Miss Jack: Acknowledgement must be paid to my fabulous, amazing, inhuman beta-- Asa (Aspiring Author). She fell from beta-heaven, and I was just the lucky one to snatch her up. If there are still mistakes, they're mine (and possibly because I was too thick-headed to listen to her).

Once Upon A Nightmare

~a tale of darkly ever after~

Chapter One

A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes

“Though dreams can be deceiving, like faces are to hearts

They serve for sweet relieving, when fantasy and reality lie too far apart.”

This is a good one, I thought, stretching my mind’s muscles into the farthest reaches of the dream. Dreaming had always been one of my very fondest pleasures; private and freeing. This dream, though, I could practically smell it was so inviting, like a warm trap. Something as simple as feeling the texture on a stone wall gave me a shivery little feeling of pleasure. This was the third night I’d dreamed so richly, and I'd gone to bed early in anticipation

As often happened, I couldn’t recall the beginning of the dream. Almost like I'd fallen into it mid-action and wormed my way into the main character's mind. Apprehension hung in the air—someone was after me, someone who should of scared me: a serial killer/kidnapper/generally creepy guy stalking his (or her, if your tastes ran more to Carmilla's flavor) prey. It probably would have scared your average seventeen your old girl, but the sublime was my brand of fun.

Creepy Guy, whom I hoped might be a suavely dangerous combination between Hannibal Lecter and Lord Byron, was closing in on my hiding spot in an old gothic church. It was abandoned, with a taaaaalll ceiling and decaying gargoyles. Very Hunchback of Notre Dame. I had crammed my twiggy, five foot two body behind a few disused organ pipes, and Creepy Guy was getting closer.

“Olly, olly, oxen free,” he called in a honey-sweet voice, barely above a whisper. Dream-sense told me he was moving slowly in and out of the dusty benches.

Suppose, I thought, suppose my foot accidentally knocks this pipe and a dissonant chord echoes off the stone? That would be unfortunate. Gazing casually at the ceiling, giving my foot the chance to deceive me, I rammed my toe into a pipe. It barely made any sound, but it hurt, and I gave a startled yelp of pain.

“Found you.” He was on me, moving into my hiding place. The sudden rush of adrenaline, more than anything, caused my initial jolt of terror. It felt forced, like a heavy blanket coming over me.

“You'll never take me alive!” I gasped, patting my unarmed hips. “Drat,” I muttered. Where was a dagger to impale yourself with when you needed it?

Creepy Guy sighed. “That's it!” Like Moses parting the Red Sea, he swept both arms out and just like that, the old church vanished. Poof, gone. Our surroundings became a dome of blackness. It was hard to tell if it expanded forever, or just didn’t expand at all. In the center, illuminated, we faced each other.

Mr. Dark Engima had been something of a recurring factor the past three nights, and for the first time, I could see him clearly. He had an interesting face, all sharp angles and shadows, and a mouth that was naturally unapologetic. With his shoulders drawn back and his arms crossed over his chest, he was... commanding, and I had the strange urge to bow.

He glowered. "Whatever you're doing, stop it."

They were the exact color of fire, his eyes; the glaring, unpleasant kind that scorches and lays waste. I was so used to gazes slipping past me, the sudden focus was daunting, and I missed his next words.

"What?" I managed to say, feeling uncomfortably like I'd been irreversibly changed in some way just by looking into his eyes.

"You're doing something," he grilled me. "Otherwise, I wouldn't still be here."

Here? In... nothing land?

“Now, I heard you, but...”

He nearly cooked me with his eyes. "Not here," he gestured impatiently at our surroundings, "Here." He tapped his temple. "Your mind. I can't leave. I've tried everything."

This was starting to get weird, even by my generous standards.

"But…" I fumbled for words. "You're— I mean, of course you can't leave. You're a dream, a figment of my imagination." I tried to keep my voice gentle as I broke the news.

