To Fight the Black Wind

Chapter 13

Returning to reality—to Earth, to my office—was both a blessing and a curse. While I knew that I did not know my home at all, I have never been more glad to see familiar surroundings. I thought I was done, free of that place and its frightening truths. I was wrong.

I struggled to a seated position and looked around. The clock on the wall lied to me. No more than fifteen minutes had passed. I couldn’t believe it. We’d been in the Dreamlands for hours. I turned from it and reached a hand to Josephine. “Please, God in Heaven, please. Be all right. Be well. Please.”

I shook her knee. There was no response. My stomach dropped to the floor. I shook her knee harder before my fingers found her wrist and sought her pulse. It was there. Slow and steady. I wanted to cry. She wasn’t dead.

It had been a dream after all. I was home. All was going to be well again.

Josephine’s eyes fluttered open. She looked around in a panic. She focused in on me, her eyes burning with loss and anger. “I died and you left me.” Her voice was soft and intense as she sat up. “I—died.”

I moved away, recognizing the high emotion. “It was a dream…our session…the hypnotherapy. It wasn’t real. I’m still here.”

“Of course it was real.” She stood with slow decorum; a woman using every ounce of will not to scream. She covered her face with her hands. “Did you learn nothing during our time in the Dreamlands? It was a real dream. A living, real dream, and I died.” She pulled her hands down so they only covered her mouth. A gesture of anguish.

Agony tore at my heart. I should have done something, but I hadn’t been able to. I reached a hand to her. “It was a dream. It wasn’t real. You’re here. Alive.”

She turned her back to me. “You do not understand. You could never understand. I can never go back. The stairs are closed to me. I am exiled from my home, my dreaming home.”

I moved forward to put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “You will dream. You will still dream.”

Josephine whirled, and with a strength born of grief she struck me across the face. I tumbled backward, falling over the low table. Stunned, I lay on the floor, aching from my hard fall. Something within an inner jacket pocket jabbed my breast. As I gathered my senses, Josephine ripped at her dress.

“If it was just a dream, if I am barred from my Dreamlands home, why am I still marked? Why does His mark still burn my breast?”

I saw her upper chest revealed. Upon it were the glowing, writhing, gold marks, beautiful and terrible against her beige skin. If I kept looking, one of those tentacles would move and reveal the eye of the Black Wind…in this world.

My world.

The real world. I refused to see. I turned my face away, ashamed at my cowardice.

“Why can I feel him looking through me? With my way to the Dreamlands barred, why does His mark still burn my soul?” Josephine flung her arms wide in supplication. “Why do I feel this power within, searching for a way out? Why can I do this?”

For a moment, she posed as if martyred. I stood, something metallic falling from my pocket. I thought to chide her for her dramatics—despite the glowing mark upon her breast—but stopped. The wall nearest her left hand began to warp and melt. I had to remind myself we were no longer in the Dreamlands. Such things did not happen here. “Josephine!” I pointed to the wall. “What’s happening?”

My patient turned to the warping wall and tilted her head. It was as if someone had taken a picture of the wall, put it on fabric, and was winding that fabric up from the middle. My bookcase, and all its books, twisted and turned but did not fall from the wall nor the shelf. It was as if they no longer existed in this world. “Josephine, are you doing that?”

Her voice came slow and thoughtful. “Yes. I believe I am. I don’t know how. I did not have this power before.” Even as she spoke, the glow from her chest intensified. She smiled, wide and mad. “I understand now what happened to me.”

I backed away and found myself behind my desk, as far away from the warped reality of my office wall as I could be. With trembling hands, I unlocked the desk and sought my father’s gun. I almost collapsed to my knees as I found its cool, solid, metal form. I hadn’t lost it in the real world. It was here. What was happening before me was an impossibility. And yet…“What do you understand?” I left the gun in the unlocked drawer—available but not yet at the ready.

“Why I needed to die in the Dreamlands. What my family’s pact with the Black Wind is.” Josephine reached a hand toward the swirl in reality and tapped it with a single, elegant fingertip. A tiny hole appeared. It did not reveal the office on the other side of the wall. Instead, a faint eldritch light flickered through the small tear in reality.

“Tell me, Josephine. I need to know.” I couldn’t take my eyes from the hole that looked onto another place and time. The edges of reality shimmered and undulated in a rainbow of colors that reminded me of what I saw as I was pulled into the Dreamlands.

Josephine turned to look at me with three eyes—hers and the Black Wind’s. I froze, pinned like prey in bright light. “I have not lost the Dreamlands. I can journey there again at my whim.” Pleasure traveled through her words and over her face. “I have not lost my second home.”

Behind her, the gate between worlds widened. Through it, I could see movement. Creatures I recognized—and ones I could not. My mind slid off of these other abominations, refusing to give name to their forms. “You can open a way. You have become one of those meeting points.”

“Yes.”

“Can you close a gate once you’ve opened it?”

