Threshold

The bus coasted silently through the lamp-lit streets of San Francisco, stopping to pick up or drop off passengers. This late night route found the typical fare to be mostly males of indeterminate age wearing the latest in homeless garb, a clothing ensemble consisting of mismatched colors and fabrics set off by a daring assortment of sizes.

Russell sat in the back. A bathrobe, his most frequent choice of clothing for this particular ride, allowed him to blend in with the other collection of oddities. He looked out through bloodshot eyes that hovered above a slack, unshaven jaw. He blinked rarely.

Trying to make sense of a collection of interrogatives, Russell began to feel a slight, yet growing sense of panic. Where am I? he thought. It was as if a piece of time had been stolen from him, that segment of hours and minutes between when he finished dinner up to when he found himself on this bus, in this moment.

Maybe it was a dream. He slowly reached over and pulled a hair from his arm, wincing at the sharp pain. Can you feel pain in a dream? he wondered, looking around at the city as it passed by outside the window. The bus stopped and an old man pulled himself onto the coach slowly, pausing to take a long drag from whatever he had in the bag he carried in his hand. Russell saw, for the first time, that the bus had several other riders as well. Funny he hadn’t noticed that earlier.

As they pulled away from the curb, the old man plopped down heavily into a seat a couple of rows in front of Russell, who had begun to wonder if you could smell smells in a dream as the drunk’s swirling cloud of invisible alcoholic particulate welcomed Russell inside of its orbit. The drunk was asleep and snoring in a moment.

A new passenger appeared about mid-way down the length of the bus. Where did he come from? Russell wondered. The bus had not made another stop. He must have already been onboard. If that was the case, why was Russell just noticing him? This new passenger was not one you could easily miss, standing well over six feet tall, wearing a cowboy hat and one of those dusters, a long overcoat worn by gunslingers and cattle men in the more recent western genre movies.

The newcomer looked around with purposeful aggressiveness as if he was after someone specific. His eyes came to rest on Russell who immediately tried to sink a little lower into his seat, his bathrobe bunching up around his ears. The big passenger’s darkened face was somehow unclear although there was plenty of lighting. Russell felt certain that he was about to find himself in deep, deep trouble.

In a flash, the big man charged. Russell could feel the scream coming from deep in his chest, knowing it would never have time to get out. Then, at the last possible moment, the drunk came suddenly to life, leaping from his seat, knocking the big man sideways, smashing the shadowy figure bloodily against the window. He turned to Russell, no longer a drunk, but a warrior, apparently battling the demon passenger in order to save Russell.

Holding onto the large man in the overcoat, he, the drunk, turned to Russell and shouted, “Go! Get out now!”

He sat up abruptly in his bed having the vaguest of recollections about his dream or, better put, his nightmare. Scratching himself absently, he walked out to put the coffee on, clicking on the wide-screen television as he passed by it on his way to the kitchen. Russell stopped for a moment to admire this standout piece of technology, his apartment décor being generally reflective of a single male’s idea of style, wood furniture with a variety of brown-shaded wood stain.

Surfing quickly through the channels as his coffee brewed, something caught his eye but his channel changing pace was too quick to stop and the channel was replaced by an infomercial. He flipped backwards to see what it had been. Back one, then two and now three channels, there it was! A bus filled with terrified kids filled the screen. Clint Eastwood was, for some reason, riding on the top. Why had he stopped at this channel? It was right there, just out of his conscious reach.

He turned to get his coffee when it hit him. It was the bus! There was something about that bus that coincided with his dream last night. A chill went through him as his subconscious mind relived the moment the drunk had saved him. At a conscious level, the dream was still an unclear fog.

The next day at lunch, Russell went down to one of his usual sandwich haunts where they specialized in bulk rather than quality. As he walked out with two pounds of sub in his bag, he saw something that made him stop in his tracks. His mind took in several seemingly unrelated facts at once. The number nine bus was speeding down Van Ness, late as usual. An old woman was making her way towards the curb, not a problem as she had obviously noticed the speeding bus. Then there was the strange dark figure, oddly dressed and oddly out of place, in a city filled with oddness. A cowboy hat and overcoat … why would that look familiar?

The dark figure walked over behind the old woman, then paused to glace directly at Russell who had become frozen in place. Russell tried to shout a warning; nothing came out. He tried to run but his feet seemed to be one with the sidewalk. The dark figure’s eyes - they were red, like coals fanned by a bellows. The stranger grinned and then simply shoved the old woman to her death in front of the bus.

