The Imaginary Corpse Read online

  “Ow!” it says, like a toddler with a skinned knee.

  All my fear, anger, and curiosity pops like a soap bubble. “You alright?” I ask, not bothering to mask my concern.

  “No!” they cry, in a tinny, air-duct wail. They curl in on themself, rubbing at their leg where I connected. I’m pretty sure they’re actually smaller now. I feel awful.

  Now that they’re not moving, it’s easier to get a bead on what they look like: black, some hints of purple and red, like the night sky just outside a city. They’re about six times my size, four limbs, the hunched stance of a dog or a cat, but their head is roughly human shaped. Given the fluid way they move, I think they’re always shaped like whatever they think will terrify their target the most. And then there’s the machinery, the eyes like welder’s goggles, the whirring drills in place of claws, the saw blades spinning along the ridge of their back, all anchored in place by a spaghetti dinner of leather straps and big chrome buckles.

  This is a nightmare, which by the logic that made me means it’s a bad guy. I can feel in my stuffing that I’m supposed to mock them, insult them, play it cool. But that’s not what they need, and that’s probably not what I need, either. I swallow my first instincts and go with the second wave.

  “Anything I can do?”

  The nightmare sniffles, still curled away from me, continually rubbing their leg. “No.” They don’t sound sure.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say. “You scared me, and I reacted. Doesn’t mean you aren’t hurt, but…”

  They sniffle again. “I was trying to scare you,” they say. “I understand. It just… it really hurt!”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry.”

  They rubs at the affected area for another second. “I’m okay. I’ll be okay.” They don’t sound okay, at all.

  The good news is, I have a job to do here, and it might actually make things better. First things first. “What’s your name?”

  The nightmare tenses up in confusion. “What?”

  “Your name. If you’re willing to give it to me?”

  When they blink, there’s a sound like a garage door opening and closing. “I’m… Spindleman.”

  “Hi, Spindleman.” I extend a cloth paw. “I’m Tippy.”

  Spindleman looks at my paw, trying to decide what to do, then brightens before enveloping it with a hand that’s mostly screwdrivers. Shaking it makes me glad I’m kind of hard to hurt.

  “Can I ask you for your pronouns?”

  “Huh?”

  They’re very young, then. “When I don’t call you by name, do you prefer he, she, ze, it…”

  “It,” Spindleman says. “Matthew always called me it.”

  “All right then, it.” I smile, and log the name Matthew for later. “I’m really sorry.”

  Despite itself, Spindleman brightens. I take the opportunity.

  “Can I ask you a few questions? No is fine, if you’re too upset.”

  Spindleman sniffles again. “Okay.”

  “Thank you.” I sit down on my haunches, removing what threat I can, and get ready to memorize. “So… judging by appearances, you’re a long way from home, aren’t you?”

  “… yes?”

  I nod, trying to act as casual as possible. “Okay. Can you tell me where you came from?”

  “The bushes around the house,” it says. It sucks in air like a drowning man. “The, the night-time house with the big orange moon. The one that Matthew sleeps in.”

  Okay, this I can work with. My stuffing is starting to unclench. “What can you tell me about Matthew?”

  “Small,” Spindleman says, almost awe-struck. “Small, and defenseless, and… vulnerable.” There’s a glaze of saliva over its words, but it’s hard to hold that against it; we’re all what our people made us. “Every night, he has to sleep in his huge room all by himself, and the light in there is bright, so much brighter than the sky I live in during the day…”

  “So Matthew is your person?” I ask.

  “My person?”

  So it’s a very young nightmare, then. “The one who created you,” I explain. “The one who made you Real.”

  Spindleman sniffs, nods. “He was my… person. But he’s not anymore.” Its head sags on its long industrial accident of a neck. “He didn’t need me anymore.”

  This sounds familiar. I never stop hating it, though. “Are you here because you got separated from Matthew?”

