Natalie Cuddington
We walk along the yellow brick road for a while in silence and are now approaching a willow tree about the size of an apartment building. It’s not silver or shiny like the ones from earlier, it’s just huge. The branches droop way, way down and hang on the grass, but they’re coming from so high, I don’t understand how the branches aren’t breaking. I didn’t think trees this big existed. I grab at one of the branches by my face and pull off a little leaf, twirling it around in my fingers.
“Have you had enough time to process all this, yet?” Chance asks me.
“No. I don’t think I will ever have enough time.”
He smirks and steps closer to me. “But do you understand what I’m saying to you about this whole thing being dangerous?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
His eyes are so stern, it’s like I can feel the worry in them as he looks at me. “You have to take this seriously, Becca.”
“Ok. I will.”
“I’m not kidding around. I know you didn’t ask for any of this, but you can’t make it go away. So you have to listen to me, and you have to let me help you. Ok?”
I look away from him for a second, and look back at the leaf in my hand. I drop it and watch it flutter to my feet. Chance gently grabs my chin and tips my face up towards his.
“Ok?” he asks again.
“Ok.”
The corner of his mouth raises a bit and he drops his hand from my face. “Ok. We’ll come back here later, then.”
“So in the caf,” I say, trying to make sense of the dream I apparently ‘half experienced’. “Someone was dreaming that Zac’s face was melting off?”
He smiles and shakes his head. “No, someone was dreaming that their friend’s face was melting off, and since you were still actually at school, you saw the melting happen on someone who was really there with you. Zac.”
“So Zac didn’t know what was happening?”
“Oh I’m sure he had an idea. Just like in the hallway. A Malevolent or an Aura sees someone acting all crazy like that, they know the explanation.”
“But everyone else is just going to think I’m crazy.”
“Nah. Probably just assumed you saw a big spider.”
I know he’s trying to be funny, but this is really bugging me. I thought I was seeing Zac’s face melt off, and I freaked the eff out. I screamed like someone in a horror movie. Everyone’s going to think I’m insane!
“Really,” he says. “Time for you sort of slowed down during it, so you thought you were screaming for a few minutes, when in reality, it was like, four seconds. I’ll bet you no one even remembers it now.” He smiles at me and nods his head forward. “Come on.”
He starts walking away so I follow him. I follow him down a steep hill that I almost have to run down to keep myself from tripping and tumbling all the way to the bottom. He laughs at me every time I pick up my pace to overcorrect myself when I lose my balance. We finally make it to flat land at the bottom and come to a pond that has seven or eight swans swimming around in it. I walk to the edge of the water and watch in awe as they glide across the surface so gracefully. It’s like they don’t even realize how beautiful they are.
“This way,” Chance says, grabbing my hand and pulling me off in another direction.
He’s walking really fast and practically pulling me behind him instead of just letting me walk next to him. I pick up the pace and tug my hand from his, sliding in beside him.
“Why is everything so far?”
“It’s not that far. And we don’t usually end up where we did after a nightmare. I just pulled us out of it sooner than I was supposed to, so we came out at a different spot.”
“Oh.” I want to ask him to explain himself a little better, but something inside me is stopping me.
He must know that I wanted to know more, though, because he keeps talking. “You’ll catch on to everything really quickly once you start doing it all. If you haven’t done it yet yourself, it’s hard to explain. But basically, you’re supposed to stay in a nightmare until the dreamer wakes up or can move on to a new dream or different sleep cycle. Preferably after you’ve changed it into something less scary. If you leave early, you just sort of get chucked somewhere random within Rem.”
“That doesn’t sound confusing.”
He shrugs. “Oh. Well whatever.”
We slow down as we approach a glass castle with towers in the corners and a draw bridge over a moat. I have to raise my hand and shield my eyes from the shimmering sunlight bouncing off almost every inch of it. I look to the top of the towers which reach high into the sky, and smile at their atypical shape. They’re not like classic castle towers with pointed tips. There are many different levels to each tower, with different cylinder-like sections, some higher than others. I try to look in past the draw bridge, but all I see is a shiny floor on the inside.
