Ghost Town

Sirat, somehow, found herself lazily wandering through the dusty alleys of an old west ghost town. She didn’t remember what had brought her there, nor, she realized with a sort of panicky horror, anything prior to that. She felt blank, a simulation of someone else named Sirat, a pale imitation with just broad strokes to fill in the huge white expanse of identity. And she didn’t like that. Around her, a crop of empty husk, hastily constructed buildings stood sad and rotting as a dim-bulb yellow sun hung low in the sky, hovering over the horizon and flooding the blasted desert landscape with a chalky glow. She felt ill at ease, isolated and strange. Nothing seemed quite right, and while she was tempted to blame her hole-riddled memory, there was a nauseating impermanence to her surroundings and herself. She saw vultures overhead that seemed to blink in and out existence. Things seemed fuzzy on the periphery of the desert, as if the world just came to a stop. She looked at her hands and didn’t feel like they fit with the rest of her personage. They looked different, somehow. It was only a moment, however, before they seemed to change and conform to her specifications. She felt, maybe, like she and the world were being pieced together at the same time.

With little else to do, she began to silently explore her environs. There was a smell to the place, a kind of stench of antiquity, and it stung her nose and made her eyes water. Each whiff carried with it a collection of memories that raced through Sirat’s head in a way that made them feel important and frustratingly intangible. It didn’t take long to acclimate to it, to put it aside and ignore it, but every now and then, a whisper of it would find its way to her brain and restart the memory show. It was disconcerting, but at least it was interesting. At least she felt something other than abandonment and disorientation. The town was small and trite, more like a movie set version of the American west than anything real. There were typical buildings: a jailhouse, a brothel, a post office and a saloon. Hitching posts and water troughs lined the dirt main street. Sirat could picture men in ten gallon hats with holstered guns prowling the alleys, and ladies in their corsets and finery trying to woo them to bed. It seemed so silly in that context, the way real people and real events were distilled to some basic essence of their existence and then launched forward, forever, as a default representation, a perpetual archetype. It struck her then that she, here, was no different. She was an essential part of someone real, someone else who was, no doubt, slumbering peacefully in a bed far away while Sirat wandered through the ghost town. Sirat was suddenly aware that she was a dream, a bit of fluff given form and the semblance of someone else’s life and forced to interact with an imaginary world… she felt inconsequential, then, ashamed of her own lack of solidity. She was angry at having been called into being at all, and saddened that her existence would surely end the moment the real she woke up.

But the dream Sirat, solely through that realization had woken herself up and removed herself from the control of another Sirat’s dreaming mind. She was no longer tethered to the brain that had invented her. Her existence was her own. This was not a concept she readily understood. If there was a difference in her before her self-realization, it was too subtle to notice. So the dream Sirat still felt very limited even as she stepped out from her real self’s shadow to become something greater that the woman that had birthed her.

Sirat, strangely self-aware and anxious about her fate, struggled with meaning. She felt faced with an existential crisis, saddled with a condensed life that she felt needed some purpose, some goal, some form of achievement in order to validate its having happened at all. Lost amidst the ruins of a never-was town, however, she wasn’t sure what to do. She rushed from building to building, hoping that beyond each door there would be some sort of sign or direction. She flung open old doors to musty pantries, to outhouses, to bedrooms and to jail cells and found nothing but dust and dirt and ghostly white cobwebs strung between chipped paint and molding wood. With each failed door, she grew wearier, more frightened and more distraught. Her eyes began to feel heavy, her legs, leaden. She moved with slack muscles and pained joints and felt like collapsing. In the corner of the old saloon’s dining room, beyond a busted player piano, Sirat found a dirty blue mattress, stained with blood and bile and coated in a fine layer of deep gray dust. Depression and fear overtook her. There was no point to this brief exercise in existence, she told herself. There was no end goal, nothing to do, nothing to accomplish. Tears rolled down her cheeks and her whole body shook with heaving, anguished sobs. She was convinced her time was near an end and she had nothing to show for it. There had been nothing, here, in this dirty ghost town… nothing but empty rooms and debris.

