Free Dreamland by Robert L. Anderson Page B

through it quickly; navigating the in-between space was getting easier, too. The darkness broke apart and she stepped through it. She was standing among mounds of broken-up cinder blocks and concrete ruins, the remains of the apartment complex that had once been Connor’s mind’s protection from her intrusion. There was a sign staked to a chain-link fence nearby: COMING SOON, WHOLE FOODS . Dea almost laughed. It was a nice touch.
    It was snowing again—the same ashy gray snow, accumulating in thick, silent piles, far faster than normal snow. The Christmas lights were still blinking on the awning of the deli across the street. Light overspilling its big window turned the snow a sickly shade of green. She scanned the windows above her, noting the bedroom she’d identified as Connor’s, which was fitted with funnyblue curtains patterned with giraffes. She saw a shadow pass the window and wondered if it was Connor or his mom. She imagined the big Christmas tree behind them, covered in tiny glass ornaments, like a coating of frost. She wished, for a moment, she could go upstairs, knock on the door, invite herself in.
    But she knew that Connor must never see her in his dream. Miriam had always emphasized that rule especially. Dea wasn’t even sure what would happen if he did. Maybe he’d die from shock or something. Then she’d be stuck here, in his dream, forever. Or maybe she’d die with him.
    Instead she crossed the street and repeated her trick with the Christmas lights, tearing them down with one hard yank. Her hands were shaking a little, and her mouth was dry. Funny how even her dream-self got anxious.
    She knelt in the snow, enjoying the slice of the cold in and out of her lungs, her breath steaming in the air. She worked quickly, her fingers red, stiff from the cold.
    She was nearly done before she realized something was wrong. It shouldn’t be so cold. Connor never filled in the details like that. And it was only getting colder. Now each breath felt like inhaling glass. The snow fell so thickly, she could hardly see. The construction site across the street was almost completely obscured by a thick veil of gray snow, like a vast shadow stretching from the sky to the earth.
    The dream shifted almost imperceptibly, like the ground right before an earthquake. But suddenly she was aware of the vast silence of the streets and the darkness of the skies and a waiting quiet, as of an animal holding its breath to avoid attack, and she knew that this wasn’t a dream anymore.
    It was a nightmare.
    She felt them even before she turned around.
    There were two of them coming down the street—men, she thought at first, but as they drew closer, she saw she was wrong. The urge to scream worked its way from her chest to her throat and froze there.
    They had no faces. No eyes, no noses, no cheekbones or foreheads: just a swirl of flesh-colored skin, barely patched together, like some horrible painting left to bleed in the rain. But they did have mouths. Dark mouths, gaping open, toothless, like long dark tunnels. They were sucking the air in-out, in-out through their mouths. Tasting it.
    Looking for someone.
    She felt as if the wires that kept her body and mind connected had been cut. She stumbled toward the door of the deli, slipping in the snow, barely managing to right herself. She threw herself inside—a bell tinkled overhead and she was furious, in that moment, that this, of all details, was intact, the stupid, fucking bell—and slammed the door, wishing it had a lock. The deli was empty, thank God. The cash register was barely sketched in. It kept blinking in and out, like the awning lights, now half-buried in the snow.
    The lights. They would see the lights and know she had interfered.
    They would find her.
    She remembered what her mother had said all those years earlier: she must follow the rules or the monsters would find her.
    Dea’s heart was going so fast it was like the