I wasn’t expecting one right before you fell asleep! Imaginary Me defended himself. Well, at least he wasn’t blaming this one on me in his usual smug tone. I continued to drift into sleep, only barely aware of what was going on around me.

That is, until a boot collided with my ribs.

It wasn’t a large boot, as those things go. Boddy-One didn’t exactly wear size sixteens. But it was a boot and it hurt. With a sudden rush of energy, I woke up. Sitting, I saw Boddy-One pulling the hammer on his old western revolver back. Maps had produced a long-handled axe from somewhere, like the sort you used to split logs.

Slowly, one hand still held in place where I had been rubbing my ribs, I rolled onto one hip to follow their gaze.

A hand. Well. A claw. A claw was pushing its way slowly out of the ground mere feet from where we had settled down at the base of the post. What looked like an arm was following it. Another claw and its arm followed suit a couple feet away. And another, behind both of them.

A lot of claws. A lot of arms. Now that I was fully alert, I realized what they were and why they were here. You really have an active imagination. Imaginary Me commented. Scooting back to a position behind Boddy-One, I pulled my feet under me and pulled the hatchet off my pack, holding it in one shaking fist.

The front claws finished their digging and a…I guess a body is the only word for it. A mass of something started to emerge. I realized at this point that all of the claws belonged to one creature. One creature that I had accidentally summoned with one careless metaphor.

“Okay, idiot,” Boddy-One said, taking his revolver in a two handed grip leveled at the body of the thing. “What careless metaphor is this?”

“Sleep,” I managed to get out through the increasing panic distracting me. “As I was falling asleep for the night, I thought of Sleep as clawing its way out of the ground for me.”

Blam! Blam! Blam! Boddy-One fired three shots, which impacted the Sleep, raising sprays of some sort of fine powdery material from its surface. When the powder drifted clear, there were no bullet holes. That wasn’t good.

Boddy-One was looking at me. His mouth was moving. All I could hear was a ringing in my ears. Right. Guns were loud. I tapped my ears and tried to say “I can’t hear anything.” Boddy-One looked at me, down at his gun, over at the creature, then back to me. I’m not much of a lip-reader, but I’m pretty sure he swore.

Interesting. Imaginary Me said, deliberately grabbing my attention. What was interesting?

The creature. Sleep. Your metaphor. The gunshots didn’t harm it, but somehow they seem to have…frightened it? It’s retreating. I looked over to see that he was right. Sleep was retreating from us, as if pushed back by the gunshots. Its escape was limited by the fact that it hadn’t managed to excavate its whole body yet.

I tapped Boddy-One on his shoulder, and mimed shooting his gun at the creature again. This time, I remembered to plug my ears. The ringing sensation was only just starting to fade. There was another Blam! as Boddy-One fired a single round, audible even through my plugged ears and hopefully-temporary deafness. I watched. The creature recoiled away from the gunshot again. It seemed to be struggling to get the rest of its body out of the ground so it could get as far away from the source of the bullets as possible.

Boddy-One was watching it too, this time. After a short pause, he fired his gun again, but not at the creature. Into the air. To my surprise, the creature recoiled away again with as much effort. It had extracted the rest of its mass from underground and scuttled off into the night.

Boddy-One grinned, showing his unsettling number of teeth. He mouthed something at me. No, he said something to me. I only heard “murm murm murm murm”, but I did hear something other than ringing. That was a good sign, I was pretty sure.

Maps hurried to grab the packs, shoving each of ours at us and swinging his own around to strap it into place. I slipped the hatchet back into its loop and strapped the pack onto my back again. As I did, I checked to make sure the box hadn’t fallen out.

Boddy-One was reloading the five empty chambers in his revolver, keeping his eyes focused on the still-retreating Sleep. The creature scuttled away until it was nearly out of sight, then slowly started creeping back towards us. Very slowly. I suspected it would take over an hour for it to reach us again.

My hearing was back sufficiently that I was able to ask Boddy-One to repeat himself and actually understand it this time.

“Metaphor,” he explained. “It isn’t just representative of sleep. It is sleep. Loud noises wake people up. They chase Sleep away.”

I almost groaned aloud. It was--Don’t even think it. Imaginary Me interrupted. Fine. He could think it for me. He was irrealis and his metaphors wouldn’t take root. Wait, how did I know that? Fine, Imaginary Me agreed. It’s as if the Lane runs on terrible puns. Exactly. Of course, if we follow that line of thought… Imaginary Me didn’t have to finish the explanation.

“But that only chases sleep away. It’s a temporary solution,” I finished, out loud.

“Yup,” Boddy-One acknowledged. “Nothing will keep it away forever. And the longer we let it go without claiming you, the more persistent it’s going to get. Eventually, you are going to be caught by Sleep.”

“Okay, so what do we do? Capture it, somehow? Like…restrain it?”

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Does that fit into your metaphor?” Boddy-One asked. He seemed genuinely interested.

“It does not,” I admitted. Okay, so if this thing was Sleep itself, I could only defeat it in ways that I would defeat the need for Sleep. I took off my pack and rummaged through it. Cookie’s trail food. Rope. Protein bars…aha! I pulled a glass bottle out of my pack. “This might work. At least…for a while. Better than loud noises. It should take care of it for a few hours.”

Boddy-One looked at the label on the bottle. “Coffee? That’s good thinking. Might buy us enough time to get to our destination.”