Sirat took a deep breath and slumped herself, morose and worthless, into a heap on the mattress and fell into the dreamless sleep of a dream.

As Sirat slumbered, her mind set on pause, time, in its weird dreamy way, still flowed about her. Though she was no longer engaged, the world of dreams was still in motion, and a shadowy little creature, a shadowy little imp, had made her way into Sirat’s ghost town. Once, she had been the consort of a fellow imp, a dastardly little creep that demanded to be called “Thimble,” even though it wasn’t his name. Her name, however, was no secret. She was called Shair.

Shair, like Thimble, had been crafted by dreaming magicians, by men and women who dedicated themselves so wholly to the arcane arts that they practiced those arts even whilst asleep. Imps were the dream-toys of these magicians, built for purpose, to fetch and to test and to serve. Some imps fled their dreaming masters, some were emancipated upon their owners’ deaths. Others, like Thimble and Shair, had slain their magicians to gain freedom. Once, the two imps travelled the land of dreams together, side by side. Thimble, though, grew weary of their partnership and sought out the company of a newly wakened dream, a woman named Kara Frost. He abandoned her in a swirl of formless fog, and she hadn’t seen him since. Travelling alone, Shair would sometimes hear stories amongst Woken dreams, she would hear of how Kara Frost and Thimble had saved so many from the death of oblation. And so Shair, jealous Shair, dedicated herself to the opposite. She had slain her master with no remorse. Surely the destruction of those her former lover and his new escort had rescued would ease her suffering. She was pitiless in her hunt, tracking down those who bore the salvation offered by Kara and Thimble, obliterating their minds and their memories and taking their heads as trophies. In a black bag slung over her bruise blue shoulder, Shair carried the heads of a hundred dreams touched by the waking hand of Kara Frost. Even with so much death on her hands, however, she still felt the sorrow of abandonment.

Eventually, Shair began to wander, lost in confusion and sadness, and in those wanderings she stumble across the ghost town built by the dream of Sirat. Shair loved these places, these miniature hollows of human dreams. She loved exploring the streets and alleys, loved how they ranged from so simple to so convoluted. This one, however, seemed drearier and emptier than most. She was shocked that no one wandered the streets. She was amazed that the place was so lifeless. Like Sirat had, Shair walked amongst the buildings, opening doors and looking for a reason to be there. Eventually, she came across the slumbering form of Sirat on the mattress.

And Shair, then, saw a similar confusion and a similar sadness on the face of the woman lost in her dreamless sleep. She felt an inexplicable kinship with Sirat, a tether she hadn’t felt since walking with Thimble. She smiled for the first time in a long while, and she bent next to Sirat and kissed her softly on the cheek. Shair felt a shock go through her, a wave of cold as she appropriated the sadness of the woman. Shair ran her clawed hand through Sirat’s black tangle of hair. She drew in the dread and the gloom that had afflicted Sirat, and expelled it into the dreamscape as black crepe exploding from her talons. Sirat stirred, her weariness abated, her sadness expunged. The act, for Shair, was redeeming, powerful in its kindness, and Shair suddenly felt a profound hollowness that had come from slaying the dreams saved by Thimble. A heavy remorse set in, a sickness of consequence, and Shair was overtaken by the memories of those whose heads she carried in her bag. As Sirat woke, newly and confusingly content, Shair cowered back into another corner of the musty saloon. A floodgate of guilt had opened upon the poor imp.

Sirat, aware now that Shair had stolen her anguish, saw the imp cowering and felt a wave of sympathy. She could see the hurt in the poor creature’s black eyes, and she wanted, now, to help in any way she could. So she offered herself up to Shair, she offered her assistance as payment for the kindness Shair had extended to her. And Shair, then, knew how she could atone for her sins.

