Fantastic Metropolis

Dream labyrinths. Nightmare corridors of sleep.

Henry Sleep fled through darkness, a pulse drumming at his temples. A cramp stitched his side. Breath burned in his lungs. When he paused, his heart hammered at his ribs.

He turned back the way he had come, straining his eyes against the omnipresent black, the old terror on him now — the terror of pursuit and loss, the hollow ache at his core. He lifted the flashlight: darkness, bifurcated by a column of watery radiance. A thousand sparkling dust motes glimmered within it.

He stood very still, hardly daring to move.

His heart beat leadenly. He could hear nothing else, no human voice or footfall, not the stir of pursuit in the fallen reaches of the labyrinth.

That was worse somehow, that silence. Silence could mean anything. Silence could mean pursuit was far away, lost in the twisting corridors. Silence could mean that it was closer than he dared imagine, lurking in the dark. Waiting.

Henry drew a slow breath, angling the light into the dark. Walls. Walls of sweating gray stone, rough hewn and seamed with black; a floor of fallen slate, stitched with rusting track; dank stone above him, reinforced with heavy crossbeams, thick as railroad ties. Dry as year-old kindling, they buckled under the tremendous pressure of rock. Looking at them, he had a sense of the terrific depth of the place, a mile below the daylit surface of the planet, an abyss of night and silence, with only those ancient, rotting crossbeams to protect him.

It’s a dream, he told himself. The dream.

The thought calmed him.

Yet the labyrinth had the gritty feel of a real place, a place he knew. And the fear — the fear felt that way too.

He began to climb again, slower now, time plastic, twisting away into a blur of branching passages, that sense of something lost, the terror of pursuit closing on him like a starved rat, gnawing, retreating, lunging at him again. A deep subterranean chill enclosed him. Still he climbed. At the black mouth of every opening, he paused to search the dark interior.

Sounds haunted him. The faraway drip of water, the trickle of dirt and dust, shifting in some hidden place. The groan of crossbeams, bowing beneath their mighty weight of earth.

And something else, almost imperceptible.

He paused, flashed the light into the corridor behind him.

Walking again, faster now, he could hear his heart and breath, blood booming at his temples. But the other sound had grown clearer, too: a distant rustle of pursuit. He pressed on, probing every tunnel with the light, searching —

— my fault, my fault —

— searching.

And still the sound of his pursuer drew closer. Still it gained on him.

He broke into a run, black passages hurtling by him, the search forgotten. The light leapt before him in fitful glimpses, damp stone, the debris-strewn floor. He turned a corner, the flashlight shattering the darkness before him and —

— stopped, breath catching in his throat.

A man stood before him.

A man he knew. Iron hair swept back from a stern face. Searching, thoughtful eyes.

Henry stumbled away, gasping. “Dad?”

Quincy Sleep stepped forward, dressed not in clerical garb but as Henry more often thought of him — in washed-out jeans and leather shoes, the sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled back to reveal the forearms of a man muscled like a logger. He made no sound, and when he reached out to touch Henry’s face, Henry felt nothing, or almost nothing — an icy caress from another place, like the chill from a door into February, standing ajar in a distant room.

“Dad?”

“It’s time, Henry,” the apparition said. “Come home.”

And then it was gone.

The silence swelled, burst into a clatter of pursuit. Henry cried aloud. He could hear the thing close behind him, just beyond the last turning of the corridor. He chased the light through glimpses: now the stony ceiling, now the track-scarred floor, now the walls, looming, steep.

And he ran.

He never saw the thing that tripped him — a rock maybe, or a spur of the narrow-gauge track. But suddenly he was flying through the dark, the tiny ember of the flashlight flipping away to shatter somewhere, extinguished. And then the floor itself rose up to hurl itself against him.

The air burst out of him in a stunned exhalation. For a moment he could think of nothing but the agony of breathing. And then he remembered where he was, the labyrinth of dream.

He heard something close behind him now.

The thunder of onrushing wings.

Copyright © 2002 by Dale Bailey.