Painter wound through the next set of streets, tracking the nightmare as the rain tapped him on the head. The trail was difficult to follow; the dark wisps seemed to vanish in the haze. He backtracked twice as the streets grew narrower, winding through the huddled tenements of the city’s outer rings.

The hion lines overhead here were as thin as twine, barely giving him enough light to see by. It got so bad that he eventually decided he’d lost the trail and turned to go home, passing a slit of a window he’d neglected to glance through earlier.

He checked it this time and found the nightmare inside, crouched at the head of a bed.

The room was lit by a faint line of teal hion tracing the ceiling, making shadows of the room’s meager furniture and frameless mattress, which held three figures: parents the nightmare had ignored, and a child who made for more . . . tender prey.

The little boy was perhaps four. He huddled on his side, eyes squeezed shut, holding to a worn pillow that had eyes sewn on it—a poorer family’s approximation of a stuffed toy. Treasured regardless.

The nightmare was tall enough that it had to bend over, or its head would have hit the ceiling. A sinuous, boneless neck. A body with lupine features, legs that bent the wrong way, a face with a snout. With a sense of dread, Painter realized why this one had been so difficult to track. Virtually no smoke rose from its body. Most telling, it had eyes. Bone white as if drawn in chalk, but as deep as sockets in a skull.

This nightmare barely dripped darkness from its face. It was almost fully stable. No longer formless. No longer aimless.

No longer harmless.

This thing must have been incredibly crafty to have escaped notice during so many trips to the city. It took around ten feedings for a nightmare to coalesce to this level. Only a few more, and it would be fully solid. Painter stepped backward, trembling. It already had substance. Things like this could . . . could slaughter hundreds. The entire city of Futinoro had been destroyed by stable nightmares only thirty years earlier.

This was above his pay grade. Quite literally. There was an entire specialized division of painters tasked with stopping stable nightmares. They traveled the land, going to towns where one was spotted.

The sound of a small sniffle broke through Painter’s panic. He ripped his eyes from the nightmare to look at the bed, where the child—trembling—had squeezed his eyes closed even tighter.

The child was awake.

At this stage, the nightmare could feed on conscious terror as easily as it did the formless fear of a dream. It ran clawed fingers across the child’s cheek, trailing streaks of blood from split skin. The gesture was almost tender. And why shouldn’t it be? The child had given the thing shape and substance, ripped directly out of his deepest fears.

Now, the story thus far might have given you an unflattering picture of Painter. And yes, much of that picture is justified. Many of his problems in life were his own fault—and rather than trying to fix them, he alternated between comfortable self-delusion and pointless self-pity.

But you should also know that right then—before the nightmare saw him—he could have easily slipped away into the night. He could have reported this to the foreman, who would have sent for the Dreamwatch. Most painters would have done just that.

Instead, our painter reached for his supplies.

Too much noise. Too much noise! he thought as he slapped his bag onto the pavement and scrambled for a canvas. He couldn’t wake the parents. If anyone started screaming, the stable nightmare would attack and people would die.

Calm. Calm. Don’t feed it.

His training barely held as, trembling, he spilled out canvas, brush, and paints. He glanced up.

And found the thing at the window, long neck stretching out toward him, knife-fingers scraping the wall inside the room. Two white eyeholes seemed to suck him into them, pull him through to some other eternity. Before this day, he’d never seen a nightmare with anything resembling a face, but this one smiled with bone-white lupine teeth.

Painter’s fingers slipped on the ink jar, and it struck the ground before him with a clink, spilling. He struggled to keep his calm as he fumbled for the jar, then frantically decided to simply dip his brush into the ink puddle.

The nightmare stretched forward . . . but then caught. It wasn’t used to having so much substance, and had trouble pulling itself through the wall. Its claws proved particularly difficult. The delay, though brief, probably saved Painter’s life, as he managed to get his umbrella out and open to shelter his canvas so he could begin.

He started with bamboo, naturally. A . . . a blob at the bottom, then . . . then the straight line upward with a swipe. Just the briefest pause then to make the next knob . . . Like clockwork. He’d done this a hundred times.

He looked toward the nightmare, which slowly slid one hand out through the wall—leaving gouges in the stone. Its smile broadened. Painter’s mind, in his current state, was most certainly not beneath its notice. And bamboo was not going to be enough this time.

Painter tossed aside his canvas and pulled the last one from his bag. Nails ground stone as the thing pulled its other hand through the wall. Rainwater connected with its head, running down the sides of its grinning face: crystalline tears to accompany the midnight ones.

Painter began painting.

There’s a certain insanity that defines artists. The willful ability to ignore what exists. Millennia of evolution have produced in us not merely the ability to recognize and register light, but to define colors, shapes, objects. We don’t often acknowledge how amazing it is that we can tell what something is simply by letting some photons bounce off us.

An artist can’t see this way. An artist has to be able to look at a rock and say, “That’s not stone. That’s a head. At least it will be, once I pound on it with this hammer for a while.”

