The Moors

The beginning of this dream is lost. The first thing I remember is dark, cold moors. There isn’t a house around for miles. No lights. I have a job to do, but I don’t want to do it. Oh god, I don’t want to do it. But I have to. If I don’t do what I set out to do, my life will be forfeit.

            I smile in the darkness, even though he can’t see it, and grasp his hand. I hope my grip is steadier than it feels. The smile feels traitorous on my face. He drinks more. Good. He’s drunk. Not drunk enough to stumble and fall. I have to make sure he doesn’t drink that much. He’s bigger than me, so if he goes down, I have to do it the hard way. The mere thought of it sends my stomach pitching and rolling like the hills over which we walk.

            Darkness coats the moors like paint, but I look up and read the thick spray of stars well. I know these moors and I know where I must take him. It’s not far, but the bitter wind slices through to my bones and slows me. Neither of us has a heavy coat, but that doesn’t bother him. Alcohol is his coat.

            I stretch out the hand that’s not connected to his and brush something hard and rough. The tree.

            I tell him that we need to wait a minute, but I don’t let go of his hand. Don’t dare. I can’t lose him in the darkness. I lean against the tree, wrap my free arm around it and press my cheek to its crusty, craggy bark.

            It’s warm.

            I know what it looks like in the light: Gnarled and twisted, dark and blasted. Its limbs do not reach for the sky anymore; they’re arthritic fingers, curled into knobby claws by time and age. It’s shedding its bark; it falls off in musty-mossy chunks. Wind and water and day and night have worn away the ground around its roots. They rise from the earth like the backs of sea serpents. He trips over them and almost falls. My heart leaps into my throat. But he leans on the tree to get up again.

            “Don’t touch it,” I almost scream. “It’s not yours!” I screw my mouth shut against the scream pressing against the backs of my teeth.

            Technically it’s not mine either, but I bare my teeth and snarl at him silently. He doesn’t notice. He spilled his beer on the roots of the tree. I want to force his head down and make him lick it off, but there are more important things to get done.

            I don’t want to leave the tree. I draw no comfort from its crumbling existence. Its peeling, pointed bark pierces the bare flesh of my cheek and arm, but I grip it tighter anyway. It is still warm, and that’s what I cling to.

            It’s time to go, I say to myself. You have to. Now.

            I let go of the tree gingerly, feeling like I’ve left my heart impaled on one spiny piece of bark. It’s connected to me only by strings, which spin out like thread on spools as we make our way over the moors.

            It’s downhill now, and I know we’re getting close. I don’t hear it yet, and I hope he won’t hear it until it’s too late.

            There is no moon, which is good and bad. Good because there isn’t enough light for him to read the land and, more importantly, to read me. He’s always been good at that, and I’ve been bad about keeping my heart hidden. Bad because I love the moon. I miss the moon. It anchors my heart. It is my eye, my satellite, my safety, my blanket of light in this always-night.

            He doesn’t notice when I begin to hum. He still holds the empty beer bottle and tips it back from time to time, trying to drink from it. We still hold hands. I try desperately to keep my grip from mimicking the clawed branches of the tree.

                        To my dearest forsaken

                        Who the earth now has taken

                        Empty, the bottle drains no more

A rushing, hushing sound begins to drown out my quiet hums. I’ve been down here dozens of times, but that doesn’t matter. I must be still. Because to most, the sound has no source. It creeps and surrounds, blankets and disorients, makes you scared and dizzy. The very air makes the sound, it seems, and it’s warning you like a rattlesnake.

            But I know better. I know how to find the source of the sound. I close my eyes and remove myself from myself. It used to be a lot more difficult than it is now. I throw my consciousness out wide in front of me like a net and find what I’m looking for. Close. Not even a football field away. Relief and trepidation muscle into my mind and I am sucked back into myself.

            Awareness begins to clear the cloud of drunkenness around him and he asks where we’re going. I squeeze his hand in reassurance, which he seems to accept. We walk. I feel the strings attached to my heart begin to pull. I hum.

                        It is true that I loved you

                        Despite the harm now on you

                        Wash us; the river has you, boy

As we get closer, the sound does not grow or change. It gets colder, though, as we pick our way through the blasted moor grasses, down, down. I glance up. The fog kicked up by the water is separating us from the stars. That’s okay. It’s not them I’m wedded to, not their tiny needlepricks of cold white light. I urge him deeper into the mist.

            We may as well already be underwater. It’s bone-cold and dangerously black. The air, the fog, the sound presses on us like silt on a riverbed. Here is where it gets tricky for me. I don’t know precisely where the drop-off is, so I have to tread like a frightened child, reaching out to test the ground with one foot before I take each step. I tell him not to step ahead of me.

