The Loop

We arrived at the field where the girls had gone with Angie to find this Hype, Oneiros, only to find the place deserted. The tent where he’d been was empty, the long queue outside that the girls told me had been there before was gone. Overhead, the sky was turning black and the sort of thunderstorm whose possible shadow looms over every hot summer day seemed to be rolling in.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Shouldn’t she be asleep in the tent?”

“No,” said Krista. “You still don’t get it. When you fall asleep under Oneiros’s power, you’re literally transported to his Dreamworld. Not just your mind.”

“So she’s physically there? Does that mean she can be hurt for real? That she could die?”

“Under normal circumstances,” said a man, emerging from behind the tent where we’d looked and found no one less than two minutes ago, “nothing in the Dreamworld can harm you. My power ensures that the creations are harmless.”

“But these aren’t normal circumstances, are they?” I asked him.

“You must be the brother,” he said to me. “What the hell did you do to your sister’s mind?”

My sister’s three friends looked at me nervously before stepping back. Evidently all they'd been told was to come get me, not that I was the one who'd allegedly broken a piece of Angie's mind.

“I … Nothing. I looked in her mind a couple times. I tried to nudge her thoughts in a positive direction once or twice. I never meant to cause any harm.”

“You what?” said Chloe.

“Has it occurred to you that people are meant to process their own emotions? That trying to force their brains to skip past that and straight to being okay is cheating?” The man looked at me sternly, and I understood it wasn’t just because of what he thought I'd done to Angie. If he was right, my actions might have permanently messed up an aspect of his power, or irrevocably defiled his hallowed realm.

“And has it occurred to you,” I said, matching his tone, “how wildly irresponsible it is to use a power like yours for profit? To use it on underage kids just to give them a little thrill? You’re no better than a drug dealer.”

“Oh come off it,” he said. “My power is completely safe—for anyone who hasn’t had a telepath rooting around in their brain, anyway—and non addictive. Only one person is to blame for this situation, and it isn’t me.”

“I—” I began.

“Guys!” said Krista. “You can have this argument later. Right now, shouldn’t we be, you know, saving Angie like we came to do?”

I swallowed, nodded. Oneiros nodded too, looking at the ground.

“Not ‘we’,” I said. “Just Oneiros and me. Thank you guys for getting me, but it’s too dangerous to take you back in there. Just be here when we get back out.”

“But we—” Emma started.

“He’s right,” said Oneiros. “I should have gotten you all out the minute I felt that something was off with your friend’s mind. I won’t make the mistake of taking you back there now.”

They looked ready to protest again, but something in our demeanor must have shut them down.

“Just get her out, okay,” said Krista. “It was my stupid idea to bring her here.”

I resisted the urge to look in her mind, to soothe her guilt. There was a terrible pressure urging me constantly to peek, to poke and prod. Lincoln’s warning—and his theory—kept coming back to me. Could he be right? Could I have inadvertently absorbed some part of Pitch into my mind when I was inside his? Was that how I'd managed to turn off his access to his power, by cutting a piece of his mind out and carrying it inside my own head?

It would explain a lot, but the idea was revolting. My mind rebelled against it. Still, it seemed prudent to act as if it were true, even if I didn’t want to believe it.

Certainly some part of my mind wanted to ignore the warning, to insist that it was impossible, and that was the same part pushing me to use my power, to act aggressively, to be reckless. And that seemed like proof enough that there was something going on.

Oneiros led me into the tent.

“Don't mind all the stuff,” he said, gesturing at the afghans, lamps, and other assorted exotic accouterments scattered around. “It helps sell the mystic persona.”

I noticed that his voice, which outside with the girls had had a sort of vague Indian accent, was now straight Midwest American.

“You're a bit of a showman, aren't you?” I asked.

“Aren't we all?” he said.

And he wasn't wrong. I wasn't wearing my mask or costume, which I'd hastily taken off upon arriving at my house and forgotten to put back on, but the fact that I even owned those things proved his point. Hypes—at least the ones who cared about keeping their identities secret—were showy by default.

“I really didn't mean to do anything to her mind, you know.”

“I know that. But if you think I've been reckless with my power, get a mirror. What is your power exactly? I gather it's some sort of telepathy, but what are the specifics? Anything that might help us in there?”

I deliberated how much to tell him for a moment, but I made up my mind pretty quickly.

“General telepathy—that is, I can read thoughts and transmit thoughts; influence thoughts, ideas, emotions; alter or erase or plant memories. All that. Also telekinesis.”

He whistled.

“Wow. Quite the skillset.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I don't know how much I can count on any of it right now. I think someone else left a piece of themself inside my head, and now I can hardly trust my own thoughts, much less my power.”

