Dream King by Elise Knight
18
Isaw the back of Dream first. A sliver of moonlight highlighted his crown. He didn’t hear me as I crept toward him. Before him, there was only darkness, though as I moved closer, shapes began to take form.
At first, it was nothing but low light and a hint of color. But then the colors solidified into something horrific. Something I never expected when I walked through that door.
Dream stood stock still, his face glued to the image. I stood not far behind. If I reached out, I could have touched his shoulder, but I didn’t. He still didn’t know I was there, and if I kept my breathing low, he wouldn’t have to know.
I should have left--gone back out to the relative safety of the forest, but something glued my feet to the ground.
There was a woman tied to a wooden chair, her wrists bound behind her with something...I couldn’t tell what. Shoelaces, maybe? She looked to be in her early thirties, though it was difficult to tell with the mascara running down her cheeks and her lipstick smeared. A purple bruise was beginning to show on her cheek.
I couldn’t hear anything, but I could tell she was begging. Pleading. The fear etched across her face said it all. A man stood before her, an ugly son of a bitch. He was younger than her, younger than me, even. Eighteen or nineteen, perhaps. He wore a white, sweat-covered vest stretched over his roping muscles. But none of that turned my stomach like the way he grinned at her. He was enjoying her fear--feeding off it.
She said something that made his grin falter. Then turn into something dreadful. Pure evil filled his stare as he seized her hair in his fist and slammed her head into the back of the chair. Part of me hoped she’d pass out, and this nightmare would end, but she didn’t. Her scream cut through the air, and this time I heard it.
“Shut up, bitch,” the man growled, his fingers still entangled in her hair. “Don’t want the neighbors to hear, do we? They might come and spoil the fun we’re about to have.”
Every part of me wanted to run that son of a bitch down, but it wasn’t real, and literally nothing I did would stop this sick scene from playing out. I already knew where this was going.
The man jerked her hips forward on the seat, eliciting another scream from her. This time it wasn’t just fear. Her arms were still tied behind the seat back and were now at an angle that would be painful, if not excruciating.
“So what’s it going to be, darling?” the man sneered. “Want to wrap that pretty mouth of yours around my dick?” He unzipped his pants, letting his dick fall out. He wasn’t even hard.
She clamped her lips shut tightly as he shoved his hand up her skirt. Her eyes followed her mouth, closing themselves against the invasion.
“She’s nice and wet, boys.”
Boys? My stomach clenched.
The scene panned out a little.
The two weren’t alone.
Three more guys stood off to the side, all of them with predatory excitement in their eyes. None of them could be older than twenty, and none were as well built as the asshole, but they didn’t need to be. Asshole was breaking her. All they had to do was follow. One of them, a skinny white guy, was already stroking his dick and practically salivating. The other two hadn’t gotten that far yet, but they were close to it.
My eyes flicked to the man who towered over the bound woman. He still had one hand under the woman’s skirt, but the other was rubbing his dick now, making himself hard. The woman’s eyes were squeezed shut, tears seeping from beneath her lashes.
Bile rose in my throat as he pulled his hand away then grabbed her ass, bringing her whole body even closer to him. Someone screamed.
This time it was me.
“Stop it!” I screamed out, punching Dream on the back of his shoulder. “Why aren’t you doing anything!”
He turned to face me, his eyes full of fire. I'd seen him angry plenty of times but never like this.
Terror filled me as I took a step backward. The sound of grunts and groans and screams rent the air as Dream grabbed my arm and dragged me outside, slamming the door behind him.
He didn’t let go until we rounded the door. He threw me to the ground, disgust written across his every feature. I narrowed my eyes. He wasn’t the only one disgusted. How could he just stand there and watch someone get raped and not do anything?
“What’s the fuck is wrong with you?” I hollered at him.
His mouth curled down into a grimace. “Me? It is not I who act in such ways. Humans revolt me. I had begun to change my mind, but now I see how foolish I am.”
“Don’t lump me in with those monsters. You’re the one who tied me up, remember?”
“I do remember, and I also remember why. Humans are the lowest of creatures. Always giving in to their base instincts.”
I scrambled through the leaves until I found what I was looking for. Picking up a stone, I lobbed it right at him. It grazed the top of his head, sending his crown toppling to the ground.
I pulled myself up from the ground and faced him. “Don’t you dare tell me what I am. I’m not the monster here. Maybe you should take a good long hard look at yourself in the mirror.”
