Who: Iris and Jonathan What: Dreamwalkin. After midnight. Out in the moonlight. Where: Iris' dream and then Jonathan's. When: A night later in the week. Warnings: A little disturbing but hardly graphic. More sadface than anything.
The road wasn’t really a road; it was a highway. A long two-lane blacktop with a yellow line that had been long worn down. There was no sound except the loud chirp of nighttime insects, and the air was still thick with humidity even in a night so black. There was no sidewalk (people weren’t meant to walk along highways), and the trees were so thick on either side of the road that her bare feet sometimes walked over bits of asphalt, and sometimes tree roots. She didn’t seem to notice, nor was she cold in her thin dress, which was sometimes brown and sometimes black and always the hazy gray of dreams. After a few steps, she turned to her companion and said, “You been down this road before?” She spoke with a very distinct dialect that was bound to the hills of this region; Eastern Kentucky is very audible.
He shook his head. “No, it’s new to me.” He didn’t know how he’s gotten here, nor who the woman at his side was, but that was the logic of dreams, that she seemed somehow familiar despite being a total stranger. The night was black as pitch, but that didn’t bother him in the slightest. It reminded him of being a kid, and the rare occasions on which he and his mother would travel. The night always seemed so strange, dark and matte as velvet, a terrifying marvel compared to the hazy orange glow that penetrated deep into the urban sky. Real darkness. Everything in the country was more real-real grass, real sky, real trees.
There were stars, too. Far off twinkling ones. The crickets sang harder. “This highway takes you all the way to the Sixty-Four,” she told him, “and it’s quiet,” (she said it the way some people say “quite”) “unless some’un comes down it.” She looked over her shoulder behind them. Far back in the hills, moving in the distance, a pair of very white headlights scraped through the trees. There was something ominous about it as it came, though it never seemed to come closer.
He followed her gaze toward the headlights and began moving off to the side, but they stayed just where they were, so he stopped. “Why do you want to get there?” he asked, turning his eyes away from the unsettling, piercing glow of headlights in the distance to look at her. “Where will the Sixty-Four take you?”
“I’m not getting anywhere,” she replied. She had a short, loose dress on, but no more details were available. Her face was clear in the starlight, however, and she walked with an easy familiarity beside the roadside ditch. “If you want to go on,” she said, though there was no end in sight, “then the Sixty-Four takes you to Lexington, and then Louisville.” There was no breeze now, and the air hung close to the skin. The headlights rocked and bounced on the hills behind, though she had stopped looking back at them. “Where you from?” she asked, curiously.
“New York,” he said, since that was as effective an answer as any. “I’m in no rush to get anywhere.” He was enjoying the walk and the company, of whom he had the vague impression of beauty and an indistinct shift with a twang in her voice that was practically exotic. This was somewhere new, which was always a treat, and peaceful in its way. He didn’t mind staying along the road, wouldn’t mind walking it for a long time to come. “You’re from around here,” he said, a statement, not a question.
She nodded and lifted a hand, bare of jewelery or any other distinction, to point off into the trees toward the base of the hills, far off under the stars. Then she said, “I’ve never been to New York. You like it there? Seems like it would be crowded somethin’ awful.” She put a hand down and let the tall grass brush her palms.
He looked off into the trees on either side of them. Somehow, thick and close together as they were, they didn’t seem threatening. “It is,” he said. “People packed in together, breathing the same air, listening to each other’s noise. You can lock your door and be an island inside the crowd, or you can live a venn diagram with everyone around you, everything overlapping. Depends on the kind of person you are, I guess.”
Did he like it there? Good question. “I’ve never lived anywhere else.” He put his hands in the pockets of his jeans, well worn and comfortable, the little pills in the cloth strangely vivid. “Do you like it out here?”
