C.E. Murphy - Coyote Dreams

The elevators and halls upstairs were bustling with exhausted-looking doctors and nurses and the buzz of worried confusion. More and more people were being admitted with the sleeping sickness, and nobody’d woken up yet. I flinched my way around gurneys and frustrated medical personnel, whispering promises to make it better as I slipped into Billy’s room and sank against the door, eyes closed for a few seconds as I muttered another internal thanks to my gifts and let the bubble of invisibility slide off me. Then I shoved away from the door and took two steps before jolting to a halt in complete dismay.

Bradley Holliday was conked out in a chair by Billy’s bed.

My first thought was, shit, what if he wakes up? And my second was, shit, what if he doesn’t? I stood where I was, foot half off the ground with indecision, then swore noiselessly and crept forward. A tile creaked beneath me and Brad snorted and stirred, far more reaction than Billy gave. Despite my not wanting to be caught, my shoulders dropped in relief: far better to have Doc Holliday wake up than go into a permanent sleep like his brother and sister-in-law had. I put my foot down and exhaled carefully, looking around the room.

Mel was in the bed closer to the door, now that I was noticing things. She, like Billy, looked well, except for the unbroken sleep. Brad Holliday looked uncomfortable as hell. I thought about waking him up to save him the crick in his neck, but he probably wouldn’t appreciate it. Besides, I didn’t want to explain how I’d gotten in there.

Which led me to the good news. Nothing had come out of the dark to attack me through my use of power.

The bad news was I could feel the feathery heaviness of sleep in the room, as if it gathered there and waited for something. Even’d get you odds it was waiting for me.

And I didn’t know what to do about it.

I tiptoed to the middle of the room, seeing if I could touch both Billy and Melinda at once. I couldn’t, and edged back to Mel’s bed to see if it could be moved a few inches without noise or pulling any important-looking tubes loose. I didn’t want to try moving Billy. For one thing, he had almost a hundred pounds on me, and for another, it was his bed Brad was next to.

Mel’s bed was actually surprisingly easy to move. I lifted the foot and swung it over eight or ten inches, then snuck forward to move the head as far as I dared. Air stirred around me, thick and slow, and seemed to stick to my skin as I moved. Like tar. I thought of Coyote, and thought, like amber . It took another minute of maneuvering to get the beds close enough together, and then I stood there between them, panting quietly and trying to order my thoughts.

As best I could tell, Billy and Mel had been the first two to go to sleep. I’d spent more time psychically linked with Billy than anybody, and I figured the events of a few weeks past had bound Melinda and me together in some fashion as well. If there was a place to start ending this plague of sleep, it was probably with them.

But I was on my own. Coyote was gone and my forays into other realms were stung left and right with darkness and encroaching sleep. There was a real possibility I wouldn’t be able to snap out of it if I went to do battle with this thing.

I also didn’t see that I had much choice in the matter. I wasn’t going to let my friends die. I wasn’t going to let Coyote have died for nothing.

Besides. A ghost of humor passed through me. At least if I got myself caught by this thing I wouldn’t have to face the embarrassment of seeing Morrison again. That made the prospect of getting stuck in dreamworlds almost appealing. The extra chair in the room was on the far side of Billy’s bed. I didn’t want to move it and risk waking Brad up, so I took a deep breath and knelt down between the two beds, reaching out to touch the sleepers, making myself a conduit. It wasn’t very comfortable. I thought it’d take a while to get myself into a trance state.

Instead, the weight in the room crashed down on me like a waterfall.

The world around me was golden, the color of a warm summer day, but with no sun to light it. The earth itself gave off brightness, mountains glowing with cheer and good purpose. A river cut through the land, gold as the sky and ground, and reached to the horizons. They were farther away than I expected, a certain curvature to the earth, unlike the flatness of the burning world or the near mountains of the blue world. It wasn’t the Middle World, certainly not with the warm glow of the land and no sun in the sky, but this place was the closest yet to my own time and place that I’d seen.

Around me, in the distance and close by, I half heard and half knew that men and women and beasts and plants, all the creatures and things of the world, spoke the same language, communicating easily with one another. It reminded me of Babylon, though the land I’d entered was as different physically as it could be from that city of twisting spires and hanging gardens. That had been a metropolis, and this world was an agrarian desert. For an instant I grasped how they might still be the same thing, but my understanding was lost as red streaks appeared in the sky, pocked and marked like comets.

People fell ill and struggled to survive, their distress worsening with every heartbeat. Accusations rose up, turning a land of joy and peace into something far more like the world I knew. Blame fell down gender lines, anger and fear thrown all around me. The women said it was the men bringing illness, and the men said it was the women. They separated themselves from one another, making the streaks in the sky and the pain of loss even more difficult to bear. A protest formed in my throat and caught there uselessly; watching the world collapse around me was like watching a time-elapsed video of a train station. It moved too quickly and too violently for me to affect. I stood outside it, gasping for air as the world fell down.

And then something slipped through the midst of the world’s breakdown, moving at the same slow, normal rate of speed I did. My eyes, accustomed to the lurching hurry of the dying world, took a few seconds to pick out details that were as much physical as known within the depths of my mind. It wasn’t a human creeping through the world’s end, not on four legs, not furry and sly and furtive.

Coyote.

My heart leapt and lost hope in almost the same instant, leaving me with an ache bordering on whimpers. This coyote’s fur was acid-etched, each thread of it gold and copper and bronze, strong with power. Not a spirit, not a guide, but an archetype, the trickster who helped make and unmake the world. I wondered if every trickster was Coyote, and Coyote every trickster, one eternal concept that took form however the people thought to see it. That left me with the bemusing idea that Coyote and Brer Rabbit were exactly the same thing underneath, and for an instant I saw through to the truth of that. Saw , not just saw, the very concept that lay beneath Coyote’s recognizable form.

A fractal pattern exploded in my vision. Chaos bled in bright beautiful spikes, sometimes doing damage where it struck, other times ricocheting into mutation, creating new life. It wasn’t caring or uncaring or anything but there , senseless in the way that most of the universe often seemed to be.

Curiosity hung over it like a cloud, not an inherent part of its random magic, but so heavily imposed by limited human understanding that it seemed to wear that impulse like a cloak. I kept my eyes wide, afraid to blink for fear I’d lose sight of that thread, and while I watched the cloak shifted. Rabbits and spiders, gods I could name, like Loki, and an astonishing series of creatures and beings I couldn’t, interspersed with a handful of icons so familiar they made me laugh despite the oddness—Charlie Chaplin and Daffy Duck—shimmered through that cloak, and then it settled down again into a coyote shape, leaving my eyes burning.