Alex Reynard
The Library
Alex Reynard's Online Books
CHAPTER THIRTTYTHHREE
"MOM!!!"
Toby was suddenly wide awake, not knowing whether he'd actually screamed or just dreamt it.
It was so dark in the tiny room his eyes needed a moment to adjust. The automat panel glowed just enough to make out the indistinct, fuzzy shapes in the room.
Piffle was still beside him, and still asleep. So he must have cried out in his mind only. If he'd done it for real she would have been startled out of her skin.
Careful so as not to wake her, Toby peeled the covers back and slowly crawled, inch by inch, towards the padded landing area. After a dream like that, he just wanted to move. To know he wasn't trapped in one spot anymore.
At the automat, he moved around the little food icons with his finger until a bottle of water came up. He poked the image urgently. Seven seconds later there was a small 'thud' as it whooshed through the tubes and arrived. Toby winced, hoping the noise hadn't disturbed anyone. Hands shaking, he unscrewed the cap and drank so fast it spilled all down his pajamas.
Good god, that dream...
Toby had wondered what the nightmares here must be like. And now he knew. They were just as bad as when he was alive.
He had been sitting in bed at home, watching one of his favorite cartoons. But the screen was too close, like the TV was hovering an inch or so off his lap. And then he was inside the TV show, observing it omnipresently. The Keen Team were once again on the trail of Dr. Bigfoot's latest evil plot. But the normally light and wacky program had a more intense edge to it somehow. The animation was far too detailed. The camera angles swung in drunken arcs. No one was smiling. And when a cage fell from above and trapped the heroes, there was real fear in their eyes. It wasn't their buffoonish nemesis this time. It was a tall, thin presence in a featureless mask. He laughed an unearthly, glass-breaking laugh and the screen went black. But instead of cutting to a commercial, it returned to the show. The heroes were all tied up, back to back. Tears were pouring down their faces as they struggled against barbed wire bonds. The man in the mask was looming over them, drawing on their faces. No... No, he wasn't drawing. He had some kind of knife shaped like a pen. And he was carving their facial features off. Slowly. Piece by piece. They were trapped and couldn't escape, and had to listen to the anguish of their teammates, their friends, suffering this meaningless, cruel torture. And it wouldn't end. The scene just kept going and going and going. Toby was uncomfortable to the point of nausea, but his body was paralyzed and he couldn't tear his eyes away. He had to watch while his beloved cartoon stars wept in agony. He started screaming hoarsely for his mother to come take the TV away, to shove him away from it, anything! He screamed louder and louder, but had a deep, sick knowledge in his gut that something was very wrong and she wasn't coming to help him. She wasn't ever coming back to him ever again. Because she-
That's when he woke up.
Toby suckled on the plastic bottle till he'd crushed every last drop out of it. He sat there, back to the hatch, just trying to keep his heart from banging its way through his ribs.
He reached up to feel his cheeks. They were wet. But not from water. He'd cried his eyes raw during the dream.
Part of him hated his mind for putting him through such a horrorshow.
But another part wondered if this had been inevitable.
At least when he'd spent all that time in the cave weeks ago, he hadn't been holding anything back. He'd been constantly terrified out of his wits, screaming, crying, and wishing like crazy for help. But over the last few days he'd still been surrounded constantly by pain and danger and surreality. He wasn't any safer. He was just learning to deal with it better. But a lot of that was simply shutting the fear off and tucking it away for the moment. Caching it for later. He was among other people, after all. Societal rules decreed that descending into fits of blubbering hysteria was unsightly. So he held it in.
No wonder it had all come back out when it had the chance. Maybe his brain was even doing him a favor. Uncorking the bottle before it burst.
After all, he had been enduring what should have been impossible levels of stress. Losing Piffle. Nearly having his brain erased by that pink gas. Tinder Fingers' burning touch. The rancid swamp. The waterfall. Trapforest Path. The ice angels. The parade of psychotic terrors in Amaurosis Fugax. Tearing his own flesh to shreds. Letting Junella skewer him. Nearly being killed by Rither. The sound of Rither's limbs being crushed. The masked kid's jawbone...
There was so much he'd been through already. By all logic, it should have driven him insane by now. He should have been a gibbering mental case, biting his nails down to the skin and sitting in a puddle of his own piss.
He had no idea why he wasn't.
