The Dreamwalker's Battle

“He’s been in a coma for a week,” the client’s wife explained to me as we stood in front of his hospital bed. “Nothing will wake him up.”

“And how did he enter the coma in the first place?” I asked.

She shrugged, her distraught, tear-stained face suddenly exasperated, as though she had told this story a million times already.

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice strained. “He went to bed one night, and the next morning, he just…didn’t wake up. He had been making all sorts of noises that night, as though he were having a nightmare, and he still makes them occasionally…they say that there’s still normal brain activity…it’s just as if he’s fallen asleep and can’t wake up.”

I fiddled with my high school class ring. This all sounded very familiar, but not regarding anything that was considered an official rule of dreamwalking. It was more of an urban legend, really, something related to the “normie” urban legend of “if you die in your dream, you will die for real”. I didn’t really believe it, but if I wanted to be thorough, I’d have to check out every angle possible.

“Can you help him?” she asked me.

I glanced into her wide, watery eyes and offered her a soft smile.

“All we can do is try, Mrs. Blanche,” I answered honestly. By the way her shoulders sank, I knew that wasn’t what she had wanted to hear, but it was the best that I could give her. “Now, I need you to leave the room. And please, turn the lights off and close the door when you leave. I need all the peace and quiet that I can get to enter your husband’s dream realm.”

Mrs. Blanche nodded, though she seemed reluctant to leave her beloved alone with a strange woman. I took her hand and squeezed it gently.

“I promise you, Mrs. Blanche, I will do everything within my power to get your husband back.”

She smiled slightly and squeezed my hand back, as weak as the gesture was.

“They do say you are the best,” she finally said. “All right, but I’ll just be outside in the hallway if you need anything.”

“Thank you.”

I waited for her to leave before I took a seat beside the client’s bed. Normally, to enter the meditation, I needed to touch something that belonged to the client. However, with him being right here, I opted to hold his hand instead.

Holding his cold hand in one of mine, I settled back in the chair and closed my eyes. After a minute of deep breathing and concentration, an oak door appeared in my mind’s eye, and I immediately opened it to a blast of heat.

A lava field appeared before me. In boiling cauldrons all around, naked bodies writhed in pain as the flesh bubbled and peeled off their bones, yet never did they make a sound. Skeleton dogs howled on distant hills, accompanied by equally skeletal riders on flaming horses guarding over the scene below. One of the riders turned his skull towards me and gave me a demonic grin, sending a shiver down my spine.

I waited for the landscape to shift, as they always do when I first entered someone’s dream realm. Surely anything would be better than trying to traverse this hellish world. But after several minutes, nothing changed.

Strange, I thought. THIS is his permanent dream realm? No wonder he has nightmares.

Cautiously, I proceeded forward, avoiding what I could of the lava field. I still did not believe that if you died in your sleep, you died in real life, but I knew that a dreamwalker could feel pain as real as in life if they got injured in a dream. I was not about to risk a third-degree burn from a stranger’s dream.

As I traveled across this Blake-like landscape, I searched the cauldrons for any sign of my client. I finally spotted him after about the thirtieth cauldron, inside his own solitary pot, the only one to have his cauldron all to himself. Half the flesh had fallen from his skull, and only splotches remained on his body, but I could feel from his essence that it was him.

“Dr. Blanche?” I called out to him.

He was all but dead, barely clinging to consciousness as he hung over the side of the cauldron, but he still had the strength to look up at me. At least, one of his eyes did. The other hung loosely from its socket and bounced around aimlessly.

“Dr. Blanche, my name is Amelia. I’m a dreamwalker. I’m here to take you home, but there is something that you must do first—”

“I don’t think so.”

I jumped at the booming voice. It had not come from Dr. Blanche. Yet if it had not come from Dr. Blanche, then that could only mean one thing…

“Show yourself, dreamwalker!” I yelled.

Blue flames erupted between Dr. Blanche and me. From these flames emerged a skeletal rider on a skeletal horse, though this one was different from the ones on the hills. This one wore a long robe and carried a scythe like the Grim Reaper, and behind him appeared an enormous bubble containing an hourglass.

“Dr. Blanche’s time is up,” the voice boomed again. “You will not interfere with my work.”

“You do not scare me!” I croaked. I cleared my throat. “I know that’s just a façade. Why don’t you show me your real face?”

The dreamwalker hesitated.

“I have nothing to prove to you!” he replied. “But if you will not stand down, I have ways of making you stop.”

He lifted his scythe and in one swift move cut the air. Suddenly, the red, hellish landscape turned black. All that remained was an oak door.

A man’s wailing emanated from behind the door, and I instantly knew what was behind it.

