Dead Dreaming

The first trick was falling asleep, but Zoe had always been rather good at that. Day or night, at home or at school: if there was warmth in the air and somewhere to rest her head, sleep had never wandered far beyond her grasp.

The second trick was waking up. Not an easy feat for any teenager, but manageable all the same. The transition from the foggy realm of dreams to the awareness of reality was, at the very least, a well-practised ordeal.

It was the third trick that Zoe had so far failed to master.

The third trick, after cracking the other two, was to remain asleep. To wake up without truly waking up. To disentangle the return to consciousness and the rousing of the body that eighteen years had taught her were inseparably conjoined events.

It was something so simple, and yet, all the same, so maddeningly contradictory that it could only have been impossible. But she was persistent. Determined. There was something behind that veil of dream-fog that she needed to find, and if it took achieving the impossible to get there, then that was exactly what she planned to do.

She just had to focus.

‘Zoe!’ The familiar tenor voice was followed by a short series of raps on the bedroom door.

‘What?’ Zoe called back, frowning in annoyance as she glanced down at the history homework on her desk and tried to remember what she’d been thinking about before the interruption. It felt… important…

The door opened, and a boy in his late teens leaned inside from the hallway.

‘Dad called,’ he said, scratching at the side of his unruly mop of golden hair, ‘he’s not gonna make it home on time, so you need to walk Scout before tea.’

‘Why?’ Zoe asked, fiddling with the ring on her right middle finger, ‘are your legs broken? You do it. I’m busy.’

‘Nuh-uh,’ the boy replied, ‘I walked him yesterday.’

The feeling of the warm metal between her fingers made Zoe stop and take stock. Yesterday… What had happened yesterday…? More to the point, what had happened today?

‘I… don’t remember…’ she muttered, glancing back down to her homework and frowning at the mathematics textbook that she could have sworn had just been for history. She didn’t take mathematics.

‘Kit…?’ she asked, taking a second to calm herself as her heart rate spiked. Equal parts excitement and apprehension.

‘Hm?’ the boy responded.

‘You’re not… real, are you,’ she stated.

‘Rude,’ her brother replied, shaking his head, ‘but no. Of course not. Just make sure you walk Scout, or Dad’s gonna be mad.’

‘Right…’ Zoe nodded, carefully getting to her feet and putting all of her effort into focusing. Her thumb and ring finger pinched periodically at the ring between them. An unsteady anchor: don’t forget, and don’t wake up.

‘One thing before I go, though,’ she added, stepping across the room to the door and opening it a little wider so she could see Kit more fully. Her brother was shorter than her by a few inches, younger by a year, and was wearing a comfy pullover hoodie and silt-stained jogging bottoms. She pulled him into a hug.

‘Uhhh…’ Kit mumbled, tentatively patting his sister’s shoulder, ‘okay…?’ She gave the boy a firm squeeze before letting him go and gently pushing him back out into the hallway.

‘See you soon,’ she told the boy, giving him a sad half-smile, closing the door, and taking another moment to steady herself.

Okay, she thought, going by what she’d read, all she had to do was visualise where she needed to be. Shouldn’t be hard, right?

She eyed the now-closed door with determination. Supposedly she should just be able to close her eyes and go there, but, somehow, she didn’t trust that she wouldn’t forget. Closing her eyes felt dangerous, like she’d lose her already tentative grip on that flimsy anchor to awareness she’d worked so hard to achieve.

No, the door would offer a more stable method of travel. Doors led places, after all. The concept was practically archetypal. Extremely easy to accept. She only had to forget where she was, just for a moment, and a door could lead to anywhere.

Zoe took a deep breath and did her best to clear her mind, heart still hammering softly in her chest as she let the room around her fall away and the door in front of her fill her awareness. This wasn’t her bedroom door. It didn’t lead to the landing. When she opened it, she wouldn’t see her brother standing there watching her with a sceptical gaze.

No, it was just a door. And this door led to…

She reached forward and turned the handle, wilfully ignoring every preconception as light spilled into the room and she stepped outside into the cold, springtime air of Holmstowe’s seaside promenade.

Salt and decay filled her lungs as the door behind her clicked shut, and she glanced back to see that she had just stepped out from the Mariner Café. She swallowed dryly at the undeniable proof that none of this was real, and took another moment to steady herself, clinging heavily onto the ring on her finger.

Once she was ready, she cast her eyes about the familiar promenade before her. A road before another pavement, and then a set of stairs leading down to the beach. Shale around the narrow tidal strip that led out to the tiny island with the ruins of the old lighthouse, and then coarse sand and rock pools on either side to the far reaches of the cove.

Zoe squinted up at the sun, hidden behind clouds in the hazy grey sky. Damn it, she needed it to be night… From what she’d read, that seemed like the sort of thing she should be able to control, but it wasn’t like she’d had much practice.

