Running away from your problems never solved anything, but it helped. My issues and the cul de sac behind me seemed to shrink with every slap of my shoes against the pavement. In fact, they were now more minute annoyances rather than true "problems".
Ta da.
The neighborhood slept as I ran, slowing to a jog, eventually a walk. The air was peaceful; the world around me full of snoring people who dreamed and hogged the covers and wet the bed and would wake up in the morning feeling well-rested and refreshed.
As long as I was out here, moving, I pretended I was refreshed and careless as the sleepers tucked into their beds.
My slow pace came to a complete halt. I considered turning back, facing the annoyances that would once again become problems the moment I crossed the threshold of our 50s ranch and re-entered the real world. That's when the ground split open.
Pure chaos turned my ears inside out as the pavement before my feet erupted, spitting light and heat from the depths of the earth out into the cool night air. I stumbled backwards on unsteady legs while the world shook in an unnatural earthquake, ripping open the street where I had been standing.
Like a scene from a bad disaster movie, the computer generated kind, a crack grew in the street, stretching until it reached the curb on either side, completely cutting off my path; chunks of pavement fell into the abyss below, a light shone from the pit, contrasting the darkness of the street above it. With a final thunderous ripple through the ground, the crack finished its growth spurt, satisfied at its length. I lost my footing and landed on my ass mere feet from the chasm.
The noise died abruptly, leaving only lingering, timid quiet. No car alarms, no investigative neighbors, no barking dogs to alert the world to the Home Owner's Association nightmare of a pothole that boldly split the road in two.
The good news: I had a front row center view to witness the thing that emerged from the chasm in the earth.
The bad was the thing came out of the chasm in the earth.
"Hello, Autumn," he said, as if instead of appearing out of a giant chasm in the street he had simply bumped into me at the grocery store, as if it were just another Tuesday.
My mouth fell open in response; I was dreaming. I had to be dreaming. I tripped and hit my head and I was dreaming. Dreaming of a handsome, mysterious man who knew my name and had come to save me from the horrors of graduation and college and the Real Worldâbecause I am the pragmatic type and this is how we deal with issues, sensibly and realistically.
Even in my dreams I never could have imagined a man so equally striking and frightening. His dark eyes promised chaos and adventure and anything my heart desired if I just took a bite of the proverbial apple. Yepâdefinitely a dream.
He Who Knew My Name kept speaking and I, from my position on the ground looking up at him, wondered why none of my neighbors had come to inspect the damage to the street. Somebody could lose a car in that crack. Or a child. I waited to feel outrage at the disturbance on the neighbors' behalf, the audacity of it to show up in our quiet suburb. That thing was going to hurt somebody. And yet not a soul came to check on the earthquake or the girl caught in its wake.
There goes the neighborhood.
I remembered an ethics discussion from the fall semester about the murder of Kitty Genovese and the dozen or so neighbors who heard her cries for help and did nothing. If I cried out, would anyone come running?
If I cried out in the dream would it be enough to startle me awake?
In the back of my head I knew I should feel something intense, fear maybe, or shock. But all I could come up with was curiosity.
It may have killed the cat but my grandfather used to say sweet satisfaction always brought it back.
He was still talking, stringing an awful lot of words together that I hoped weren't important. None of them registered in my brain until he said my name again, the word rolling off his tongue like honey whiskey.
"Autumn, you belong to me."
StopâI closed my eyes against him, drown out the sound of his voice and the pretty words, no matter how odd, that dripped from his mouth. I wanted it to stop: his voice, the street, the whole damn day just needed to stop. Dreams mean something, I just had to figure out the message my subconscious wanted me to receive. I searched for the parable, the teaching moment. I tried to remember the last scary story I'd read, horror movie I'd watched, the fairy tales and Grimm's stories that warned children away from kid-munching witches and handsome men making promises.
This sort of thing only happens in that particular brand of gory fairy tale, the kind you find in the back of the library, tucked between dusty tomes of fiction and nonfiction, like they didn't want to be found.
Doesn't it?
Yet none of those tales prepared me for this. I didn't have the tools to decipher the dream, no weapons, no enchanted friends, no True Love's kiss.
Time's upâmy eyes snapped open in time to see the man from the crack in the street bend over me, to see his face so close to mine that I could feel his breath, to watch the street around me disappear as, in one smooth motion, he lifted me from the ground and we fell together into the chasm.
His arms felt surprisingly solid around mine, holding me too close, to ensure I wouldn't slip away as we fell. And fell. And kept falling.
I should have screamed. I should have had the sense to fight him. I should have run away when the earth started to shake and never looked back. Instead I braced for impact, eyes squeezed shut as we tumbled into the hole in the ground.
But it never came.
I opened one eye to a slit. We fell head over heel, rotating slowly; dream gravity doesn't act like real gravity, of course it wouldn't. When my face pointed up towards the street I could see the crack carefully knitting itself back together, rock sliding against each other as we plummeted farther and farther into the earth, their rumbling growing harder to hear with every rotation we completed. I watched the moon disappear into the darkness above us along with the rest of the world. Flipping and tumbling into oblivion, my stomach made violent threats to lose what little dinner I had eaten until, just as suddenly as the world burst open, I was on my feet again.
The sky above me was just a ceiling, not stars in sight. Flat and whole and completely lacking the street-long crack into which we fell. My mouth gaped open.
"Stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back." A chuckle sounded in my ear though his words did not inspire giggles in me.
What?
My first instinct was to scream but just like on the street, something held me back. Fear? Curiosity? Stupidity? Tall, Dark, and Mysterious hadn't released his hold on my torso, holding me too close, too tight.
"Hands off, buddy." To my credit, today had been a trying day already and the slight waver in my voice was probably due to exhaustion, to frustration, rather than fear. Probably. Maybe.
When he didn't relinquish the embrace, I struggled against his hold. He didn't fight me. He didn't react when I shoved him away from me to create space between us. He didn't say a word as I glared at him, taking in his dark hair and wicked, confident grin that could easily be mistaken in dark for a kind smile. My fingers twitched to run through his hair but remembering that he had dream-napped me helped to quash that desire.
The man standing in front of me looked dangerous in his black shirt and grey slacks; he looked like he would like to eat me but in a business-casual setting.
Now would be a very good time to wake up.
But the dream wasn't finished with me yet.
"For the record, I do not belong to you," I informed my companion, hands on hips, confidence laced through my words. Fake it 'til you make it.
He smirked at me. "That's debatable." His words were thick in the air, truth hidden in teasing.
"May I have the pleasure of knowing just who it is I'm supposed to belong to, then?" The sarcasm oozed from between my gritted teeth. I did not like where this dream was going.
"I'll give you three guesses," was his easy response.
Rumpelstiltskin, huh? I can work with that. The fairy tales were on my side after all; I knew the danger of three wrong guesses.
He grinned at me, feeding the uneasiness in my stomach. My gaze flicked around the room unable to stand that grin. We stood in the middle of a lavishly decorated room, larger than the whole first floor of my house. Paintings covered most available wall space and what wasn't hidden behind canvases, an old mirror the size of a door, and shelves looked like textured wallpaper. Books and papers strewn across tables and floors alike kept the dust company and dozens of volumes lined the shelves from floor to ceiling on one entire wall. I could see two closed doors, one open threshold, two plush sofas, an overstuffed chair, too many scenic paintings, and zero windows.
We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
"Look, this has been really fun but it's passed my bedtime and I should be getting back home. Can you just open that thing back up," I circled my finger towards the ceiling, the totally normal, un-cracked ceiling, "and let me out?"
There would be plenty of time later to wonder where this dream would take me, and why. Plenty of time to try and understand my subconscious desires for strange men and chasms, to ponder if it meant anything. A dream is a wish your heart makes. My heart had a sick sense of humor.
Wake up!
My bed seemed so far away, even in dreamland.
No one answered my question. Mysterio had turned his back and started towards the open doorframe. I quickly maneuvered around the coffee table, only half noticing the mountain of books next to the empty mug sitting on its surface. He led me through a door and into a kitchen where I stopped short in the threshold.
It was like walking from a seventeenth-century English castle into a modern-day suburban homestead. Into mymodern-day suburban homestead to be exact; the kitchen in dreamland even had the outdated refrigerator/freezer I've been sneaking ice cream from since I could walk.
I spun around thinking our front door would greet me, with the uneven red paint from my brilliant Mother's Day gift. Painted because I wanted to do something she would appreciate and uneven because I was twelve and broke and paint is expensive. But masterful artwork greeted me on the other side of the door rather than my sorry paint job. The juxtaposition of the art gallery and library to the kitchen was pronounced, two separate worlds all together.
"Look, I don't know what's going on here, but I really do think it's time that I leave. I need to go home. You need to take me home." The words came out too quickly, panicked and strung together in a high-pitched whine that hardly sounded like me. I don't know if it was more from anger or fear. Maybe both.
As if I was highly amusing, he chuckled a little under his breath.
"Try clicking your heels together three times and saying 'There's no place like home'."
My lips pursed against his tease. Could he read my mind? Just for good measure I thought fiercely, Get out of my head.
Mysterio said nothing, did nothing, to indicate he heard my thought. I took a weary step into the kitchen, and another, until I had a very clear view of my kidnapper.
If I didn't know any better I would say he was preparing dinner. I choked on my laughter and the resulting sound was unpretty. It would seem I had been kidnapped for a dinner date.
"Gordon Ramsey, the Devil, or Rumpelstiltskin," My guesses were purposefully ridiculous.
"Excuse me?" he paused long enough to raise an eyebrow at me before returning to his task. The island in the center of the kitchen sported a breakfast bar exactly like the one in our house, which hid whatever he was working on from view.
I didn't smile at him. "You said three guesses: Gordon Ramsey, because of the kitchen; the Devil, what with you flying out of the depths of hell from a crack in the earth; or Rumpelstiltskin, because of the three guesses." I stepped up to the bar on the opposite side of the island from him, as if we weren't strangers in the weirdest scenario of my life but instead old friends on a mission to catch up. But we weren't friends of any kind and I wasn't about to eat with a man who kidnapped me off the street.
I had to stop thinking the word "kidnapped". Every time it floated across my mind I felt my skin crawl with frustration.
"So, do I win?" Again, there was no answer other than his amused smile. I should have asked what the prize wasâand what I exactly would lose if I were wrong. Hopefully not my first-born child. He continued to ignore me; I clenched my fist, nails biting into my palm, and asked a politely as possible given the circumstances, "What are you doing?"
"Just waiting," was his easy response.
Waiting for what?
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