Dreaming of Me (Enchee’s dreams)

She’s been here before. It’s a warm room with a big fireplace, the red light makes everything feel cosy - comfortable. She lets herself feel it for just a second, feel the tension fade away. A curiosity always wells in her heart when she’s here. Just to put her hand in the fire, that’s all. Feel it just for a second. It’s not solid, it’s not liquid. Enchee wonders if she can even feel pain here, would it burn? Would she even manage to feel the heat, after all, she knows it’s all in her head. The crackling isn’t the only sound, however. Behind her, a bigger figure is snoring. If she turned around she’d see it sitting, head back, bottle in hand, probably around three or four feet tall. For some reason, the shadows play up on it, they misinterpreted their instructions. Light should bounce off the face, bounce off the skin, but this person will stay cloaked. She’s tried to will the darkness away, before, to dream up what it looks like, but she has no control - no power. In the day, she imagined his features, but he was a generic mask. She’d never access that memory again, something had locked it away. Why was it gone?

Enchee flicks her ear up, the right one. On that side, there is a door, beyond it, there’s a woman. She knows this. The woman will be cooking. It changes sometimes, but it’s usually a stew, a meat stew, and if that lady feels so inclined, there may even be carrots. The dream can shift. The smell of burning wood and coal fills the goblin’s nose more than anything, but faintly, something unfamiliar drifts under the gap of the floor and the door. This is the first sign. There are two ways this dream can go.

Behind her, a crash. Hardcover, leather bound, the book lies on the ground now. Untucked from the shadowed figure’s arm, it must have fell. The book wouldn’t work, it was a dream, but she knew what the book was supposed to be. Bedtime tales, they used to be passed orally. She realised, after some years, they weren’t goblin tales. She wasn’t sure there were any goblin stories, any goblin history or any goblin songs, from what she knew, these were cut and pasted knight’s tales, for humans and dwarves and gnomes and whatever else there may be, with names like Sam Smorkle instead of Sir Richard. It didn’t upset her, not at all. In fact, these were probably better than authentic goblin stories for children. She wanted to hear about fighting dragons, and saving princesses, she didn’t care to know about clearing big rats from caves, or whatever it would be. There was one story in that book that she loved the most, in which a goblin girl had a literal heart of gold, and figurative. She went from place to place, eventually catching the eye of an elven prince in the forest, even though she wasn’t the prettiest, but she was the kindest and the most soft spoken. She’d never heard of a half goblin half elf, but she knew of a half elf with a human mother and elven father. He was a frequent figure in Enchee’s life. Just a little older than her, he’d usually babysit while their parents were... working. She didn’t know what happened to any of that family.

Eventually, Enchee rises to her feet from sitting in front of the lovely fire. She couldn’t delay it anymore if she wanted to wake up this century. The other door. The one where no light came out from under, or the keyhole. It should go outside, and in a way, it did. But the real version of this building - the real, real one, in reality, the material plane, well, it had a front garden, and a picket fence. Flowers growing under the window. Grass. Green, fresh and real grass. This version? That door lead to something sinister, and evil. It made her feel so powerless, but it was the only way to wake up, and the door would open eventually. She could wait longer, but if the hooded figure came in it’d only get worse. Waking up in a cold sweat is so much worse when you thought it would be blood.

The handle is cold, but she came to expect this. Opening the door feels like a mistake but it wasn’t - if you let it in, it’s quicker and easier. You can’t fight him, you can never fight him. Enchee sighs, and steps through the doorway, dragging her feet until they drag on blackness. No light enters with her, and soon the door is gone anyway. It’s oppressive. It’s freezing. It’s inescapable. The void is crushing, it comes from around her and inside her. There’s no way out, no way to stop it. She has to just wait until it’s over, just like everything, it’s not over until it’s got nothing left to say, nothing left to do. Clearly the darkness has plenty left to say with Enchee.