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  And then a light flickers on in front of me. Not one light, but several. Four glowing blue lines in the shape of a door, floating in the void. I glance around to see if anything else is illuminated by its glow, and notice the faint outline of two girls, one on either side of me, a few feet away.

  Suddenly, a loud, hollow knock comes from somewhere above. Then another. And, as the door creaks open, I feel my stomach drop. I hear screams from the girls as a third and final knock sweeps me off my feet and high into the air, spinning me inside an invisible vortex and through the door. In a blinding flash of light, we are gone.

  CHAPTER 5

  JAIME

  BY THE TIME ZHU AND VESPER GET TO THE SLEEPERS, the beeps reach a screeching crescendo and then stop. There is a split second of silence, and then the red lights suddenly switch to green, and the beeping restarts at the normal tempo.

  The researchers look at each other, and then at the small screens on the Tower. “Heart rates and breathing have stabilized,” Vesper says.

  “Except Beta subject seven,” Zhu corrects him. “His have remained elevated.”

  “He’s our wild card. We have to regard his feedback separately,” Vesper comments, leaning forward to inspect that monitor. “You’re the one who made the point that he’s not even in the same league as the others.”

  “We need to wake them up anyway,” Zhu urges.

  I can’t bear just sitting here. “Can I do anything?” I call, my voice trembling. But the researchers either don’t hear me or don’t want to.

  I watch, electrified, as Zhu and Vesper try to wake the subjects.

  Zhu takes the girl on bed one by the shoulders and shakes her gently. “Catalina?” she says. “You need to wake up.”

  Vesper goes to bed two and begins slapping the boy’s hand with his fingertips. “Fergus,” he says, leaning in toward his face. No response.

  Zhu whips around and meets my eyes. “Jaime, go to my computer. Now.”

  I leap from my seat and scramble to her workstation.

  “Do you see the window open in the top right corner of my screen?”

  “Yes,” I say, and, grabbing the mouse, run the cursor up to a window labeled “ECT.”

  “Pull the toggle at the bottom of the window from green to red.”

  I do it, and the low hum from the Tower stops.

  “Now pick up the phone, dial nine, and ask the operator to send emergency medical responders immediately to the basement laboratory in building one.”

  I make the call, trying to keep my voice from shaking.

  The paramedics arrive—a team of four—and as the doctors hurriedly explain what happened, they begin inspecting the kids, opening eyelids and shining lights in their eyes, taking pulses, inspecting the feedback on the Tower monitors.

  “I’ll attempt waking with ammonia,” one of them says, and holds a vial under subject one’s nose. No reaction.

  “Their breathing and heart rates are stable,” says another, “so it wouldn’t make sense to employ lifesaving techniques.”

  Lifesaving techniques? For some reason, my thoughts go to the parents who are somewhere outside, waiting for their children. When will they be notified?

  The EMTs talk about setting up life-support machines in the room, “in case conditions deteriorate.” As they make their exit, Zhu and Vesper work their way around the room, removing the subjects’ electrodes but leaving all of the sensors connected for monitoring.

  I slip back into my spot, and once again it’s like I don’t exist. Which I actually prefer. Something awful has happened, but I don’t have enough information to grasp the scope of it. And the feeling of not knowing . . . of having absolutely zero control over the outcome . . . is making me feel panicky. My stomach twists with anxiety as my eyes flit from the researchers to the subjects and back.

  Zhu and Vesper have returned to their chairs. “Brain waves are primarily delta,” Vesper says. “No mental activity. We have to call it what it is and care for them accordingly in the hope that something changes.”

  Zhu stares at the monitors like she’s in a trance. Finally, she leans toward her microphone. “With the assistance of a team of paramedics, Dr. Vesper and I attempted to awaken the subjects, but none regained consciousness.”

  Vesper is staring at her like he’s challenging her to do something impossible. “Call it,” he urges.

  She sighs and says, “As of seven fifty-five a.m., I declare all seven subjects comatose.”

