It was hot, which made him angry, and he was scared, which made him furious.
Aaron would have brushed all those feelings aside and ignored the turbulent chill in his stomach — he didn’t get angry, after all — but the scene before him was just too weird.
He was standing at the plate of a baseball diamond, an aluminum bat in hand. That was familiar. Strangely familiar. So was the park the ballpark was located in, except there were some glaring differences that were perfectly normal yet made absolutely no sense.
The first difference was at the edge of the park. Where the sidewalk should have been, massive stone walls rose… and rose… and rose. The walls, which looked like those one might see on some European castle, climbed up into the sky, seemingly without end. It was nonsense, yet Aaron understood that it was exactly what was supposed to be there.
Another peculiarity — or, rather, peculiarities — were the passages that opened in the walls with irregular spacing. There were more than a dozen of these hallways, each about five or six feet across. Aaron could see that more hallways branched off these, creating the impression of a complicated labyrinth. That, too, was strangely familiar, although it was hazy and Aaron wasn’t sure why the maze was familiar.
The most ludicrous — yet perfectly normal — thing in the park was the car parked across the pitcher’s mound. Most of the windows were tinted so dark they were basically opaque. One of the windows, however, the driver’s window, was broken. Sunlight glittered on the tiny chunks of broken glass scattered on the ground near the door. Which was odd…
Shouldn’t the glass be inside the car? Aaron asked himself. That’s the direction the softball was going, after all.
An old black man was leaning through the broken window, his arms resting on the empty frame. He had on an old Army jacket despite the heat of the day and he was beaming at Aaron.
“Fancy meeting you here,” the familiar stranger said.
The cold pulsed in Aaron’s stomach and he tightened his grip on the bat. He stared hard at the old man. He didn’t know why this old man bothered him so much — he wasn’t angry, just annoyed — but the feeling was undeniable.
“Oh, now, don’t give me that sour puss, son,” the old man said. “I’m just trying to make proper introductions. My name’s Barrett; I’m here to help.”
“Help me?”
“Shit yes!” The stranger slapped the car door lightly, for emphasis. “I imagine there’s been all sorts of weird goings on in your life lately; I’d like to help you sort it all out.”
Aaron wasn’t sure what ‘weird goings on’ the old man was referring to. He’d been feeling out of sorts lately and having a ton of extra screwed up dreams, but other than the softball thing, he couldn’t think of anything unusual happening recently.
For a brief moment, he saw a masked man lunging at him with a terrible knife. He flinched a little, but the apparition was gone almost as soon as it appeared.
“Did I hit the mark?” the old man asked, misreading Aaron’s reaction.
Aaron’s only response was to give the man a deeply skeptical look. He kept his mouth shut otherwise.
“Anyways, like I said, my name’s Barrett. Since we didn’t have a chance to introduce ourselves earlier, you got me at a disadvantage.” His smile was friendly, but his eyes were serious. “So, what’s your name, friend?”
All of Aaron’s half-formed suspicions from earlier in the park came rushing back, this time with something extra. He had a feeling that bordered on ominous and couldn’t put his finger on why. He didn’t know how to respond without being aggressive, didn’t know what was up with this goofy dream, and didn’t have anywhere he could run if things took a nightmarish turn except those narrow stone hallways.
He continued stonewalling the old man and stayed silent.
“You’re hesitant; I get that,” Barrett said. “Let me think a minute.”
The old man rummaged around in his car for a few seconds. Aaron shifted his weight, bracing for whatever might come. He was ready to charge the car or bolt for the walls. Barrett pulled out a legal pad and pen.
“So, let me guess about some of these unusual events and you let me know if they ring any bells, alright?”
Aaron thought the old man would give him time to answer, but he barely even paused for a breath before listing things off.
“You’ve been having funny dreams, maybe about people or places you’ve never been but they’re somehow still familiar. You’ve had trouble with the details of those people and places or they’re blocked off entirely. Like maybe there’s some kind of fog or giant stone walls between you. An associate says that might be a kind of defense to keep yourself hidden.”
Barrett gestured around at the impossibly high castle walls and the maze passages that radiated from them in every direction.
“We don’t really know why you’re hidden away this time, but we’ve got some educated guesses. Way we figure, the special something that’s started to coalesce in you recognizes a threat it’s run afoul of before, so it’s changed things up to avoid the danger. The downside is that it’s a bit more troublesome for us to make contact.”
That’s not quite right, but…
But what? Aaron didn’t know, not specifically. His throat felt tight. Barrett was close, but neither Aaron or the old man knew how close. Or how far. That was the most frustrating thing for Aaron, not knowing what was off.
“I’d wager there have been other, more tangible signs. You’ve started doing strange, even incredible, things. Sometimes you’re impossibly strong — which I personally witnessed — other times your flesh might be tougher than seems possible or your reflexes are so good you react before you even realize there’s something to react to.”
