To Fight the Black Wind

Chapter 5

I have never been one to refuse a challenge. To show weakness or uncertainty in front of my peers in college was to admit weakness—something I could not afford to do in that competitive world. This has served me well in my professional life. Unexpectedly, this stubbornness and unwillingness to acquiesce assisted me in my efforts to learn how to lucid dream. When faced with an impossible situation, I learned to accept what I saw and to seek out specific cues to my state of being—awake or asleep.

Josephine descended the stairs with a grace and surety born of familiarity. I descended at a slower pace, still thinking about how I got here. If I focused on that, I couldn’t focus on how high up we were and how small each step was. I was still within my office. But, somehow, I was also in a hypnotic state. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. Was I lucid dreaming? I tested this.

Looking down and to the left, I asked, “Am I awake?” I looked up and around. I was still upon the wooden stairs. I felt awake. I looked at my wristwatch. 3:11. I looked away and at it again. Still 3:11. In dreams, I had never been able to read my watch a second time. Ergo, I was awake. I looked at my blue skirt and thought, I should be wearing pants. I need pants for an adventure. Before my eyes, my skirt shimmered into pants. Rather than being startled, I relaxed. I was in a hypnotic dream state—both dreaming and awake. It accounted for the conflict of visual clues. My will was strong enough to control it if I could just remember the truth of the reality I was now in.

Movement caught my eye. The robed figures below crossed their weapons before Josephine. How had she gotten so far ahead of me? I promised to stay by her side. Heart racing, I descended the stairs faster than was comfortable, almost stumbling. A fall would be disastrous. There was nothing except an endless chasm below. Even as the robed figures straightened and allowed Josephine to pass, I wondered if it was this fall that made people on the edge of sleep jerk awake.

Pushing the thought away, I hurried down the stairs. “Josephine, wait…”

She paused, a beige-clad black woman on the other side of gold barred gates. “You have not been here before. You must show Nasht and Kaman-Thah that you are strong enough to survive the Seven Hundred Steps of Deeper Slumber.” Although she was far away, she didn’t yell. I could hear her as if she stood by my side.

“How?” I ran in an uneven gait toward them, keeping my eyes on the landing. I refused to look elsewhere.

“You will know.” Josephine turned her back to me and waited.

I slowed as I reached the guardians—for they could be nothing else. They were huge, at least twice as tall and twice as wide as a man. Up close, the robes were identical except for the color. Both had similar beards, but I couldn’t see their faces. The beards—brown, long, and evenly trimmed, hung to their chests. The hoods that obscured their faces stood irregular from their heads, as if they wore crowns beneath the fabric. They crossed their weapons, a halberd and a scythe, before the gate and remained silent.

I waited, keeping my own silence.

“Time is of the essence.” It was Josephine. The words were whispered in my ear even though she had not turned around.

Mustering my courage, I raised my chin. “I will pass. I have a job to do.”

In response, each guardian held out a closed fist. “Which hand revives the dead?” Although neither guardian spoke, the voice was all around me. Both robed figures opened their fists just long enough for me to see a crushed butterfly within before closing them again.

I bowed my head in thought. It was a test. One of mental fortitude. It was a trick as well. It had to be. Some part of my subconscious created this challenge to show me how difficult Josephine’s case would be and to prove to her that I was up to the challenge.

I concentrated and held out two closed fists as I raised my head. “These hands revive the dead.” With that, I opened my hands and released two butterflies—both very much alive.

The guardians, Nasht and Kaman-Thah, opened empty hands before they straightened their weapons and allowed me access to the gate. Holding my breath, I approached and pulled on the gold bars. The gates didn’t move. They seemed rooted deep within the rock. I peered close. Glimmering, gold, and just far enough apart that I should be able to slide through them.

As Josephine said, time was of the essence—perhaps she feared that the longer she spent in the asylum, the more likely Dr. Mintz would turn her into one of his experimental subjects. I pushed through the bars. It was tight, but they bowed, allowing me to pass.

Josephine waited at the head of another impossibly steep set of stairs that had no rail and disappeared into the darkness below. They looked exactly like the stairs I’d already traversed. I didn’t want to go down another set of stairs like that again. I looked back at the gate. The bars were tightly spaced. I shouldn’t have been able to fit through there. My mind gnawed on this.

Josephine touched my arm. “We must go.”

“Where?”

She nodded down the steps that terrified me. “The Seven Hundred Steps of Deeper Slumber. At the bottom, we will reach the Enchanted Wood.”

Josephine continued to improve. Her cheeks flushed with exhilaration and the darkness beneath her eyes had all but disappeared. Her speech had returned to its normal formality. “How do you know this?”

Josephine shrugged as she looked around. “I have been here before. This is the beginning of every journey.”

“Tell me what you see.”

