Out of Mind

  The Dreamscape, Volume 1

  Ash Gray

  Published by Ash Gray, 2022.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  OUT OF MIND

  First edition. July 6, 2022.

  Copyright © 2022 Ash Gray.

  ISBN: 979-8201634674

  Written by Ash Gray.

  Also by Ash Gray

  A Time of Darkness

  Time's Arrow

  The Infinite Athenaeum

  Fallen Stars

  Fragile Hearts

  Broken Minds

  Digital Heartbeats

  Electric Souls

  Metal Bones

  Her First Knight

  The Knight of the Wild

  Sparrow Song

  Rowan's Hammer

  The Dragon of Almara

  Sanctuary

  The Flower of Adwean

  The Halls of Erinyel

  The Daughter of Light

  The Tomb of Azmon (Coming Soon)

  Dawn of the New Age (Coming Soon)

  Knights of Passion

  The Queen's Lust

  Handfasting the Warrior Queen

  The Revenge of Raven's Cross

  The Light of Lythara

  Taming the Wolf Knight

  The Mermaids of Menosea

  The Fairy Queen of Elwenhal

  The Dragon of Edhen

  Essential Selene

  Hearth and Home

  Ona of Ozmora

  The Amulet of Tizra

  The Bandit Queen of Crystal Falls

  The Council of Eldor

  The Sword of Avara

  Wicked Things in the Wilds

  Once Upon A Time

  The Beast of Berrybrook (Coming Soon)

  Fair Hilda and the Fox (Coming Soon)

  Bronagh and the White Bear (Coming Soon)

  Elsa and the Seven Dwarves (Coming Soon)

  Cara and the Glass Slipper (Coming Soon)

  Tales from Vallinwir

  The Assassin's Kiss

  The Fairy Ring

  The Main Course

  Tales of the Blood Moon Coven

  Bloodlust

  The Hidden Memory

  Whispered Names

  Morbid Fascination

  Bending to Her Will

  The Chronicles of Omicron

  The Thieves of Nottica

  The Watchtower of Rustoria

  The Dreamscape

  Out of Mind

  Whispering Roses (Coming Soon)

  Elemental Tears (Coming Soon)

  Goddess Run (Coming Soon)

  Open Heart (Coming Soon)

  The Last Queen of Qorlec

  Project Mothership

  The Harvest

  The Suns of Anarchy

  The Light-year Lion

  Moon Fire

  Exiled Stars

  Zora's Stone

  The Last Scion

  Devotion (Coming Soon)

  The Legend of Kiva

  The Starlight Stair

  Standalone

  Qorth

  Fall Apart World

  Unicorn Blood

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also By Ash Gray

  Dedication

  Out of Mind

  More From Ash Gray

  Sign up for Ash Gray's Mailing List

  Further Reading: Recalling Color

  Also By Ash Gray

  About the Author

  For Alice, Dorothy, Sarah Williams, and Candy Quackenbush.

  Out of Mind

  Kate stood before the enormous wall, in which there was a doorway shaped like a woman’s head. Pink clouds were puffing almost cheerfully through this bizarre doorway and trailing away to nothing behind her, and on the other side, a field of green was sitting quaintly beneath a perfectly pink sky. Kate could see a long table in the distance, full of paper plates and pitchers of lemonade. There were people at the table. It looked like a picnic or a barbecue. She didn’t know which. She only knew she was hungry. Before her was a pink staircase. All she had to do was walk up it, and then she would reach the food. Her only worry was that the people already sitting there would not welcome an uninvited guest.

  Kate didn’t move and stood there indecisive. Where was she and how had she come to be here? She was standing in an empty room with pink walls and a pink floor – a floor the pale pink color of brains, in fact. She had the intense feeling that she would be leaving some integral part of herself behind if she were to step through the head-shaped doorway. And suddenly, she realized the doorway was shaped in the image of her head. It was her head that formed the way out. How bizarre.

  Taking a shaky breath, Kate stepped up the pink stair slowly and deliberately. She glanced to the right and realized with a gasp that the world ended quite abruptly some ten feet away. There was green grass and then a sudden, sheer drop into the pink sky – as if one could simply walk off the edge of the world!

  Kate kept climbing the stair, the wind in her blonde hair, and as she drew nearer and nearer to the top, she realized that the world did not end. Glancing back, she could see that she had been standing inside a great stone carving of a head that was perched on the edge of a grassy cliff – and the head looked exactly like her!

  Kate halted in her tracks, turned back, and stared in amazement. The head had her features, her lips and eyes, the ears that sort of suck out. And her hair, pale blonde and cut in a short bob that barely reached past her ears. She stared at it and stared and stared, trying to make herself believe what she was seeing. The stone image of her face was smooth and impassive as it “gazed” down on her with eyes that could not see.

  Pulling herself together, Kate turned her back on the stone head and continued up the pink stair, but as she went, she could feel its blank eyes upon her. Panicking, she broke into a breathless run, her skirt streaming behind her, and lost one of her ballet slippers – Why was she wearing ballet slippers?

