And so, a hazy amount of time later, Richie again found himself scoping out the complex. The structure itself, and the adjoining buildings did in fact exist. An eerie quiet had come over the place upon second coming, however. While before Richie might have noticed the ambient chirping of birds and the rustling of winds off in the distance, now he heard only his own footsteps where they snapped twigs or rustled leaves. The odd green coloration of the light from the interlocking treetops above was still present, as it had been before, and seemed largely unchanged by the time of day to the extremities of twilight, eclipsed only by night itself. There was a lingering smell in the air now, one that Richie did not like. It smelled oddly of sewage, of rotting vegetation and decay, bringing to mind the absurd image of a troll waiting in a storm drain, like a modern take on the troll beneath the bridge in The Three Billy Goats Gruff. More subconscious murmurings of the presence of a predatory entity somewhere in the unknown, possibly far away, possibly very close to Richie, he supposed. Was he only imagining the stark silence out of this creeping anxiety? At last, the moment of truth to put his fears to bed or else confirm them came when he shouldered the fence. He came to the intersection where the perpendicular barriers met, and there he saw there was indeed a plank out of place, but the world beyond it was nowhere to be found. Conforming again to the standards of physical reality, there was only the edge of the fence where they should have met, and a narrower gap to the right that spilled into the comparatively mundane woods Richie already saw were a constant fixture of this place.
He should have breathed a sigh of relief right then and there, but he didn’t. The anxiety he hoped to abate by confirming the impossibility of that tunnel of compact interwoven ivy intensified instead, as though he were instead looking upon a beach whose tide had suddenly and violently pulled out to sea, forecasting a coming tsunami. There was another sound now. The buzzing of concealed cicadas. To Richie, they sounded somehow like a metronome. Chilled despite the humidity, he sought shelter. That had been the other reason he came here in the first place, after all, and his rational mind knew that superstition and paranoia were no good reason to pass up a free secluded home where he could rest without reproach. He straddled the back porch of one of the ground level units, a concrete slab narrowed by clutter, and even a wholesale abandoned bike that looked brand new, suspended upside down from ceiling hooks. It beggared belief that someone would leave this behind, and seemed only plausible if the occupants had left in a sudden rush, as though evacuated on short notice, never to return. A cursory glance of the bike showed it to be largely untouched by rust, and the critical components all perfectly functioning. It was Richie’s bike now, he figured.
Ducking under it, Richie let himself in through the sliding glass door. He was in a darkened bedroom, one of two primary bedrooms divided by a stretch of hall that ran its way to a bathroom, living room, and the aforementioned kitchen. In contrast to the ruin of the parking garage and greenhouse, Richie confirmed that this unit was almost completely intact and untouched by decay. What mustiness he smelled belonged only to the accumulation of dust over what could have been decades. The space inside was completely cleared out, as if it had never been lived in or furnished. Richie found a presumably working refrigerator in the kitchen, along with a microwave. The power was cut, so he would have to find a way to get it running again. That could take a whole day or more depending on the complexity of the circuits, and if he had to bring in a backup generator, which would likely have to be assembled wholesale from parts he’d have to steal piecemeal one by one. A pain in the ass, but hardly an overbearing downpayment on such a miraculous find. The living room was spacious enough for a small apartment, and he could already picture that this is where he would lay the mattress. Rather than a bedroom, he liked it best where he could keep an eye on every entrance and exit in a building. It was an instinct he had picked up from whatever experiences in his childhood lay behind the pitch black curtain of time and psychological disconnect between then and now. Escape routes was how he thought of them, ever the survivalist.