“What is this place?” I ask, tilting my head back to see as much as I can.
“This is the best part of Rem, Becca. This is Somniatis.”
“Somni-what?” I say.
Chance smiles and turns back to look at me. “It’s Latin. Means dream.” He shrugs. “Most of us just call it the Glass Castle.”
“How creative.”
He takes my hand again, and I let him. We walk together across the bridge that echoes under our footsteps. Or I guess mostly just Chance’s footsteps, since I’m still just in my socks. I run my free hand along the glass railing and look over the edge into the sparkling blue water. Chance tugs me along and I look ahead to the inside of the castle. The sunlight coming through the glass walls at different angles and heights makes streaks of white and rainbows through the air and on the floor. Any time you turn around, you’re met with a different line of light and colour, bouncing off a different piece of furniture. I want to reach out and touch them all.
“This way.” Chance leads me farther into the castle and we slowly make our way up a big, wide set of silver stairs. He takes me down a long corridor with glass railings and I look down over the edge at the different streaks of light taking up space where we entered. We reach a door with a frosted glass window sitting at eye level, and Chance opens it, revealing a very normal looking bedroom. There’s a queen size bed under a large window, looking out at an ocean that goes on forever. There’s a dark wood nightstand on either side of the bed with a few books and a lamp on each. I see a dresser off to the side, with a closed laptop sitting on it, and an oversized beanbag chair beside it.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“This is my room.” He says it with a bit of uncertainty in his voice, but I pretend not to notice.
“You live here?”
He shakes his head. “But most of us have rooms here. So we can catch up on sleep, or just get away for a bit. Time moves really slowly here, like in a dream, so you can get a full night’s sleep here in about an hour.”
“Wait, you mean, time is practically standing still while we’re here?”
“Sort of.” He lets go of my hand and it’s only then that I realize we were even still holding hands. I watch from the other side of the room as he sits on his bed.
“So why aren’t you showing me the dreams and stuff?” I ask.
“Well I thought you might want a change of socks.”
I lift up my right foot behind me and turn to look at the sole of my sock. It’s definitely dirty.
“I also thought you might want some time to sleep off your buzz before we did anything dangerous,” he adds.
“What? I’m not buzzed.”
He tilts his head at me and smirks. “Sure you are.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know you were drinking at Zac’s party.”
“How do you know I was at Zac’s party?”
“Well you did tell me you were in his room.”
“Well how do you know I was there for his party? What if I was giving him my history notes?”
He smirks. “I was watching you, Becca.”
“You mean you were spying on me.”
“Uh, no.” He stands up and runs his hands through his hair, making it all messy. “I knew you were going to go into another nightmare. It was just a matter of time before you went full into one, and I didn’t want you getting hurt.”
“I’m sure I could have taken care of myself,” I say, a little offended.
“You could have gotten yourself off the roof of a burning building, when you had no idea how you even got there in the first place?”
“Don’t sound so skeptical, Chance.”
He laughs. “Don’t be so modest.”
I open my mouth to say something, but I can’t think of anything, so instead I just make a face at him that I hope lets him know that I’m offended.
“I just don’t want you getting hurt,” he says.
He crosses the room to me and grabs onto my hands. I look down at them, afraid to look him in the eye.
“Look, if you don’t want to sleep or anything, that’s fine,” he says after a minute of silence.
I sort of shake his hands off mine and cross my arms. “I just don’t like you spying on me.”
“I wasn’t spying.”
“Whatever, I don’t like it.”
“Ok, fine. Good luck getting out of the next nightmare you get sucked into. Do you remember your way back from here?”
“Why are you being like this?”
“You said you didn’t want me looking out for you, so I won’t look out for you.”
“I didn’t say that,” I argue. “I said I don’t want you spying on me.”
“Why, because you don’t want me to know that you made out with Zac?”
I take a step back and shake my head. “You watched?”
“No, I didn’t watch, don’t make me sick.”
“You know, I just realized that I really don’t know you very well, and I’m not sure I feel comfortable with you taking me away to magical places and then trying to get me to sleep in your bed… so…”
He chuckles and scratches his eyebrow. “You’re so hard to figure out, you know.”