            Even though that would be easier.

            But I still have hold of his hand; if he falls, he’ll grip me tighter instead of letting go.

            I can’t let that happen. I can’t fall with him. I can’t.

            The heartstrings, connected to my heart still at the tree, are nearly taut now.

With my next step I reach out, step on nothing but air. I find the edge of the bank, orient myself along it so that we stand side by side facing the yawning crevasse the river has cut into the flank of the moor.

            Despite how close we are to the roaring rapids, the sound is not deafening. That’s because the water has spent millions of lifetimes carving this never-healing wound; it’s cut so deep into the earth that the sound works so hard to reach us it’s tired and weak when it gets here.

            “It’s warm,” he says.

            It is. The poisonous cold is less here, right at the bank, especially when you lean out over the emptiness. The river ran so deep it must have struck the earth’s vital warmth, which it was now releasing. I look down, even though it’s still too black to see even a hand an inch from my face. The water must be boiling down there.

            I let go of his hand.

                        Here on the eve of too long

                        Where you’ll think I have done wrong

                        Waking in fear of you no more

I am scared. I feel the triphammer-pound of my heart through the strings, which thrum and vibrate and send out a frantic, skittery song.

He is quiet. Still. He’s sober now and beginning to guess why we’re here. I have to do it before he realizes how deeply I violated his trust.

            I have to do it.

            I wonder if he can feel the terror and anticipation baking off me in waves.

            I have to do it.

            I will the soft soil under his feet to suddenly crumble and pitch him into nothingness.

            I have to do it.

            I put my hand on his shoulder.

            If he decides to fight, he’ll win. He’s bigger and stronger than me. What will I do then?

            If I move another inch, the taut strings of my heart will snap.

            I have to do it. Now.

            I take a shuddering, painful breath and push.

            There is a terrible ripping from the center of my chest. The pain is blinding. It tears the breath out of me and I fall back onto the bank coughing and gasping. I clasp the sucking hole in my chest, expecting to plunge my hand into gouts of hot, thick blood, but feel nothing. Not even a hole.

            I feel nothing.

            I lie there for a moment and catch my breath. Gazing up into the stifling blackness, I begin to hum again.

                        To my dearest forsaken

Dearest vow I have broken

Afraid of your angry hands no more

River may help me later

                        Sleeping my lost love for you, boy

Song: "Dearest Forsaken" By Iron and Wine

Ponies and Soldiers

I posted this dream first over on "and then i couldn't breathe" (andthenicouldntbreathe.blogspot.com). The contributors to that blog all write down and categorize their dreams. It's a really neat read-- some bizarre and crazy dreams over there! Go check it out.

The dream began in the midst of a gunfight between two small groups of soldiers. It got a little odd when I realized the enemy had decided to occupy and fortify my childhood home in the middle of the North Carolina suburbs. Instead of the slightly rusted chain link fence that surrounded the back yard, I and my company of four were balked by a new glittering razorwire fence around the whole property. The front of my mind was occupied by the plan we’d come up with for infiltrating the “compound”, but a tiny mouse-voice in the back of my mind glanced around, tapped ceaselessly for attention and peeped “Hey, um. This shouldn’t be happening. Not in broad springtime daylight. Not in this neighborhood. Where are the neighbors?”

 “They’re all dead, of course. These bastards killed them all,” my “rational sense” replied. “Which is why we have to get in there and neutralize them.”

My team and I approached my house from the west; from behind the nine-foot-tall screen of magnolia bushes my elderly neighbors had planted to protect themselves from our two loud, overzealous dogs.

The razorwire fence stood just on the other side of the bushes. We crept close to the heavily-guarded gate, our M-16s at the ready. There was no door, only a gap like a missing tooth in the run of the fence. One of my fellows poked his rifle through the bushes and shot blindly; he took out two of the guards. The remaining two watched their comrades flop to the ground like dead fish, then opened fire on the bushes. I broke cover and ran at the two guards. I pointed my M-16 and shot one guard in the chest at point-blank range. He flew back in a spray of blood. The last remaining guard turned his M-9 (handgun) on me and we stared down each others’ barrels for a minute or so until I shot him high in the belly. He made a whiny sound like he’d just been interrupted and did not appreciate it. I could feel my fellows getting antsy behind me; I told them to go take the house. They burst out from the bushes and ran screaming at the house. They were instantly mown down by several M-240 machine guns. The sound was earsplitting, like steel popcorn in a tin bucket.