“No,” she said, seeming to have no compunction about revealing her opinion. “Lot of dirt and closed minds.” She put her hands along her thighs into the deep pockets of her dress, mimicking the way he did it. “I’m gonna leave real soon.” The sound of an engine joined the bobbing of the lights behind them, still pinpricks but growing. The stars were slowly fading out above their heads, and the crickets were becoming silent. “Maybe you wanna get gone soon,” she said. It sounded like an offering of opportunity that he might otherwise have missed.
Things seemed to be changing, leveling off and growing eerier and more still as the lights came closer. He turned to look at them. “Why?” He didn’t like the idea of leaving her alone here, for whatever reason. He didn’t trust the headlights in the distance, nor the people they might be bringing with them.
“The truck is coming,” she said, gently, as if he was just very slow and new in town. “And he drives up here where we’re walking.”
“What happens when he gets here?” he asked. Then, as if the answer didn’t really matter, “You should come with me.” He knew, like he knew that he didn’t know the color of her dress, that there was a city somewhere close by. It was like stages all set beside one another. All they had to do was duck through the curtain and watch it close, seamless, behind them, and be somewhere else. He was walking backwards, a few steps ahead of her, watching the headlights get closer and her, when she spoke.
“I can’t,” she said, in the same careful tone, with the short vowel native to the rolling hills around them. “My sister’s here, see.” And just like that, she was. She hadn’t been there the entire time, but she never arrived, either. She was just there, all at once, walking next to the woman. She only came about as high as the grown woman’s hip, and she had a small, heart-shaped face rounded in the way of all young children under ten. She had stringy brown hair, dirt-streaked cheeks, and skinny arms that stuck out of a tent-like skirt. She grinned cheerfully at the man who walked backwards, though she seemed more intent on kicking small pebbles out of her path with her bare toes.
The engine sound was most surely a semi truck. The sound of the brakes was distinct.
When the girl appeared it was like she had always been there, he just hadn’t noticed her until now. He gave her a small smile before looking back to the woman. “The man who’s coming. What is he going to do?” He had a growing feeling of dread over the man in the truck, but it was unattached, in a way. Whatever it was, it wasn’t meant for him, unpleasant as it might be. But if she wasn’t going to leave with him, he wasn’t going to leave at all. He didn’t like the idea of her facing whatever was coming with the truck on her own, just her and her sister.
“He drives off the road up ahead,” the woman said, almost aside and very softly, as if afraid to alert the girl, who kept ranging a few steps up into the base of the trees and twitching a long piece of grass through the brush. She pointed ahead to a curve. “And he crashes. You really should go.” She didn’t slow down her pace, and neither did the girl. They just kept on, steady, walking the same direction on the side of the road as the truck accelerated in the long straight stretch behind.
He didn’t stop when she told him what was going to happen to the truck, but he very nearly did. “You should stop,” he countered, still walking, eyes rapt on the truck. “I’m not going anywhere.” He offered the woman his hand. “You should come with me. At least into the trees. You and her.”
She didn’t take her hands from her pockets as she slowly shook her head. “You don’t get” (’git,’ she said) “it. We walk this way. The truck comes. Then it crashes.” She involuntarily twitched her gaze to the girl, oblivious, who was humming “Frère Jacques” to herself under her breath. “You don’t want to be here when that happens.” They were nearing the curve now.
Now that he knew where this scene was going, he was no longer willing to just stand idly by and watch the semi barrel off the road and possibly into the woman, the girl, or both. He took the woman by the arm and pulled her, “Neither do you,” and went for the sister as well. He was looking for the edge of the curtain, trying to find the seam that he knew had to be there. There was a soft place at the edge of the trees as the truck came ever closer, and he reached for the girl. It was like trying to grab a handful of fog. He fell through at the same time, pulling the woman with him.
The lights lit up the night around them for a split second, and the girl screamed--only there was a second scream almost on the heels of the first, and it was not the woman that made it. The truck never hit the brakes, and the girl did not separate from the fabric of the reality of that night road. The woman did.
