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Lucas tightened his grip on the handset. Although his hearing aid didn't pick up the sound, he could feel the cheap plastic protesting the abuse. "Is that your idea of a joke? Do you have any more bombs you want to drop on me?" Sarcasm, his old defense. He felt bad about it as soon as the words left his mouth. Joshua was out there. How would he feel if it was Ellie?
"I'm no happier about it than you are," she said, her voice guarded.
He forced himself to keep an even tone. "I don't like ultimatums - they're Andy's thing, not mine - but I'm offering one right now."
Ellie's hand on his shoulder paused him. "Don't be like him," she said quietly. "If Angelica needs you, go. You can do this, Lucas."
"What?" Angelica said on the other line, her voice sharp with irritation and impatience.
"Nothing," he said. "As much as I hate myself for saying it, I'm in."
It was just after seven in the morning, and Chloe Arbor was alone in the kitchen of her family's home. Her parents had just left to catch the train into the City, where they both worked, and her older sister had moved out the month before. She felt a bit nervous; home invasion robberies were becoming increasingly common on Long Island, and as far as super-powered individuals went, she was fairly weak.
The reality of being a part of the League of Explorers was slow to sink in. It had been two weeks, and she still didn't quite believe it. She hadn't even wanted the job, but her sister Lydia had insisted. "You need to do something, Chloe," Lydia had said, in a condescending tone. "You can't just sponge off of Mom and Dad for the rest of your life." Harsh though her sister's words had been, they were true. She couldn't go to school, she couldn't hold down a job, and she could barely help out around the house. Mr. Weinstein's offer might be the only way she could be something resembling a productive member of society.
Chloe wasn't going to the Bermuda Triangle; she'd be more of a liability there than anything else. Instead of going off on a grand adventure to the sort of place that most people would only read about, she was going to provide whatever intelligence she could from home. From her bedroom, more accurately.
She washed up the dishes from breakfast, the one meal she'd eat that day, and turned over the details that she'd been given. The missing submarine held the League's best and brightest, the heroes she'd seen often on the news and hoped to someday meet. There was one missing detail, one omission that nagged at her subconscious mind. Everyone was being very close-lipped on exactly why it had seemed like a good idea to take a nuclear sub into the infamous Bermuda Triangle.
It was a struggle to keep her eyes awake as she tidied up the kitchen. Super hero or not, she still had chores - though once the paychecks started coming in, she was going to hire a maid. The less time she spent being domestic, the more time she could spend asleep, helping the Explorers.
Already, she spent twenty hours a day in bed, for it was in sleep that her power lay. With little effort, she could pierce the veil of sleep and descend the seven hundred and seventy seven steps to the Gate of Deeper Slumber, whence lay the Dreamlands. Though it was her chief joy to wander that strange and wondrous realm, it was her other abilities that Mr. Weinstein had asked her to use. Chloe had the gift of oneiromancy, the ability to have and interpret prophetic dreams.
Despite the fact that she didn't feel the need to protect her identity - she had no friends, no job, no social life to speak of, and had not left the house in three months - the Explorers had insisted that she adopt a code name. When she refused, they had chosen for her, and that was how she found herself saddled with the unwieldly moniker Somnambula. She hated everything about it. More than its awkward sound, she despised it for its inaccuracy. She was a dreamwalker, not a sleepwalker. The fact that it could have been the brand name for an insomnia pill didn't help matters one bit.
The only thing that she hated more than her nickname was the tedium of the waking world. It seemed so plain, with its linear time, immutable laws of physics, and Euclidian geometry. After one had stood at the top of a tower of sparkling crystal whose facets joined at unfathomable angles, and watched an entire civilization rise and fall in the blink of an eye, all the supposed wonders of Earth seemed trite by comparison.
Her family had consulted multiple doctors when her powers first manifested at the age of fourteen (she'd slept for a week straight before they roused her), and all of the doctors agreed that it was best for her to be forced to spend some time awake. Over time, a regimen had been developed, to which she was supposed to strictly adhere to. Four consecutive hours of wakefulness every day, during which time she had to eat a nutritious meal, get some sunshine, and do some aerobic exercises to ensure that her muscles didn't atrophy. During those hours, she also caught up with her parents over breakfast, and read the newspaper, trying to pretend that she was interested in the world around her.
The morning's news said nothing about the missing sub. Chloe wondered how long Mr. Weinstein could keep it covered up. She had been instructed not to tell anyone about it. A matter of National Security, as if she would tell someone who would tell someone who would tell some terrorists, who would somehow exploit the fact. But rules were rules, and besides, her parents had enough to worry about without her filling their heads with extra problems.
By the time she had exercised, showered, and braided her long black hair (the better to keep it from snarling while she slept), she had only been awake for three hours. She hesitated only a minute before climbing the stairs to her bedroom. The Explorers needed her, her country needed her, and in this one instance, she felt like doctors' orders could be ignored. Every minute that she dilly-dallied around the house was a minute wasted.
Her bedroom was small; all the rooms in the Levitt houses were, and the slanting ceiling made her room seem even smaller. It had been just right when she was a little kid; then, she'd felt like the room had been made for her. Even now it was fine. She spent most of her time asleep, and there was something comforting about having the ceiling right above her bed, forming a cozy little cubbyhole.