She glanced at my face, searching for something, before she turned to our surroundings. “The stairs spiral down. They are marble. The handrail is wrought iron. All around us the sun shines and puffy clouds drift through. Within the clouds, pupperflies play.”

As she spoke, I imagined what she described. Before my eyes, the straight, deeply plunging stairs became a marble spiral with a wrought iron handrail. They reminded me of the marble stairs within the university library. I seized upon this and focused to make the stairs I saw match the stairs I was familiar with. As I did so, the encroaching darkness receded and fluffy clouds appeared. I didn’t see anything playing within the clouds, and I didn’t know what “pupperflies” were, thus they weren’t important.

What was important was the fact that this was a shared dream-state hallucination—mostly. As long as the two of us agreed upon what we saw, all would be well. It would make for a fascinating research paper in the future. I gestured for her to go ahead. “Lead on. This is your adventure.”

Josephine hesitated before beginning her descent. “You believe me? You see what I see?”

“I forced my mind to see as you see. For me, so many stairs is dangerous. But as you said, you’ve been here before. I knew they wouldn’t seem dangerous to you. I needed to see things the way you see them. Does that make sense?” I followed her, keeping close behind. The iron railing was a comfort and I kept my hand on the cool metal. It was not the wood of the university library staircase, but it was a banister and that was worth everything. This control meant I could continue on and help Josephine like I had been unable to help Malachi.

“Is that part of your anomalous thinking?”

“A little. I’m not in a childlike state, but I am willing to entertain what comes to your mind.”

We both laughed at that. Our laughter trailed off at a sound. Josephine and I stopped on the stairs and listened. For a long moment, we could only hear our own breath. Then it came again: a cry for help.

Josephine gasped, “Oh no! I forgot. How could I do that? I’m late. Oh, poor kitty.”

Without waiting for me, Josephine sprinted down the winding staircase. Whatever was happening was bad. She’d lost control and used contractions again. I ran after her, slower and less sure, but sped up as another cry for help came from below.

I fell just as Josephine disappeared from view.

Tumbling down the stairs, I banged against the railing and rebounded, rolling over and over. My head struck the corner of a marble stair. Lights flashed before me. The pain was enormous. Dazed, I continued to fall. It was too much. I was about to go over the railing. If I did that, I would fall to my death. Or worse, I’d never stop falling.

As I bounced up and over the railing, I shot out a hand and grabbed for whatever I could. I caught one of the balusters and slid down it. My body jerked as I hit the bottom rail and held on. I hung there—partly suspended over nothing and partly over the winding staircase. I could try to climb up or try to swing myself over the stairs below and drop. I wasn’t strong enough for the former, and the latter gave me a chance of falling into the abyss.

I looked down. The stairs were so far away. I closed my eyes. “This is a dream. This isn’t real. I can fly. I can fly.” I swung my legs back and forth and opened my eyes as I flung myself at the stairs. “I can fly!”

I didn’t fly.

I didn’t fall.

I floated from my hanging spot to the stairs I’d been looking at. As I landed with a soft bump, I collapsed to my knees and shuddered. I was much closer to the bottom than I had been, but I needed to collect myself. I covered my face, shaking, and forced slow, calming breaths.

There was no time for that.

As Josephine’s shouts entered the fray from below, I remembered why I was here: I needed to be by my patient’s side. Josephine would not be another Malachi. She would not die under mysterious circumstances. With a speed and agility borne by my sense of duty, I was up and sprinting down the last of the stairs once more. This time, there was no hesitation, no fear. My patient needed me. I would be there for her.

The bottom of the stairs disappeared into the deep, green foliage of oak leaves and trees. I didn’t pause. I plunged into, then through, the branches that wound themselves around the stairs. I met the ground with enough give that I was forced to stop and get my bearings. It was the loamy soil of a deep forest, covered in years of fallen leaves that hid gnarled roots and ankle-breaking holes.

I pushed myself to my knees. All around me, glowing fungi dotted the forest floor. This must be the Enchanted Wood. Things rustled in the underbrush as I looked for Josephine—things I didn’t want to see. Some of the oak trees appeared to be fighting vines that threatened to strangle them. As I watched, a vine shifted and slithered around a thick branch as if it was alive, sentient. Shouts broke through my horrified fascination.

Two voices rose above the squeaks and chatter of animals. Josephine shouted, “Get away! Get away from him!” The other voice, higher pitched like a child’s, encouraged her. “Get ’em, Josephine! Get ’em!”

I surged to my feet and ran in the direction of the melee. I hurried as fast as I could through the unfamiliar forest. I dodged around oak trees with branches that had exploded out from their trunks like frozen fireworks in wood. I rounded a large tree and stumbled into a glade. In the middle was the largest oak tree I’d even seen. Josephine, standing on its jutting roots, was dwarfed by the size of them. Above her was an orange cat. Below her was a swarm of creatures I’d never seen before. They looked like a cross between a rat and a weasel, with large, tattered ears, bulbous, goat-like eyes, and a writhing mass of tentacles where their mouths should be.

