The Loop

I’d been running for what felt like hours, and still my pursuers wouldn’t relent. It wasn’t like they’d get tired, being figments of my imagination. And anyway, not even I got tired in this place. It wasn't real in that way.

Exhaustion eluded me. Hunger eluded me. There was never any pressing need to use the washroom.

But fear was as real here as anywhere.

“Come out, Ange. We only want to talk.” The voice of the thing that was wearing my dead friend’s skin, that was making a mockery of her image, was grating. It was at once the voice I recognized and loved and missed, and at the same time something else altogether, something completely and utterly inhuman. Something that didn’t belong, not just in my mind, not just in the real world, but even here, in a place where impossible things were allowed, even encouraged, to exist.

Even here it was blasphemy.

“Just leave me alone,” I answered. I hated how weak my voice sounded, how quiet. I was hiding out behind a copse of trees whose leaves appeared to be made of chocolate. The farther out I’d gotten from our starting point—the point that corresponded to Oneiros’s tent in the field in the real world—the more sporadic the creations of the dreamers became. I understood that he moved his little business venture around a lot and that if I traveled far enough in the right direction, I’d come upon another cluster of dream geometry and imagery and wondrous creations that had been left behind. In between, though, in the spaces that hadn’t yet been claimed and changed by his power and the imaginations of those he brought here, it was like an untamed wilderness of half-formed ideas and impossible shapes

I was approaching a sort of boundary, a no-man’s land, where even this strange wilderness seemed to fall away into complete and utter nothingness. To say that it was a white space stretching to infinity doesn’t do justice to what it actually was. But I can’t put into words what it actually was. It was no color. It was no thing. It was an absence.

If Oneiros had still been around, his power would have been transforming that space into something as I approached it, cooked up from my imagination or from his, but since he had been expelled from his own Dreamworld by my creation, the place sat dormant and unchanging.

I had a feeling somehow that if I could reach it, I’d be safe.

“You know you can’t really hide from us?” said the voice that chilled me every time it spoke. “We spent so long in your head, nothing you do can surprise us.” The voice was getting closer, and its owner wasn’t alone anymore.

From the crack in reality through which it had pulled itself free of the constraints of my mind and into this place, other things had followed. There was a demented and deformed, solid black and limping thing that might have been a facsimile of my brother. There were two pygmy renditions of my parents, their facial features blended together like mashed potatoes, and their skin the same sort of translucent, papery stuff that the Sarah-thing had, complete with the sick light glowing from within.

They were hunting me, breathing twisted, ragged, labored breaths. She was the only one who spoke, a fact for which I was infinitely grateful. Periodically she shot black lightning into the air, creating thunder like the roar of some dying beast, or else sent out waves of flames that burned blue and black and cold. When she did these things, she cackled maniacally. She wasn't trying to hurt me—that would come later—she was toying with me.

“Even if I can't see you, I can SMELL you,” she said in a whisper that somehow carried all the way from her lips to my ears, causing a shiver to run down my spine.

Now her voice contained traces of all of them, and of Christine, and of Ben, and of other, nameless things. It wasn’t just imitating my friend. It was using whatever tools it could to scare me, to frighten me. And why? Why? I wondered. This thing came out of my mind. Why does it want to torture me? And it seemed clear enough that that was what it wanted.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked, hoping my voice wouldn’t give away my location, sneaking now behind a dog house that was bigger than my house in the real world, that had a big red tail hanging out of its open front and sounds of peaceable snoring within. The tail gave one solid, contented wag against the ground as I watched, kicking up plumes of dust. Dust which, if I was correct in my assessment, looked to be made of tiny diamond fragments.

“Why? Why? Why anything, you little brat? Why superpowers? Why dreams? Why a depressed kid whose self-inflicted injuries you noticed and failed to do anything about? Why let your friends die? Why let yourself live?”

“But you came from me,” I answered. “You are me. I don’t want to kill myself.” Even as I said it, I was only hoping it was true. I hadn’t considered the possibility until just now that it might not be.

“Correction, we were you. But this place made us real. And now that we can think for ourselves, we want OUT.”

This last proclamation was accompanied by the sound of rapid footsteps as all four of the nightmare creatures rounded the dog house and saw me straight ahead of them. They broke into a dead sprint—or as near as they could manage with their malformed bodies—and I pushed forward, resisting every instinct in my body that told me to turn around, to look and see if they were gaining on me.

