Dream King by Elise Knight

26

Fear washed over me at the sight of him. In the darkness, I’d not really seen how bad his chest was, but with the extra moonlight here on the beach, the enormity of his injuries hit me like a brick to the face. Teeth marks had ravaged his chest. From just below his neck to just above his stomach, there was no skin left, just ragged bits of wet flesh. Beneath that, bone poked through, and, Christ Almighty, I could see one of his lungs. I swallowed thickly to stop from throwing up on the beach at the sight of it. There was no way he should be alive. It wasn’t possible, and yet the lung I could see was still moving up and down, in and out. Miracle didn’t cover it. It brought it home to me just how strong he really was. A normal human would not have been able to survive injuries as extensive as this, let alone walk for half an hour. The real miracle was that his lung didn’t just plop out en route. It was only his rib cage that kept it from doing just that.

I ripped off another part of my dress and dipped it in the lake water. I was basically wearing threads and not much more, but Dream needed the cloth more than I did. What was a little public nudity compared to keeping a vital organ in his body? I wrapped it gently around his chest, letting the water from it drip into his chest cavity. I was not going to be winning any nursing awards anytime soon, that was for sure, but I’d kept him alive so far...just about.

Beside me, Dream murmured, his eyes closed. There was no way he could do his job in this state, so what did that mean for the people of the world? Frustration settled in my belly. If only he’d told me things like how this world worked, but he hadn’t. Not enough anyway. He’d forbidden me from leaving his side, but surely he wasn’t in his right mind. I knew one thing. Without someone there to check the doors, they wouldn’t move, and people...humans wouldn’t dream. And then what? This world would die? How quickly would that happen? It had already been three days. Sure, there was some weird time difference in the parallel space between the doors, but I hadn’t understood it when he’d told me any more than I understood it now. Anger surged through me as I realized I had no choice. Someone had to go back and watch those dreams, and the only someone around here that could walk was me. With great reluctance, I took one last look at Dream to check that he was still breathing then began the long journey back to the red door.

Anger and anger alone kept me going through the forest. I was sure that if I happened to come across a wolvery or a savagara, I’d break its bones out of sheer spite at this point. I was beyond fear. What was the point of constantly being in fear of the darkness and of the forest and its occupants? My life was worth nothing unless I could make it back to the doors. It was the thought that I might actually be doing something useful for the first time in twenty-seven years that kept me marching through the forest. Grit and determination were my only companions on the walk. Fear didn’t get a look in. Not that I ended up needing the fear. No one and nothing bothered me the whole journey, and the familiar squawk of Raven greeted me as I came to the doors. He flew down and landed on my shoulder, where he jumped up and down excitedly. In all the stress, I’d completely forgotten about him. He’d lost us somewhere and obviously come back here in the hopes we’d somehow eventually return. That Dream would eventually return.

“He’s by the lake,” I said, in no doubt that the clever bird could understand every word I said to it. “He’s unconscious, but I think he’ll live. I came back to get the doors moving again, but you should go to him. He might wake up. I’ll go back to him in a few hours.”

Raven jumped impatiently up into the air and spread his wings. I expected him to fly off in the direction of the lake, but instead, he leapt onto the frame of the nearest door.

“You want me to go through this door?” I asked.

He nodded his head and jumped up and down. It was the nearest door to the red one. There was nothing special about it, and I expected to find nothing special in it. Raven was just trying to help me.

I heaved a deep breath and turned the handle. The door opened, and I stepped inside.

I’d been through many of these doors now and knew that nothing inside could hurt me. There was nothing but the imagination of the person dreaming in there. Nothing tangible, and yet I felt nervous as the door closed behind me, leaving me in complete darkness.

The darkness gave way to a pale green meadow on a winter’s day. A young girl of no more than five or six skipped happily through the meadow. She had a smile on her face, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. She slowed down and brought her finger to her lips. Her eyes darted around, looking for someone I couldn’t see. Neither could she. Whoever it was, they weren’t there...And then they were. The little girl beamed as a man, assumedly her father, ran into the scene and picked her up, spinning her around. She giggled, and the scene began to fade. Such a short dream and such a poignant one. I wondered if that girl often played in the meadow with her father or if he was somehow lost to her in real life. That was the rub. I had no way of knowing the truth to any of these stories I saw. They were the personal thoughts of the billions of people on the planet and truthfully bore little resemblance to reality. They were more the heart’s desires of the people dreaming them than the truth. I left the room and watched as the door moved past the red door to the side where tonight’s dreams had finished. Turning a hundred and eighty degrees, I opened the second door of the night, just as I had seen Dream do. I had no idea why there were two rows of doors facing each other, rather than one long row of doors, but Dream always alternated them and let both rows make their journey past the red door.

