From part one:
After hours of flying over nothing but snowscapes, her eyelids began to droop. Fighting sleep, and running low on propane for her burners, she realized that the wind had picked up without her even noticing it, and the blue sky had turned grey. Snowflakes began to appear out of the air around her. Gently floating at first, they picked up speed, whirling and suddenly pelting her face and eyes. Blindly she fought for control as the basket jolted violently, cords got entangled and a burner hit her head. She heard her own desperate call for help drowning in the howling wind, ”Superman, help!!! Clark…. ” as blackness descended on her.
Now read on....
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The sky was low, and looming, as Lois came to. She was lying flat on her back, looking up into that sky, black with a tinge of red, and feeling sharp, jagged ridges press painfully into her back. A man was bending down over her, reaching out to touch her. ”Clark?”
For a moment she could feel his hand, warm, solid and soothing, and loving, concerned brown eyes looked into hers. Then the fingers holding her hand turned thin, almost bony, and strangely luminous eyes, set off by dark charcoal markings, swam into her field of vision. A paper-white face, surrounded by spiky wild hair, and a flowing black robe of satin and stars completed the image. ”I am the Sandman,” the strange man said, his voice a rustling echo of a cacophony of voices. ”Lord of the Dreams. Welcome to the land of Dreams, Lois Lane.”
”Clark?” She fought to sit up, then stared at the apparition in front of her. ”Who’re you? Where’s Clark? I saw him…. ”
The robed figure reached out an arm, which grew to an immense length, and grabbed the glowering horizon an eternity away. Reaching out to gather in Lois with his other arm, he pulled them both, at a dizzying speed, up flush against the wall of the horizon. With his bony fingers, he parted its red-black folds, and opened a window onto a world outside; grey, howling and swirling from a blizzard. Grabbing her hand tighter he led her out into the raging, pounding snow. But the screaming white fury didn’t seem to touch her. As if her body had been surrounded by an invisible aura, the snow whirled past her, failing to make contact.
Then she made out the crashed balloon, its huge red inflated air-trap, a beached whale, a titanic Amazon’s cut-off rosy breast, straining and pulling at the remnants of its basket across the snow-choked ground. Next to it, a small, brightly-colored figure of a man, his red cape flapping furiously in the wind, was carefully cradling an unmoving, broken-looking woman in his arms.
”Clark?” As she stood watching the tableau in front of her, the name leapt unbidden to her tongue. The man with the woman in his arms did not react.
”Is that me? Am I dead?”
”Look behind you,” her companion answered.
Lois turned around. There, ten yards behind her, stood a dark, robed figure, his face hidden in a large and heavy cowl. His black-sleeved arm reached out for her, skeleton-hand poised to grab her, and beams of blackness seemed to radiate from the faceless center of his hood.
”My brother Death,” the Dream-Lord informed her. ”The most patient and formidable of the gods. He is waiting for you, Lois Lane.”
”What???” She grabbed the Dream-Lord’s robe and shook him, sending stars and spiders flying. ”You bring me here just to make me watch myself dying???” Turning, she spat sparks of fury at the approaching shape of Death. ”And you can take your scythe and shove it!!! I’ll make you sit on it!!! I’ll…” But she was thrown up in the air, then harshly shoved into the broken, dying body on the ground. Roaring pain descended on her, deafening her ears, blinding her eyes, crushing the air out of her lungs, making her heart stop beating. Death…. He was winning. He was taking her. Death.
No. Not yet. Not until she’d found Clark.
The arms of Death reached for her. She could feel them take her. Icy cold. Death.
Then they turned warmer. She could feel it. They encircled her tenderly; she could feel their solid, comforting strength. The cowl of Death was opening before her, a one-way gateway to a bottomless pit, and she turned away her face from the terror of its void. A single drop of warm moistness fell from Death onto her cheek, and she had to look up at him.
Death had brown eyes. Chocolate eyes. So warm. So despondent. Overflowing with grief. Fighting the vise-like grip that trapped her, she managed to lift a hand to brush away his tears. Instantly, the roaring pain in her ears was gone, like the howls of the blizzard enveloping her. A hush fell on the world. In that sound of silence, a lonely voice rang out:
”Lois…. Oh, God, God, Lois….”
And she was floating comfortably in the sky, looking down at a still woman and at three men gathered around her. One man, in a beloved blue skintight suit, its bright colors and gaudy design seemingly taken right out of a children’s comic book, was cradling the woman in his arms. A tall figure, so dark that the negation of illumination seemed to radiate out of him like an inverted sun, moved inexorably closer to the woman and reached out a skeleton-hand for her heart. But another man, in a satiny dark robe of stardust and spiders, ignored the body of the lifeless woman lying on the ground, and fixated her flying self with his oddly gleaming eyes.
”I’ll make you a deal, Lois Lane,” said the Dream-Lord, his voice echoing, as if he were speaking from the vaults of a cathedral. ”We fight for the possession of humans, my brother and I. Of course, he always wins in the end… but I like setting him back when I am able to. Act wisely, and I’ll grant you a wish. One wish. But you must return to your body now, for my brother is waiting for you.”
