Lo! The crisp feel of a brand-new, shiny morning with the foil just off!
See! The light fresh and brilliant, so sparkling to the eye that blindment is an impossibility!
Breath! The deep strong lungfulls of air so good it’s positively an intoxicant!
Smell! The enveloping, nostril-bleeding musk of a bull elk in full season!
Hear! The full-throated bark of joy from an oversized elephant gun as it tears a hole directly through its head and out the other side in a spray of meaty bits and delicate little bone splinters!
Harrison Harolds watched in satisfaction as the animal fell over, its eyes too bemused to even start glazing. A good, clean shot on a good, clean animal. He wasn’t sure which to be more proud of, his aim or his son-in-law’s imagination. It was a good elk, the sort a sportsman wished for day in and day out, which meant that now Eric should have some extra time on his hands to spend fantasizing about the things he should, such as how to get ahead at his firm and make his wife Ellen, Harrison’s daughter, obscene amounts of money. Or possibly just daydream about her straightways; Harrison supposed that’d be a good second best. Sentimentality was a weakness, but one he had grudgingly learned to tolerate in his life, if only for appearance’s sake.
He spent too much time killing other people’s dreams to put much stock in them.
Harrison woke up in his chair downstairs. Now and then, someone would try and make a fuss about he really shouldn’t do that sort of thing at his age and the possibility of falling out and hurting himself or having back problems or a spontaneous attack of dead or something. All he ever had to do to silence the worries was offer a two-second spell in the chair; the thing was thicker than a slice of Ellen’s pound cake and nearly as soft, battered as it looked. The cushions could’ve swallowed pythons whole.
He was pleased to note the steady, clear look in Eric’s eyes over breakfast – no imaginary game hunts there. Good. The last thing he needed right now was distraction; not with a six-year-old to deal with, another on the way, and having to stay at his father-in-law’s. Harrison had tried his best to be welcoming, but he’d rather lost the knack, or possibly never had it – he’d forgotten which. Ellen had certainly never displayed much remorse over moving out of the nest; the only member of the family that had shown any sort of cheer over the whole thing had been little Jackie. Ellen said she’d just gotten past explaining they were “staying at grandpa’s” when she started jumping up and down and making steam whistle noises.
“Fastest recovery from a disaster I’ve ever seen,” she commented. “She almost looked disappointed when I told her it was just ‘till we get the fire damage sorted out.”
Harrison shrugged. “So long as her room was fine, there’s nothing much for her to miss at that age. And of course she’s tough – so are you.”
Ellen gave him some sort of look, and the conversation had died off quickly and without dignity soon after that. He still wasn’t sure what he’d said wrong. It annoyed him, as it had so often.
If there was one upside to the whole thing, it was the return to dream-hunting. He’d almost hunted out his neighbours’ entirely; they were worn down to the nubbins, barely a sickly hart shared between them all. Not that they’d been spectacular sport to begin with. Too many dried-up lives around here, too many flaccid imaginations. Too many middle-aged men and women who’d decided their lives were over already. Where was the glory – or point, for that matter – in shooting down someone’s hopes of one day owning a slightly nicer car?
No, Eric and Ellen were breaths of fresh air. Both had problems, the fire just being the most visible of them. Both needed focus. Both had entirely too many airy-fairy notions floating around in their heads for their own good. He was doing them a favour, really. And besides, it reminded him to get some food in his diet that wasn’t cereal.
His thoughts were interrupted by the latching of tiny arms around his neck, putting him in an expert stranglehold which he reversed with a quick grab-and-tickle. Jackie fell away from him in a burst of giggles, reminding him of the other upside of their presence. He hadn’t seen his granddaughter since Christmas, and already it seemed like she’d put on a half-foot in height.
“Too slow,” he told her. “And guard your sides better – and if you can’t do that, for the love of Christ don’t giggle on the approach; you completely gave yourself away.”
“Still got you,” she said, unrepentant and damningly insightful.
“If you’re done eating, go study. You had homework, didn’t you?”
Out came the Lip, involuntary and omnipresent at the prospect of work. “Homework’s boring. And I did almost all of it. Almost. Miss Susan understands it when we don’t.”
“Miss Susan’ll be all the happier if you get it all done then. Surprise her. You need to learn to get things done, and done properly. This is important.”
The Lip quivered. Inside himself, Harrison felt something cave in and knew he’d already lost. “But it’s all so stupid. It’s just math, and it’s really really easy. I don’t need to do it, please?”
