Moon Dreams (The Jeremy Moon Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  A doorway and a guard, evidently. The wall seemed suddenly to loom overhead, the height of a skyscraper, featureless and gray. And set in the wall, dead ahead, perhaps only a hundred yards or so distant, was a man-sized aperture, with a figure visible within it. Setting his jaw, Moon made directly for the opening.

  It grew larger, swelled into an oval perhaps seven feet high and, at its widest, three broad. The figure inside waited patiently, not budging as Moon approached. It was a man, bearded, wearing a faded purple robe—as Moon came nearer, he could see that the garment once had been quilted and brocaded but now showed considerable wear, its quilting gone loose and baggy, the brocade threadbare and dull. Moon was, for the first time, aware of his own attire, the ridiculous red pajamas that Cassie had given him. That was all; he wore no shoes. The ground under his feet didn't feel like soil, but was rubbery and pliable, soft enough almost to allow him to grip it with his toes. He halted a step away from the stranger. “I'm here,” he said.

  “You want this to end,” the other replied, his voice hollow and distant, as if coming through a long tube.

  “I wish it would.”

  “You can end it, you know.”

  Moon frowned. “I've seen you before.”

  “Yes. In the mirror.”

  “You're me?”

  “In a manner of speaking. Look, you won't stay asleep forever. Do you want to end this thing now, or not?”

  Moon did not at first reply. The other man did look like him. The two had the same dark brown hair, the same brown eyes, the same lines of forehead and cheek. But Moon had never, not even in his student days at the university, worn a beard, and the other had a luxuriant growth, chest-long, curled a little at the ends. “I've dreamed about you before,” Moon said at last.

  “I know. I've been trying to make contact for some time now. It's very difficult, not knowing the times of exaltation, you see. I had only a rough idea of the best cusps of temporality for the attempt. Still, I think I did pretty well, all things considered. Now, do you want to stop these dreams or don't you?”

  “How do I do that?”

  “Just come through the door here. That's all. Let me cross over to your side, and you take my place.” When Moon hesitated, the stranger said, “It can be done. I've made all the calculations, and it can be done with practically anyone. But the only way to make sure it lasts is to exchange those who have sympaths on the other planes, you see.”

  “I don't understand.”

  “You don't have to. Just come through the door, that's all.”

  “And the dreams will end?”

  The other smiled, teeth white in the brown beard. “You'll never be troubled by your own nightmares again, I assure you.”

  Irresolute, Moon turned away. He stood at the base of the enormous wall, and on every other side of him, as far as he could see, gray desolation stretched. After a complete circuit he faced the stranger again.

  “Come on,” the figure in the purple robe urged. “After all, it can't hurt you, can it? This is just a dream.”

  “That's right,” Jeremy said, though somewhere far-off a warning bell jangled in the mind of Moon the observer. “What the hell.” He stepped forward.

  For just a moment there was a curious sensation of going in two directions at once, of oozing simultaneously forward and back; and then he was through. He turned. The purple-robed man now stood on the other side of the oval. “Good,” the other man said. “Excellent.”

  “And now my nightmares are over?” Moon asked skeptically.

  “Yours are.” The other grinned. “Before I go, one word of caution: beware of the storms. They can really kill you. Oh, and another thing: Tremien may look in on you now and again. Give him my best.”

  “I don't understand,” Moon repeated in a plaintive voice.

  “You don't need to. Good luck.” He grasped the edges of his side of the oval, tugged—and the entire wall poured into a point at the oval's center, faded to a drifting dot like the point of light left after a TV is switched off, and then disappeared.

  “Hell,” Moon said. He stood at the center of a flat, featureless gray plain—wall, door, and stranger had all vanished. Overhead, empty of sun or moon, was the luminescent gray sky, and at equal distance all around was the scarcely distinguishable flat line of the horizon. “I'm not walking any farther,” Moon announced to himself. Still grumping, he sat down on the yielding surface to wait for developments. Not at all to his surprise, after sitting there for what seemed like an hour, knees drawn up to his chest, boredom washing all around him, he nodded off and fell asleep.