He reached for her, to reel her in, but she ignored his hand. ”Clark?”
She lowered herself to him. The man who was her world and her life. But he was burying his face in her lifeless body, and didn’t see her spirit-self before him. Slowly, fearfully, she reached for his face, and, touching him, sent a jolt of electricity jumping between them. He jerked, looked up, and still failed to see her. Holding her spirit-breath, she bent to kiss him. As she brushed her lips to his, the wall between them cracked, and the world exploded. A discharge blinded her, and she was tumbling, crashing back into her broken body. And falling. The world receded. She fell away from him, and shimmering cords between their hearts stretched and grew taut. Then in a burst of blinding pain, her heart was torn out of her, and she fell deeper into darkness. White wraith-hands grew out of her to reach for him, but grabbed at nothing.
Far, far from her was a light, a million miles away. Somehow she could see his beloved face there. Again she reached, but that man’s heart was stone, and she could see his features melt and turn into the hunger of oblivion. Death was tempting her.
Casting out her spirit-hands again, like an angler his fishing-line, this time she felt her true love’s grief and loss. His loss was a Lois-shaped hole, a cardboard cutout hole in the fabric of existence. Latching onto to the edges of the hole, she hoisted herself up and passed through a Lois-shaped tunnel, leaving the realm of death behind and exiting into the light to find her loved one kneeling in the snow before her.
He was a huddled, grieving figure of a man, with a Lois-shaped hole in his heart, still oblivious to her. She reached out to him, to touch his heart. His heart-hole beckoned her. It invited her in, and she floated inside, settling herself into the snug fit of the hole. Until it was a hole no more. As she completed him and filled him, and snuggled herself into his warmth, she felt his presence imbue her. His heart, now healed, made her own heart grow back inside her. In tandem, their hearts set her stilled blood moving. Together, they sent her presence flowing along his nerves and capillaries into the body that was hers, leaping like sparks of electricity into the body he was holding in his arms.
”Lois…? God…. Lois?” Strong arms cradled her, lips pressed kisses lightly on her face, tears fell on her parched skin like rain.
”Cl..ark…??”
”Lois…. God, Lois….”
”Don’ cry….”
”You… you’re alive…. Alive….” He was quivering, pressing her into his shoulder. ”God…. Why….? Why d’you come here? Lois?”
”Lookin’ for you…. Why… d’you leave …?
Shaking, trembling, quivering, he couldn’t answer her.
”Hey… make you a deal….” Pausing to breathe, she started again, ”Promise… y’ won’t run away…. No… promise… you come back….”
His body convulsed in a spasm of tears. ”You… may… not… live…..”
”Maybe she will, mortal.” The Dream-Lord stood taller than a mountain beside them, his voice crashing and roaring like a waterfall. ” Lois Lane, have you decided yet?”
”Yeah… give ’im back… his life… Let ’em forget… ’bout him…. Let ’im be… himself….”
The Dream-Lord grew taller still, the ghost of a smile playing at the corners of his world-enclosing mouth, as wide as the horizon. The horizon was smiling. ”You chose wisely, Lois Lane. In granting your wish, not only can I give back Clark Kent his life, but I can also give back the lives of all those others whose lives were stolen from them.”
Stopping the rumble of his voice for a moment, he continued, his voice growing softer, ”I will let sleep descend on you. On every human being on this Earth. As you awake, it will be like waking from a dream, where the content of the dream slips like sand between your fingers. The truth about Clark Kent will wash away like mud in a stream down a mountain.”
Again pausing, he turned to Lois. ”You too will forget. Both of you. But for you, Lois Lane, there is another price to pay. I will return Clark Kent to his life, to his apartment in Metropolis. You, however, must remain here, in what is left of a balloon that has crashed in the Arctic. For you see, this is a game that I play with my brother. With Death. I must leave you here, to be claimed by Death if I lose my wager with him.”
Turning to Clark, he continued: ”But you, Clark Kent, can save her. But only if you are willing to give her yourself, as she has already given herself to you. As she may even sacrifice her life for you. Remember, Clark Kent. I am the Lord of Dreams. If you fail her – if you recoil from her in fear – I will make her haunt your dreams forever. And if she will not be my instrument of torture I will spin my web of nightmares around you myself. So tight will I spin it that morning light will not release you. Remember, Clark Kent. I am the brother of Death.”
As he spoke, the blizzard died down, and the clouds parted, letting the stars shine through. Rustling curtains of green Northern lights rippled across the Arctic sky, and meteors traced a delicate latticework of ephemeral lines and starry soundless explosions across the heavens, as the majestic Big Dipper arched itself over the glittering expanses below. A red balloon, dark in the pale moonlight, lay half-buried under the snow, and a woman’s broken body lay sprawled beside it, her blood tracing a delicate calligraphy of love letters in the snow.
tbc....
Ann
