Usually when I stepped into someone’s dreams just after they’d fallen asleep, I didn’t arrive in an active dream so much as in a place of significance in their subconscious: a proto-dream of sorts. The kind of place they’d have recurring dreams about. As a lucid dreamer, I didn’t have true recurring dreams—deliberately conjuring dreams of my favourite places didn’t count. But I was familiar with the concept. Jen had told me that, usually, those dreams she remembered contained elements of her family home. Brad often dreamed of his grandparents’ house, where he’d spent a lot of time as a child.
That was why, when I appeared in a brightly lit department store, I raised my eyebrows. Huh. First job, maybe? I stood in an aisle full of bags of confectionary: liquorice sticks, mixed lollies, chocolate drops. But everything was slightly off. When I focused on a rustling purple and yellow packet, trying to make out the brand name, the logo slid away from my gaze as if it didn’t want to be nailed down. Price tags were illegible: smeared or written in gibberish characters. And when I looked between the packages I didn’t see a backboard filled with mounting holes but sheer, impenetrable darkness.
The darkness gaped back at me.
With goosebumps shivering along the length of my forearms, I took a moment to prepare myself, sparing a thought and a shred of energy to conjure a set of trusty motorcycle leathers. I didn’t have any such thing in the real world, but in dreams I’d found they served quite well as armour against the barbs on a blight’s tentacles. A clear-faced, round helmet made me feel like an idiot but protected my eyes. I didn’t know for certain that there was a blight here, but something was definitely not right. Even if it was just a creepy manifestation of Daniel’s subconscious—even if he was indeed going crazy—it paid to be careful. Ephemera could still have teeth.
I crept towards the end of the aisle, leather squeaking faintly as I listened for the telltale bubbling hiss of a blight. Peering past a stand of round-bellied plastic animals stuffed with jellybeans, I saw a row of unattended registers to my left. To my right, clothes swayed in a breeze I couldn’t feel. In front of me was the store’s main entrance: the roller shutter was down, allowing only a vague impression of a darkened mall beyond.
Deserted apartment stores were bloody creepy. Even ones with the lights on. Still, this didn’t look like a place a blight had trashed. Brad’s had shredded the surface of his dream, tearing holes in walls and coating everything with a mess that would do a slimy Ghostbusters spectre proud. This store was creepy, sure, but trashed? No.
Like my thought made it happen, a corner of the store went dark as one fluorescent light, then another, went out with a pop and a tinkle of glass on tile. “What the…?” I whispered, looking up.
That was when I spotted the blight.
It hung upside down from the ceiling, somewhere above the menswear section, like a deranged bat a few feet wide and made of smog. Its tentacles were jammed deep into the rectangular ceiling tiles; the tiles themselves were slick with an oily coating of blight ichor that dripped downwards, spattering across a garish display of novelty ties that hurt my eyes.
“Gross,” I said, my voice somewhat muffled behind the helmet’s faceplate. The blight turned, rotating slowly until its stained yellow eyes glared down at me.
“Oneeiiiiroi,” the creature hissed.
“I was talking about those ties, but you’re gross too. You look like an evil Christmas ornament up there, you know.” I gathered power around my hands, threads of blue-white lightning encircling my wrists and licking down my fingers. The fine hairs on the back of my hands stood on end, tickling until I had to resist the urge to scratch them. I forced my back straight and my shoulders square so the blight wouldn’t see my energy flagging, draining into the lightning.
With a shriek so high it hurt my ears, the blight yanked downwards, its tentacles tearing ceiling tiles free to smash to the floor. One tile, three, five. Then dozens. Tiles shattered around me and jellybeans scattered like marbles. Fluorescent lights exploded, plunging the store into gloom. By the glow of my lightning charge, I darted towards a service desk, diving under the counter hatch. Huddling in my leathers and helmet, I barely fit.
I stared at the rain of tile fragments as it slowed, and then stopped. Each was coated on one side with blight ichor, as if the entire ceiling cavity had been filled with the blight’s contamination.
This blight hadn’t destroyed the surface of the dream. It had rotted its very bones.
I couldn’t see more than a dozen feet in front of me. The light curling around my hands wavered and danced. Maintaining it was eroding my reserves of energy. Normally if I ran out, I’d be thrown out of a person’s dream and into a deep sleep of my own, where I could recover. No big deal. With a blight on the prowl, though? I shuddered.
Breathing as quietly as I could, I tried to hear the blight over the distant tinkle and crash of merchandise tumbling to the ground. But it was futile. The creature could float. Unless it spoke, I wouldn’t hear it until it was on top of me.
