Chapter 10: A Dream of Eyes and Masks.

  It was good to have my apartment back now that the cops had released it, but there were a few problems. Firstly, the graffiti was still up, and while I had to admit that Iron Mask may have had some artistic flair, I didn’t want to let that slide. I’d have to plan a trip to Bunnings at some point, or the landlord would let me have it with both barrels.

  The second was that somebody had nicked the remaining beers from my fridge, the cheeky bastards. Nothing else had been nicked, nothing I noticed missing anyway. I read over the police report. No sign of forced entry, no valuables taken, no sign of my attacker, and of course, not even a mention of the infamous Iron Mask. No mention of the graffiti, either. Just a useless police report and some beers nicked from the fridge, either by Iron Mask, or Port Moonstone’s finest.

  I sighed. This was not how I imagined my mech pilot career would turn out when I signed back up. I know it was kind of messed up to want monsters to show up again, but most of my time at the Crystalline Initiative had been spent in the toy business, and I wanted to be back doing what I was best at.

  I did laundry to get the dust out of my clothes, and checked the news websites. Still nada about the attack, Che Saguaro or Detritus. Even less than nada about Silverback or Amy. This had to be some kind of a joke. How the hell does the government cover up a kaiju attack, let alone magical girls and Mechs? The internet should have been making this go viral, but none of the mainstream news was covering it, not the ABC or SBS, not the Murdoch rags, not even A Current Affair. Sure, this did create questions on who was showing the video in the bar, but I put that aside.

  I checked the Port Moonstone subreddit. There were videos and people talking about it, like it was the late 2000’s again. That was more like it. Once you got out of the actual news networks, and into the blogosphere, now we had some traction beginning. We even had memes. There were a disturbingly high amount of horny posts about Amy, but I reported those and moved on. Another thing I notice was reports of humanoid creatures being spotted around the outskirts of Port Moonstone: some of the escaped mini-cactus people, but also some of the skull-faced aliens we’d faced in the simulation. Could’ve been A.I, but then again, Port Moonstone was a notorious weirdness magnet.

  I needed to distract myself from being productive. I’d done enough for the toy business lately, and I needed to look after myself, physically and emotionally. Step one was a light workout: a fairly basic Indian club workout. The hospital had told me to avoid anything too strenuous or anything that would aggravate the core, and I didn’t feel like jogging, so Indian clubs it was. I had my hoodie on, put my headphones in, opened a playlist for a low intensity workout, and began the circuit: the clubs could be deceptively heavy, but I appreciated the way they loosened up my shoulders. I slammed a protein shake from the fridge, and after that, I vegged out a bit and watched some WWE on TV. I’d been kind of sceptical when Triple H took over, but I had to admit, the man had made some positive changes. I checked my phone during a commercial break, and decided to look at my Down Under Connections profile. Amy’s profile was gone. Guess she really had simply forgotten to delete the app.

  I guess that Indian club workout that I did must have worn me out more than I expected. The room felt toasty warm and I felt so comfortable that I began napping on the couch, almost involuntarily. I tried to fight the sleep, but I sunk into the couch’s warm embrace, sleep claiming me.

  But as I fell into the dream, everything turned ice-cold. The world around me felt wet, but I couldn’t see anything. I tried to reach out and touch something, but there was nothing I could hold on to. I didn’t know which way was up. All I could do was kick, try and do a simple breaststroke to go somewhere, anywhere in the inky black. I swam, for what felt like hours, without direction, without a goal, except to move forward. I saw nothing but black, and felt nothing but cold and wet.

  Suddenly, an eye opened in the dark, right in front of my face. It was this huge gold iris, which searched the surrounds around me, before the black pupil fixed itself on me. I tried swimming back, to get a better look at it, against my better judgement, but I couldn’t see anything else. The eye blinked, and I heard a voice whispering, cold, wet and rasping.

  “He lives.”