The wounded guard staggered, moaning, and I realized that I had shot him in the worst possible place besides maybe the groin. With a preternaturally accurate sense of geometry (and anatomy) I only possess in dreams, I calculated that my bullet had hit his stomach, large intestine, and lodged in his left kidney. No major blood vessels were damaged, so he would not bleed out quickly.

So I dropped my M-16 and approached the soldier with my hands up in an indication of harmlessness. He, wild-eyed like a trapped fox, tried to point his M-9 at me but his hand was shaking violently. I gently took the handgun and shushed him like a mother. He quieted, let out a huge, relieved sigh and said, “My name is Geoff. I’m going to die soon.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I began leading him around the interior perimeter of the fence, (somehow) out of range of the M-240s at the house, toward the driveway, which leads to the backyard. He stopped directly in front of the house. “Hang on,” he panted bashfully, painfully. “I gotta pee.”

Does it have to be now? I thought, eyeing the multiple gun barrels peeking out of the boarded house windows like the black malevolent eyes of night animals. But I didn’t verbally protest, knowing this is probably one of the last acts this dying man would undertake. Nobody should die with a full bladder.

So I disentangled myself from him and held him steady as he unbuckled his ammo belt and unbuttoned his fly. After I asked him if he’s okay to stand on his own, I politely turned away and let him do his business.

Geoff whimpered and grunted like a baby animal behind me and I felt a pang of sympathy so profound I nearly pulled his M-9 from my belt to end his misery. But my sympathy was riven in half by a shriek so otherworldly I almost realized I was dreaming. I turned to see Geoff’s face contorted with horror and pain. His urine stream was a watery red, laced with ribbons of near-black. It wasn’t trickling out steadily like urine does; it was spraying out like water from a showerhead, so forcefully that a cloud of fine spray appeared around the head of Geoff’s penis.

As if to add flavor to my growing alarm, a wind sprang up and blew the blood-laced urine onto me. I was showered with it, soaked with it, drenched with it. I let out a screech of my own and immediately regretted opening my mouth.

I suddenly bolted up the driveway toward the house, still bristling with guns, prepared in the back of my mind to be blown away, and not entirely satisfied by dying covered in a dying man’s bodily fluids.

I burst through the gate separating the back from the front lawn and ran to the hose curled up there by the back door.

My mind at this point underwent a curious halving. One half, temporarily taking control of my body, was obsessed only with getting Geoff’s blood/urine off me. The other half, waiting patiently and quietly in the back, wondered why I wasn’t being shot at and planned how to get in and retake the house in my parents’ name. After all, it was their goddamn house.

I shed my helmet, ammo belt, pack, boots, socks, and tore off my fatigues until I was completely naked. I pointed the hose at my face, had a curious double image of a gun barrel and Geoff’s penis, then the painfully cold water hit me.  I scrubbed madly at my face, my neck, arms, hair, hands, body. The water smelled sweet and earthy and I attempted to inhale it to get the acid tang of blood and urine out of my nose. This of course resulted in a racking spasm of coughs as I realized rather quickly that my lungs would not accept water as a usable source of oxygen. This broke me out of the panic-circle, and I turned off the water. Shivering, panting, sodden and naked (but clean), I stood there and let the halves of my mind swap places. Where were the soldiers? Why hadn’t they shot at me? The back door wasn’t barred. Could I get in?

I began to poke around the back of the house and found a small, newly overturned mound of earth beside the air conditioning unit. I dug like a dog and unearthed a gallon-size Ziploc bag full of magazines. Svelte women in various degrees of undress graced every single cover. I chuckled to myself. “Looks like I found my enemy’s porn stash.”

Suddenly I remembered Geoff. I had left him out in the middle of the front yard, pissing blood and screaming like a nine year old girl! I stood up and, with no regard for the soldiers and guns in the house, scurried out of the back yard and back down the driveway.

Poor Geoff was right where I’d left him, still holding his penis, which by now was just dribbling thick dark blood. He was barely upright; his shoulders and head sagged deeply. I approached him gingerly, eyeing his penis, ready to bolt if it were to start spraying again.

“I’m sorry I ran away,” I said softly, again at a loss for words. I was no good at dealing with dying people.

“’S okay,” he slurred and struggled to lift his head.

I stood there clueless for a moment, then remembered the stack of magazines in my hands.  “Hey, look,” I said to Geoff cheerily, holding out a copy of Playboy. “Titties.”

He managed a small half-smile, his eyes resting on something that was not the magazine. “Yes ma’am.”

            I struggled to follow his gaze, then realized why. He’d been looking at me. I had not reclothed myself after my hose-bath. Mortified and mortified that I’d been mortified by a dying man, I clapped the stack of magazines over my naked breast.

