Till human voices wake us
He moved down the dim dripping tu a pace just below a run, knowing that if he ran, that was it. It would all bee real and he would be running for his life, and then this pce would take him.
He tried to pull the memories of his other trips, Luke’s mbo ride and EP’s river, out of the swirling pani his head, but other, more tangible memot in the way, slig them into hazy fragments of dreams.
Just wake up!
He froze, but the sensation of moving tinued, as if the tunnels were flying through space. He reached out and grabbed a pipe to steady himself.
“You need something to hold on to.”
Philip’s warning in the Vault returo him, feeling more like a taunt than salvation. Still, it reminded him.
That feeling, now so far away, chosen as his anchor so long ago. He now.
He saw them walking across the lot, felt the longing in Michael’s voice as he told the story of the Hardworlds war. He felt the energy in his chest as he dropped out of the ceiling, Five Seven screaming, as he showed EP his kill, as he stepped into Hardworld after Hardworld ready to face whatever Philip had to throw at him, and he felt that nameless, indescribable feeling on the edge of each vision, that hybrid realization-remembrahat Anamnesis, his light in the dark.
No. I’m not asleep. I'm not you. I'm something more. I’m a Spirit. A Hardworlder. And I have a job to do.
As if aware that he had found a on, the Dreamworld around him shed out in desperation, striking him with a mog doubt.
How you believe that? Are you going to run from your problems with fantasy and delusion forever? Pushing 30 and pying pretend hitman? Have yourself itted. It’s not too te to salvage some sembnce of a normal life!
The voice followed him as he moved, his own voice, dragging him away from the light. He tried to beat it back.
Yes, I’m delusional, insane. A failure, unfit for normal life. Yeah, I’m chasing shadows just to feel alive.
No, I won't go back. I’m going to find a door to take me deeper into my delusions. I'm going to find that energy, that feeling of something beyond all this, and sink into it. So fuck off.
He searched the walls desperately for a door, holding the memory of the hallways, and the Allcity just beyond, in his head, but all he found was more bare wall, exposed pipes, disused fuse boxes…
Sounds echoed from unseen eunnels, slithered through the walls, vibrated in his teeth. The wrabbed at him, tackled him, threw him down, closed in on him. There was nothing but this dark fotte-behind pce, and he—
“There you are!”
She stepped out of a door in an angled shaft of light that broke the dark tunnel in half. The elted away and a moist ut-sted summer air moved in with her. For a moment, she stood there lit up, an explosion in human form, then the door smmed closed and the light vanished, but its sibling remained.
The tunnel lost its edge. No more “moon/street-light snaking in from some unseen cluttered grate”. The light came from hazy, dim fluorest tubes flickering in the ceiling. The phantom water sounds were repced by the distinctive noise of “a boiler or pumproom or something” behind the walls. Even the chill was gone, cut off suddenly by her voice.
Celeste stood there beaming, in a floral sundress and flip-flops. The actual st person Gradie had ever expected to see.
“Kra seo get you. She saw you were having trouble.”
“Uh yeah, a little bit.” He was still reeling from the trast of it all.
“Normally, it's best to just let you struggle through your first time, but we’re on a deadline, so let's go.” She motioo the door she had e in through. Gradie was too caught up in her cocoa butter and tequi st and tan-lined soft hss-o wonder what was behind it, and when he pulled it opened and stepped through, realized the trick.
He knew, instantly, what this new hallway was. Where the dark ice tunnels before had screamed their identity like a battle cry, this one revealed itself to him instantly aly like an expression of affe, unicated with that same dream knowledge.
It was an underground access tunnel, ected to a massive sprawling dream mall, ready to take him anywhere. He knew of trap-doors and stairwells, hallways hidden behind maintenance closets and bathrooms, new-deal-era tile giving way to crete steps and freedom. This was his dreamworlds, which meant the pce before must have been some kind of personal nightmare realm, jured by the Self.
Ae had tricked him into finding it by letting him open a door without remembering to be afraid he wouldn’t find it oher side.
“Thanks,” he said. She smiled knowingly as she passed him.
“It was all you, don’t fet it.”
He tried to believe it as he followed her down the hallway, trying not to stare at her ass. It seemed wrong after such a deep personal experience.
“It was too much me,” he said, his miurning to thoughts of the nightmare tunnels once he stuck his eyes on the ceiling.
“Yeah, that other you get really gy. You kinda gotta make peace with your self before you go. Let her, uh, him know that it's okay for you to leave. If that makes sense. Or you just brute force it like Philip I guess.”
She made it sound so simple, and he guessed for her it might be, but for him ign the self pletely, as difficult as it had proved, seemed the only way he would get anywhere.
“Ok, where’s the exit?” She had stopped dead in the hallway, fag him. He stared at her fluttering bck eyes.
“Uh,”
“So you got away from yourself, which is half the hassle, but now you o imagine a path to the Otherworld, or else you’ll just wander around in circles in the Dreamworlds.”
“I thought the Spirit wao get back to the Otherworld? Why would it keep me,” He struggled to finish his thought. His grasp on how it all worked was hazy even before his dest to self hell, now it was like bining Escher-shapes in his head.
“It does, but you’re not totally separate from your self until you get out of the Dreamworlds. Bits of him are still stu you, if that makes sehis is the part where you have to vihe Spirit that it’s moved away. Get it?”
He looked around the hallway with what little focus he could collect while the rest of him thought about Celeste’s purring void the way her dress y against her body in all the right pces, and opened another door. Inside was aairwell, but this o by silver m sunlight bursting through thin frosted windows above. They climbed to the nding and their steps eusically. The door opened with a pyful squeak.
It looked like another hallway at first, but when the rest of his focus caught up with him, he realized it was a stretg arm of a dead mall.
“So now you want to focus on the fact that yetting closer to the Other,” Celeste said to him, softly, like she was sharing a secret. It did not help his focus.
“Keep your destination in mind, keep moving, and never doubt,” she said, ting the three rules on three slim neon-capped fingers.
He nodded and looked around, caught between the panic of the ice tunnels, the promise of the Otherworld, ae’s unfair hotness.
She must have sensed his struggle.
“Ok, don’t stress it. This time we’ll take my way and you just focus on how it feels to make the jump.”
It felt like being babied.
“Nah, just give me a sed. I think I —”
“Don’t stress it, dude. It took me going with someone like twenty times before I got it.” She y a hand on his shoulder and ughed in an “I’m sharing a really embarrassi with you” way that disied all his mental progress.
“I’m sure you’ll get it, but the meetings starting and Philip’s giving me shit,” she sighed and bouowards the door of a closed down shopfront that stuck out suddenly from all the others. The sign above the grated windows said “Seaquest” in darkened bubble letters with a seahorse for an ‘S’.
She unlocked the door with a deep ‘k’ sound that echoed through the dead mall, ging it in a way he couldn’t expin. Another sound, rushing water behind gss, poured out the door and echoed oile.
“Everybody I’ve taken says my path is really fun, anyway. Even EP came out smiling.” She gri him and a smile exploded on his face as he followed her inside.
What would your dreamworlds look like? ime, Gradie gets a lesson in loosing his self. episode: Aqualove