By Mob
I’d never wanted anything from the park, other than for it to be a park. Grass. Trees. Quiet. But not too quiet. I see that now. Rumours spread that the council thought it too expensive to maintain, and sold it, though I never heard to whom.
The new owners came and installed metal fences and gates whose access cards they posted to the apartments of each block around the square—a slogan printed along one edge in type so small I had to squint:
We’re Listening To Your Dreams
It was strange for them to send a card like that. For them to listen to our dreams.
They didn’t ask for my dreams, though perhaps I missed the invitation. I can’t imagine they asked that many residents at all—who would want a stranger in their dreams?—but I don’t know my neighbours well enough to be sure.
The park that first night of the access cards wasn’t yet quiet. Other residents entered, testing their new access cards, and I had to walk quite far along the perimeter until I could merely watch them, rather than be forced to interact.
I stood and I smoked and I stared just as I always had, but the apartments around the square loomed, horribly interrupting the horizon, and before long there were no passersby to break the shadows of the trees.
Those other entrants melted, consumed into the space of the park, and with those new gates, no strangers could enter and provide more to watch.
The thought left me coughing. A cloud of discontent billowed into the city-orange night.
My time away must have affected me—smoking in the dingy alley beside my block, and being stared at, wrinkle-nosedly, by other residents, having induced some change. I could no longer stand still as I once had. I could no longer bury my nerves in the smoke.
So I wandered, and maintained my watch, as it was the only thing left.
There were no couples or students sneaking illicit affections or tame drugs. There were no dead-eyed drifters lying down or pitching camp. The paths through the park had changed too, criss-crossing and jagged. They did not point where my feet led. I drifted inwards, cutting across unwanted borders. Mud and leaves stuck to my boots. My house coat caught among shrub thorns I didn’t remember having been in the park before.
The ground sloped upwards—a rough hillside strewn with patches of long grass and dense ferns. A metal bench and a tree stood at its peak, and a man waited beside them.
“Hostile architecture,” he said.
I frowned back, and he seemed to notice despite the dark.
“The angled edges”—he pointed to the metal bench—”and the rails. The things they use to stop people sleeping on them. Cruelty by design. I can’t understand why they bothered, what with the new fences.”
I stared, and the glow of my cigarette was enough to better light his face. “Are you the man from Flat 616?” I asked, having maybe seen him once in the hallway or at the entrance, and recognising the tone of his voice through my ceiling.
He stared back. “Are you the young woman from Flat 516?” he asked, and I didn’t enjoy the question in return.
I was not from that apartment, but merely lived there, and no longer felt young. I smiled instead.
“I don’t think they listened to our dreams,” he said.
I liked that even less, but had to agree. “I don’t see how they could have. Do you know who they are, the new owners?”
But he paced aside instead until the tree’s shadows hid his face, and the light pollution from the clouds fell on the twisted metal bench. It had not been designed to sit on, that much was clear. Its bars turned and snarled and convoluted, its curves too sharp to really be curves but far too curved to be lines. It was an ugly thing, and cruel enough to earn its title. Hostile. Perhaps it truly was.
Little curios dangled from it on keychains and strings and woven bands. Odd things, handmade, with messages and symbols too dim to make out scrawled across their surfaces. Old and new, ritualistically crowded. They reminded me of those chain link fences sagging with padlocks and broken promises. Imbued with unresolved meaning.
“If they’d been listening to our dreams,” he said, “they’d know I wanted a dog.” He played with one of the fetishes as he spoke, a plain circular band like a collar, and I wondered if he’d placed it there.
“You really want a dog?” I asked.
He smiled, and his face was sadder for it. “That’s the nature of dreams. We can’t have them. Perhaps I do not want a dog at all. Just something to look after and feel loved. Dog-ish, without the dog.”
The cigarette was burning down, so I took a puff, and managed not to cough. “That’s good,” I said through the smoke, “the building doesn’t allow pets.” I turned to stub out the cigarette’s butt on the tree.
“I don’t think they could have listened to our dreams,” he said. “Or they would have known that, at least.”
When I looked up, the man from Flat 616 was gone.
* * *
It was several weeks later when I returned to the park. In amongst a deluge of deadlines and meetings and project demands, on one of those days a man had repeated my suggestions back to me across a video call and claimed recognition for it, I needed to go again. Needed the smoke and the delusion that I was connected to this city I never visited, despite living in it.