  As strange as it is to have a dream in which you are sleeping, it is stranger still to have a dream in which you are dreaming, but that happened to Moon sometime after he dozed. With an unnatural clarity he dreamed that he was hungry and that he had ordered out for Chinese food. With supernatural efficiency the delivery boy was at the door before Moon had hung up the telephone, and—even more wonderful—he refused Moon's proffered cash. In the dream within his dream Moon had just transferred the aromatic goodies to his dining-room table when he woke up.

  For a second or two, Moon was disoriented and distressed. He lay on his side, almost in a fetal position, on a rubbery gray plain, with an opalescent gray sky luminous overhead. Then it came to him that he was still asleep, and had only awakened from the dream of a dream. With a grunt he pushed himself up on his left elbow.

  The garlic chicken still smelled delicious.

  Moon blinked at the improbable sight before him: four white cardboard cartons arranged at the corners of an invisible square, and in the center of the square a teapot and cup. His stomach growled.

  Investigation proved that the cartons contained garlic chicken (wonderful aroma!), fried rice with bits of egg gleaming yellow, two egg rolls, and a dozen fortune cookies. The tea steamed from the pot into the cup and had an agreeable snap when he tried it.

  “Should've dreamed of a fork,” Moon muttered to himself. But he had not even a pair of chopsticks. He munched the egg rolls and found them good as he considered the problem. Inspiration finally struck, and he carefully tore and folded the waxed cardboard carton the egg rolls had come in to form a sort of primitive spoon, not as good as a real utensil but serviceable. With it and with some help from his fingers, he ate his way through the chicken (marvelously tender!) and fried rice. All the time he was aware of the most profound silence: nothing, not even a breeze, stirred across the great leaden plain. His own swallows sounded loud in his ears, and his satisfied belch at the end of the meal almost made him jump, it was so thunderous.

  Only the fortune cookies were a disappointment. The slips of paper they bore were blanks, all of them. But Moon managed to eat the entire dozen and finish the last cupful of tea.

  That done, he rose and stretched. “Better than the nightmares,” he told himself. He tried to remember the last time he had felt so comfortably filled, so peacefully at home with the universe. It was beyond the reach of his recall, whenever it was. Now if only something would happen.

  After a timeless interval of waiting that was probably ten minutes, Moon struck out on a stroll of exploration. He left behind the litter of his meal, empty cartons, pewter teapot, delicate china cup, and that proved his only bearing. He took a hundred steps and looked back. Only the debris from his picnic broke the monotony of the gray plain. With a grunt Moon turned his back on it and started to walk. After a while, locked in boredom, he began to sing.

  He had gone through all the early Beatles, a considerable part of the Rolling Stones, and several Broadway musicals before he stopped to rest. “Wonder how long it's been?” he muttered aloud, to no response. If only he had his watch—but no, it was beside his sleeping body, on the bedside table back in his apartment. He tried to estimate how far he'd come but was stumped. It might have been a matter of miles. After a few minutes’ rest Moon trudged on again, going in the same direction as before. He launched the second stage of his march with “Me and Bobby McGee.”<
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  By the time he was riding on the City of New Orleans, Moon was almost ready to scream. He was about to change his mind about the benefits of dreaming this weird place over the nightmares; at least the nightmares gave him reference points and didn't threaten to drive him out of his mind through sheer inaction. Grimly he sang his way through the song, all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. While he was casting about for an encore, he became aware that finally he saw something different.

  It was far-off, to be sure, but it was a feature of sorts: a mesa-like projection on the horizon, darker than the landscape, almost purple against the luminescent sky. With bleak determination Moon strode toward it.

  The formation failed to gain solidity as he approached, but remained an amorphous, though growing, swirl of darker colors. It seemed to be the size of a circus tent. At least, as he approached, its shifting outlines appeared to stay roughly in that size frame. It was more like a coherent fog bank than anything else, though opaque; when he came close enough, Moon stopped, wondering if it was plastic or insubstantial. He swept a hand into the periphery of the area and felt nothing. Emboldened, he took a couple of steps forward and found himself actually inside the fog bank.