“Good.” I don’t even know what I mean by that.
“I won’t spy on you anymore.” He says the word spy like he’s mocking me. “But I really do care about you, and I want to make sure you’re ok. Can I just… come with you to things like that until you know what you’re doing? Especially when you’re hanging around with Zac?”
“No, you can’t. Especially with Zac. And why do you care about me? You don’t even know me.”
“You’re right. I don’t know you. But you’re a person, and you seem like a good person. And I’m sorry if I’ve come on too strongly, or given you the wrong impression, but I just don’t want anyone getting hurt when they don’t have to. I can help you through this, so why not?”
“Do people normally get guided through this by strange boys from their school?”
“Well, like I said, we’re normally really young when we get into this. And we usually get into it in pairs. And someone older leads us through it, and we have to stick together with our partner all the time.”
“Who’s your partner?”
“It was Zac.”
“What? Really?”
“Zac and I were dream buddies until about grade six, when he started realizing that he liked nightmares more than dreams, and when he figured out he could control them the way he wanted… he switched sides.”
“You can do that?”
He just nods and clears his throat.
“Wait, if you were his partner, why did he say he didn’t know who you were yesterday?” I ask.
“Because he’s a jerk,” he shrugs. “I was standing right there, and he knew it would bug me.”
“Did it?”
He raises his eyebrows. “Huh?”
“Did it bug you?”
“No.”
I nod and he sort of smiles, taking a step back.
“I’m sorry for being a bitch,” I finally say.
“It’s ok. I’m sorry you thought I was spying on you.”
“I don’t know why I keep flip flopping emotions all the time,” I start. “One second I think I’m super cool and can do whatever, and the next, I feel like I’m the most insecure person on the planet. I go from low key loner girl, to total bitch in three seconds and I don’t get it. I’m not like this.”
“It’s ok. That’s normal. This is really weird, and there’s a lot going on inside your head, and a lot of stuff happening inside you that’s making all this possible. It’s normal for your emotions to go out of whack for a bit. You’ll be your normal self again soon. Except you’ll be your normal self who controls dreams, and that’s way cooler.”
Chance tosses me a clean pair of socks that are too big for me, and says he’ll be right back, before leaving the room. I sit down on his bedroom floor and switch the socks out, and within a few minutes, Chance is back with a few different pairs of sneakers.
“Where’d you get these?” I ask, untying the laces on the first pair.
“We sort of have a place here where you can get new clothes and stuff.”
“What!? And you didn’t want to bring me with you?”
“No, I didn’t really want to turn this into a shopping trip, to be honest. It’s also just supposed to be for when you need something, and not for when you want something.”
I laugh softly and pull on a pair of black and pink Adidas. They actually fit. They would fit better, though, if I had proper socks. “Why didn’t you get me smaller socks while you were there?”
“Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s alright.” I lace the shoes and get to my feet, and bounce around a little to get a feel for them. “Well you do have good taste, I’ll give you that.”
“Those ones are good?” Chance asks.
I smile and nod.
“Good. Then follow me.”
Chance leads me out of his room and back down the corridor with the glass railings, and down the silver stair case. It seems to be a lot higher now that we’re going down, and I squeeze his hand as we descend. We make it to the bottom and I spin around in all the different streaks of light, and stick my hand out in front of them, watching my palm seem to change colour under each light. Some of the light streaks are like glare off a car headlight in the rain, or a sparkle on a cartoon tooth. They bounce and reflect off so many surfaces, it’s as if I’m walking through a laser maze in a high security bank. Only they’re pretty. And then there’s the rainbows. Rainbows across the floor, in the air, on people’s faces as they walk by. I can’t stop staring at it all as we walk around to the other side of the stair case. We leave the entrance through a hallway that’s splattered with all different colours, like someone threw paint at the wall, and dipped strings in paint and threw those at the wall, too. It’s very fun and cheerful. I run my fingers along the embossed colours, but Chance pulls me along at a speed that’s making this all very difficult for me.
“Why can’t you let me look at everything?” I ask as he yanks me down the hallway even faster. We’re practically running now.
