“Matthew Swift,” I replied. “What the bloody hell is going on?”
“We remember you,” we said. “You gave us life!”
“I did? That’s nice.”
Round about this point, as is so often the case with dreams, I became confused, nagged by the sense that something about this whole picture wasn’t quite right.
“Have we met?” I asked, as we grew a hedgehog on our head and a small bendy bus drove across the Eiffel Tower beneath us.
“We are…” we began.
“… I’m sure there’s something…” I suggested, surprised to discover that my hands were purple and had three fingers each.
“Is this…?” we tried.
“Definitely something up,” I agreed. “Perhaps if…”
Then we heard a sound, a deep dark rumble sound that shouldn’t have been there, that rose up into a hacking boom, that became, filling the wire with its presence, laughter. We cowered behind me, instinctively feeling that I offered better protection against this very human sound in our domain, although surprised at ourself for feeling so immediately drawn to shelter behind a creature that was as clearly weak and alien as myself. In a turn in which our toes trailed across the mobile phones of Africa and our nose bumped the firewalls of Washington, we spun in the blueness until we saw the source of the laugh.
The source was, predictably enough, a mouth, full of pointed, rotting teeth, and that was all it was. The mouth filled our world, rose up over and above the scattering voices and dancing fire of our home, revealing a deep black gullet behind, and from between its lips came the stench of rotting flesh and the sound of giggling ball- bearings as it spread, swallowing our world whole in a single bite, blocking out all light around us, as we felt the fire on which we stood, the electricity in which we swam sink into the black hole of its throat, sliding down like its tongue was greased with thin oils, until all we could see was mouth and teeth and tongue and dead once-pink tissue that with a single gulp swallowed us whole.
As we fell into darkness, we looked back.
I watched the fire of the blue angels die out in the encroaching shadow, dislodging the cheetah that had decided to attach itself to my shoulders in order to keep warm, and said, “Don’t look at me. I was dead to begin with.”
Then even I was swallowed up into darkness.
Whiteness, whiteness, everywhere.
I looked to my left; I looked to my right. This was about as much physical movement as I could manage.
My eyes fell on the needles plugged into my left arm. If I hadn’t already seen most of my own internal organs up close and personal the last time something bad happened, we would probably have fainted. I held us to consciousness, and tried to think calmly.
The whiteness was from the walls, and the ceiling, and the buzzing strip light overhead, so bright that it hurt. Our eyes were gummy and dry, our lips were chafed, our tongue felt like leather in our mouth. Lifting my head was the extent of what I could manage; everything else seemed firmly strapped to the bed I lay on. I squinted at the bags suspended above where someone had rolled up my shirt sleeve to put in the needles. One held blood, type O, flowing at a steady rate; I noticed that my veins stood out thin and blue like an addict’s. Another plastic bag, dripping its contents into me, looked like it held glucose and minerals. Further up my arm, there was a pink plaster over the bulging veins in the crook of my elbow; clearly the relationship I was now in was one of give, as well as take. Someone had taken our blood.
We bit back on anger and nausea.
I wondered why I was still alive, and looked down further. My feet were bare. I wiggled my toes in an attempt to distract myself from the sudden grip of fear in my stomach. Where had they taken my shoes? More importantly, perhaps,
I resisted, forcing us to breathe in and out with a slow, steady rhythm and consider our situation. By rubbing my chin against my shoulder I got the impression of a few days’ growth of beard. By my light-headed state after even that small excursion, I guessed that they’d taken several pints of blood from me during this time; the administration now of type-O blood was for no better purpose than to keep us alive a bit longer, for their own benefit, rather than ours. By the fact that all our internal organs were where they should have been and our heart rate steady, we guessed that they still needed us, and felt for a moment a thrill of optimistic heat in our skin.
There was no hurry.
I could wait.
I lay back and closed my eyes, and let the blood fill my veins again.
“Matthew?”
I said nothing.
“Oh, Matthew. How did things ever come to this?”
“You know,” I replied, “I’m only two restraints, a cramp and a cocktail of drugs away from shrugging contemptuously in answer to that one.”
The squeak of a wheelchair on rubber flooring; a sigh. “Matthew,” chided the voice, “this is for the best.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I still don’t understand how you ended up like this! How it became so… rooted… in you. I know they drove you to do the things you did, and I promise you, I will free you from their curse.”
We opened our eyes. “Our what?”
Bakker leant forward in his chair, hands clasped together in front of him, face concerned. “I understand that… despite the terrible things you’ve done… it was for them. The angels hunger for life; of course they do; what wouldn’t? They feed on it, long for it, for experience, sense, freedom – it only makes sense that they would… well. Enough of what they would. It’s too late now for San and Guy and Harris and all those other poor souls who I’m sure they’ve dragged down, while wearing your body. I am sorry for it, and for the things that you will feel, if I should ever manage to free you from the angels’ snare.”
I stared at him, his pale, ageing face made more so by the gaunt contrasts of the room. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but can I just clarify this? You think
He shook his head in dismay; began to turn the chair.
“Mr Bakker!” I called out after him. “I do not believe you can’t in your heart of hearts sense the things that have been done, guess at the crimes committed in your name! Look in the mirror and tell me where your shadow goes when you are so happily dreaming of good deeds; look at your own reflection and tell me why, in a bright light, the darkness we all cast isn’t lying at your feet!” He gave no response. I screamed after him, “You can’t be so blind as to not know! A part of you
He didn’t answer, and wheeled his way out of the room without once looking back.
No more dreams.
We wanted no more dreams.
…