  CHAPTER 6

  CATA

  I AM SUCKED FROM THAT PLACE OF DARKNESS, with the disembodied voices and terrible knocking, through a glowing blue door, and find myself plunged into a dark liquid. It happens so suddenly that I don’t even struggle—I stay suspended for what feels like an entire minute, not understanding what’s happened until I breathe in through my nose and begin choking.

  And then my reflexes kick in and I raise my arms to execute a powerful upward stroke while scissoring my legs. My head breaks the surface and I am gasping and sputtering and tasting brine . . . not brine, but something fishy and foul. I tread to stay afloat and find that I’m not swimming in water. It’s something warm and thick, like mucus. I’m swimming in liquid snot, I think. I gag and spit and blow it out of my nose. My shoes are heavy, dragging me down. Holding my breath, I go under and yank one off, and then the other, letting them float away as I fight my way back up. I fill my lungs with air, and then, wiping the stuff from my eyes, I try to get my bearings.

  I’m in a cave. The walls are wet with slime, and there’s the sound of dripping, echoing, slop . . . slop as the thick liquid leaks from a ceiling high above me into the lake. I turn myself in a circle, investigating the space.

  It is an immense room filled with the sludgy sea—the only dry land being a shelf of rock emerging from the lake to form a type of shoreline along the wall in front of me. On the far ends of the space to my left and right, tunnel-like openings suggest that this is only one section in a series of caverns.

  The murky light is barely enough for me to see the entire room, and I can’t tell where it’s coming from. The walls? The lake itself? A green phosphorescent mist hangs above the surface of the lake.

  I propel myself toward dry land, nauseated from the sensation of the gluey substance sliding past my skin. As I near the shore, I catch sight of something . . . someone already there, crouching against the wall in the shadows. I freeze, my heart seizing in fear. I don’t know whether I should keep swimming toward it or away. And then I see a pair of pink Converse tennis shoes. It’s a person, not a monster. Not the Flayed Man.

  I kick and paddle toward the shore, and the person leans forward, tipping her head to see me better. “Hello!” I call. She unfolds and walks toward the edge of the water. Standing before me is a painfully thin girl with long, blond hair, dressed in skinny jeans and a long-sleeved loose top. Her clothes are dry. She obviously didn’t land in the slime like I did. So how did she get there? How’d I get here, for that matter?

  The girl is silent, watching as I make my way toward her, and then calls, “Are you real?” I recognize her voice. She’s the one who was crying in the blackness, just before we got sucked into this cave.

  I don’t answer—I’m using all of my strength to move my arms and legs to propel myself through this thick, nasty liquid. My bare feet scrape the ground. It’s solid rock, but so slippery and slimy that I paddle a few more strokes before I stand and carefully wade the short distance to shore.

  The girl must have decided I’m real. She waits for me, arms wrapped protectively around herself. And then something behind me seizes her attention and her hands fly to her mouth. With eyes like saucers, she shrieks, “Watch out!”

  Something grabs my ankle and yanks me back as my body pitches forward. My chin hits the rock with a loud crunch, and I am dragged under the liquid. Pain shoots up through my jaw and my lungs scream for air as I struggle to claw my way up. The grip on my ankle tightens, and I kick at it as I lift my head above the l
iquid to gasp in some oxygen.

  “Grab my hand!” I hear, and grapple forward to where the blond girl stands knee-deep in the slime, her arm stretched toward me. I kick hard again, my foot connecting sharply with whatever is shackling me. Its grasp is broken as I thrust my body forward to reach for the girl’s hand. She pulls hard, dragging me forward on my knees, jagged rocks cutting into my skin as I scramble onto the rock shelf.

  We both scuttle backward to the cave wall, but whatever is in the water doesn’t come out. I hack and cough and spit out the foul-tasting liquid, wiping a trail of dark green slime on the back of my hand. “What was that?” I ask, panting.

  Her eyes glued to the water, she responds, “Blue. It was this sick kind of blue. It looked kind of like that Gollum thing, you know, from Lord of the Rings.” She turns to me, her face strained with fear. “Are you the girl from that dark place before? Cata?”

