Seraphim (39 page)

She could even change him.

Once, a dreamer had transformed him into a skinny black lady who was throwing a baby shower for a pregnant Ed Asner. Another time he was mutated into an underwater camera fastened to the hull of the Calypso, filming a school of Yoko Onos chasing a yellow submarine. He’d always go along with his new role for awhile, behaving like the parasite that he was.

Because the last thing Chris ever wanted to do was arouse suspicion in the dreamer. Like a safari where tourists discover that the Jeep’s canvass top and their screaming guide are no match for a pride of starving lions, the dawning awareness of a dreamer was terrifying. The psyche had its own lymphatic system, but rather than dispatch phagocytes or white blood cells, it eradicated prowlers and burglars with something a bit more unique: it turned their own fears against them. Chris had named this potentiality “Door Number Three.”

Chris had already decided that, once he reached Juanita’s subconscious mind, he would conjure the interior of a church. Since she was always lugging around that rosary, he figured some pews, an altar, and a baptismal would be great fodder. He would go in dressed as an acolyte, a liturgical task he’d shared with other teens while going through the Lutheran equivalent of catechism. And he would most certainly have to alter his face, as he was quite sure that Juanita would reap about as much pleasure in seeing him hanged by his testicles as she would getting a conjugal visit from the Pope. However, mask or no mask, given enough time she would eventually intuit that it was him.

The ship, now free of the space station, drifted lazily toward the moon. Chris started the main thrusters. On the console before him, an array of soft, blue lights pulsed with the ship’s engines. A red flashing bulb to his lower left indicated that the beacon was functioning. He grabbed the joy stick with his right hand, pressed a button marked EGO, then one marked ID. The star field wavered, then was lanced simultaneously by a million dazzling trails of white light.

“Han Solo, eat your heart out.”

To hook up someone could take as little as a minute, or as long as twenty. Chris had never been gone more than thirty minutes, and was estimating no more than five for this job. But that was time registered by his digital AM/FM clock radio on the nightstand by his bed. The sort of time that passed in Wonderland was almost sedentary compared to the hasty brand Timex doled out in the waking world. Chris returned every time suffering from astral jetlag, finding that he’d only been gone eight or ten minutes, when it seemed more like hours or sometimes even days.

Regardless of its gender, time was still of the utmost importance. Sometimes he got lucky and the host kept the mirage going because he or she was such a willing participant, contributing their own fun rides to Chris’s traveling carnival. When that happened, the pressure was lifted, and Chris could work at his leisure. But that was rare. He had to always keep in mind the IA Factor (Inevitable Annihilation). This was when the dream started to really break down, leaving the intruder with three options. One: get out; Two: stay and let the host cast him into the next production; or Three: hastily create another dreamscape and pray it passed inspection by the host’s psyche. Chris avoided option Three at all costs. He had no desire to have his tenuous carcass buried in someone’s mind’s eye to fester there like the proverbial splinter.

The mind was a formidable foe. Whenever the host’s psyche was in defense mode, death became a real plausibility in Wonderland, ethereally and otherwise.

If there was another way to die psychically, Chris didn’t know it. When younger, before he’d become more atheistic than not, he believed that if he were to ever perish in someone’s mind, he would never get to heaven because his soul—the interloper—would already be dead. But he’d since learned that it hadn’t been his eternal soul traipsing all these years through Wonderland, but rather its sibling; a kind of temporal step-sister that died with the physical body. Every man, woman, and child had one, but only a very select few were ever given permission to use it. When someone needed to be hooked up, the “intangibles” would call upon Chris and his talents. This communication could come in any form, be it voices routing themselves through his refrigerator, a stinky old bag lady, or a talking stained glass window.

He liked to think of himself as a younger, if not leaner, version of Maytag’s lonely repairman, calmly devoted to fixing the telepathically challenged. However, he was more partial to mastiffs than he was pouting basset hounds.

Strangely, his least worry was the dreamer being suddenly awakened from deep sleep for whatever reason. That would only catapult him back into his spaceship, or whatever contrivance he was using at the time, with nothing more than a migraine. Happened all the time.