  I was too close to make out what it was, but I wasn’t trying to find out. I desperately switched direction, began swimming as fast as the water would let me, but I felt something large and powerful tug on my back. I screamed without sound as I felt myself being tugged back towards the eye.

  I awoke with a start, heart pounding in my chest, covered in sweat, like I’d run a marathon. I gasped for breath, paralysed at first. I forced myself to relax, letting the feeling return to my limbs and fingers. The warmth of the room soothed my body, and I sat up slowly as I focused on slowing down my breathing. I touched my face, my clothes. Sweat aside, everything was dry. Just a nightmare. A horrifying, vivid nightmare in the middle of the day, and a nightmare that I’d had before, but a nightmare nonetheless.

  I called my parents, had a good talk. I didn’t tell them about the nightmare: Why would I? I was damn near 30, too old to be running to my parents after I had a bad dream. I didn’t tell them that I’d slept in a factory last night either: My parents had left their home countries because they believed Australia would offer them a better life to start a family in, and I didn’t want to break their hearts by having them think I’d fallen into poverty and homelessness. Finally, my mother’s inevitable question came around.

  “So what are you doing for work now?”

  I froze. I didn’t like the prospect of lying to my parents, even though I’d had to do so for years, to make sure they didn’t know about Staaldier, or Puma One, or any of my career as a mech pilot, and when I joined the Army, it meant that we didn’t speak for three years. I swallowed in a dry throat. I told them I worked for a toy company based in Port Moonstone. This, at least, wasn’t technically a lie. I told them that we were still getting started (Also true), and that things were actually going great (Subjective and questionable, to say the least).

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  After about an hour, Mum seemed to believe me, so she let me go. I breathed a sigh of relief. ASIO, the CIA, GRU and Mossad all pale before the inquisitorial might of an old Colombian woman with nothing better to do than to interrogate her only son. I made a note to find a way to prove that I worked for the toy arm of the company, and only the toy arm, to sate her curiosity.

  I began browsing the web again. I really should have been going to Bunnings, but I needed answers. This time, I needed info on my nightmare. Curiously, when browsing, I saw reports of others having the same dream. I screenshotted a few before they could be taken down. I made sure to jot the details down in a note on my phone, before I could forget.

  I rubbed my face, gave it a love tap before I took my hoodie off, and checked the time. Still midday, but the wrestling had finished. I vacuumed the house, finished the laundry before deciding what else I would do today. There was a Dan Murphy’s near me that ran late, so I could grab beers later, replacing what I’d lost. I went through my room. Nothing there looked like it had been disturbed, apart from the cops going through my stuff. I opened a small compartment next to my bed, with a photograph, of me in my dress uniform and slouch hat, with the members of my old unit.

  I don’t have any regrets about leaving the Army. Sure, it had given me discipline and knocked some hard-won sense into me, and I appreciated being qualified with a weapon when it came down to it, but I couldn’t deal with the politics and the power plays from the senior officers, as well as the rank incompetence of the juniors. Plus, quitting the Army had actually let me restore my relationship with my family, which I’d realized made me happier. And after Jim Parkes was KIA against Rahab, well, that was when I matured a bit. I copied the screenshots to a secure USB stick, then hid it in a secret place. After Iron Mask, I couldn’t afford any risks or chances. I finished cleaning up my room before I got another call from Mum. “Mum, we just spoke. What’s going on?”

  No response. Just a quiet clicking in the background. The call went dead. I swore. Scammer probably, in a best-case scenario. But if not…

  It didn’t bear thinking about. I went back to the computer, seeing if there was anything new to pull up. After refreshing the pages, the posts were gone. I exhaled loudly. I had my backup copies, sure, but to see confirmation that this was being covered up was chilling. And for what reason? If something was out there, giving people psychic dreams and sending messages like “He Lives”, why bother to cover it up? Who the hell are you fooling?