His hand darted out and seized my throat, tightening around it. He opened his mouth to speak, but instead, he let go of me. Reaching down, he picked up his crown and stormed into the forest, leaving me alone with my thoughts and Raven for company.
I watched with relief when the doors moved, and the one I’d just come out of moved past the red door. It was still there. It hadn’t moved very far at all. Only a couple of feet, but somehow having it past the red door made it feel safer. I wondered if it meant the dream was over. I certainly hoped so. I’d never been attacked in the way that woman was, but I felt every ounce of her pain when I was in that room. It was going to take a long time to get over it.
My blood boiled as I went over and over the encounter in my head. Nothing settled me, and with nothing to do, I stormed around the small clearing for hours, the vivid images of that atrocity spinning round and round in my head.
Raven had the good sense to keep his distance on a tree branch somewhere high above me. I was surprised he hadn’t followed his master.
I didn’t know what to do, which road to take. To stay here now would be madness. I’d let myself be fooled by a hot body and his gentleness when tending to my wounds. I’d told Aethelu that I didn’t have Stockholm Syndrome, but clearly, I did. And more clearly, I was in denial about the whole thing. But leaving the brute now would mean abandoning my mother, which I couldn’t do. It was the main reason I was here.
A strange kind of calm fell over me. I knew what I had to do.
I had to kill him. It was the only way, though the thought terrified me. If Dream were dead, whatever hold he had on my mother would be broken, and all those other people in the same situation would wake up too. I’d been so wrong about him. So heart-achingly wrong. How pathetic I was to fall for a pretty face and the first hint of intimacy I’d had in months. Would I ever learn?
I couldn’t fix my hopeless relationship woes, but at least I could fix something. For Mom, if not for me.
Once I made my mind up, I spent hours and hours coming up with ways to kill him, none of which were remotely possible. I was brought up in the country, and if I had a gun, there was a good chance I could put a bullet through his brain with my first shot, but I didn’t have a gun, and I had no way of getting one in this creepy world with no shops. Hell, Dream couldn’t even get me decent food here.
My idea of making a cross-bow and arrows stalled almost as soon as I had it, as I had no idea how. And the closest thing I had to a blade was a sharp twig. If I tried anything with that he’d laugh at me and then slit my throat with his own knife.
The red door sat there mocking me, urging me to go through it. Beyond it was my world with guns and crossbows and knives and a great many other things that could kill a man. But I knew I’d never get back. There was only one way for me to enter this world, and that was with Dream, and he was hardly about to let me go back to find something to kill him.
I heaved a sigh and gritted my teeth. This strange world had other inhabitants. Dream and Aethelu weren’t the only ones. If there were people, then there had to be shops. It was just a matter of finding them.
Making sure Raven wasn’t watching, I took off into the forest in roughly the direction of the stream. I found it quickly enough and stopped for a moment to drink.
A shudder skittered through me as a crack of a branch rang out through the forest. I hadn’t realized how wound up I was, and it was only now that I remembered both Dream and Aethelu’s caution of monsters in these woods. Nervous laughter bubbled up through my throat as I realized I was the one who’d cracked the dry branch beneath my knee.
I’d gotten lucky this time, but it would do me well to be more alert of my surroundings and not draw any attention to myself. And so it was that I walked quickly through the forest, careful to keep my steps light. My skin prickled with every noise, though noises were few and far between. Maybe monsters and beasts did roam these woods, but there was a distinct lack of prey for them. If any of them saw me, I was sure to be lunch.
It didn’t help that every part of this damned forest looked like every other part. Dead and dark. I’d made sure to keep in a straight line, but it was impossible to know if I’d veered slightly. Keeping track of landmarks so I could get back to the doors was another impossibility. There were no landmarks. Every so often, I fancied that I saw a tree that looked slightly different from the rest, but in the end, they all jumbled together in my mind.
Ignoring my jangling nerves, I set my focus on what I had to do. I was on a shopping trip. Or so I told myself. Nothing to worry about.
After at least two hours of walking through the darkness, I began to wonder if hungry, vicious beasts weren’t my biggest worry after all.
This whole place defied belief. What if there was no one else here in this hell hole? What if it was just Dream and Aethelu, and all this was some kind of game? He’d not tied me up again. Surely he’d know I’d run?
My stomach grumbled as if trying to convince me to turn round. If I did, my only option would be to go through the door and go home. I knew that now. I couldn’t spend another second in Dream’s company after what he did.