They were left in an alley, still night. They were obviously in the middle of the city, but everything was hushed and quiet. There were no car sounds, no burble of people and conversations. What little sound there was hovered at the edge of hearing. Things were blurred, and then they resolved themselves a little sharper, still softer than reality, colors muted.
As soon as their feet were stable on the pavement, she tore her arm from his grip. She looked around--here, her dress was a curve-hugging black strapless, almost worthy of Italian design--and then looked back at him with an expression of such helpless rage that when she threw herself out him it was definitely no surprise. “Bastard,” she screamed at him, colliding hard with his chest. “You left her!”
He didn’t push her off, or touch her at all, really, just held up his hands and let her rage. “I tried to grab her!” he said, still reeling somewhat from that scream. Somewhere on a road just beyond things there was a dead little girl, he was sure of that. But he was just as sure that he’d tried to pull her out of the way, and it had done no good.
She didn’t hurt him, didn’t even throw a solid punch, and Lord knew she knew how. She just banged her fists on his chest a couple times and then shoved him away to press her fingers into watering eyes. “I left her alone. I always stay. It never matters, but I always stay.” She still had bare feet, and though she hadn’t been a child in that last dream, much of that innocence was gone. The accent was, too.
He didn’t think it would have been better for her if she’d stayed, but he still felt a twinge of guilt. He walked up to her. “You’ve probably seen it enough times by now,” he offered. He paused, then moved past her. “Come on.”
“You should take me back,” she said, in a soft, dull voice with a faint London touch. There wasn’t much in the request, though, because after a moment’s pause, she turned her step and followed after him. She pressed the tears away with the back of her wrist, and far from sobs of grief, they seemed to speak more of loss and frustration than anything else. That road was a long time ago, and very far away.
She looked up at the buildings. “New York,” she observed, in the same tone as before. Then she turned her head, and frowned. If it was New York, it wasn’t quite right. Not ominous or bad, just... not right.
“I don’t know if I can,” he said truthfully. Just because he’d gotten lucky once didn’t mean he could just as easily do it again. He walked with her out onto the street.
The street seemed to go on for a very long time. The streetlights shone white, keeping the darkness from being oppressive, and the quiet in the alley continued out onto the sidewalk. There were no people here, only shadows passing by. They looked like people, or close enough, but their edges were hazy and they said nothing, more window dressing than real entities, walking here and there. They weren’t threatening, and when he stopped walking to give her a chance to catch up as she wiped the tears from her eyes, they merely parted around them and continued on down the street.
Behind them, a long way off, things got more solid. The people gained definition, and what little sound of speech there was came from that way. It was darker down there as well, the streetlights more orange, the shadows deeper and the highlights more saturated. The cluster of reality seemed to center around one block in particular.
He didn’t walk that way. He walked the other way, toward downtown, where things were hushed. “New York,” he said, confirming her statement. It was, but it wasn’t.
Despite the reassurance of their indistinct forms, she did not like the presence of the other people. She stood tall and confident in her dress--there was something about wearing that dress that said much about what she’d trained herself to be after what happened on that dark Kentucky road--but she averted her steps from the passing figures, and traveled closely in his wake without being in reach at side or front. She didn’t ask him where they were going, she just followed. She turned her head as they passed nearest to where reality colored so well, but she said nothing aloud about that, either. Again, she just followed.
They were at a park before they really should have reached it, a block passing by in an eyeblink. It was lush, but pale as the rest of the city. He turned into it. Here, there were almost no shadows. They seemed to avoid the place. “How old were you when you first saw that?”
As secretive as she was awake, she saw very little point of hiding her inner self from what she thought was her inner self. “Twelve. Layla was nine.” Her bare feet went pleasantly cool on the wet grass, and for the first time she looked down and seemed to relax a little out. “It’s pretty here.” The lack of people went a long way toward her good opinion.
