When Dreams Walk Among Us

SPECIAL TREAT! This is a guest post from the amazing Lizzi Rogers of Considerings blog. 
What did I do to deserve this treat? Basically I assigned it to her like a mean substitute teacher, as part of an award. 

She introduced me to the concept of the Secret Book of Rules (SBoR and/or BoSR,) which is much like the Maurader's Map from Harry Potter. If you tap your wand upon it, metaphorically and not at all pervertedly, or mayhaps just a tiny bit pervertedly, and solemnly swear you're up to no good, you can find a way around any rules in the entire Blogosphere. But you have to mean it, about the being up to no good. I'm obviously Team Captain of this concept. I took the book and ran with it.

I had a very vivid dream, that I only remembered a few seconds of. Her mission, and she chose to accept it, was to take what little I remembered and write a short story about it. For Lizzi is the Hermoine Granger of fantastic fiction. Here is her tantalizing tale of terror. (Me? Yeah, I'm the Neville Longbottom of alliteration.)

When Dreams Walk Among Us

By Lizzi Rogers

We burst out of the solicitor’s office laughing, whooping and hanging around each other’s necks, crying with happiness. We were totally immune to the stern glares of the prim secretaries, deaf to the ripple of irritated “SHH!” sounds our exuberance had triggered and were thoroughly committed to celebrating the moment.  

“Success!” she shouted, punching the air. “Finally, after all this time and heartache and panic – we’ve done it; we’ve pulled it off.” 

Radiating a joy and peace I’d not seen in her countenance for many years, she pulled me into a tight hug.  

“I couldn’t have done it without you”, she whispered into my hair “you’ve been amazing. Thank you.” 

I squeezed back, choked with emotion, before remembering something important. I pulled away suddenly, surprising her “Hey! We said when this day happened we were gonna go for...” 

“ICE CREAM!!” we squealed in unison. Prompted by the explosion of noise, the secretary jumped up and strode over to Glenys, offering a curt invitation to please remove ourselves from the office. 

Grinning, and with linked arms, we went to find the elevator down – away from this office with its memories of such trepidation and anxiety; away from this office with its revelations and its hard-won victories; away from this office for the last time – to freedom. 

Her heels clacked along the floor, the spring in her step apparent to everyone who saw us.  

Even in the elevator, she couldn’t stay still, dancing and fidgeting and still exclaiming her incredulity that it was all over – that she could move on – her gorgeous red power-shoes tracking across the metal floor, imbuing the tiny space with staccato possibility. 

The lift shuddered to an unexpected halt between floors, the light flickering. Our eyes echoed the flicker as we caught each other’s gaze, wondering whether we should panic. I reached out and grabbed her hand, hoping that the bombardment of positive emotions we’d just undergone would not turn sour. 

Before my eyes, a small hatch appeared to slide back in the metal wall of the elevator. The stench came through before the visual; a male face with a large, rounded head and overly-pointed chin, was looking through at us, his lip curled in a sneer and his blank eyes darkly infathomable.  

Glenys was fluttering around, banging the emergency button, trying to get hold of an engineer to come and sort the problem out so we could disembark. I was caught in the coaly glint of the face through the window, feeling his attitude creep in until everything was coated with the stink of fear and the loss of oxygen.  

“Andela”, his voice snickered out into the air, making me shudder “you didn’t think you’d seen the last of us, did you?” 

“I had hoped so, Kakaios, but she is safe now – it is finished. You have no further business here” 

Glenys had sunk into full-on panic-mode, sensing the need to leave this place and its stifling, crushing atmosphere. She was pressing all the buttons incoherently, the happy tears of minutes before now showing shining tracks of terror down her cheeks.  

Kakaios’ mouth stretched into a wicked grin, showing his grey lips and pointed teeth. He reached in with spidery hands and slowly, deliberately, wrapped them around the corners of the metal box, suddenly shaking it. Glenys squealed in terror, and my heart jolted, knowing that we were in a very precarious position indeed. 

“You fool” he laughed, his tortured pit voice filled with malicious glee “We will never be finished with the two of you. Not until you are finished. Which might be right now...” 

He shook the elavatror again, hard, and we began to plummet. 

Glenda was screaming, her eyes bugged out in desperation. 

The air was whistling past us, and we could feel the weight of the metal around us, and sense the floor rising up as gravity pulled us inexorably downwards, ever faster. 

I met Kakaios’ leer and evident pleasure at our predicament with burning anger and sudden, shining wings erupted from my shoulders, lifting me from the floor as I reached down to pull Glenys away from her doom. 

A world-splitting CRASH! echoed through the building as the plummeting lift met its swift and inevitable destruction against the unforgiving concrete foundations. The floor shattered and the edges buckled out, the roof smashing down on top of us, swatting us out of mid-air and into a twisted, aching heap in the corner.  

Screams and the sound of urgent movement grew closer as people rushed to help, heaving away sheets of tattered metal, finally uncovering us, not a wing to be seen, just the shaking, terrified ‘normalcy’ of two people who have just survived a crisis. 

Hands reached out to us, pulling us from the wreckage amidst exclamations of wonder at Glenys’ scrapes, cuts and total lack of terminal damage. 

Across the bustling, emergency-fuelled atrium, a man sat in a bubble of calm - Maalik - the now-ex husband. His presence simmered with barely-contained anger. He glared, pointing two cocked fingers at her, miming the pull of a trigger and the kick of a gun. Behind him, Kakaios leaned down to whisper more poison in his ear, reaching through his skull with those long, spidery fingers, to stir up dark thoughts in his mind. 

Lizzi is a Deep Thinker, Truth Teller and Seeker of Good. She works a normal job and has a secret life as the writer at Considerings. Wife to Husby and Mother to two Neverborns (and now dealing with the challenge of primary infertility) she is a frequent instigator of silliness and loves to entertain with words. 

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