Dreamspace

Dreamspace
A Short Story by M.J D’Arcy

“These are the last footsteps you will walk on your earth, Lucas, so ensure they head in the desired direction”.
  The words, spoken to my mind having bypassed my ears, bounced around inside my head and collided with my vision as I awoke, making my confusion and lack of coordination even more pronounced. I had awakened on a foreign sofa, in a foreign living room. A small child I vaguely recognised was sitting under a Christmas tree feeling his presents. The black void that was the world outside the window indicated I had awoken slightly earlier than planned- and that the boy was very keen to surprise Father Christmas.
  ‘Hello’, I managed, ‘I’m hoping that perhaps you could tell me where I am’
  ‘I’m waiting for Santa’, murmured the kid, without looking up or glancing at me at all.
  ‘Well that’s not really the answer I was going for. How about if I told you Santa doesn’t exist and is often just a fat relative dressing up? Would you tell me where I am, perhaps how I got here? Or would you decide to sit and wait for the grass to grow to the desired length?’
The kid had started crying, so I stood up and walked out of the lounge, and followed the general direction of where I thought the front door was. Having found it, I turned its intricate brass knob and stepped out in into the misty early morning cold.

I woke up moments later in my bed at my parent’s old house. It was here that I began to panic, slightly unsure of what was happening and whether someone had slipped some sort of heavy narcotic into my evening beer. This theory was somewhat reinforced in my mind following the rolling growl emitted from the creature lying behind me.
  I had often had this nightmare as a child- I was laying facing the bedroom door, which was open slightly, allowing a shard of yellow light into the otherwise black room. The creature behind me had its index claw buried somewhere in my upper spine, which unfortunately for my mobility, disallowed me from turning around and facing it.
  I knew the creature had no eyes- I had seen that much before, however it somehow saw everything I would do. I also knew that it often dribbled blood from its flayed lips and that it grinned using yellowed teeth as it ate various body parts.
  My panic escalated until my throat closed and I could no longer speak. I could only sit and listen to the creature’s wet breathing.
  “Your ambition has waned, Lucas. Can it be reawakened?” The words, thrown forth with the same voice as earlier- not the creature’s however, barely registered through the haze of terror, but a single thought made itself pronounced amongst the clutter in my head: ‘Natalie…’.
  The creature behind me stirred and clasped the claws of its free upper limb around my left shoulder. I heard the sound of its moist lips parting, and felt it shift its mass closer to me. I smelled its breath as it leaned into my ear and hissed: ‘Closer!’

  I had reawakened in a memory. Natalie Goldman lay asleep on the floor next to me. A woven blanket concealed our nightly activities, and proved more difficult than I had originally thought to remove without disturbing her. She roused lethargically and asked:
  ‘Luke, you’ve never written me a poem before, how come you’ve written everyone a poem except me?’ Her words reached my ears as if having travelled through a large expanse of water.
  I found my shirt lying close by, and hurriedly put it on before replying:
  ‘Because you’re difficult to write about. I’m assuming you are also just a figment of this dreamy wonderland I’ve been thrown into. Mostly because I know you’re not the sort of girl that would get back in bed with an ex. And you are even less likely to find a way to bring yourself back to life to do so. So here’s a poem for you:
You’re the cold morning fog that tenderly rouses me from slumber.
You’re the cunning fox that allures me to my nightly bed.
Mostly the fox though.’
  A stab of guilt clamped my chest- even I found myself callous and too satirical at times. I’ve found that people often avoid emotion through ignorance, and I admit to being privy to these tendencies more often than most.
  Natalie seemingly ignored my potentially hurtful verbal spear, and carried on with her responses to my statements uttered back when the memory was made, as if on a movie screen and unable to alter her dialogue, smiling lazily:
  ‘Luke, you’re silly. Stop playing games.’
  I walked out of the room we had slept in, and down the hallway to her front door. I had taken one step outside when the yard and house around me dematerialised.

  I woke up in a stark white room, bare except for myself, a hammer, and a blue vivid pen. I reconsidered what had just happened with Natalie and wrote on the floor around me with the pen:
Locked in a memory, she cannot see,
The future in which our paths grow distinct.
Now to escape this absurdity, I must truly awake,
And on this bizarre dream, fret and think.
  I replaced the pen with the hammer and nudged the hammer against my thigh. I could not feel the chilled steel, which made me feel slightly better regarding what I was about to do.
  ‘God I hope this is a dream’, I muttered as I swung the hammer down onto my knee. I felt the metal this time- as it passed through skin, cartilage and bone- promoting me to scream extraordinarily loudly. Blood cascaded down onto the floor, letting me know that this was definitely no ordinary perpetuation of dreams I was trapped in.