He shook his head, unruly black hair falling into his eyes. "First of all, I'm a Nightmare, not a Dream, and while I am a figment of imagination, I am not a figment of your imagination, and I have been trapped in here for three days.” Well, so much for that honey-sweet voice; he spoke now with the rough, husky edge of a chain smoker.

“Jeez, relax. Go, if you want to.”

"I don't need your permission," he growled unpleasantly.

I sighed. “Well. Whatever.”

“Whatever?”

“ You,” I said, “are cranky. And I have better things to do than listen to you whine at me.”

I walked away, and for several seconds, he didn't follow. Then, he was beside me. “First of all,” he said, “Where ya going?” He flourished a hand at the never-ending darkness, brows arched in mocking question. “Secondly—“ With one step, he pivoted in front of me and stopped my progress. “Were you even listening?”

“Sure.”

“And... having a Nightmare trapped in your mind doesn't bother you, I suppose.”

If I believed him, it might have bothered me, but my dreams had been this convincing before, but in the end, that's all they ever were: dreams. I squinted at him. “If you're really a Nightmare, why isn't this dream scary?”

Color seeped into his face. “Excuse me?”

“Just saying.”

“You want a scary dream? My brand of scary?” His mouth curved into a smile. “My pleasure. Another night, though.” Tilting his head, he pretended to examine a watch on his wrist. “As you're about to wake up.”

It was as if his words pulled a trigger. I felt the dream yank out from under me, lifting my mind back into reality despite my frantic attempts to hold on. In a matter of seconds I was irritatingly fully awake. I clenched my eyes shut and tried to call back the dream, but it wouldn't have mattered even if it had worked, because in the next instant, my alarm went off.

Morning light spilled through my window, and I knew I only had a few minutes to lay there in silent fury, the alarm clock blaring in the background, before I'd have to get ready for school. He had known. Somehow.

Or had I known? It was my dream after all. My mind.

I took a long time brushing my teeth, frowning at my reflection as I pondered. By the time I laced up my shoes to leave, I had two complicated plots figured out in my head. One version involved insanity and my ex-lover's ghost, and the other featured myself as a repressed psychic, tormented by my visions of prophecy.

Late for school (thank you over elaborate daydreaming) I rushed out the door with a hastily yelled goodbye at my dad and made the usual fifteen minute trip to school in ten, skidding into Algebra a few seconds before the bell. First period Algebra meant one of two things: under-the-desk reading time, or failed pop quiz.

Today seemed to fall into the first category, so I slipped Dracula out from my backpack and began to read. For Dracula, I usually only resurfaced for two things: death and roll call, but this time Nightmare (formerly known as Creepy) Guy kept pulling my thoughts back to him like an annoying, make believe magnet.

“Violet Darcey...?” Mr.. Patterson left the last syllable of my name hanging. Adjusting his glasses, he peered over the rows of students, squinting at each one, trying to determine who belonged to the mystery name on his roll.

It was March, well into the year, and this still happened regularly. “Here I am,” I said, waving my pencil in the air. Movement usually alerted people to my presence, if nothing else did.

“Ah, yes. Violet.” A check by my name and I’d floated out of his mind, gone until the next class.

I was forgettable. It was my only talent besides reading at an abnormal rate. Forgetability, though, was truly my forte, and at lunch, I was able to demonstrate this astounding skill by, once again, being sat on.

One moment I was arranging my carrot sticks in my mashed potatoes like a castle, and the next, a sudden pressure fell on my leg. “Hey—”

"Whoa, sorry, I didn't even see you," Gregory Mackey apologized while looking in some direction off my shoulder, moving along to the next table. He was a sophomore and his favorite band was Iron Maiden. It irritated me that I knew this. It irritated me that I even knew his name since he'd probably only thought of me in that split second when he attempted to sit in an occupied chair. I couldn't help knowing, though. He'd sat in front of me in our history class all year with his headphones turned up full volume.