Deciding she’d have to work it out as she went, she took her first step away from the café and made to cross the road. She’d stick to her original plan: the tide was low, and Drey Island had a good, wide view of Holmstowe as a whole.

She descended the stairs, trying not to get too caught up in marvelling over just how real the metal of the handrail felt against her palm, or how uncannily the weathered stone of the steps curved beneath her feet.

Rough sand crunched under the soles of her shoes as she trudged her way over to the tidal bridge. Even more so than usual, carving a path through the uneven sand felt like walking through treacle. There was a moment when panic almost overtook her as she realised her destination wasn’t getting any closer for her efforts, but she stopped to calm herself before focusing on where she wanted to be and carrying on.

Whatever happened, she couldn’t panic. Panic would wake her up, and all of this would end up just another failure. A highly informative failure, perhaps, but a failure nonetheless.

Soon enough, she felt shale crunching under her, and she breathed a sigh of relief as she followed the raised path out to the island.

Kit… the real Kit… had described a tower. Something tall and imposing that didn’t fit in the small, sleepy old fishing town of Holmstowe. Something that only showed up at night, under the light of the moon.

If Zoe could locate where in the town Kit’s tower appeared, then, at the very least, tonight’s attempt would be a step in the right direction. Of course, she couldn’t rule out that some tower or other would just show up because she expected one to, but if she’d started out with no faith at all, then she never would have come this far in the first place.

Shale gave way to rock, and then to the overgrown, hardy tufts of grass that clung to Drey Island like limpets to the hull of a boat. Finally, coarse, stony dirt. By the time Zoe reached the ruins of the old lighthouse, it was starting to spit with rain. How long had that taken her…? It felt impossible to tell either way. For all she knew, her time here was already running short.

Turning back to the mainland, she cast her gaze across the shore. Holmstowe looked… wrong. Slightly too big. Too many buildings. Whole areas of town that didn’t feel like they’d always been there.

But no tower. Nothing so obvious and out of place as Kit had described.

Zoe squinted up at the concealed sun again. Damn it. She should have visualised the promenade at night when she’d walked through that door. She glanced around her for inspiration amongst the ruins. There weren’t any doors nearby, and she was hardly experienced enough to force her will on the world without a prop to aid her.

She looked down at the rain-slick grass, watching as the sunlight glistened from the blades as they swayed in the wind.

The door had just been a trick, she thought. A way to fool her mind into accepting what it was she wanted it to do. All she really needed to do was trick it again. She narrowed her eyes and concentrated on the grass.

That wasn’t sunlight, she thought, blocking out all the distracting sensory information flooding in from around her and focusing solely on the dancing blades. She let the idea play through her mind, leaving it to sit and ferment until she really believed it.

‘Moon sure is bright tonight…’ she muttered, once more glancing up and seeing that the promenade was now dotted with the warm orange glow of streetlamps. Lights twinkled from a thousand windows across Holmstowe as misaligned stars peeked out from between the clouds that veiled the dark sky above in a daunting, silvery shroud.

Suppressing her excitement, Zoe pinched at the ring between her fingers and squinted out across the now moonlit town. Still no tower.

‘Goddamnit Kit…’ she grumbled, tutting to herself as the disappointment washed over her like the first wave of an encroaching tide. Of course there wasn’t any mysterious tower that only showed up in dreams on a moonlit night. She couldn’t fault herself for being desperate, but in hindsight it was still a stupid thing to have believed.

She turned to let her frustration out through a kick against the fallen stonework of the lighthouse ruins, but instead found herself staggering back in surprise as a vast silhouette loomed rapidly into her view.

The lighthouse was no longer just a weathered foundation and a small field of scattered stones. It was tall. Proud. Dark against the moonlit sky. It had been a ruin for a hundred years before she’d been born, but there it stood, a great stone tower, entirely out of place and built to a strange, almost Gothic architectural style that didn’t fit anything else in town.

Zoe swallowed in anticipation. Kit’s tower. She’d been stood in front of it the whole time.

An imposing, salt-stained oaken door stood ominously before her, and, for the first time since coming here, Zoe realised she wasn’t anxious or excited… she was… afraid.

The sky darkened behind her as the dream warped around her emotional state, but Zoe swallowed the lump in her throat and took a step forward. She had to know, after all. She hadn’t expected to come this far all in one go, but… this had always been the point, right?

She reached a hand out and wrapped it around the cold, wrought iron handle, leaning her full weight back away from the heavy wood of the door and forcing it to shudder open to the sound of a protesting hinge.

The base of the tower flooded with moonlight. Carved stone stairs spiralled against the inner walls of the lighthouse, and Zoe felt her stomach lurch as she saw that the steps didn’t lead upwards as she’d expected, but down. Leaning forward as she felt her heart rate climb, she traced the spiral deeper and deeper until the steps faded away into a dread and nauseating black impossibly far below.