  “He stopped caring about me.” Spindleman’s goggle eyes widen, and in their glass I see a towering silhouette offering a big, thick hand to me. “He said I wasn’t scary anymore, and then he kicked me out, and I had to leave the house and come out here and I… I…”

  “Shhh. Shhh. It’s okay.”

  I lay a gentle paw on one leg, and Spindleman recoils from me, huge again, saw blades sparking where they connect with the cross-beams overhead. I back up, partly calculated and partly panic. Spindleman doesn’t have any facial features, but I can still tell it’s upset.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, keeping my distance. “I should have asked before I touched you. And… I’m sorry you got separated.”

  Spindleman hesitates, but from my detective stuff’s read, that’s only because it has no idea what an apology looks like. This is going to be a steep climb.

  “Is it okay if I ask you some more questions?” I ask.

  Spindleman whimpers. “Yes?”

  “Is this the first place you went after you left Matthew’s house?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. I didn’t leave very long ago, but, this isn’t the first place.”

  I sit down on my haunches. “Where was the first place?” I think I know, but that’s when I most need to ask questions.

  “I went to the big motel. The one in the big sandbox. The… the bird woman, she helped me find my way there.”

  “Bird woman? Tall, muscular, eyes shine red, white, or blue?”

  “Yes!” Spindleman says, excited to be able to answer in the affirmative.

  “That’s Freedom Frieda. You were staying at the Freedom Motel?”

  “Yes!”

  I nod. The Freedom Motel is a common first stop for Friends newly booted into the Stillreal. The question is how it wound up out here on Sundrop Farms. My toes are starting to vibrate again. “Why did you decide to leave?”

  Spindleman shrinks again, now about my size, its machinery partially retracted into its body. “It wasn’t safe there. And everywhere else I went was so, so big, and so open…”

  It’s afraid. Hopefully a small distraction will help. “Your home Idea’s pretty small, then? The house, I mean.” I need to be careful of my phrasing.

  Spindleman cocks its head. “The sky is big…but the house, and the little garden, and the… car…” It shivers. “Yes. It’s pretty small.”

  “So you left there because Matthew didn’t think you were scary, and then the motel was too wide-open for you?”

  “No,” Spindleman says. “No, everywhere else was too open for me. The motel was perfect.” Its voice brightens for a second. A very short one. “I left the motel because of the Man.”

  “What man?”

  “The Man in the Coat. He came by the motel, and he looked in all the windows, and… and he was like me, scary like me, and I had to get out of there…”

  “He was like you?” I ask. I try not to sound too excited.

  “He was… Real, you said? He could travel like me. He was there looking for me because I left the house.”

  My brain sets off fireworks. “He was at the house, too?”

  “Yes!” Spindleman says, excited at my comprehension.

  That makes only a limited amount of sense. This man has to be from Spindleman’s home Idea if it saw him there, but if he were from Spindleman’s home Idea he wouldn’t be a stranger. Well, probably – plenty of weird fish in the Imagination…

  “So… this man came to your home, and you had to leave. But then he showed up at the Freedom Motel after you started staying there, so you fled… here
?”

  “Not right away. I had to look around. I had to find somewhere safe.”

  This thing is lucky it didn’t wander off into an Idea it wasn’t going to wander back out of. I start to ask a follow-up question, but it’s drowned out by a clap of thunder.

  “You–” The rain starts, pitter-pattering down onto the ugly gray soil outside. It’s so loud, like it’s right in my ear. “So, you came here after you–”

  I already feel wet. I hear the squealing rubber, and I hear Daddy shout, and then I’m turning over on my head –

  I snap back into the barn. Spindleman doesn’t look concerned, so the pause can’t have been that long. Then again, I’m not sure what a concerned Spindleman would look like anyway.

  “Was, uh – was there a particular reason you came here?” I ask.

  “You asked that already, didn’t you?”

  “Maybe? I meant how did you get here?”

  The rain is so very loud…

  “I – thought? – my way here.” It sounds proud. “I like it here. It’s got big sky like the motel does, but, but there’s this…” It gestures at the shadows overhead. “This dark place, like my home…”

  “We need to get you out of here.”

