Probably Sort-of Safe
The story so far:
And now…Chapter 16
The Perils of Dream Walking
“I really, really don’t want to do this. I want that on record.”
“We don’t have a record.”
“But if we did, this would be on there. Clear?”
“Clear, Clark.”
Lim spoke up, saying, “I would also like it on record-”
“There is no record!”
“-that I have no way, again, NO WAY, of knowing if I can actually open up the door to wherever it is that Clark sees in his dream.”
“If I can even turn around,” said Clark.
“And if it’s even a real place.”
“Look, you guys heard The Man of Locks,” said Melissa. “Lim, he said that you were bending the key to your will, making it your own.”
“Yeah, and he also said that it was incredibly dangerous.”
“Grown-ups say that about all the best stuff,” pointed out Grub.
“And anyway,” Lim went on, “he said I was ‘making’ it my own, you know, as in like an on-going process.”
“So you skip a few steps, no big deal,” said Derek.
“Yeah, no big deal,” chimed in Grub. “Plenty of things can be done just as well if you skip a couple of boring steps. Like me and bathing.”
Everyone stopped doing anything.
“Grub, uh, what steps of that do you skip?” asked Derek.
“Oh, you know, just a few minor ones.”
“Which minor ones?”
“The ones involving soap.”
“Oh God.”
“And water.”
“Holy crap.”
“Hey guys,” said Clark, “not to be a prima donna or something, but could we maybe get back to the matter at hand?”
This was not an unreasonable request. They had gathered in his bedroom and begun the process of tying him down to his bed. Clark had explained that he always woke up from the dream with a violent shake, so it was decided that if they could keep him from forcing himself back into waking life, he could stay with the dream long enough to find out where The Dog was coming from.
Belts were fastened around his wrists and ankles and then to his bed posts.
“Do we do his head?” asked Lim.
“No!” said Chowdah. “It’s like my Mommy told me, ‘You don’t want to do anything that messes with your head-blood. Head-blood is the most important type of blood.’”
None of the others had the courage to ask what kind of incident would have prompted this knowledge.
“Look, you shouldn’t worry about any of it,” Derek insisted. “We’re all right here to wake you up just as soon as you need us too. Chowdah’s all ready to scream in your ear to get you up.”
“I’ve been hydrating a lot,” the little girl beamed.
“And do we think that’ll be enough?” Clark asked.
“Last time it made a guy’s ears bleed.”
“So yes.”
The tied-down boy was still sweating profusely.
“Uh…guys, y-you see…the thing is-”
“It’ll be easy,” Melissa assured him. “Think of it like watching a movie, or playing a game. It’s just a dream, so you’re in no more danger than you would be doing either of those other things. Once you turn around and see where you are, you can wake up. And we’ll be waiting right here to help you.”
Clark flicked his desperate eyes from one to the next. It was all that his bound form could do.
They chatted about nothing while the hours passed. Eyelids wavered. Drooped. Chowdah ate dozens of candy bars, claiming that there was nothing more energizing in the whole world. She soon lay curled up in the corner and could not be disturbed.
Clark was resisting sleep, snapping his eyes open whenever they so much as fluttered.
The only person in that room who did not seem to feel the toll of the day was The Grub. He bounded around the room on his tiptoes, clapping and tapping his hands to a tune being transmitted by some unknown radio-station on a frequency only he could hear.
No one noticed the exact moment of transition. In one instant, Clark was awake. In the next, he was gone.
He sucked in air through his nostrils and exhaled it as frame-shattering snores.
“How long do you think we’re going to have to wait?” asked Lim.
“Not long,” said Grub as he rocked back and forth on his heels, “not long at all.”
He was, technically-speaking, quite right. Twenty minutes is, in the grand scheme of the universe, not a significant amount of time at all. Nor is it a tremendous amount of time in comparison to a year or a month or even a day. Twenty minutes is not even all that much out of an hour.
But given the proper context, any amount of time can be an agonizing wait. In the proper context, twenty minutes is to the mind as a trek across the Sahara is to the body.
By the end of the twenty minutes, sleep had claimed Lim and Melissa and Derek. The quiet of the room drew them into hypnotic contemplation of minutia, be it the irregularities in the paint or the swaying branches outside the window. Each object became host to a billion recurring patterns that the eye struggled to contain while the brain labored to decode.
And so, they slept.
Grub, never pausing, never waiting, was left awake among the mass of sighing, snoring and twitching figures.
Clark began to moan.
It was such a soft sound that at first Grub could not hear it over the constant turbulence that was the inside of his mind.
It was only when Clark began to shake in bed and strain at the belt buckles that Grub noticed what was happening.
“Clark?” he said, touching the restrained-boy’s shoulder. “Clark, are you OK?”
Clark relaxed and settled back into the blankets.
‘Phew,’ thought Grub.
Clark’s eyes snapped open. His pupils had rolled to the back of their sockets. He surged upwards, pulling every belt taut.
He was speaking now, shaking now, pleading and begging and crying now, tears spilling out from his unseeing eyes. His fingers began to spasm, clutching at the blankets and the air, digging into the palms of his hands.
“What’s happening?” mumbled Derek. Seeing Clark, he snapped awake. “Oh God, what’s happening?”
Rivers of sweat streamed.
And still those eyes stayed open, veins pulsing out against the border of white.
Grub was on top of him, poking and punching and pinching and slapping every available spot on Clark’s body.
Nothing worked. Clark kept moaning and weeping, kept shaking and struggling, kept leaking that same clammy sweat.
The idea appeared in Grub’s head fully formed. It was a left-over memory from his toddler days, when his older brother, Kenny, had discovered that younger brothers were that most excellent combination of vulnerable and invincible. Kenny had delighted in the freak-outs, the fake-outs and, most crucially, the gross-outs.
So, doing as he did not remember that he remembered, Grub took Clark’s head in his hands and held the other boy’s face directly in front of his own.
Grub took in one deep breath and-
(“What the hell is he doing?” Lim said.)
-belched directly into Clark’s open mouth.
Clark gagged. He blinked and puckered his nose and coughed down a choke. His eyes came back into focus.
“Grub,” the dazed boy said, “did you just burp right into my mouth?”
“Yes,” said The Grub, “yes I did.”
Clark nodded slowly. “Thanks.”
He collapsed back into bed.