I sighed, and not for the first time, wondered if I could pull off Goth. Not that I wanted a stereotype, but at least I’d be recognizable enough not to get sat on. And maybe have a group to hover around and pretend to be friends with. But even though I adored all things dark and creepy, I didn't look like a goth, and really, I didn‘t want to— eyeliner and I had a bad history. My short hair was plain, untidy, and an average dark auburn color; though I liked to amuse myself by saying it glinted like freshly spilt blood in the moonlight. My fashion sense bore the matchless title of none, and like any respectable bookworm, I wore glasses.

Leaning my chin in my hand, I nibbled at a potato-drenched carrot and glanced at the table next to me. One of the cafeteria employees, a balding man with watery eyes and bad teeth who spoke with a heavy Polish accent and served the vegetables, worked a scraping blade where a mass of seniors had made a mound of their squished, uneaten food. He looked up at me and tipped me what may have been the most cynical wink in the universe.

Suddenly, I saw the cafeteria covered in blood, chairs overturned and bodies on the floor, and the Polish cafeteria worker carefully wiping his cooking blade clean, smiling to himself.

I grinned brightly and flashed him the thumbs up. He had my go ahead, anyway. Frowning with puzzlement, he went back to scraping food.

After school, I walked home by myself, savoring the open air prickly with a vague heat that would peak in July and bake everyone alive.

My house was old with bad plumbing, a beautifully creepy attic, and lots of old trees and overgrown vegetation. I bounced up the creaking wood steps and called, "I'm home, Dad!" as I wiggled my way through a front door that more or less opened when it was supposed to.

He emerged from the kitchen with a half-eaten hot dog. He was covered in paint as usual. Seeing me, he grunted some kind of greeting, and walked past me into his domain where untold horrors were likely unfolding. Well, probably not, unless you considered landscape paintings horrific. Still, I wasn’t going to be surprised when some kind of Franken-garden clawed its way from his studio to wreak havoc upon our village— er…home.

Dad had been the one to give me my name. Mom wanted to call me Victoria, after her grandmother, but Dad, being the artist he was, said no, my eyes were ultramarine violet (or 'Deep Violet (Dark Purple)', as it said on his paint tube). Personally, I didn't see it. My eyes looked black to me. Dad said the light had to hit them the right way.

It wasn’t going well, if the incoherent grunt was anything to go by, and I made my way up the stairs into my room without further comment. I tossed my backpack onto my small, neglected bed and blew the customary greeting kiss to my Vincent Price poster, the only memorabilia that showcased a non-fictional person. On the armrest of my reading chair (a cherished piece of furniture that far outshone the bed) The Mysteries of Udolpho was laid open for casual side-reading.

The true glory of the room was the bookshelves. They almost touched the ceiling and they covered an entire wall. My passion, should I be so bold to claim one, was for words. I loved words and all the infinite ways in which they could be arranged and put together. I would read just about anything written in English (and a few things that weren‘t), but my favorite books, the dog-eared, dropped-in-the-bathtub ones, were stories of fantastical horror and tragic romance.

Stacks of Gothic literature overcrowded my shelves, names like Ann Radcliffe, Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King embellished across their spines. I felt at home with castles, darkness, madness, secrets and curses. I loved the villains, the maniacs, the persecuted maidens, the monsters and ghosts like I would friends.

Needless to say, a lot of the books I read as a kid were unsuited for children and blossoming imaginations, but it’s too late now. I read addictively, consuming books the way a carnivore devours meat.

Growing up, Dad would wait until the last possible moment, then frisk me, so I wouldn't have time to stash yet another paperback down my pants. Otherwise, as soon as things got rolling —be it birthday party, funeral, wedding or afternoon picnic— I'd be the forgotten kid in a shadowy corner, reading.

"Violet," he would say tiredly, holding up the contraband. "Don't you want a doll?" If her name is Catherine Earnshaw and she has pull-string catchphrases, I'd reply. I never did anything worthy of serious punishment, but if Dad wanted to get my attention, he would threaten my books with replacement Barbie dolls or make-up.

