When the Center Falls Away, Part 2 of 2

by Luc Reid

This is the continuation of a rare Cabal two-part story, begun yesterday here.

And there Chico was, staring at some kind of lumbering, horned, monster-woman over the crumbled remains of the person whose dream he was in. Except that the dreamer couldn’t just die and crumble away–
The woman lurched at Chico, her jagged fingernails stretching out at him. He tumbled backward onto the floor of the elementary school cafeteria, slipped as he scooted backwards, then turned and fled.

There was nothing to worry about, he thought, fleeing in panic. He was perfectly safe. It had to be–aha! It was his own dream. He was the dreamer … he was just dreaming he was in someone else’s dream.

The monstrous woman’s feet crashed down on the linoleum behind him as she pursued. Chico tried to run faster.

And if it was his dream, then now he was aware in his dream, dreaming lucidly, which meant he could do anything he wanted–just fly away, if he pleased. So he leapt into the air, looking for a door or window to fly out of…and landed, skidding on his face, on the dirty floor. He couldn’t fly. Which meant it probably wasn’t a lucid dream. Which meant it probably wasn’t his dream. Which meant …

His flight stopped in a dead end corridor, where all the doors were locked. The woman had kept up with him. She was skinnier now, and her horns were gone, but she had huge horn-like claws and she was reaching out for him.

“Wait!” Chico said, realizing. “Wait, you don’t have to do this.”

She stared at him … silently … for a long time.

“Yes I do,” she said finally.

“You can just walk away,” Chico said. “Try walking away. Try letting go of your anger for just a minute, just put it aside for just a second and walk away.”

“You’ll be drawn to me and I’ll have to kill you,” she said. “It happens over and over and over.”

“Not this time,” Chico said. “This time you can change it.”

She eyed him suspiciously, but she backed away. Chico felt the drag of the dream protagonist, the drag he had thought originally was coming from the boy-figure: it was coming from the woman. As she moved away, he could feel himself tugged in her direction. But however strong the pull was, he had to give in to it for it to work. He wasn’t a usual dream person; he was special, a true being, an anomaly. He had some power.

The woman gained confidence as she moved further away, and her claws had begun to dwindle, the fierceness to migrate out of her face. Chico felt like he was being torn apart. The woman smiled at him.
Then the force was too much and his dream-self ripped apart, torn and scattered, ended. His last thought in the dream was that surely he would wake up now.

Surely.

When the Center Falls Away, Part 1 of 2

by Luc Reid

This is a two-part piece; the conclusion will be posted tomorrow. Please feel encouraged to comment if you have feelings about this kind of thing one way or another.

Chico didn’t really understand how people were inserted into dreams; it was all a bunch of neurochemistry and electroneurology and interface science and software entity engineering, and those weren’t where his skills lay. But he didn’t have to understand it. All he had to understand was that a rich guy was having nightmares.

No nightmares so far, though. He just sat in the dim grayness of the subject’s mind, watching images spring up from the blackness, flicker, flatten, and fade.

Then he felt the gravitational pull of the dreamer’s mind as the dream began: a loose and imprecisely-defined ego coalesced out of a swamp of memories and habits among dark semi-human shapes. Dream interventionists were always pulled to the dreamer’s ego, because everything existed in related to it. Chico felt himself dragged down the thought vortex toward the dreamer: a generic shape, flickering with shadows, mostly in the form of a boy. Across from the boy sat a hugely fat, glowering woman with bull’s horns. The boy turned and ran, but his dream dragged the woman along after him effortlessly: she was too important to whatever he was worrying about to slip away. Chico could feel the fear in the air. The setting suddenly flickered into sharp relief, a school somewhere, all linoleum hallways and painted cinder block walls with grade school art projects taped up on them. The horned woman stepped out of a classroom door ahead. Then the hallway crackled and snapped and turned into a cafeteria crowded with shouting, oblivious students. The boy stopped running, knowing (Chico could share the thought) that he couldn’t leave the cafeteria during lunch without a pass. This was the time for Chico to step in: he would help the dreamer face the horned woman …

The huge woman lurched forward suddenly, scattering children who folded back into her wake. Then she reached out and and grabbed the boy’s head with one meaty hand. He screamed as she jerked on his head, snapping his neck. Chico cursed. Now the dreamer would wake up and he would have to start all over.

The dreamer collapsed to the floor and began to break apart into ash. Chico felt a sudden rush of panic as he realized the dream was not ending.

The horned woman looked up at Chico and shrieked wordlessly.