That same instinct inclined him to distrust unnecessary doors - that was to say, doors not acting as the minimum requirements to fortify defenses behind in the event of a security breach, like by the kind of violent drug-addled psychotics that had ruined a handful of Richie’s days previously. This meant that pantries, washrooms, and closets especially all had to be stripped of doors to deprive would-be invaders of hiding places under Richie’s radar. As Richie made his way back to the bedroom he had entered to appraise how long it would take to remove its closet doors - folding models instead of a singular door - he felt another surge of paralytic fight or flight take hold. It was joined by an odd tingling sensation, and a droning ringing in his ears. He froze in place. The edges of his vision turned fuzzy and began to drift away, nearly giving him tunnel vision, and instantly returning the daydream of the ivy tunnel to memory. He turned his back to the closet to look out on the backyard from whence he came, fully expecting that tunnel to have returned, and for the killer to be crouching there. Instead, he saw only that same empty space.
The hairs on the back of Richie’s neck raised, and he felt he had exposed himself to a beast ready to pounce on him from behind. He whipped back around and stared into the closet depths. The inner wall was still there, though darkened by the shade within. Somehow though, that wall felt like it wasn’t concrete, and like it was lesser than. Straining to focus his vision and quell the illusion offset this visual, but not the sensation. Richie thought, seemingly randomly, of those magic eye paintings where you only see the true picture in the chaos when you stop looking for it. He let his eyes go slack and wander. The fuzziness at the edges of his vision grew granier and spread, and the darkness obscuring the inner wall of the closet began to deepen. At the same time, that wall seemed to become transparent, and offer a peak into a long enclosed walkway beyond.
Am I hallucinating again? These feel like dreams, and yet… they don’t, at the same time.
If he didn’t suspect he was dreaming before, Richie certainly did when his tattoos began to glow. The azure dragons beneath his clothes spread their light straight through the fabric, seeming to shift and hiss under his skin, as though they were reacting to something. Another dormant memory - that of Richie’s homeschooling - came to mind, on the subject of chemistry and chemical reactions. In that moment, he knew, just as he had known that the police were going to pursue him, that his tattoos were responding to this liminal space within the closet, and that it and the ivy tunnel were linked.
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If this is a dream, and I’m aware of it, that makes this a lucid dream. That means there’s nothing to be afraid of. I knew this place was too good to be true anyway. If anything bad happens, I’ll just tell myself to wake up and that will be that. No matter how realistic it feels, I can’t be in any actual danger.
Richie told himself the reasonable lines, and where his nerves failed him, his stoic adherence to rationality won out. He closed his eyes and measured his breaths, inhaling through his nose and exhaling through his mouth, centering his body and mind as if he were meditating. After a period of ten seconds or so - or whatever units time was measured in within dreams - Richie opened his eyes again. The inner wall of the closet was gone altogether, replaced by an empty door frame into a long brick and mortar corridor that stretched on as far as the eye could see, uniformly lit in equal spaces by flickering overhead light bulbs. It was some kind of tunnel like under a wide bridge or through a hill, or maybe like that of a modern catacomb.
Richie’s every cell was nagging at him to flee and go nowhere near the entrance to this unknown frontier, but the dragons he shared his body with were tugging him toward it, spurred on by an instinct and agenda known only to themselves. Richie had the curious feeling of feeling someone else’s nostalgia - the dragons’, he supposed.
“Fine, you win, guys.” Richie sighed.
Confirming the presence of his swiss army knife on hand, he steeled his resolve and entered the tunnel.
His footfalls echoed on and across the wet ground, and the flickering above cast everything in an eerily dimly-lit glow. It was rank and coldly humid in here, as if he were many miles below ground, trudging through the icy bowels of some frozen cave system. More than once he raised a hand to bat away at flickers of movement that revealed themselves only as warped shadows, dancing on the walls. The tunnel gave a feeling of constriction, as though Richie were within the stomach of a great python swallowing him deeper and deeper into itself. Still, the dragons tugged him forward, revealing nothing of the object of their interest. It seemed far too long that Richie paced down the length of the tunnel without closing any measurable distance. The pinprick of light at the very end of the tunnel seemed as far away as ever.