Sure, he could just barge straight in—what he called a “No-Knock,” in honor of the kind of warrants SWAT teams used when making house calls. No costumes or guises or psychic software of any kind; just him and the dreamer squaring off. In his younger days, No-Knocks had been challenging. He didn’t know then about hooking people up, was just there for the pure thrill of it. Now, to go in for nothing but kicks was just plain reckless.

Descending the access ladder, he jumped the last two rungs to a grated walkway below. He had to manually shut off the engines, and they were located in the rear of the ship. As he turned, he saw that the space to his right—a place where the hull should have been—was nothing but a gaping hole of interstellar matter. As he started walking, the vacancy filled itself in with stark white paneling, flashing control panels, something that might have been a fire extinguisher...And as he continued down the corridor, other omissions quickly infused with twenty-fourth century decor. To mentally picture lush, rolling hills, dense forests, a star-filled cosmic night—those were easy to maintain. But to keep a three-dimensional image fully intact of something as complex as a space ship—something entirely fictional—that was hard. To do so for any good length of time was impossible.

To patch Juanita into her special gift, he’d opted for the organ. This was part of the software he’d downloaded earlier. Once he played “Mary Had A Little Lamb,” Juanita would be soldered to the ethereal plane, and could then—without the use of her rosary—eject people’s psyches and souls from their bodies and slam them into stained glass windows with much more confidence and better aim.

He disengaged the engines from the hyperdrive coil, allowing the ship to coast toward a deep red nebula. The doorway into Juanita Santiago’s mind.

“Where no man has gone before,” Chris intoned, and thought that was probably an accurate guess, given her ugly mug and holier-than-thou disposition. He kicked on the thrusters, shaking his head. “Bible thumpers.”

As the ship entered the nebula, passing through its web-like dross, Chris closed his eyes and recalled the church he’d attended while growing up in San Diego. It was Lutheran, not Catholic, but he figured it would be close enough for government work. Any conflicting aesthetics would be negligible to the point where Juanita would either overlook them or simply change them without becoming suspicious. And there was certainly not going to be a sermon, because Chris wasn’t going to summon a pastor. He’d had plenty of evangelizing for one lifetime, thank you very much, not to mention enough wine and unleavened bread to choke a platoon of disciples. But if Juanita did decide to whip up a priest, a congregation, and an inspirational oration, then God could ransom her guilt, and she could fill the collection plates to her heart’s content. Not a problem.

Just as long as she didn’t retain an organist.

Exhaling slowly, he pictured himself standing by the organ.

The image was crystal clear.

2.

Chris opened his eyes.

Bricks of differing size, drooling mortar from their seams, composed the high, narrow passageway before him. From their iron cradles, torches licked soot upon the crude masonry, and shadows pranced to the susurrant sounds like gypsies around a campfire.

Directly behind him was a structure rising so high that the top was not visible from his perspective. If he didn’t know any better, he would swear that it was the main tower of a castle. He’d played enough
Dungeons and Dragons
to know a donjon when he saw one.

To his immediate right stood a huge door, the wood planks running vertically and strengthened by long, thick ores of iron. The three clasps and hinges were massive and looked like ostracized coats of arms, painted black to expunge those clans from memory. The sand was dry and loose but bore no tracks.

Chris paused. Yes, he was now quite certain that this was not the Emmanuel Lutheran Church of his childhood, where he learned about Adam and Eve and Noah’s Ark and God smiting the heathens.

Staring down at his white Adidas, he bent at his knees, swung his arms, and jumped. As his feet landed, dirt clouds rolled away from his soles, surging like waves against the walls on either side. He watched with growing concern as the settlings evanesced in the dimness.