After shuffling around like I actually had other hobbies, I grabbed The Mysteries of Udolpho and settled down to read. Real life, for as little as I indulged in it, had settled my mind back into routine, and the weirdness of the previous night’s dream had lost its poignancy.

It was only when I was curled up in my bed, about to drift off, that I remembered Nightmare Guy's promise to make my next dream scary. For a moment, I stiffened, unsure, then I relaxed. Did I really believe someone was in my head controlling my dreams? He was just a particularly potent creation of my overactive imagination. Right? Exactly.

I fell asleep with a book open next to my head on the pillow, the pages wrinkled and stuck to my cheek. The next thing I knew, I was screaming. Raw, suffocating fear surged through my veins like liquid fire, crippling my senses. Every time I closed my eyes, if I blinked, the images flashed behind my eyelids. My mind kept drifting back—no, don't think about it— the remnants of the nightmare scorching the inside of my skull. I forced myself to forget. Helpless and out of sorts with my own body, I sobbed into my pillow for almost a minute before realizing my cheeks were wet with tears as well as sweat.

The emotions of the nightmare thrummed beneath the fear, even without the accompanying visuals, and I couldn't push them away. Guilt for every wrong I'd done and every right I hadn't, the pathetic summary of my life mocking me even as I was punished for it. And fire. I remembered burning, for eternity, it seemed like.

I began to shiver uncontrollably. I pulled my sheets, sticky with sweat, around my shoulders and fumbled my way to the bathroom by feeling along the walls. I turned the shower water on cold to help ease the flames I still felt licking at my skin and lay there in the bathtub, my pajamas on. For how long, I didn't know. I didn't care.

Eventually, I got out, stripping and leaving my clothes and the sheet in a sopping pile on the floor. I put on dry clothes and curled into my reading chair, The Princess Bride clutched in my hands like a lifeline. For once, I didn’t feel like stories of horror and the supernatural. My lips were blue, but I still felt like I was burning.

I sat like that, the book closed in my hands, for awhile, before I stood and tiptoed into the hall. I pushed open the door to my dad's room and looked at the shape of his sleeping form in the dark. “D-Dad...?” I whispered. He was perfectly still, no movement to suggest heavy breathing. It had an eerie feeling of expectation. But whether he was asleep or pretending to be asleep didn't matter. I left.

The next morning I was like the undead, and surprisingly, not glad about it. I'd read The Princess Bride completely through, skipping the parts where Westley got tortured and staying as far from sleep as possible.

Even Dad commented on my zombie appearance. He offered to give me a ride to school, and I gratefully accepted, not in the mood for a walk when every muscle in my body was suffering from a night spent awake and cramped up in a single armchair.

We drove in silence. Our house was old and poorly insulated, but if he'd heard me last night, he didn't comment on it. We pulled into the parking lot and I murmured a half-hearted goodbye.

I drifted through school, possibly more translucent than I usually was, and didn't retain a thing. It was a challenge of Olympic proportions not to fall asleep in every class. Every quiz produced an F, I got smacked in the face during dodgeball. I thought it quite the accomplishment I even remained upright, considering my brain had the consistency of Swiss cheese. At the end of English, Mrs. Moonie placed a hand on my shoulder and I jumped.

"Are you alright, Violet?" She sounded concerned. I liked Mrs. Moonie, and I liked her English class, but the question confused me. The idea that someone had been noticing me was too taxing for my tired mind, so I nodded and left the room as fast as I could.

After school, I was surprised to see our old station wagon idling outside the entrance doors— surprised Dad remembered. I suppose I ought to have been touched as well, but I only felt mildly bewildered. It wasn’t until we were halfway home that I murmured a shy thank you.

That night, I fought sleep with the ferocity of a Hun warrior. I avoided books, because I knew the comforting ritual and steady movement of my eyes traveling across the page would incapacitate me in a heartbeat. I had who-knows-how-many shots of caffeine in me, and I was pretty sure the volume level I had Toccata and Fugue blasting in my ears was causing hearing damage.