  “But why?” Spindleman wails.

  The rain is constant now, hissing like some big snake – focus on the drill-monster, Tippy.

  “I’m sorry you got scared,” I say, back in my soothing voice. I’m good at the soothing voice. She always needed me to be. “But, Ideas like these, they’re… impressionable. You’re bringing parts of your home Idea with you.”

  “You mean like the house?” it says with hope.

  “No,” I say. “You’re from a – you’re a nightmare. So this place is becoming nightmarish because you’re in it. Just a little bit right now, but it’ll get worse the longer you stay here, and it’s not supposed to be like that.”

  “But… I miss home…” Spindleman says, tapping whole new reserves of sorrow.

  “This isn’t your home,” I say.

  Gosh dang it, why is that rain so loud?

  “This is someone else’s home.” I normally have a whole speech for this, but I need to go. Now. “Turning someone else’s home into your home isn’t nice. You could hurt people.”

  “Oh, no! No!” There’s a whimper under the whirring of drills. “I don’t want to actually hurt people.”

  A nightmare that doesn’t want to hurt anybody? How young was its person?

  “But…” Spindleman shakes its head, its whole body. “But…”

  “Listen.” I take a frustrated step forward. “I know that you’re new, but–” Spindleman whimpers again, and I catch myself. Easy, Tippy. “We need to take you somewhere you can stay.”

  “But where? Where do I go?”

  “There are places that are – that are where we all live. Places your changes won’t hurt anybody.”

  Spindleman lets out a deflated whine. “I didn’t mean to hurt anybody.”

  But what I say is, “I know.” I’m supposed to comfort it, I want to comfort it, but the rain is like a bag of wet hammers. “I’ll take you where you won’t.”

  “The motel?” Spindleman says with horror. “But the motel, that man–”

  “Not the motel,” I snap, and immediately feel terrible. “I live in a place called Playtime Town,” I say, trying to soften my words. “It’s meant for Friends like us, who aren’t at home anymore.”

  “Friends?”

  “It’s what the people who live around here all call each other, long story, but – Playtime Town. I can take you there right now, if you’ll let me. My buddies can get you set up with somewhere nice to live.”

  “And I will be safe there?”

  “From there we’ll find you the safest place you can be, where you can live with Friends like you. Frieda was probably going to send you there as soon as you were ready.”

  “I wish she’d told me…” Spindleman says. “I… I wouldn’t have hurt anybody that way…”

  “It’s fine.” Really, she just knew it wasn’t ready, but it had to go and… rain… water… I shake my head again. “Are you ready to go?”

  “Right away!” Spindleman says. “Oh, yes, I would love to go and be safe and have a home again. Right away!”

  I should be touched, but mostly I’m relieved. “Great,” I say. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  I hold out a paw. Spindleman examines it, shaking, and finally takes my paw in its own. I want to give this poor drill-monster a hug, but there’ll be plenty of time for that when we get to Playtime Town, I figure.

  Remembering that moment feels awful.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Stillreal? Gosh, how do I explain the Stillreal…?

  Short version: People (actual people, out there in the real world) have ideas. Nightmares. Mascots. Scripts. Conspiracy theories. Those ideas exist in the Imagination. For the most part, they’re ephemeral – they come into being, they hang around your head, they surface when they’re needed and duck down when they aren’t.

  But sometimes, an idea is bigger than that. Sometimes you have a recurring nightmare that helps define your personality. Career aspirations you can see in full 4-D in your mind’s eye. A novel that speaks to the depths of your heart. An imaginary friend who gets you through the darkest times. Sometimes, you have an idea you love so much, you make it more. You make it Real – a true citizen of the Imagination, dependent on but separate from its person.

  But then what happens?

