7

"Where am I?" Victor asked, unable to entirely suppress a smile of his own. Things were not quite as he remembered them. The view out the window here was a familiar gray one, but unlike usual, this room was small and almost cozy, the ceiling low and the wallpaper striped.

"A parlor, I think," Emily said, following his gaze around the room. "Isn't it usually?"

"Yes, but not like this," he said as he approached her, his eyes fixed on the shifting scene out the window. "It's much larger in my dreams."

"Really?" Emily said, smoothing her skirts and sounding interested. Her dress was long-sleeved and modest; it might have been pink, or white, or a light feminine blue. "Well. What are dreams, anyway, but memories made bigger? Come on, sit down. We haven't got long together, and it's good to talk face-to-face."

Victor shook his head slightly. For the first time in a year, he could see her clearly as the day; her hands were fully fleshed and her hair soft rather than tangled. She was not blurred, not concealed by a hand or a lock of hair, nor rotting before his eyes – just Emily, sitting there and looking at him sort of sadly. In the sky, a cloud drifted lazily across the face of the moon.

"Did I just kill myself?" he asked, dreading the answer.

"Oh, not at all!" Emily assured him. "Well. Not yet. You're certainly less dead than I was, but poison's not good for anyone. We need to talk, and quickly. Victor," she said, placing a hand on his cheek to look him straight in the eye, "you've got to find a way back here, alright? Right back to this place. I think I can help you."

"Wait, what?" he asked, brushing her hand away and back standing up. "Oh, no. Not this. Not this again."

"What?" she asked, sounding surprised.

"The – the cryptic messages, the half-baked riddles -"

"What on earth are you talking about?" she said again.

"I've been having this dream for a year!" he cried, gesturing to the window and piano in turn. "Here, or – or someplace near enough. And you're always here, and I can tell you things but when you try to speak to me everything starts to fall apart, and half the time I can't even remember your name. And now it's happening again! 'Find a way back here,' you say, while I'm already here, what does that m-"

"How does Victoria stand you?" Emily said, pressing her arched fingers against her face. "You haven't been dreaming, Victor, not entirely. You're remembering things."

It was Victor's turn to ask, "…What?"

"Your dreams are sort of – of warped memories. Well, everyone's are. You remember this place from the last time you were here."

"I don't understand," he said.

"When you died, Victor. You were here. Everyone passes through, but few make it back, and nobody really remembers it properly. Dreams are just the right sort of upside-down mirror for it all – but that's not what's important. I'm not trying to riddle you. You've got one foot Downstairs and we haven't time for everything we need to do."

Victor blinked. This certainly felt like one of his dreams, but then again, his thoughts and vision were much clearer than he would have thought possible for a sleeping mind. (Or was that just what a sleeping person would think?) This small parlor lacked the grandness he had come to expect from it, but it still had an intimately familiar air, a grandfatherly warmth which made him feel small and appreciated. In the sky, a cloud drifted lazily across the face of the moon. There was a door in the wall near the window which he'd never noticed before – nothing elaborate, but a simple wooden door which appeared to lead to the garden outside.

"What's out there?" he asked.

"Nothing," said Emily. It was with a very strange tone in her voice. "We've only got a few seconds. Will you listen to me that you've got to come back in between, Victor?"

"In between what?"

"Life and Death," she said. "Or, Existence and Not, if you plot the Underworld on a third axis, but – oh, just find a way back, will you? And try to do it before it's too late."

Before he could respond again, he felt a sharp breeze on the back of his neck, and when he turned to investigate it, it was to find himself turning instead out of the parlor and out of the dark and into a cheerful, cobbled alley with a coffin perched against one wall. The light from a nearby streetlamp was greenish blue and the air was dry and cool, but the change was so dizzying and abrupt that Victor found himself staggering forward to lean up against the warped wooden side of a shop in order to keep his balance.

"Good Lord," he said weakly.

"Y' alright?" he heard from nearby. When Victor looked up, it was to see a blue-skinned man peering through a teller's window at him. His mutton chops were respectably grand, but he was also missing large chunk of his head and one eye was shot through with a feathered arrow. It was a transfixingly grotesque sight, and it took Victor a moment to realize that his mouth was hanging open.