A small voice inside him timidly offered that maybe there was more resilience at his core than he'd ever had reason to believe in. Or maybe being with people who were kind to him, and forgave his cowardice, helped to make him stronger.
Toby felt new tears from his eyes. He remembered then what had happened just before he fell asleep. And that made him realize why now was when he'd finally snapped, not earlier. It was seeing his room again. The room he'd remembered fondly. The room he would have given up his own skin to return to during those long nights in the cave.
He'd already discussed with Piffle his realization of what going back home meant going back to. But that had been a vague worry. Something easy to forget. It hadn't become concrete until he'd felt that room again. When he'd entered himself, his mind had taken him, not to the place he wanted to remember, but to what it had actually been.
A plastic tomb. His sickbed full of mottled vinyl sheets and stomach-churning odors. His toys splayed all over the floor, since he increasingly lacked the energy to put them away. His beloved books lying open, their pages spotted with phlegm and other substances. The unbreathable poison cloud of artificial flowers. The haphazard spots and patches of his mother's unhinged, compulsive "cleaning".
He had called out her name in panic within the dream. But in his waking state, he realized now that he hardly ever mentioned her. How often had he even thought about her in the past few days?
Why would a boy who has known nothing but his mother's love throughout his life, upon finding himself in a strange, faraway land, not be paralyzed from the grief of separation from her? Why was he not in mourning? Why did his thoughts seem to slide away from her, to subconsciously avoid her?
'What does your mother's face look like, Toby?' a ghoulish voice within him asked, grinning with crooked teeth at the knowledge that he could not answer the question.
He did not dare answer.
Because what Junella had said couldn't be true. It couldn't!
FUCK HER!!!
Toby gasped, stunned by that sudden gunshot of rage that had just overwhelmed him. It had felt like being lashed by a whip of fire.
'You're lying to yourself,' he said to his empty insides.
He wished this room had a window to look out of. He wanted to lean on the sill and stare out into the night at all those turning wheels and let them take his mind away. Somewhere far from these agonizing thoughts. He felt like his brain had been flayed. He just wanted it all to go away. To go home.
But that was why the nightmare had come. Because, at some deep level, he knew it was no longer that simple. He wanted to escape from this nightmareland and return to a place where life was simple and safe. Except it wasn't. That was only how it had seemed while he was trapped inside. That was the hazy, hypnotic dream he'd had while he was caught in the pitcher plant.
His subconsciousness knew better: he had no home to go to.
So what now? Call off the journey to Anasarca? Tell Junella and Zinc he'd wasted their time for nothing? And where would he go even if he did back out? Did he just expect them to babysit him and keep him safe forever? Toby realized that he had no idea how to survive without a Mommy taking care of all the details of his life.
He hadn't been trying to get "home", he realized. He'd been trying to get back to a place of no responsibilities, no accountability, and no thought for tomorrow. A place where every today would be exactly like the yesterday before. Dull, colorless, plastic-coated. Safe.
Toby wondered if he'd ever stop feeling nauseous.
He thought about ordering another water.
Then he thought about going out for a walk.
That was ridiculous. Of course it was. He'd never been to this city before. And he had no idea how long he'd slept. It was probably the deep part of night out there now. The time of night Coryzans had built the walls for. Even assuming Ectopia Cordis had its own defenses, what about its citizens? Toby couldn't fend off a punk with his hammer and not feel sick about it. What would he do if a couple dozen surrounded him this time?
Or what if that didn't happen? What if he just went out and got some fresh air for a few minutes, never lost sight of the hotel, and came right back? He didn't have to go poking around in any dark alleys. He knew this city was probably lit up like a Christmas tree 24/7.
He'd be safe, just going out and coming right back, right?
"I'll do it," he whispered to himself. 'I'm going to get up and push that button that says 'lobby', then just climb into the tube. If Mr. Roosman is downstairs, I'll say hi to him and tell him I'm going out for a little while to clear my head. Who knows? Maybe I'll see some late-night party store and go in and have a look around. Maybe I'll buy an Ectopia Cordis souvenir. Maybe I'll get a baseball cap or a postcard.'
Toby let his mind wander to all the possibilities his little nighttime excursion might take.
He didn't notice that his eyelids were drooping, or that his thoughts were rapidly dissolving into slush.
Minutes later, he was fast asleep on the floor of the gym mat, his back to the hatch.
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