“Sorry.” He slows down and I see him watching me admire everything out of the corner of my eye. “I’m so used to everything, it’s all normal to me now. I don’t even notice it.”
“You don’t notice it?” I can hear the shock come through in my voice. “Even in the main entry with all the light dancing around everywhere? This place is beautiful.”
“I know. I just…” He stops for a second and shrugs. “I basically grew up here. It isn’t new to me, and because I’m so used to it, it sort of just makes the real world seem sort of dreary.”
“That’s depressing.”
He smiles. “It is, isn’t it?”
“You should really learn to appreciate a beautiful thing when you have it, Chance.”
He rubs the back of my hand with his thumb, our fingers still tangled together by our sides. “You’re right, I should.” He’s looking at me with this little grin and it’s making his dimples stand out in a way that I can only see as adorable.
“So how much farther are we going?” I ask, shaking my head to try and clear it.
He blinks and clears his throat, letting go of my hand. “Uh, not much farther.” He nods up ahead, and I can see a door at the end of the hallway.
We make it to the end and Chance reaches out and grabs the glass doorknob, opening the shiny white door and revealing a room that is completely white. It’s just a room of nothingness and white. It looks like it did when we were in transition after the nightmare, where I didn’t know where the floor ended and the wall began. It was literally like we were in some dream and that’s what it’s like now.
“There’s a bunch of these rooms,” he starts. “But this one’s my favourite, I’m not really sure why. It’s just sort of became my default room for some reason. Plus not a lot of people use this one, and I like coming here and being the only one.” He looks at me for about a second, and all then all of a sudden, we’re no longer surrounded by white. The walls, I can see now, are curved. They curve up the ceiling, and they curve around, like we’re on the inside of a donut. And I can see the shape of the room now, because the walls are covered in moving images. People running through dark, foggy forests, kids dangling from mountain tops, or running from monsters. All the moving pictures are of some sort of scary event, and every person in them looks like they’re on the verge of tears.
“These are nightmares,” he says.
“I thought we created dreams,” I counter.
“We do. But we also kill nightmares. We turn them into dreams. This is where you get to be the hero.”
“What if I don’t want to be the hero? What if I just want to make cotton candy lands for people?”
He shrugs. “You can. But that’s not what you’ve been chosen for.”
“What do you mean?” I can feel my eyebrows twisting in confusion.
“You’ve been going into people’s nightmares, Becca. Without knowing what was happening, you’ve been entering nightmares. This is what you’re meant to do.”
“But… But that’s scary.”
He laughs softly. “Yeah, it is. But you get to make it not scary.”
He grabs my hand and presses it to one of the moving images on the wall, his hand over mine, our fingers intertwining.
“Are you ready?” he asks.
“No.”
My breath is sucked out of me. I try to inhale, but I can’t, and I feel like I’m choking. Wind is whipping through my hair so strongly that it feels like I’m falling from a plane. I realize that my eyes are shut tight, so I open them, and everything stops. The wind stops and I can breathe again. I look around to see that we’re in the middle of a snow covered desert, and the land stretches on forever. There aren’t any hills or anything to obstruct our view. The wind picks up again, but not nearly as strongly as it was when we first entered the nightmare. I wrap my arms around myself to try and stay warm.
“We won’t be here that long, don’t worry. We can warm up when we get back,” Chance says to me. “We need to find the dreamer.”
“How do we know who the dreamer is?” I ask.
“They’re usually the only clear person in the dream. Most of the time, if the dreamer has friends or other people in it with them, they’re a little blurry, or out of focus.”
“Oh, weird.”
“Makes it easy for us. Let’s go.” He walks through the snow and ice, and I follow, trying to convince myself that this is actually happening.