But living on two hours of sleep the night before rendered all of this useless, and at eight thirty, I was gone.

As soon as I fell asleep, there he was.

“Well, well. If it isn't the non-believer.”

I opened my mouth, but he raised a hand. “Wait— Hear that?” Materializing as if by magic, two sets of crowds appeared on either side of us, erupting in applause. Nightmare Guy took several bows. “Thank you, thank you.”

I stared at him. “It isn't funny,” I whispered.

The crowds and noise vanished and he stared back, eyes burning. “Know what else isn't funny? Being stuck here.”

“How do I make you leave?” I asked, with a touch of desperation.

"I don't know," he said. "Force me from your mind— envision me gone. Something."

I eyed him doubtfully. "Do you think that would work?"

His shoulders sagged. "I'm willing to try anything at this point."

I couldn't believe it, I actually felt bad for him.

"I could try," I offered with a feeble smile. He indicated for me to go ahead with a half-hearted gesture of his hand. An armchair appeared behind him and he sat down.

He waited, and I nodded, and kept nodding, as if the action might somehow better prepare me to remove someone from my mind. I closed my eyes for a little privacy, but I could still feel him watching. It was so hot and so precise, I almost felt the exact circles where his two eyes rested on my face. I cracked open one eye. "Could you not watch?"

He raised an eyebrow and didn't say anything for several seconds, and then shrugged one shoulder. A tent dropped suddenly over the top of my head, enclosing me in a small space of pin-striped fabric.

"Right," I muttered to myself. Thanks. I straightened my back and assumed a meditation pose.

I pictured the Nightmare and I pictured my mind (a big cavernous football arena type thing) and kicked him out. An invisible hand plucked him up and tossed him aside like a speck of dust. There. Gone.

"Tell me when you've started," his voice, bored, seeped into the tent.

My cheeks burned. Maybe not so gone after all.

I squeezed my eyes shut, and concentrated. This time I imagined him outside the tent, I remembered how the nightmare had made me feel, and I mentally shoved at him. I huffed and puffed a pretty formidable metaphysical wind, and even felt a little out of breath when I finished.

I paused uncertainly, and listened. He didn't say anything. I stood from my chair and opened the flap to the tent, peering out.

He glared at me with a mixture of pity and annoyance, chin propped against his fist. He also didn't seem too surprised.

"That was pathetic," he informed me.

"It was the best I could do," I grumbled.

"I believe you."

I flushed, and he groaned and threw himself dramatically to the side where the sofa extended to support his position. "Incredible," he griped, the word muffled.

Ditto, I thought.

"I'm sorry," I said after a moment, thinking of nothing else to say.

He twisted his head to look at me. His eyes narrowed in scrutiny, and I had to look at my shoes in order to escape the sensation of my insides melting.

"There are worse minds to get trapped in," he said, after I'd gone through the entire process of the scientific method to confirm that I did, indeed, have two laces. "Yours isn't so bad. No ringing obsessions with your appearance, no shopping tendencies, and no Edward Cullen.”

"Thanks. I think."

He grunted in reply, flopping over to his back. He glared at the non-existent ceiling, his hand resting on his chest like a dead fish. I sat down on the edge of the couch by his feet, folding my hands in my lap. "At least it can't get any worse?" I offered helpfully.

He gave a short bark of laughter. "Yeah. Sure. Worst day ever? I’ll bet it's tomorrow."

I switched the subject. "I'm Violet Darcey, by the way."

"I know."

I glanced at him from the corner of my eye, a bit peevishly.

He noticed the look and sighed. "Alexander."

It was very strange to think of a Nightmare having a name. It was strange to think of a Nightmare as a proper noun. "Are there others like you? Do I have some unknown being hanging out in my head every time I sleep?" I asked, not sure if I wanted to know.

