Fang whined softly, placing a wet paw on my arm as I fumbled with the thread. “I know, boy,” I murmured, stroking his back to calm him. The fluorescent lighting in the tunnel was bright enough that I could make out Emig and Ella further down the tracks, bodies hunched over as mine was, yet dim enough for us to hide in the shadows cast by the gently curved walls of the tunnel.
I placed a hand on the cool metal train tracks, feeling the slight vibrations increase, signalling a train approaching. I could feel her travelling at a speed too fast for any human to run. She was on the train. I strained my senses, casting a net of surveillance in my mind. She was in the third-no, fourth cabin from the front.
Close. Very close.
At the far end of the tunnel, two twin lights raced towards us. I nodded at Ella. She made a gesture with her hands, and the light in the tunnel flickered before going out.
The rail under my hand was shaking violently. I kept the other on Fang, feeling the heat from his body seep into my fingers, the moon silk thread cutting into my palm as I grasped one end. The other end was in Fang’s mouth. He sniffed the air, hind legs tensed, waiting for my signal. In the space before we struck, I could feel his heart beating in sync with mine.
Inhale.
Exhale.
“Now!” I commanded, propelling myself backwards as Fang sprang forward into the path of the train. The thread stretched taut between us as he made it to the other side safely. The thread caught in the wheels under the train and there was a moment of suspended time where it looked as if the force of the train would splinter it. Luckily it did indeed prove to be “the strongest material in this city” as the weaver who sold it to us in the market had claimed. The metallic screech reverberating around the tunnel as the train ground to a halt was a victory cry in my ears.
“Good job, Fang,” I said as he trotted around the front of the train to join me.
“Emig, the fourth cabin, my side.” I voiced over the growing noise coming from the passengers in the stilled train. Singaporeans in this time period obviously did not like having their reliable Mass Rapid Transit system interrupted.
I felt Emig move further away from me in quest of the fourth cabin. He would pry open the doors and extract her without drawing too much attention. If anything went wrong I had briefed them both on Plan A, B and C.
Meanwhile, I had to deal with the driver of the train.
.. who had disappeared. That, or we had miscalculated and trains in this time were fully automated. I frowned as the side-door of the train swung open to reveal an empty seat. There were more pressing matters at hand though.
The train’s interior lighting was failing due to our presence, with whole cabins plunged into darkness at random. We didn’t know why, but technology had a way of failing or going berserk around us. I was afraid that mass hysteria would befall the masses in the train soon, hindering our mission, if I didn’t work fast.
I grabbed the ribbed black cube with a wire attached to it, hoping it was the intercom system. I lifted it off its handle and heard the reassuring “beep” coming from the rest of the cabins. Exactly as 23 had told us.
“Dear passengers,” I began.
“Don’t panic,” the voice over the intercom said. “We are looking into the problem and -” He was interrupted by a dog’s bark which he tried to cover with a cough, saying quickly, “And will work to get you to your destinations as quickly as possible. Stay calm and try not to break any windows.” There was a pause, as if he didn’t know how to end the announcement, before the intercom beeped and went silent. He had an accent I couldn’t place and spoke with a clipped tone that indicated he was used to snapping out orders.
When the train stopped, the air-conditioning had slowed to a whir. Standing with my back pressed against the doors, I had never been more aware of all the different smells clinging to the people around me. It was getting rather stuffy and I turned around to face the slit between the sliding doors, hoping for a whiff of fresh air. Did no one notice that a dog had barked over the intercom? I wondered if MRT drivers were allowed to bring their pets to accompany them on their lonely journeys through Singapore.
Through the reflection in the glass windows I could see people’s faces thrown into sharp relief by the garish light of their cell phones, the outlines of their noses casting monstrous shadows. It looked almost clownish in a way, reminding me of the time I had gone to the Haunted House in Escape Theme Park and disgusted my friends by laughing rather than screaming at the grotesque figures.
I was thinking of a particularly amusing “Horny Devil” costume when I noticed that my lungs were enjoying an inordinately large amount of relatively odourless air, considering the enclosed space I was in. I realized two things almost simultaneously: 1. The doors were slowly but surely, almost innocently, sliding open. 2. A hulking man with a massive head of blonde hair was standing directly outside the doors.
The air-conditioning seemed to heave a last heavy sigh before going silent altogether. Chaos broke loose as the last vestiges of waiting out the disruption in any sort of comfort evaporated.
In the distraction, he grabbed me before I could scream.
19 looked.. well, young. A strand of hair curled on her soft cheek as she slept fitfully. She was chubbier than 23, and though I had not seen them I had a feeling the hollow look had not settled in her eyes yet. Her thoughts on the train had been amusing, prompting my face to arrange itself in such a manner as to have a shadow of a smile. I couldn’t stop staring. Seeing her felt like a tall glass of water after a long stint in the desert. She shifted on the pallet, moaning. I touched my palm to her forehead, alarmed to feel her burning up.
We assumed she had passed out from the shock of Emig’s abduction. Ella knelt by me, running her fingertips over 19′s skin. After a moment she shook her head at me, eyes widening.
Far too late, the pieces fell together. The missing driver. The ease with which our plans had been given the green light, how we had found precisely what we needed at the exact time we needed it.
“The sandman,” I fumed, storming out of the room after instructing Fang to stand guard over 19.
Emig came with me, his face looking uncharacteristically worried. “It would take us days to locate the grains,” he said, placing a hand on my shoulder. I shrugged him off, whirling to slam my fist against the wall.
“It’s her,” I said, “No doubt. The way she breathes. The way she thinks..”