“Uh, I’m… I’m gonna go back up to the house to find clothes… and you some water.”

Without waiting for a reply from Geoff, I skittered back up the driveway.

At this point the dream shifted to a nighttime newly fallen. I remained in my driveway, but the house had reverted to its proper place as my parents’ house and childhood home. The chain link fence separating the front from the back yard was still intact, so I lifted the catch and opened the gate. At its familiar clink-chuk sound, my little sister turned. I smiled and waved; she waved back from her place sitting on the grass just beyond the driveway. I sat down beside her (fully clothed) and followed her eyes to a place cradled in darkness on the far side of our neighbors’ yard.

In waking reality, our neighbors to the left had planted the magnolias; our neighbors to the right had just used the portion of our fence that bordered their yard to start a fence of their own.  In dream reality, the partition between yards was no longer there. Neither was the fence between our neighbors’ and their neighbors’ yards. Ours was the end of a five-house-long strip of fenced backyard.

As I realized what stood in that pocket of darkness, the purpose of this backyard strip became clear. It was a makeshift paddock to contain two horses.

My sister and I watched them move and graze. The adrenaline-soaked anxiety that had laced the first part of my dream (a very distant memory now, like I’d dreamed it and was now awake) was eased by the presence of family and animals, but not entirely abolished. What was left was a diluted sense of unease which is, if you’ve read accounts of my other dreams, the default setting in which I operate.

“It’s so cruel to keep them here like this,” my sister said and sighed.

I agreed.  I wasn’t entirely sure which of our neighbors owned these animals, but nobody ought to be keeping two large beasts of burden in a tiny suburban neighborhood.

“Let’s get them outta here,” my sister said, the weight of conviction in her voice. We stood and gently approached the horses. They were both bay. One was far larger than the other. The larger one had traces of Shire in its conformation (body shape). The smaller one, with feathered feet like its companion, was cutely ponyish, but not too small to ride. My sister ran her hands over the Shire’s glossy coat and cooed to it with something like reverence. It stood sedately, letting itself be talked to and caressed. The ponyish bay seemed to size me up and deem me worthy. Of what I wasn’t sure, but it allowed me to climb on its back once I’d helped my sister clamber onto the Shire. I leaned over and unlatched the gate and we rode the horses west down our street, away from the main part of town.

I noticed a tiny constant clicking slightly below the clip clop of hoofbeats on asphalt. I turned and saw three mongrel dogs, all the same shade of mutt-brown, all low, quiet and frightened. The clicking was the sound of their claws as they trotted. I smiled warmly down at them, mentally inviting them to stay; we’d find food for them soon.

My sister yelped.

“What?!”

She pointed; I looked. Several men were running toward us, guns leveled.

“Run!” I called to my sister and wheeled my pony around, but my sister had trouble turning the Shire without a bridle, since she was smaller than me and it was bigger than my pony.

A single roaring shot ripped the night-quiet apart. The Shire shied, stepped back, wavered, snorted, and fell. Like a stone monument. Agonizingly slowly. I prayed that since my sister had no stirrups to tangle her feet, she could jump clear of the falling ton-and-a-quarter of horse without being crushed, but instead of jumping, she froze with fear and watched herself fall with her horse.

I vaulted off my pony and began to yell for my sister. I reached the part of her that wasn’t trapped beneath the massive horse just as my wake-up alarm began to chime. Her eyes were closed and a pool of blood began to seep out from behind her head. Then I woke up.

Heaven's experience

I had a dream in which I was acting out the events of a story my waking self read, but the story was a dream and I woke up still dreaming. This is the story as I remember it.


Edit: the "he" in the story is a nameless, faceless male presence. My mind did not specify.

One evening while we painted stars on our ceiling with flecks of broken glass, he asked me to a masquerade ball. His face was pale, and I asked him if he was all right. He said yes; I said yes.

For me we picked out a black and red tuxedo cut for a woman. It fit me well. I preened uncharacteristically in the mirror for a while until he chuckled, having dressed in his own costume, and pulled me gently out the door.

The neighborhood was dark and as we walked I had trouble seeing him. I knew he’d dressed as a vampire, but the fitful orange light of the streetlamps played changeling with his face and once he was pensive; once his face was lined with animal rage. I felt the press of unease on my mind like a crowded train station. But I kept to myself.

I could hear the sounds of the masquerade, hosted by a friend of his who collected old houses like stray dogs but never found the time to wash or fix them, from down the street. I deliberately slowed my pace, needing to prepare myself for the wild forest of sound, heat, bodies, movement, sensation inside the house. I told him to go in without me; I’d be there soon. He nodded, smiled (and it was broken on his face), and went in. I continued down the street.

