Chapter 3: Dreams Of My Father

3

Bealz dreams. He knows he is dreaming. He usually does.

And not just because his dreams had always been so intricate and confusing. It was because they always seemed so real. So familiar. As if he were not just looking through someone else's eyes, experiencing someone else's feelings and emotions, but experiencing them himself, as they happened.

In a way, his dreams were more real to him than the real world. It was a place to escape the dusty, rat hair smells creeping through the thin walls of his daily reality.

There were glimpses of darker things in his dreams, too, though. He'd seen Dakari there before. Except that he didn't look like a man then. Or not quite like a man. Bealz could see something else, some kind of dark, miasmic cloud where a man should be.

It made him nauseous to look at it and Bealz knew then as he shrank back from the probing black cloud that roamed about, searching  around in his dream, that most all monsters and demons could easily pass for regular-looking people in the waking world.

Now Bealz dreams of his father. He's never lain eyes on him, but has a clear image of the man in his mind. When he's dreamed of him before, he could almost swear that his dad was really there with him, that he was actually talking to him. Asking the kinds of questions a father would ask a son at the end of a normal day.

How was school? You got homework? Did you eat?

Just a dad talking to his kid.

But sometimes, in those dreams, his dad would show him things. He would take him places and introduce him to many different strange and wonderful people. All of whom weren't really people. 

Some seemed to be places, whole fields and forests and huge rock cliffs, the clefts in their faces cracking into wide granite smiles. These anthropomorphics spoke through the winds in the trees or the hum of the insects in their fay gardens or through great towers of flame that roared deafeningly. All of them, people and places alike, treated his father with deference. Likewise himself.

But even these strange dreams, as he thinks back on it, seemed perfectly normal to Bealz. As if he weren't dreaming of some fantastical places and people, but instead meeting old family and friends. It felt as though he dreamed of a home that called to him, where he could smell the air, so sweetly scented. Nothing like the exhaust choked air that hung like a low cloud over the neighborhoods bordering I-57.

Dreams were the purist form of escape for Bealz. He cherished these moments, the chance to drift away, to leave his grim reality behind in search of his father, the bright skies and fields filled with singing flowers. He could leave the cruelty behind, forget that he slept curled up tight in an overstuffed two-bedroom apartment.

Now, as he recognizes with lucidity that he slept, he looks around hoping for beautiful fields and a sun-filled sky. What he sees instead looks very much like a prison cell. His father sits on the lower bunk of a hard, uncomfortable looking mattress.

“Hello, son.”

“Dad?” Bealz asks, thoroughly confused.

“Hush, now. I need you to listen son,” Bealz's dad says. “You'll have questions, but for now I need you to just listen.”

“What?” Bealz asks, just the same. “Dad, I don't know what's happening. I'm really scared. That man, he said he knew you!”

“I said, hush, child. Things have changed,” his dad says sternly. “The rules have been broken. They call me out to war.”

Bealz can feel hot tears welling up and spilling down his brown cheeks. Why would he be feeling that? Why would he feel so clearly the salty sting of tears? He was dreaming.

But he knew, in that instant, that he really wasn't.

His father, sitting rigidly, un-moving but for his mouth and eyes, continues to speak to him, cutting through Bealz's distress. “You must go, child. Now you must run. My enemies have been made aware of you. They will come, so you must run.”

The room slowly begins to fade away, washing Bealz away with it.

“Wait!” he calls out. “What do you mean, I gotta run? I ain't got nowhere to go!”

“You'll know,” the fading shadow says, his voice fading away as well. “Look for your mother. Look for my allies. They will come also. They will keep you safe until I can find you and protect you myself.”

“How? I mean, you're in fuckin prison!” Bealz begins to panic. Never a good thing to do while dreaming.

“How are you supposed to help me? I mean, you're locked up.”

“I've told you, the rules have changed, son. I no longer have to abide by the laws of man. But first I must gather my strength...”

“...and son?”

“Yes, dad?”

“Watch your language, boy...”

“Uhm, yessir?” Bealz stammers, as he too returns to the darkness.