WIP: Doctor Fantastik

But the dream had come three mornings in a row. Three mornings when she woke up with a start, fear clamping its fingers, slender as reeds, strong as iron, around her throat, her hands clenched so hard that her nails bit into the heels of her hands.

She was walking along a bridge, which narrowed further and further, so much only a single person could walk across it, then crumbled away in the middle, leaving a two foot gap. She knew a wide enough step would take her across it, but when she looked down, she saw the water, seething with toothy eels, their lanterned eyes staring up at her, waiting for her to fall.

She saw Bella far, far away, down the long road on the other side, back turned as she walked away, too far to hear Adelina calling after her. Snowflakes were falling around her, as though a cloud echoed her progress overhead, and moonlight glinted on the snow, tinting it purple and red.

A headshake, like a dog cleaning itself of rain, chased the sensation away.

Bella had vanished over the horizon. Parks lay to either side, and she knew they were Tabatian parks, but ones she’d never discovered before. The notion delighted her: she’d investigate their histories, incorporate that into her long-time project, a complete history of the city.
But which one to enter first? She hesitated.

The left-hand one held a fabulous menagerie surrounded by a high, green-painted fence. She could hear the creatures roaring and whinnying, baying and moaning and a calliope’s wheedle. Fireworks arced and popped above it.

On the right was a more sedate water-park. But it held nooks and crannies as enticing as any brightly-colored booth: serene statues had placards waiting to be deciphered, and a massive fountain in the center roiled with carp colored white and purple and red.

It came to her that the righthand side would cost her no coins, but that the menagerie would require the price of admission, so she fumbled at her belt, thinking she’d let the lack or not determine which way she went. But the coins in her pouch were unfamiliar and she was uncertain whether or not the ticket seller would accept them.

She hesitated, torn between choices.

Something was coming padding down the road towards her. A Sphinx and a Manticore, unchained, unrestrained. They walked without hurry, placid and implacable and deadly. Their mouths moved as though they were talking to each other, but they were too far to hear.

Where had Bella gone?

She looked from side to side, but something in the way they walked told her they would follow, no matter where she went.

They came so close she could smell the stink of the Manticore, hear the sound of their steps on the road. They were silent now as they came towards her”¦

Then she’d wake.

He let himself be stung by wasps, each time burning like fire, melting like ice, evaporating into unconsciousness.

He chewed hallucinogenic onions and leaves so bitter he tasted them for days later.

He tried the flesh of an animate cactus and slept for three days in a dreamworld where he lived and died and rose into the form of a strange creature with ribbed horns on its head and hooves that struck fire from the rocks it ran over. It died to a wolf, and he rose that time as a vast flower, taking up a good third of the Abyss’s width, skirting the sunstrip and forcing travelers to bring him water and shit to pay passage. He lived for eons that way, then was vanquished by fungus and woke with his mouth tasting of licorice.

He listened to the dissonant orchestras whose intent was to derange the senses in tandem with a particular brew made from spit and a leafy green vegetable that had been shipped up from Ellsfall and followed it up with the discordant screeching of rodents.

He ate the eyeball-sized snails that thrifty city folk grow in barrels to sell at market, trying them raw, cooked in butter, and threaded on skewers to be marked with the grill’s deep black stripes.

He let parasites burrow into his skin and waited for the bliss of their hatching.
He huffed gritty crystals scraped from a cavern’s wall and scorpion venom.

He drank the blood of a mausel dog, although he let someone else wield the blade that killed it. He told himself it would have died with or without his intervention.

He smoked snakeskin and toadskin, and the dust of the yellow moths that come out only after a great wind.