Chapter 26 #2
He’s standing at the blackboard in only his underwear. The floor in front of the board is moving as if it’s a conveyor belt, and Nevan is walking on it, trying to stay in place, one hand gripping a piece of chalk.
I step forward through the rows of desks without deciding to, passing through the noise like it isn’t there, until I get close enough to read what he’s writing.
Stupid.
Except not quite.
SPUTID. SUTPID. STIPUD. STPUID.
Over and over and over, three hundred iterations of the same word, each one wrong in a different direction, the chalk scratching on the board, the floor moving, and the kids laughing, and Nevan’s voice barely audible under all of it.
“It has to be right. I have to make it right. It has to be right…”
He’s so deep inside his nightmare that he doesn’t even notice me standing next to him.
Shit.
I write horror, so I know horror. I know how to build dread from pacing, and the wrongness of familiar things made unfamiliar. I’ve spent years with my hands in the dark parts of human imagination, and I’ve come to something like peace with it.
But this isn’t the horror I write. This isn’t monsters, darkness, or things that chase you through forests. Psychological horror is the kind I never touch. Too close to the bone. Too real.
The classroom door opens somewhere behind me, and an adult voice says in a bored tone, “Not good enough, Nevan. Still not good enough.”
What a dickhead teacher is that?
I turn while I’m already composing the yeet. I have a window picked out, and I know exactly which desk I’m going to use as a launching mechanism, but then I see him, and I go completely still.
He looks exactly like he did last time, which is to say, he looks like nothing in particular and everything wrong at once.
It’s a face your brain tries to file away and keeps losing, a face that exists in the space between recognizable and forgotten.
He’s standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, green eyes already fixed on me, and the wrongness of him radiates through the air like a sudden drop in temperature.
He smiles, and if it didn’t send ice down my spine, I could almost understand Tessa. This Man is devastatingly handsome in the way dangerous things are, magnetic and absolutely terrifying.
“What are you doing outside your forest, Ridge Wells?”
“How do you know my name?”
He tilts his head. “Who do you think keeps you there?”
The forest. My subconscious stuck in my worst nightmare. My powerlessness.
Who keeps you there?
“Why,” I question carefully. “Would you do that?”
“Maybe I’m bored.” He lifts one shoulder in a gesture so unbothered it borders on obscene. “Or maybe I didn’t appreciate you wandering around dreamscapes.”
“Why would that concern you?”
“Ridge Wells.” He says my name once more as if he’s tasting it. “How about you mind your own business, and keep your nose out of mine.”
“Tessa. Is she what you consider your business?”
“She was happy.” He looks back at me, and there’s something in his expression that might be genuine, which is somehow worse than if it weren’t. “I made her happy. You and your doctor friend decided to interfere with that.”
Paul?
“We were trying to help her—”
“Tessa,” he cuts in, his voice dropping low enough that the air in the classroom drops with it. “Is my business.” He takes one step closer, and the fluorescent lights flicker overhead. “Until the lot of you understand that and keep away, you’ll get what you deserve for it.”
I glance at Nevan.
He’s still writing.
SPUTID. SUTPID. STIPUD.
Tears are running down his face silently now.
What the hell could he have possibly done to Tessa to deserve this hellscape This Man obviously invented for him? He would’ve been way too young even to know her when she was still awake.
“I’m stupid, so stupid,” Nevan murmurs through tears.
No. I’m stupid.
I think about Paul, the falling out, the things Paul said and didn’t say, and the things I said that I meant and the things I said that I didn’t.
Paul pushed me out, shut the door, and I told myself it was ego and professional distance, the friendship curdling under the weight of everything that went wrong.
I’m less sure about that now. Paul doesn’t make careless decisions. Everything he does is deliberate. Which means whatever he chose five years ago, he did on purpose, and that means something. Only I don’t know what.
“I thought I had you pretty well contained in your forest,” This Man says pleasantly. “But first I find you in Lennon’s dream, and now here.” His smile widens. “Nose. Business. Et cetera.”
“What do you want from Lennon?”
“I don’t want anything from her.”
What the hell?
“And what does the Shaw boy have to do with any of this?”
“Oh, he and I go way back.” He looks at Nevan, then back at me, and a small, private smile curls at his lips.
