Chapter Four

For past week Cierra had been doing as she was attempting to do now: fall asleep while picturing the person in the fog. In the past she had been able to usually, but not always, revisit previous dreams by thinking about the place while falling asleep, and she had been hoping to find the mystery person through the same technique. She tried not to think about what might happen if they weren't a person at all, if they were some other manner of creature and was now one with whatever the skogkatt's world had become.

The only problem was it depended on the other person also being asleep at the same time. She hoped they were on a normal sleep schedule, preferably in the eastern time zone; her plan was completely moot if they happened to be on China standard time.

Cierra tried her best to not imagine the Bringer of Nightmares or the way her feet had sunk into the mulch and maggots. Her chest ached in an unfamiliar way when she thought of the tigers and how they had simply been popped out of existence. She tried not to explore the feeling too much, knowing it would take more internal strength than she thought she had at the moment to dissect all the guilt, rage, and sadness their death caused her.

Instead, Cierra focused on what she could do, or hoped she could do.

Early in the week she had made a list of goals:

1) Find the mystery person and force them to give her answers to every single last one of her questions

2) Pass calculus

3) Find and stop whatever a 'Bringer of Nightmares' was

4) Figure out what she wanted to do with her future

In that order.

Every day she went to class, came home, and studied, before going to bed and trying to hunt this person down.

She had gone through dreams full of nothing but oversized flying insects with long tube-like proboscises sucking pollen from daffodils taller and wider than she was, a dusky water world where everything was coated in neon glow-in-the-dark algae, and another where everything seemed to be made of yarn like fibers, from the purple trunks of trees to the spiked deer frolicking in hay colored grass.

None of these were worlds she recognized.

There had only been two times that she thought she might be on the tail of the mystery person: one, when she could have sworn she saw the shadow of a person, but had followed it to find a resting gigantic insect, and the second was when she thought she saw a head disappearing under the waves of the algae world. Something had moved under the water then, and a mass of algae had been pushed to the shore on the back of medium sized wave, leaving an uninviting dark spot in the water where the algae used to be.

In many ways it felt like a useless task, how was she going to find a person in a dream when she didn't even know what they looked like? But then again, what else was she supposed to do? She found herself getting frustrated. Why couldn't there be a yellow pages entry for 'Potential Human in a Dream You Saw that One Time' or a Google search hit that would match. In desperation one evening, she had checked missed connection forums, scanning page after page for someone describing a rotting forest looking for a tiger collector they hadn't been able to see well due to extreme weather conditions.

So far nothing had proven fruitful.

The only thing of interest was how Cid came with her every night, transforming back into his true tiger-esque self. Every night Cid curled up on her shoulder, and they went to sleep, exploring the different dreams together. Cierra had never realized how lonely she had been before, never really getting to interact with the inhabitants of her dreams and instead being regulated to watching. Now she could talk to Cid, not that he talked back, or she could watch him try to hunt, body low to the ground, waiting to pounce. That had been amusing until he had caught a spiked yarn textured fawn and brought it back to her as if to share. Now when she noticed him slinking away, she chose to explore in the opposite direction, making sure not to wander off too far.

Cierra wasn't sure how fast skogkatts were supposed to grow, but Cid was growing faster than any cat she had known. Where he had simply been a cub earlier in the week, he was now at calf biting size in the dreams. In real life, he was only slightly bigger than before, about the length of Cierra's foot and ankle height. Cierra found herself wondering how long it would take him to become fully grown and how she was going to explain his miraculous growth to her aunt and uncle.

'Concentrate', Cierra thought to herself, forcing herself to get back to the task at hand. She pictured in her mind, for what felt like the millionth time, the silhouette of the person in the fog.