I didn’t want to go to it, but I felt compelled to open the door. When I did, I found my parents’ bedroom, set up with medical equipment just the way it was that night. A younger me—just a couple years younger—stood in the doorway, watching the bed as my father cried and held my mother.

“No…no…” he moaned. “Why…”

The younger me stood there, silent for a couple minutes.

“Is she…?” the younger me finally asked.

 My father nodded.

“Come here,” he said as he started to get up out of bed. “Whisper in her ear, tell her a story…”

The younger me shook her head. I remembered why I didn’t want to at the time. It would have made it too real. My stories would never again reach her ears, my loving words never again reciprocated, so, I thought…why bother? But still, younger me approached the bed and laid down beside her and stroked her arm. Instead of telling her a story or whispering in her ear, younger me sang “You are My Sunshine”—the song that my mother had sang to me so many times.

Before younger me could finish, the scene twisted and spun, and I was outside the oak door once more. My father’s wailing reached my ears again.

“No!” I cried. Fresh tears streamed down my cheeks. “Stop it!”

“Leave Dr. Blanche to me,” the dreamwalker’s voice boomed. “He deserves his punishment.”

I knew immediately why the dreamwalker said that. I had read the news, just like everyone else. Dr. Blanche had skated off on a dozen medical malpractice lawsuits based on technicalities. It didn’t hide the fact that more than half of those patients had died because of his unauthorized surgeries, though.

“That’s not up to us,” I said after a minute’s thought. “We are not judge, jury, and executioner—”

“But I am.”

My eyes widened at the realization.

“You were on his jury.”

“That judge had no idea what he was doing. He’s next—”

“No, he’s not. I won’t let you.”

“And how are you going to stop me?”

My dad’s wailing grew louder. I covered my ears. I knew how to stop this, at least temporarily, but it meant doing something to myself that I swore I would never do.

I closed my eyes, and a key appeared in my hand. I walked up to the oak door. With shaking hand, I inserted the key into the lock and turned it.

The wailing stopped. Suddenly, I couldn’t remember why I had been so upset.

The black abyss shifted back into the hellish landscape. Dr. Blanche’s cauldron appeared before me—as did the dreamwalker.

“I won’t let you!” the dreamwalker cried.

“You have no choice,” I said confidently as the key vanished from my hand. “You have nothing against me now.”

“You will let a murderer get away with his deeds?”

I glanced at the dreamwalker, taking in his reaper form, as I walked over to Dr. Blanche’s cauldron.

“If it means stopping one of my own from becoming a murderer as well, then yes.”

I knelt before Dr. Blanche and took his head in my hands, repulsed slightly by the sticky flesh in between my fingers. I forced his good eye to look up at me.

“Dr. Blanche, I am here to help,” I said, “but there is one thing you must do. You must make the landscape into your normal dream realm. Can you do that?”

He blinked his good eye, which I took as understanding.

“Good. Now, close your eye and focus on what this place normally looks like.”

He followed my instructions. After several minutes, I thought it hadn’t worked. The dreamwalker laughed behind me.

“He’s too weak, too close to death now,” the dreamwalker taunted me. “There’s no way—”

Then the ground began to shake. Lava fields started to close. Skeletal figures sank into the dirt. The red sky shifted to bright blue. Flowers, trees, and shrubbery sprouted all around us. Cauldrons and melting people disappeared. Dr. Blanche soon remained the only disfigured sinner, kneeling on his knees without his cauldron.

“Help…me…” he moaned with his unhinged jaw.

“I will,” I replied.

I touched his head once more. I closed my eyes and focused on what he looked like in the hospital bed. Warmth passed through my fingers to Dr. Blanche. Suddenly, a sharp pain stabbed me in between the ribs. Instinctively, I removed my hand from Dr. Blanche to cover the wound.

I looked down to see the end of the dreamwalker’s scythe in my side.

“You will not heal him!” the skeletal figure yelled.

The dreamwalker yanked the scythe out of me, drawing out a cry from me, and pulled it back for a killing blow. Just as he was about to strike, a man’s hand grabbed the handle and wrestled the weapon away from him. Dr. Blanche smiled broadly at his triumph.

“Too late,” the doctor said. “Now, both of you, out of my dream!”

***

My eyes flew open forcefully. I saw myself surrounded by doctors as they tended to my scythe wound. I could see that Mrs. Blanche had violated my rule of staying out of the room during the session, and for once, I was glad that a client’s relative hadn’t listened to me. Maybe I really would have died in real life if I had died in this dream.

Author's Note: This story is for RMS's Unofficial Writing Challenge (August), which can be found at the link below. It is also a sequel to my story, "The Dreamwalker's Mission", which you can also find below.