Chasing the Moon

CHAPTER EIGHT

A howl shook Diana out of the first deep sleep she’d had in a week. A great despair seized her. It was an alien thing, a tidal wave of grave emo

Her head cleared as she pushed away the alien fear and confusion. It was only then that she noticed she wasn’t alone. Something else was in her bedroom.

Her first thought was that it was Vom, who had finally come to eat her. The thing was the same size, and had the same general proportions in the darkness. But then she noticed that it had eyes, something Vom lacked, and that those eyes were bright green orbs.

They were hypnotic, and though she wanted to look away, she couldn’t escape them. Her body went rigid. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t think. She should’ve been frightened to death, but those eyes even robbed her of fear. They left only a hollow chill in her gut.

“Who are you?” someone asked.

It was her. She did have some control over her body. She recognized her voice, even if she couldn’t feel her lips move. But if she focused she could sense the air slipping out of her lungs and out of her throat.

The eyes narrowed. The thing growled.

It moved toward her. In the unnatural dark around her bed, the thing’s mottled orange hands, shaped like seven-pointed stars, grasped her blanket and pulled. She tried to hold on to it. The monster was cheating. You weren’t supposed to be in danger if you could hide under the covers.

If she could just reach the lamp, if she could just turn it on. The light would drive away this thing. Even if the covers couldn’t protect her, the light would. But even as she thought this, she noticed in her peripheral vision that her arm was already reaching for the lamp. She wasn’t paralyzed. Not technically. She was just so disconnected from herself that moving required absolute focus.

Concentrating on her arm, she managed to gather just enough sensation to realize that the lamp and the end table were missing. And now that she looked, she understood that everything in the room was gone except the bed, and that, as she willed her gaze upward, she saw a sky filled with dim stars that did nothing to light the darkness.

The thing ripped away her blanket with a shriek and wrapped one hand around her ankle. It was going to drag her into the shadows and kill her, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.

A flare lit this inky void, just beside her bed, and its harsh glare drove the thing away. It disappeared, though its howls of discontent echoed for a while yet.

Suddenly she could move again.

West, his pockmarked face lit by a flare in his right hand, squinted at her. “Is that you, Number Five?”

She covered her eyes. The light was so bright.

“Yes, it’s me. What the hell was that?”

“You shouldn’t be awake,” said West.

She wasn’t about to let him dodge the question. “What the hell was that?”

“Dream eater. I wouldn’t be too concerned about it.”

“Not concerned? It was going to kill me.”

“It was just feeding on your nightmares.”

“But I wasn’t having a nightmare.”

“Well, of course you weren’t. It was eating them. The dream eaters perform a valuable service, consuming negativity and other dangerous emotions while you sleep. Without dream eaters, the entire human race would’ve gone mad some time ago.”

“Wait a minute. You’re telling me those things keep us sane.”

“You didn’t think your fragile psyche was able to hold itself together all on its own, did you? Something has to clean out the baggage, remove the excess goop clogging the gears.”

“Labroides dimidiatus,” said Diana.

“Uh-hmm.”

“Cleaner fish. It forms a symbiotic relationship with other fish by eating the particles that—”

“I know what Labroides dimidiatus is, Number Five.” He took another flare out of his coat pocket and handed it to her. “We should get you out of here. Before they come back. They don’t like being seen. Puts a fright into them, can make them dangerous.”

“But you said they were symbiotic.”

“Symbiotic and easily frightened. Not that it matters unless you wake up too suddenly, like you did.”

The dream eater’s cries were echoed by others of its kind. Lots of them.

“You should probably follow me now.”

She was wearing her pajamas, and the ground under her feet felt warm and squishy. Like sand that wasn’t quite mud. Every step made a wet, plopping noise. A few steps, and her bed disappeared into the emptiness. She could see some shapes in the dark. Maybe trees. Maybe rocks. But aside from that, all she could see was West’s torch, which she followed closely.

“It was that howl. It’s what woke me up.”

She could still hear it. Low and mournful. Inhuman and pitiable.

“That’d do it,” said West. “You must’ve heard Fenris’s pain. You must be an empathic soul, Number Five.”

Diana had always assumed empathy was a good thing, but if it meant waking up in an alien corner of the universe, she wasn’t so sure. That’s what she got for assuming anything.

“Who’s Fenris?” she asked.

< />“The wolf that chases, the herald of Ragnarok, the ravenous godling. The big green thing that forever chases the moon.”

“Shouldn’t it be called Managarmr then? Because in Norse mythology—”

“I’m well aware of the mistake.”