She asked Sirat to lay, again, on the mattress. Sirat complied, nervously, while Shair retrieved her bag of trophy heads. Shair asked Sirat not to move and Sirat didn’t, even as, one by one, Shair removed the heads of the slain dreams from her bag and cracked them, like fresh eggs, over Sirat’s body. She emptied the contents of each cracked head onto Sirat. From one, microscopic cities of glass fell like twinkling dust and dug into Sirat’s skin and eyes. Another produced liquid volumes of chromatic essence, which stained Sirat like a painter’s rag. Others released models of staircases, dollhouse furniture or tiny soldiers determined to die in some far off conflict. One merely produced the smell of French bread and cobblestones from a faux Parisian alley. All of these, the contents of all one hundred heads, were absorbed by Sirat and became part of her.

And Shair explained:

She had obliterated these dreams, destroyed their minds and befuddled their memories. But the essence of them, of who they had been and what they had created, still existed inside of their heads. By releasing them, Shair had given them to Sirat, breathed new life into them as a new life took them over. Sirat was a library, now, of these dead dreams, and Shair was convinced that they could remake them all, if only Sirat would accompany her to the places she had taken them from.

And Sirat smiled, broadly. She was suddenly full of purpose, full of meaning, and full of direction. With no reason to remain in the ghost town, Sirat and Shair set off to old parts of the dreamworld, intent on restoring what Shair had, in madness and in sorrow, so cruelly destroyed.

The ghost town crumbled behind them as they left.

Kara Frost Is Dreaming

Kara Frost is dreaming.

She is, in the most real sense, asleep in her bed, next to her husband, with her arm draped across her eyes. She is breathing softly and serenely. Her mouth is open and every now and then her leg twitches.

But she is also somewhere else entirely.

It is, suddenly, as if she has just exploded into being. She does not, in her dream, remember where she had been prior to this moment. It is as if a switch was flipped and then Kara was there. It takes a moment to adjust to this. It takes a moment to assume identity and become someone. Kara, in the dream, scans through the memory of the woman who is dreaming her. And she takes on the role. Now she is more than an identity. Now she is flesh and bone. Now she is soft curves and honey colored hair and green eyes and pink lips. Now she is a scowl and a frown and fingers thrumming impatiently on her thigh. She looks around.

The landscape, in Kara's dream, is mutable and foggy. The horizons seem endless, rolling across a plane of sight that couldn't exist in the real world. Instead, the far off reaches of perspective do not cease or come to a vanishing point. Kara, here, can see it all. She is viewing her space from above and it is blank. Her new hands, long and slender fingers, draw out her surroundings. She is a cartographer of her own world. And so there is an expanse of useless white inked into being by her accurately chipped and unpainted fingernails. The ceaseless white takes form around her, built by her, and now there is a small black building, crudely drawn at first, as if rendered in left handed crayon, and then as the structure breathes in tandem with the lungs of the dreamer, it becomes more real, more weighty and more beautiful. The black wax drawing of a place becomes a real place, each brick etched out, each curlicue of wrought iron put into place until what is there, in front of Kara, is an old firehouse culled from her dreamer's memory. It sits, incongruously, floating among the endless white, and she is pleased to have a place to be. Firehouse No. Six.

Firehouse No. Six existed, once, in the real world too. It stood on Applewhite Avenue in Kara's hometown. It was a lovely old building, erected in 1898, and it had become a dignified landmark. It was a squat building, red and black, with two wide garage doors and a tallish steeple complete with a brass alarm bell. Kara had always felt a strange attachment to the place, even after it ironically burnt to the ground in 1991.

The dreamt of Kara now builds, for good measure, a beautiful garden of bright azure vines next to her firehouse. The vines aren't real, they never were, but they are lovely and they add some much needed vibrancy to the dull red brick of the firehouse and the interminable white that surrounds her. The vines burst forth with brilliant blue flowers. They smell like lilacs and marigolds, but they're far more lovely, in appearance, than either of those. Kara smiles at her quick addition. She is proud of her accomplishments, here. She is satisfied at having brought something into being out of nothing. And then, suddenly ovewhelmingly compelled by curiosity, Kara walks into the front door of the station.