‘You shouldn’t be here.’

The voice was dry, male, and entirely too close to her ear. Already on-edge, Zoe couldn’t help but cry out as she felt a firm hand clasp down on her shoulder. She twisted around in a fright so sudden and instinctive that the very world around her flinched away in response.

Her body jolted and her eyes opened, and all that was left of the dream was a fading afterimage of spiralling stairs against the battered wood of an old school desk in the orange light of the afternoon sun.

‘Zoe, c’mon!’

The voice was quieter now. More personal, feminine, and tinged with an anxious concern. Much like the hand on her shoulder, it had followed her out of the dream and into the waking world, morphing as it did so into something far less threatening.

‘I’m awake…’ she mumbled, pinching her eyes shut against the surface of her school desk and forcing herself to commit what she’d just seen to memory. Drey Island. Kit’s tower. The spiralling descent into a sinister darkness… Dreams could be so easy to forget, after all. Especially in the presence of such persistent distractions.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ the voice insisted, the now far smaller and gentler hand jostling her shoulder as she refused to budge. ‘It’s almost the end of lunch! What if a teacher comes in? You’ll get in trouble.’

‘Then I’ll get in trouble,’ Zoe sighed, pushing herself up off her desk and blearily glancing around the empty classroom. The muffled chattering of students in the hallway outside played gently against her ears like the wash of waves against shale.

Once she’d both fully woken up and committed the events of the dream to memory, she finally glanced up to the girl stood at her side. Long, maple brown hair and wide, hazel eyes, Eirene’s face was fixed in that well-practised, panicky expression of hers that said “you’re doing something wrong, and you’re going to get caught”.

It wasn’t that Zoe had any particular issue with authority figures, it was more that she just took whatever they said on its own merits and made her decisions from there. Eirene, on the other hand, would have insisted the sky was green if anyone sufficiently imposing had told her so.

‘I did it,’ Zoe said, slowly getting to her feet, wary of the likely response but feeling the need to share with Eirene all the same. The two of them had been friends for almost as long as she could remember, after all.

‘Did what?’

‘The tower,’ she explained, nodding slowly as she let her mind’s eye drift back over the dream. ‘I found it. On Drey Island… The old lighthouse…’

Eirene’s expression shifted into one of awkward sympathy. The kind of look one gives a dying man as he shares his plans for the years to come.

‘Zoe…’ she started, but Zoe cut her off with a shake of her head.

‘I know, I know,’ she sighed. ‘Brain chemistry. Seeing what I expect to see.’ She leant down to pick up her schoolbag off the floor. ‘But it… wasn’t what I was expecting. It felt different. Like it didn’t come from me…’

Slinging her bag over her shoulder, she caught her friend’s expression and let her justification trail off with a quiet huff.

‘You doing anything this evening?’ Eirene asked, her smile a mixture of kind and sorry. ‘We could head down to the Mariner’s after school? Grab a coffee?’

Zoe paused for a moment, more than a little tempted to accept. Some time away from the inside of her own head, chatting about unimportant things like school, boys, and university applications… She had to admit, it was an attractive offer.

‘Sorry,’ she replied, finding herself shaking her head even before she’d consciously decided to decline, ‘I… think I’m going to head on over to Sacks. Dad’s working late tonight, so…’ She gave her friend an appreciative smile. ‘Maybe sometime this weekend, though.’

‘Oh,’ Eirene nodded, frowning to herself in what was probably concern, ‘okay. Well, would you like some company, or…?’

The jarring ring of the school bell jolted Eirene straight back into that panicked expression that she wore so naturally, and Zoe couldn’t help but smile.

‘I’m alright,’ she replied, ‘thanks, Eirene.’ She stepped past her friend and gave her a playful frown on her way to the door.

‘C’mon,’ she teased, ‘you’ll get in trouble if a teacher comes in!’

The country road leading out of Holmstowe carved its way through rolling waves of springtime green. Leaves budding from the branches of trees rose and fell in the breeze like sea water, residual droplets of the morning’s rain catching the amber sunlight as they reached their peak, sparkling like an ocean spray.

The clouds had parted, releasing the landscape from their veil of moody grey, and bathing it in a heavenly beauty that Zoe couldn’t help but resent.

She pushed her bicycle just a little bit harder in the hopes of shortening her journey by a few seconds, swinging into the long driveway on her left with as much speed as she dared. It wasn’t exactly a busy road, but, even despite her mood, she didn’t want to cause her dad any extra trouble by rolling herself over the windshield of an oncoming car. He already had more than enough to worry about as it was.