  I awoke in a large lush field flanked by mountains and topped by endless azure sky. Before me lay the sea, reachable by a short drop off the cliff edge, and behind me stood proudly a forest of tall trees. All around, the atmosphere had taken on painting-like qualities, each line of material demarcation blending into the next, and I decided the relatively distinct forest was the only plausible object of pursuit.
  The grass shrouding my bare ankles swam past my feet with every footstep. Closer to the forest I noticed two figures leaning against the nearest tree, watching my progress with a satisfied curiosity.
  ‘You haven’t done so well thus far, Luke!’ the taller one called out utilising a male’s pitch and tone.
  ‘I honestly don’t know what you are talking about, but it would be brilliant if you could point me in the right direction for getting out of this labyrinthine dream.’, I replied, closer now and somewhat breathless.
  The woman who accompanied the man took a step towards me, a smile playing on her lips,
  ‘The key to the door that binds you here in Dreamspace can be found through honesty. Honesty towards yourself”, she said.
  ‘Lady, thank you for the riddle, but I’m always honest with myself. I look in the mirror and see a dashingly handsome young man, because that’s what is standing there in front of it.’ I did wonder what she meant by Dreamspace, but I figured all of this was inside my head anyway, so I’d only be faced with another annoyingly cryptic riddle should I inquire.
  ‘Your decisions in this place affect other people too, Luke, actual living people. Not everything here is your own’, advised the man. I turned to walk away from the looney two, but they both gasped ‘No, Lucas!’ I turned back to face them and found they were pointing to something deeper in the forest.
  When I noticed they were only pointing at a tree situated a few metres in front of where we stood, I was confused at their urgency. I then saw the face hidden in the bark outline of the tree trunk and a thought began to flicker in my mind. A new theory about why I had been placed here started to form.
  
  When I woke up seconds later, I was once again in the white room, accompanied not by pen and hammer, but a strange luminescent two-way signpost. It declared in a very shabby demeanour that ‘Life’ lay somewhere to my right, and that ‘Death’- announced with a bold, clean sign- lay towards my left. On the end of each branch of the sign there hung a key.
  I reached up and took the key attached to the sign bearing ‘Life’, as I had no intention of escaping this absurd series of confusions using my mortality as a weapon. The sign flickered, apparently an illusion in a dream, and disappeared.

  I reawakened in a city park on a bench next to Natalie. My heart sank as I watched her face light up once she had seen me stir. This memory was spawned years ago on the day we had broken up. She had died three days later in a drink-driving incident, as the passenger of the victim soberly-driven car. This particular day had seen me ignore a friend, avoiding confrontation with a known mongrel to save myself. This event would go on to cause the deciding argument later that afternoon between Natalie and me.
  Jimmy Parks walked along a path a few hundred metres down the path from us. He noticed me and waved. I did not wave back, but Natalie maintained her routine dictated by the memory and smiled at him, waving enthusiastically. A large man bumped into Jimmy and knocked him aside. Jimmy protested but the large man did not hesitate and punched him square in the face. I felt the subtle nudge from Natalie as I had felt it when the memory was created, but obliged this time, unlike then- when I had turned for the opposite direction- and ran over to aid the stricken Jimmy.
  The large man noticed my arrival, gripping Jimmy by the collar. I recognised him as a friend of an old workmate.
  ‘Let him go fat man, he hasn’t done anything.’
He now recognised me and responded with a glare:
  ‘You’re that guy who worked on the farm with Joe. That’s right, you think of yourself as a poet or some shit don’t you?’
  ‘You could say that. So here’s something poetic for you tubs: Let Jim go, and you may be able to entertain yourself tonight with all ten fingers intact; Joe doesn’t appreciate thugs like you, I think you’ll recall. Sound good?’
He thought on this proposal for a minute and sighed.
  ‘I’m letting this guy go as a favour to Joe, but there won’t be a next time. Anyone who smacks into me gets free cosmetic surgery.’
Jimmy was released and he nodded thanks. I helped him up and glanced back at Natalie, who was running towards me and smiling broadly. That was not something I remembered from the day this had originally taken place.

