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By Robin D. Laws A tale of Dreamscape Part of Cathedral of Thorns


Kendra Vale hadn't yet realized she was dreaming. It was the slow accumulation of details that would do it, but for the moment everything around her seemed right and real. She and her younger sister, Emily, were sitting in a café, chatting away. A foamy bowl of latte sat on the table in front of her, wafting out the aromas of coffee and steamed milk. She noted the spots of raspberry vinaigrette on the tines of her fork, which sat in the middle of a cool white plate. They seemed beautiful, and strangely purposeful, like a coded message left only for her. This was a weird observation to make, but, in and of itself, did not tip Kendra to the true nature of the experience.

She and Emily were talking about their jobs, as usual. They both loved their jobs with an enthused ferocity other people found off-putting. Only when they were alone together could they really get into it, without being teased for their full-throated overachieverness. Kendra laughed from the sheer self-indulgent pleasure of it, a deep bubble of joy that gathered in her throat and burst up through her full, immaculately glossed lips. It had been too long since she and Em had gotten together for a full-on update. It was their lot in life: Their career obsessions got in the way of getting together to talk about their career obsessions.

Emily had that gleam in her eye, the shining huntress look that took her when she had a prize story in her sights. "It's going to be a huge feature," she said, gesticulating with long, pale hands. She'd cut her hair short since the last time Kendra had seen her, with bangs on top and a taper down the back of the neck. A cute look for her.

"Cover story?" Kendra asked.

Emily laughed. "Do you even read magazines? It's all movie stars on the covers. But I'll get a header in thirty point type, with byline, right next to Naomi Watts' face. Or Paris Hilton or Jimmy McCracken or whoever."

"Thank god for movie stars, our only haven of sanity in a crazy world," said Kendra. Instinctively she looked around the café for a TV set running headline news. You couldn't look away for more than half an hour these days, unless you wanted to miss the latest catastrophe. If you didn't know the mournful details, you seemed hopelessly detached and callous. "You're not in any danger, going to interview this guy?"

Emily absently dinged the side of her coffee bowl with a gleaming stir-spoon. "I hope so, otherwise I'll be stuck for a lead."

The café's ambient noise became suddenly muffled. It occurred to Kendra that no music was playing, which was odd. Also the layout of the place, on careful consideration, seemed peculiar. The front part of the place, over Emily's shoulder, jutted right out into the street, as if the proprietors had enclosed their patio over the entire sidewalk. Pedestrians had to step out into the street to get around, snarling up traffic. Kendra was aware of the indignant honk of multiple car horns, but without hearing them, exactly.

"What about you?" Emily asked.

"I've had to ease back on the case work, which hurts because wrongful arrests are up something like forty percent since 2008. Which makes my duties on the reform commission all the more important. Gotta tackle the macro problem, or the little guy's gonna keep getting his head chopped off. " Time stopped. There were salt and pepper shakers on the table, which she hadn't noticed before. They were ceramic figures, shaped like anthropomorphic wolves. The shakers stared nobly ahead, as if on the watch for danger looming atop a distant ridge.

"You were saying?" said Emily.

"Your glasses," said Kendra.

"What about them?"

"They're different."

"Yeah, do you like 'em?"

Kendra did like them. They were a hip variation on the classic cat's eye shape, with a swirling curve of teal-colored metal along the crossbar. But that wasn't the point. "No, I mean different from a minute ago." Kendra concentrated hard, focusing on a detail that was eluding her. "A minute ago, you were wearing your old glasses. Your really old glasses. Those incredibly huge ones with the clear plastic frames. From high school."

Emily laughed. "You're nuts. Why would I be wearing those?"

Kendra checked the table again. The wolves were gone. Stacks of soiled breakfast plates, spattered in the remains of food they hadn't ordered or eaten, lay strewn across the calico tablecloth.

"I should have known! We're dreaming, Emily." This happened to her all the time, though not so much as when she was a kid. Lucid dreaming, they called it. Sometimes she could change the circumstances of her dream. More often she was merely aware she was asleep, and her surroundings, imaginary.

"What do you mean, we?" Emily had adopted her interrogative, reportorial demeanor. Kendra didn't care for it; it reminded her too much of the smug junior prosecutors she tussled with five days a week. "Assuming you're right," Emily continued, "only one of us can be dreaming. Either you're dreaming me, or I'm dreaming you."

The flying mallards on the café wallpaper, which Kendra had not noticed until now, took flight and, quacking furiously, assembled into a V and veered out the door. Their abrupt departure aroused little reaction among the restaurant's huddled patrons.

"No, I bet you're in Idaho or wherever --"

"California," Emily corrected.

"You're in California, I'm in New York, and we're meeting in dream. Just like when we were little."

Emily thrust a tiny tape recorder at her. "That never happened. You claim it did, but I don't remember it."

Kendra smiled. "That's what we in the legal profession call an opening. There's a mile of difference between didn't happen and don't remember."

