The Dreamer

by Paul R. Panossian

This dream is a memory. He knows this because he remembers the path. It winds now as it did then, between the brook and the rolling hills whose grasses glow neon against the sinking sun. And, of course, she's there too, cresting the next ridge: the one they never found.

Her dress flickers like a flame on the blazing horizon and his eyes devour the form silhouetted in its cloth. His feet work double to make up the distance, his heartbeat racing like it did when he first saw her so many summers past.

But something's changed about her. There's no startled turn as he overtakes her on the trail, no hint of unease when he asks, “Don't you know these are treacherous parts for a pretty young bird on her own?”

Nor is her answer the polite evasion he remembers. “This place is so lush,” she says instead. “My home was like that once.” Her voice is the same sweet, innocent tune, only now it sounds distant, dreamy.

And he can't get a solid fix on her face. For some reason that troubles him.

But only a little. He can't tell where this is going, but he knows how it ends, and his stomach alights at the frenzy to come.

“Such a pity,” he relates, craning for a glimpse at her face only to be rebuffed by a blinding crown of rays, “but I know of many a fine place we can go.”

“This is the one I like best,” she insists, “from before you went to sleep in the cold bed.”

“In the cryochamber, yes,” he mutters.

Even here on the sun-washed slope, the word brings a chill, and he bristles that the unsavory detail of his exile has intruded upon such a pristine parcel of his past.

“You've slept for a long time,” she observes as they descend into the hill’s shadow, “and I sense there is yet more to come.”

“That depends on how far the starship has traveled,” he answers, though if what he's heard is true, the hard labor he'll face on the colony will be little different from the gulag he left.

“You prefer it here,” she says, reading his tone.

He takes in the sky, the grass, the murmur of water below before returning to the comely sway of her hips.

“I do,” he says.

He feels only the slightest pinch of concern when she responds, “I prefer it here, too.”

Far from the cautious reserve from his recollection, she sounds content, eager even. It occurs to him again that he's yet to see her face, and he instinctively feels for the razor in his pocket. The curve of the handle enfolding the blade revives the fire in his veins—she'll not be so confident with its edge at her throat—but for now, he decides, he'll play along. There's a whole song and dance between here and the dam, and he intends to relish every step of the way. He searches his memory to recover the lines.

“This is where you told me the story,” she continues, as if to answer the thought.

“About the hunter in the reservoir,” he recalls and, despite the day’s dying heat, he begins to sweat. His voice, however, remains even. After all, this is his dream. She is but a figment of his sleeping mind. Besides, what she knows and how is immaterial. So long as he holds the razor, he’s in control.

“But first,” she goes on, “you put your hand on my back.”

It's spoken like a command, and though he complies with a palm to the base of her spine, it's not without a sidelong glance at the stranger beside him.

Her face is guarded by a curtain of locks, but her shoulders fairly glimmer out from the shadows, disclosing a knotted musculature beneath the taut skin. Each swing of her arms ripples through the latticework, and he can't help but wonder: Was she really quite so rangy?

His memory is one of graceful curves and supple flesh, but all he sees here are sinewy limbs and the chamber of ribs to which they're joined, filling her bodice like a carapace.

There's strength bundled there, certainly more than he met with on their first encounter. Yet when he tries to draw on those vivid impressions, he finds he can't. He remembers himself remembering them in the past, but the images themselves seem to have absconded. All he can picture now are the gaunt angles before him.

His grip on the razor tightens.

“Then you asked me,” she goes on, “if I knew why no one comes this way after dark. You said it's because of the hunter.”

“Yes, the hunter–” he begins before she talks over him.

“–who stalked the settlers that displaced his game,” she says, “but the settlers captured and hanged him.”

 “But first,” he interjects, frustrated at the hijacking of his narrative, “he warns his executioners: ‘You may think you've put me to rest, but my dreams will become your…’”

The last of the line, “nightmare,” catches in his throat. The breeze carries a chill, and with it an image of his own sleeping countenance, framed like a portrait in the sight glass of the cryochamber. His expression is serene, his final breath sealed beneath frosted lips, as his shuttered lids betray nothing of the psychic landscape he presently navigates. He thinks of the catacomb-like silence in the corridor beyond and ponders what countless other visions are unfolding behind its cargo’s muted faces.