Sacks Cottage Hospital had once been a minor country house on the very outskirts of Holmstowe. After a localised outbreak of encephalitis lethargica in the 1970’s, it had been repurposed for non-emergency medical usage as a way for families to be able to visit their sick loved ones without travelling all the way out to Carlisle or Whitehaven.

These days, Sacks served much the same function, albeit now more focused on frontline and convalescent care. If anything, Zoe’s brother’s situation was something of a throwback, as far as the hospital’s modern patients went.

Securing her bike and removing her helmet, Zoe took a deep breath and headed through the open double doors. Sharing an artificial smile with a passing nurse as she removed the hair tie that had been keeping her lengthy auburn hair out of the way as she’d cycled, she ignored the sparse crowd of other visitors in the waiting area and made a beeline for the reception desk.

‘Zoe Lucas,’ she told the receptionist. ‘Here to visit Ki— Christopher Lucas.’ That never felt right. No one had ever called him “Christopher”.

The woman on the other side of the desk nodded and quickly checked through her records.

‘If you could just sign in here,’ the receptionist replied, tapping at a clipboard to Zoe’s side with her long, French tip nails. ‘Follow the corridor on your left to the end, then head right, and he’s the third room along.’

Zoe ignored the woman’s superfluous directions, filling in the sign-in sheet as she’d done what felt like hundreds of times before.

‘Thanks,’ she muttered, more out of reflex than anything else, placing the pen down and setting off on the all-too-familiar walk into the miniature hospital’s depths.

Old, worn remnants of what had at one time been beautiful wooden façades decorated the hallway walls as she passed. Herringbone floor slats that had once been carefully maintained by dutiful servants now lay scuffed and faded underfoot, long since saturated with neglect and the decades-old stench of antiseptic spray.

Finding her brother’s room, Zoe hesitated for a moment before turning the cold brass knob and letting herself inside. This never seemed to get much easier, and, even as she closed the door behind her, she found herself keeping her eyes fixed anywhere but on the bed at the other end of the room.

Pulling up a battered old armchair to the side of her brother’s hospital bed and taking a seat, Zoe finally mustered up the strength to let her gaze focus on the room’s sole other occupant.

‘Hey, Kit…’ she said, giving her brother a sadder, but altogether more genuine smile than she had the passing nurse. ‘How’ve you been, huh? Scout’s been missing you. Keeps finding ways to get into your room, heh. It’s driving Dad nuts…’

The golden-haired boy in the bed didn’t respond, the only motion coming from the soft, unhurried breaths cycling through his chest, and the occasional flicker of his eyes as they rolled back and forth behind his eyelids.

Had it not been for the feeding tube snaking its way up into one of his nostrils, and the rhythmic bleeping of the heart rate monitor, Kit may just as well have been sleeping.

In fact, as far as the doctors could tell, he was sleeping. The only reason he was in a hospital bed and not his own was that the last time he had woken up had been almost a month ago this coming weekend.

The boy’s chart described his condition as “atypical encephalitis lethargica”. What had started as a mild fever and abnormal difficulty in waking up had evolved over the course of about a week into what his doctors described as something between a coma and the state of akinetic mutism expected in more normal cases of encephalitis lethargica.

He was neither so fully unconscious as a coma patient, nor so immovably alert as a traditional sufferer of the vanishingly rare disease with which he had been diagnosed. If anything, with the fever now long since passed, he appeared by all accounts to simply be asleep. Brainwave monitoring had even gone so far as to suggest that he was dreaming.

Although his primary doctor had suggested the old term “coma somnolentum” to better describe Kit’s situation, his ultimate diagnosis had remained as an atypical form of the more clinically accepted disease.

Sacks Hospital’s past cases of similar patients in the 70’s had not escaped anyone’s notice, but, with Kit seemingly an isolated incident, there was little to be done with that information other than to search for environmental causes around Holmstowe. A true needle-in-a-haystack exercise, if ever there was one.

‘I found it, you know,’ Zoe told her brother, reaching a hand out and placing it over the bedsheets covering his own. ‘The tower in the moonlight? Would have helped if you’d said it was a lighthouse, heh…’ She chuckled softly to herself, wondering just how much—if any—of what she was saying was even getting through.

‘I know it’s a long shot,’ she sighed, stroking a thumb over the side of Kit’s covered hand, ‘and Eirene’s probably right that I’m just seeing what I want to see, but… I’m not a doctor. I can’t do anything to help with… this…’ She gestured weakly to the tendril-like cables of the heart monitor that reached up and under the bedsheets to clutch possessively at her brother’s motionless body.

‘I just… It can’t be a coincidence that you started seeing it right when the fever hit, right…?’ She gave her brother’s hand a squeeze, more so for her own conviction than for his potential reassurance. ‘And every night after…?’ She shook her head.

‘If that’s where you… went…’ she gritted her teeth, hating how desperate she sounded, ‘if that’s where… “you” still are…?’