“It’s good practice for all the things in life that you’ll need to do anyways,” said Harrison. And then, because he knew he was going to say it no matter what and wanted to get it over with, he amended, “but I suppose if you already know it there’s no point.”
“Yay!” she yelled, and then tried to strangle Harrison again.
“Shoo! Go play with Seuss or something.”
“Seuss is boring,” she laughed. “All he wants to do is sleep.”
“He’s eighteen-and-a-half, not dead. Just tickle him and see what happens next – careful, or you might lose a finger.”
Lured by the prospect of possible dismemberment, Jackie departed at top speed to track down the cat.
Harrison wondered if he’d ever been able to move like that, or if he’d just imagined it. He snorted. Of course he hadn’t imagined it. He’d made a habit of pruning his own fancies quite regularly.
Jackie went to school. Eric went to work. Ellen went to work. Harrison went to the TV and turned it onto the weather network, then settled himself in his chair and closed his eyes. True, midday naps were getting easier and easier as he got older, but it never hurt to have a little aid. The soothing sound of cold fronts and warm updrafts and sunnies that may have contained a chance of cloudy washed over him, soft as a whisper on a windy day.
He blinked, and was outside. It was always such a relief nowadays; you never really realized how much joint pain hurt until it vanished.
From these eyes, in this place, the world was different. A lot of kind-of-dark, mostly. Shadows lurking that could’ve been trees. An emptyscape where there were buildings and roads. Gaps that were both endlessly wide and traversable with a quick jump. Distance didn’t really mean anything until you reached the lights where minds were; shedding reality like torches on everything they passed.
Harrison approached a dimly flickering one, fading at the edges, and examined it with a critical eye. For all they claimed to treasure them, some people were awfully careless with their brains. Look at this one right here, belonging to…. He probed for a moment… Jeremy Holloway, aged fourteen years and four months. Sick at home from school, but not so sick as to not do homework, and yet he was messing about on a computer, playing some sort of game that involved removing limbs from things before they did the same to you.
Well. Harrison would just have to see about that.
Jeremy’s mind was drifting in neutral as he played, and it made an easy target for boarding – all the footholds and grips and latches you had to jimmy were easy to spot in its dimmed illumination. Trying to board an active brain was like trying to bowl with a thousand-watt lightbulb strapped to each retina, with your consciousness the ball. Missing wasn’t fatal, but it was embarrassing and not a little painful. Harrison hadn’t missed since he was thirteen. Those had been the dangerous days, back before he’d learned exactly what sort of mind it was and wasn’t safe to venture into. He still winced when he thought about Marjorie.
The inside of Jeremy’s brain was much larger than the outside, curled over and wrinkled as it was. Right now it was pretending to be a maze-upon-maze-upon-maze of coiling mechanized tunnels, flickering with the strobe-like flashdance of terrible lighting and riddled with mysterious fans, ducts, and creaking noises reminiscent of automobiles giving birth. Something unspeakable scuttled along an unseen passage with an unnecessarily ostentatious amount of noise.
Harrison squinted, stuck his right pinky in his mouth and chewed on it, and pulled an extremely large and complicated gun out of his jeans pocket. It looked like the illegitimate offspring of a crossbow and a glue gun, and the combination of its heft and slight hum was a comfort. Flashy, over-built, and stupid as all-get-out, but with loads of firepower. Yes, this was a typical teenager’s dream. They were like modern movies: all full-frontal special effects, no surprises. He’d seen it all before a thousand times. It was because of this that he was very nearly completely unfazed when four hundred pounds of slimy exposed muscle tissue leapt from under the floor and into his face, which it screamed at full-force for nearly five seconds straight.
Harrison used the time to take aim, then held down the trigger until the noises stopped. He wouldn’t be getting many trophies from this one, at least none that wouldn’t fit on a dime. Ah well, the satisfaction of a job well done was its own reward. He could already feel the darkened metal fading from underfoot and the groan of ancient computers fading away as Jeremy stirred himself, inexplicably bored of his loafing. Harrison dove for the airlock, punched in four or five different combinations, and got the hell out an instance ahead of the full blossoming of wakefulness. Even from behind, “eyes” shut, he was nearly blinded by the glare. Good mind on the boy, and one that wouldn’t be wasting its time for the rest of the day, at least.