  It was a schoolroom, out-of-date and badly fraying at the edges. Old-fashioned desks, arrayed in strict and correct lines, bore faint carvings. At the front of the room (for Moon had stepped in from the rear, from what now appeared to be a solid wall of bookshelves), a tall man loomed large over a smaller, seated, cringing figure. Behind the man was a chalkboard, and on the chalkboard were the arcane hieroglyphics of some unimaginable mathematics problem.

  “You know what I do to little girls who don't turn in their homework,” the man at the front of the room said in a voice like a badly oiled hinge. “You know what must be done, Jean Louise.”

  “Yes, sir,” said a middle-aged lady in a flannel nightgown from where she sat in the front row. She cringed a little lower in the too-small seat. “Just don't tell my daddy, Mr. Guest.”

  Moon blinked. With each breath the teacher was visibly inflating, his shoulders rounding, his brow protruding more and more. Frothy saliva dripped from suddenly grown fangs and drooled down his chin. His hands, holding a ruler as if it were a baseball bat, knotted with muscle, became grossly hairy. “Get out of your seat, Jean Louise.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the woman. Timidly she slid from the desk and turned to lean against it. Now that she was facing him, Moon saw that she was about fifty, with rumpled gray hair and improbable plastic-framed spectacles. She started as she saw him. “Who the hell are you?” she demanded suddenly. Behind her, the terrible Mr. Guest simply froze in mid-motion, one frame of a movie seen as a still.

  “I'm Jeremy Moon,” he said, surprised into answering.

  “Why are you wearing red pajamas? They make you look like a tomato.”

  “Uh—they were a gift,” he said. “What's going on?”

  “What do you mean, what's going on?” The woman's voice was nasal and waspish. “Mr. Guest is about to spank me for not having my homework, that's what's going on. What are you doing here? You were never in this dream before. Do I know you?”

  Moon had suddenly noticed something that shocked him, momentarily at least, into silence. The entire picture, the whole classroom, was in black-and-white, indeed like an old movie: the desks, the books, the chalkboard, even Mr. Guest, all had a solid three-dimensional look about them but no color at all. Only he and the woman exhibited any hue.

  “Hurry up and answer me,” Jean Louise insisted. “I want to get this over with before I wake up.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She rolled her eyes, magnified behind the pink-rimmed spectacles. “Go away, will you?”

  “Wait a minute,” Moon said. He had the distinct impression of pressure, as though the woman were exerting a physical push against him, forcing him back. “Wait, I said! Why is everything in black and white?”

  “I never dream in color,” Jean Louise snapped.

  “What about my pajamas?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “That's right. They're red. How did that happen?” She backed away from him, her derriere gently swiveling the inert Mr. Guest aside as she did so. “You get away from me. This is scary.”

  “Perhaps,” grated Mr. Guest, “the young man needs to be punished.” He grinned, displaying teeth that had been filed to points, as he began to advance on Moon. The ruler, Moon saw now, was a ferrule made of steel, maybe an eighth of an inch thick and two inches broad. Mr. Guest whished it through the air and smacked it into his left palm with an explosive sound. “I think we need to teach this boy a lesson.”

  Jeremy gasped for air. As he retreated down the aisle, he shrank. Or the classroom—and Mr. Guest—grew. Moon was painfully aware of everything about him, of the smell of cleaning compound, of Scheaffer's Ink and chalk dust, of the hard, slick feel of the wood floor beneath his bare feet, and, at the end of the aisle, of the uncompromising press of the bookshelf against his shoulders. He could not back out the way he had entered. By now, Mr. Guest towered over him, the size of a bull walking erect, his eyes glowing a baleful orange, the gnarled hand brandishing the ruler more like a claw than anything human. “Turn around!” Guest bellowed, and the floor beneath Jeremy's feet vibrated.