He lifted his head, considering me. "Not every time. How often do you have nightmares? Or a dream that was so great you wanted to go back to sleep just to have it again?"

"Every once in a while, I guess," I said.

"There's your answer. Every once a while, there's probably a Dream or Nightmare tinkering around in your mind."

I stared at my hands, dumbfounded and fascinated all at once, the two emotions clanging loudly in my head. Alexander pushed himself upright, rolling his neck. "So, what do you want to do?"

"What do you mean?" I pressed my palm between my brows, squinting at him with one eye.

He turned slightly. A sense of dread landed in the pit of my stomach at the look in his eyes. "If I'm calculating correctly, which I am, then you have about eight and a half hours left before you'll wake up. Normally, your mind might wander and explore on its own, but while I'm in here, nothing happens in your subconscious unless I say so." He leaned closer. "The time will pass very slowly for us both if we do nothing but sit here."

My headache flourished and my vocabulary slowly fell apart until all I had left was a whiny, Whaaaaaat? I kept my word to myself, however, and instead emitted a half-strangled, "Nnnghk."

“Scared?” he asked, and moved closer still.

My brain said, ‘Never tell your predator you’re afraid, that only makes it worse.’ So the word that came out of my mouth was a quiet, “No,” but my body shrank against the couch like a big flashy sign screaming, “Yes!”

“That’s not fear,” he said, and stood to his feet. “But I do make you nervous.” The sofa vanished and I hit the floor with a startled yelp.

A charming smile lit up his dark face, like the silver fittings of a coffin, and the flames in his eyes simmered to more approachable levels. He bent down, hands on his knees. “How about a game?”

A game. My eyes cast around our plain, black setting and returned to him, doubtful.

“Like Monopoly?” I asked.

He hesitated, lips twitching. “Something like that, yes.”

“Not Monopoly,” I rectified. I always lost at Monopoly. In fact, I was the guaranteed loser in most games, but there had to be something I hadn’t failed at growing up. “Candyland,” I blurted. “Let’s play Candyland.”

“Candyland?” he echoed, voice thick with disgust.

“Yeah.”

All pretense of patronizing kindness vanished, and he crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t play…” He barely forced himself to say the word, “Candyland.”

“Because you always lose?” I tried.

His eyes flashed. “No.”

“Well, you would this time, because I always win.” The easy lie surprised me; I almost believed myself.

One black brow arched— apparently I wasn’t as convincing as I thought.

Plan B: I stuffed my fingers in my armpits and flapped, making clucking sounds.

“Cute,” he said.

I clucked one final time, and waited.

He sighed heavily. “Just remember, you asked for it.” He waved a hand, and a path of blocked colors appeared and curved away from where I sat. Trees sprung up on either side of me, dripping with syrupy sweets.

I didn’t know when the last time he played Candyland was, but the scenery lacked the sugary sparkle I remembered as a kid. The landscape sprawling in front of me looked more like Tim Burton’s grotesque parody of the game. The sleeves of my new red and white striped shirt hung past my knuckles, with blue overalls strapped on my shoulders and big, floppy shoes on my feet. I looked like a dope.

“Remind me again how you play,” Alexander drawled in a burdened tone. He’d spared himself the cutesy overall outfit, dressed in swashbuckling black and crimson, vines of ropey red hanging off his shoulders, the ends curling at his waist. Lord Licorice. In the illustration on the gameboard, Lord Licorice lived in a creepy mansion with bats coming off the turrets, by a very spooky looking Licorice Forest. Needless to say, he had been my favorite character.

“You draw colors,” I said. “Whatever color you draw, that’s the space you move to.”

Pretty simple. Candyland was designed for children who only needed to know minimal counting to play. Hence, why it was the one game I could sometimes win.

“If you draw a character, you move to their spot, even if it’s backwards,” I added.

Alexander extended a silver platter to me with a deck of cards stacked in the center. I drew a card off the top and glanced at it. Double-blue. Around the curve of the colored path, the second blue square lit up.