“I guess I just have to drink it?” I asked. Imaginary Me answered even before I finished. It’s not just your Sleepiness. The way you created it it was a generic ‘sleepiness of people’. You have to apply the coffee to the creature. “Wait, no, that wouldn’t work. It’s not just mine. Like how the loud noise affected it even when I was too deaf to hear it.” Maps was nodding. Boddy-One dropped to one knee and rummaged through his own pack. “We need to give the coffee to the creature?”

“Seems that way!” interjected a feminine voice. Startled, we all turned to face…well direction had no meaning here. Somewhere leftish of where we had been facing.

Standing there was a very naked woman. She had a satchel bag slung over one shoulder and nothing else. Her hair was bright green and seemed to glisten as if wet. She was about my own height, which was also surprising, but it didn’t compare to the complete lack of clothing she possessed. Her skin, which I found I could not avoid noticing, was so pale as to almost seem blue. I carefully, pointedly, looked a different direction entirely. Oh, it’s just a naiad, you prude. Imaginary Me taunted. What are you going to do, hold a conversation with her without making eye contact? Eye contact would be fine, if I trusted myself to limit it to just that.

“Oh, sorry. I should have introduced myself. You can call me Wanda. You’re from Community, right?”

“Can’t answer that,” Maps answered, cutting off Boddy-One’s response. Unlike me, both of them seemed perfectly comfortable with the idea of a naked woman just on the Lane. “Afraid it’s private business.”

“Is it? Ooh, the Head of House is going to love to hear about that. I’m from Curiosity, you see. I’m not on private business at the moment, so you can know that.” I coughed. Imaginary Me roared with laughter in the back of my head. “What’s up with him?”

“Human,” answered Boddy-One. A pause followed. He did not elaborate. Wanda the naiad kept asking questions. “Oh I see. Interesting. And he thought up that fascinating metaphor, did he?”

“Yup.” answered Boddy-One. Maps nodded along. “And he found a way to deal with it. So at least he can fix his own mistakes.”

“Didn’t I hear you say it was Sleep? The metaphor of Sleep crawling up to claim someone?”

“That’s right.” I answered, still looking at what might sometimes resemble a tree in the nearest yard. “I was trying to police my thoughts,” Ahem, Imaginary Me said. I ignored him for the moment “--but when I got tired I sort of let my guard down and…that thing came of it.”

“Well, if it’s Sleep itself, coffee might delay it like you think, but…I’m not sure. I guess we should try it and find out?”

“Try what, Miss Wanda?” Maps asked. I noticed that he was carefully maneuvering so that Wanda never got any closer to us. He didn’t trust her? Well, that was fair, I guess. Boddy-One had said the Lane was dangerous. She was on the Lane without a stitch to protect her. Well, she is from House Curiousity, said Illusory Me. You know what they say about that cat? She basically works for it. Wait. House Curiosity? House? Yes, House. So that’s what the Houses were? Some of ‘em, at least. Maybe most. Overlapping psychic resonance of a single shared human concept.

If that was the case, what House was I working for? Seems like the sort of question you should have asked before taking the job, Illusory Me commented. And no, I don’t know the answer either.

Wanda was still talking. With the help of Illusory Me, I pieced together what had been discussed while we had been having our own…internal monologue. Hell, I was going crazy. Talking to myself and everything.

“Well, it seems like if that’s Sleep and the metaphor has already been formed, then it would also be able to form subservient metaphors. That is…if the human--” “--Daniel--” I offered, now admiring some maybe-sunflowers off to her right. “If Daniel,” she continued, “thought up this thing as Sleep, then keeping it at bay is going to have the normal side effects of sleep deprivation. Especially for Daniel himself.”

“What, like…fatigue? Hallucinations?” I asked.

“Sure, if you were back in your own home on Earth, but you’re in the irrealis. When fatigue rears its ugly head, it’s not just an expression, you know? There’s going to be a real fatigue, and it’s head is going to be ugly. I’m so interested to find out what it looks like when that happens!”

Maps and Boddy-One and I all looked around expectantly, since the metaphor would have lodged in my mind. But apparently, Imaginary Me--Can I have a name too?--Imaginary Me had caught it in time.

Boddy-One was still tense and kept his hand on his revolver. “Only if the fool lets his guard down again. Unless--”

“Unless he’s capable of forming mental constructs!” Wanda finished, excitedly. In the periphery of my vision, I saw her reach for her bag. “Oh, I hope he is. It’s always so exciting to meet a human who can do that!”

“Umm…what does that mean?” I asked.

Maps answered first. “Well, a rare few humans can do a sort of…mental trick. It lets them form independent thought forms. The forms can interact with the human’s thoughts as if they were another entity entirely. Developed forms even have their own awareness of the human’s surroundings or insight into the nature of the irrealis.”

“Oh. So it’s like…a voice in your head?”

“More like a whole artificial person in your head. Thought constructs are semi-independent entities.” Maps answered.

“Could it, say, keep track of all my idle thoughts and censor out metaphors? Or track down outside influences, like from the House’s influence?”

“If you assigned it to do so.”

“And would it know things about the nature of the Lane that the human would have never learned themselves?”

“Yes, if sufficiently developed. No need to worry, though. I’m sure the Head of House wouldn’t have hired you for this delivery if you could.”

“Umm…about that,” I started. Wanda let out a high-pitched noise of delight and I heard the rapid scratch of pencil on paper from her direction.

I guess the jig is up, said Illusory Me.