Ok, so he didn’t partake in the assault...rape of that woman, but he was quite happy to watch. He didn’t do anything to stop it. If he was the creator of dreams, then he was also the creator of nightmares. I hadn’t seen his face when he was watching, but my mind filled in the blanks. It must be how he managed to go without sex for so long. His perverse mind conjured up horrifying acts and put them in people’s heads.
It had been so real. The woman dreaming it must have already gone through the nightmare in real life and was playing it over and over in her dreams. I refused to believe any woman would be able to make that up with so much clarity. Though, that begged the question then—if Dream really didn’t make it up, he’d still stood by and watched it. He could have turned around and let that door go at any time, but he didn’t.
The bilethat was threatening earlier came to the surface, and I threw up on the forest floor, retching up all my disgust and anger and frustration. I couldn’t think about it anymore. Any of it. If I did, I’d only end up going mad with it all.
I was doing something about it. That’s why I was here. There was nothing I could do for that poor woman, but I could stop the millions of nightmares like it that would come in the future.
As I wiped my mouth with a shaky hand, my eyes snagged on what I could only describe as a pathway beneath my feet. The fallen leaves had been flattened by the footsteps of many people...or beasts, it was hard to tell. Relief welled up in me. In that moment, I didn’t care whoever—or whatever--flattened this pathway. A path means an end to the aimless walking. A destination. Perhaps that destination was the belly of a ginormous beast, but it was an end nonetheless. As I studied it, it became clear that one route curved around and would take me backward and to the left. The other way seemed more promising, so I took it, slowly this time.
The cloying darkness still surrounded me, but having a clear-cut path through the forest put me at ease slightly. Or at least it gave me purpose. With each step I took, I gazed at the path, trying to figure out whether it was shoes or hooves or claws that had carved it. Without any mud for prints, I couldn’t be sure. Overhead, branches had been snapped off to clear the way, leaving almost a tunnel through them. By my estimate, whatever used this path was just under seven feet tall. Both Dream and Aethelu were well over six feet, so it could be human...or whatever they were. Of course, it could just be some freaking enormous monster with fangs sharp enough to rip my throat out.
Something sprinted through the woods right in front of me, nearly giving me an aneurism. It took a few seconds of my heart doing the samba around my ribcage to realize that it was a deer. Or at least deer-like. I supposed I couldn’t call any creatures by the names of the animals they looked like in the real world. Besides, this dear had deep blue fur and glowing antlers and had disappeared through the trees before I’d managed to see much more of it than that.
It had acted like a deer, fast and skittish, and not out for my blood which was the only thing I could hope for in this place. And though it had moved so quickly I’d barely seen it, I hadn’t noticed massive fangs anyway. Hopefully, it was an herbivore.
It didn’t take long before the trees began to thin out and the darkness began to clear. Or at least turn into a paler kind of darkness. The moon was bright, which made the trees almost luminous. I stepped out onto a grass verge with a dirt road running left to right. Directly ahead of me sat a small log cabin, the chimney puffing with smoke. My heart twinged with how cozy it looked, so much like the places I vacationed in as a child, the few times my mother could afford to take us anywhere. All that was missing was the snow.
To the right, the dirt road continued off into the distance, but to the left, there looked to be a small village.
I kept to the verge. Should anyone venture down the road, my plan was to hop back into the trees. I might be dressed like these people, but I sure didn’t look like them. I was a foot too short for a start and had neither the ethereal beauty of Aethelu nor the unbridled gorgeousness of Dream. I had no idea what the plan was once I got to the village, but I was good at thinking on my feet.
As I neared the village, I realized that I couldn’t use the forest as cover if I actually wanted to do anything. If I ever hoped to find a weapon, I was going to have to suck it up and go in. Taking a deep breath, I stepped out into the road and then along a path that I hoped would lead me into the village center.
The cobbles beneath my feet were a welcome change from the dry, dead leaves I’d been walking on for the past few weeks. They made sense somehow. Made it feel like I was in a real place instead of some dystopian nightmare. The houses helped too. Each was different, but all shared the same thatched cottage-style roof. Even in the darkness, I could see that these cottages were painted in bright colors. Muted now, though, in the moonlight, they were barely more than shades of blue. Why would these people bother to use bright colors in a place where there was barely any light? Perhaps that’s why they had done it—anything to counteract the constant dusk.
So far, I hadn’t seen a soul, which I reminded myself was a good thing. I would probably stand out as an outsider from a mile away. As soon as the thought slipped through my mind, I caught sight of someone.
I froze. I couldn’t quite believe what my eyes were seeing.