13 Mink Street

This isn’t real...

After waking up half a month ago, Karon had spent nearly a week grappling with the truth, piecing together the certainty that he had crossed into another ”real world,” not merely fallen into a dream or hallucination. But what faced him now stood entirely apart from reality.

He should be, no, he was still in the basement of the Immers house. Everything had begun to unravel the instant he had tried twisting Jeff’s head. The massive red high heels before him, the woman’s impossible face, all so starkly illogical and so fundamentally disconnected from sense and truth that the answer was clear. He was under hypnosis.

Hypnosis could mean many things, but in this moment, it was unmistakable: his body left behind, his spirit trapped, drifting untethered. Put simply, he was dreaming.

The radio’s static sputtered on. Above him, the woman’s mouth slowly began to open. When her lips reached their limit, they continued to tear apart, rending wider, the noise brittle and grating, like the fibers of a zipper forced open.

Her face split from side to side, the teeth vanishing into a hollow gap. From within, her tongue uncoiled, huge and disturbingly agile, snaking downward with the quick precision of a gecko about to swallow defenseless prey.

The world buzzed as it closed in with a damp, suffocating heat; then, all at once, his body was wrenched upward.

There is a peculiar rush when one is hauled into the air, like a carnival ride flinging you into space, or a swinging pendulum gathering speed. An exhilaration that sharpens, and then, when pushed too far, begins to disorient, to smother. One could easily lose themself, or black out altogether.

This is a dream. This is just a dream. Karon repeated, over and over. He knew he had to wake up, and quickly.

He did not know what had brought on any of it. Still, he clung to what little he understood, wrestled the unknown into something he might control. It was like working through a puzzle with mismatched tools. He played whatever rules he knew, hoping to hammer chaos into order.

The mind, when pressed, was a world entirely of its own. Usually, a dream’s intensity was enough to shake one awake. Occasionally, however, one became aware of the fact that they were dreaming, yet remained impossibly trapped, a state known as sleep paralysis.

Some circles called it lucid dreaming. With practice and self-hypnosis, the odds of entering such a state could apparently be increased.

Most who chased after these experiences out of curiosity quickly swore them off; the act of waking, forced and unnatural, felt like drowning. It was the kind of panic that could unravel a person, an afterimage of dread that lingered long after.

Those with quick, restless minds sometimes unwittingly wove dream traps of their own making, burrows so deep the mind could not always climb free.

Worse still, the dream could layer itself, each false awakening crafted by the subconscious to feed the illusion and sap the will to resist. That was the truest deception.

If ordinary sleep paralysis was akin to a diver rising toward the surface and breaking into air, then this was a diver breaching only to find unyielding winter ice above, a sealed-in frozen trap.

What happened to those who never woke? There was no definition for it. No death certificate had ever offered a box for “Died in a Dream.” And those who emerged from a long dream returned with their bodies unscathed, the experience slipping away behind them like a fading shadow.

Wind screamed in his ears as the tongue dragged him upward and pulled him into the open maw. In its darkness, he was battered by the sounds of chewing, swallowing, relentless and pounding. It was noise that would not stop.

He was being devoured. He was being torn apart. He was being swallowed whole. He felt himself dying, dying, dying.

And then, in an instant of awful clarity, he knew he was already dead.

Karon understood that if he did not wake now, the consequences would be dire.

He was someone who had already died once; those who had crossed that threshold rarely treated life or death lightly. They clung to the act of living with a fierceness others could barely imagine. Karon was one of them. The urge to survive burned within him even now.

In a place like this, he would need every shred of faith and courage to punch through the surface of the dream and find his way back to his body, to the waking world. This was not unknown territory, even if it was stranger and darker than anything he had faced before. Both his work and his own restless curiosity had once placed him in situations reminiscent of this, though perhaps never so sinister. He had survived those times by relying on beliefs forged in hardship.

Illusion could only be dispelled by truth. Weakness needed to be recast in the mold of ideals. Evil had to be broken by truth as well.

When one’s own strength falters, they must reach for something beyond themselves.

So Karon began to sing. His voice rang out, each word a desperate summons, filling the dream: “Arise, you slaves who are hungry and cold; arise, you people in all the world who suffer. Our hearts are surging, brimming with heat. We struggle for truth...”[1]

In moments like this, conviction had to fuel his will, burning bright enough to lead him from this mire of the spirit. Besides, in his previous life, Karon had always been a hard-headed materialist.

As he sang, the sensation of his body being chewed away slowly faded. Karon could feel himself rising. He kept singing as he nodded downward, and saw first the woman’s teeth, then her tongue, her mouth, her whole face, and finally, between her legs, another face. It was fused into her body, emerging from her, a sight so jarring that for a moment, the very air felt wrong.

Then the hiss of static faded. The man’s voice returned, laced now with confusion. “Huh... who are you?” A pause. “Where... is this place?”

Karon dragged every last shred of consciousness upward, clawing for the surface.

Open your eyes! Open your eyes! Open your eyes!

He willed for his eyes to open, forcing the command through the suffocating dark.

A harsh buzz snapped him back.

Karon opened his eyes and saw Aunt Mary crouched in front of him, her face drawn with worry.

She gasped with relief, slumping to the floor and pressing a trembling hand to her chest. “You scared me half to death, Karon. Do you know how frightening it was to watch you collapse and just black out like that?”

He had been gravely ill not long ago, almost lost. If anything happened now, Aunt Mary couldn’t imagine what she’d tell her father-in-law. The memory of carrying the last body out of the house lingered between them.