A yellow-orange blink of light on the ground grabbed my eyes. It was a large coin, almost the size of my fist. To hold it in one hand I had to keep all the fingers splayed wide.  I liked it. The faces were primitive, Slavic. I tucked it into the waistband of my pants and covered it with the cummerbund. Its comforting weight immediately brought me peace. I turned around and walked back to the pulsing house, ready to face the riot.

But he and two friends came out and met me on the stoop. I smiled, but only he returned it. It took him a few tries, as if the act of smiling caused him pain. So far he’d kept his mask perched on top of his head, and I secretly begged him not to cover his face with it. Broken smiles were better than hidden ones.

He invited me to walk down the street from the way I’d come. He took my arm and led me chivalrously. We passed the place where I’d found the coin and I felt a jab of territorial, frantic jealousy for the coin. Nobody must have it. I pressed my arm against my belly and was again comforted by the coin’s steady weight and shape.

We walked, and my body began to twist in its deep places as it does when I sense wrongness like a wolf waiting just outside the ring of light made by a camper’s fire. I didn’t let the uncomfort get as far as my face. I asked him where we were going. He said “To get you a new mask. It’s a masquerade after all, and you have to have a mask.”

I’d completely forgotten about a mask. His, still cocked back on top of his head, was nothing but two black gapes for eyes and a wavering, fanged maw of a mouth. He’d done well on his vampire costume, well except for the face. I glanced behind me; his two friends walked quietly, their bodies empty of expression or attitude.

The street became pocked and turtlebacked; the houses grew shabby and sad. We walked through this blasted neighborhood and the dark began to collect in pockets and send out vines. Soon we were overrun by rank growth of darkness, and I kept my hand on the coin. It was warm, having collected heat from my body.

We rounded a corner, and light limned the edges of things. It was not moonlight or street-light, and it was still four hours too early for the sun. It was only what it was not; a sourceless sickly yellow light that threw me into doubt, doubt for myself, doubt of him, his friends, the party, the coin. Oh, the coin.

I gazed at him, pleading with my eyes, and he slid the mask down over his face. Under it, though, I saw a small, genuine, apologetic smile, lined by pointed teeth. He said, “Come on. There’s a party store at the end of this block. We can find you a mask there.”

I didn’t resist when he and his friend each took my arm. I sensed that I could have. There was nothing acting on me to slow me, stupefy me, confuse me or disable me. Only a grossly inflated curiosity, swelling my skull with hot air. I felt lightheaded and giddy and would have settled a hand on top of my head to keep it from floating away but one hand needed to stay pressed against the coin and the other needed to stay linked to his.

The end of the block was a dead end. A brick wall with a razorwire fence on top. The ugly yellow light dripped off the wire like pus.

“I guess the party store was down the next block,” he said, but did not turn. His friends, one on my other arm and one drawn up beside him, stared straight ahead like tin soldiers. He took my shoulders gently and turned me around to face the entrance to the dead end alley. We all turned. It was as if the alley had been cleared deliberately, as if the buildings had consciousness enough to part for us. Because as we stood with our backs to that wall, the street stretched out in front of us, straight and flat as the desert, arrowing to a point so small it was unseeable.

How many angels can dance at the end of a road? I thought madly, and felt my mind break from its moorings.

He stepped close to me and tenderly, gingerly untied the scarlet bowtie at my neck. His nose almost touched the line of my jaw. His thick cologne bit my nose and the sound of his labored breath rasped my ears.  His friends unbuttoned my topcoat with civility but no care. They pulled it off, sleeve by sleeve, then he untucked my shirt and began to unbutton it. His friends untied the cummerbund at my back and I reflexively clasped the coin to my belly to keep it from falling. I held it there, fearing more for its safety than my own as he removed my bra. The diseased yellow light wanted nothing to do with their faces, instead slathering itself over my bared skin. The light lay on me like a sick and sleeping cat, hot and heavy and itching.        

They stepped back, his friends, against the wall and into the thick shadow that suddenly grew there. Something drew my eyes to the point of road hundreds of miles in front of me, and again one of the ropes that anchored my mind snapped. There, crouched just below the horizon like the big brother of the light-cat asleep on my bare chest, was the source of the light. I knew in a moment it would rise like a bastard usurper son.

Suddenly I felt a bright flare of pain high on my side, near my right breast. He had slid a wicked-looking knife between my ribs. It slid in easily at first, dizzyingly easily, then hit resistance. He stopped, balked by my body, hesitant to continue. I thought, “Hurry up; it hurts. Put your back into it.” Then the not-sun’s yellow-grey light pierced the horizon and raced toward me faster than I could see. I stood with my naked top half, my breasts bare to the light but still I felt the knife go no deeper. I looked over at him. His eyes were closed.