Zoe exhaled, glancing up for a moment at the amber sunlight trickling in through the window, then to the heart rate monitor, and then finally back down to her brother’s smooth, sleeping face. Determination swelled within her, and she found herself setting her jaw, giving the boy’s hand another much firmer squeeze.

‘I’m coming to find you, Kit,’ she told him, feeling the beginnings of tears starting to sting at the corners of her eyes. ‘I’m coming. So hold on, all right? Just… hold on.’

She dipped her head, feeling the distinct urge to hide her face in case her brother somehow saw her cry.

‘I’ll be there soon. I promise.’

The warmth of stored body heat between a thumb and ring finger. The weight of metal sliding around the base of a middle digit. A nervous habit transmuted by determined practice into a cue to stop and ask a single, disarmingly simple question:

Is any of this real?

Focus. Disengage the autopilot of everyday life. Take a breath and look around. Where am I? Why am I here? How did I get here?

Answer carefully, and, most importantly, accept the conclusion. Don’t be drawn back in.

Turn around, and take a step.

Moonlit Holmstowe had changed since the last time Zoe had briefly walked its roads. Even from the moment she had turned away from the hazy, joyful dream of endless holidays hiking through the Kentish woods with her mother, the familiar streets that had emerged beyond the trees had led her to unexpected ends.

Having not seen the lighthouse from afar before now, Zoe took a moment to silently apologise to her brother for criticising his description. It really was more of a tower than it was a lighthouse. Sure, a light may well have burned near its apex, but the ship-warding glow seemed almost an afterthought in the building’s strange, Gothic construction.

It wouldn’t have felt out of place attached to a church or cathedral, but—perhaps more strikingly—as Zoe approached across the tidal bridge, she saw that the entrance at the tower’s base looked precisely the same as it had at her last visit. Unlike the ever-shifting town behind her, not a single stone block seemed amiss.

The rest of the dream appeared to be subject to the wandering currents and eddies of her subconscious mind, but the tower, by contrast, felt fixed. Bathed in pale moonlight, and as real as anything in the waking world, the building was a solid, static point that Zoe could neither change nor displace.

If Eirene was right that this was just a desperate trick of her mind, then she could only congratulate herself on being wilful enough to create such a stubborn aberration amidst the surrounding sea of roiling change.

She checked behind her as she pulled against the door, wary of whatever had stopped her last time she had stepped inside this place. Although she knew the hand on her shoulder and the words in her ear had been her friend’s, something in the back of her mind just couldn’t shake the idea that the voice itself had belonged to someone else.

That familiar dread pooled at the base of Zoe’s stomach as she once more found herself confronted with the spiral of stone steps leading down into the darkness below the tower. Wary of being grabbed again, she fought past the instinctual fear rising in her chest and pulled the doors closed behind her, shrouding the tower’s interior in darkness.

It took her eyes a moment to adjust, but when they did, she realised there was still just enough light by which to see. A quick glance up revealed that the tower’s interior terminated abruptly only a few feet above her head. However, the very bottommost of the square, glassless windows she’d seen dotted along its exterior were visible inside too, allowing both moonlight and an ocean-stained breeze to filter down to where she was standing by the door.

The muffled sounds of waves crashing against the base of the island outside were drowned out by the tuneless howling of the wind echoing through the inverted tower’s hollow interior.

Zoe swallowed and set her eyes firmly on the stairs, reaching a hand into her coat pocket and pulling out the torch from within that she had just decided had been in there all along. Increasingly afraid as she was becoming, she was at least glad for the reassurance that she still retained some control, even in this place.

She pressed the button on the side of the torch and frowned when nothing happened. A few more attempts later, and a weak, flickering beam of light finally shone out from the LED bulb and cast harsh shadows against the wall behind the top of the stairs.

Zoe gritted her teeth. There was a part of her that wondered if her torch’s ability to illuminate was somehow tied to her own resolve, and it was thereby a little disquieting to see such a fragile and trembling projection against the opposing wall.

It didn’t matter, she decided. She wasn’t here for her own enjoyment.

Taking a deep breath, Zoe crept across the base of the tower and took her first step down onto the stony spiral staircase. She hated how loudly even her most careful footsteps echoed through the interior of the hollow tower, but she could only hope that the groaning of the wind would mask her approach from… well… anything that might be lurking at the bottom.

She kept her pace steady, moving perhaps a little faster down the dizzying spiral of stone than she would have liked for fear that morning might come before she reached her goal. She must have more time now than during her last attempt, right? Sleeping in her own bed at night, rather than on a school desk in an empty classroom over lunch break…

Still, there was no way to keep track of time in here that she knew of, so—much as her steadily rising heart rate was trying to convince her otherwise—she had no real choice but to keep moving forward.