Her voice restores him to his station at her side: “...he'd returned to pursue them from beyond the grave,” she’s saying, having never relented, “So they constructed the dam to bury him beneath fathoms of water, but sometimes–”

 “But sometimes,” he cuts in, desperate to beat her to the conclusion, “on fair summer nights like this, he rises from the waters to stalk his prey!” Though the belted finale reverberates off the hills, the line itself falls flat. Originally coinciding with their arrival at the dead end of the dam, it’s meant to be his cue to pull the razor, but her condensed retelling has left the whole program in shambles. The dam's sheer concrete face is nowhere in sight, and he’s too discombobulated to spring an ambush.

“Yes, it was a fine tale,” she’s saying, and he can all but see the patronizing smirk parting her lips.

If she knows what peril she trifles with, he reads no indication. Her leisurely gait portends no distress, and his hand, which originally had pressed her firmly onward now hovers vestigially over her waistline. No need to push or prod this evening. She's all too willing to venture with him into the deepening shadows. He even detects a giddy shiver traverse her spine as she continues, “Now let me tell a story.”

There's a shift in the breeze; something old and dank infiltrating the fragrances of fresh life, like the cold exhalation from an open crypt, he thinks, and suddenly, he'd rather not revisit this particular episode of his past. In fact, he’d rather be anywhere other than here, listening to the screed of this distasteful creature.

But this dream is a memory. He's bound to the path he forged all those years ago.

And yet…he's unable to fathom by what slip of vigilance he's allowed her to seize such control. Is it possible his memory deceives him? Or, has he, in his prolonged slumber, wandered down some rebellious offshoot of his subconscious? Again sifting through the dregs of memory yields only the moment at hand; the hulking figure beside him and its melodious voice as it begins:

“My story took place not so far from here, on an ancient world whose aged sun fills the sky and scorches the land. Life on this world has long been relegated to fleeting seasons in polar valleys, and it's in one of these disparate vestiges that a simple race of hunters—in many ways like the one you told of—eked out an existence.”

What his hunter could possibly have in common with the monsters of this exotic world—besides their namesake proclivity—he'd rather not find out. He tries instead to focus on the trail, to hone in on its symphony of wind and water and thus tune out the singsong treacle burrowing in his ear. Yet when he does, he finds he can hardly separate one from the other. Her voice permeates the air between the knolls, blending with the glissading elements into a mesmeric stream that inundates his mind.

“For much of the year,” it sibilates, “these hunters slumbered deep underground, safe from the harm of the sun's hostile rays,” and as those words meld with his psyche, the hills seem to rear up on either side, enveloping him in their depth like the gullet of an earthen leviathan. The darkness that follows is like none he's ever encountered: a red-tinted pitch broken only by a vague, vermilion glare some indeterminate distance down its length. That musk has returned, steamy and thick, and he instantly yearns for the open green of the hills.

“But when the sun receded,” her voice goes on, “and the valley flowered once more, they surfaced in the twilight to feed!”

 The red aura suddenly rappels forward. His hand seeks the back of her dress for orientation and connects with a surface too hard and rough to be cloth. Whatever its nature, there's no time to investigate. The mouth of the tunnel is upon him, its red radiance blighting his vision as a tropical surge plasters his face like a drenched rag.

The landscape he enters is alien in every sense of the word, his adjusting eyes assaulted by a riot of color and shape: aurorae snake across a ruby sky; mats of fleshy growth proliferate at the foot of great, wind-warped formations; a swarm of silvery things dart wriggling into creases of layered, blue-green geometry. But before these snapshots can coalesce into a coherent whole, he pivots hard. An incomprehensible jumble of limbs and scales fills his vision before the vicious descent of scythe-like claws. Blue liquid peppers his cheeks, and he shields himself from the carnage. Even so, there's no mistaking the hideous squealing that follows. No matter how inhuman, he knows a scream when he hears one. Above the wet cacophony of death, her voice returns.

“So it went for countless cycles, but as the millennia wore on, so too did the sun's relentless expansion.”

Heat slams into him like a giant, atomic fist. Through his clenched eyes, he can see the bones in his fingers, between which is outlined the distant horizon, stark and jagged against the brim of a rising inferno. Then everything goes crimson, and he's back on the trail.

