The Waking Dreamer (6 page)

Emmett knew he was dreaming. He’d had this dream countless times before.

He was standing in an apartment. It was the same apartment he had dreamed of throughout his life. He could hear the evening news anchor’s polished enunciation from a television playing through the walls. There was a weather report of the northern storm blowing in from the Great Lakes. And there was an update on the mother and daughter who had been missing since the previous week.

The apartment was like a
Twilight Zone
curio cabinet. A seemingly endless collection of odd statutes lined shelves along the ceiling perimeter—hawks and other birds—with towers of unread old books stacked so precariously high that the slightest wind threatened to collapse them. Burgundy shawls doubled as lampshades, casting dim lighting over a pair of over-sized cream-colored ottomans in the room’s center. A wooden table cracked down its length sat between the cushions, on which was a collection of nine Russian nesting dolls. The walls were covered in odd-shaped mirrors, shiny glassware, and hanging baubles that light and image bounced off. A hundred different reflections of Emmett bounded around the room as he tentatively moved through the living room. The fluttering color from the goldenrods and orange velvety wings of two Monarch butterflies sitting on the outside of the window’s ledge registered in his periphery.

Hanging on the far wall beside the window was an unframed oil painting of a group of people at a dinner table looking aghast at a disembodied hand in the air above them. There were five people sitting at a table set with food, each dressed in old period clothes. One of the men wore some kind of crown and, like the others, looked frightened by a hand above them pointing to words written on a hazy cloud-like backdrop. The letters were in a language that Emmett could not read.

“
Belshazzar’s Feast
,” a voice said to Emmett. He turned to see a young woman standing behind him. It was always the same woman. Her face was concealed by the serpents coiled around her head except for the pair of amber eyes that stared at him.

“The Dutch painter Rembrandt created this portrait of the Babylonian King Belshazzar who, according to the biblical Book of Daniel, in drunken revelry blasphemed the sacred vessels taken from Solomon’s Temple by the previous king,” the woman continued as she always did. She stepped past Emmett to the painting and pointed up at it. “In response, the ghostly, disembodied fingers of a human hand appeared in the air and wrote on the wall words that the prophet Daniel interpreted as meaning that God had numbered the days of Belshazzar’s kingdom, and that the Babylonian King had been weighed and been found wanting.”

The woman lowered her hand and looked at Emmett. “The painting is currently on display at the National Gallery in London.”

“Why is it here?” Emmett asked. He always asked the same question.

She always gave the same answer. “Do you know the words?”

“No.”

The woman recited the words without having to read them from the painting. “‘Look at the sky, how the orbits of the planets and stars never change, how they rise and fall according to their natural order. Look at the earth, how everything that takes place has their beginnings and their ends—summer and winter, and clouds and dews and rain. The trees appear to shed their leaves; the trees crown themselves in green leaves and fruit. All this from year to year forever and ever and ever like the bottomless sea and the endless rivers that lead to it.’”

“What does that mean?” Emmett asked, already knowing her answer.

The woman turned to Emmett and held one hand up with her palm facing him. She lowered the other hand, palm facing out and down. She always did this with a look in her amber eyes as if she were waiting for him to respond in kind. Yet he never did. And so the dream ended as it always did, the woman repeating the same seven words.

“One day, Emmett, you will save me.”

CHAPTER 5

Emmett raised his eyelids with great effort, wading through murky, imageless darkness. As his eyes struggled to focus, so too did his mind. A formless memory surfaced, steeped in malevolence. He crushed his eyes closed against the torrent of returning images: trees and thorny bramble, a gravel road, a flashing overhead light. Then he remembered a crash. He had been running; his aching limbs told him so. He had fallen. He was attacked.

