When walking a byrinth goes wrong

  He got the syringe plunged and fell back like some magi had tablecloth-pulled the car seat out from under him. After dropping through a familiar darkness for a bit, rolling and grasping at nothing, he nded on his ass in the empty parking lot.

  It was just as he had left it seds before, but Lihe car, and Philip were o be seen. Somehow, they had kept him from “hitg a ride” as Kra had put it. Just ahiill didn’t uand about all of this.

  Out beyond the weed-burst edge of the lot, empty highways and bck windowed buildings stretched out to the horizon, dead still. Stra didn’t writhe like the nd outside the gas station had that first day, and he wondered if that had been something uo Michael’s dreamworld.

  He looked around for a. This was his dream, right? So, if he just expected a to appear, maybe…

  A fluorest buzz, like a lightbulb in a cartoon, drew his attention to the abandoned fast-food pce at the other end of the lot, which he nnized as an old Taco Bell. A red EXIT sign had appeared above the plywood-covered door. It was the only uhing in sight. The molten-red letters glowed like thin slivers of the Otherworld.

  Ok, here we go.

  As he walked across the lot, his footsteps echoed ftly and there was an ironcd absence of wind, like the entire world had dropped onto a sound stage. The grey overcast sky was a single gradient that might have been just inches above the light poles. Despite the total stillness, or perhaps because of it, he felt someone was watg him. He suspected it might be himself.

  The plywood door swung inward with a nudge.

  It itch bside, besides the slice of grey light diffusing against the rust-colored floor tile, and he k was because he had fotten to imagihe interior lit-up. He fumbled on the dusty wall and found a light switch. Half a row of cracked fluorests flicked on above him and the dining area lit up relutly, pastel blues and es winking among a toppled dusty ruin, like fine a in a deep o wreck. The room retreated into a rainstorm dark phantom of itself in the plywood-backed window gss.

  A doorway o the kit resisted the light and remained a solid pane of bck as the overheads hummed. His way out.

  He felt around on the wall for anht switch as darkness pressed against his face, unyielding. He found it as soon as he expected to, and the darkness vanished with a cck.

  More flickering light fluttered down a crete staircase with a drooped across the top step. A yellow and bck metal sign hanging on the advised ‘CAUTION’. It stirred up a memory, and a nervous fear, but he wasn’t sure if it was something he had seen in the Real or one of his other dissolved distant lives.

  He unhooked the a ctter to the stairs, and the sound echoed after him as he skipped down. The crete was wet in pces and there was a smell of bleach from somewhere that kicked up more frayed bits of memory. He tur the nding a down again, then again, and again. There were no doors, and a fear chased him down, the kind of fear that appears suddenly in dreams and explodes instantly into truth.

  There would never be a door, and if he went back up, he would find nothing but endless staircase and bare crete wall.

  Bullshit. The Otherworld is right outside. I just have to get to it.

  He took the stairs three at a time, as another dream-fear cwed at him.

  The Otherworld is a fantasy. There’s nothing here but nightmare. The only way out is to wake back up and run far away from those drug addicts sleeping—

  He brushed it off and took the steps with a gravity-defying leap, and found a door waiting for him, ignorant of his pse of faith, shaming him with its dumb straightforwardness.

  All right. I’ll step out of this door and into the void above the Allcity, just like I did with EP.

  Another voice advised him that EP was a figment and the Allcity did in this dream, sorry. He pushed through the door before it could say anything else.

  It was essentially the exact opposite of the Otherworld’s void. A long, wide, t hallway, strewn with debris that evaded identification in the darkness, with walls of bare beams and deg drywall. Pipes and wires. A strange arched ceiling. Lit by a full-moon glow ing from nowhere. There was a sound of running water that might have been rain falling far above, or a deep p pool draining or filling in some hidden chamber behind the walls.

  He knew with his dreamsehat somewhere along this maze of tunnels was every abandoned pce he had ever seen, waiting in buried darkness, waiting for him. Somewhere in the maze, the Mall rotated and called his name. But this time, its call was faint.

  He exhaled, and it was mist in the air. The cold worked its way in through his skin, and he khat there was a massive frozen thing somewhere in the sprawling maze of tunnels. Its ess had spread to the ends of the earth, and he had to go to it. It was the only thing that could wake him up.

  “Fuck!” He shook himself and his voice echoed iuhen came back, altered. A memory shook out of part of him.

  “The Dreamworlds are ected to the self…”

  Michael’s words brought a revetion. The anger in the walls and the hate in the cold was the self speaking to him just as much as the fear in that other void the desperate plea to wake up. This pce was made of him, and he didn’t want the Spirit to leave it.

  A cold fear rose from his chest.

  This might be what it feels like to drop out.

  Have you ever mapped the ndscape of your dreams? Be sure to mark the Nightmare pces. ime, Gradie realizes he's not alone. episode, Gradie in Dreamnd.