“How do you know? You were a mess after 23. It could be any girl on that bed right now, and you’d be blinded by your desire for it to be her. ”
I swallowed the urge to grab Emig’s neck and pummel him, instead focussing on the fact that as much as I would never admit it, he was right. 23 had wrecked me beyond anything I had ever suffered. 23 was the reason why we even openly referred to the girls as numbers, rather than their name..
“I would know, Emig! Especially in this place. Especially here, between wake and dreaming. This is where I knew her first and where I know her best. It doesn’t matter what age she is,” I said, “Or what she looks like. I would know her.”
He was silent for a long moment. “I feel it too,” he finally says softly. “It’s weird. I suppose it’s what humans would feel if they met the God they keep talking about. Do you think she’ll like me?”
I had to grin at that. “She might find you tolerable.”
“Oi!” Emig punched my arm. “Now wet your feet before the Sandman comes a-sanding.”
I thought I had died. And then I thought I was dreaming, but there were violent objections voiced. So now I’ve settled for insane. Well, wouldn’t anyone come to the same conclusion if they woke up to find that characters that had previously only existed in scribbles on paper were coaxing them to eat some sort of bitter vegetable? I said “no thanks” to the disconcertingly purple tubular vegetation, but if seeing is believing, then I had ample proof that Ella and Emig were as real as I was.
Take Ella for example. I had created her, dreamed her up in a bedroom in my aunt’s house when I was twelve and bored. Ella had lived in a notebook, her background a scrawled mess of random scenes and facts – 5″4′ tall, a selective mute, a half-blood witch. And yet, here she was, seven years later, in the flesh. The fact that I could just reach out and touch her was exhilarating despite my confusion.
Dim only added to that confusion. He was the short-tempered, annoyingly vague self-appointed leader of the group. I couldn’t figure out why I had never seen him in my life but everything about him felt so achingly familiar. Unlike the others whom I quickly grew close to, he never showed me any outward affection; only in the moments before I slept did I sometimes imagine him tucking a blanket around me.
Our odd gang was nomadic, travelling within the boundaries of what they called “the drowsy city”, a spectacle of sand-laced tunnels and low-rise buildings. Sometimes around a corner I would hear the rumble of a train, and in the early days I would drop everything and run towards it before Ella laid a gentle hand on my arm. It didn’t matter – no matter how fast I ran, the most I ever got was a glimpse of its backlights as it left me behind. In some ways I felt as if I were wandering the underground tunnels of Singapore’s MRT system. Maybe this world was underneath me all along.
Crowds gathered wherever I went, which was so contrasting to the situation back home that I could almost imagine staying with them all my life just to feel such unfettered adoration. Dim explained that I was a “Waker”, someone with the power to wake sleeping people from their sleepwalking lives. I had no idea what that meant, so I just regaled the crowd with stories that had been swimming in my head for ages. I had never seen people more entertained by my “nonsense” in my entire life.
“They don’t dream much here,” Dim said, obviously thinking he wasn’t being vague at all. I pressed the issue and he finally told me about the Sandman. “He is a dream-weaver and a bringer of nightmares or ecstasy if he chooses. He resides here, in the place between dreams. But he derives his power from the sleepwalkers from the world you came from. Which is why people like you are a threat to him.”
“But what can I do? I’m nobody!”
Dim gestured to the city. “I think you’ve made a difference here already, don’t you?” I didn’t get what he meant until later in the market, when we were biting down on juicy mangoes and one of the shopkeepers told us in an excited whisper that he had dreamt of his dead daughter and he was ready to move on.
“Move on? To what?” I tip-toed to ask Emig, because Dim was too busy inspecting the fruits.
“The waking world,” he said joyfully. “It’s like our version of heaven. It’s the same thing: everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”
Which, if you thought about it, wasn’t very helpful at all. Despite my questions leading to more mysteries of the world I’d found myself in, I figured it was a happy accident that I had fallen through a chasm in the worlds and ended up meeting Emig, Ella, Fang, and yes, even Dim.
My fatal mistake was bringing her to Oslo. We were in high spirits that day, and on a whim I gave Oslo three flat coins and told her to stay very still as he painted us. As expected, she kept fidgeting throughout and bounded off when he was done, racing me back into the cool interiors of the tunnels towards our rooms.
She darted into my room ahead of me and I heard an unwelcome crash. By the time I stood in the doorway, panting, it was too late. In her hands she clasped the portraits, all drawn by Oslo, each with a different number. She must have knocked over the box by my night stand. In my own hand I held the one with her, 19. She was looking through the portraits with 55, 42, 31 and finally, obviously more well-worn than the rest, 23.
“How many?” She asked me shakily, taking a step backwards. “How many have there been before me?”
“Four,” I said. There was no use lying to her now.
“What happened to them?”
“They.. they went back to sleep.”
“And can you explain, properly I mean, why they all look like me except older?”
“Because..” Because they are you. They’re all you. I couldn’t bring myself to say it. The look on her face told me I didn’t need to.
You would think that after everything that had happened, something like this would not cause me to raise even an eyebrow. Well, I didn’t know how to respond. This went deeper than anger or fear, this settled into my stomach like cold steel.
“You’re different,” He said, “None of them told the stories you did. To varying degrees, a part of them was sleepwalking. But you are wholly awake.”
“No, I’m not. What am I doing here? You said I fell through by accident! Don’t you dare lie to me again!”
So he told me about his plans A, B and C. He told me how his team set up disruptions all over Singapore on different days, how Ella short-circuited forty metres of power rail with her magic and how the investigations into the MRT breakdowns would draw sleepwalkers into our world.
I think he could tell I was leaving.
I could hear the train around the corner, and this time I knew I would catch it.
“I’ll see you around, Ying.” He said my name for the very first time.
ns 18.68.41.179da2