Now I knew why he seemed too small… because he was lying down, asleep. Now I knew why nobody felt real; because nobody else was really there. It was only him and me in our bedroom. I lay in bed with a knife between my ribs, and I knew I had done it. The small sounds and squirms of my death may have reached him lying next to me, but he only stirred and moaned lightly. The pain of my body shutting down, little by little, was exquisite.

But then there was more than the pain. My body ceased shutting down (the knife fell from my side and clanged on the floor) and began to change. This was painful too, but painful as growing is. Itchy. Achy.

The pain abandoned me completely, and I felt new. I was aware that I had arms, legs, a body. Time. A mind. Strength. Teeth.

I took a breath. I was aware of heaven’s drawn-in experience like a brush of fine sand across my cheek.

This is what I get for reading IT before bed.

I had a dream... that alarmed the ever-loving snot out of me.

I avoided the word “scare” for a reason. I seldom have good dreams, but I seldom have real wake-up-screaming-soak-the-sheets-with-sweat nightmares. I describe my nightly run-of-the-mill dreams as unnerving, uneasy, unreal, uncomfortable, uncanny. If you catch the point, they are best described by what they are not.

This one, at its core, was no different. I remembered it for more than my usual minute or two beyond waking because of how it unfolded in my mind. Usually my dreams are fragmented, plotless, non-linear; a mere collection of images melting together and oozing apart. Occasionally, my dreams will have a storyline, some linear sequence of events that I can name and follow; this one was one of those.

My first memory of the dream was of a supermarket. Garrett and Ann and I were shopping for food for a summer grill-party to celebrate Ann’s birthday. Garrett was showing less than his usual puppyish cheer. I figured he’d just turned inward and gotten quiet like he sometimes does, but I watched him carefully anyway. The further we walked through the labyrinthine aisles of the store, the less healthy Garrett looked.

Let me take a brief hiatus to mention that my M.O. in any kind of shopping excursion is and has always been “Let me get my shit and get out”. I make a detailed list beforehand so I do not have to wander and search for the items I need. Garrett, on the opposite end of the bell-curve, likes to enter a grocery store with only a vague idea of what he needs; he follows his nose and his stomach around and around the store with a contented smile on his face, enjoying the good smells and the endless choices. If left to himself, he would spend upwards of two hours wandering the food-stocked labyrinth.

In my dream, however, he did not so much as stray from the side of the buggy as we shopped. Outside in the parking lot, I asked him what was wrong. He mumbled something I couldn’t understand. I turned his face toward mine and realized, with dawning alarm, that he literally looked green around the edges. “You’re sick. We need to get you to the doctor,” I said. I told Ann to drive us to the hospital while I sat in the backseat trying my best to comfort Garrett, whose fever was ratcheting up by the minute.

By the time we got to the hospital (Motown General, the sign said, and I wish I was kidding), Garrett was drifting in and out of consciousness. Ann and I had to carry him in like a dead log. The receptionist, who looked and sounded exactly like Miss Hattie, the owner of the orphanage in the film Despicable Me, said to take him up to the top floor to room 1020, where a doctor was waiting. Oh and by the way, the elevator was broken.

I am not sure how my sister and I managed to carry my unconscious fiancé up nine flights of stairs, but we did, and now he rested as comfortably has he could have in room 1020, attended by nurses with dirt-stained uniforms and bug-like antennae. I knew that the uniforms were smeared with dirt because these nurses had climbed out of their graves for the express purpose of tending to my fiancé. While it made me uncomfortable, I accepted it with the uneasy resignation I only seem to find in dreams. The doctor, a hulking brown-furred thing with bat-like ears and a squidgy gorilla nose, came in and introduced himself in an alien language made even stranger by his voice, which sounded like a wolverine’s bark rendered verbal.

He told me (though the translator in my mind that, again, is only present in dreams) that Garrett had caught an extremely rare virus that causes little physical harm to a body but ruins the mind. If Garrett ever recovered consciousness, the doctor said around two sets of hippo-like tusks, he would be in a constant state of hallucination. To him, I may appear one minute as former President Gerald Ford, the next, a horrible manifestation of all his childhood fears and angers.

Struck numb, I thanked the doctor perfunctorily and he left. I told Ann to go home and tell our mother what had happened. She took the hint that I wanted to be alone with Garrett and so graciously left. I closed the door behind her and crawled into bed with my deathly-still fiancé. The first tear I shed hadn’t even hit the pillow when a nurse burst into the room, her filmy white eyes bug-wide and her mouth a pale blue O of surprise.