He didn’t comment on her answer, but smiled a little when she seemed to ease a little more out of her earlier anger. “I like it here too,” he said. “It’s quiet. People stay away from the park.” By ‘people’ he clearly meant the shadows, which were facsimiles of people at best. “Not as good as the woods, I guess, but a little piece of nature in the city seems like it’s worth more than it is. You appreciate it more, with all the concrete.” He stopped close to a fountain, near the center of the park. There were buildings on two sides and streets on the other two, but here in the center you could almost believe you weren’t in the city, so long as you didn’t look up.
“The woods were okay when there wasn’t anywhere else to run off and get lost,” she said, coming closer to the fountain and, subsequently, him. “The sooner I could find a big, busy place to stay in, the better.” She put her hand down to sink into the water of the fountain up to her fingertips. “Why do people stay away from here?”
He sat on the edge of the fountain, nodding toward the trees beyond it. “The city has haunted places too,” he said. For a moment, there appeared to be a shadow under the leaves, then a dozen, then none. A breeze ghosted through the park. “People don’t like haunted places, so they stay away,” he said with a shrug. “Where did you go?”
The whole city seemed remarkably, strangely clean and well-kept. Everything in the park was blooming or at the height of its growth. The fountain’s edge was smooth and unblemished by graffiti or chips and cracks, but clearly of old construction. This was a city that no one really lived in, like a model home, just for show.
“The other end of the world, as far as I knew. I didn’t really know a lot about geography, at the time. I was just fourteen.” Then in the same breath she asked, “Are there ghosts?” It didn’t occur to her to fear. She was frightened of the living, not the dead.
“No. Some people thought there were, though.” The shadows made a brief reappearance. He frowned a touch, and they disappeared again. As they vanished, everything around them shifted for a moment before settling again. “Everyone used to say that a girl drowned in the fountain, but it was just a story.”
“You weren’t missing too much,” he said. “It doesn’t matter where people are. They’re the same in the middle of nowhere as they are in the middle of New York.”
She looked around at the shadows when they appeared, not quite with alarm but with a certain discomfort. She seemed to take their subsequent disappearance with aplomb, however, and she sat down on the edge of the fountain too, continuing to trail her fingers back and forth in it. “Yes,” she agreed, “people are people.” She did not say it as if she liked them very much.
He leaned over his knees, looking over at her. “Do you feel any better, being here?” There was a muffled sound in the distance, a crack like a gunshot, gone as quickly as it had come. The shadows on the street paid it no mind, continuing on past each other with clockwork regularity, without any clear purpose to their walking.
She didn’t have an answer for him, but at least she didn’t have to come up with one. She turned her head at the quick sound, and stared in the direction she thought it had come. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” he said, so calmly that it was arguable he hadn’t heard it at all. The sound had echoed down the street from the place where things grew more solid, and he had no intention of going down that way.
“Everything here is something,” she said, not as if she was arguing but just as if it was true. There was nothing like gunshots in her dreams. Like the dead, they weren’t the things to be feared. “You know, or you don’t want to know?”
“Don’t want to,” he said, tone going flat and severe. “It’s not worth it. If you think about things here, they happen.” Beneath them, the fountain began to develop cracks, creeping across the surface of the stone like vines.
She stood up, very quickly, as soon as the stones started to break, and backing away from both him and the fountain, she shut her eyes very tightly. Wake up, wake up, wake up. Usually, it was the truck, the headlights on the road lighting up, but this was something else, and she didn’t want to stay for it. Wake up!
He stood up from the edge of the fountain. However steady it had seemed to begin with, it was clear that the dream was a more unstable place than it had first appeared, and he no longer wanted to be there either. All around them, the cracks in the fountain spread, growing into the ground, spreading across trees. What little showed of what was underneath the veneer was worn and dark, and he reached for her hand, thinking he might pull her somewhere else. The city seemed to be getting smaller. Before he could reach her, however, the dream collapsed, and he awoke with a start in his bed, reaching for something in his sleep.