When an end to the circular descent hadn’t made itself apparent by her third circuit around the tower’s inner wall, Zoe stopped for a moment to lean over the steps and cast her flickering light down into the abyss. There was no handrail, so she kept her centre of mass away from the edge as she peered down.

Nothing.

She checked back above her, and noted that her suspicion that this place was somehow more stable than anywhere else in the dream appeared to be proving true. Having been keeping track of her rotations, she counted just as many stairs above her as she expected.

Without warning, her light died again, casting her back into sudden darkness. The failing torch kept going out of its own accord, but—so far at least—she had managed to get it to come back to life with a few more presses of its switch.

Coaxing her only light source back into service once more, she set her jaw and continued on down, hoping as she went that the monotonous descent wouldn’t be enough to lull her back into the state of unaware dreaming from which she’d worked so hard to escape in the first place.

When the warm, flickering light from below had first emerged into view, it had taken Zoe more than a few steps to register that it wasn’t just her mind playing tricks.

She’d lost track of how long she’d been descending the stairs now, and she could only hope that she still had a good amount of time left before the morning.

Frowning as the subtle changes in the surrounding illumination slowly became more apparent, Zoe turned her torch off and squinted over the side of the stairs.

There was what looked like a wooden floor far below, strewn with objects that she couldn’t make out, and cast in a wavering light emerging from one side of the tower’s wall. The tower itself seemed to have been slowly getting wider as she descended, so it would still be a few minutes yet until she reached the floor below.

The temptation to call Kit’s name died before the breath even made it to her lips. There was something sinister about this place that, although she’d yet to encounter anything… well, alive… kept her from wanting to draw any unnecessary attention. If Kit really was down there, then something very insistent in the back of her mind told her that it would be much safer to keep on creeping down the steps and find out for herself.

It may have only been a dream, but something about the potential danger still felt uncomfortably real.

Hurrying down the last few rotations of the staircase as quietly as she was able, Zoe kept her torch in her pocket and her silhouette close to the wall.

The howling of the wind above finally started to die back, and she couldn’t help but pause as the retreating noise was replaced by not only the crackling of a fire burning below her, but by a muffled, lilting melody.

Frowning, she pushed herself to round the final circuit of the staircase, finally feeling her shoe touch down on comparatively soft, pliable wooden floorboards.

With one cautious foot still on the last of the stone steps, Zoe took a moment to absorb the scene before her, quickly noting that, although the staircase terminated here, it continued on down again on the other side of the room.

The space must have been around forty metres across, and was lit solely by a grand fireplace built into the wall to her left. Decorated with dusty, antique furniture—almost like an enormous living room—the chamber looked like everything inside it had been scaled up so that, had the space been shrunk down to the diameter of the tower above, everything would have been the expected size.

Monstrous armchairs partly blocked the firelight from reaching the far wall, where towering bookshelves flanked a set of mouldering, oversized bunk beds. Atop the dining-table-sized coffee table by the fire, a gramophone warbled out muffled and crackling ballroom music through a tarnished old acoustic trumpet large enough for Zoe to crawl inside and hide.

Most unsettling, though, were the statues. Three great, hulking gargoyles, wingless and matched to the proportions of the oversized room, stood frozen in a grim pastiche of what everyday life might have looked like for people living in a place such as this.

One hunched over a lit gas stove by the far stairs, as if tending to the contents of the bubbling pot from which Zoe could see steam curling up and past the statue’s snarling, canine visage. Another by the bookshelves clutched an enlarged tome between its jagged claws, standing motionless atop the toes of its bestial hind legs as it seemed intent on replacing the book on a higher shelf.

The third—largest by far—remained largely obscured, collapsed in front of the fire into an armchair that, even with its distended size, was still too small for the figure that it bore. Facing away from Zoe as it was, head tilted unnaturally far back over the top of its seat, the only detail she could make out was the yawning emptiness of the statue's deep, shadowy eye sockets.

Swallowing her unease, Zoe crept away from the stairs and slowly traced the edge of the chamber along the opposite wall to the fireplace, until she came to the bookshelves and had to contend with the statue replacing books. Keeping a firm eye on the thing, and noting that, up close, its body appeared draped in old, tattered clothin—

Bang.

Her foot collided with something solid, and her heart hammered in her chest as she glanced down and saw a long, serpentine tail on the ground, leading away from the statue’s back.

She spent an uncomfortably long few minutes staring into the statue’s cavernous eye sockets as she waited for the other shoe to drop, expecting that it would spring to life at any moment and pounce on her for disturbing it.

But as nothing seemed to come of her transgression, she allowed herself an uneasy glance back at the other two statues in the room. Noting that neither of them had moved, she spared the one closest to her one last look before carefully stepping over its tail and making a silent, crouching dash the rest of the way to the far stairs to continue her descent.