As they leapt for Josephine with sharp claws and grasping tentacles, they chattered and squeaked to each other. As one, they would leap upon the oaken roots to dart at Josephine’s feet. She swung her makeshift weapon, a fallen branch, forcing them back again.

I saw a small contingent of the creatures move with silent steps around the huge tree to the back. They climbed with slow, sinuous motions, flat against the bark. Their target was the orange cat.

I needed a weapon. A good one. One I was familiar with. I saw it in my mind’s eye. My father’s 1911 Colt .45. Not a decade before, he’d carried it in the Great War. When I started at Providence, he forced me to learn to shoot, and learn I did. I was very good. The pistol now resided in my office desk in the back of one of the drawers. I’d never used it on the job, but I still kept in practice.

Even as I thought about the pistol, I felt its weight in my hand. It was a comfort. I didn’t need to look down to know it was there. I braced my arm against a branch and aimed. The shot went wide of the tree. I instinctually knew I shouldn’t hurt the creature I’d aimed at. The shot was deafening in the forest and every single creature froze at its sound.

Coming out from behind the tree, I called in a loud, strong voice. “I am very good with this pistol. I didn’t hit any of you on purpose. It’s time for you to go. Now.” I don’t know why I spoke to those creatures as I did, but they’d displayed intelligence. I assumed they’d understand me.

They did.

As one, they swarmed toward me—not in malice, but curiosity. A tumble of voices cascaded around me. “Who is she?” “She’s new.” “She has a weapon. A strong weapon.” “A good ally.”

I stood my ground. They stopped about ten feet from me in a clump. One of them came forward and peered with those disconcerting, goat-like eyes. “You didn’t hurt us. Why?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t have to.” This close up I could see their tentacles had suckers on them and wondered how they could eat, and what. I refused to think about what they would’ve done to the cat.

“You are good and strong. Come. Come with the zoog. We’re good allies. Come now. The Enchanted Wood is dangerous. We’ll protect you.”

Again, I shook my head and sheathed the pistol in the thigh holster I knew was there. “No. I have other duties. Thank you.” I glanced up at Josephine. At this point, she was on the ground next to the oak tree with the orange cat wrapped about her shoulders.

The zoog began muttering and chittering among themselves. “As you will. The cats of Ulthar are dangerous. When they betray you, come back here. Come to us. We’ll protect you.”

I inclined my head once—an acknowledgment, but not an agreement—and said nothing. They looked between us a last time, then scampered off as one into the forest like a moving carpet of fur, tentacles, and claws. As they went, I hurried to Josephine.

“That was brilliant.” The words came from the orange cat wrapped about Josephine’s shoulders.

“A talking cat. Can this get any weirder?” I shook my head. “Are you all right?”

Josephine smiled at me as she nodded. “Absolutely. It will get much weirder. It is the Dreamlands after all. Also, yes, I am well.” She pet the cat that snuggled to her. “This is Foolishness, a friend of mine.”

“Foolishness. A pleasure.” I started to offer a hand, but I didn’t know what the etiquette of meeting a talking cat was. I settled for crossing my arms. “What are you doing out here?”

The cat yawned. “I do what I’m supposed to do. I’m foolish. I walk in the Enchanted Wood alone. I get harried by the zoog. You, or someone like you, rescues me. We all have our parts to play in keeping the Dreamlands as stable as it can be.”

I looked around the glade and at the huge oak tree in front of us. The world looked stable enough. Grass peeked up through the fallen leaves. Tiny flowers made of colored paper adorned the winding tree roots that edged the glade. The sun shone overhead. It even looked as if some of the trees were smiling.

Foolishness stood on Josephine’s shoulders, stretched, then jumped down. “Come along. I’m sure you wish to speak to Insightful. She’ll know what you’re doing here.” With that he strode off toward a path through the forest I hadn’t noticed before.

Josephine linked an arm through mine and led me down the open road. Flowers appeared at our sides as we passed by. “I love that kitty. He is his namesake, but he is an ally.”

“You know him?” The trees above us made a natural tunnel of green and gold at the top that morphed into a darkness filled with fungi and scuttling creatures at the bottom. I kept my eyes and attention on the orange cat strutting in front of us with his tail held high.

“Oh, yes. I’ve rescued him dozens of times.”

“Have you ever failed to rescue him?” Josephine didn’t respond, but from the look on her face the answer was yes.

Ahead, the forest thinned and ended as tree branches parted, allowing us passage. We stopped at the tree line. Josephine gave a grand gesture as if she were revealing something magnificent. In truth, she was. Across a field, I saw the first buildings of Ulthar.