I wanted to walk and find that hill. Find that strange bench that could not be sat on. Last time, I decided, I had gone far too late in the evening, and hadn’t been able to experience that feeling of there being a link between the park and the city, the trees and the people. I had been too preoccupied with the newness of it all. Too disturbed by how it had changed, and that strange man from Flat 616.
There had not been much noise from the ceiling, and I did not want to meet him again on a day when I’d already had too much. Perhaps some later time when I might have something to say that proved I was not just the woman from Flat 516, young or otherwise. I used my office chair as a stool and stood atop my desk, one ear tilted towards the ceiling.
No words filtered through. No talk of dogs and dreams. Only a faint whisper, as though of wind and rustling leaves.
In the lobby, a notice crowded out the board, repeated too often for comfort:
We Thank Everyone For Their Continued Dreaming
And Promise To Continue Listening
The outside air was cold. The wind stung, and I turned my neck for far too long to keep the noticeboard and its payload of unwanted messages in sight. The new owners. What did they mean, by posting such a thing?
Across the road, the park gates jutted from the ground, seeming to lean over me as I approached. I inserted my access card into the slot on one pillar.
They opened with a shrill bleep.
When there had been no fences, and no strange bench on a hill within the park, the possibility of the land one day being unavailable never occurred to me. But struggling to light my cigarette on the path behind the gate, as it swung back and clicked and bleeped closed, I couldn’t help but picture a future in which I might need to access the park and find my access removed. A useless card, a sealed gate towering before me.
The lighter flared. I dragged deep and whistled out that first cloud.
It would be easy, I assumed, to find the corner I usually stood in, and chart my path back to the bench from there. Yet when I tried again to walk along the boundary, bushes interrupted my path. Trees drooped long-fingered branches to rake at my shoulders. Those harshly weaving paths spun nets to drag me back into approved areas.
I rested in a small clearing. The cold set into my fingers, leaving me scrabbling for the next smoke, the lighter shaking in my hand.
I saw him in that moment of dark before a flame. The sky was black and free of clouds and stars, blowing only cold wind and colder moonlight.
The man from Flat 616 stood beyond the first line of trees.
He held a lead, which stretched off, further and darker into the space beyond. The creature at its end had limbs that bent through uncanny angles, prancing and tessellating in the shadow of the bushes. The man watched it move with a broad smile on his face.
The cigarette remained unlit in my hand. I tried not to shiver, not to make any noise, and when the man ambled off—that not-dog writhing ahead of him on its lead—I followed.
Paths turned and twisted through the trees. They rose and fell and once I became sure that the moonlight that should have come from far above shone only on one side. Yet the man did not look back, or make any indication he’d noticed the paths’ strangeness, and the not-dog pulled him on.
I can’t say how far I walked. Fascinated revulsion swelled in my chest. I had to know. What was on the end of that lead. Where the man had gone and what he’d done in pursuit of his dream.
Then one tree stood alone atop a hill, and a bench that could not be sat on was spared the moon by its shade.
“You saw!” The man from Flat 616 stood several metres to my side. The lead had vanished from his hand.
I leapt, heart racing. He’d been straight ahead of me all that time, walking single-mindedly forward along paths that couldn’t possibly exist. My gaze darted this way and that, searching for that not-dog in the shadows and its twining, jerky movements. It wasn’t there.
My thumb caught the wheel and flint on impulse. The flame flared overbright and I lit my cigarette and tried to keep my voice level. “Saw what? I just came here to smoke.”
The man’s eyes were wide. The moonlight picked pinholes out of their broad wetness, like will-o’-wisps on a stagnant pond. “It’s wrong,” he said. “You can’t watch peoples’ dreams like that, they’re only supposed to be listened to.”
I backed up, and he advanced. He’d become so gaunt his clothes hung from his frame. But he never shivered on that cold night. Not once.
“What have you done to my dream?” he said.
He loomed like the gates and I turned my head to blow smoke past him. He drifted along the margin of the cloud, unwilling to touch it, and suddenly he was past me, marching those last few metres up the hill to the bench.
The man spiralled. Closer and further away and closer again, his liquid gaze pouring over the curios and their strange texts. I found I couldn’t read them clearly. Despite the lack of clouds, the tree held its shadow, and the bench its secrets. But I couldn’t find the collar amongst all the others, and neither could he.