  And she was wearing tights as well. But her skirt and the sleeveless pink top she wore, those were hers. At least, she remembered wearing them back in the real world. The real world. How could she get back there? Maybe the people at the picnic would know!

  Breathless, strings of hair in her eyes, Kate halted at the top of the hill and leaned forward, resting her hands on her knees to catch her breath. She had finally reached the picnic table. She could hear the people talking and laughing, but upon seeing her, they fell silent.

  Kate straightened up. “Excuse me, could you tell me—” The words halted in her throat: the people sitting at the table were not people at all. There was a woman with a dog head, a woman with a cat head, a fat unicorn who sat on the ground between two chairs, a lion was sleeping under the table, and a robot was standing at the grill, flipping burger patties and even wearing an apron. There was also a little girl with a mouse head who was flying a classic pink kite on a string, and a small fishbowl sat at the center of the table with a fat goldfish circling inside.

  The people at the table were enjoying hamburgers, hot dogs, and potato chips, as well as plastic red glasses of lemonade. That they had chosen the robot to cook for them – a creature that could not even taste – was probably the least bizarre thing about the picnic.

  The woman with the cat head had glasses perched on her pink nose and tilted them down, peering over them at Kate. Her eyes were giant in her face, bright green, with the shrewd slanted shape of an old, crafty housecat. “And you are?”

  Kate was taken aback and suddenly felt ashamed: she had not even bothered to introduce herself. Her cheeks flamed a little.

  “Humans,” snorted the woman with the cat head. “They always forget their manners!”

  The fat unicorn extended its neck and bit savagely into a large white cake with strawberries on top, covering its face in white icing. The mouse-headed child with the kite squealed in indignation at this, scowled, and stuck her little hand in the cake in an attempt to salvage a clean chunk. She crammed the entire misshapen chunk in her face and stuck out her tongue at the unicorn, which indifferently kept chewing the cake it had stolen with dull eyes.

  From under the table came a great snore from the lion. Kate wondered if it would leap out and eat her if she wasn’t pleasant.

  “M-My name’s Kate,” said Kate nervously. “And I’m. . .”

  “Lost,” supplied the dog woman. She took a sip of lemonade from a red plastic cup and eyed Kate over it lazily, as if she were appraising a work of art and was wholly unimpressed.

  “Another lost soul,” said the cat woman and clicked her tongue. “From the Other World, aren’t you? I can tell. You have that pop-eyed look about you.”

  “Pop-eyed? Yes, I see it,” agreed the dog woman. “Also, sort of high-strung. It’s all in the eyes, Minerva.”

  “Indeed,” said the cat woman, the apparent Minerva, and extended her arm, appraising her pink-polished fingernails. Her hand was a human hand. So was her arm. The only part of her that was a cat was her head. She was wearing a pink party dress that was low cut, revealing her enormous cleavage, and further down, her waist was tiny. Her head was the head of an orange tabby.

  The dog woman, meanwhile, was dressed ra ther like a stereotypical butch lesbian, Kate thought. She was wearing a red flannel shirt open over a black t-shirt, and her human hands were devoid of nail polish, the nails cut very short. Hers was the head of a rather forlorn beagle. She took another sip of lemonade, eying Kate with her doleful eyes.

  “Do you think we could make her like us?” the beagle woman asked the cat woman.

  Minerva eyed Kate as well, then suddenly yawned wide, showing razor-sharp fangs as her whiskers lifted. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Astrid. The girl has been here five minutes! Most of the Other Worlders don’t last one day.”

  “Hmm. That’s true,” said the beagle woman, but her dull, lazy eyes were still fixed on Kate – but with much interest now.

  Kate took a step forward, steeling herself. “Um . . . excuse me? Could you tell me where I am?”

  “You’re in the Dreamscape,” said the child with the gray mouse’s head. She, like the butch dog woman, was wearing rather tomboyish clothing: cargo pants, boots, and a military jacket open over a white shirt with a yellow smiley face on it. Her mouse head was cloaked in a mane of white hair, and she had sat herself on the edge of the table and was licking her fingers of cake icing. The pink kite was streaming from one hand.

  “The Dreamscape?” Kate repeated blankly.

  “It’s what your kind call our world,” said Minerva, picking up a spoon and critically examining her reflection in the back of it. The spoon wasn’t enough, however. She shook her head impatiently, picked up her little pink purse from the table, and rifled through it before pulling out a compact mirror, which she opened with a snap.

  “Darling,” Minerva said, observing herself crossly in the mirror, “are my whiskers still there? Did I lose a whisker? They look crumpled.”

  “Your whiskers are fine, baby,” said the beagle woman almost absently. She seemed to have lost interest in Kate and was mournfully contemplating the last contents of her red plastic cup. Her smartphone was lying on the table, and it was white, so that it almost blended with the white picnic table. Kate could see images sailing over the screen but could not clearly make them out. The woman picked up the phone and scrolled through it dully with her thumb.

  Minerva, meanwhile, continued scrutinizing her appearance, while the fat unicorn chomped away at the cake and the mouse child sucked her fingers of icing. No one was paying the least bit of attention to Kate.