"Oh! Yes, t-thank you," he said, straightening and shaking his head to clear it. He was rather dizzy. "That is, um – yes. Thank you for asking." The bushy man shrugged and retreated into the shop while Victor shook slightly and gazed down the alleyway. The Land of the Dead hadn't changed a bit, at least for what he could see. This appeared to be one of its narrower alleyways, snaked uneasily between two particularly spindly buildings and lit with only a single lamp halfway down its length. The gutters were quite black.

"Actually, erm, s-sir?" he found himself asking, stepping backward toward the window. The man popped his head out again suddenly enough that Victor found the arrow's fletching very narrowly missing his own eye.

"How can I help ya?" the teller asked cheerfully.

Victor slowly lowered a protective hand from his face. "Goodness. You don't happen to know the way to the… the pub, do you?"

"Sure enough," said the dead man. He jabbed his arrow down the road to the east. "Follow this alley past the intersection with Festering Abscess Road. Turn left on, er… Clotted Blood Way, I think, and you should see the opening to Blackbowels' Square on the right. Can't miss the pub on the corner. 'F you reach Syphilitic Skeleton Avenue, you've gone too far."

"Those sound dreadful," Victor said. "Is everything so putrid down here?"

An irritated look crossed the bushy man's remaining eye. "Careful, lad," he said, somewhat gruffly. "Most of my friends are putrid. Go on, it's late to be out on the streets."

Victor ducked his head away from another of the arrow's violent swings. "Of course. Thank you. I apologize. You, um…" He gestured weakly to his own eye. "You haven't thought about having that removed?"

"What removed?" the dead man asked.

"Nevermind." He walked on.

At the end of the alley, which the street sign proudly proclaimed as being named 'Severed Achilles Tendon Court,' the young man stopped to sigh and shiver. He rubbed his arms absently and realized, with a shock, that he was no longer carrying his jacket. He double-checked his hands and took a few steps back down the street to see if he'd dropped it, but no – thinking back, he realized that he wasn't sure he'd had it since before stopping at the well Upstairs. Bother. So he continued down the road in his sleeves, treading down the green-lit avenues with a strange sense of loneliness. On one occasion he saw a corpse out on the street with him, but he paid Victor little heed beyond a polite nod, a favor which he returned. It seemed an emptier town than he remembered.

He would have found Blackbowels' Square before long even without the teller's help. Many roads must have led to the center of town, because Victor had quite managed to botch up his directions by somehow ending up on a street called 'Eyeball Hemorrhage' before seeing a road on his left which opened into the square, and he stepped out from between the buildings with a small sense of relief at being free from their crushing weight. The square was much as he remembered it; the General's horse was swishing its stubby tail on the platform, and two intoxicated skeletons lay in raucous heaps at its feet. A woman's shrill voice called from a high window, "Drunkards! It's the middle of the night!" followed by the sound of clattering shutters, and both dead men roared with laughter. Victor shook his head as he ducked into the pub entrance on the square's south end.

Things inside were darker than he remembered. He stooped slightly in the low entrance, and from within caught the sound a low, crooning voice singing a song in what sounded like the wrong key. When he cleared the doorway it was to be greeted with a mostly empty bar. A few colorful lights still burned above the stage, but the chairs were up and the piano was closed. A lone skeleton sat at the tap, his back to the entrance. He had a bourbon in one hand and a bowler in the other.

"Nobody knoows the trouble I've seeeen… Nobody knooows my soorrow…"

"Bonejangles?" Victor asked.

The one-eyed skeleton made a stiff jolt and sat up, craning his neck toward the door with a bewildered expression on his face. "Hey, it's you!" he said after a second. "You! You dead yet?"

Victor looked at his hands. "No."

"Eh." Bonejangles paused to glance at his drink before draining it neatly, contributing to the puddle on the floor below his stool. "Well, what're you waiting for?" he asked, slamming the tumbler back on the bar. "Join us, have a siddown."

Victor obliged.