  Well, for some of us, our reason to be Real fades away naturally – kids grow up, scripts get abandoned – and we waft off into the After-Real, imaginary friend Heaven (or so we hear). Some people share their Real Friends with others and they’re lucky enough to become Big Ideas, cultural touchstones, surfing between minds as everyone concocts variations on Tom Sawyer and Scheherazade and Superman.

  But then, there are some Friends whose people experience something that goes too hard against the grain of our existence – something that makes our continued presence too scary, or too painful, or too lacking in internal logic. They need to get rid of us: stop writing that novel that their husband left them over, let go of that career goal that will never happen after the accident… stop expecting an imaginary friend to make sense of a world that doesn’t actually make sense. They need to get rid of us, but we’re still Real…

  For us, there’s the Stillreal. The underbelly of the Imagination. The place for Ideas too Real to fade away, too anonymous to go Big, and too messed up to stay where we are. We’re a patchwork of places, a population of emotional refugees, all knitted together at random and doing our best to survive without literally life-giving love. In other words, we’re a mess.

  Welcome.

  For real-world people, travel’s simple – places are next to other places, and you get from Point A to Point B by physically moving yourself there. In the Stillreal, it’s a bit more complicated. Ideas might look like places, but they’re still just ideas, separate and distinct; there’s no guarantee that time flows the same way at Point A as it does at Point B, or that gravity even works there, or that the Friends there need to eat or sleep or breathe. So, getting from Point A to Point B safely is a matter of finding the symbolic links between the two points and envisioning yourself at Point B. Preferably, you do this by focusing on something unique from the Idea you’re traveling to, but you can just sort of envision something and try to jump to it – as long as you don’t mind the risk of, say, not going anywhere; or aging a thousand years because you end up somewhere time flows faster; or never coming back at all.

  If you’re part of the ninety-nine percent of the Stillreal who don’t like pioneering with your face, then short, precise jumps are what you need: find something unique in your surroundings you can focus on, and imagine it changing into something similar in an Idea that has more in common with your destination. Then refocus, do the same thing again, but jump a little bit closer to your destination this tim
e… and eventually, you get where you’re going. If that sounds complicated, good; you won’t be one of the Friends who are never heard from again.

  I hold Spindleman’s hand, and think us from the barn at Nightshire Farms to a barn I know in Merrysville, a similar design to Nick’s but with a smell like someone gutted Christmas and hung it from the rafters. From there we go to a deserted old ranch in Perdition, our local Wild West town, the skeleton of a farmhouse looming at the back. Then we head to a big, candy-apple-red farmhouse in Small-Town America, all fireworks and factories and grandmas, our last stop before we arrive the gingerbread and pastel of Playtime Town, just in time for the gold-chased Playtime Metro trolley to go smirking and joking past us, a five-o’clock shadow of rust on its apple-cheeked face.

  Some Friends, like Farmer Fran and Farmer Nick, show up in the Stillreal with a place to call home, but most of us aren’t so lucky. Luckily for us homeless Friends, not everything that washes up in the Stillreal is a person – some of them are places. (Well, and some are both, but that’s off-topic.) Over the course of imaginary history, different places have attracted different sorts of Friends. Your superheroic and funnybook-dwelling Friends tend to drift toward the four-color style of Avatar City. Your grittier, but still science-fictional Friends prefer Chrometown’s cyberpunk aesthetic. There’s Santa Erzulie for the urban-fantastical ones, or the Hex Dimension for the ones that like their dungeons full of dragons. And for those of us who trend toward the more youthful persuasion, there’s Playtime Town.

  Playtime Town is a big city by way of a kindergarten playground, soft edges, simple shapes, bright colors and smiling faces on everything. It’s got poor districts and slums, but they’re cozy and familial instead of bleak and oppressive. It’s got dark alleys, but the shadows are about as threatening as the ones underneath your favorite blanket, and the criminals are just there to learn valuable life lessons they can impart to you. It’s a big American city as described by someone who loves the city to its core; its joys are supercharged and its ills are downplayed and everything is all set for you to have an adventure that will never, ever really hurt you.