“The hospital is under attack,” she croaked in a dirt-choked voice. “There are zombies! Get out now!”

“But you’re a zombie,” I said, my own voice choked with tears.

“No, I’m an alien zombie; there’s a difference,” she said, pointing to her antennae. “You have to get out, miss, the zombies will kill you.”

“I’m not leaving Garrett,” I said simply and firmly.

“Then die like the rest of us,” she said with a sigh of resignation and went out, leaving the door open.

My cell phone rang; the caller ID said “Garrett Cooperman”. What? I held the phone to my ear and felt cold wet rat feet skitter up and down my spine.

“This is Garrett,” said the voice, which was not Garrett’s. It was as deep as the doctor’s, but behind it was a wheezing quality, like wind over the eaves of an old old house. “Well, at least the only part of him that’s still him. Listen carefully, Kate. The disease can’t touch me. Abandon the body you’re next to right now. There is nothing left of Garrett in there; I’m the last bit of him. If you listen to me and do what I say, you can get out of this safely. The zombies are not the real problem. I know it sounds ridiculous, but the things out there now are just like the slow, brainless things you’ve seen in movies. Do not be afraid of them. Be afraid of what’s down on the first floor.”

“What’s on the first floor?” I asked, my eyes riveted on Garrett’s pale, still face, knowing more fully with each passing second that the voice on the phone was him, was the thing on the first floor.

“Something you can’t possibly beat,” said the voice.

“Then how will I escape?”

A split second before the voice said it, I glanced at the room’s single window, looking out over more buildings and city streets. “The window. Open it and climb down.”

“Are you kidding? There are no handholds. I’m ten stories up. I’d fall and die.”

“That death is eminently preferable to the one you’d suffer if you met the thing on the first floor. Trust me.”

“Okay, I know you’re not Garrett. Garrett uses big words, but not that big, and not at a time like this.”

“Kate, you have to understand. I’m not wholly Garrett; I’m only a part of him. I guess I’m just the part who uses big words all the time.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Believe me or not, you will die anyway if you don’t get out of his hospital. Now.”

The line went dead. I slowly got up from the bed and went over to the window and looked down. While I had lain next to Garrett in the middle of this hospital gone to hell, the sun had disappeared behind clouds and it had begun to rain fat, no-nonsense drops. The water ran down the side of the building in thick rivulets; there was absolutely no way I could have climbed down even one story without slipping and falling to my death. So I turned around and faced the open doorway, Garrett lying white and still in the bed to my left. As I walked toward the door, I brushed his covered feet with my hand, transferring to him the promise I had just made to come back for him as soon as I found a wheelchair or gurney.

In the hall, I realized that my promise would be difficult to keep. Not only were there no wheelchairs or stretchers or anything in the hall, there were no doors either. The door I’d just come out of was the only door for miles and miles either direction. Yes, miles. The hallway went on forever, and I could have sworn it bent a little with the curve of the earth. I stood frozen with indecision and fear that perhaps Garrett’s door would disappear as soon as I closed it. The trill of my cell phone, painfully, drillingly loud in the choking stillness of the hallway, broke my paralysis.

“Ann?” I asked, prepared to hear yet another strange voice.

“Where are you? Did you leave the hospital?”

It was Ann all right, her voice edged with concern. “N-no, I’m... I’m still here in Garrett’s room.”

“Uh... no you’re not. I’m in Garrett’s room. And you’re definitely not here.”

“What? No... wait. I’m standing right outside room ten-twenty right now.”

“I don’t see you. Are you sure you’re not by one-twenty?”

The edges of my mind began to fuzz grey; a queer twinning began to split my vision. I closed my eyes and shook my head to clear it, but the cottony feeling still advanced and the doubleness in my sight got worse.

“No. Ten-twenty. Ann, get out of this place now. Something bad’s happening. Please get out.”

“What? You’re mumbling. I can’t understand you.”

“Get out!” I screamed as loud as I could, trying to drive the haze away. “Get out! There are zombies and bad things! Leave now, Ann!”

“I guess the connection’s bad. If you can hear me, I’m gonna go down to the first floor for a snack. If you’re there I’ll find you.”

“No! Not the first floor! Stay away from the first floor! Stay away from the first

blink

floor!”

And suddenly, I was there, back on the first floor, in front of the reception desk. And I looked out onto the scene with eyes that saw two completely different things, like chameleon eyes. The desk looked the same, the floor and the ceiling, but there were things that moved, things that crawled, only shadows when both my eyes were open. But when I closed my right eye, another world, an under-world, was thrown into such lurid detail that I stumbled back and fell flat on my butt.