They walked a little farther. The cries of the dream eaters variously seemed to come from behind them or ahead of them. It was impossible to tell. Aside from the light of the flares and a dim shape glimpsed here and there, the world was nothing but black.

“Why is Fenris in pain?” She asked the question as much to keep her mind off what was happening as to satisfy any personal curiosity.

“It’s trapped.”

She chuckled to herself. “Aren’t we all? Take a number, pal.”

“True, Number Five. But for a being like Fenris imprisonment is unbearable. Most creatures were meant to occupy a single sphere of existence, but Fenris is one of the rarest of beings, made to swim the oceans of existence like you walk from room to room. Imagine being entangled in a net from which you cannot escape that only tightens itself the more you struggle.”

It did sound pretty damn awful. “Isn’t there some way to free it?”

West looked over his shoulder. His face was nothing but shadows, except for his four eyes that glinted in the torchlight. “The net is your universe. Or what you once thought of as your universe before your eyes were opened.”

“Oh.”

“If it makes you feel any better, this is merely an inconvenience for Fenris. His efforts to free himself are why there are tears in your reality in the first place. His thrashing snaps and strains the fabric of your world. While it might contain him for a while, he is greater than the forces that bind him. Inevitably, he will escape, even if he must obliterate your world in the process.”

“But—”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about that, Number Five. Now that you live in the building, your existence doesn’t depend on anything as delicate as reality. So it’s really not your problem anymore, is it?”

She didn’t find that very comforting.

“Hasn’t anyone figured out a way to help him escape without destroying the world?”

“If there are forces at work with the power to do so, they’re largely indifferent to the well-being of this small universe.”

“But—”

“It’s a long ways off,” he said. “At least a day or two.” She stopped. “What?”

He kept walking. “Or perhaps the day after that. Or the day after that. Eternity is measured one moment at a time.”

She used one of thosemoments to focus on what was important, escaping from the dream eaters, and caught up with him.

“Where are we?”

“Do you know where you go when you sleep? When you close your eyes and no one is looking at you, not even you?”

“Here?”

“Sometimes here,” said West. “Sometimes other places.”

“You’re telling me that when I go to sleep, my body is transported to a place like this?”

“More or less. Unless someone’s watching you.”

They passed another bed where an elderly couple dozed. A pair of those things were lurking beside them.

“Should we do something?” she asked.

“Do what? As long as they’re asleep, they’re fine. Trust me, waking them up would only cause problems.”

“How often does this happen?”

“I already told you,” he said. “Every time you aren’t seen.”

“I get that, although I won’t ask the obvious question like how does that work with the blind because… well… because it’s probably pointless. But how often do people wake up too soon? And what happens to them if those things get them?”

“It happens infrequently, and you don’t really want to know what happens. Now we’re almost there. Ah, here we are.”

West reached out and flicked a switch, dispelling the dark. The dreamworld disappeared and her bedroom fell into place. Everything was normal. West and the dream eaters were gone. She might’ve convinced herself it had all been a vivid dream, if not for the flare still clutched in her right hand.

She threw on her slippers, pushed the dresser aside, and stalked out of the apartment and downstairs. She pounded on West’s door. She didn’t expect him to answer right away, but she resolved to stick with it until he did. She was midway through her second round of knocks when the door opened.

“How in the hell am I supposed to sleep now?” she asked.

West leaned against the door frame and sighed. “If you don’t sleep, how can the dream eaters clean out your mind?”

“And knowing that dream eaters are out there or that my world is destined to be destroyed by a cosmic monster, how am I supposed to get to sleep then?”

“All you need to do is close your eyes,” he said. “The eaters take care of the rest. Now that you’ve nearly seen them, they’ll be drawn to you. You’ll probably sleep better than you’ve ever imagined you could. All the tenants that survived the longest woke up too soon at least once or twice in their first few months in the building. It’s a good sign.”

“But when I’ll close my eyes,l I’ll see is—”

“You’ll see nothing. The eaters will give you blessed oblivion, relieve you of the burden of jumbled thoughts and overheated memories. They’ll allow you the sanctuary of a state of pure, untroubled unconsciousness, eight precious hours at a time. If I were you, I’d be thankful for every moment of peace you can get in this hectic universe.”

He closed the door.

Diana trudged back to her room. He was insane if he thought she could get back to sleep, knowing what she did. She cracked open a book and read to stay awake. At some point, she fell asleep.

It was the best night’s rest she’d ever had.