“Good afternoon,” an accented voice greeted him. Emmett groaned in response, pushing his eyes open again to a whirl of unfocused shapes. As his vision sharpened, he could see he was lying on a plush bed in a massive room whose ceiling and walls were made of glass like an enormous greenhouse. He could see snow-crowned mountains carpeted in fields of thick evergreens filled the horizon. A stone walkway wound through the room whose floor was soft, red earth. Surrounding him were broad tufts of bamboo stalks, dark taro pads, and the soaring green and purple leaves of immense banana trees. Waist-high shrubs of wild, erratic palms and fragrant, feathery ginger blossoms lined a whispering creek encircling the bed. Several large, worn boulders accenting the path were home to heart-shaped fronds whose masses of twisting, exposed roots climbed the rocks, upon which sat several people in hushed conversation. And in the distance, Emmett saw a young woman in a diaphanous white gown and waist-length black hair dancing around by herself, her body encircled by a swarm of bees that seemed to elicit her gleeful smile.

Emmett tried to force himself up on his elbows, a dull tingling of a thousand pinpricks racing throughout his limbs. He felt an immense nausea in his stomach, wincing as his dry throat cried back at his own coughing. He forced himself to swallow what felt like broken glass.

“You’ll want to take it a bit easy, then.” Emmett saw a young man sitting relaxed in a chair opposite the bed with one leg crossed over the other, composed in his gray pinstripe slacks and fitted black turtleneck. His mind stumbled over the chaos of returning memories before registering the face.

“What the hell did you slip me?”

“I didn’t slip you anything. Mind you, I kept you asleep for the last three days while we drove back, but Amala thought it would be easier. Here,” he said, offering water.

Emmett felt too sick to protest, and he accepted it sitting back against the cushions. He groaned and squeezed his eyes shut as he drank and was rewarded with hysterical coughing.

“Three days?” Emmett asked, bracing against the discomfort. The coughing seemed to jar his memory, and tumbling out of the coalescing fog were dueling shadows: one of a white-skulled creature, the other a graceful woman who moved like flowing water.

“After this much time we’ll obviously want to feed you. I’m feeling rather peckish myself. You might want to use the loo first, though.” Keiran pointed at an open door behind Emmett where he could see a bathroom’s sink and shower built from granite.

Emmett felt the telltale exigency and tumbled through the open door. It was a moment later when modesty resurfaced and he closed the door with the back of his foot, Keiran having turned away. When the door opened several minutes later revealing a beleaguered Emmett holding his stomach, Keiran stood up from his chair.

“I had your jumper washed,” Keiran said, motioning to Emmett’s hoodie, which was draped over the chair opposite the bed. “It is wicked cold here in Oregon,” he added, handing Emmett a long, wooly scarf, which Emmett brought around the back of his neck but left untied in the front.

“Oregon?” Emmett scoffed, his mind still struggling to reconcile his surreal environment.

“Answers for all your questions. With food. Promise,” Keiran smiled, motioning to another door at the end of the stone walkway. The door was built directly into a sheer wall of rock buttressing the glass walls, as if the structure were constructed alongside and within a mountain.

Keiran walked over and opened the door. Whether it was Emmett’s hunger or confusion, he followed. They were in a smaller room. A central fireplace ensconced in tan-colored rock dominated the room, with a variety of floor rugs, thick body pillows of various colors, and low cushions surrounding it. Pottery as tall as Emmett featured wildly arranged and organically out-of-order floral arrangements. They were not the sort of trimmed bouquets found in a hospital, but rather were celebrations of living, unrestrained color.

“Who have we got here? An angel on the road, or a devil at the fireplace?” called out a baritone voice.

A pair of men entered the room from another door, walking as much as strutting. Not appearing much older than Keiran, they were deeply tanned identical twins with short brown hair and brown eyes, though one of the twin’s eyes seemed to sparkle as if flecks of silver swirled in his irises. Like Amala’s. And whereas Keiran was athletic and strongly built, the twins’ wide barrel chests strained against their shirts.

“All right?” Keiran smiled, clapping each on the shoulder. “Emmett, this is Sebastian and Paulo Rodrigo.” He gestured to each twin in turn.

Both nodded silently at the same time. The twin with the sparkling eyes narrowed them, staring at Emmett. “Interesting coloring,” the twin said.

“How long with the Rot?” the second twin asked.