  My thoughts were interrupted by a banging at the door. I grabbed one of my Indian clubs, uncertain of my chances. If I got a surprise hit in, I stood a chance, but my body still felt sore and needed to recover still. But if it was Iron Mask again, I had no choice. Gritting my teeth, I opened the door to find a ginger woman with an unamused expression and a Defence uniform standing outside my doorway. She looked down at the club in my hand.

  “Since when do your mob use nulla-nullas? Put that crap away, Elias.”

  I let the woman in, jaw hanging limp in shock. She looked around my apartment, like how I imagine a mafia don looks around at his associates before he tells everybody he smells a rat. She sat on my couch, looked right up at me. I was shocked. Normally, I’m not the type to be fazed by strange women entering my apartment, except Private Sophie Kessler had been dead for a couple of years now.

  “How the hell are you-“

  “We’re not here to discuss me, Elias.”

  “I saw you dead, Sophie. Your eyes- How? Am I still- I’m still dreaming, aren’t I? It’s the only way any of this makes any sense. “

  She leaned back into my couch, baby-blue eyes boring into my soul. I would’ve sat down, but that couch was really the only bit of furniture I had in the room, so I just stood, waiting for a response. Sophie’s sighed. “There’s a cover-up, but if what I think’s coming really is coming, then the government won’t be able to keep a lid on things much longer. Doesn’t mean they won’t damn well try. Truth is, right now, a lot of things aren’t sitting right with me. My old sergeant told me that problems come in threes-“

  “Except we’ve had at least 4 now. Detritus, Che Saguaro, Iron Mask make three, but I’ve had… I dunno. A dream? A vision? Something like that? So I’m not sure how well the analogy holds up.”

  “You’ve been having visions? You might want to go get that checked out, Elias.”

  “Yeah, one small problem, Sophie: It’s almost the exact same dream I had before Rahab showed up. It’s the one you told me about before- well, I thought... Only difference, is I heard a voice saying ‘he lives’. If Rahab is somehow still out there-“

  It was then I saw the silver pistol at Sophie’s hip, and the carnival mask she was wearing on her face. Ain’t no fucking way. This was impossible. This was unthinkable. I tried to run, but only got as far as my kitchen before falling. I looked around, but I wasn’t in my apartment now. I was in a barracks room, back at Duntroon. I recognized the place. All these years, and I could still remember the place. I looked around, but there were no doors. I tried to shout for help, but nobody was coming. Sophie had followed me easily, almost stepping out of the walls, and raised the pistol, grinning a rictus grin before cocking back the hammer, and removing her mask, showing a face with plucked-out eyes. She seemed to grow, taller and taller, or was I getting smaller and smaller?

  “Please, you don’t have to-“ I begged, before she pulled the trigger. The gunshot came almost as a relief.

  I woke up again, screaming this time. I checked my watch. 3 PM again, in my own home. I breathed deeply as I walked over to the bathroom mirror, and browsed the web. Another nightmare, two in a row. I breathed deeply, looked up at the mirror. I cursed my dream self for my cowardice, and considered the possibilities, and the words from my dead fellow trainee officer.

  Despite having fought monsters from god-knows where since I was thirteen, seeing another comrade killed in front of me during an operation, and despite discovering another soldier’s eyeless corpse, I'd managed to dodge a lot of the psychological consequences you'd expect me to have. Whatever smack I talk about Defence, I'll admit: Their psych docs are probably the best in the business. The military had agreed to grant me early discharge on the condition of absolute secrecy, and my parents had helped me get more professional assistance. I hadn’t been allowed to tell anyone all the details, but I’d been looked after in that regard. I’d never had the sleepless nights, the memories that wouldn’t go away, so why was this only cropping up now?

  Australians say that trouble comes in threes, but the Japanese don’t necessarily agree. For reasons I don’t quite understand, their word for the number four is shi, and it’s written and pronounced similar to their word for death. I counted. Detritus was one, Che Saguaro was two, Iron Mask was number three. And if that old catfish bastard wanted to be number four, then I’d make sure it would regret disturbing my dreams. Especially if he wanted to taunt me using Sophie Kessler’s corpse.