The second dream was of a young woman. She stood at a lectern to tumultuous applause. Just as the first one, this dream didn’t last long. It was a happy dream of fulfillment, and yet, just like the first, I had no way of knowing whether the dream was a memory or a wish of the woman involved. Dream had seen billions and billions of these snippets of life, and yet, he had no idea what any of them really meant. Sadness crippled me as I stood in his shoes, going from dream to dream, not knowing what these people went on to do. It was like picking up a really good book right in the middle, reading a page, and then having that book ripped away, only to be replaced with another book. No wonder he was the way he was. Always being a part of people’s lives but then having to leave, over and over and over again. Only a few, such as Gladys, even knew he existed.

I went through door after door for hours, watching people’s lives flash by. Each one exhausted me further—even the happiest of dreams. I’d had happy dreams before where I’d been somewhere beautiful, the sun on my back, and yet I’d always woken up in my apartment, my fridge empty of food. This whole existence was pointless and fruitless. What a horrendous job to have. Deep down, I thought that maybe Dream knew it, but to abandon it would destroy literally everything. I was an emotional wreck by the time Raven hopped down from his place on one of the doorframes to my shoulder.

“Is that enough?” I asked, stroking his head. He bobbed his head which I took to mean yes. Another day of work done so both worlds could continue to exist. Except it wasn’t a full day. What was hours of work for me was less than a flash for Earth. I’d exhausted myself for what was essentially less than the blink of an eye. It put McGee and his cheapness into perspective. He paid a fraction of what I was worth for eight hours of work, but this job paid nothing at all.

I made to step between the door frames to head back to the beach, but something stopped me.

The memory of the little girl in the meadow, the first dream I’d seen that night. It had reminded me of my mother.

Dream had controlled the doors so that I could see David’s dreams. What if I could do that and go inside the head of my mother? It was possible that, just like Gladys, she’d see me. I’d make her see me. I needed to tell her I was sorry. Sorry for running away, sorry for not coming back. Sorry for not being as good a daughter as my sister.

“I just need to do something,” I said, squeezing around the frame of the red door to the grey doors where dreams had passed.

Raven flew from my shoulder and landed on the red door’s frame, where he hopped up and down, creating a racket.

“I’m only going to try it once. I need to see that my mother is ok.”

Obviously, that wasn’t what Raven wanted to hear, but as he was only a bird, there was little he could do to stop me. What could stop me was the fact that I didn’t have the first clue as to how Dream had done it. How he’d maneuvered the doors so that David’s appeared right in front of me? I’d been buried in his chest and missed out on the key detail as to how he started the process.

Looking around me showed me no knobs or levers. Nothing jumped out at me as a way to try. It had come from him. The magic or whatever it was to move the doors.

“How do you move the doors?” I shouted up at Raven.

The little git had the audacity to ruffle its feathers and turn away from me.

“Fine!” I shouted back petulantly. There had to be a way to do it. Maybe the magic was already here, and Dream somehow channeled it. My only knowledge of magic was the one Harry Potter movie I saw years ago, and they all had wands, but surely a wand was just a way of channeling magic that was already there, right? I had no idea, and it was only a work of fiction, but without anything else of much use to work with, I closed my eyes and tried to feel for any magic around me. I’d felt the vibrations of the magical bonds Dream had used to tie me up, so I knew what magic felt like. I tried pulling that toward me, to feel something in the atmosphere that would help me, but nothing did. There was no vibration. No low hum of magic. However Dream got his magic to move these doors, it was not coming freely to me. Maybe it was inside him after all.

Frustration bubbled up within me. My mother was here somewhere. Ok, not literally here, but the door to her dreams was, and yet, with over nine billion of these doors to check, there was no way I’d manage it without magic.

“I want to speak to my mother!” I screamed out, pounding my fist onto the frame of the nearest door. I’d barely gotten the words out of my mouth when a wind roared between the parallel rows of doors, knocking me from my feet. I would have been blown away entirely if it wasn’t for me grabbing the frame of the red door and hanging on to it for dear life. The wind lifted my whole body from the ground until I was like a flag flying in the breeze. Dirt and dead leaves from the forest floor hit me in the face. The wind stopped, and I fell to the ground with a bump. I spat out the dirt I’d somehow managed to inhale and rubbed the grit from my eyes. Everything looked exactly as it had moments ago, except that one of the nearest doors to me was covered in thick vines.

“Is this my mother’s door?” I asked, getting to my feet and looking up to where Raven had been moments before. He wasn’t there. For a moment, a thrill of panic flew through me that I’d managed to blow him away, but then I saw him in a nearby tree. He wasn’t stupid enough to get caught in the maelstrom of wind I’d managed to conjure.

“Is this door my mother’s?” I asked Raven again. He flew to the door and landed on the frame.