“Three nights ago in Florida.”

“How unexpected,” the twin with the strange eyes commented.

Emmett felt like a child being talked about by grown-ups at the dinner table.

“I never got to say good-bye after the aurora australis in the spring,” Keiran said, ending the momentary uncomfortable silence.

“It’s okay, we had to head back to Noronha early …”

“Allessandro sends his regards…” the other twin added mid-sentence, to which Keiran smiled knowingly.

“So what brings you up here?” Keiran asked.

“
La Pastora
had us hunting the coast. We left Natal two weeks ago.”

“Anything of interest?” Keiran asked.

“Rumors. An old man in Pureza said that several of the area’s children had gone missing. The trafficking trade is too extensive to be certain what happened to them.”

The other brother nodded. “There was talk of a disease spreading through an isolated village in Martins—odd muscle spasms, high fever, eventual death … the typical thing you’d expect if they were active in the area and failing to cover their tracks …”

“… but since there was massive flooding in the area and the main roads were washed out, the villagers couldn’t wait for officials to arrive. They burned the dead in case of malaria, leaving nothing left for us to check.”

“So no evidence of Revenant activity?” Keiran asked.

“We followed a trail of similar signs north through the Amazon until we reached what we thought was a dead end in Veracruz. Then we started hearing talk of
el hombre de la bolsa
again …”

“… which we hadn’t heard that far south of Monterrey before.”

“The man of the sack?” Emmett finally interrupted. And though he’d heard of the foreign horror movie of the same name, he knew just enough Spanish to understand nothing of what was presently being discussed.

The twins turned and looked to Keiran as if it were his responsibility to explain. Emmett couldn’t tell if they were being deferential to Keiran or were simply irritated.

“The Sack Man is a story parents in Latin America tell misbehaving children about an ugly old man who collects and eats bad children. Classic bogeyman story … except, of course, that it’s not entirely untrue. Not when the bogeyman really
does
kidnap children and eat them, anyway,” Keiran said.

Emmett’s mind numbly absorbed Keiran’s words as the twins resumed. “Honestly, brother, I wish we chased real shadows instead of our own. Some children went missing and some farm animals were slaughtered, but no Revenants.”

“Since we were so close to the border, we caught a flight to rest and visit here. Paulo’s got a crush on that widow who runs that restaurant you’re so fond of.”

The other twin—Paulo apparently, though Emmett was uncertain if he could ever tell them apart but for Paulo’s unusual eyes—jabbed his brother before looking back at Keiran. “We were heading to say hi to Sophie. We’ll let you get back to your tour.”

Keiran clasped their hands individually before they left through the door Keiran and Emmett had just exited. Emmett watched them leave, noting that neither turned to say good-bye to him as they did so.

“Right, then,” Keiran began before Emmett could ask anything else. “On to food.”

Sure, we can just pretend I processed all of that.

They passed through a seeming labyrinth of hallways and passed at least a dozen or so people of various ages—usually in pairs, the woman always with glittering eyes—before reaching the rustic kitchen, its extensive deep cherry woodwork and granite facing an uncovered window looking out across a wide valley.

“Right. Have a seat, then,” Keiran offered to Emmett, moving to the refrigerator. “The trick is always to find something that refreshes without being too objectionable.”

Keiran withdrew a knife from a drawer and set to slicing various pieces of fruit. Emmett’s eyes glanced sideways at the door, and in a moment he had decided that if he chose to run, short of throwing the knife at him, Keiran probably wouldn’t be able to catch him.

Fine, genius, you run … and go where, exactly?

Keiran offered a kiwi wedge from his knife to Emmett. Emmett made no attempt to hide his leeriness as he regarded the extended knife or possibly drugged fruit. Keiran seemed comfortable with Emmett taking time to consider him as if he expected it.

Emmett finally accepted the offering with a loud rumbling of his stomach. He felt the first bodily objection as he hesitantly chewed, and tasting nothing immediately foul, swallowed it to quell his rising hunger.

“Mind that you don’t drip juice on the floor, please,” Keiran said, handing Emmett a napkin.