She blinked at me as if I had said the most absurd thing in the world. “Close the gate? Why would I want to close the gate? This is the power I’m meant to have.” A manic joy that bordered on madness danced in her eyes.

I realized I wasn’t speaking just to Josephine anymore. I had to reach through the thing influencing her to find her core. I pointed to the hole in reality. “If you can go through, back into the Dreamlands, they can come here. Isn’t that so?”

Josephine whirled about and stared through the porthole-sized opening at the oncoming mass of monsters. “That cannot be. They do not belong here. This is my world. They are not welcome. I will not have it!” The glow upon her chest diminished in her outrage.

“Then I suggest you close the way.” I sounded far calmer than I felt.

She looked down at her chest, at the mark of the Black Wind. When she looked at me again, her eyes cleared from madness to fear. “He is inside me. The Black Wind is doing this.”

“Then stop him.” I used a tone of command with no expectation of failure.

Josephine furrowed her brow and reached a hand toward the tear. She shook her head. “How? I don’t know how. Help me.”

“How would you have done it in the Dreamlands?”

“We aren’t in the Dreamlands.”

I pointed to the widening hole in reality with the minions of the Black Wind running ever closer. “We are. Partly. Use what you know. Use what you’ve always used. Fight him.”

Josephine turned back to the window-sized gate and held out her hands. She brought her hands together closer. The gate halted its opening. “It works!” Her triumph was short-lived. The mark upon her breast flared and she fell to her knees with a cry of pain.

I rushed to her side and helped her up. The eye of the Black Wind focused on me, glaring, and I felt my soul quake. I was nothing before its glare. It was hungry and I was food. I would be the first consumed when the Outer God’s minions arrived.

“It…He is fighting me.” Josephine bowed her head.

“All your life, you’ve learned to fight, to evade, to escape the Black Wind. Use what you know. I believe in you.” As I spoke, the first howls and jeers of the bandits came through the portal. I needed to help as much as I could. If Josephine could at least keep the gate from opening any wider, we would have a good choke point. It would be the Battle of Thermopylae. Hopefully with a better ending.

I squeezed her shoulders. “You know what to do. Fight him. Fight the Black Wind. Close the portal.” I stepped back and left her to do what she could while I went for my father’s gun. It was not much, but it was something.

A glint of metal from the floor stopped my steps. I had not lost my father’s gun to the chasm, but I had returned to this world with another weapon—one I had chosen to carry. A weapon that could help close the gate.

It could also kill Josephine in the process.

I picked up the scroll case. In this reality it was as long as my palm and twice as thick as my thumb. The end cap came off in my hand as if eager to help. The rolled tube of paper was stiff with rough edges. I could still see pieces of the plant fibers that made the paper. It reminded me of papyrus, but every instinct I had screamed that the paper was not of this world.

I unrolled it with careful fingers. Swirling glyphs filled my mind. I don’t know how, but I understood what they said. Not the exact words. Only their true intent. I could not grasp it in whole. I understood the concepts. I understood that I could use this spell—for that was what it was—to close and seal this breach between our worlds.

I also understood that it might harm, even kill, Josephine. I looked at her back as she struggled with the tear she’d created. It was smaller, yes, but she would not close it in time. If she died, I didn’t know what would happen to the gate. My heart feared for her. The bandits might use their ranged weapons to repeat what had happened in the Dreamlands and murder her in the name of their otherworldly god.

And yet, if I used the spell, it might tear her asunder. It was a choice. A choice only I could make. I couldn’t ask her if she would sacrifice herself. Could I? Saving the world from the chaos of the Dreamlands might require a sacrifice. Was there really a choice?

Two things answered my unspoken question at the same time. First, a cyclopean abomination appeared upon the horizon so large I could not find anything to compare it to. It stared at me with its writhing tentacles playing over each other as it moved with impossible speed. Second, Josephine cried out, horror plain in her exhausted voice. “He comes! Doctor, help me!”

I straightened and chose the only path I could. “I have the Elder Sign. I’ll use it.”

Josephine did not answer. She focused on making the portal smaller, but she only managed to keep it the same size, her body trembling with the effort.

If my patient died, her blood was on my hands.

So be it.

I raised the scroll and began to read in that impossible language. Line by line. After the first sentence, Josephine straightened, a strength flowing into her posture. After the second sentence, she echoed my words. After the third, she echoed my words and drew glowing glyphs, clockwise, in front of the portal, ending with a pentagram to seal it.

With each line of the spell and Josephine’s echoed response, the portal grew smaller. The abominations on the other side of the breach howled their fury. As did the Black Wind. With eldritch might, the Outer God tried to suck Josephine through the portal before it closed, heedless of the damage it would do to her mortal body. A foul wind pulled books and papers from the shelves and my desk. They clattered, fluttered, and thumped to the floor in an unholy cacophony of sound.

I found myself holding Josephine by the waist with one arm and the tatters of the Elder Sign spell in the other hand as we finished closing and sealing the gate together. We yelled the last line, struggling against the grasping wind and the noise that threatened to burst our eardrums.

Then there was nothing.