A faded poster was tacked on the ceiling, a mare and her foal grazing in some vibrant green field. Her younger self would lie awake for hours and stare at it when she couldn't sleep, daydreaming of owning her own horse, of galloping through flower-studded meadows with her hair flying free, fingers knotted in the flowing mane of her steed, without a care in the world. Now, she barely saw it, because there was never a time that she couldn't sleep.
Chloe did not fall asleep, rather, sleep reached out and grabbed her, pulled her down towards it, like a lover drawing her into an embrace. Before her head even touched the pillow, she had reached REM and was standing in the little bubble of reality that was her own personal dream realm. From there, she could access the Gate of Deeper Slumber, or seek out visions of the past, present, and future (for within dreams, time is fluid, and it is as easy to learn about one as another. The only difficulty is in differentiating them).
To some extent it was like the field in her poster, but nothing in dreams is so exact, so stationary. Its appearance shifted, especially at the corners of her vision, always in a state of flux. The grass changed colors, flowers moved, the sky shifted from dark to light and back, and at the very edges, the entire thing gave way to a terrifyingly dark ocean full of unwholesome creatures.
The only true constants in the field were her and her dream guide, Tuffy. She looked like herself, dressed practically in a pair of sturdy jeans, a t-shirt and hiking boots, quite unlike the pajamas she spent most of her life in now. Tuffy looked just like he had in life, a little black tri corgi whose brown eyebrows made his face especially expressive. He was romping through the field when she arrived, chasing a butterfly.
For a time after her powers developed, she had been seeing a psychiatrist who had suggested that Tuffy's presence in her dreams was an expression of her lingering sadness of her death, and that he was just a figment of her imagination. She knew the truth, however; Tuffy's spirit was there to guard her in the dream realm, just as he had considered him her protector (despite his small stature) when he was alive.
"Aren't we going back to Celephais?" he said, his little stub of a tail raised in anticipation. Tuffy spoke with the exact voice and accent of Stephen Fry, though he didn't have quite the vocabulary or store of trivial knowledge.
"Not tonight, we have important work to do. We need to look for the Explorers, they disappeared on a sub in the Bermuda Triangle."
"Well, that is quite interesting," he said. "All of them disappeared?"
"All who were on the sub, which is most of the team. We have to find out what happened."
"Let's go then," he said, and started forward through the grass, which reached up to his shoulders. His bounding gate was not at all in key with the gravity of this situation, but then again, it was hard for a corgi to look dignified.
When they reached the edge of the meadow, there was a sudden, sharp tug and she was drawn into the water as if by a riptide, dragged along in an uncontrolled rush through the stygian depths. Tuffy swam beside her, seemingly unaffected by the current. He shouldn't have been able to keep up with her, but the laws of physics were very fluid within the dream. Fighting panic at the darkness and the pressure of tons of water above her, she kept her mind focused on her goal, and let the dream take her where it willed.
She stopped, and was still within the ocean, where she could somehow see despite the absence of light. Not far ahead of her lay the sleek shape of a submarine, moving through the water in a course perpendicular to her. Chloe pushed closer to the vessel, then swam around it, and saw no damage or sign of distress.
Suddenly, she was shoved back from the boat by an unseen force, so that again she was viewing it from a distance. As she tried to regain her bearings, a dark and terrible shape rose up from the depths below the submarine, a deeper darkness against the black water. At first she thought it was a colossal squid, for its tentacles waved wildly in the current, but then two massive arms reached up and grasped the sub, dragging it down.
Chloe tried to cry out a warning, but she had no voice. Next to her, Tuffy barked silently, his hackles defying the weight of the water. The fearsome thing noticed her, and rose higher, turning towards her. Five baleful red eyes gazed at her across the fathoms, and her heart raced with fears. Its face was indescribable, a mass of protrusions, orifices and eyes to horrible to comprehend.
Her vision became jumbled as she was assailed with multiple images overlapped with each other. She saw the Explorers within the vessel, on the verge of panic as they tried to wrest themselves from the monster's grasp. She saw a building of Cyclopean proportions, and within it, a horde of robed figures made obeisance before a stone idol. She saw the world ravaged and rent asunder by forces beyond man's comprehension. There were bodies, and blood, and horrible shapes that swam through the water and crawled upon the land after mankind had been wiped from the planet's face. All of this was interspersed with a view of the vastness of the cosmos, and suddenly, she understood.
With a terrified scream, she ripped herself from sleep's grasp and bolted awake in her bed, almost slamming her head into the ceiling in her haste to stand up and race for the phone. Despite her fear, she felt slumber's tug; her eyes were heavy and her mind was slow. A glance at the clock in the hallway showed that she had been asleep for only two hours.
The League of Explorers' office number was on speed dial. She punched the number and paced while the phone rang. When a receptionist picked up, Chloe cut off her greeting and said, "Please, I need to talk to Mr. Weinstein."
"Mr. Weinstein is unavailable right now," the receptionist said, all cool professionalism. "May I take a message?"
"I know he's there. This is Ch- Somnambula. I have information on the missing sub."
"I'll put you right through," the receptionist said, suddenly flustered.
A short moment later, she heard Andrew Weinstein's voice on the other end. "Somnambula. What do you have for me?"
His voice was so level and measured that she felt momentarily grounded, able to gather her thoughts together coherently. "I've just come back from dreaming, sir. I saw it, what happened to the sub. There was a horrible creature in the depths, and it snatched them up and dragged them down. And then there was this, this evil cult, and you won't believe what they plan to do to the Explorers!"
Next: Aligned Stars
Characters created by Jesse N. Wiley and AJ Reardon
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