The sky is dark, and the air is cool, and all he knows is that he's got to get away. He considers the razor, but immediately discards the idea. The back on which his hand is—even now—planted is an armored wall clad in taut fabric, the blade in his pocket laughably puny and inadequate. In any case, his window to mount an offensive is closing as her voice takes hold, soft and omnipresent:

“Rainy seasons dwindled, and the hunters spent more and more time underground. But their dormancy wasn't a total loss, for it was in this prolonged slumber that these simple hunters became dreamers, and what worlds they wove once their threads converged.”

He's not sure what he's seeing. It's too much all at once. An atrium, perhaps? A cavern? A nest?

But then where were the walls? The ceiling? The most he can descry is a contiguous mass of funnels and folds, dissolving into a pearly luminescence whose configurations are only discernible by the transit of bodies swarming over its surface.

There are too many legs for those shapes to be human, and it's then that he realizes he's looking at a web, a massive, convoluted, shifting web.

“Behold the citadel,” she declares, “crowning achievement of my people,” but he can barely hear above the din. A trillion trembling strings fill the chamber with a tortured bass that reverberates in his chest.

“Can you feel their voices?” she asks, her own deteriorating to a resonant drone. “The music of a thousand collective dreams. Alas, it was not to last.”

The world goes silent. His ears ring in the absence, but there is sky overhead and earth underfoot, and that is all he needs to know. He falls to his knees digging into the turf for dear life.

“No matter how far we'd come,” she continues, paying him no mind, “we never outgrew our predatory roots. So when the sun scorched the rains, confining us to our burrows, there were some who could not resist weaving their traps in the dream. And thus, as the world above us withered and died, the citadel became a killing ground.”

A cry splits the air somewhere over the hills and is lost among a bellow of rushing water.

“Then a catacomb,” she finishes, the words drifting over his shoulder.

He scrambles across the dirt, refusing to face their speaker, but doesn't go far before a sheer concrete wall rears up from the weeds: the dam!

“Please,” he pleads against the monolith. “No more.”

“No more,” the thing returns, distantly at first, then crying out with desperate sincerity. “No more! No more!”

He's heard those words before, on a purpling dusk just like this, so many summers past, and it all comes rushing back in an instant: the razor, the trap, the terror in her eyes that enlivened his work. And, of course, the plea she belted over and over again: “Please, no more, no more!”

She'd cowered then where he kneels now, pressed to the wall from the approach of strange steps.

“No more,” his once-victim repeats abstractedly. “Words we've both had to reckon with for far too long—for there was yet one dreamer left standing in the aftermath, doomed to reign over the silence of ruins, and repeat for the ages, that same desperate plea.”

A massive shadow brings night to the wall around him as something heavy crunches the gravel at his feet. But he can't move, doesn't dare to face it. His hand instinctively gropes for the razor.

“And after a time,” intones a strumming vibration, “Her pleas were answered.” The thing is so close its speech rattles his eardrum. “In the form of a faraway starship, passing what appeared on the surface to be a dead planet.”

He squeezes his eyes shut as claws scrape cement on either side, caging him in. “Please,” he mouths, the words lost to the dam's roar, “please.”

“So, after centuries of torturous solitude; of merciless nothingness and unmet needs left to fester, the last surviving dreamer found a sleeping cargo and in it fertile grounds to expend her fire.”

The man swings the razor, a blind, rash attempt that nevertheless finds the blade in flesh. An inhuman squeal like an abused violin splits his ears—whether of pain or amusement, it's impossible to tell—and hot liquid spatters his face and hands, but when the shadow recedes, he can't resist raising his eyes to its source.

She fills the trail above him, a pale tangle of limbs crammed into a dress, its bust sprouting a multi-jointed bouquet of arms and talons, its skirt flickering over the knobs of too many knees.

“You were right, my prey, to raise your weapon,” she says. Blue liquid dribbles to the ground between them, fallen from behind a curtain of locks. “For now,” she sings, “we shall ravage each other in the ways of our people.” And for the first time in this dream that is no memory, those curtains part, and he gets a good, sustained look at the puckered organs and writhing mouth parts that compose her face. The man emits a dog-like whine as the strength drains from his arms and legs, but it's only after she lifts her dress that he truly starts to scream.

In the cargo hull, an automated life support system recirculates freezing air across row after row of silent masks, as the starship continues its painstaking crawl through the vastness of space.