  “Whip his ass!” shrieked Jean Louise from the front of the room. “Beat him!”

  Books tumbled off the shelves behind Jeremy. He caught one, a heavy textbook with the title of Human Development. With a surge of desperate strength he hurled it straight at Guest, catching the man square between the eyes.

  “Bad boy! Bad boy!” screamed Jean Louise. “Now you're gonna get it!”

  With a mindless roar Guest swept his arm back and arced the ruler. It slapped against Jeremy's upper left thigh, shockingly loud, and felled him like a lightning-blasted pine. He scrabbled under a desk, heard the steel ruler smash into the desktop, sending splinters flying, and tried to get to his feet on the far side. His throbbing leg wouldn't hold him. He crawled under another desk as Guest kicked aside the ruins of the first.

  “Get him, get him!” Jean Louise giggled.

  “Wait a minute,” Jeremy protested. “Wait!”

  But the behemoth was still coming. Jeremy had reached the wall and finally got to his feet there. He hobbled to the front of the room; Mr. Guest, now as big and implacable as Frankenstein's monster, lumbered after him. A flag stood beside the chalkboard, Old Glory, its black, white, and gray stars and stripes attached to a wooden staff that was supported by a knee-high wastepaper basket. The staff ended in a decorative sphere and cone, a stylized spear. Jeremy seized the flagstaff and fended off Guest with it.

  “Ooh!” squealed Jean Louise. “Now he's gonna kill you!”

  With all his strength Jeremy thrust the spear forward, striking Guest in the chest. The wooden staff splintered, and with a sweep of his arm, the monster knocked the flag aside. Jeremy, too late, realized that he was cornered. He sank to the floor, his back in the angle of the wall, knowing that Guest's next blow would surely kill him. The ponderous arm swept back and up, paused, and then began its descent—

  —the school bell rang—

  “Damn,” cried Jean Louise. “I'm waking up.”

  —the ruler whistled down upon him, and Jeremy felt—

  —a harsh, dry breeze across his face and cheek.

  He had been holding his breath. He let it out now and gasped in another. Guest was gone. Jean Louise had faded. The schoolroom was dissolving into a bruise-colored mist that dissipated even as Moon watched. The walls behind vanished into insubstantiality, dumping him backward onto the level gray plain. In a few minutes all traces of the experience had disappeared under the even gray glow from the sky.

  Except one. Moon unsnapped his pajama bottoms and shoved them down to his knees. There on his left thigh was the only remnant of the—dream?

  But dreams didn't leave bruises behind. Especially not bruises two inches wide, four inches long, and shaped like an old-fashione
d flat steel ruler.

  The injury seemed real to Jeremy, more real every minute as he limped painfully along across the featureless plain. That had never happened to him before, not even in his worst nightmares: he thought hard and decided that never before had he actually dreamed pain. But this hurt like the devil and made it necessary for him to rest more frequently.

  Twice more he slept, both times in brief dozes, but neither time did he dream within his dream. “This is getting alarming,” he told himself after waking the second time. “It's really about time I woke up.” He concentrated on waking up, to no avail.

  “That damn sleeping pill,” he decided at last. He had been sitting for some time, thinking about waking up, trying to make contact with the sleeping Jeremy back home in his bed. But it was no good. Just as he was about to get up and resume walking, the ground heaved beneath him and the lights went out.

  For a dazed moment Jeremy thought he was actually awake and back home, but then something familiar in the swirling dark colors around him broke through. “Oh, no,” he groaned, getting painfully to his feet. “Not Guest again!”

  No, not at all. He was in a forest, or at least a glade, with birches abounding and a blue sky overhead. The air had the cool caress of early spring, scented mildly with the green smell of fresh new leaves. Moon reached out and rubbed his palm against a tree. It was solid, smooth, cool, and real.

  Liquid laughter came from his left, from downhill, and he followed the sound. After a few steps he heard water, too, the gentle chuckle of a woodland stream. And after a moment he stepped into a clearing and saw—