“Dude,” he said, slightly alarmed. The gravity here wasn’t right because it was
too
right. Although dreams were normally born with the standard laws of physics already preset, it was only a matter of moments before they began to deteriorate. That didn’t make them any less real, just more unstable. Chris knew that once the cataleptic curtain lifted for the director and his play, Sir Isaac Newton would be yanked from stage and his lead role usurped by a cute little thing from Detroit who didn’t know jack about physics, and even less about acting. Eventually and indubitably, the psyche would start taking liberties with the script, not to mention the cute little thing from Detroit, and pretty soon apples were falling up instead of down, statues crapping on birds instead of the other way around.

But Chris could find no corruption of Newtonian physics here; no atrophy, no decay. By the looks of things, Sir Isaac was not only still in character but bowing before a standing ovation. If this was Juanita’s dream, then she had one hell of a knack for keeping things fixed and focused.

He turned in a circle, searching for clues in the construction, in the ambience, looking for tell-tale signs that could confirm that the theater in which he now found himself was, in fact, mind-woven; rhapsodized.

No. Finally, no. The setting lacked that capricious, mercurial atmosphere so endemic of dreams. Parody, usually in abundant supply, was absent. Nothing faltered. Nothing changed.

“Where the fuck am I?” he said to the gloom.

Chris stepped to the door, grabbed the big metal ring, and pulled. As he had fully expected, the massive hinges heralded his entrance like a trio of lovesick banshees. Gusts of mildew-laden air swept past his neck and face like Chiffon ascots. He stepped through and found that he was, after all, inside a church, just one that predated good table manners. In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised to find King Arthur’s name scribbled in the guest book.

The interior was huge, and although he’d only seen a fraction of the structure, Chris was already left with the impression that he was, indeed, in the midst of a fortress. A medieval castle.

Groin vaulting had apparently been the rage when the place was built, lending it an eerie, antediluvian resplendence. Torches clung to the groins, gibbering in tongues like reticent monks. Shadows became black, gossamer monkeys swinging from column to column. Candles were in ample supply, as was dust, thickly suspended in the sanctum’s cavernous light.

Chris stopped and listened to his own breathing. Had someone stirred the dust?

Very curious now, he strolled down the center aisle, looking for clues, anything that might help him understand what was happening. And then it occurred to him. Either he wasn’t in Juanita’s mind, or he was…but he wasn’t her only visitor. Maybe someone else was playing him at his own game; someone who had the ability to keep his or her psychic universe so intact as to make it analogous to waking reality. After all, these were not the blueprints he’d drafted.

Or, just maybe, this was a by-product of Juanita’s recent endowment. Yeah, that was probably part of the answer.

The marble altar was massive. He dragged a couple of fingers across the surface, leaving deep tracks in the dust and soot. The smell of smoldering wax was heavier here, although no candles were burning despite their abundance. To his left, at the far end of the altar beside some kind of round, clay vessel, a rat stared at him with golden eye shine.

Michael Jackson’s “Ben” started playing in his mind. He immediately canceled that selection and chose Elton John’s “Funeral for a Friend.”
Fuck ’em,
He thought.
If they want atmosphere, I’ll give ’em atmosphere!

Most disappointing, however, was the absence of an organ. And given the apparent century, it wasn’t likely he would find one hidden elsewhere in the castle. That presented a problem. He’d already programmed Juanita to receive the connection via his (albeit one-fingered) rendition of “Mary Had A Little Lamb.” It didn’t really matter if he played the tune from inside this ancient church or the top of Pike’s Peak, just as long as he had an organ to play it on. And soon.

“I ordered
Sister Act
,” he groused, “and they fucking sent me
Excalibur
.”

Picturing a walnut organ with massive pipes directly in front of the altar, Chris strained to make the image as detailed as he could. If he was successful, it would answer the question of whether this was a waking place or a dream state. If only a dream, then he could probably conjure just about anything. If it was waking reality, then the only organ he’d be playing would be the one behind his fly.

He opened his eyes. The organ was there. But it was a ghost image, fading fast. Someone was interfering, trying to shut it down. He could feel it.

It was now obvious, however, he was in Wonderland. One of its unexplored continents, perhaps, but definitely Wonderland.

Had he finally entered a sandbox where someone else—someone just like himself—had already started working with pail and shovel? Highly unlikely.