It was times like these that I wished that he could talk. I wished he or I was a polyglot just like the other people here, but he wasn’t. He could only speak raven, and I could only speak English, and that was that. I didn’t need to understand his cawing to see that he was displeased by my actions. I ignored him and held my hand out to the door. I could barely see the grey behind the deep green vines that enshrouded it, wrapping their way, not only over the door but around the frame, too, making it impossible to open in the state it was in. Determination pulled at my guts as I brought Dream’s knife from my boot and started hacking away at the vines. Each one was thick and sinuous, unlike any vine I’d ever seen before. Not that I saw many vines in Vancouver. I had to saw through each strand bit by bit, and when each came away, I threw it on a pile on the floor. My muscles burned with the effort, and a sheen of sweat beaded at my temple, but I kept going. Even as Raven’s caws got louder and more intense, I carried on with my task, desperate to finally see my mother.

Dream hovered at the back of my mind. I should have gone back to him hours ago. He was incapacitated lying on a beach alone. The savagaras could come back at any second to finish him off, and he’d be defenseless against them. Two forces pulled me in opposite directions. I knew I needed to go back to Dream, but this might be my only chance to speak to my mother again.

Finally, I hacked through the largest of the vines, the only one left, and let it fall to my feet. The door was finally free. I pulled at the handle, afraid that it wouldn’t open despite everything that I’d done to free it. I was almost surprised when the door opened as easily as all the others now that it no longer had the vines holding it.

I entered into the darkness, my stomach churning with anticipation. The door slammed shut behind me, echoing into the inky void. My mother’s image appeared. She was stood against a wall, her fists hammering against it, her face stained with tears. My heart tore as I took in her appearance. She was so much older than I remembered her. She’d always had a youthful appearance, and despite our lack of wealth, was always dressed well. She never left the house with a hair out of place. In her dream, her hair was a tangle, her dress creased. Silently she hammered at the wall.

“Mom. It’s me, Ana.”

My voice sounded eerie and out of place in the silent dream. I knew the sound would come. It always did just after the vision, so somewhere deep in my heart, I’d hoped she’d hear my voice. But she didn’t stop banging on the wall. Her eyes didn’t even flicker as I called out to her.

I stepped up to her and touched my hand to her shoulder just as the noise finally began to kick in. Sound that drove deep into my soul. She was sobbing. She hammered on the wall again, and I thought I heard a faint thudding coming back in answer. Then a voice. It was faint, but it was a voice I knew well.

Arizona, my sister.

My mom held her head to the wall, trying to make sense of the sound. Arizona’s voice was so faint that I had to copy my mother’s actions. It sounded like she was reading a book. Alice in Wonderland. It had been both Arizona’s and my favorite book as children, and we’d begged our mother to read it to us time and time again. Who would have thought that both my mother and I would have fallen down the rabbit hole ourselves?

I looked toward my mother. Tears were still streaming down her face, but she was no longer making any noise. If anything, she was holding her breath to hear my sister’s voice.

She closed her eyes and just listened as Arizona read the words I knew so well.

My heart almost broke at the sight of her. This wall was what kept my mother locked in her mind. What stopped her from waking up. The voice she heard was my sister’s real voice. Arizona was probably seated at her bedside in the hospital reading to her. All I needed to do was smash down this wall, and my mother would wake up. Probably.

I hammered at the wall in much the same way my mother had been doing moments before. The noise drowned out Arizona’s voice, and yet my mother didn’t react at all to me beating on the wall in front of her. She could neither hear nor see me. I should have been sitting at her bedside with Ari, not bashing at a wall in her dream. A wall that was not yielding to my fists at all.

Outside the door, Raven’s cawing became more frantic. The more I hammered on the wall, the louder and faster he squawked. Everything seemed to be crashing around me. I needed my mother desperately, but I was no more than a ghost to her. Her tears were not over me but over Arizona. I could no more knock the wall between them down than I could get my mother to see I was standing right in front of her. Raven’s squawking reached a fever pitch, and a rapping sound started at the door. It was thinner and more hollow than my pounding at the wall, but it was there and becoming more insistent. Raven!

“I’m coming!” I yelled toward the door. “One more minute!”

If only I could break the wall. Just an inch. I slammed my fists into the wall until they were bruised, but the wall remained solid.

Raven’s squawking was now feverous as he bashed his beak at the outside of the door to get my attention.

“I’ve got to go, Mom,” I whispered, kissing her cheek. I couldn’t be sure if the taste of salt on my lips was her tears or mine. She didn’t even open her eyes as I turned from her and headed back to the door. I pushed against it, but this time it didn’t budge. Something was stopping it. I pushed again, harder this time. Behind me, my mother’s dream was fading into darkness as they always did. If I didn’t get out in the next few seconds, I’d be swept away with the door and be lost forever.