Junie Flynn was asleep, lost in a dream of strange creatures that blossomed like flowers from twisted trees, then broke off and went flapping on gossamer wings. The landscape was filled with discordant images of intense beauty and ferocious ugliness, and in her dreams Junie was one of the newly hatched creatures who flew over forests of living plants, along beaches of jagged glass sands that ran beside oceans of boiling mercury. When she cried out, her voice was a piercing shriek that sounded like the dying wail of a wounded seabird. Or like a child who was lost and knew she would never again be found.
It was a dreadful dream and this was the third consecutive night she’d had it.
That was how sleep was for her. Her dreams were seldom about Joe or their life here in California. She rarely dreamed of things that had happened during the day, or of the incidental mundanities of life. Her dreams flowed like a river between fantastical and nightmarish.
As did her life.
She seldom shared those dreams with Joe and never with anyone else.
Never.
On those nights when she woke shivering and bathed in fear-sweat, Joe calmed her and comforted her, and from the soothing things he said it was clear he thought that her sleep had been troubled by the cancer she had beat two years ago, or the baby she had lost when an assassin’s bullet destroyed her uterus. Or of the things she had witnessed while coasting the edges of the violent world of the DMS.
But that wasn’t it.
That was never it.
Her dreams took her to strange worlds that Joe would never understand. Junie thought she did, though. After all, her DNA was so complicated and it belonged, at least in part, to other worlds than this one.
Was that where her dreams took her? she wondered. Did this fractured and surreal landscape exist in some other place, and were images of it somehow stored in her cells?
She hoped not, because it was a dreadful, dreadful place.
If that was true, though, then she found it strange that she never saw people in those other worlds. Not once.
Or, maybe it was that the creatures who lived there did not fit any definition of “people” that her senses would recognize. There were plenty of creatures here. Bizarre forms that seemed to change shape the moment she looked away from then, as if it was a game for them to hide from her through transformation. Flesh — if flesh it was — flowed and shifted and assumed improbable forms. Some of them were devilishly similar to things that triggered recognition but did so imperfectly. It was like trying to read a book written in Rorschach inkblots. Other forms were simply devilish in their own right, and when the creatures were in these forms they looked up at her as she flew overhead and they smiled with mouths that were filled with row upon row of teeth.
Tonight, though, the dream changed and in doing so found a new level of strangeness. A new level of horror.
This time she saw a human form running naked along the beach.
A man.
The soles of his feet were shredded from the jagged glass sand and there were awful gashes on his knees and palms from times when he fell. His body was crisscrossed with scratches from plants that reached for him and claws that sought him with pernicious delight.
He ran and ran.
Despite the pain, he ran.
Despite the damage, he ran.
Junie flew above him and tried to call out his name, tried to tell him where to go to escape the things that bit and the things that tore. But her voice was a wail and she had no words.
She could not speak his name even though it screamed inside her mind.
Joe.
Her lover ran from shambling, twisting, metamorphosing beasts that chased. But he also ran toward a great, gray storm cloud that hung strangely low over the horizon.
Except that it wasn’t a storm cloud.
No. It was something far more dangerous. Something far worse.
Joe ran in a blind panic toward it, and the cloud — that shapeless mass — lifted itself from the horizon and rose into the sky. Silent, powerful, indifferent to gravity, acknowledging no physical laws at all. It rolled backward, exposing a face. Eyes that burned with black fire and a snarling mouth wreathed by wriggling tentacles.
As it turned its face upon the world, every single creature below, from the shape-shifting monsters to the sentient trees, screamed out in a language that did not belong in this or any world.
She screamed herself awake.
INTERLUDE FOURTEEN
Dr. Greene was not expecting visitors and it was too late for clients. His secretary and nurse had already gone home and the office was locked. He liked working into the evening because the quiet gave him time to reflect on his day’s sessions and dictate case notes. His iPad was snugged into the speaker dock and Miles Davis was blowing soft, sad, complex jazz and blues at him.
When the door to his inner office opened, Greene yelled in shock. A high, sharp, almost feminine sound. He half jumped up but succeeded only in shoving his chair back so that it struck the wall hard enough to knock a framed certificate from its hook.
Two men stepped into the office. One was black, the other was white. They were both in their middle thirties. Tall, fit-looking, and wearing identical black suits, white shirts, black ties. Both of them had wires behind their ears.
Neither of them was smiling.
“Who the hell are—?” began Greene, his anger shooting up to match the level of his shock. But the black man silenced him by placing a finger to his own lips in the kind of shushing gesture an adult might use on a child.
The white man raised his hand and pointed a gun at Greene. Or, at least some kind of gunlike weapon. It had a handle and trigger, but instead of a barrel there was a blunt snub of an end with no opening, and around it were four steel prongs that curved inward so that the metal balls on the end nearly touched.
“Dr. Michael Greene,” said the man with the gun. It was a plain, uninflected statement, not a question.
“Who… who are you?” gasped Greene, his voice subdued as much from the shushing finger as the strange weapon. “How did you get in here?”
“Dr. Greene,” said the black man, lowering his hand, “we need you to turn over to us all of the materials you have on one of your patients.”
Greene bristled. “That’s absurd. Are you with the government? Let me see your identification. Let me see a warrant.”
The white man and the black man said nothing, did nothing except stare at him. They both had brown eyes that were as flat and uninformative as the painted eyes of mannequins.
“Doctor-patient confidentiality is—”
And that was as far as he got.
The black man suddenly raised his foot and kicked the side of the desk. Greene’s office furniture was all made from heavy hardwood, seasoned and sturdy, with steel reinforcements and a dark cherrywood glaze. The desk weighed nearly 350 pounds. So when it shot backward, propelled by that single kick, the desk struck Greene with shocking force. The desk’s legs were buried deep in the carpet, without casters or wheels, and yet that kick moved it like it was made from balsa. The footwell engulfed Greene’s knees, but the desktop crunched into his gut so forcefully that it snapped the doctor forward with such speed that he had no chance to get his hands up to protect his face. His nose, chin, and forehead slammed down. Pain exploded in his head and blood splashed outward to form a rude Rorschach pattern on the open file folder for one of his newest teen patients.
Greene rebounded from the desk and sagged into his chair, bleeding and dazed. The lights in the room seemed to flare to white-hot brightness, but that was only in Greene’s head because immediately darkness seemed to cover him like a blanket.