Tim Lebbon - Reaper's Legacy

“Rook!” she called. He won’t answer, he’s gone, he’s fallen already into the pit just like my dream and —

“Over here,” he said. Lucy-Anne almost collapsed with relief. She took three steps and looked past a big tree, and there he was. He’d run along a shallow gully towards what looked like an old bandstand, and he was now climbing the gully’s sides to walk back to her.

There was a bench on the left, halfway between them. Alongside the bench, a coil of green wire, the sort sometimes used in parks to define the edges of a path. On the air, a memory of blackberries.

“No,” she breathed. “Rook…” But she could not shout.

She tried to close her eyes so that she could not see the man swinging down from one of the trees, but Rook called her name—a shouted warning—and she looked. The man swung between her and Rook, naked and coated with dye, unnaturally long arms heavily muscled…directly from her dreams.

“Rook, stop!” she shouted, but he was running. And now the dog-woman , she thought, and there she was down the slope, urinating on a tree and sniffing at the ground. “Rook! Don’t come any closer!”

“I don’t think they mean any—” he began, and then the ground beneath him opened as he ran, swallowing him up as if he was never meant to be there at all. His rooks fluttered and flitted in confusion.

Lucy-Anne’s vision began to fade, her world receded, and she bit her lip to try to see away the faint washing over her.

The ape man swung away, the dog-woman scampered into shadows. And from the pit she heard Rook’s awful, blood-filled cry.

She staggered to the edge of the pit and looked down. There was Rook. At first she thought her vision was deceiving her, and that it was not a huge, wormlike thing chewing at his throat. A worm-thing with the remnants of humans limbs and long auburn hair.

Noooo , she tried to scream, but it was not even a whisper. The last thing she saw as she hit the ground, rolled, and vision fled was the rooks, hundreds of them spiralling up into the sky and away. She heard their cries, and one more from Rook.

And then nothing.

They are somewhere overgrown, a place where nature has been given back to itself. Humankind has lost dominion here. There is a bench smothered with a rose bush, a path, and—

And this is my dream.

Rook is down the slope from her, moving quickly towards her with a look of excitement. He has seen something that he wants to share. But…

But this is my dream, I saw this happening, and soon there will be —

The naked man swings between them from the trees, and this time Lucy-Anne takes time to examine him and the rope he uses. He is smeared with a heavy dye, like coloured mud. Yet he still wears glasses, and she is sure his earrings are the red and yellow of Christmas. The rope is thin and blue, the kind used for tying down loads on the back of trucks. He ends his swing and clambers into a tall tree to her left.

I’m steering this , she thinks. Already this dream is not progressing like it ever has before .

She moves forward and looks for the man, but he has scrambled higher into the tree and is hidden from view.

She sees the dog-woman sniffing along at the foot of a tree farther away.

She’ll piss, and then Rook will fall into the pit, I’ll hear him scream and then look and that horrible worm-thing will be chewing at him, and he’ll be dying .

“Rook, wait!” she shouts, and it is the first time she finds her voice.

Rook hesitates, then runs faster towards her.

Not long now. He’ll fall .

“Stop running!” she screams. Rook’s expression falters, and he skids to a stop twenty feet from her but not far enough away. He slips forward as the ground gives way.

“Grab something! Don’t fall! Don’t let yourself fall!”

Lucy-Anne is running forwards in her dream, in full control. She feels a gleeful rush of power, and even as Rook is scrabbling for his life she glances to the left. A tree explodes into colour, raining down a thousand fat red blooms that splash across the ground. She looks right and imagines a fully-laid dinner table, and there it is, meats and vegetables steaming all across the crisp white tablecloth.

She screeches in delight, and when she reaches Rook he is hauling himself from the edge of the pit. Something crawls around down there. Something hisses.

“I did it,” she says. Rook is silent, almost not there. “I did it.” But then she realises that this is a dream, and remembers what she has already seen in real life. She looks sadly at Rook, and he sees his own death reflected in his eyes. He starts to fade away.

There is a jump. Her surroundings change, and though there is no external jolt, inside she feels the shock of displacement. It is a blink between dreams, but Lucy-Anne now knows that she has some say in what she is seeing and experiencing, and that makes the change so much more shocking.

She and Rook are on a wide area of scrubland. London is in the distance so this is still the Heath, but a part of it she has never seen before. It is surreal. A huge table and chair stand before them, fifty times normal size, with long grasses growing around the legs and creeping plants trying to gain the tabletop.

What once were people move across a tree line farther up the hillside. They seem to be crawling on all fours, but she can’t quite tell, because there is something so alien about their movements.

So what’s this? Lucy-Anne thinks. She urges herself to wake—actually pinches herself in the dream, feeling the sharp sting of pain—but the dream still has more to show her.

Rook says something she can’t quite hear. His voice is distant, and she experiences a moment of complete panic. Perhaps he really is dead, and this dream is simply an unconscious wish.

Of course he’s dead! I saw him fall, saw that thing eating at him, so he must be dead, and now —

Nomad appears. She steps from the top of the huge square table and drops to the ground, landing with knees slightly bent and yet seeming to cause and experience no impact. The grasses around her feet barely move.

“You,” Lucy-Anne says, fear cooling her blood.

“And you,” Nomad says. She looks at Lucy-Anne sadly and raises her hand, and Lucy-Anne senses the staggering amount of power held in Nomad’s fist. Going to blast me scorch me burn me , she thinks, and between blinks she sees the nuclear explosion that has accompanied every other dream of this woman.

“I’m sorry,” Nomad says.

Lucy-Anne steps back. She’s here to kill me! The scene freezes, filled with potential. “This is my dream,” she says aloud, but her voice sounds muffled and contained. “You can’t kill me here.”

Movement begins again, and everything has changed. Rook is sitting in the long grass, and Nomad is squatting close by, frowning, shaking her head, and looking at Lucy-Anne as if she has seen a ghost.

“But no one knows me,” she says.

Lucy-Anne goes to speak, but there the dream ends. Her senses fade back to herself. She feels grass against her cheek, smells the freshly turned mud and foul sewage stench of the pit, and remembers the last time she had really seen Rook.

“Oh, Rook,” she said without opening her eyes, and she cried because the dream could not be real.

“It’s okay,” Rook said. “You fainted. No wonder. That thing stinks.”

Lucy-Anne’s eyes snapped open and Rook was there, kneeling by her side and resting one cool hand on her brow. He was shaking.

“Thanks,” he said. “One more step and I’d have gone right in.”

She lifted herself up on one elbow and looked past Rook towards the hole in the ground. The branches that had been laid over it to disguise it stuck up like broken ribs, and from deep in the dark pit she could hear a sickly, wet sound of movement.