In Dreams Wake

Beck once again surveyed the foliage around him. He tried to spot the other noisemakers to keep his thoughts from his uncle’s reasoning, but either the devices were too hidden or his mind too scattered to locate them.

“Normally we would want to be thorough in our scouting, but for the sake of our sanity let’s stick to the path for now,” his uncle said.

He murmured in agreement, and they moved out of the forest proper. The speaker next to them activated once more as they left, prompting Beck to cover his ears again.

Back on the trail he felt more at ease. Despite still being in an alien land, he couldn’t help giving in to the familiarity of the facade. The path they were on cut a loop around the pond, offering little variation in scenery. The same types of oak surrounded them, and he was starting to become convinced they wouldn’t find anything else unusual until a hollow under one of the tree’s roots caught his eye.

He pointed to it. “Over there.”

Rowan’s gaze followed to where he was indicating. Beneath the arc of the root a dim light shone through. “Good eye, that looks promising,” he said with a smile.

They walked over to it and Beck crouched down to get a better view. There was an opening under the root through which he saw the backside of a wallboard and a decrepit wooden floor. The light source was somewhere overhead, above where the space beneath the hollow should have ended.

“There’s a room under there,” Beck said, “but the opening looks like a squeeze. Is there a way to make it larger?”

“Unfortunately, probably not,” his uncle said. “Patch, Spool, see what’s on the other side.”

Patch dropped from his back, and the fox velour flowed off Rowan’s shoulders. The latter padded on tiny, graceful feet in contrast to its sluggish demeanor, and both velours slipped through the entrance. Their soft footsteps faded out and left Beck and Rowan to themselves.

“You’re right, it did happen.”

Beck turned to his uncle. “Pardon?”

Rowan’s jaw was slack, almost stuck open, like he was struggling to push the words out of his throat. “There was an incident where another’s consciousness entered a body,” he was able to get out. “That is how we know of the phenomena in the first place. Otherwise we wouldn’t have known we needed dreamcatchers or pass phrases or any of the other measures that have been put in place. We haven’t had an occurrence since.”

“Oh,” Beck said. An uncomfortable silence settled over the glade. There wasn’t an appropriate response he could think of to fill the space.

He kicked himself for having yet to acclimate to his uncle’s social mannerisms. His uncle pulled on conversation threads in a seemingly random order, which was still putting him on the back foot. It had been nearly an hour since they were arguing over that uncomfortable subject, enough time that any anger he’d felt had dissipated. A voice somewhere deep inside him was nagging at him that he ought to still be angry, but his uncle’s explanation smothered it.

A pattering of footsteps announced the return of the velours. When they emerged the fox immediately circled Rowan’s feet while Patch casually lumbered up to the humans. “This is another opening into the tenements,” the bear stated.

“Well, we were going to run into them sooner or later,” his uncle mused. Any trace of vulnerability he had shown earlier was gone. “It’s a relatively safe area, so we can go ahead into it.”

Beck nodded and approached the hole. When he got close he hesitated. “It’s a rather small opening,” he reiterated. The velours were able to pass without issue, but for a person the gap wasn’t even tall enough for someone to go on hands and knees.

His uncle bent down and examined the gateway. “I don’t think we’ll get stuck,” he said.

“Thanks, that’s comforting,” Beck retorted.

He stared down into the hole, caught by a guttural unease. Closing his eyes, he let out a long breath and lowered himself onto his stomach. He crawled forward. Dangling fibers from the root above brushed against his shoulders and showered dirt onto his back. The ground under him became clods that stuck to the heels of his palms and the knees of his pants. When his head emerged into the room he let out his breath — he didn't realize he'd been holding it. Drywall crumbled from the wall within as he scrambled out of the hole. This gateway was a much less pleasant experience than the one leading from his dream into the glen.

The building he found himself now certainly reflected how Patch had labeled it. The passage back into the forest was a hole at the bottom of the wall, the remainder of which was a patchwork of wallpaper and bare wood. The rest of the space was more put together, but similarly dilapidated. An entire home was squished into a single room; a stove, bed and rugged couch all stood within hand's reach of each other. It held the appearance of being lived in, but there were no occupants.

He heard a grunt as his uncle came up through the hole in the wall. Rowan stood up, not bothering to brush off his now filthy suit. To be fair, his uncle didn’t seem to be concerned about most other decorum, either.

“So you’ve been to this space before,” Beck said.

His uncle nodded. “Many of the areas we’ve mapped connect to this world in some way. It’s not surprising we came upon this place. Sometimes it feels like all roads in the Reverie lead here.”