It feels like we’ve been walking for about 10 minutes, and all I’ve seen is snow on the ground, and snow blowing in the wind. No people, and nothing really to be afraid of. But then I hear a weird grunting noise, and feel something warm breathing down my neck. I stop and slowly turn around, to see some kind of abominable snowman standing above me. He’s about nine feet tall, and four feet thick, his long, furry arms hanging down to his knees. He stares at me with red eyes, and his fangs have big globs of drool dripping off them. I want to scream, but I’m frozen. This is someone’s nightmare, but to me, it’s real. If he decides he wants me for dinner, that’s it for me. I slowly take a step back, but he just follows me, keeping pace. The ground shakes every time he takes a new step, and I try to pretend that I don’t see cracks forming in the ice beneath my feet.
“Chance,” I say softly.
“I see it,” he replies. “The dreamer must be close, otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing it like this.”
And then I hear a scream. The snowman monster takes his attention away from us and jerks his head up to look at who the dreamer is. I turn back slightly to see a girl about my age with her hands covering her mouth as she cries.
“What do we do?” I ask.
“We have to change it!”
“How!?”
The snowman starts to run after the girl and I have to jump out of the way so he doesn’t trample me. I land in the snow and can already feel it soaking through my clothes, freezing me to the bone. I clench my jaw to stop my teeth from chattering, and run after the monster with Chance. He’s not very fast, but he gains a lot of ground with each giant step that he takes. The girl trips in the snow and has trouble getting up, and I wince as the monster seems to get closer to her.
“What do we do!?” I ask again, getting frantic.
“You have to think of something to change it to. It has to be something really simple at first; something subtle.”
“Like what?”
“Maybe the monster’s running after something in front of her. It just looks like he’s after her because she’s too scared to notice the thing it really wants.”
“What does it want?”
“I don’t know yet. That’s all we need for now,” he says.
“So how do we do that?”
“You have to want it. You have to believe that you can see it.”
“I have to believe that I can see the monster running for something that isn’t that girl?”
“Yes.”
The girl screams again and I jump, startled. I look up to see the monster leaping over her, leaving her trembling in the snow, watching as it runs away. Chance and I run close to her, but don’t let her know that we’re there. The girl is crying and trying to lift herself up, but her arms are shaking under her. I am about to run over to her but Chance catches me by the elbow and shakes his head at me. He points out towards to the snowman monster and I see that he’s now playing on a giant swing set. The girl is slowly standing up, watching it in awe, as it swings higher and higher, threatening to break the ice beneath it.
“What if the ice-”
Chance cuts me off. “It won’t be ice for long.”
It starts to rain, and the snow and ice melts so quickly, it looks like a time lapse. When the snow and ice wash away, a beautiful, green field is revealed, and the girl stands up on her toes, opening her mouth to catch the rain drops on her tongue. She dances around and splashes in the squishy grass, when a boy her age with short blonde hair shows up out of the blue. The girl squeals in excitement and wraps her arms around his neck, letting him stick his hands in her back pockets. They stand so closely together, and I smile as I watch the boy slowly take his hands out of her pockets and wrap them around her waist, pulling her in closer to his body. They smile at each other for a few minutes, until the boy finally closes in the rest of the inches between them, and kisses her.
I don’t even feel a transition. One second we were in the rain, watching two teenagers kiss, and now all of a sudden, we’re back in the room with all the nightmares on the wall. My hair is dripping into my eyes and my clothes are so wet, they feel like they weigh a ton. I turn to Chance, whose hair is plastered to his forehead.
“You’ve been doing that since you were six!?” I sort of shout.
“What?”
“That was insane! There was a giant snow monster chasing us and we could have died!” I can feel my hands shaking, so I cross my arms to try and hide it.
Chance’s smirk isn’t helping. Why does he think this is funny? “Yeah, I guess we could have died. But I know what I’m doing.”
“Right, because you did that shit when you were six.”
“I didn’t do that when I was six. Are you crazy? Who would let a six year old do something like that?”
I stop and stumble over the words that aren’t even coming out of my mouth.
“Exactly,” he says. “No one.”
“But…”
“I became an Aura when I was six. I wasn’t killing nightmares when I was six. I was practicing. Learning how to control my mind. Making little dreams for babies, where it’s safe. They don’t just throw little kids into this crap; they’re not heartless monsters.” He’s still smiling, but I’m not.