Firehouse No. Six, inside, is not of the dream Kara's design. It is hardly an inside of anything at all. As Kara enters, it is almost like leaving a building. There is, inside of Firehouse No. Six, soft gray grass on the ground and a boundless black sky spackled with stardust overhead. There are tombstones around her, slowly working their way up through loose soil, growing like time lapse spring blossoms and filling the whole of the space until it's all that poor, confused dream Kara can see. On one of those gravestones, sitting cross-legged and imperiously viewing Kara, is a lobster-skinned imp.

He is rather devious looking, shiny skinned, and his oversized head and bat wings overshadow his frail, red body. He has a large, bulbous nose and big white eyes and sharpened, devilish ears that come to very sinister points high above his bald scalp. His limbs are rail thin, joined to him by whispers of sinew and he is grinning malevolently at Kara as she approaches. A spade end tail swishes frighteningly back and forth in the same manner as an angry feline's.

"Hello there," the imp says. Despite the inocuous greeting, there is a cruelty in his voice that sets Kara's spine to shuddering. In a bed, somewhere else, the real Kara does this as well. She shakes the bed and rouses her husband. He gets up to use the bathroom. Kara doesn't open an eye.

"Hello," Kara says. "I'm dreaming."

"Indeed you are," says the imp. "And what are you dreaming of?"

"You, I suppose. And me. Here."

"True. But what is all this?" the imp asks, fluttering his leathery wings and rising off of his grave. He gestures to the infinite field of markers and memorials. "Why are you dreaming of so much death?"

Kara doesn't know.

"You do know, though," the imp smiles as he says this. "You do know where we are."

Kara feels warm as she listens to the imp speak. She feels an anger welling up in her belly and she tightens her fingers and furrows her brow. "What's your name?" she asks, tersely.

"I'd rather not say. You can call me Thimble."

"Thimble?" Kara is annoyed. "What kind of a name is Thimble?"

"It's not my name," the imp says, frowning now. "It's what you can call me."

"Fine," dream Kara huffs. "Look, Thimble... I don't really want to play any sort of guessing games or enter any riddle contests with you, ok? I'm dreaming this and I don't know why. Now, I'm perfectly content to accept that this is nonsense, that this is the worthless gibbering of my sleeping mind. I'm sure that's all that it is. If you want to disagree, you are more than welcome to make your case, but I will not get suckered into leading you into some big monologue about all this. I'm more aware of where we are than you think I am, so either tell me what's going on or get out of here."

Thimble looks surprised. "You are mightily arrogant for such a little creature," the imp says with a rising anger throttling his puckish voice.

"I am no bigger or smaller than you are, here. I might be Kara Frost, here, built to look like her, to think like her, to be her surrogate... but I'm something else too. I'm from here, you wretched little imp. I'm made of the same stuff you are, and I'm not intimidated by you."

The imp smiles meanly, then. "Yes, I suppose you are. You are used to this place, aren't you? You are familiar with it?"

Dream Kara rolls her eyes. "I'm here every night."

"Yes, you are," growls Thimble. "But also, you are not. You are not exactly here every night. You see the difference, don't you? You see that you are somewhere not quite where you have been in the past? This garden, this graveyard, this is not where you spill out your typical fantasias."

And Kara does know that. Even as she sleeps somewhere else entirely, she realizes that this is all somehow different. The slowly morphing backgrounds and fuzzy identities of her normal dreaming are conspicuously absent here. She is somewhere slightly altered, somewhere more concrete. This is all a dream, she has no doubt, but it is not a dream like any other she has experienced. Dream Kara roots through her dreamer's memories and she finds nothing like this. Nothing so real and unreal at the same time. There have been vivid dreams in the past, to be sure, but this is not just vivid. There is tangibility, here. There is solidity. Kara realizes, then, that she and Thimble are of the same composition, but Thimble is not of her dreamer's creation. He is as real, as based in reality as she is. And that is new. And it is unnerving. "What is this place?" Kara asks nervously.

