(Narrated by Kevin Coffey)

Hello. I hope this finds everyone well.

In case you need to catch up before reading or listening:

* You can always find up to date drops of this story as it progresses in order under the new KINGDOM OF DREAMS tab on my home page.

Enjoy! -KC

With the intent of entering the Kingdom of Dreams, Jimmy’s first step slowly sank through the mattress like it had been filled with pudding. Yet, there wasn’t any kind of liquid present. The fall claimed his body, yet his descent was so inch by inch slow, he reached out his hands and traced the foam padding rising smoothly past his fingertips.

The harsh textures of his bed: the wood, springs, and metal were all absent, just a flurry of fluffy, white, soft cotton layers. Wisps of white blinded his vision; there was a rush and crispness of outside air billowing past, grazing his skin, yet Jimmy still couldn’t catch a glimpse of the new realm.

There was a break in his fall as dangling strands of white gently lowered him to the next tier of his incredible bed, but Jimmy discovered this wasn’t a mattress anymore at all; he was falling through actual clouds in a sky! Endless rows of clouds lay out in rippled patterns just below, awaiting his body like he was an airplane about to plunge through the lowest cloud level before landing.

But this wasn’t like skydiving on Earth. The clouds here reacted the same way they looked; their surface was soft and padded, like the most comfortable bedding in existence. The clouds absorbed his fall through every section as if they were gentle hands passing him down to lower strata. The gradual sink reminded him of diving into the foam ball pit at the recreational centers he had visited as a kid. A bit more comfortable with this strange process of falling, Jimmy scanned the sky but Lem was nowhere to be seen. His internal alarm triggered again. What if something had happened to her? Where was she?

Jimmy called out to Lem and choked as he inhaled a sudden gulp of saltwater. The clouds were gone; he plunged into some kind of ocean! The water was warm, and there were assorted lights so bright they appeared neon and illuminated his descent. The light came from planets and stars—there was a full constellation in this sea! Jimmy continued to descend just like he was in a pool. The lower he sank, the more the colors of the galaxy faded until all colors diminished into a blur. Shock and awe flowed through Jimmy like they had replaced his blood. Am I entering a new realm? His skin tingled and his toes felt numb. Everything was so surreal. He continued to drop, jostling around inside of a liquid substance. Am I breathing water?

Next, there was a click like someone strumming the teeth of a comb just outside of his earlobe, followed by a reverberating hum. Then, without any fuss, Jimmy simply climbed out of the bed on the other side where his bedroom wall usually existed.

Only… there was no wall. Not even close.

Coffey House is a reader-supported newsletter. Quality storytelling, writing, illustration, and narration requires time and resources. The best way to support me and to get more stories more often is by taking out a paid subscription:

“Lem!”

Lem stood dumbfounded on the muddy imprint of where their home should be.

“H-hey,” Lem struggled to say in a meek voice.

Jimmy shuffled close beside her, not wanting to be far away from her here—not for one second.

Jimmy’s mind was barely able to process their new surroundings. No bedroom anywhere. No house either! Just a huge, thick icing of mud and some unidentified blowing foam spread out over their empty neighborhood of leveled yards with similar rectangular spots, the only evidence of the missing houses that used to rest there.

“Our house is gone! But where?” Jimmy said.

“No clue,” Lem spat hair out her mouth whipped in by the wind. “And where are our neighbor’s houses?”

Even stranger, the colors around them were a dimmed, subdued grayish hue, like they had stepped into a world stripped of the regular colors of Earth, leaving only black and white. Everything appeared black and white, except for themselves!

Jimmy marveled at his appearance and extended an arm to the sky that popped against the subdued backdrop, as if an artist had splashed paint on him and his sister and then wandered away to get something to eat, not bothering to return to deal with the landscape.

Lem examined herself from head to toe as well, probably as equally baffled as Jimmy was. “What’s up with the lack of colors on everything but us?” Lem asked Jimmy.

Jimmy shrugged. “No idea. Let’s take a look around.”

The street signs were the same, and Lem traced her fingertips along their beaded-up mailbox where it still said Reve. It might have reminded them of their neighborhood, but to Jimmy, this was the bizarro version, and then some.

All the other houses were gone, but their neatly mowed lawns remained, as did the sidewalks, sewer covers, and fire hydrants—everything almost exactly the same but very much NOT the same. Jimmy’s bed, which he know knew to be the so-called Portal of Dreams, was the only physical thing they could see for miles.

A savage roar from behind them caused Jimmy to cry out in unison with Lem, clasping each other for support as they wheeled around. A tumultuous wave the size of Niagara Falls came crashing down from an unbelievable height—the sky itself! It was as if the clouds had burst and were dumping magnificent waterfalls.

The ferocious wave hammered into a cratered valley, clearly a result of the violent repetition of the crashing tidal wave.

The momentum of the unforgiving wave defied gravity, and it surged up the valley wall as if on a skateboard ramp about to perform a trick jump, foaming and fizzing right up to the lip of the land where Jimmy and his sister stood.

Jimmy and Lem clung to one another, helpless to do anything else.

The raging wave had no indication of stopping; by a miracle, it did.

The colossal wave retracted, sliding backward with a boiling slurp—right up into the sky it came from! Both children breathed again with some relief, but were still frazzled and stunned.