  There was no moving when I roused next. I had woken up in someone else’s body. They lay in a heap in the corner of a filthy tiled bathroom, its floor littered with used syringes and a fine sugary powder- a sight that reached my mind only after having been filtered through their eyes. I could not control the eyelids that drooped over my vision, nor the hands that shakily pushed the thin frame to standing stance and the feet that took a few steps forward. The skin that stretched over the bones of this body was pale and grey, streaked with purple cuts.
  I called out from inside the space I was occupying, to the owner of this dying body:
  ‘Where are you going?’
  The response escaped the lips of my host without any natural coherence, in attempted justification for this movement:
  ‘More, need… In bedroom, more.’
The room around me then began to fray at the edges and repair itself, the walls bulging in some areas, shrinking in others. Small black spots began to dance elusively on the colours of the atmosphere, merging and splitting like oil on a watery surface.
  The strange person who owned all I could see and not control, moved towards the door of the bathroom. Their feet carried them into a corridor and travelled to a bedroom disguised as a war zone. Clothes were strewn in all manner of disorganised fashion, and every drawer or cupboard was splayed open revealing the innermost bowels of this person’s derelict life. The bed yielded a small sachet of the sugary powder with little rummaging, and the feet resumed their shuffling, this time back to the bathroom.
  ‘Hey!’ I called out, ‘Kid, I hope you don’t plan on sticking that in you. There’s someone else here who wants out too’.
  ‘Just… one more. I’ll stop… tomorrow’, came the fumbled reply.
The feet reached the bathroom doorway and turned to face inside. I struggled as much as I could against the unseen and bizarre paralysis, watching as this addict performed his hourly ritual. The reddened needle approached the swollen crook of his arm, uniquely steady in its path. My struggling made something that bound me give way. The needle wavered.
  ‘What the… shit?’ came the response from the afflicted abuser. More struggling and I could control the right arm. I threw the needle against the wall and watched it splinter. The eyelids already obscuring my view narrowed and drooped towards the floor.
  ‘Get a job, mate. This isn’t life’ I uttered as I felt the floor sink away and my body come free.

  I awoke in a hazy grove on soft grass. A pleasant scent somewhere between thyme and rosemary clung to the air. I rose slowly. I was surrounded by trees bathed in the sepia tones of dusk, their leaves hinting at autumn. One tree was more prominent than the others, blushed by an amber tint, as though the falling sun had eyes only for it and me. I looked closer and saw it was the tree that the cryptic couple had singled out not long ago. I once again saw the visage made by the grooves in the bark. Natalie’s face awakened and spoke using wooden lips. Her words took a long time to touch my ears:
  ‘Lucas, I have missed you so. I did not think I could hold one so close to my soul, but with you, I lost most of me.’
  ‘Natalie, you can see why I never wrote you poetry, you have your own that surpasses mine.’
  ‘Well I’ve head a few years to sit and think up what I would say when I saw you, Luke.’ She laughed, and I joined her.
   I knelt down and noticed that the trunk that supported her face had been bound by a thick chain and fastened with a heavy lock. The key I had retrieved from the “Life” sign fit easily into the keyhole, and the lock sprung open. I looked to the ground and traced in the dust at the foot of the Natalie-tree what I should have said to her when she could walk beside me somewhere other than in dreams or imagination:
Autumn may steal the leaves from the tips of her fingers.
Winter may freeze the soil that feeds her veins.
But Spring will soften the bark on her figure,
And the Summer sun will warm the heart of my love.
  Natalie’s tears collected at the foot of the tree, weaving through the dust and pooling in the letters I had formed.

  When I awoke again I was back in the field outside the forest. A tall man in an immaculately pressed suit stood over me, a bemused expression on his face. He held a mug full of ice cream in one hand and a spoon in the other, and took a spoonful as I rose.
  “Yes, Lucas.”
  ‘Yes what?’ I replied, unsure of whom this strange man was.
  “Yes, you have figured out why you are here.”
  ‘To correct the things I may have done wrong?’ I noticed that this man’s was the voice that had been talking to me at various points along my way through these dreams.
  “Spot on.” He took another spoonful of ice cream. “Dreamspace is where we stick all the people that we don’t know what to do with. It would be fair to say we had a good reason to put you here, yes?”
  ‘I suppose it depends on the criteria for that sort of notion.’
  “True. We’ve boiled it down to, in your case, a relative disregard for life. We gave you this fantastic gift, and you didn’t even want it. So we took it back, and sent you to Dreamspace to see if you could learn about that which you had previously disregarded.”
  I smiled, understanding now. He continued:
  “In Dreamspace you live your own memories as well as the dreams of people in need of help. That young boy you spoiled Christmas for was your cousin. He wanted to ask you to say hello to Grandma for him.”
  ‘Oh’ I muttered, slightly embarrassed.
  “But you did all right in the other situations, so we’ll let you off.” He chuckled and the mug in his hand disappeared.
  ‘Why did you put me into my childhood nightmare with the creature then?’
  “Lucas, we are most truthful in a state of fear. We just needed you to be perfectly honest as to whether or not you believed you could get your ambition back again- not for our sake, but for yours.”
  ‘I see, and so who are you?’ I asked.
   “My name is Jack. I’m titled as a Guardian. Some might label me as angelic…”
I pondered this and understood. Jack nodded at something behind me, and I turned around, a face now occupying my vision: ‘Natalie…’