“Well… I don’t… I mean, when did you…”
“Everyone’s different,” he shrugs. “Most kids are about 13 when they start. Some of them like to kill their first nightmare on their 13th birthday, sort of like a ritual thing. But Zac and I started killing nightmares when we were nine. It took a lot of convincing, though. We had to prove that we were strong enough. Both physically and mentally.”
I just nod; all of this information is so overwhelming. I can’t imagine nine year olds doing what we just did.
“Are you ok?” he asks.
I nod again, but it’s a lie. “How did you do all that? Change the dream, I mean?”
“I honestly don’t know how to explain it. It’s like asking someone how they smile. I just do it.”
“Well didn’t you say you got training? How do you teach someone to do it?”
“I don’t know. I was so young; I don’t even remember how I was taught. I remember that I learned, but I don’t remember the details of it.”
“Well is there someone around who can teach me?”
“Sure there is. We can find someone higher up who normally does this sort of thing. I’ve been wanting to get someone to help us with this since I found out about you anyway. I’m surprised no one’s mentioned anything yet, to be honest.”
“Well you didn’t mention anything to anyone either.”
His top lip curls into a little crooked smile. “Touché.”
I hear the door open behind us, and we both turn to see a tall, thin, older man step in. His dark hair is streaked with grey around his ears, and even though I’ve never seen him before, I think it makes him look handsome.
“Ah, Chance, I see you’ve met Rebecca.”
“Becca,” I say, out of habit. “Wait, how do you know who I am?”
“It’s a little difficult to keep track sometimes, but I know all our Auras.” He smiles at me but his eyes remain flat and emotionless. I hate it when people fake smiles.
“Well are you the one who’s going to teach me how to do what Chance just did?”
He shakes his head. “No, Chance is going to. That’s why I was glad to see you’ve already met. I knew you went to the same school, and was hoping you would find each other naturally, and so it seems, you have.” His smile is more genuine this time. I stare for a second at the wrinkles in the corners of his eyes, but I still don't like him that much.
“What do you mean you were hoping we would meet each other naturally? What if we didn’t?”
“But I was just telling Becca that I don’t know how to teach her,” Chance says over me.
“Then it’ll be a learning process for you as well as her.” He puts his hands behinds his back and turns around to leave the room, but not before taking one more step back like he forgot something. “Why don’t you give one more nightmare a try?”
We’re still wet as we walk through a forest of twisting trees and fog up to our waists. It’s pretty quiet, so to break the silence, I ask Chance a question.
“Who was that guy back there? Is he like your boss?”
“Nah. He’s been here for a really long time, though. I think he wants Head Aura, though. He tries to kind of fill that spot whenever he can. I think he thinks people will recognize it and kind of appoint him when the position becomes available next. But the thing is, Head Aura doesn’t get appointed by anyone, it just sort of happens.”
“What do you mean it just sort of happens?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. But there have been two Head Auras since I came here, and when the new one took over, no one voted for him. There wasn’t like a meeting or a rally or anything. He just was.”
“Maybe you were too young to know what was going on.”
“Maybe,” he agrees. “But I don’t know, I just always thought that was a thing. People being Head Aura just because. Like, no voting, I mean.”
I want to tell him that I hope he doesn’t become head Aura, since he just left me to fend for myself. I was being thrown into nightmares while he was just hoping Chance and I would become friends. I mean what’s with that? But I also want to tell him that I’m glad it worked out the way it has. I’m glad we did become friends and I’m glad he’s the one to show me through this. When I open my mouth to say something though, I get nervous for some reason, so I bite my bottom lip and just walk quietly beside him.
All I can hear is the sound of the twigs and leaves crunching under our feet. I didn’t realize just how creepy our surroundings were until we stopped talking. The wind swirls around us and sounds like a cartoon, giving me chills. A wolf howls in the distance and I spin halfway around on reflex, hugging myself tight. Chance laughs and I hit him in the shoulder. An owl hoots and I shoot my gaze up to the tree to see that it’s not just any owl. It’s an owl with one of his eyeballs hanging out of the socket. I gag and take a few steps back, walking into Chance. He puts a hand around my waist and pulls me into him.
“I’m right here,” he says softly.