I was surprised by my own candidness, but it felt like I needed to tell someone. And it would have been pretty messed up to go into this situation without giving the guy fair warning that I might not be completely stable.

“So how do you intend to save your sister, then?” He looked incredulous, like he was suddenly wondering what good having me along would be.

“I'll just have to figure it out. All I know is that I have to save my sister. If I end up losing myself in the process … So be it.”

“Very noble,” he said. “Just so you know what we're heading into: the thing your sister brought forth from her mind had the power to shoot a bolt of lightning at me and wake me out of my own dream. Powers that interfere with or hijack other people's powers like that are pretty rare as far as I know, and your sister isn't even a Hype. To be honest, I have no idea how any of this is possible, and I'm not entirely sure what to expect when we get in there.”

His face took on a terrified look the longer he went on talking. I placed a hand on his shoulder and looked him in the eyes. I resisted the urge to ease his mind with my power. When had I become so reliant on it for stuff like that?

“We'll figure it out. Between your power and mine, we'll figure it out. And this thing came from Angie, right? So I have a feeling she'll be able to help us, too. As soon as she’s ready to face her demons.”

“I hope you're right. Are you ready?” He sat down on a plush divan as he spoke, and indicated some large pillows on the floor for me to make myself comfortable.

“How does it work?” I started to ask, settling onto the pillows. But a massive weight of exhaustion settled over me before I finished the question, and I felt myself slip away from the here and now before I realized I was tired at all.

——————

My first impression upon waking up was that it hadn’t worked, that I hadn’t gone anywhere at all. We were still in the field, but the tent was gone. As I looked around me, though, I understood that I had to be in the Dreamworld, because almost nothing I was seeing could possibly exist.

There was a building like an inverted pyramid, with a base that came to a point on the ground and a top the width of a football stadium a mile up in the sky. There were robotic birds chirping and whirring and flitting by me cheerfully. There were living statues patrolling a hedge maze whose walls were constantly shifting.

But beyond all these pleasant, impossible dream creations, there was a pervasive feeling of dread. Everything looked corrupted somehow. The metal of the birds’ wings was rusted, the inverted pyramid shed dust and bits of brick down upon the earth and threatened to collapse at any moment, the animated statues had a malevolent gleam in their eyes, and I felt that if I walked into the maze, I’d die or go mad long before I ever found my way out.

“My god,” said Oneiros, opening his eyes on the ground next to me. “What has that thing done to this place?” He looked devastated. I could understand that. This place was sacred ground to him, it wasn’t supposed to be possible for anyone else to affect it to this extent. I supposed it would be like someone kicking you out of your own home and trashing the place while you were away.

“Who are you calling ‘that thing’?” came a silky, broken voice. It was familiar somehow; it reminded me of someone, maybe of several someones. My brain almost latched onto the names of the people it might have belonged to, but they slipped away like grains of sand. I turned toward its source with trepidation.

What I saw shocked me more than anything so far. It was Angie’s friend, Sarah, naked, twisted, with translucent skin and thinning hair that had fallen—or been torn—out in patches. Her eyes were like deep pools of oil, and there was a pulsating, sickening non-light that shone underneath her papery flesh. I imagined piercing that all-too-thin skin and seeing that light pour out. The thought brought a wave of nausea and a shudder that was impossible to suppress.

But the things flanking her were somehow worse. Worse not just because they were depictions of people I’d known far better than I’d ever known Sarah, but also because they highlighted the twisted way that Angie had come to see our parents, to see me.

“Oh, Angie,” I muttered.

“Don’t waste your breath feeling sorry for your idiot sister,” said the thing that could only be a darkened reflection of me. “She gave you up—summoned you here and then abandoned you to be killed to save her own skin. And let’s be honest, you never liked her that much anyway. She’s weak. She’s pathetic. Always moping around, feeling sorry for herself. She disgusts you.”

It wasn’t true, of course, but a strange and usually silent part of me felt something relatable in the thing’s words. Like it was speaking thoughts that the part of me that I hated would have had if I’d let it.

“She’s not pathetic,” I said, keeping my voice as emotionless as I could. “I am. I let her down, in so many ways. She wouldn’t see me as … you if I had been a better brother.”

“You’re right,” said the high-pitched voice of the thing that was supposed to be my mother. “She was always our favorite child. You’re the pathetic coward, underachiever who’ll never amount to anything. Angie could have done anything she wanted.”

“If you hadn’t screwed her up so badly,” finished the thing that resembled my father.

“Enough talk,” said Oneiros, before I could reply and get drawn into whatever game they had in mind. “This is my realm, and you’re not welcome.”

He reached his arms out to his sides, and started humming some low, unearthly tone. On all sides, the corruption that I’d sensed when we arrived seemed to draw back from him, to recoil as darkness withdraws from flame.