The counter was suddenly miles away, the café emptied of other patrons. A low rumbling shook the floor. A salt shaker -- the standard glass kind with the tin top -- jittered off the table and fell to its death on the moss-covered rocks below.

Emily grabbed Kendra's wrist. "Something's coming."

"I'll protect you." Kendra opened her purse to look for . . . to look for what? A weapon, perhaps? She had nothing in there any deadlier than a nail file. But if this was a dream, maybe she could will something to appear.

They heard the guttural screaming before the walls flew open. Exploding cinderblocks showered through the dissolving café, thudding all around them, crushing tables and splintering chairs.

A stout, inhuman figure blundered through the hole it had pounded in the wall, hissing and shrilling. It crouched, surveying the café with three blazing orange eyes. They shone out from a wrinkled, ovoid face, pulled taut by massive, open jaws. Mucus and saliva dripped from an array of needle-sharp teeth. Veins and muscles popped and slid beneath its slick, buff-colored hide. With thick fingers it reached down to grab a piece of cinderblock, crushing it to dust. It loped like a quadruped through the hole in the wall, giving Kendra a better look at the bizarre appendages rising from its back and shoulders. They resembled a quartet of intertwining snakes, each terminating in a beaked head, surmounted by three spiky flanges of triangular bone.

"Tell me I'm dreaming," whispered Emily.

"You're dreaming," said Kendra.

They sat still in their chairs, absurdly hoping to avoid its gaze. The café floor was bigger now, and they were alone in it. There had been no stampede for the exits; the other patrons were simply missing.

The ogrelike creature looked at Emily, producing a wet, broken noise in the back of its throat that might have been the word you.

Kendra grabbed for a butter knife and held it clamped in white, trembling fingers. It was an absurd gesture but she couldn't let go of it.

A cruel crocodilian smile slid across the creature's sinister features. "Emily Vale," it said, clearly this time.

If this was a dream, Kendra could wake up from it. She tried to close her eyes, but they refused to obey her command. Kendra repeated a subvocal mantra: It's a bad dream, it's a bad dream, it's a bad dream.

Emily looked pleadingly at her elder sister. It was plain what she was thinking: Don't leave me here.

The creature bounded toward them.

Kendra smacked her paralyzed legs, willing them into action. She wrenched herself out of her chair, skidding backward across an uneven expanse of rock. Pain shot up through her arms as she landed on the heels of her palms. Dirt and flecks of lichen flew from her as she leapt up, seizing her toppled chair.

The creature charged at Emily, who was still stuck in her seat. Kendra smacked the chair down onto the creature's back. Its dorsal snakes snapped and hissed at her as the chair splintered into fragments. The creature turned its bestial face toward Kendra, snorted, and backhanded her into the coffee bar. For a moment, she felt nothing. She hunched her shoulders to protect herself from a rain of syrup bottles. As they fell, the jolting impact of her collision with the counter registered in her bones and in the sockets of her teeth.

Emily howled in terror as the creature encircled her in its muscle-bound arms. She called Kendra's name. The creature bounded through the café window, which conveniently dissolved as it passed through. Kendra tried to follow but her feet were like cement.

She fought to free herself from tangled bed sheets. Kendra launched herself from her mattress, barefoot, onto the cold hardwood floor of her New York apartment. Her hands were drawn into fists, ready to pound on the monster. The distant whisper of traffic noise on the street below brought her back to reality. Her alarm clock's blue digital letters read 4:35.

She sank back onto the mattress, running her hand through sweat-soaked hair. Man, that had been one vivid dream. It was like she could still smell the espresso shots from the imaginary café, and also the moss from its rocky floor.

After a quick slipper search, she padded down the hallway to the bathroom. She surveyed her face in its unforgiving light. The Kendra in the mirror stared back at her with the stunned pallor of a catastrophe survivor.

On the way back to her bedroom, she'd pass the side table where she kept her keys and cell phone. She promised herself she would not pick up the phone and bug Emily just because she'd had a bad dream. Even if it was a freakishly vivid one. Most dreams faded after a few minutes of wakefulness, but this one she still felt in her muscle memory. She rubbed her palms, as if she'd really hurt them in a fall.

Kendra stopped at the side table. She did the math. If Em really was out in California, it would be 1:35 AM her time. Still too late to call on account of a freaky dream. If her sister was still in NYC, which was probably the case, calling would come off as even nuttier. Kendra snatched up the phone, hit the memory key, and paged through to highlight Emily's number.

"What the heck am I doing?" she asked herself. Speaking aloud finally broke the spell. She was about to set the phone down when she saw that she had a voice mail waiting. Shrugging, she performed the key sequence to call it up.

It was her mother's voice.

"Kendra, dear? Are you there? Can you pick up the phone? I hate this horrible voice mail system of yours. Kendra, call me at the lake house. You'll tell me I'm just worrying. As always. But Kendra -- Kendra, I can't reach your sister. Emily is missing."

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