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CHAPTER FIVE

Emerging on the other side of New Victoria, I confirmed
everything I had suspected from my first visit—fear is
the temperature at which dread solidifies, and conversely,
the point at which stolid reality dissolves. A scream can
become the glass of a window, frozen into place like a
wicked memory, conducting blood-dimmed light through
its invisible body. Sleep is a place where worlds spin atop
the heads of pins and oceans gather into nutshells, and New
Victoria is only the most visible part of a nightmare prowling
the unclean depths of humanity’s collective unconscious.
This nightmare-under-a-nightmare was a primal mockery
of the sane and solid world, where a goblin-night—a
shrewder, more enduring incarnation of our waking version—
lived without cycle, light, or limit. It provided wakeless
things a sky, oceans, shadows, everything they needed to
survive and thrive. Whereas its waking incarnation wore
the guise of death and desolation, New Victoria’s unwaking
counterpart was entirely vital, forged with feelings as much
as whatever substituted for matter. Accordingly, every object
and place possessed no fixed appearance, but only reflected
a wild mutability born of darkest whimsy, free of the laws
that prevailed over lesser, solid worlds. All this, and still it
was not the world I wanted. While it was a dream in every
sense, complete with all the wonder and uncertainty a mind
could chase, it was only another iteration of failure—albeit a
more attractive failure than the one I’d grown familiar with.

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