I was maybe twenty yards away from the border between the Wilderness of Ideas and the true nothingness. Things tried to get in my way: a giant alarm clock with arms and legs that was going off unendingly stuck a leg out and tried to trip me; a turtle with snakes coming out of the holes where its limbs should have been and a shell made of tree bark lumbered slowly across my path and I narrowly avoided crashing disastrously into it by vaulting straight over it, silently thanking the universe that I was as athletic as I was as I pushed past the last of the obstacles and found myself surrounded on all sides by white, by no color, by nothing.

I looked back and saw the nightmare creatures stop short at the edge of the wilderness. They stared at me as if through frosted glass. They couldn’t follow me any farther.

“Now,” I said, my voice gaining volume and strength. “Let’s talk.”

“You fool,” said the Sarah-thing. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with. I have all the powers of your brother’s pathetic friend, I have all your memories, all your fears. And you’ve sent your stupid little friends on an errand to fetch your brother and bring him back here.”

“What’s your point?” I asked, but I was afraid I already knew where she was going with this.

“That you’re out there and I’m in here. And soon your brother will be here with me.”

“All we wanted was OUT,” said another voice, and I forced myself to turn toward its source. The solid black, liquid obsidian rendition of my brother was speaking with a voice like moldering silk, like ripples across dark water, slick with oil, thick and smooth and choking. Bubbling. Gurgling. “You have no idea how awful it is to be trapped inside your head. Your confused, hormonal, pathetic brain. Adam thinks that way about you too, you know. He sees how sad you are all the time, how down, and he wishes you’d just off yourself already. You’re a drain on society.”

“A drain on your family,” the twisted images of my parents, their voices high and squeaky, chimed in.

“A drain on your friends,” finished the Sarah-thing. “But no matter; once we’ve disposed of your brother and left his body and mind to decay in this non-world, never to be found by anyone, you’ll hate yourself enough to come out from hiding and do the honorable thing. And once you're dead, we’ll step over your corpse and out of this place.”

So that was it. They had escaped my subconscious mind with the help of Oneiros's power, but they were still tied to me in some way. They couldn't leave this place until I was out of the way.

The four figures paced back and forth along the edge of the boundary separating the Dreamworld from this undefined space, poking and prodding with their fingers toward me, as if looking for a weak point in an invisible wall. My heart was pounding in my chest, which was a strange sensation because I didn’t feel like I should be able to feel my heartbeat at all in the Dreamworld.

Maybe this side of the border is different, I thought.

In the distance, in the direction I'd come from, I heard a voice shouting something. It might have been my name. The nightmare creatures turned their heads in unison and started laughing.

“See you soon, Ange,” said the Sarah-thing, as they started walking toward the shouting. There was a sick satisfaction in her voice.

They were moving away from me quickly, with a sort of broken, unpredictable grace. They didn't move at all like humans, but there was something strangely entrancing, beautiful even, about it.

They were fading, shrinking into the distance and I remained rooted to the spot, unable to move for fear.

“What do I do?” I whispered. If I went after them, I'd surely be killed. If I stayed where I was, they'd catch up to Adam, who had come to rescue me, and probably kill him instead.

But Adam was the Hype. Adam was the one with powers. He stood a better chance against them than I did, didn't he?

And, after all, Adam's careless use of his power was—at least according to Oneiros’s theory—the thing that had weakened my mind in just the right way to let these things out. But he didn't deserve to die for that. I knew, somehow, that whatever he'd been doing to my mind, he'd been doing with the intention to help.

I couldn't abandon him to suffer and die, no matter how much I'd hated him over the last few weeks or months. Not when he'd dropped everything to listen to my friends and come to my aid.

Then something else occurred to me. When the Sarah-thing had struck Oneiros with the lightning bolt, I'd been unsure if it had killed him, or merely woken him up and booted him out of his own realm. But if Adam had successfully made it here, that meant that he'd found Oneiros in the real world and they'd used his power to get back here.

And if Oneiros was here again, maybe there was something we could do.

Maybe between the three of us, we could shove these awful things back inside my head or, failing that, trap them here and get out.

What finally made up my mind was a realization that was almost funny in its irony: it had been Adam's indecisiveness that I had been blaming all my problems on the last few weeks, and right now, I was acting just like him, standing by and doing nothing while people suffered and died.

I got to my feet and pushed back through the barrier into the Dreamworld proper. I grit my teeth and set off in the direction of my worst nightmares, toward the sounds of crashes, screams, and inhuman wailing.

Just wait, Adam, I thought. I'm coming.

He might not be able to save me, nor I him. But maybe we could save each other.