“I’m fine, I just got spooked.” I step out of his grasp and keep walking forward, looking for the dreamer. I’m about to step around a tree stump when someone trips in front of me. I’m about to ask him if he’s ok, but when he looks up at me, I see that his eyes are white, and his mouth is covered in blood. His skin is almost a grey colour, like he’s starting to rot. And when he screeches at me, and reaches for my legs, I realize I’m in a freaking zombie dream.
“Oh shit!” I step back and grab onto the tree, really not even sure what I’m doing. “It’s a fucking zombie!”
Chance is by my side in less than a second. “Climb the tree.”
“What?” I can hear the fear come through in my voice, but it was only because I could hear it in Chance’s. “Can he turn us into zombies?”
“Just climb the tree.” He starts grabbing my waist and trying to hoist me up, and I let him, because my legs are starting to shake so much, I don’t know how fast I can do it on my own. His hands cup my butt as he lifts me higher, and I grab onto a thick enough branch and swing my legs up to the trunk so I can pull myself up the rest of the way by digging my toes into the bark. I pull myself up onto the branch and watch as Chance follows. He stays tangled in the branch right by mine, and looks into my eyes.
“No,” he pants. “They can’t turn us into zombies. But they can eat our brains or tear us apart enough to kill us.”
I gulp and look down at the zombie, who’s now circling the tree, looking up at us as he makes horrifying groans that you can tell have a hint of curiosity behind them. He bites his teeth together a few times, raising the hairs on the back of my neck, and I see three more zombies appear at the base of the tree. They keep biting their teeth and making weird chucking noises with their throats. It’s like they’re talking to each other.
“What do we do?” I whisper.
“The dreamer’s got to be around somewhere.”
“Why does the dreamer have to be around for us to change it?”
“Because if the dreamer isn’t around, we’re just hanging out in the space around it, the stuff the dreamer doesn’t really know is there. If we try to change it here, the dreamer won’t see. And if the dreamer doesn’t see it, it’s not strong enough to spread. We need them to know what’s going on when we change it.”
The zombies’ cries get louder and one of them starts scratching at the tree. I yelp and try to climb higher, but when I look up, I see a little boy hiding up in the taller branches.
“Chance,” I whisper, pointing to the boy.
Chance smiles and then turns back to me. “Excellent.” He looks back up at the boy. “Hey! Kid!”
“Yeah?” he calls down.
“You got any Twinkies?”
“No!”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure! Why would I have Twinkies?”
“Because Zombies love Twinkies! They love them more than brains!”
“But I don’t have any Twinkies!” The boy starts to cry and he wipes his face with his dirty hand.
“Just check your pocket one more time,” Chance tries.
He reaches into his pocket and squeals. “AH! I have one! I HAVE ONE!”
The zombies start to get excited and their grunts get louder and more full of emotion, which just makes my skin crawl. I hold on tighter to the branch I’ve had my arms wrapped around, and watch as the boy drops his Twinkie to the ground below. All the zombies pile on it and start munching away, pushing one another off each other, trying to get at it first.
“I have another one!” the boy shouts, as he drops that one too. The zombies pile on top of that one, but they aren’t moving out of the way.
“Now that I think of it, I think I saw on the news that Twinkies cured zombies,” Chance says.
I narrow my eyes at him. “Huh?”
He nods his head up towards the boy and raises his eyebrows at me. I’m still a little confused but I just let him go with it.
“Yeah,” Chance says, louder this time. “Twinkies cure the zombies!”
“No way!” the boy shouts down.
And wouldn’t you know it, the zombie start to walk off, but with less of a limp in their strides. Their groans and head twitches start to vanish, and as they walk farther into the trees, they look like normal people walking away.
The boy starts to climb down and stops once he reaches my branch, smiles at me. “You’re pretty,” he says. “Who are you?”
“I’m Becca.” Are we supposed to tell them our names?
“Yeah, but who are you?”
“She’s your girlfriend, dummy,” Chance says.
“Aw man, no way!” His grin grows across his entire face, and I’m really not sure what I’m supposed to do. The kids’ like, 10, I’m not going to kiss him or anything.