“What have you done?” he cried, and for a moment I was terrified he might charge back down to where I stood and smoked and watched.
He whistled. “Here, dog!” he cried, and “Where are you, dog?” but he never mentioned its name. His spiralling grew wider. Out beyond me and back down the hill, running far too quickly for me to catch up.
I couldn’t look away from the shadows in his wake. The branches moved like bizarre limbs—fracturing in the dark.
* * *
It struck me later, with the soft impact of one snowdrift too many, that the man from Flat 616 had been the only other person I’d seen in the park that night. It had been quiet, so very quiet on those long paths we walked before the hill, and his ‘dog’ had never barked.
I purchased a vape pen and smoked inside instead. Smoke filled my flat until I grew blurry behind the camera and people asked me if I was ok and if I needed time off and I didn’t know. So I agreed.
The building had grown silent. No noises came from flat 616. None came from either side. Some nights, I looked out over the park in the square. Lights crawled winding patterns through the blackness, blinking on and off as the trees shielded them with purposeful fingers. The silence wasn’t the same. Deeper. Uneasier.
I tried to fill the void. I played music. I drank. I yelled and pleaded and shivered, but no answers or rebukes came.
When I ventured down to pick up my weekly supermarket delivery, I found the noticeboard in the lobby choked with fresh messages.
Dreams. Are There More Dreams?
We’re Still Listening.
…and…
The New Owners Granted Access That There Might Be Dreams.
Where Are You Hiding Your Dreams?
They clashed and overlapped in fonts that were no longer small or neat. Large, ragged letters vied for space on every scale and angle.
“Hey!” I yelled across the lobby. “Has anyone seen these?”
My voice echoed back to me.
“I’ll get rid of them then!” I yelled from the front door. “I’ll burn them all!”
The lighter was in my hand and the delivery was forgotten on the floor and still no answer came.
I ran up the stairs. One flight. My legs burned. Another. Great choking coughs erupted, but I kept running. All the way to the sixth floor. All the way to Flat 616. I hammered on the door before I could change my mind, before my coughs could run up the stairs behind me and leave me doubled over and wheezing.
The door didn’t shift, the noise of my pounding muted, fast lost in the vast and cloying silence that filled the building.
Above the handle, a narrow slot sat where a keyhole should have been. Carved directly into the wood, yet it conjured images of leaning gates, and when I slid the park access card into its slot, it let out a bleep of twisted familiarity.
And opened.
No pictures hung on 616’s walls. No furniture stood in its rooms. The bathroom shelves were bare, and in the kitchen, the oven and the fridge stood empty and unused. In the living room, before a tall window that overlooked the park, there was a single mattress on the floor, and an array of telescopes. Each pointed to another building on the square, and another flat on the sixth floor. Each flat in turn was empty, only further lenses peering back.
The central, and largest, telescope pointed down at the park. But when I looked through its lens, there were only shadows, and the suggestion of limbs.
* * *
As I stood before the park gates, I searched one final time for the printed slogan on my access card. I had tried it in every apartment of my building that day, and found only mattresses, and the blank-eyed stare of telescope arrays. Perhaps it had worn down through its use, for now only three words could be made out along its edge:
Listen To Dreams
I could not be certain if I had.
What dreams had I brought with me to this city? Had I ever really lived here, that I wouldn’t notice the park being sold, or know who these new owners were? When I didn’t even know the name of the man from Flat 616 who did not exactly dream of having a dog?
The gates opened with a bleep.
A hill stood beyond them, as though it had always been there. Only one path led straight to its peak, where a tree offered its shade to a metal bench that did not look like it could be used for sitting.
The sky above was purest black. No moon. No clouds. No stars. Vast limbs and pulsing organs convoluted in its depths. The apartments around the square failed to loom. Failed to watch me with their hollow, telescopic eyes. It was as though there was only that hill, and the city did not exist at all.
I lit my last cigarette, blew a cloud of smoke, and tried to sit on the hostile bench.
But I had no dreams to offer.
I’d only ever wanted the park.
End.
Mob writes, codes, and boulders. Work found on Translunar Travelers Lounge, Dark Void magazine, and Mysterion. Contact Discord or Twitter @mob_writes.