Painter couldn’t see just a nightmare. He had to see what it could be, what it might have been, if it hadn’t been produced by terror. In that moment he saw the child’s mother. Though he’d barely glimpsed her face in the bedroom next to her son, he recreated her.

Turn something terrible into something normal. Something loved. He’d been warned that painting the nightmares as people was dangerous, because a person could still hurt you. But tonight it felt right. Even with a few brief strokes, he evoked the shape of her face. Stark eyebrows. Thin lips, faint brushstrokes of ink. The curve of cheeks. For the briefest moment, something returned to him. Something he’d lost in the monotony of a hundred paintings of bamboo. Something beautiful. Or if you were a nearly stabilized nightmare, something terrible.

It fled. An event so incongruous that Painter slipped on his next brush stroke. He looked up and barely caught sight of the thing running away through the alley. It could have attacked, but it wasn’t quite stable yet. So it chose to flee rather than risk letting him bind it into a passive, harmless shape. In seconds, it was gone.

He breathed out and let the paintbrush drop from his fingers. He was relieved, on one hand. Worried on the other. If it knew to escape . . . it was dangerous. Extremely dangerous. He had basically no idea how to deal with something like that—and doubted his skill would have been enough to defeat it. Only the most talented painters could bring down a stable nightmare, and he’d learned—painfully—that wasn’t him.

Fortunately, he’d done enough to frighten it away. Now he could go and tell his superiors about the encounter, and they’d send for the Dreamwatch. They could hunt it before it finished its last few feedings, and the city would be safe.

He left the canvas on the ground beside the umbrella and stepped up to the wall, wrapping his arms around himself to try to force some warmth into his core. Inside the room, the child had opened his eyes and was staring out the window at him. Painter smiled and nodded.

The kid immediately started screaming. That was a more violent reaction than Painter had been expecting, but it had the desired result: a pair of terrified parents comforting the boy, followed by a hesitant father in shorts opening the tiny window.

He regarded the supplies on the ground—paintings slowly losing their ink to the rain—and the wet young man standing in the alleyway.

“. . . Painter?” he asked. “Was it . . .”

“A nightmare,” Painter said, feeling numb. “Feeding off your son’s dreams.”

The man backed away from the window, eyes wide. He searched the room, as if to find something hiding in the corners.

“I frightened it away,” Painter said. “But . . . this was a strong one. Do you have family in another city?”

“My parents,” the man said. “In Fuhima.”

“Go there,” Painter said, speaking words he’d been taught to say in such a situation. “Nightmares can’t track a person that far—your son will be safe until we can deal with the horror. There is a fund available to help you during this time. Once I register what happened, you’ll be able to access it.”

The man looked at the child huddled in his mother’s arms, weeping. Then at Painter—who knew what would come next. Demands, asking why he’d let the thing escape. Why he hadn’t been strong enough, good enough, practiced enough to capture the thing.

Instead the man dropped to his knees, bowing his head. “Thank you,” he whispered. He looked back up at Painter, tears in his eyes. “Thank you.”

Huh. Painter blinked, stammered a second. Then found his words. “Think nothing of it, citizen,” he said. “Just a man doing his job.” Then, with as much decorum as he could manage in the rain—and with hands still trembling from the stress—he gathered up his things.

By the time he finished, the family was already packing their meager possessions. You’d forgive Painter for walking a little swiftly, often checking over his shoulder, as he wound through the narrows. He had the feeling of one who had nearly been crushed by a falling piece of stone. A part of him couldn’t believe he had escaped with his life.

He breathed a sigh of relief as he stepped out onto a larger road and saw other people—the regular foot traffic of the morning shift. The star was low in the sky, barely visible over the horizon at the end of the street.

He looked toward the foreman’s offices, but suddenly found himself unnaturally tired. His feet like clay, mushy, his head a boulder. He teetered. He needed . . . sleep.

The nightmare would not return to the city tonight. It would run to the shroud, regenerate, then slink in the following . . . night. He could tell the foreman . . . when he woke . . .

Sluggish, his mind a haze, he turned toward home, which was fortunately nearby. He barely registered arriving, climbing the stairs, and walking to his apartment. It took him four tries to get the key in, but once he stumbled into his room and threw on his pajamas, he paused.

Dared he sleep? The family . . . needed his report . . . for the funds . . .

What was happening to him? Why did he suddenly feel like he’d been drained of strength? Abruptly gasping for breath, he flung open his window for fresh air, leaning out. Then he heard something odd. A rushing sound? Like . . . water?

He looked up toward the star.

Something came from the sky and struck him. Hard.

All went black.

#

Painter blinked. He was hot. Uncomfortably hot, and something was shining in his face. A garish light, like from the front of a hion-line bus.

He blinked his eyes open and was immediately blinded by that terrible overpowering light.

What was (lowly) going on? He’d hit his head perhaps? He forced his eyes open against the light and pushed himself with effort to a sitting position. He was wearing . . . bright cloth? Yes, some sort of bulky formal nightdress made of bright red-and-blue cloth.

Beside him lay a young woman. You’d recognize her as Yumi.

She opened her eyes.

Then screamed.