Chance winks at me and nudges the kid in the back, making him lose his balance and fall closer to me, forcing me to steady him. The kid blushes as he hangs off me, but before I have a chance to do anything else, we’re surrounded by white for a few seconds, and then we’re back in the nightmare room.
“Thanks for that,” I say sarcastically.
“What?” He throws his hands up in mock defense. “I knew he was going to wake up before anything happened.”
“What if he didn’t?”
“Well he did.”
“Whatever. Anyway, that seemed really easy for you.”
He nods. “It was. But it’s also Friday.”
“What does that mean?”
“All the Malevolents are out partying. They’re slackers. Fridays are always easy. It’s like they just have some kind of automatic nightmare creator they use for weekends so they can all go get drunk. No one’s there monitoring them. Monday, though, Monday’s a different story.”
“Wait, are you serious?”
“Yeah.”
“Are they all teenagers or something?”
He shrugs. “No. But they’re all partiers. Tonight looked easy because it was. But during the week, the Lents are there.”
“Lents?” I ask, cutting him off.
“Malevolents. Lents.”
I nod once. “Right.”
“Anyway, they’re there the whole time, monitoring, keeping the fear, keeping us from taking over. Sometimes it’s a big back and forth thing where we get control and start to change it, but then they change it back… You need to be really strong to do this. Not so much strong physically, but strong mentally. But the best way to change a nightmare, is to get one of the Lents to do it.”
“How do you do that?”
“I don’t know, I just do it. I’ve only done it a handful of times, though. It’s really hard. You have to get inside their heads. Make them think the dream changes are their idea. I’ve been getting a lot better at it, though. Especially lately.”
“Weird.”
“But before we try and figure any of that out with you, we need to teach you how to control this thing with being sucked into nightmares in the middle of the cafeteria. That can’t happen anymore, for two reasons.” He holds up his index finger. “One, it’s dangerous,” he adds his middle finger, “and two, people are going to wonder how you’re randomly disappearing into thin air.”
Chance and I walk together down the colourful hallway and I drag my fingers across the wall, listening to them brush along the raised patterns. Chance looks over at me and smiles, so I give him one back, but we don’t say anything until we get back into the main entry with all the streaks of light. Chance stops walking and faces me, but I can’t focus on what he’s saying, because a beam of pink light is hitting him in the back and bouncing off him in a glow that completely surrounds him. He looks like an angel or something. His mouth is moving, and he looks like he’s on a bit of a passionate role, but I can’t stop looking at how beautiful and magical his skin looks.
“Are you even listening to me?” he says, snapping me from my daze.
“Huh?”
He smirks and shakes his head.
“Sorry,” I say. “You just… you look like you’re glowing.”
He looks down at his chest and arms, and smiles before looking back at me. “Just a bit of a preview, I guess.”
“A preview for what?”
“Nothing.”
It’s not nothing. Why would he say that if it were nothing?
“We’ll go somewhere less distracting,” he finally suggests.
Of course we end up back in his room. Of course we do. Chance sits on his bed and rests his hands casually on his thighs. I decide to go for the bean bag chair. I plop down in it, the beans shifting around me to make a little pocket for my butt.
“So,” I say, not sure where to start. “What do we do?” I hate that that has seemed to be my go to question tonight.
“So when a nightmare is trying to pull you in, you sort of get this feeling in your stomach. Like this dark feeling, like everything has turned bad.”
“Like I’m getting diarrhea?”
Chance laughs and actually throws his head back.
“What? I’m serious.”
He keeps laughing and wipes a tear from his eye. I just sit there in his bean bag chair and watch as he tries to settle his laughter down. But any time he comes close to stopping, he chuckles again and then breaks out into full on laughter again.
“Sorry,” he wheezes. “Sorry.” He’s not sorry. “Sorry,” he says again, holding his stomach. “That just surprised me, is all.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “Sorry. I just…” He sighs and lets himself fall back onto his mattress, the comforter fluffing up around him as he lands. “It’s not like diarrhea.” And he’s done. His laughter is filling the entire room and I know now that it’s never going to stop.