Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts by Grey Orrin

Author:Grey, Orrin [Grey, Orrin]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Tags: fiction, horror, short stories, monsters
Publisher: Word Horde
Published: 2015-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

The Labyrinth of Sleep

Beyond the wall, the first moon has already risen. Kendrick stands still for a while, getting used to the changes to air, to gravity. He can still taste the last bitter dregs of the cigarette he stubbed out just before hooking up to the machine, can still smell the antiseptic tinge of the room he’s left behind, as a breeze perfumed by distant and unnamed glades carries it away.

Down below him, at the bottom of the hill, is a forest of tall white trees, and beyond that the beginning of the Labyrinth. He’s been here before, maybe not right here, but near enough. He’s seen this moon before, stood under its light. He’s been in that forest, even if maybe some other part of it. He’s seen the split-headed giants that live there, the doors that they build in the ground, the men with cloven hooves and the heads of dogs, the black shapes that occasionally flit in front of the moon. All of this is familiar to him, but something about the night, this night, feels different. A smell in the air, like the ozone smell before a storm. Something.

Maybe it’s because this trip is different. Not some hapless dreamer he’s riding in this time but another rider, another professional. McCabe, lying in a drugged coma in his hotel room. McCabe, a few milligrams of noxitol short of dead, lying there on his bed, hooked up to monitors and IVs and to the machine. McCabe, waiting somewhere in the Labyrinth for Kendrick to come in and find him, to learn why he’d gone to the needle instead of his oldest friend.

The company is paying for the hotel room now, for the monitors, and paying Kendrick double his usual rate, but this one he’d do for free. He has to know what happened, what changed. Or, the worse answer, if nothing has, if this was always what waited at the end of McCabe’s street and he’s just been blind to it until now.

One way or the other, he has to know, and so he starts down the hill, toward the Labyrinth.

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