I returned from my trip to find a small parcel waiting for me. It was from Sumaya. What I found when I opened it up was a home-made dream-catcher in green and pink. I’m not a very spiritual person, but I liked the thought. Handcrafted presents are always nice, like a little part of a friend’s creativity to keep around me. Perhaps I would have thought the implications through more on any other day. But my mind was far away, floating on the wind by a beach, floating on wind that once had a mind and soul. Being so distracted, I never paused to consider that a dream-catcher might actually catch dreams. Kazzifrezz was very annoyed the next morning when he found it.
“That explains why I couldn’t find any dreams to eat!” he shouted. He sounded hurt. “I thought we had an arrangement, and you put that there?”
He wouldn’t look directly at it. He was repulsed like a vampire from a crucifix.
“I’m sorry, Kazz, I didn’t think,” I said, honestly. “It was an unexpected gift from a friend. I haven’t seen her except over video call since March. I liked it there to remind me of better times when she was here.”
“Well take it away! Hang it in your workshop, not by your bed! I’m hungry!”
“I will. Sorry.” I sighed. “She’ll be back soon. Everyone will. How will you feel about so many people in the house?”
“People are terrible! Unless they’re asleep… Well, I quite like you when you’re awake, but no one else.”
I smiled - a genuinely nice thing to say, even after I subjected him to the horrors of a dream-catcher. I reached up to unhook it from the wall and stopped. There was something there - of course! The dream! Shimmering bubbles of thought, like the rainbow glimmer of spilled petrol. I could see hints of motion in the shapes. They were too small to decipher what was going on, but they were surely thumbnail previews of dreams I’d had and couldn’t recall. I reached out a hesitant finger, wondering what would happen if I touched one.
Immediately, I was transported into the dream. It felt far more natural than projecting into Mimsy’s memories. These were my own dreams after all. But they weren’t pleasant dreams. I was alone on the beach again. It was calm but not soothing. It was the unsettling stillness of impending disaster. The silence before a storm. Before Storm. The calm ended and she was there with fury. There were no words, but somehow in the crash of thunder and waves I knew she was screaming that I had tricked her. I had deceived her into giving up her soul. The sea turned red, and twisting vines sprung up beside me dragging me to the sand by a thorny grasp around my wrists. My own voice - no, Mimsy’s voice - cried out, “You did this!”
Before I could respond, a black smoking void was torn from the sky. I tried to ignore it and focus on Mimsy and Storm.
“I’m sorry, Mimsy! I’m sorry, Storm! I didn’t want-” I cried out as the world shook around me and more black rifts formed. Realisation hit me, and I yelled up at the broken sky. “Kazz! Stop! Eating! My! Dream!”
He appeared in the sky above me, visible through the cracks he had made. Here, he really did look as scary as he tried to look in the waking world. He was vast, filling the sky, one smouldering orange-red eye filling a crack in the very fabric of the dream.
His voice was thunder. “You can hear me?”
“Yes, I think I’m actually living this dream, not just dreaming it! So stop eating! I need to see this play out.”
The dream was already unstable as it was. Another bite might have brought it crashing down around me. Kazz looked to be considering my words with confusion and concern in equal measure.
“You shouldn’t…” He hesitated, then shrank down, floating through the rift to join me at his normal size on the beach. His voice no longer rumbling and echoing from the boundaries of the dream, he said “You shouldn’t be able to talk to me. That doesn’t make sense.”
“Well, I guess I’m awake this time. Am I? Can you see outside and inside the dream at the same time?”
He vanished for a few seconds, then popped back. “You’re sort of awake but in a trance. You couldn’t hear me out there.”
“But I can in here. Interesting.”
Still the sea crashed red, though neither Storm nor Mimsy had tried to speak. It seemed that only whatever I was currently focused on took any form. Turning back to the sea made it rise up in anger again. Looking at the ground made the plants writhe and grow. I closed my eyes and tried to force the thoughts from my mind.
“I just wanted to do what was best for everyone,” I whispered to myself.
“You did,” replied Kazz, with uncharacteristic softness. In that moment, I heard not the Lord of Nightmares, not even the angry billow of smoke I had first found - I heard only a friend.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“Then why are they so angry?”
“This is your dream, not theirs.”
“How can I know if I’m just making it up or if my dream is looking into some other part of reality?”
“You can’t. But I, as a mighty nightmare spirit, can. Prophetic dreams taste different. This one only tastes of grief, anxiety, and existential dread.”
“Oh.”
“If you can talk to me here you have control. You can change the dream.”
“What would that achieve? I think I need to let it flow and just process it.”
“You could…” he began, then paused. “Yeah. Let it flow.”
I thought of asking what he was going to say, but let it slide. I turned back to the sea once more and the red waves rose high in response. It was high tide all of a sudden. Bloodstained seafoam lapped around my feet. My wellies kept me dry. I hadn’t been wearing them when the dream began. The cold of the wind was biting at me - I wished I had a jacket, and then realised I was wearing one. Kazzifrezz was right; I did have control. At least a little bit. I couldn’t calm the sea or the winds.