  I nod. “I heard you too,” I say. “You were . . .” I almost say crying, but she looks like she’s about to start again. “. . . you were there. And there was a boy.”

  “I’m BethAnn.” The way she says it—like it’s of utmost importance—it’s like she thinks that by naming herself she can make some sense out of the horrific world we’re trapped in. She points to my face. “You’re bleeding.”

  I touch my chin, and my fingers come away smeared in blood. Holes are torn in my sopping-wet jeans, and through them I see my knees are bleeding too.

  “Oh my God, there’s someone else out there,” BethAnn says, pointing to the middle of the lake. Barely visible in the glowing mist, a boy swims toward us, cutting his way through the murky slime. I squint through the gloom, and, as he gets closer, I recognize him. I’ve seen him before. He’s the one who was limping through the field of high grass as I was running from the Flayed Man.

  “Watch out!” I yell to him. “There’s something in there!”

  The boy is swimming like I had, dog-paddling to keep his head above the slime. But, hearing my warning, he throws himself forward into a practiced crawl, cutting his way through the lake at an impressive pace. He gets about ten feet from the shore before being jerked under the surface.

  “We have to help him!” BethAnn screams.

  The two of us run to the water’s edge, looking at each other as if daring the other to take the plunge. I look back out over the lake, squinting to try to see through the green haze. He hasn’t resurfaced. No matter how terrified I am, I can’t just let this guy drown.

  “I haven’t swum in three years,” BethAnn pleads, her voice trembling.

  So, it’s up to me. Swallowing my fear, I scan the surface of the lake for the Gollum before venturing back into the liquid. I’m a few steps out when I lose my footing on the slippery rock and pitch backward, landing hard on my butt. Stars flash behind my eyes as pain shoots up my tailbone.

  I hear a splash. BethAnn seems to have overcome her fear of swimming: she’s plunged into the lake and is paddling out toward where the boy went under.

  Wincing, I use my hands to get up and wade carefully toward them. A seaweed-type sludge drips from my fingers, and I flick it away while scanning the lake. I can’t see a thing under the surface.

  And then, a few yards from me, there is an eruption of bubbles. I struggle out toward it as BethAnn emerges from the slime, spitting and gasping as she gains her footing. “I got him,” she yells. I wade forward and, bracing myself, grasp her arm and pull with all my might.

  As she rises from the murk, the boy’s head breaks the surface behind her. He coughs and gasps for breath. We each take an arm and pull him, fighting against the invisible force dragging him in the other direction. The boy thrashes, kicking hard, and the pressure releases so abruptly that the three of us lurch backward into the slime. And then we’re scrambling and slipping and clawing our way out until we’re on the shore, retreating to the back of the rock shelf, as far as we can from the toxic lake.

  “What. The fuck. Was that?” the boy gasps. He and BethAnn are coughing and spitting and taking in great lungfuls of air.

  “Are you the guy from the dark place?” BethAnn asks. She seems oddly obsessed with sorting out the details, seeing that she just escaped being dragged into a slime lake by an unseen monster.

  The boy nods. “Fergus,” he gasps.

  “BethAnn,” she responds. For a moment she seems reassured. But her eyes flit to the lake and she lets out a bloodcurdling scream. I turn toward where she’s looking. There is a ripple in the liquid at the edge of the lake. A hand emerges, clawing at the rock.

  CHAPTER 7

  FERGUS

  FIRST IT’S JUST A HAND. A BLUE HAND—THE GRAYISH blue of a corpse. And then a second hand emerges from the lake, scraping at the rock shelf with grotesque jagged claws as the monster drags its hideous form out of the lake. A bald head emerges, skin stretched tight over an elongated skull. Its bulbous eyes blink at us, see-through vertical lids flicking inward and outward. A skeletal body follows, its protruding spine curved and crested. It hunches over and oozes mucus as it inches toward us.

  The blond girl . . . BethAnn . . . grabs my arm and clutches me so tightly that her fingernails bite into my skin. “Oh my God, oh my God,” she chants, wheezing with fear. The dark-haired girl is on my other side, and is silently backing away.