The leader of the creatures hissed and lunged toward him. The fight had begun.

Without thinking, I pushed out with my telekinesis and … next to nothing happened. The thing wearing Sarah's face moved a couple inches backward, as if hit by a sudden gust of wind, but given how much energy I'd put into that thrust, she should have been sent flying. I'd delayed her advance by a few seconds, nothing more.

“Right, sorry,” said Oneiros, sparing me a glance while he kept up his mental pushback against the forces corrupting his Dreamland. “Built-in defense mechanism of my power. Nobody in here is at full offensive capacity unless I allow it.”

“Do you want to maybe allow it?” I asked. While the Sarah-thing continued toward him, walking as if against a powerful wind, the other three began to circle around me. “Quickly,” I added.

He pushed one of his hands toward me and I felt a sort of loosening, like something coiled inside my mind was being unknotted and teased out. But with that surge in power came the intrusive thoughts, the violent desires.

Crush them. Kill them, I thought. They're not real. They don't matter. Make them perish. Cause them pain.

But they were real, at least in some sense. Wasn't that how Krista had explained it? Oneiros’s power wouldn't normally permit living, thinking things to be created, but my sister's broken subconscious had overwhelmed him and pushed these things out. Whatever else they were, they were alive somehow.

Can I kill something sentient? Do I have that in me?

Again, memories of my last life, my alternate future, surfaced in my mind. There'd been so much going on I'd hardly had time to focus on the impending apocalypse that I'd apparently been sent back to avert. In that other time, I had killed many times. But never if I could see another way out. And I'd never taken pleasure in causing pain, in killing.

One of the parent figures—I didn't have time to tell which—rushed my left side and I reacted without hesitation, using my power to crush eight of its twig-like ribs and send it sprawling. I felt a strange thrill rush through me. Power, I thought. This is what power feels like. It was a pleasure to cause such pain.

The thing—I looked more closely and saw that it was the dwarfed facsimile of my father—was writhing on the ground, clutching at its chest and emitting a sort of high-pitched whine.

The other two took a few steps back from me and I concentrated more of my power on the Sarah-thing, who was now within a few feet of a scared but determined looking Oneiros.

I put all my will behind a mental shove to her midsection, hoping to at least put some distance between Oneiros and her, but even less happened than the first time. Instead of moving, she stood rooted to the spot, her eyes lit up with an evil red glow, and all the light within her body seemed to shine a little brighter. I realized who the other voice I'd heard layered under Sarah's was.

Christine? I thought. But why would Angie create a replica of Christine? And with her powers intact. How did she even know about Christine's powers? Why would she merge that creation with the image of her dead best friend?

Those questions rushed through my mind in an instant, but it was a long enough distraction for the other me to close the distance and punch me in the jaw and send me sprawling. Where his flesh met mine, I felt a terrible, burning coldness. His touch was like frostbite.

“She'll never love you, you know,” he said, pointing to the Sarah-thing, who I now thought looked more like Christine after all. “She'll never even respect you.”

He stood over me, sneering, his face contorted into a grotesque image I couldn't have replicated if I'd tried. I sensed such hatred in him, such malice. And, realizing I could sense those things, I remembered my other power.

Pause, I thought as he raised his foot to deliver another blow. He stopped in mid motion.

How deeply did I want to dig into his mind? How ready was I for what I might find there? It was like looking into a mirror and seeing your own, bloody face staring back, smiling a hateful, murderous smile.

I dove in. I saw what these things were. I understood.

There were bits of me in there. Bits of Angie, too. But the creature's mind resembled, above all, the labyrinthine space I'd found inside of Pitch’s brain.

“When I went inside his head, some part of him latched onto me,” I muttered aloud. And that piece has been leaching out of me and into everyone I touch with my power, I thought.

So the things we were fighting, they weren't just Angie, or me, but Pitch, too. They were some strange amalgams of three consciousness, brought to life by a power no one could have anticipated interfering.

It was insidious, like a mental infection that had been working behind the scenes. I wondered briefly if it had made its way from me into anyone else besides Angie. I didn't have time to worry about that at the moment.

“What are you doing to him?” asked the Christine-thing. “Stop that!” She'd stopped dead in her pursuit of Oneiros, who had been steadily backing away while keeping up his own power, putting the pressure on these unwelcome creations and trying to force them out.

She looked at me with contempt. Oneiros looked at me with puzzlement. The other three creatures looked at me with dread.

“I think I know what they are,” I said. “And how to stop them.”

Behind the three that were attempting to surround me, I saw a figure running toward us. Angie.

Perfect timing, I thought.

“This won't be easy,” I said. “For any of us.”