Only another two circuits of the tower’s perimeter, and Zoe’s feet finally met solid ground. It was a cellar-like space, empty save for a scattering of wooden crates and barrels so decrepit that whatever they contained had likely rotted to dust long ago.

Heart still hammering in anticipation of those unsettling statues groaning to life and pursuing her, Zoe wasted no time in making a beeline for the huge oaken doors across from the bottom of the stone steps.

Distant, muffled ballroom music still echoed down the stairs from above as her shaking hands met the uneven surface of the doors and pushed. They were mirror images in every way of the tower’s main doors far above, and every bit as heavy.

Gritting her teeth and pressing her full weight against the wood, she was met with a rush of cool, dusty air, and a deep, foreboding silence that seemed to wash away the music from behind her away like smoke on the wind.

Keen to escape the perceived danger at her back, but equally wary of what might still lie ahead, Zoe took a moment to remind herself that she was just dreaming and wasn’t in any real danger. Steeling her resolve, she slipped through the gap of the partway open door.

There was a certain scent of deterioration in the air as she stepped beyond the confines of the tower cellar. Not quite must, but more the smell of a hundred years of wear from the countless footsteps responsible for the irregularities in what had once been a smooth, stone floor.

Zoe’s torch flashed to life in her hand for only a mere second before giving out. She cursed to herself as the door behind her creaked shut, trying to get the thing working again, but to no avail. Finally giving up and replacing the useless light source in her pocket, she glanced ahead to find she had emerged at the corner of a large, masonry-arched corridor, lined on one side with tall glass panes through which was spilling what seemed to be pale moonlight.

Spying vague shapes in the glass, she squinted for a moment before realising she was looking at a series of stained-glass windows, each depicting what appeared to be a different religious scene. Frowning, she glanced to the interior side of the corridor, and was just about able to make out similar such scenes painted on the walls between the pillars in the form of frescos.

A sense of uneasy half-familiarity washed over her as she surveyed her new surroundings. They almost reminded her of Trinity Church in Holmstowe, but… well, bigger. The passageways both ahead of her and to her right were practically wide enough to allow for road traffic, and the structural pillars protruding from the walls stretched up far enough above her that the very apex of the arched ceiling was shrouded in almost perfect darkness.

It must have been some kind of cathedral, she thought, although she’d never been inside one herself. Her mother had used to take her and Kit to Trinity every Sunday when they had been kids, but that was a very long time ago now.

If this place truly was someone else’s dream, then it probably wasn’t her brother’s. Sure, he loved working his way through video games filled with exactly this kind of Gothic imagery, but… The taste of the air. The feel of the uneven stone beneath her feet. It was too… real. Too complete to have been dreamed up by someone who only knew these kinds of places from the other side of a computer screen.

Taking a deep breath of the stale air, Zoe glanced between the two corridors before picking the one straight ahead on account of it being slightly better lit. The great arches towered oppressively above her as she walked, but—as before—her unease was overpowered by the pressing concern that she didn’t know how long she had left to search.

Even in length, the corridor seemed to stretch on forever. After more than a minute of walking without finding an exit, Zoe was starting to consider heading back to try the other passageway when a brief flash of light caught her eye just inside a recess in the wall to her right.

Apprehensive, she quickly checked over her shoulder for trouble before swallowing her fear and approaching the alcove. Quietly ducking inside, she noted what appeared to be some kind of memorial against the wall that had been scuffed and knocked askew. Names she didn’t recognise were engraved in golden italic script and illuminated from underneath by the gentle, orange glow of rows of votive candles. Some of the candles had been extinguished and scattered to the ground, presumably by whatever had impacted the memorial.

The candle glow was too weak against the light from the windows to have been what had attracted her attention, so her eyes quickly drifted to the floor. Amongst the scattered candles and puddles of dried wax lay a small, familiar device with a black outer casing and a cracked, reflective screen, glinting in the moonlight.

Heart lurching in her chest, Zoe crouched down and picked the object up, sliding its façade up to reveal a keypad concealed underneath.

She swallowed dryly. The phone was a Nokia 3600. Identical to the one her brother had received for Christmas from their dad last year.

Instinctively, she turned the device on. The damaged screen flickered to life, displaying the familiar logo, and then two hands reaching out for one another across a field of white.

Half the screen went black, the logo disappeared, and the leftmost hand was left reaching out into the darkness, jerking back and forth in an unsettling spasm before, finally, the phone failed altogether.

‘Dad was always telling you not to leave this in pockets it could fall out of…’ she muttered, uneasily running her eye back up along the memorial and noting the telling angle of the disturbed votive stand.

Tracing the apparent direction of impact, her gaze fell onto one of the puddles of wax nearer the far side of the alcove. It was smeared by what could easily have been a handprint. She pushed herself up to her feet, phone still in hand, and stepped back into the corridor, now carefully scanning the surrounding area for more details.