  The thing is out of the water now and crawls slowly on all fours, its head raised, blinking obscenely at us. It looks like it crawled straight out of a horror film, but no effects team could create something this gruesome. Its mouth hangs open, and green slime drips from pointed white teeth as sharp as blades. Terror chokes me. I feel my head nod forward and my knees grow weak. No, not now! I grab my forearm and focus on my tattoo: “DFF” inked in curly Gothic letters. I breathe in deeply and feel my strength return.

  I have to calm myself so I won’t get too emotional and collapse. Surely something I’ve seen is scarier than this, I reason. How about The Ring? The Japanese version. That was terrifying, and I watched it so many times it made me yawn. I glance back at the monster, and it slowly lifts its head to look me in the eyes, and I’m paralyzed by shock and confusion. Although the grotesque features mask any sense of humanity, there is something there that strikes a chord deep in me. For a moment, I have the craziest feeling that something is familiar about the creature. Something is familiar about all of this.

  Then I recognize the creature’s eyes. They’re the same cold green shot through with brown as my dad’s. And they’re staring straight into my own. I shudder with horror and disgust.

  “What do we do?” BethAnn shrieks, shaking me from the illusion. I look back and those eyes are set in the face of a monster. It is not my dad. But I’ve been here before. I can feel it—a memory that is just beyond my grasp.

  I yank my mind from the sense of déjà vu and force it into strategy mode. We’re trapped. If we stay here, the monster’s got us. If we go back in the lake, it could follow us. Or, scarier still, there could be more of them lurking below. Waiting to grab us with their bony fingers and pull us under.

  I glance around at the shelf we’re standing on, trying to spot anything I can use as a weapon. There’s nothing growing inside the cave. No branches or roots to break off and use. But, a few yards away in the shadows, a section of the ceiling has caved in, and large pointed stones—stalactites?—are piled in a spiky mound below. The brown-haired girl has noticed them too, and makes a dash toward them. BethAnn is clinging to me so ferociously, I’m pretty much immobilized. By the time I’m able to disentangle myself, the brunette is already rummaging through the stones. She picks one up, but it slips through her fingers and shatters against the floor.

  She lunges for another and comes out with a shard the size of a baseball bat. Holding it in both hands, she strides toward the monster. It is halfway across the shelf, crawling like a spider toward BethAnn, who is screaming like she’s the victim in a slasher movie.

  I’ve made my way to the rock pile, and, leaning down to grab the heaviest one I can find, I he
ad back toward where the girl has confronted the monster. The gruesome creature has seen her coming and switches into high gear, scrambling toward her faster than she can move out of the way. And then it pauses midattack and directs its attention to me, staring unblinkingly with my father’s eyes.

  I hear him speak. “Your illness is a figment of your imagination. You could heal yourself if you wanted, but you don’t want to be normal, do you? You’re pathetic.” The voice seems to come from the direction of the beast, dripping poison into my ears with those words I know so well.

  The girl takes advantage of the creature’s being distracted and raises the rock shard high over her head.

  “Wait!” I yell without thinking. She hesitates, then watches in horror as it dives for her leg and clamps its claw around her ankle.

  I fumble forward, numb with shock. What the hell, Fergus? This monster is not your dad.

  The girl is kicking at it. She stumbles backward and loses her grasp on her stone, which clatters to the floor. I pull my arm back to lance mine like a spear, but the girl is in my way now, and I’m afraid I’ll hit her.

  The creature grabs her ankle with its other claw, and as it throws its head back to bare its teeth, I finally have a clear shot. I hurl my stone, and it connects with the monster’s protruding rib cage. Its scream is a chilling mix of a baby’s cry and a raven’s croak, amplified to a deafening level by the cave’s acoustics. It lets go of the girl’s ankle.

  BethAnn darts forward, picks up the rock shard the other girl dropped, and swings it high over her head. She brings the stone down with a powerful blow, smashing the beast’s head so hard that the stone embeds in its skull. She lets go and scuttles away as I grab the brunette under her arms and pull her toward me. The monster lies lifeless on the ground, dark goo oozing from under the stone forming a gelatinous puddle around the head.