Karon drew a steadying breath, stretched his mouth in a shaky smile. “It’s all right, Aunt. Maybe I’m not fully recovered yet, that’s all.”

He glanced over and saw Jeff’s head. The corpse on the stretcher was in its proper place once more.

A cat meowed outside the door to the studio. The black cat, Poelle, poked its head in, casting a wary look inside.

Karon braced himself on his hands, preparing to stand, but a stinging pain flared across his face. Warm blood began to trickle from his nose.

“I... I slapped you to wake you up,” Aunt Mary said.

So that explained it. Well, it hardly mattered. “Thank you, Aunt,” Karon replied.

“Go up and rest. Get Mina to help clean you up. You’re not needed here.” Aunt Mary’s tone left no room for debate. She would not risk anything else happening to her eldest nephew.

Karon nodded and rose slowly, glancing back at Jeff on the stretcher. Some tremor of instinct told him that the nightmare was tied, somehow, to that body. If he left his aunt here alone, would she be at risk too?

At that moment, his cousin Lent called from the stairs, “Mom, Grandfather’s back.”

Grandfather was the unyielding head of the Immers family. Whenever he came home, everyone was expected to greet him, no matter what they were doing.

Lent hurried over and took in the stretcher, and the corpse atop it. But he didn’t look frightened. When horror lives with you long enough, it becomes just another piece of the furniture.

Mary, still anxious, worried that she had broken Karon’s nose with her slap. If the bleeding didn’t stop, it might go on and on.

“Take Karon to your sister for the first aid kit,” she told Lent, her worry still etched deep. “If the blood doesn’t stop, it could get serious.”

“Oh, right. Come on, Karon!”

Karon let himself be led away, leaving the basement behind.

Karon tilted his head back, one hand pressed hard against his nose, while Lent led him out into the cold light. At the top of the stairs, someone stood waiting. The figure was neither tall nor broad, yet his presence alone carried a deep, unshakable composure, as though nothing in the world could truly disquiet him.

Karon felt his nerves settle all at once.

“Grandfather,” Lent called.

“Grandfather,” Karon echoed, voice slightly muffled.

In Karon’s memory, his grandfather, Tiz Immers, had always been a severe man. But when it came to his eldest grandson, some softness shone through the sternness.

Tiz offered a single nod and began his descent. He ignored Karon’s bleeding nose and let silence fill the stairs.

Lent, uneasy in their grandfather’s presence, pulled Karon hurriedly past. Together they made for their sister, leaving Tiz at the mouth of the basement.

The light there hung yellow and faint. As Tiz stepped down, he caught sight of the black cat Poelle gliding by, elegant and silent. Tiz stopped; so did the cat.

“Got a lot of free time today?” Tiz asked. Poelle only flicked its tail and tipped its head, either puzzled or indifferent.

Tiz waved his hand, already bored of the encounter, and continued toward his daughter-in-law Mary’s studio.

Mary was inside, seated and lighting a cigarette. The events with her nephew had shaken her, and she hadn’t expected her father-in-law to appear so soon. She stubbed out the cigarette in a rush; the smoke lingered briefly, but she drew it back with a strangled breath.

She coughed, eyes watering.

Tiz paid her no heed. Instead, his gaze fell on Jeff, and with practiced detachment, he pulled open Jeff’s eyelids and pressed a hand to his chest. Tiz’s expression sharpened. He stepped back a pace, as if surveying the very air of the studio. He even sniffed it, slow and cautious.

Mary, flustered, blurted out, “I’ll never smoke in the studio again. I mean it, never again.”

But her fear of her father-in-law ran deeper than etiquette. Even before moving under his roof, she had found something oddly disturbing in him, for all his reputation as the gentle priest of Mink Street Church.

Tiz brushed the matter aside. “What happened just now?”

“I—Karon passed out, and I tried to wake him—broke his nose, I...” Her words faltered.

“Karon passed out?”

Mary nodded, twice for emphasis. “Yes. Yes.”

“And then Poelle appeared, is that it?”

For a moment, Mary was confused, before remembering Poelle was the black cat. She never grasped why the old man had chosen such an awkward name.

“I think—I... Karon woke up on his own. Poelle didn’t come in.” She couldn’t remember whether the cat was near the door, but she was certain it hadn’t set a paw inside.

“No?” Tiz mused over this. “So he woke up by himself.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Where did he die?”

“It’s a welfare slip, Father. Died to the cold by the roadside last night.”

“Welfare slip? Call your husband home.”

“Mason’s at Bloomwater Sanitorium...”

“Call him back.”

“Yes, Father. I understand.”

Even after so many years under this roof, Mary felt the weight of Tiz’s presence. Other women might use their father-in-law’s name. She never had; the title “Father” now seemed to bear the charge of something close to prayer.

After Mary had left, Tiz shut the studio door behind her. He crossed the room, sat in the chair she’d abandoned, and regarded Jeff’s body on the stretcher.

The studio was still, the only sound the faint stutter of the bulb in its socket.

Reaching forward, he closed his fingers on something unseen in the air. Out from beneath him, ribbons of shadow uncoiled, spreading like wild vines across the floor, crawling up the walls, until all light was swallowed and the whole room was wrapped in darkness.

Tiz spoke into the stillness: “Tell me, how did you die?”

The act itself was absurd, a senseless attempt to speak to a corpse.

What followed was even stranger. Jeff, long dead on the stretcher, slowly sat up.

1. This is my own English rendering of the Chinese version of “The Internationale.” ☜