Rowan ignored the strange room layout and went straight to the door, opening it. Patch scrambled up Beck as he followed him out into a long corridor. He looked to the side and his vision was caught, trying to decipher the pattern down the hall. In the dim yellow light of the sconces he saw there were lines running diagonally from each corner of the ceiling and floor, meeting at a fuzzy, indistinct place in the center. It took a few seconds for his brain to reframe what he was seeing to the reality of the space; it wasn’t a pattern on the far wall, the lines were the edges of the hallway as it stretched endlessly into the distance. The pale grain in the middle was where the fog encroached, what could have been miles away.

He felt Patch butt the back of his neck again, causing him to unfreeze. Given the doors that lined the corridor and the sheer vastness of it, Beck could understand how so many other in-betweens were connected to this place. While he had been caught in his daze, his uncle had begun walking in the opposite direction from him. He jogged to catch up.

Following his uncle’s lead, he glanced over at the other doors they passed. Each had a plate with the room number on it. They were all several figures long, which didn’t help give Beck any reference to where they were in this building. As they continued on, one of the numbers on a door caught his attention. The character wasn’t an Arabic numeral, although it looked like a backwards seven with a serif on the bottom. Blinking, he more carefully examined the other numbers. On a passing glance they appeared normal, but on closer inspection all of the numerals were off; the lines crossed and looped in ways that only imitated known symbols. Beck figured this was another aspect that the Reverie had “confused.”

He was so focused on the figures that it came as a surprise when another hallway opened up perpendicular to them instead of another door. His uncle was already going down the new hallway, and Beck gratefully followed after. Not only was it a departure from the mind-numbing corridor they had been traveling, but he also saw the far wall down this one. This hallway had an end.

There were more doors on either side, but when they reached the far side of the hallway it opened into a stairwell. Relieved to be somewhere he could gauge their position, Beck leaned over the railing to see how far up they were.

He immediately regretted doing so. Looking down was like staring into infinity. If there was a ground floor, it was so far away as to be beyond sight. Vertigo overtook him, and it took a considerable amount of willpower to push away from the side of the stairs instead of succumbing and toppling over the edge.

Beck slumped down against the wall with his head still spinning. “How many floors does this building have?” he gasped.

“I don’t even know if we can guess,” Rowan said. “One time I had Fielding try and reach the top of the tenements, but after a day of climbing he called it quits.”

He looked at his uncle with big eyes. It wasn’t only the scale that made him uncomfortable; His mind struggled with the idea of being inside the Reverie for that long.

“Master Beckham, if you please,” Patch said from behind.

Beck realized he was squishing the velour against the wall he was leaning against. “Sorry,” he mumbled in apology as he got to his feet. “How do we even begin to explore this place?”

Before his uncle could reply, a faint sound drifted up from the chasm-like stairwell. It was the distant sound of footsteps. As they echoed up the shaft, it became difficult to pinpoint how far away the source was. It could have been a hundred feet or miles.

“Are there other members of your company exploring here?” he asked quietly.

Rowan stared ahead silently for several seconds. “We should head back.”

They hurried to the never-ending corridor and down the way that they had come. When they passed a door that looked like all of the other ones, Patch said, “This is where we entered.”

“Good, good.” Rowan looked intensely towards the direction of the stairway. Beck strained his ears, but didn’t hear anything now besides the soft buzzing of the sconces.

“Now, your task for tonight,” his uncle continued. “We do need to start mapping this section of the tenement. Looking through the rooms near the entrance back to the woods is as good a place as any to begin.”

“Mapping to discover any other adjoining in-betweens, to find a path to this Midwich place,” I said.

“Of course.”

“So, how would I even keep track of all that I’ve seen?”

“I’ll be doing that for you,” Patch said. “Understanding the landscape of the Reverie is natural to us velours.”

“What if I wander off too far and can’t find my way back?”

His uncle pointed at Patch.

“And what if —” He trailed off as he turned in the direction of the stairwell.

Once again his uncle pointed at Patch. “You shouldn’t have any troubles tonight, but God forbid you do, you’ll be in good hands.”

“You’re leaving me here,” Beck said flatly.

“I don’t see any reason why I need to stay, you’ve proven yourself more than capable tonight,” Rowan said. He opened the door that led back to the glen. “Besides, I have other duties that I must attend to. I enjoy exploring the Reverie as much as anyone, but don’t have the time for it.”

Beck raised an eyebrow. “Alright, but when should I return back to the waking world?”

He thought for certain his uncle was going to gesture to Patch again, but instead replied, “We’ll give you a call.”