All hell broke loose as people scrambled to the scene. Everyone seemed to be ignoring the dark man. Russell didn’t understand. It was as if they couldn’t see the guilty figure who had just committed this heinous crime in broad daylight. With a tip of his ever-present cowboy hat, the culprit vanished into nothingness.

Russell suddenly regained a few motor skills as his feet began to respond to the backlog of signals sent from the brain to RUN! He turned and fled up the street, away from the nightmare. Something very bad was going on here and he wanted no part of it.

After putting a city block between him and the crime, he slowed to a walk and was almost immediately pulled into an alcove just off the sidewalk. Russell struggled at first, thinking he was being attacked. The strong hands held him effortlessly against a dirty brick wall, waiting for him to calm down. When he did, Russell looked up to see the drunk man from the bus dream.

“You!” he said. The dream opening up to conscious thought at long last. “You were in my dream last night! You saved me.”

The man looked at Russell questioningly, as if he weren’t certain that he had grabbed the right person off the sidewalk. He felt Russell’s skinny arms with clear scorn. This couldn’t be the one he was sent to recruit.

“Is your name Russell Malton?” he asked dubiously.

“Y-yes. What is this all about?”

The man grabbed Russell’s hand, spun it palm up and then slip up the sleeve. There it was, the mark of the protector, a diamond-shaped birthmark about half-an-inch across. Russell was the man he sought after all. Hard to believe.

“We have to talk.”

Twenty minutes later found them in Russell’s apartment, Russell sitting in an easy chair trying to sink down between the oversized cushions, the stranger, standing near the window with his arms on his hips.

“I don’t understand,” said Russell. “What do you mean I am one of the chosen? Chosen for what?”

“You have been chosen to protect the Threshold, that boundary between conscious thought and the subconscious realm of the mind as experienced in dreams and nightmares. There is no limit to the evil that can exist; demons that will tear out your soul, fanged shadows that chase you in the night, fires that burn for eternity and even magic beings capable of enslaving you to fight for them against the armies of good and righteousness. You must choose to answer the call. You must fight against those that would breach the threshold and unleash themselves upon the waking world. Don’t fight … and you become one of them. Russell, they are coming for you. You will have to decide.”

Russell suddenly found himself standing in the middle of the busy, downtown sidewalk, people shuffled by, not seeing him, the story of his life. Never one to stand out in the crowd, he suddenly saw how insignificant he was to the world around him. To make matters worse, he was apparently now having hallucinations, visions of make-believe where he is supposedly someone of note, someone that actually mattered.

He looked around at the faces that looked through him, faces that refused to acknowledge such an insignificant part of their world. He turned and headed home, his head hung in shame.

That evening, as Russell prepared dinner, the lights flickered and then went out completely. A glance out the window showed that other homes had power. Must be a fuse, he thought. Grabbing a flashlight, he headed out to the garage where the fuse box was.

As he entered the garage through a side door, a movement just outside of the beam cast by his flashlight, caused Russell to yelp. What was that? he thought, circling around behind the car. He looked around for some sort of weapon, settling on some shears.

It happened so fast, he could do nothing more than shriek and fall backwards against the wall. The giant, black hairy shape had jumped down, onto the car. Steam indicated the pace of its breath, a foul stench suggested decomposition in progress. It moved towards Russell who cowered down in a corner. Russell closed his eyes, hoping to wake from this nightmare.

It came within inches of Russell, sniffing the air around the cowering man. Then it spoke.

“You? We are to be afraid of you?” It threw its head back and barked out a deep haunting laugh.

Russell felt the familiarity of the situation. Yet another demonstration of his insignificance. Even this horror found him contemptible.

The beast continued to laugh.

Russell was surprised to feel the anger growing from within. It started deep down in his soul, the feeling that things couldn't get any worse. He slowly uncurled, a new unfamiliar fire rising in his gut. Slowly clenching his fists, he rose up to stand on his feet, his brow furrowing uncharacteristically.

The beast stopped laughing to look at this new development. What had, only a moment earlier, been supreme confidence, was now uncertainty. Something changed. Russell, the one he had come to either recruit or destroy, had changed.

It leapt at Russell with superhuman speed.

Russell brought the shears up in a flash, catching the beast just under the jaw, the blades slicing upwards into its brain.

Without a sound, the beast crumpled to the ground in a heap.

Russell looked around with newfound confidence. Like a molting snake, he shed the old Russell and became who he was meant to be … Protector of the Threshold.

Without looking back at his apartment, he left it all behind. Russell walked into the night, a hunter in search of prey; his range, the boundary world known as Threshold.

Word count 1,956