“There’s an ocean in the sky?” Lem said, raising her voice as if she was saying the words out loud to test her own sanity.

Jimmy didn’t have the heart to tell her that this murderous landscape was the spawn of his dreams and imagination. Their once landlocked neighborhood was now beachfront territory, but hardly sought after real estate; now perched on an artificial cliff that got throttled by violent, plummeting waves shot down from the sky as if by a monstrous cannon.

Another wave hurled from the sky and pounded the land without mercy. The sheer volume, velocity and violence of its impact and ascension back into the sky was no less startling.

“We’ve got bigger problems,” Lem had to yell over the incredible and horrifying volley of waves. “Looks like a major storm’s headed our way,” Lem pointed to a dark section of clouds cruising their way fast over the ocean in the sky.

True to his sister’s words, a feisty gust of wind pushed in an overwhelming scent of rain well ahead of the actual showers. The temperature dropped and the black and white landscape darkened under a fast-approaching shadow. A storm sprinted across the mixed-up sky, a tempest that appeared to have the strength of a hurricane and the speed of a falcon.

Then, the downpour arrived: boy did it ever. Water beaded up on their skin as their clothes gained about thirty pounds of water weight in seconds by sudden torrential rain. Gusts of noisy winds threatened to lift them off their feet and hurl them like boomerangs. Jimmy’s teeth involuntarily chattered and he hugged himself as the combination of severe winds and rain made his nose snot-up, and froze him to the bone. Lem huddled herself as well, keeping close to him for apparent warmth.  

If anything, the strength of the nosediving waves increased. The last wave thundered a bit too far over the rim of the land for Jimmy’s liking. They had to hustle and kept moving away from the cliff to avoid being sucked into the boiling surf.

“I hope our pets are okay,” Lem said.

“Me too….” Jimmy feared the worst for his little cat. He was so tiny to endure such ferocious weather.

Much too fast for any normal storm, an active spiral appeared overhead, like when meteorologists showed a hurricane from space. But this storm’s eye had an actual eye. An inky pupil full of bad intentions greedily searched the land below.

The hurricane dropped four black funnels that spun off at a sprint, covering ridiculous tracts of land. The funnels appeared to be an extension of the storm, searching like giant hands pawing around at the ground with a clumsy, catastrophic touch.

Jimmy wasn’t sure what this storm really was except bad news, and that eye was not friendly. Not at all. It conjured his memory of an eye he suffered before at close range, and he bet a million bucks it was searching for him.

“We’re sitting ducks out here! Has it seen us?” Lem screamed.

“Hope not. We’ve got to hide!” Through the relentless rain and stinging ocean spray from the exploding wave-bombs, Jimmy spotted a dark haze across the street that might be a forest, with tall, much-too-skinny, unusual-looking trees.

“Come on!” Jimmy grabbed Lem by her sleeve, and they made a run for it, ducking inside the odd vegetation.

“Ouch!” Lem cried, slicing her hand open on one of the slim trunks. A thin line of red appeared until the rain washed it away. “It cut me!”

Lightning raged and tagged the surrounding ground. The supposed trees reflected the sizzling light, and Jimmy concluded that these weren’t trees at all, but blades of grass as tall as normal trees on Earth, with one major catch: they were literal blades!

Each stalk of the dark grass was as sharp as a sword fresh from a blacksmith’s anvil. All sides flashed deadly edges converging into a single point on top.

Jimmy was thankful the peculiar blades of grass were so big, they don’t grow too close together to cut them to shreds, but there would be no running through this field. With that eye so close, Jimmy figured their best bet was to impersonate rocks.

Jimmy clamped his hands over his ears, and Lem did the same. The noise of the crashing waves and the hurricane-force storm was unbearable, as if a thousand trains were attempting to squeeze into a single station at the same time.

The roving evil eye patrolled overhead inside a squadron of buzzing clouds and shrieking wind. No way it hasn’t seen us, Jimmy thought. We’re going to die. Right here in the entryway to the Kingdom. Probably stabbed to death by weaponized grass.

Jimmy became one with the ground, grimacing as the rumbles just about shook his spine out through his teeth. The howling became so loud and lifelike, it made him want to scream.

Jimmy pressed his hands harder against his ears, opened an eye to check on Lem, then closed it after observing she was in the same fetal position as him against the ground. Jimmy squeezed something with all his might and almost forgot their immediate dilemma at the surprise: he and Lem were grasping hands! They suffered through the ordeal as one: the ground quaked and shuddered, taking the waves’ best haymakers, followed by the wrath of its terrible tag-team partners: the crackling lightning and startling claps of thunder. The smell of salt and rain exploded into their lungs. The great ruckus lasted for so long Jimmy wasn’t certain if he had passed on or was swirling in the middle of the winds being tossed around.

So it took him a second to comprehend someone’s tapping his shoulder. Lem. She blinked at him. They stood on firm ground. She mouthed something lost on deaf ears, motioning at the sky, but she smiled a grateful smile. The terrible noise and vibrations were gone. Jimmy dropped his hands from his ears.

Far off against the horizon, the living storm swooped and dove, darting around like an agitated insect until it disappeared.

Jimmy shook out his nerves. He was all too aware they majorly lucked out. Against all hope, the gruesome bad dream hadn’t found them—not yet.

The key question that haunted Jimmy now: how long until the Night Terror called the Lurking came back?

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit coffey.substack.com