Richie’s skin crawled as he picked up the nearly-imperceptible white noise of whispering further down the tunnel. Picking up his steps, he found himself break first into a trot, then into a jog down toward the seeming source of the beckoning. Finally he could make out some manner of silhouette framed by the yellow light of the tunnel beyond, standing some thirty feet from him. Whatever it was, it was huge, practically taking up the whole tunnel with its width and height. A long, low-centered form hugged the ground, looking nothing so much as a massive malformed log, a water-swollen log beached after untold days adrift on a river current. Knobby protrusions and welts covered a velvety hide that began to look a gastly hue of pale the closer Richie drew, which was now only a few timid steps forward.
In that moment, the inner child of Richie’s being raised first a choked whisper of a warning, and then a maddened shriek to run. That warning had been that Richie was not in a catacomb.
He was in a sewer.
A pair of unnerving orange lights materialized within the obstructing mass. Within a moment, Richie realized that he was looking into the slit eyes of a gigantic reptilian predator. Richie’s own eyes finally adjusting to the darkness, he realized with mounting terror that the shape before him was a gigantic albino alligator, straight out of the urban legends he had heard of such beasts in the sewers beneath the city streets as a child. With a protracted hiss, the reptile’s snout separated into the gargantuan jaws out of Richie’s worst imaginings, lined with hundreds of yellow-white fangs each easily the size of a butcher knife. He stared down its fleshy maw, into its bellowing gullet, and the darkness of death within. The tunnel shook with its roar as Richie heard the rattling of water pipes somewhere down further, and the sudden torrent of a coming flood of sewage behind the scaly behemoth.
“Nope.”
Lucid dreaming was for chumps.
Richie turned tail and sprinted in a mad dash for the gate from whence he came. The thunderous rushing of water signaled the heavy thudding tread of the giant alligator galloping after him. Richie’s blind escape was impeded by the sudden presence of thick sludgy heaps of entangling mud and waste at his feet. The rising water level was not only at his back, propelling the giant alligator, but scouting forward streaming tendrils of trickling liquid that splashed increasingly under his boots, wetting his socks and sticking them cloyingly to his ankles. Twice he passed through invisible pockets of noxious gas, and only the mortal terror of certain death in the jaws behind him kept Richie sprinting through what should have made him pass out on the spot. The tunnel once again didn’t seem to be getting any shorter, and Richie could once again taste iron on his tongue as his blood pressure coarsed so intensely he thought his heart would burst. His screaming legs were startled into compliance by the gnashing at their heels, as the gator - its loathsome body scraping the stone as it charged - closed the distance more and more. It roared again, and Richie felt his bones vibrate, his ears ringing as though he had been on the cuff of a flashbang. Now it was no longer just his legs - Richie himself was screaming too, his vocal cords stretched to their limits. He couldn’t hear his cry of terror over the continuous roars of the crocodilian horror lapping at his back. The square of light that was the closet exit into the apartment bedroom was beginning to materialize again at last, sixty, fifty, forty, thirty feet away - Richie felt rancid gusts of hot breath flare at his back from the nostrils of the alligator, as though it sensed its prey was nearly free of its range.
Richie stretched his fingers out for the door frame as the final steps counted off. Half-falling, half-leaping, Richie threw himself free of the closet, sailed forward by the alligator’s own last-ditch lunge. The boy tumbled wildly across the carpeted floor of the room, crashing into the far wall. He distantly heard the thud of the gator’s body crashing against the boundary, where the too-small door frame of the closet surely wedged its hideous jaws shut. Rolling onto his knees, and then his feet, again, Richie swung his head up to look at the closet.
It was only an empty closet. The white alligator, and the extradimensional sewer tunnel, were both gone.
Richie cackled madly, caught in the seizure of hysterics, and clutched at his ginger hair nearly hard enough to tear it free from his scalp.
“What the fuck?!?” he cursed at the top of his lungs into the closet.