“Well,” I said. “See ya.” And I strolled forward in my dopey costume, over purple and green and red, past the wooden sign that said, ‘Gingerbread Plum Trees’, and would have waved to Plumpy if he hadn’t thrown a plum at me. It hit the ground by my foot and splattered my big red shoe.

“Hey,” I said. The next plum caught me in the shoulder. The purple juice instantly stained my shirt, soaking through the cotton fabric, sticky on my skin.

Plumpy tossed a third plum up and down in his palm, then stretched his arm back for another throw. His long, green fur was matted and stuck in clumps with plum juice, and his eyes were yellowed and dripping. I stared with open-mouth alarm until he heaved the overripe fruit, and then I ran. I ran right past the illuminated blue square and collided with an invisible wall.

“No cheating,” Alexander called pleasantly.

I blinked rapidly to regain my vision, on my back and breathless. What in the name of Dorian Grey? With a grunt and clenched teeth, I sat up and twisted my head to look behind me at Plumpy’s plum tree, where he’d retreated into the branches, camouflaged except for his yellow eyes. I shivered.

“Your turn!” I yelled back. I wanted away from Gingerbread Plum Trees, and the sooner Alexander moved, the sooner I could move.

He drew an orange square, which landed him right on the end of the Rainbow Trail. A convenient draw. I could see him, barely, and he tipped his hat at me before strolling across the shortcut.

The platter holding the cards appeared in front of me, hovering in mid-air, and I turned up the corner of the top card. It was a candy cane, the icon for Mr. Mint. I inched a foot over my blue square and didn’t meet with an invisible wall, so I hurried down the path until I reached the sign reading, Peppermint Forest.

The temperature dropped and a frosty breeze brushed over my skin, raising goose bumps along my arms. The juice-sodden fabric at my shoulder cooled and crystallized. I could taste mint in the air.

Candy canes rose high from the ground on either side of the path, leaned in so their curved tops formed a sort of archway above me. Up ahead, the lit candy cane square laid in wait, casting a pink glow over the white ground. I slowed. Where was Mr. Mint?

He appeared from the trees, crunching peppermint in his wake, and stopped, straddling the path. The shards of the desecrated candy canes rained down like little knives and I crossed my arms over my head to shield myself. They tore through my sleeves as if my shirt was made of toilet paper and a few grazed my skin. For a dream, the pain wasn’t dimmed like I thought it would be; if anything, it was heightened. Sharp, stabbing wounds that lingered.

Mr. Mint was at least double the height of the candy cane trees, I had to strain my neck to see his face. The scarlet stripes around his limbs bled into the ivory; they looked like— well, you can guess what they looked like, dark red and wet.

He raised his ax high over his head and swung down. I dodged, but couldn’t leave the path, and the force of the blade as it embedded into the square I’d previously occupied sent a tremor through the ground that knocked me off my feet. Teeth chattering —whether from nerves or the chilly air I didn‘t know— I crawled between Mr. Mint’s legs to the glowing pink candy cane square.

But Mr. Mint wasn’t done. Finding me gone, he swung his ax out in a wide arc and relieved half a dozen candy cane trees of their top halves. He roared and through the downpour of peppermint debris I saw the ax blade whistling toward me. My hands flew over my face as my last defense, and I shouted, “Stop, stop, stop!”

Mr. Mint stopped. Or he missed. Anyway, I wasn’t dead.

I peeked through my fingers. Lord Licorice, otherwise known as the-guy-responsible, stood in front of me, head cocked to the side. Behind him sat Mr. Mint, docile as a kitten, bound and gagged with chords of licorice.

“Problem?” Alexander asked.

“Yeah,” I said hotly, feeling pretty brash and indignant now that a candy cane axe wasn’t threatening the connection of my head to my body. “There’s a problem. What’s the matter with you? This isn’t Candyland, this is some kind of… of…”

“Nightmare?” he supplied.