Harrison woke refreshed, had a drink, and did some of the dishes. There seemed to be such an awful lot of them these days, even for four people, one of them growing. Maybe he’d starting eating less and hadn’t noticed; a good dream-hunt did seem to tide him over more than mentally. It was one of those things he’d never really taken the time to think about; after all, what good would it do? It was what it was, and there was no changing it, just rolling with it.
Dinner was quiet that night. Eric chewed thoroughly, ate quickly, and excused himself having completed his third of the dishes, heading almost straight for bed. Most efficient. Ellen had that funny look on her face again, and Harrison wasn’t sure why.
Jackie, however, consumed most of his attention. She looked profoundly ill-at-ease, an emotion that should never sit on any six-year-old for more than ten minutes. It was unnatural to the eye.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“Go to bed early then,” he said. “You’ll be fine tomorrow. It’s nothing.”
She smiled – very poorly – and left the table. Ellen directed her look at Harrison.
“What now?”
“You can try digging a little deeper next time before you write her off.”
“She’s a tough girl; if she doesn’t want to talk about it, I won’t make her talk about it. Trouble at school can seem like a nasty thing, but it only gets worse if you pay mind to it. Just ignore it and it goes away.”
Ellen sighed. “You’ve made your point, dad.” She rose from the table. “I’ll check on her and turn in.”
She left, and it was only after she’d vanished upstairs that Harrison realized that she’d avoided her share of the dishes.
On the far side of midnight, lodged in the depths of the mind of his neighbour-across-the-way Jim Thompson (currently manifested as a beautifully sprawling reefscape), Harrison found himself distracted by that conversation. He didn’t like the implications. Of course he cared about Jackie, he wasn’t sure how Ellen could question that. He cared about her enough to respect her, that was all, and that meant not getting up in her face about every last little worry. You had to let people stand on their own; make their own mistakes.
It suddenly entered his thoughts that he hadn’t seen the fancy he’d been trailing for a while, and it was only the luck of coincidence that led to him finding it no less than two seconds later, as it rammed into his back. It was a gorgeous thing, half-whale, half-yacht, mast towering above its blubbery folds and a compass’s point dancing inside each of its beautiful big eyes. Harrison was left spinning in its wake, harpoon gun whirling away to some godforsaken corner of the reef and brain (roaming free and confused) trying to figure out which side was up, whose body it was attached to, and what it had eaten for lunch yesterday.
He shook his head and scowled. Wonderful. A whole night’s careful tracking ruined by one moment of lost concentration. A more perfect illustration of what he stood against he couldn’t imagine, and he had to laud the irony involved, if not its chosen target. Well, it looked like an early morning for him then. After this little incident, he doubted he could face the shame of a full sleep.
Harrison stepped into the wee hours of the early morning just in time to hear the ambulance pull up.
“Appendicitis,” said the doctor morosely. She was a moderately large woman, the sort whose life bespoke a long, tired history of expected jolliness and who had become quite fed up and jettisoned it along with her sympathy long ago. “Quite a nasty case, too – caught it a bit late. There’s probably some complications.” She shrugged. “We’ll fix it.”
Ellen and Eric were quite un-reassured by this. Standing there in his pyjamas and overcoat, neither was Harrison. He could still hear the sobs Jackie had been making every time he stopped thinking for a moment; it was amazing that he’d managed to sleep through them.
Maybe if you hadn’t been out dream-hunting, whispered a treacherous little voice inside his head. He tried to squelch it, failed, and resorted to paying attention to whatever the doctor was saying only to realize that she had left.
He cleared his throat, hollowly. “Well, at least it’s just the appendix,” he said.
Ellen gave him that look again. This time it was long and slow, and he shrank under it. “She didn’t say anything about it to me,” said Ellen. “Not one word. It must’ve just been starting this evening. But she didn’t want to make a fuss over nothing, because she was ‘tough.’”
Harrison flinched.
Ellen held him in her gaze for a moment longer, then looked away with apparent indifference. “She’s in surgery now, and there’s nothing we can do. Go get some sleep. You must be exhausted, to have slept through all that noise until the sirens came.”
Harrison was halfway to one of the couches in the waiting room before the past few hours and their implications caught up to him. When they did, he wanted to curl into a ball and hide. Not that it’d shield him from the incriminating thoughts draped over him like tree pythons.