He took the napkin, prickling with irritation. Nancy’s husband, Gerry, had done something similar once, too. By outward appearances, Keiran was not entirely unlike Gerry: tall, well built, and genetically blessed with the rugged good looks women bypassed lanky, boy-faced Emmett for. If that weren’t enough reason to not like him, Keiran was a better dresser, too.

Hating the guy who rescued you isn’t helpful, genius
.

Unlike Gerry, though, Keiran exuded a relaxed manner. Emmett couldn’t tell if it was because he was British or not, but when he spoke, Keiran seemed entirely comfortable in his own skin. To anyone else, that would engender an equally relaxed manner. To Emmett, though, it only served to remind him how uncomfortable he felt in his own skin—now even more with the Rot on his neck.

Emmett touched his jaw to test if it was still there, hissing at the pain.

“It’ll hurt less if you don’t poke at it,” Keiran said.

No kidding.

A silver kettle whistled, and turning the stove off, Keiran poured steaming water into two ceramic mugs. He scooped heaping teaspoons of fresh leaves from a jar into a pair of silver strainers, releasing a heady, almost overwhelmingly sharp aroma. Keiran dropped a strainer into each mug, offering one to Emmett.

“Cream and sugar?”

Of course he drinks tea.

“No thanks.”

“To rare joys,” Keiran said, raising his mug. “Cherish life’s simple pleasures wherever one might find them,” he saluted.

Of course he’s an optimist
.

“I suppose you have lots of questions,” Keiran said after setting his tea down.

“Nah, I enjoy being clueless,” Emmett said.
That would have worked far better as inner monologue, Emmett. Go you.

“Fair play,” Keiran grinned. “I was cheeky the first time I arrived here, too.”

“When was that?” Emmett asked, hoping to get information before he lost any pretense of patience.

“Seven years ago. I was seventeen and had come searching for answers. Like you, my life had been touched—or marred, rather—by the Underdwellers.”

“Guess I have to ask, don’t I?” Emmett snarked.

Keiran’s expression was genuine confusion. In a way, Emmett regretted his sarcasm and was thankful Keiran didn’t recognize it. “Sorry. What’s an Underdweller?”

“Abominations that hide in the earth. Long-lived creatures that are wicked strong who exist only for the pleasure of devouring flesh.”

The creature’s jagged teeth and unnatural speed flashed in his mind. Silence passed between them as Emmett suppressed a shudder that was accompanied by a dull throb of discomfort along his neck.

No wonder I always preferred the George Romero lumbering dead type.

“What about the robed dudes with the face-melting?”

“Revenants. Their human worshippers. They practice what we call runic magicks, invoking ancient words of power to harm others. Ancient cults, secret societies, tyrants and sadists—Underdwellers have ruled entire kingdoms by proxy through their human Revenant cabals. Civil wars, human trafficking, slavery … it’s all their lot.”

“So, soylent green really
is
people?”

Keiran raised an eyebrow in confusion.

“How’d you kill it?” Emmett asked.
Fewer movie references, snob.

“Iron stave through its heart.”

“Was kinda hoping for a more inventive trope there.”

“Underdwellers avoid pure running water, and fortunately for us, they have lived underground for so long that their skin can’t tolerate direct light. They only rise in full darkness when the moon is at its lowest apogee.”

“You mean they don’t rise under a
full
moon?” Emmett quipped.

“Silly superstitions,” Keiran remarked more to himself than to Emmett. “The moon reflects the sun’s light. The gift of light in the darkest hours of the night is associated with nonsense superstition. And the brightest reflection of light, a full moon, is viewed as an ill omen. You must appreciate the irony.”

“Superstition makes for good storytelling. Can’t have a horror movie without it.”

Smiling, Keiran began clearing the countertop and rinsing the dishes. “Superstition is often a convenience for avoiding uncomfortable truths. A woman dares to live unmarried on the outskirts of town in the frontier, and rather than being a resourceful, capable woman who records weather patterns and uses medicinal herbs for various maladies—”