But I could accept their fury.
I cast off my jacket and stepped out of my wellies. I stood in messy work trousers and an old oversized shirt at the mercy of the bleeding storm. I strode forward, wading waist deep.
“I’m sorry.” It was barely a whisper, but it was clear above the noise. There was no response. There was only storm and sea. Mimsy and Storm were gone. They couldn’t forgive me now. Maybe Storm would tell me that forgiveness is a foolish mortal concept. Maybe she was right. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe slowly. The wind began to ease off. The waves calmed and began to sweep in and out with my breath. The tide slowly retreated, leaving me standing barefoot in wet sand, an empty vase in one arm, and an empty plant pot in the other, the clay cold against my bare skin. I looked down and a seedling was growing there, somehow, in nothing but sand, blowing gently in the breeze.
Thunder above said; “It’s all metaphors, you know.”
I looked up to see Kazz watching through the crack in the sky again. “Do you mind? I was having a moment there.”
“Sorry, I’ll leave you to it.”
“No,” I sighed, “You already ruined it. Are all dreams metaphors, even the weird nightmares you always tell me about?”
“No, not all. Mostly it’s just the random chaos of the brain processing too many signals or the horrific demon energy I channel into you. But some dreams are.”
“Explain this one then.”
He reverted back to his small size beside me. “You explain it. They’re your metaphors.”
“I studied zoology, not poetry.”
“And I’m a demon. Actual torture is always better than metaphors for torture.”
“Well, imaginary torture that I don’t even remember when I wake up. But that’s beside the point. I still don’t know what to do. I don’t even really know what I already did.”
“You did your best.”
“My best wasn’t good enough to help Mimsy. I don’t even know if I helped Storm. I don’t know how to help you.”
“You help me by having horrible nightmares every night.”
“You know what I meant. I need to help you go home too, eventually.”
“You can control this dream. You calmed the storm and the waves. You could simply open a portal to the nightmare realm.”
“Simply, huh?”
“The cosmic mechanics of it are only understood by the librarians of hell, but the actual process is just… vwooooshh”
“Just vwoosh. Right, that explains it.”
“How did you move the tides back? Just thinking about it, right? Do that but… portal to hell.”
I imagined a portal. There was a vwoosh. He was right. It really was that simple.
“CAREFUL!” yelled Kazz. “A portal that size could let anything through!”
I concentrated and the portal shrank in response.
“So is that it?” I asked. “I just make a portal and you go. After everything we’ve been through, that’s it?”
“That’s it,” he said. There was a hint of sadness to his voice. He looked up at me. “I need nightmares to eat. It’s not the same when those nightmares belong to…”
He made a sound like a cough and fell quiet. I looked at him with a knowing smile.
“Belong to what, Kazzifrezz?”
“It’s not the same,” he mumbled, “when those nightmares belong to a friend.”
“I’ll miss you, Kazz. But I’ll be glad to have my dreams back.”
“And I’ll be glad to go find someone whose agonising pain I can fully appreciate.”
“Goodbye, Kazzifrezz the Vile, Lord of Nightmares.”
“Goodbye Charlotte Ransome, Amateur Potter.”
He drifted towards the portal and passed through. A moment later, his face reappeared with a sudden snarl, coughing brimstone in my direction. The shock woke me. His parting gift was to scare me out of my trance before I let my guilt turn back into storms. The dream-catcher smouldered slightly then fell from the wall. The petrol-spill shimmers burst with it. I’d never get to go back in. A small part of me resented that Kazz had interrupted before I could find true closure with Storm and Mimsy, but I knew it was wishful thinking. I couldn’t - and wouldn’t - just dream my troubles and regrets away. I would carry that burden and remember my brief encounters with demons. As for Kazz, an unceremonious goodbye on a beach felt strangely appropriate. Our time together had ended as abruptly and as illogically as it had begun. And now I was alone in my room. The empty ashtray on the bedside table was truly empty now. Kazz was gone. I wrote about his departure in my dream journal, not that I was likely to ever forget.
And that was the end of it. No more demons came to my workshop and life returned to how it was before, plain and mundane. Dreams were dreamed. Plants grew. Mugs remained blood-free. The wind blew, and life went on. The podcast did not. It died with Mimsy and never felt right to record after that. I called my mum but couldn’t tell her all of this. I did some work. I cycled to the beach. I made some pots, and life went on.
I have seen too much these last few months to rule anything out, but I know deep down that the ordeal is over. It seems I’ll never know how or why I brought them into the world. I might never even understand how I helped them back out again. Some fragment of my innermost spirit knows, but that knowledge lies deeper than I can connect too. Understanding how it happened doesn’t matter in the end. The cosmic mechanics of Hell and portals are too vast and incomprehensible for a mortal like me, but the demons themselves were not. Their nature was impossible, their motives a mystery, but they felt things. Their feelings were not so different to those of mortals for all that they claimed. Somehow that was reassuring. In the impossible infinity of our universe and beyond, even demons can feel something. Even the Lord of Nightmares can be a friend. Even the storm can be the ocean breeze. And even I can be the person who I need.