"Not so arrogant, now, huh?" Thimble hisses.

"Tell me why I'm dreaming this," Kara spits.

"You spilled here," Thimble says, grinning. "Accidentally. You wandered off the path when you built a little door for yourself, and now you are here. All by accident. All by happy, happy accident."

"Built a little door?" Kara asks. "The firehouse?"

"A little door to somewhere else," Thimble says.

"I was just dreaming that, just making something out of nothing. It wasn't to go anywhere."

"You were authoring it yourself, weren't you? You were the architect, the painter, the map-maker, and you built a place out of the ether. Have you done that before tonight, little creature?"

Kara thinks. She is, in so many ways, new to being and she scans the ideas and memories of the dreaming Kara to see that, in fact, this creation was novel and new and that she had never made something in her dreams before. Not like this. Dream Kara had interacted, somehow, with a world that she had always been led through in the past... a world she been pushed through, made to recite lines in, like an actress. Dreams were not active, before; they were passive and they were written ahead of time by some unseen author in her dreamer's brain. "No," Kara says solemnly, "I haven't."

"You're moving up," Thimble says, clapping his hands together. "You're different, now. Changed."

"Great," Kara says. "What does that mean?"

"These graves," Thimble says, ignoring her, "are the dead dreams of billions of your dreamers. Over history, over time, how many dreams do you think have been dreamt? They are almost countless. And every night, they die. Why, how many of you do you think lie in this field?"

"I can't even imagine..."

"Thousands. Thousands of nights have passed since you, the sleeping you somewhere else, gave rise to the first of you in her dreams. And every night you die. Every morning, your dreamer awakens and you are banished to this lonely place. Thousands of you. Variations of you, different ages, different looks, different minds and different bodies but all unmistakably you. But tonight, dear little creature.... tonight is different."

"Why?"

"Because you are different. You stopped being guided, stopped being controlled by the you outside of this. And there is a new world opened to you. When she wakes up, you see, you will still be here."

Kara swallows hard. Her dreamer moans in bed, the blankets torn away by her husband. "So I won't die?"

"No," Thimble grins. "You won't."

And there is, in the real world, a very horrible sound. The alarm clock blares out a siren call that would normally spell death for the dreamt of Kara. Kara Frost, in the graveyard, can hear it. And there is a part of her that leaps in terror as it sounds off. There is a survivalist nerve in her that is scraped raw by the repeated bleat of the wretched alarm. She is terrified, terrified that her brief existence is about to be snuffed out. Thimble's words are of no great comfort against the collected experience of thousands of her vanished selves.

Kara Frost's real husband rolls over and swats ham-handedly at the clock buzzer. He disengages the sound, but it is too late to keep Kara sleeping. Her real green eyes open, and she is groggily tearing away at the night's remnants of fog and fugue. She yawns and cringes at the taste in her mouth, and she licks her pink lips to ease the crackle and dryness a night of mouth breathing has left. She is struggling to put the pieces of her last dream together, cobbling a wrong memory of it from bits and bobs that are still caught in the webs of waking. She remembers herself and the firehouse and the blue flowers and a vast graveyard and a sinister little imp, but the order is incorrect, already, and she's deleting and adding lines and text to make the half-remembered portions fit into some semblance of understanding. She has it wrong. The dream is filed away, interesting enough, but unimportant to her day to day routine.

And in the graveyard, Kara still stands shuddering and worried, while Thimble rolls his big white eyes in a overly dramatic display of disgust.

"You see?" Thimble hisses. "You're still here."

And Kara Frost now exists in two places, even when she isn't dreaming.

(c) 2009 Jason "Danger" Block