It was in this worried, exhausted state that his sleep caught up with him. He woke up from it with a start, eyes-shut in that strange nowhere that he spent almost more time in than the real, body-world nowadays. The hospital was a strange place through sleeping eyes; minds flickering everywhere, some diamond-intense in the surgery, some blurred into a smear through medication or pain or anaesthetic, some, a sad few, blinking out altogether with faint sucking sounds that put Harrison in mind of drains and spiders and other creeping, nasty things.
He wandered over to the surgery, lying to himself about why he was doing so, and looked closely at the very wobbly and uncertain glow that was his granddaughter’s state of mind.
He remembered what had happened when he’d popped into his sister Marjorie’s brain.
He remembered exactly how hazardous the mind of a six-year-old could be.
He decided what the hell, and dove in headfirst.
The first thing that struck him, as the mindscape became clear around him, was an entire flight of flying fish, one after another. They chittered angrily at him, each brandishing a small bag of potato chips, and spiralled off into a bright pink sunset.
Harrison blinked. He was standing on a pier above an ocean. Beneath him swam hundreds and hundreds of lovingly detailed sharks (the teeth, he noted, were especially prominent) and a whale the size of a city block. The Titanic cruised across the horizon, smashing through an endless stream of icebergs with its prow.
He checked his pockets, and found an extremely large Nerf gun that he vaguely recalled getting Jackie for Christmas. He pointed it at a tree (the seaside had slipped into a park when he wasn’t looking), and pulled the trigger in the spirit of science. The tree vanished, along with the five behind it and most of the ground beneath them.
“Six-year-olds,” he muttered, gazing at the thing with respect and terror. The faint smoke that billowed from its barrel smelled of burnt toast.
Harrison moved through the park with caution, eyes on all sides. Anything could be hiding in here; buried in the sandbox’s trackless wastes; submerged in the commemorative fountain; glowering at him from inside the insurmountable walls of the vast plastic-and-metal fortress that was the playground. A dog that could’ve swallowed a Volvo whole leered at him, sulphurous acid dripping from its jaws as it strained at a waist-thick chain that tied it to an oak that was older than North America. Harrison waved the gun at it in a menacing way and it subsided, glowering.
This wasn’t the place, he was sure. He needed to find the hospital. Jackie would’ve been awake during the ambulance ride at least, and however confused and hurt she’d been at the time, she would’ve been thinking of hospitals. And then she would’ve been frightened, probably right up ‘till the anaesthetic kicked in. Which would mean her fear would be lurking around here somewhere, like a viper in a sparrow’s nest.
He felt his fingers jump a little on the trigger of his trusty Nerf pistol at the thought of it. With any luck, one shot would do. Of course, he had to have time to aim.
The park fell behind him as he travelled down a concrete sidewalk. Giant cracks rippled through each slab of pavement, charging towards his feet in a furious effort at making him snap his dear, long-departed mother’s back like a twig. He skipped, hopped and twirled through with agility that had departed him years ago, so absorbed that he almost slammed headfirst into the building that had appeared at the path’s end. The hospital? No, no; it wasn’t white enough, it was all bricks and iron bars. A prison?
A bell rang.
Ah, school. Of course.
Harrison slipped through the doors, feeling vaguely illicit as he drifted through crowds of man-sized children. Some were mean, some were nice, some were blank faces. A teacher loomed like an ogre at the far end of a cavernous classroom, bellowing in a language that sounded to be almost entirely obscenities.
Harrison squinted at the words on the chalkboard. Some of them were equations: e equals mc squared, three and five were eight, three times four was twelve. Scrawled over top of them, with such force that it was embedded finger-deep, was the message: This Is IMPORTANT.
“Oh, Jackie,” he mumbled.
A yank at his collar reminded him that he wasn’t alone, and he found himself disarmed at the hands of the ogre, fingers smarting and head reeling as hot, vile breath was hollered into his face at full volume. Then he was dragged away and thrown outside the building, which immediately burned down. The ashes gave him an accusing look.
Harrison’s stomach started to hurt.
An ambulance whirled up alongside him, red cross high on its mizzen-mast, and he was shanghaied and strapped to a plank as the crew yodelled old shanties, drinking silt-dark bottles of rum. Lesser vehicles fled in terror at their piercing, screeching war-cry, and they were given right of way all the way, all the time it took for them to come to the hospital.