“Yes.” I huffed, and my condensed breath dissolved over my chin.

“Fancy that.”

Clearly, he didn’t see the problem. “This isn’t going to work,” I said. “I don’t want to have a nightmare every time I go to sleep! If you’re going to bum around my mind—”

“I’m sorry?“ He cupped a hand behind his ear as if he’d heard incorrectly. “I’m not bumming around your mind,” he snarled. “I’ve haunted the minds of the deepest, darkest criminals in the world. Do you think I want to be here, playing Candyland with some geek girl, knowing the possibility of Go Fish the next night is the best I have to look forward to?” His shoulders trembled and he pressed his lips together in an obvious effort to reign in his temper.

“Okay,” I said and stood up, holding my palms out as if approaching a rabid animal. “You don’t want to be here, and I don’t want you here. There’s no reason we both have to be miserable.”

No answer. Probably, that was the wrong argument to make. He looked like he thought his unhappiness was a perfectly valid reason to make everyone suffer.

“Can you create a dream that isn’t scary?” I ventured.

Again, no answer, and the expression on his face suggested I’d asked him if he knew how to breathe out his elbows.

“The good news is,” I added hastily, “My standard of scary is pretty low.”

“That’s true…” he murmured. “You have a lot of… gothic foundations in your subconscious.”

“Good. Let’s try it. I’ll think up the dream, and you help create it. Then tomorrow, you can try and think of something.”

He grimaced and twitched at the promise of tomorrow, but didn’t offer resistance.

“Okay?” I asked.

“Knock yourself out, kid.”

He didn’t appear to have much confidence in my dream-making abilities, but I had faith in a skill I’d spent too many hours perfecting. “So we’re pirates,” I began. He raised an eyebrow and I gestured impatiently.

“So we’re pirates,” he repeated with a sigh, and the next thing I knew, we stood on the deck of a ship, the wind whipping through our black sails, and the salt air stinging our faces. A three-pronged hat tilted over Alexander’s face in the same rakish style of his previous fedora, and he had a patch over one eye and a wooden peg on his leg.

Apparently, he didn’t know enough about pirates to avoid the cliches. I was dressed similarly, with a parrot on my shoulder. The bird was black, of all colors, and he squawked, “I vant to drink your blood!”

Dracula, sort of. It’s the thought that counts. I beamed at Alexander, delighted, and he even sort of smiled in return.

“And we’re looking for treasure in a frozen wasteland, but not because we want the gold, but because we know that’s where the other pirates are headed. See, what we collect is pirate teeth. Only ground up pirate teeth mixed with a blade of grass from Scotland and a pinch of blood dust from Australia can cure our curse, which is to fall in love with every twenty-seventh person we see. But a pirate’s love is a curse in itself, because to incur a pirate’s love is to be given a disease which shrivels up your tongue and your eyeballs, but you don’t die. So we’re stuck loving a pack of shriveled, rotting zombies that want to kill us, and we’re headed to Antarctica to ensnare us some pirate teeth.”

Alexander fought a smile. “Why don’t we fall in love with each other?” he asked.

“Because,” I said, “We count. And when we know we’re going to hit twenty seven, we look at someone else.”

“Of course.”

So we played out my pirate dream, with dazzling effect, and we’d made it all the way to Scotland when suddenly Alexander stopped, shooting me a strange look.

“What?” I asked.

“Change of plans, Four Eyes.” And with that, he ran his sword through my stomach. It didn’t hurt; just a vague tickling between my ribs, but I still glared at him in self-righteous anger.

“What the…”

“Somebody has to die in the end, might as well be you,” he said, smirking.

I blinked, not understanding at first, and by the time I caught on to what he meant, I was already awake. I clutched my quilt in my fingers, breathing slowly to assure myself I was real. A new thought entered my mind: I'd had fun, and there had been no books involved.

If I've gone totally bananas, I thought, I'm okay with it.