Unable to open my right eye and close the left, I watched as the doctor, his formerly kind apelike face now twisted in a black-lipped snarl that cut his black eyes down to slits in his wrinkled face, shoved the fat, be-pinked secretary over the desk and began unceremoniously raping her from behind, eliciting piggish squeals of delight/horror from her.

Alien bugs crawled along the walls and the ceiling, some sleek, sinister black, some still a horribly human shade of pink, their bald flesh still dripping the green goop of birth. I crab-walked backward, still with my right eye screwed shut, the muscles ringing the closed eye beginning to ache.

I hit something hard and metal, whirled around. It was a rolling stretcher. I hauled myself upright, using its cold steel struts as support. A nest of misbegotten caterpillars squirmed on top of it. I swept my arm across the surface, spilling the bugs onto the floor. They burst on impact like sick water balloons, spraying my jeans and shirt with hot yellow-grey guts and a stench like roadkill boiled to near-liquidity in the summer sun.  I grabbed the gurney and bolted for where I remembered the stairs being; if I had to haul this gurney up nine flights to get to Garrett, then goddamn it I would. I found the door, slammed myself against it, through it, and right into Pennywise the clown, complete with a bunch of loudly colored balloons gripped in one white-gloved hand.

“Oh fuck,” I said. “Are you the bad thing on the first floor?”

“None other,” he said in the gravelly, wheezy voice that had called itself “Garrett” on my phone. “Want a balloon?”

“NO I DO NOT WANT A FUCKING BALLOON! I WANT TO GET TO MY FUCKING FIANCÉ AND GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”

“They float,” Pennywise continued in a lilt, heedless of the epic echoing scream I’d just let loose in the stairwell. “Garrett’s floating now too. Everybody floats down here on the first floor.”

“Yes yes, I know your spiel, dude. I’ve read the book. Floating and death and dismemberment, et cetera. Look. Compared to that back there,” I pointed to the reception area, where Doctor Gorilla and Miss Hattie were still going at it surrounded by bugs, “You are actually pretty tame. So actually yes, I’ll take a balloon. And I’ll tie it to this gurney so it’ll float all the way up to the tenth floor so I don’t have to drag it up.”

“Didn’t you listen to me? I said Garrett’s floating. Since you read my book, you know what that means.”

“Bullshit.”

“Open your other eye and see for yourself.”

I realized my right eye was still closed. With effort, I opened it, experienced a twinning in my vision that nearly unhinged what was left of my mind, then quickly shut my left eye.

Now I was standing in front of room 1020, in a normal hospital hallway of normal length and with its normal set of doors every few feet. Inside the room, Ann had curled herself into a chair, her knees to her chest, her eyes wide open and glassy, staring at nothing. Two nurses, sans-antennae, hovered over Garrett’s hospital bed. I couldn’t see his face. His feet twitched spasmodically. I rushed into the room screaming his name. The nurses turned and stared at me, which gave me a shock. For some reason, I had not expected them to see me. I shoved the closest one aside, nothing but boobs and butt between a head and drumstick legs, and leaned over Garrett’s face. He looked paler, greyer. My heart lunged for my throat, pushing a sob in front of it.
   
“Garrett Garrett Garrett Garrett Garrett,” I breathed, willing him to stop twitching, stop looking so grey, stop dying goddammit.
My cell phone rang again. I knew who it was, from the icy coldness of the phone to my touch, from the low insane buzzing that began in my head when I brought it to my ear, but I couldn’t not answer it.

 “Is he floating yet?”

“He won’t. Not for a long time. Not until he’s old and grey.”

“He’s grey right now, sure enough.”

“Fuck off, you stupid clown.”

A grating, dirty, bubbling chuckle reached my ear, as if a tar pit had found something mildly amusing. Then the line went dead. I threw my phone across the room and opened my left eye at the same time.

The room spun violently; I felt the phone come back like a boomerang and clip my left cheek so hard that my eye watered. I fell in the middle of an indoors tornado and curled up to just wait it out.

It stopped; I opened both eyes. Harsh white light drilled into my head and made it pound in time with my thudding heart. I smelled the soft, tangy smell of milk gone sour, which, after the sick death-smell of the hospital, was positively wonderful.

I sat up in front of the milk coolers in the grocery store. My cell phone rang.

“Mom?”

“I forgot to ask you to pick up dog food while you were out. You know what kind, right? The Alpo...”

“Where’s Ann?”

“Who?”

“Ann... my sister.”

“You mean my sister? I guess she’s still in Nashville. Why?”

“N-no reason. Bye.”

I sat there for a minute, my mind blank. I closed my right eye. Nothing happened.