NINE

From the jeep, we got our first good look at the dreaming hills - what we would, soon enough, come to call "the outlands".  Behind us, on a wide hill, was what can best be described as a  giant, jumbled pillar that was made up of everywhere I could remember going in my life.  Houses I'd lived in.  Schools I'd attended.  Places I'd hung out, streets I'd spent time on, all stacked and staggered up and up, with my current apartment building turned inside-out as the ground floor, endless locked apartment doors facing outward in a ring, with the hallway carpet as a kind of sidewalk ring that encircled the pillar.  It would have been a building big enough to take up a full block, ten stories tall at least, on any street, if it were possible at all in reality.

And just behind it, maybe half a mile distant on another hill, another pillar - some of it familiar, but more airports and hotel rooms, cliffs and ruins.  Gina drove us over towards it, over the gently waving grass of the hills, and we saw the bridge she'd made - the hospital walkway, stretching from her pillar to mine.

As we drove, I noticed that we'd left a sort of road - flat grey stones, broken and mostly overgrown in the grass, but still there.  I pointed this out to Gina, and she paused in examining the pillar of her stuff to look down at it, and follow it with her pointing finger into the distance.  As that road went over the hills and out of sight, we could see the top of another something; a pillar like ours, maybe, but what we could see of it seemed to be all brick.  After a little time looking over her own pillar, we turned that way and drove, windows down, along the broken road.

Those gentle hills, the outlands, are very much another real place, in terms of detail.  We rolled our windows down, and felt the cool night breeze.  We could hear crickets, in the grass, and watch the stars glimmer - too many and too large, in all colors  but otherwise plain enough.  So the drive was pleasant, however surreal it may have felt.

It was Ray's pillar, but...  it wasn't a jumble like ours.  It was the front facing of Derleth elementary school, an old Victorian brick-and-limestone school about twenty blocks from where my apartment was.  So, all brick, with the same windows, over and over about twelve floors up, with the same front entranceway repeated on the ground floor three times on the side facing us, and it looked like three more times on the next side, around the corner.  As we drove up on the roadway, we could see copies Ray, sitting on the steps of all three entrances.  Each copy was bouncing the same ball, over and over, in perfect harmony.

Gina leaned out of her window and shouted "Ray!  We're here to pick you up!" as we pulled up.

"You're not my dad.  I'm waiting for my dad."  Mumbled the copy of Ray nearest us, audible despite the distance.

She wasn't having it, though "Wakey-wake-dream, Ray.  It's Ben and Gina, here to drag you off on impossible adventures." she called as she puled to a stop, and opened up her door.

I got to see the multiple-selves-coming-together thing, then, with a blur of identical copies of Ray, and then other versions of him doing other things, all suddenly superimposing themselves half-transparently in space.  And then, just the one version, standing in front of us with a little shudder.

"Whoa.  Ouch."

"Yeah, we know.  Welcome to dream club!  My name is Gina, I'll be your driver, and we have no idea what the hell this place is."

"It's..   My school.  I went here, as a kid.  I'd sit on the steps, and wait for my dad to pick me up every day after school."

I broke in with "Well, maybe you figured we would be coming, so you were waiting for us.", which actually made more sense than I'd expected, and we all looked at each other for a moment.

"Anyway, you should see our pillars; they're a little different."

"Your pillars?"

So, of course, we showed him.  And talked about the difference between his place and ours.  And we tried to figure out the bridge Gina had made, and talked about how the road and jeep had appeared leading to him when we'd opened the door from my apartment looking for a connection to him.  There was a sort of sense to it all, but we couldn't quite get through it.  As we talked, we drove up the highest hill we could see, wondering if we could find any other pillars.

What we found instead was a black cat, with white-socked paws, sitting on a huge grey boulder at the top of that hill.  It looked at us, cocked it's head, and jumped down and ran over to me.  And that was the last thing any of us remember dreaming that night.