Harrison had been using the time of the trip to pick away at his bonds, and as the doors opened he elbowed the two nearest orderlies and ran for it, diving through swinging doors and dodging gurneys. He vaulted through a mausoleum-office where an ancient vampire-surgeon blinked in confusion, and stole a knife along the way (more bowie than scalpel).
This Way To Surgery, Please, signs on the wall informed him, and This Is Important, in stern tones.
“Oh, Jackie,” he said again. He kicked open the doors to the surgery, even as a nearby sign hissed at him for quiet.
Inside, it was empty. The operating table was quite bare apart from an oversized needle and thread, and there wasn’t a single bemasked doctor in sight. The ceiling wasn’t there, only a single vast lightglow that made his head swim. He swore, softly. It was too close to the glare of a waking mind for his comfort.
“Cut that out,” said a voice.
Harrison looked around. It had no apparent source.
“Stop it,” it said impatiently. “You can’t be messing around now. This is important.”
“What?” he said stupidly. He felt vaguely ashamed of the knife in his hand now. What was he thinking?
“You know what. This is only happening because you didn’t pay enough attention in the first place. Why can’t you take this seriously? It’s only going to get harder from here on.”
Harrison squinted up at the light, trying to fight off an overwhelming wave of guilt. Was it coming from up there? His lungs felt tired and loose. “What are you talking about?”
“Never mind your questions,” said the voice, reasonable and a little exasperated, “you’ve things to do. Responsibilities. Pay attention to what you’re doing. You can’t just sit around with your head in the clouds all day, or you’ll have no one to blame but yourself when these things happen. As they just did.”
“It wasn’t my fault!” he shouted, and felt his lungs gasp.
“Of course it was. Why can’t you keep your mind on what’s important? You need to do these things so you’ll be ready for all the rest of life that’s coming for you. All the sharp bits and big aches.”
Harrison tried to reply, and found that he was out of breath. He looked down, and this time he caught his own chest expanding as the voice spoke again from somewhere inside his chest. “You’re tough. Don’t you dare to worry over this. It will only get worse if you pay attention.”
Harrison stood there for a long thought as the thing spoke on using his voice, using his body. He looked at himself, and he thought; he looked at the operating table, and he thought; and he looked at the knife in his hand and he acted with the inevitable, ponderous speed of a glacier, swinging himself onto the table and flipping the blade into a reverse grip.
“Stop this nonsense,” said the voice. Impatient as it sounded, Harrison heard something tremulous in its tones. “Quit acting out. It won’t help anyone. This is nothing.”
Harrison grinned in a tremendously terrifying way and started slicing.
The cuts were surprisingly painless – obviously, this was how anaesthetic worked. The only difficulty was in concentrating while the thing that was pretending to be him squealed inside him, yammering on and on and on while he searched for it organ by organ. The liver was bare – a lovely cartoony purple it was, too, very pretty – and the lungs were clean as a whistle, but at last he found it clutching against his heart, pale and withered. It winced under the bright lights of the surgery.
“Cut it aauugh,” it managed as Harrison’s fist tightened around its neck, lifting it out of its nest and into the open. It flailed impotently at his wrist with tiny, useless fists and tried to bite him with empty gums as he stitched himself back up.
Harrison looked up at the big, empty, bright sky and moved to the exit. One finger hovered over the light switch.
“The operation,” he said, “has been a success.”
Flick. Out goes the light.
Step. Out into the dark.
Release. Out amidst the nothing.
The thing that had spoken for him went drifting away into the darkness between minds. In what might have been a passing moment of imagined mercy on Harrison’s part, he thought he saw it shrivel up and vanish. Or maybe it had simply fallen so far that he couldn’t see it anymore.
Harrison woke up with a blink. For a moment he was filled with rising panic – he was sure there was something he was meant to be doing, something massively important – but the doctor was trying to tell him something and it slipped away without a fuss. Ellen and Eric were already somewhere, something important had happened or something. It was all a bit much to grasp, right after waking up, but after he was led down to the recovery room, he understood it just fine.
Jackie looked a little pale, but better. He sat down beside the bed, next to his daughter and her husband.
“Feeling better?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. A little weak, but happier.
He patted her hand. “You’d better have a bit of sleep then. You’ll be fine tomorrow. You’ll have time off from school and we’ll get you something sugary and bad for you.”
She smiled – very softly – and was out like a light.
“A nice quiet sleep for her,” said Eric, tucking her in with infinite care. “Too tired to dream, I’d expect.”
Harrison shrugged. “No way to know.”