When she opened her eyes, she was vertical, feet on the ground, Cid's tail wrapped around one of her ankles. This world was all grayscale, the sky light shades of gray while the ground and everything on it seemed darker, as if colored in to look like shadows. Cierra looked down at Cid to find he was now more of an ashy gray, like his natural orange coloring was just waiting to peek through. Cierra herself looked as though she had stepped into a black and white movie. What surprised Cierra most though was she was standing in the middle of nowhere, grass all around her cut down to a mere inch, and in the distance, there was a house. A real, should-be-in-suburbia house.

Not once in all of Cierra's years of dreaming had she ever seen a place so obviously made for humans by humans.

"C'mon Cid." It was obvious where they needed to go.

As they walked forward, Cierra tried to see if there was any movement from the house, but everything seemed still. She looked around, everything seemed unnaturally quiet and nothing moved except them. She found herself straining her ears to pick up any little sound, but all she could hear was the grass crunching under her and Cid's steps.

Curious, she crouched down to get a better look at the grass. It looked as though it had been mowed not too long ago, the ends in some places jagged where it seemed as though a blade had torn at them.

Could dreams have lawnmowers? Cierra had never noticed a human invention in a dream before, and even though there was no reason to believe it couldn't be possible, it still made her feel like something wasn't right here. The gray, the house, and the grass all reminded Cierra of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Dawn had loved the gore, but Cierra couldn't get over how horrifying it would be hiding for your life in a closet or a shed, only to be found and hacked up.

Something about being out here screamed 'HIDE' to Cierra, making the hairs on her arm stand up. She looked down at Cid. He was staying near her feet, circling through them as they moved forward, looking around in every direction.

"You too, huh?" She bent down to pat him between the ears. It was nice to know she wasn't the only one freaking out. She tried to chalk her fear up to ancient, primal instincts and how being open in a field made you more vulnerable to predators. She reached the end of that thought and shuddered. Hopefully there wouldn't be any predators to worry about.

They kept moving forward for what felt like hours, and yet somehow the house was no closer than when they started. Looking behind them, Cierra only saw more of the field; it was impossible to tell if they had moved at all.

Cierra stared at the house, trying again to see if there was any movement at all. Finally, she saw the door open, and then quickly close, with no one or anything coming or going.

It gave her chills. This Friday, she was going to choose a comedy for movie night, Dawn be damned.

Suddenly, Cid growled. It was a throaty noise that Cierra had never heard him make before. Looking around, she tried to see what he saw, but found nothing.

Then she heard it. It was like the sound of a distant vacuum. For a moment she couldn't see where the sound was coming from, then, on the horizon behind them, a line of yellow appeared.

"Run!" Cierra gave into every impulse her body had been signaling. It took Cid no time to bolt in front of her and go, the only problem was where were they going to? The house was still no closer, and the yellow creatures were gaining, fast.

As Cierra glanced behind her, it became obvious that they were surrounded on all sides by what she could only describe as a herd of bright yellow imps. They advanced on their hands, in permanent handstand position, bodies flipped so their feet were to the sky. Flat faces to the ground, they tore at the grass with jaws filled with teeth that rotated in sets every few seconds, creating what Cierra had thought was a vacuum sound, but now sounded more and more like an actual lawnmower.

She had never been hurt by an inhabitant of a dream before, but she wasn't about to stick around and find out if that was a rule of the dreams or sheer luck on her part.

No matter how fast they ran, the house never got any closer. The same could not be said for the twisted imps. Cierra's legs were starting to cramp up, and even Cid had slowed down enough that they were going the same pace. She wracked her brain wondering what she could do. So far, all she had accomplished was what she had done in the Skogkatt's dream, but there was nothing here for Cierra to 'fix' or restore back to its original condition. Or if there was, she had no idea how this place was supposed to originally look, not that this place looked corrupted or rotting at all.

She didn't need to look behind her to know that the imps were getting closer, the sound they were making now was deafening and she was starting to imagine them nipping at her heels.

In the distance, the front door of the house was now fully open, but no one stood in the doorway. There was only one thing she could try to do.

Closing her eyes, she pictured the house in front of them, imagined they were there, at the wooden steps, waiting to enter.