It looked like someone had ducked into the alcove in a hurry, slammed into the votive stand, and fallen over before scrabbling back to their feet. Given the phone they had left behind, and who she had come here in the first place to find, Zoe could only imagine it must have been her brother.

Her eyes widened as she finally registered the long grooves carved into the pillar on the side of the alcove from which she’d approached. They almost looked like… claw marks? A spike of adrenaline coursed through her body as she estimated that the grooves she had initially overlooked as a flaw in the architecture were each spaced almost a foot apart.

Whatever it was that Kit had been running from, it must have been enormous… Naturally, Zoe’s eyes drifted up to the shadowy apex of the ceiling. This place certainly didn’t seem built for anything human-sized…

A muffled bang farther down the corridor drew her attention and made her jump. Squinting ahead, she spotted what looked like an opening on the right wall maybe sixty metres away.

A second bang a few seconds later kept her frozen to the spot, within easy ducking distance of the alcove, but when a third rang out and seemed to be no closer than the first two, Zoe swallowed her trepidation and began to creep forward.

Mindful of both her footsteps and her silhouette, she kept herself low and close to the right-hand wall, in the shadows away from the glow of the moonlit glass.

A low, background thrum soon joined the rhythmic banging, but not until Zoe reached the passage exit and peered around the supporting pillar did she realise that it was a chorus of voices.

She had been right to consider this place a cathedral. It seemed she had emerged at the transept of a vast, cavernous church. Enormous, candle-lit chandeliers hung from impossibly far above, casting the dark, stony chamber in a paltry orange glow and painting the nave below in fat clumps of sickly, dripping wax.

The pews were fuller than Zoe had ever seen at Trinity Church, although not with people but… things… Great masses of sickly flesh heaved atop the creaking benches, wrapped in skin pulled taut, and held steady by veiny roots anchored to the shattered stone below.

Like foul insects emerging from bulbous cocoons, ungainly, human-like torsos erupted from their tops, twisted faces stretched across too-long skulls, and spindly hands clasped firm before them in prayerful petition. Some even displayed the growth of feeble, underdeveloped wings from between their unnaturally prominent shoulder blades.

Where there should have been ears on the sides of their heads, there was only smooth, tight skin. They bore no hair of any sort and were so emaciated that it seemed the only thing keeping them from collapsing to the floor was the support of their rooted cocoons.

‘Fa… ther…’ ‘So… near… n-now…’ ‘…our an… gel…’

‘Deliver… us…’ ‘…can… f-feel…’ ‘Tell… tell us…’ ‘…the… l-living…’

‘A… A-Amen… Oh, God… amen…’ ‘Your… Y-Your words…’ ‘…s-so… long… Please…’

The creatures’ rasping groans overlapped into a monstrous, unintelligible cacophony as they vied for the attention of the object of their prayers. Zoe’s stomach turned at the sight.

Barely able to take her eyes off of the inhuman horrors in the nave to her left, she finally managed to pull her attention across to the apse as another of those loud, rhythmic bangs rang out through the air.

Before a grand altar—wide as a cabin cruiser and extravagantly decorated with towering golden statues of beautiful, robed figures reaching down from above—stood a creature unlike anything Zoe had ever seen before.

Monstrously tall at at least four times her height, it wore tattered, yet regal priestly vestments that trailed down to its taloned feet. Lengthy clumps of matted, grey fur sprouted from all four of its exposed forearms, as well as the six enormous wings that sprouted from its back.

A face that looked just a little too much like it may have once have been human stretched out obscenely in front of it. A sharp beak seemingly made of fused bone and teeth protruded out farther still from where the over-strained skin terminated just below the nose. The creature didn’t seem to possess a lower jaw, the opening to its throat instead a visible, yawning chasm only partly hidden behind its jagged bill.

Two of its four arms were stretched up to the sky, as if appealing to the great statues behind the altar, and one held a golden processional staff which it periodically used to strike the ground at its feet. The fourth was outstretched—seemingly arbitrarily—in Zoe’s direction, and she couldn’t help but notice the vast, talon-like claws that perfectly matched the scratch marks at the alcove.

The priest-like creature cast one arm to the side, and the congregation fell silent. Zoe held her breath, heart hammering in her chest.

The monster turned to regard what must have been its “flock” when—much to Zoe’s horror—the phone still clutched in her hand chose that moment to squawk out a sinister, corrupted misremembering of its shrill startup tune.

She held her breath and scanned the room. None of the earless worshippers in the pews seemed to have noticed.

However, when her gaze flitted back to the winged creature by the altar, it was met by dark, inhuman eyes, and a bestial hunger which left her most animal of instincts screaming at her to run.