I couldn’t stay here. At least, if I saw it coming, I could fight it.
Gritting my teeth, I stood, shouldering the hatch up. It flipped over, slamming against the counter. I flung my hands into the air, shooting the stored lightning towards what was left of the ceiling, willing the roof to catch fire. The bolt exploded against something above me with a sizzling, spitting sound like bacon in a frying pan. I stared upwards, mouth falling open.
Hidden beneath the tiles had been a second ceiling, a mass of flesh and writhing tentacles that glistened wetly. Tongues of fire ignited by my strike curled among them, cooking them. I tasted acid as bile rose in my throat.
Wailing, the blight descended on me like an asteroid on a hapless dinosaur. I leapt to the side, smashing my hip against the counter, and held my hands out in front of me to protect myself from the lashing tentacles. They snared around the leather sheathing my forearms, winding tight as the creature attempted to yank me off balance. I braced myself, knees bent to lower my centre of gravity. Still, my boots skidded on the tiles, dragging me centimetre by centimetre closer to the creature’s volcanic maw.
I yanked my arms backward and one pulled free, a few broken tentacles still embedded in the leather. They twitched spasmodically. I glanced around, looking for a weapon. A toppled stand of DVDs was just out of reach—but, even if it weren’t, the corrugated cardboard was too flimsy to be of use. Nothing else was close.
Taking a deep breath, I hauled backwards, reeling the blight in towards me by the tentacles still wrapped around my left arm. The leather tore, and barbs bit into my skin. Pain flared. I imagined a long-bladed dagger, wickedly sharp, into my other hand. My strength flagged. I couldn’t keep this up for much longer.
Bracing the dagger’s hilt against my torso, I gave one final yank on the tentacles, pulling the blight’s roiling, gaseous body onto the glittering steel. The cloud’s smoky surface gave and, as my hand reached the edge of the cloud, the blade bit into something more solid underneath.
I sent a blast of energy from my hand, through the dagger, and into the creature. Behind me, ghostly wings flared, throwing my shadow to the ground before me.
For one long moment, the blight and I stared at each other as the power grew inside its core. Its eyes were bright with hatred … hatred that morphed into terror as it realised what I had done. The roiling flickers of light in the cloud grew brighter. Frenetic.
I turned my face away just as the creature exploded.
The blast knocked me back, shoving me into the counter again. I rolled over the top. My helmet cracked against something as I fell, its plastic exterior shattering like an egg but protecting my skull. I didn’t feel particularly lucky, though. Blood pooled beneath me, flowing from the slash in my throbbing arm, and my ears rung from the blight’s final screech. I ached all over, and if my leathers had been real they’d be beyond saving, covered in gore and scorched by flame. But it was done. I yanked the helmet off and ran a hand through my hair, feeling the tender spot on my head with a wince. The helmet was a mess. Lucky this is just a dream, or I’d have a huge egg tomorrow.
The sound of a second blight’s hiss turned my blood to ice in my veins.
I whipped my head up to look over the counter, swallowing bile as a wave of dizziness washed over me. The second blight was smaller, barely the size of a football as it scooted towards me from the appliance section. A baby. Its tentacles had yet to develop barbs, instead being covered with fine, prickly hairs. I could easily beat it if I weren’t already battered and weary.
It took almost all my remaining energy to blast it from the air, leaving a steaming, blobby corpse. The dregs of power I had left were all that kept me tethered to Daniel’s dream. No more changing the dreamscape for me.
When I heard a third blight, and a fourth, I bit back a sob. What’s happening? Above me, the roiling mass in the ceiling burbled a laugh. The realisation hit me like a blow, and I gasped. It was a breeder blight. Not as well developed as the one in Brad’s grandfather. Not as strong. Maybe a juvenile itself. But it was still able to produce baby blights. The flames I’d cast into it were flickering and dying, doused by its slime, and I couldn’t make any more.
I struggled against despair as my boots crunched in tile shards, sticky jellybeans and a viscous grey substance I didn’t want to examine too closely. The breeder blight might be young, but it was still stronger than me. The two new blights shot towards me, tentacles whipping around underneath them like those of a jellyfish. Above, the breeder blight didn’t seem able to move, but an expanding pustule on its belly contained flickers of lightning. Yet another blight, almost ready to tear free of its revolting parent.
I couldn’t win this fight. If I fled into my own consciousness, would the blights follow me? I realised with a sickening certainty that they would
“Melaina! Over here!”