Barrett paused to let Aaron digest that, but didn’t wait long enough for him to offer a response.
“The change that’s most telling — and easiest to overlook — is your body’s response to temperature. Scalding coffee doesn’t bother you anymore, you’re not sweating in the summer heat, and things like that.”
Aaron couldn’t think of any instances where he’d been as durable or fast as a superhero, but he could easily imagine a scenario where some hooded criminal came at him with a knife or something. In fact, he could imagine it so well it almost felt more like a memory than fantasy. But the other stuff, with the heat? He could think of a dozen specific instances in the past few months that lined up with that.
Does the same thing work with cold, he wondered. What am I talking about? None of it works; this is just an especially vivid dream.
“The point is,” Barrett continued, “that you’re awakening to a power within yourself; a power that makes us close as kin. That’s why I’m trying to help you. Take these.”
Barrett held out the paper and pen, shaking them encouragingly when Aaron hesitated. Aaron leaned the bat against the front of the car, where it would be within easy reach, and took the pad and pen.
“I’m going to repeat a phone number several times. Each time, you repeat the number out loud and write it down. That’ll help you remember it when you’re awake.”
Aaron gave him an incredulous look, but Barrett just chuckled softly.
“It sounds nutty as pig shit, I know, but I can see you’re not ready to trust us just yet and this will give you a way to get in touch when the time comes.”
Barrett’s smile faded and he looked at Aaron very seriously. “As much as I don’t wanna push you before you’re ready, you are in danger. There’s folks’ll be coming for you. We very much don’t want them to find you, but the clock is ticking. None of your gee-damned office drone buddies would tell us shit all about you, so we’re on the slow road to tracking you down through paperwork since other, quicker methods have proven unreliable so far.”
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The cold knot in Aaron’s stomach trembled. So the old man had tried to pry information about him out of his coworkers. He hadn’t been this annoyed — annoyed, not angry — in years. With the exception of when he’d been stabbed earlier, of course.
Aaron shook his head like there was a fly on his ear. Stabbed? He’d never been stabbed. He hadn’t even been cut by someone else since his turbulent youth.
These dreams are weird as hell, he told himself. I’m probably mixing up when that bat broke. What a weird mistake to make.
Barrett, true to his word, started repeating a phone number. He started slowly, waiting for Aaron to repeat it back and write it down. For a dream — even a dream as weird as this one — this was a weird thing to do. But he went with it and jotted the number down. It wasn’t a local number.
Two-one-two. That’s somewhere back east, New York or maybe Washington, D.C. I think I’ve seen it in movies or TV shows. Or maybe it’s like the 555 phone numbers?
After they got through quite a few repetitions, Barrett picked up the pace and even adopted a sing-song approach like jingles in commercials sometimes used. Aaron rolled his eyes, but played along. What the hell else could you do in a dream?
“If you get into trouble or decide you believe me, call that number and we’ll come straight to you. We’re not fooling around here; your safety is our first priority right now.”
“Why?”
Barrett hesitated. “It’s like I said, that special something you got makes you close as kin. There’s more specifics to it, but it gets complicated, and it damned sure sounds crazy enough without the proper context.”
“Crazy how?”
“The specifics ain’t that important, right now, but I’ll give you a for-instance: if, for any reason, you can’t use that phone number — maybe you forgot, maybe you can’t find a phone, whatever — get your ass to sleep and dream. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But it makes a sort of sense given the context of this meeting, right?”
“None of this makes sense,” Aaron said.
Barrett sighed slightly. “Dreams are fickle and you seem to have unconsciously gone to some lengths to keep yours closed off. Making contact in the dreamscape, like we’re doing right now, was only possible because of how close we were this afternoon and how close I’ve tried to stay. Proximity, and some help from the closest thing to an expert we have, are the only way this little meeting could happen.”
The rear window of the car rolled down about halfway. From the shadows of the car, a figure in a black mask reached for him, something gleaming in their hand.
Not again, he thought, stepping away and reaching for the bat. Wait… not again what?
It took him a second to get a better sense of the situation. The person in the car wasn’t wearing a mask, but a deep cowl or hood. For some reason that seemed less threatening.
And the hand was slender, with long, graceful fingers tipped with polished red fingernails. The hand held a plain circle, about the size of the bracelet he thought were called bangles, made of gleaming white plastic.
Upon taking a step back towards the car, Aaron saw that the bangle was almost translucent. A dark, hazy shadow was visible around the edges and it had carvings so delicate he couldn’t make out anything other than vague details of curves and edges.
A woman’s voice, soft but clear like a small stream or brook just out of sight, came from the back seat. “If you use dreams to reach out, picture this charm. Focus on remembering how the light casts shadows within it, or the shapes of the carvings in the stone. That will help establish the connection.”