“But that would be, once again, my business and not yours.” He takes a step closer, and it costs me more willpower than I’d like to admit not to back away.
“Let me make you an offer, Ridge Wells. If you take it, everyone gets what they want.”
“And what is it that you want?”
“I don’t want much. Just what is mine. Tessa.” His smirk widens. “But Tessa wants Lennon.”
My jaw tightens with the effort of not telling him to fuck right off.
“And I know what you want, too, Ridge. You want me to leave Paul alone. To leave you alone.” His gaze slides back to Nevan. “And I’ll give you one more, since it looks like you have a soft spot for him…” He pauses, letting it sink in. “Leave Tessa alone. Leave Lennon alone.”
“I…”
“Don’t be in my way. Keep your hands and the good doctor’s hands, off both of them so Tessa gets what she needs to give me what I need, and you’ll never see me again.
Never feel me again.” He leans in close enough that I can smell the wrongness underneath his presence—stale air and endings.
“You’ll have your subconscious back. I’ll let you build your cute little monsters again. ”
The classroom floods with darkness.
Creatures materialize instantly, things with too many limbs, shadows that breathe, and walls that scream. My monsters. But this kind of nightmare architecture takes me seconds of focused effort to build, and he conjures it all in a blink. No concentration. No strain. Just will made manifest.
Holy shit.
Then, before the darkness swallows everything, he leans back, and it’s gone.
All of it. Clean white walls and fluorescent lights again, as though it never existed.
Maybe he’s not real after all. Maybe Paul is right, and he is a shared psychosis, a tulpa given form, that shouldn’t be possible.
Because no person, no matter how skilled, should be able to wield dreams like this.
Keep others hostage in their own nightmares.
Strip away someone’s ability to build in their own subconscious.
“Leave the women alone, Wells.” He steps back, hands sliding into his pockets. “And it will be like you never knew me.”
The air folds, and he’s gone.
Fuck, that guy is unsettling.
Leave her alone. Get my life back.
I stand there and let myself feel the full weight of it, because it deserves that much honesty at least. My dreams. My career.
Paul. The things I’ve spent five years grieving without letting myself call it grief because that would require admitting how much I lost when I lost him.
All of it, handed back. No more waking up with someone else’s terror soaked into my skin.
No more lying in the dark listening to a woman cry through a wall and doing nothing about it because doing something about it would mean admitting I care, and caring is the thing I’ve been very carefully not doing.
It would be so easy.
That’s the part that makes my skin crawl.
How easy it would be. How much I want it.
I want my subconscious back so badly I can taste it, and the fact that he knew exactly what to offer.
He reached into me and pulled out the precise shape of everything I’ve been missing and laid it on the table like it was nothing.
He knows.
He knows what I want, what Paul wants, and what Nevan is most afraid of, apparently, and has known it long enough to build a whole nightmare around it.
He knows Tessa, what she needs, and what to do with that need to serve himself.
He knows everything about everyone in this, and he walked in here calm and handsome, offering me a clean exit like a man who has never once been told no.
Which means he’s been watching, building a picture of all of us with the patience of something that has nowhere else to be.
My jaw aches from clenching it.
The worst part, the part I have to stand here and admit to myself in a dream classroom at whatever this hour is, is that I almost want to take it.
Not because I don’t care what happens to Lennon, or even Tessa, but because I’m tired.
Bone tired of waking up in the forest and reliving my own nightmare, or lying awake in the dark and being alone with all of it.
I want to be done.
And he knows that too. Of course, he does.
Yeah. Fuck all of this.
I crack my knuckles.
The kids go first. All of them simultaneously, desks and all, the whole laughing mass of them lifted and deposited cleanly through the window in one large, satisfying sweep. It helps. Not enough, but it helps.
Then the building itself. I find the seams of it and pull how you pull a loose thread, and the classroom comes apart at the edges. Walls dissolving, ceiling lifting, fluorescent lights flickering out one by one until the whole structure is gone.
Replaced by clouds?
Endless white clouds stretch in every direction. The floor beneath us is a cloud, too, but solid enough to stand on. Two swings hang from nothing, ropes disappearing up into more white.
Well, this is better than what was there.
I’m still angry. I’ll be angry when I wake up. I’ll probably be angry for a while about this, him, the fact he made me want it, and how close it came to landing.