building had been hit by a sprinkler jet.

  Reluctantly, Adrian tore his eyes from the giant cats, and, for the first time, took a good look at the faeries.

  The one that had been riding the grey-and-white cat looked to be the bolder of the two, a self-appointed leader type; she was about Sonia’s height, but thinner in build, tomboyish, and her hair was a shade of dark forest green that stood up at an odd angle, like a very thick, gently curving mohawk. She wore a short skirt that seemed to be made of leaves, knee-high brown leather boots, and a very short dark green shirt that managed to cover very little of her body. Instead of Sonia’s four gossamer dragonfly wings, this faerie had two translucent blue-green butterfly wings with long, trailing tails that ended at her mid-calf.

  The faerie who had been riding the tabby stood next to the green-haired faerie, hanging back as if shy. She was built more like Sonia, curvaceous and buxom, but her curves were more pronounced, not as soft. Her wings were a pale pink in color, and shaped like the quintessential pixie wing Adrian was used to seeing in drugstores around Halloween time; she was wearing what looked to be a grass skirt crafted out of fine gold chain, and a white tube top that left the majority of her midriff bare, managing only to barely contain the swell of her breasts. Her hair tumbled around her shoulders in long, curling waves of pale blue. She wore a vague, dazed expression, as though she were daydreaming about something and not quite interested in the world around her.

  “Are we late?” the blue-haired faerie asked.

  “Doubt it,” the one with the mohawk said. “We passed Lorelai’s carriage on the way up, remember? The way that thing shambles along they probably could have walked here faster. Don’t know why you made us ride all the way out here,” she said, turning to Sonia. “Surely she wasn’t too cheap to take you another half-mile?”

  “I didn’t want her knowing where he was staying,” Sonia said, and then added something in that deep, lyrical faerie language that Adrian had heard her sing in once before. He guessed she was probably saying something about him that she didn’t want him to hear.

  The green-haired faerie said, looking up to set her eyes on Adrian with hawk-like intensity. “So you’re him — the one who remembers.”

  Adrian nodded, dumbly, and thought that perhaps this would not validate their belief in the survival of his mental capacity.

  “Adrian,” Sonia said. She touched him on the back, a gentle pressure of fingertips on his far shoulder, her arm bridging his upper back. He thought he felt something protective, and possibly a bit possessive, in the way her fingers gripped his shoulder. “That’s Laurel,” she gestured first to the green-haired leader, then to the blue-haired, day-dreaming faerie, “and her life-companion, Evangeline.” Adrian wondered if ‘life companion’ meant what he thought it did, but thought it might be rude to ask. “They both work for the Crossroads law enforcement.”

  “Hi,” Adrian managed, feeling exceedingly foolish. He wondered what sort of faerie laws needed to be enforced, and whether there were faerie jails, and faerie handcuffs, and if they had a different uniform when they were on duty.

  “Hello, hello,” Laurel, the green-haired faerie said, pulling away from her companion to move near him, drawing rather closer to his personal space than he felt comfortable with. She examined him with gleaming, hungry eyes that looked, now that he thought of it, rather like the eyes of the grey cat she had been riding. “You are a fine specimen.” She reached up a hand, running her fingertips down the line of his jaw, his neck, his chest; he shivered at her touch, and she smiled. “And so demure.” She looked up at Sonia, who Adrian noticed — vaguely, peripherally — was staring back at Laurel with a look that was not altogether pleased. “Oh, Sonia, let’s keep him!”

  “Very funny,” Sonia said, voice stern, her hand dropping to Adrian’s waist and pulling him closer, her possessiveness now clearly manifested. “Come, ladies — night isn’t far off, and we have a lot of preparations, if we want to avoid the Darkness.”

  Avoid the Darkness? Adrian thought, dimly; what did she mean by t
hat? He didn’t get the chance to ask before he was ushered forward, and he followed like a dumbstruck sheep being herded by a very forceful sheepdog.

  Evangeline put two fingers in her mouth and whistled. The cats looked up, huge ears pivoting forward. One yawned, showing its massive pointy teeth and a long red tongue covered in barbs. Whiskers the size of arrows swept back against its cheeks and it rose lazily, taking a moment to stretch. Its scythe-like claws curled out of its huge paws and pierced the soft ground. It began to purr, and the sound reverberated through the ground, vibrating up Adrian’s legs.

  An inarticulate noise caught in his throat. “You’re not going to make me ride that thing,” he said. “Oh no. I’ve had my fill of weird transportation for the day.”

  “It’ll be fine,” Sonia said, still tugging him forward. Her hand caught him in a firm ‘stay out of the traffic, little boy’ vice grip that he knew there was no escaping. “It’s only a half-mile. And much more comfortable than the carriage. You won’t get sick, I promise.”

  Adrian gave her a wounded look, like a teenager whose mother has fatally embarrassed him in front of a hot girl, and muttered something under his breath.

  “What was that?” Laurel asked.

  “I said,” he raised his voice, “that I’m not worried about being sick, I’m worried about that monster eating me.”

  Evangeline laughed. “You’ll be fine. Here — you and Sonia can ride the ginger one. He’s the gentlest cat in Dreamland. I’ll ride with Laurel. She can sit up front.” She winked at Laurel. Laurel grinned back.

  Adrian looked desperately at Sonia, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. She tugged him forward to where the cat, apparently bored with the proceedings, had settled down onto its belly, all four legs folded up under its body and invisible in the mass of thick ginger fur. The tip of its massive tail twitched. Adrian closed his eyes and tried not to think of its dagger-sized teeth plunging into his chest. He tried not to think of it shaking its head with him in its jaws flopping uselessly like a ragdoll. He tried not to think of it pinning him down under the weight of its enormous paw…allowing him to escape…pouncing on him again and grinding him into the dirt, claws curling into his skin until he bled.