The hooded woman in the backseat rolled the bangle in her fingers, spinning it a full circle in the sunlight. Then, both hand and bangle returned to the dark recesses of the car, and the window rolled up. Aaron adjusted his head to catch a glimpse of the mystery woman’s face, but had no luck. The mystery woman, it seemed, would remain a mystery.
“Alright,” Barrett said, extending a hand to Aaron. “Let’s have that pad back!”
Aaron looked down at the forgotten stationary in his hand, then returned it.
“There’s one more thing you need to be made aware of,” Barrett said, turning to stow the pad in the car.
When the old man turned back to Aaron, the thick barrel of a shotgun emerged from the window, pointed straight at his chest.
Barrett, calm as the late summer sky, said, “You’re basically bulletproof.”
The shotgun went off with a deafening roar, hitting Aaron center mass.
Aaron was knocked clear off the ground and landed on his back several feet away. The knot of cold in his guts unwound, embracing the new pain in his chest and adding its weight to its own. It flared so violently Aaron thought he was going to be sick to his stomach.
Before he knew what he was doing — or how impossible it was that he was doing it — Aaron was on his feet, bat in hand, and striding back to the car. He didn’t fail to notice that, other than his shredded t-shirt, he was unharmed, but that didn’t do much to soothe the emotional tumult roiling through his body.
Having his greatly-expanded stomach exposed in front of a stranger and the mystery woman in the backseat only added to his frustration — it wasn’t anger, Aaron didn’t get angry — at having someone asking for trust ambush him with a point-blank shotgun blast.
Barrett, for his part, had dropped the gun to the pitcher’s mound and was holding both hands out in front of him showing that he was once more unarmed.
“What. The. Fuck?” Aaron demanded, punctuating each word by adding a new dent to the car’s hood with his aluminum bat.
“Wait! Listen to me, please,” Barrett said, his voice raised slightly but his tone steady and even. “I had to put the idea in your head. Certain qualities of your nature won’t function reliably without ideas from your subconscious being introduced to your conscious mind. As a for-instance, that you’re essentially invulnerable to most mundane harm.”
The bat was badly bent from its last use for punctuation, so this time Aaron kicked the car door.
“I… have been… shot… in dreams… before!”
The door was a bit dented, but had no major damage. That was unsatisfying. Aaron tossed the bat away from him — out of annoyance, of course, not anger; Aaron didn’t get angry — and it sailed across the park, hitting a tree with a loud crack.
“It’s not pleasant,” Aaron added, “whether it’s a damn dream or not, you asshole piece of shit!”
He kicked the car one last time. It actually slid several inches away, gouging deep grooves in the dirt of the pitcher’s mound. The front end of the driver’s door frame near the hood was deeply dented. That was satisfying.
“Well, I didn’t know that,” Barrett said, shrugging.
The pit of cold in Aaron’s guts started to heat up. It crawled up his throat and he felt like he was going to vomit. He turned and stormed away towards the walls.
Need to get behind a tree or into one of those hallways, he thought. He didn’t want anyone near him if he was going to be vulnerable from throwing up and he definitely didn’t want the mystery woman to see it.
When he was just a few steps from one of the narrow hallways, the woman’s voice drifted across the park to him. It was loud enough he could hear her clearly, but she wasn’t shouting.
“Don’t go in there,” she cautioned. “Whatever’s in there is not your friend!”
No sooner had she finished speaking than Aaron heard a horribly familiar sound coming from somewhere down the stone passage.
Ssswih-thump.
It was close. Aaron placed a hand on the wall and leaned against it heavily.
Not this, not again, he thought. Not now.
Ssswih-thump.
A humanoid shadow began to creep into the hallway at an intersection more than a hundred feet away. Aaron closed his eyes and tried to breathe.
If you’re going to be sick, just be sick, he told himself.
He knew it would be better to just get it over with — it always was — but he hated the vulnerability that came with throwing up and he couldn’t get over his fear that he’d somehow be unable to draw a breath and suffocate. And with his body locked up with tension, he was in no shape to fight or run from the pursuer in the maze.
The tidal rush of his own blood pressing on his eardrums drowned out everything else. His eyes were squeezed tight and the muscles in his jaw, neck, and shoulders were taut fighting to stop himself from being sick. Cold still churned in his stomach, but it was heat clawing its way up his throat.
I just want this to be over, he thought. I want this sick out of me and want out of this fucking dream.
As if dragged from desire to reality by the thought, the awful heat finally broke free. It poured out of his throat, a scorching torrent of stomach acid or bile or whatever scraping its way out of his body.
He tensed so much that the darkness behind his closed eyelids seemed to turn bright, like he was facing a bright light instead of a gloomy stone tunnel. All he could think about was when it would stop long enough to drag in the next panicked breath, to keep himself alive even as his body betrayed him.
Maybe it won’t come this time, he thought. Or maybe I’ll just wake up.