When walking a labyrinth goes wrong
He got the syringe plunged and fell back like some magician had tablecloth-pulled the car seat out from under him. After dropping through a familiar darkness for a bit, rolling and grasping at nothing, he landed on his ass in the empty parking lot.
It was just as he had left it seconds before, but Lindsey, the car, and Philip were nowhere to be seen. Somehow, they had kept him from “hitching a ride” as Klara had put it. Just another thing he still didn’t understand about all of this.
Out beyond the weed-burst edge of the lot, empty highways and black windowed buildings stretched out to the horizon, dead still. Strange. It didn’t writhe like the land outside the gas station had that first day, and he wondered if that had been something unique to Michael’s dreamworld.
He looked around for an exit. This was his dream, right? So, if he just expected an exit to appear, maybe…
A fluorescent buzz, like a lightbulb in a cartoon, drew his attention to the abandoned fast-food place at the other end of the lot, which he now recognized as an old Taco Bell. A red EXIT sign had appeared above the plywood-covered door. It was the only unreal thing in sight. The molten-red letters glowed like thin slivers of the Otherworld.
Ok, here we go.
As he walked across the lot, his footsteps echoed flatly and there was an ironclad absence of wind, like the entire world had dropped onto a sound stage. The grey overcast sky was a single gradient that might have been just inches above the light poles. Despite the total stillness, or perhaps because of it, he felt someone was watching him. He suspected it might be himself.
The plywood door swung inward with a nudge.
It was pitch black inside, besides the slice of grey light diffusing against the rust-colored floor tile, and he knew it was because he had forgotten to imagine the interior lit-up. He fumbled on the dusty wall and found a light switch. Half a row of cracked fluorescents flicked on above him and the dining area lit up reluctantly, pastel blues and oranges winking among a toppled dusty ruin, like fine china in a deep ocean wreck. The room retreated into a rainstorm dark phantom of itself in the plywood-backed window glass.
A doorway next to the kitchen resisted the light and remained a solid pane of black as the overheads hummed. His way out.
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He felt around on the wall for another light switch as darkness pressed against his face, unyielding. He found it as soon as he expected to, and the darkness vanished with a clack.
More flickering light fluttered down a concrete staircase with a chain drooped across the top step. A yellow and black metal sign hanging on the chain advised ‘CAUTION’. It stirred up a memory, and a nervous fear, but he wasn’t sure if it was something he had seen in the Real or one of his other dissolved distant lives.
He unhooked the chain and let it clatter to the stairs, and the sound echoed after him as he skipped down. The concrete was wet in places and there was a smell of bleach from somewhere that kicked up more frayed bits of memory. He turned at the landing and went down again, then again, and again. There were no doors, and a fear chased him down, the kind of fear that appears suddenly in dreams and explodes instantly into truth.
There would never be a door, and if he went back up, he would find nothing but endless staircase and bare concrete wall.
Bullshit. The Otherworld is right outside. I just have to get to it.
He took the stairs three at a time, as another dream-fear clawed at him.
The Otherworld is a fantasy. There’s nothing here but nightmare. The only way out is to wake back up and run far away from those drug addicts sleeping—
He brushed it off and took the next steps with a gravity-defying leap, and found a door waiting for him, ignorant of his lapse of faith, shaming him with its dumb straightforwardness.
All right. I’ll step out of this door and into the void above the Allcity, just like I did with EP.
Another voice advised him that EP was a figment and the Allcity didn’t exist in this dream, sorry. He pushed through the door before it could say anything else.
It was essentially the exact opposite of the Otherworld’s void. A long, wide, cement hallway, strewn with debris that evaded identification in the darkness, with walls of bare beams and decaying drywall. Pipes and wires. A strange arched ceiling. Lit by a full-moon glow coming from nowhere. There was a sound of running water that might have been rain falling far above, or a deep lap pool draining or filling in some hidden chamber behind the walls.
He knew with his dreamsense that somewhere along this maze of tunnels was every abandoned place he had ever seen, waiting in buried darkness, waiting for him. Somewhere in the maze, the Mall rotated and called his name. But this time, its call was faint.
He exhaled, and it was mist in the air. The cold worked its way in through his skin, and he knew that there was a massive frozen thing somewhere in the sprawling maze of tunnels. Its coldness had spread to the ends of the earth, and he had to go to it. It was the only thing that could wake him up.
“Fuck!” He shook himself and his voice echoed in the tunnel, then came back, altered. A memory shook out of part of him.
“The Dreamworlds are connected to the self…”
Michael’s words brought a revelation. The anger in the walls and the hate in the cold was the self speaking to him just as much as the fear in that other voice and the desperate plea to wake up. This place was made of him, and he didn’t want the Spirit to leave it.
A cold fear rose from his chest.
This might be what it feels like to drop out.