The Dream

Sleep was a different sort of darkness from the horrible abyss that falling just past, or perhaps into, or maybe through death had been: known and, though uneasy and unkind, familiar. It wasn’t a fall at all; it was a sinking into the depths. The liquid of unconsciousness rippled about Alisabeth’s mind, lapping at the edges of her sanity in blackness, with bursts of red, blue, and yellow fleeting in shapes unintelligible. It flooded so gently against her that she never felt its eventual invasion into the all-too permeable matter that makes up the psyche, and the interflow of black colour into grey brain matter alchemized to dreams—or nightmares.

The realization that she felt uncomfortable—stiff, almost incapable of movement altogether—dripped down the column of Alice’s spine like perspiration slipping beneath her nightgown’s collar. She groaned, but not with her throat: her body loosed the sound, bones grinding against sinew. The guttural noise accompanied a movement that was half subconscious, half involuntary; slowly and against a great deal of resistance, her eyes rolled within her skull to glance over her left shoulder—over her left shoulder at the terrible, pale thing that had been haunting her dreamscape for what felt like so long, that grinned cold as the moon.

Alisabeth’s breath would have quickened if it were physically possible, but each expansion of her chest suddenly felt as if she pushed against fathoms of pressure. The deepness of her sleep was becoming more and more obviously inescapable with every second that she looked at the shadow of a man, but she could not look away. Her eyes would not move back, no matter how she willed them to.

Words rushed out of her mouth and away in echoes that left the taste of blood on her tongue. “Moonman,” they said with her lips.

The echoes reverberated out into sickly yellow, pulsing through the darkness very far from Alisabeth and the thing just beside him. Then they changed again, returned from colour to sound, sighed back and were drawn in through the Moonman’s stark grin. It then regurgitated the breath, hissing it out once more in tones so slow that Alice almost didn’t hear they were words: “Boy,” it croaked with one terrible and long exhale, “you’ve only brought me halfway… abandoned me as you went on.” Never before had the thing spoken to him. Never before had he felt such utter dread.

Alice’s head began to shake frantically. It moved around her eyes, which stayed still fixed on the faceless thing. The breath being exchanged between them flew back to her, bestowed as a curse. She would have used it to scream, to beg and to deny, but it betrayed her in her lungs and on her tongue. “Please tell me,” it whispered instead. “Tell me… what must I do?”

His body was vacated of any sound as myriad tones swirled in an apocalypse of colour around the vast unconsciousness, the plea distorting in repetition and repetition, until it finally resolved into something the Moonman inhaled. “You,” it breathed, “will find your rabbit only if you listen close and do what I say, as you are told… you will go past the husk of these mountains into the caverns, the channels fraught with reddened underwocks just behind the marble slopes… you will fall quickly to her, and you will find her, and a Big Betty Duchess, and a Tasseographer, and only then will you find the true ruler of this land.”

Alisabeth wanted to wake up. She wanted to strike down all those sickening colours from the wretched dreamscape that surrounded her. She wanted to ask for deliverance from this Underland to her life—but then, what life was that? Alone and silently reviled, obscured by green-black mist and crowds upon crowds of stone and trees: as much an abyss, maybe, as the fall itself. Maybe, a nothingness. Maybe.

The echoes flew back into her mouth, filtered out again: “Yes… thank you.” The words shot into their final grotesque aurora, reeling around in gruesome joy, the bright and glaring danse macabre—and then it was gone. It was dark. The Moonman was gone.