  Kate tried not to lose her patience. Getting any information out of these people was like pulling teeth. Then her stomach growled loudly. The mouse girl giggled.

  “Sit down and eat,” said the child. “You’ll need the calories if you plan on wandering around the Dreamscape. Most humans do that when they first come here.”

  Kate gratefully sat at the end of the table, grabbed a hotdog, topped it with ketchup, and bit into it. The hot meat and bread filling her mouth was heaven. She grabbed a fistful of potato chips next and crammed them in her mouth, savoring the salty taste, then she tipped back a red plastic cup of lemonade. She was eating so ravenously that it took her a moment to realize everyone at the table had stopped to stare at her – even the unicorn who’d been gnawing away at the cake.

  The robot, which until now had been silent as it flipped burgers, tipped a burger onto the waiting buns on a paper plate, carried it over, and set it near Kate with a beep. Kate gratefully picked up the burger and bit into it.

  “She said ‘bon appetit,’” translated the child. “Do you know French?”

  “No,” said Kate around a mouthful of the burger.

  “Plus c'est dommage,” said Minerva with a sniff.

  “Her name’s Mini,” went on the child. She pointed proudly at herself, “And I’m Rusty. I like baseball.”

  Kate thought that was sort of backwards: the robot was named Mini and the girl with the mouse head was named Rusty? But she didn’t say anything. She was still hungry and didn’t want to be sent away.

  Rusty pointed at the beagle woman and the cat woman, “And that’s Astrid and Minerva, my parents.” She beamed.

  A cat and a dog were the parents of a mouse? Make it make sense! Kate thought. Make any of this make sense!!! But knowing she must appease her hosts, she nodded politely at the table at large and said pleasantly, “A pleasure to meet all of you.”

  “Finally—manners,” complained Minerva, snapping the compact mirror shut and examining her nails.

  Kate was on the verge of asking how to leave the Dreamscape and return to her world when a loud noise like paper tearing made her look up. Someone had torn open the sky as if they were punching through a paper bag, and a silhouette was coming through. The people at the table leapt to their feet, screaming. The cat woman grabbed the mouse girl by the hand and pulled her away through the tall green grass.

  “But my kite! We can’t leave my kite!” Rusty wailed, and indeed, her kite was sailing away across the sky, trailing its ribbons and string.

  Minerva ignored Rusty, pulling her very fast through the field and glancing back several times in horror, her pink dress streaming in a beautiful cloud.

  The beagle woman abandoned her red paper cup and followed the cat and the mouse, abandoning her smartphone in the process. “Run!” she barked, scrambling frantically though the grass. “Run! Run for your worthless lives!”

  The unicorn, fat as it was, managed to pull itself up and run at a fantastic gallop across the field, eventually passing Minerva and Rusty and leaving them behind until it had disappeared in the distance, mane and tail streaming. That it could move so fast was so shocking that Kate merely stared after it with her mouth open for several seconds, watching its corpulent backside jiggle.

  The lion under the table likewise scrambled from under, hit its head on the table—the table lurched – and took off at top speed, its golden mane visible above the tall grass.

  “But what’s happening?” Kate begged over the swirling roar of the wind.

  There was such a wind emanating from the tear in the sky that Kate’s pale blonde hair was slapping around her face, her clothes were beating against her, and she saw the paper plates and plastic cups go soaring away from the table and flipping across the clouds in the wind. The pink sky had become dreary gray, and storm clouds were gathering in the sudden dark. Then a hand – a black hand with long, jagged black nails – hooked on the edge of the tear in the sky. A black silhouette lifted its head, and eyes glowed like flames in the faceless void.

  Kate screamed, falling backward off the picnic bench. She tumbled down in the grass, and she felt a rock smash painfully in the back of her shoulder. As she lay there gasping with pain, she lifted her face and saw Mini standing over her. The robot blinked, and though it had no mouth, she heard a voice coming from a buzzing speaker somewhere on its body, “She has come for you!”

  Kate struggled to sit up on her elbow, her hair still beating around her face. “Who?!” she called above the wind.

  “She rules the Dreamscape,” answered the robot, “and it seems she’s taken an interest in you! Come with me! We must get away!” The robot reached down.

  Kate took the robot’s offered hands and was lifted easily to her feet. When she looked at the tear in the sky again, she saw not a black spirit but a woman – a woman with long blue hair. The woman’s hair was blowing in the wind, and her moon-shaped eyes were the color of the sea. Kate thought she was stunning and could not move.

  The blue-haired woman couldn’t move either. She seemed stricken by the sight of Kate and just stood there, the wind beating about her. It took Kate a moment to realize the wind was coming from the woman, and as they looked into each other’s eyes, it fell from a violent storm . . . to a gentle breeze. The gray sky became pink again, the clouds cleared, birds sang, and flowers bloomed in a sudden carpet across the grass.

  “What are you doing?” hissed the robot. “She’ll kill us!” And so saying, the robot grabbed Kate by the arm and dragged her away.

  It took a great deal of effort for Kate to stop trying to look back over her shoulder at the blue-haired woman, who was still standing there, stunned, staring at her, her blue hair slapping around her in the soft breeze.

 

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