The creature's eyes were not human eyes, were not animal eyes. They had pupils — but those pupils twisted and rolled without ceasing, like masses of black pus, as though at any moment they might flow out of the sockets entirely. A viscous, foul-smelling fluid was already leaking from beneath those eyelids like tears, like rot, running down the body and through the rain, yet refusing to wash away.

It had many things that resembled limbs, though they were nothing like any limb Ma En knew from human or animal. Beneath the skin the bone structure was evident, but it was as though the muscle had liquefied, surging and pressing between skin and bone. Whether looking at the parts covered in something like fur, or the exposed sections, the texture underneath was unmistakably that of plant matter.

What is this thing, exactly?

Ma En's mind turned the question over as the blade buried itself in the creature. But the creature didn't even produce a sound of pain — where the blade had gone in, pus simply welled up from the wound; to the creature, it wasn't damage at all. By the time Ma En processed this, the creature had already launched itself back into the air, rolling violently, and the pus on its body scattered with the motion, sent spinning into the rain.

Ma En clamped a hand down on his hat, planted one hand on the black umbrella, and caught a gust of wind — riding it like a leaf blown suddenly upward, he shot up the stairs.

The mixed fluid — rain and pus — struck the umbrella's surface with a sizzling sound, and in the space of a few seconds had eaten through a constellation of holes.

The main entrance was directly ahead. He couldn't make out what was inside, but the danger in there remained perfectly clear to him — no less vivid than the creature at his back, now revealed. All the same, he had the inexplicable certainty that he had to go in. Staying outside meant dying tangled with this creature eventually — maybe he could hold on longer than an ordinary person, but there was no path to victory; he had no chance at all. And the chance he needed was somewhere in this equally dangerous building.

Reality didn't give him time to deliberate further. Before the creature could launch itself at him again, Ma En shouldered the door and pushed through.

The scene transformed. What had been impenetrable from outside clarified the instant he was inside — the glass of the main entrance appeared to have filtered out most of the light, and now that he'd crossed the threshold he found the interior not dark at all, or at least not so dark that it interfered with seeing. The thunder outside might as well have been sealed away; he couldn't hear it at all. The entire hall was quiet — quieter than anything Ma En had experienced in his apartment in the small hours of the night. The unease that stillness generated was thick enough to press against the skin.

He'd grown used to breathing without sensation, but the moment he entered this place, breathing felt difficult.

He didn't pause to take in his surroundings. One sweeping look confirmed no obvious danger or abnormality in his immediate line of sight — which contradicted what he'd felt standing at the door, but there was no time to think it through. He was already running, heading sideways away from the main entrance. He'd just covered a few meters when a violent impact rang out from the entrance — by the sound alone, he could tell the glass panels set into the doors had shattered and fallen everywhere.

He kept the entrance in his peripheral vision. A thick limb was reaching through from outside — unmistakably part of the same creature, the same patchwork of animal fur and plant texture beneath, the same liquid muscle pressing against skin, contracting and extending with the force of a hydraulic cylinder. Nothing about it suggested a hand or foot, a paw or a hoof, or an insect's leg; it most closely resembled, if anything, a large insect's antenna.

The force this limb displayed was extraordinary. The door frame it struck twisted out of shape, whipsawing with each swing of the limb, until the screws pulled out of the wall and the whole assembly went spinning into the depths of the hall. Ma En had once tried prying open a door lock with his bare hands — that was nothing like bringing down a door, frame and hinges and all, with this kind of careless ease.

He had no interest in discovering what being struck by that limb would feel like.

During those few seconds, however, Ma En had already made it to a relatively safe corner. The limb was too short to reach his position; it thrashed back and forth, hammering the floor and the frame uselessly. Whether the creature could see him in his corner was unclear — it couldn't seem to locate him precisely, but it also made no move to push its whole body through the door. What it was feeling, or whether it was capable of feeling anything, was impossible to say; whatever its reasons, it stayed outside.

Ma En eased sideways along the wall toward a window. When he could see a portion of the creature through it, he stopped, held his breath, and watched.

Perhaps the hall truly was territory it couldn't enter. The creature — that hybrid of animal and plant, purpose and form equally beyond him — prowled the steps for a while, venting something by destroying the windows on the other side of the facade, apparently still searching for Ma En. Then, as though it had found nothing, it seemed to deflate. Its movements slowed and grew sluggish, and it began drifting back toward the stone path.

Ma En kept his gaze on it without blinking. Under his careful watch, the creature gradually melted into the rain, the wind, and the flying scraps of grass.

Ma En blinked. He hadn't misread it. The creature's body had gone slack, inch by inch turning transparent, dissolving a little at a time — as though part of it had been absorbed by the soil, part washed away by the rain, part scattered by the wind. In under three seconds, just as it stepped onto the flagstones, it had vanished.

Even though he'd been certain all along that this was a dream, even though he had any number of explanations for how a creature could simply cease to exist, actually seeing it happen sent his pulse up a notch.

He hadn't been hurt. Yet he had the feeling he'd barely kept his life. He wasn't a pessimist, but if he'd kept fighting the creature out there — what would have happened? He could only imagine, and however he imagined it, the picture wasn't encouraging.

Though without actual data, I can't really conclude that. He reassured himself in that familiar way, then turned from the corner and walked deeper into the hall.

Coming in through the main entrance led directly into the main hall. Inside, it was more spacious than it appeared from outside — but the space was in complete disorder, like a riot had swept through. Everything had been thrown to the floor; most of it was destroyed, shards and fragments scattered across the ground.

It was difficult to tell from the wreckage what this building had actually been used for, because the visible debris was mostly everyday personal items — not stock on display shelves but things people had carried in, abandoned in a panic. The sheer volume implied a great number of people.

Then there was the broken glass — quantities of it — and twisted door and window frames. He counted more than ten frames that looked like they'd belonged to windows and doors, clustered together; that count included the one the creature had just torn away and flung into the room. Which suggested the others had come from the same source: that scene he'd just lived through had played out in this building before, many times.

The thought made him glance back toward the entrance. The door the creature had destroyed was whole again, glass intact, closed — as though he'd imagined every bit of the damage himself. He exhaled softly and felt the building's strangeness more keenly than before. Chalking all of it up to it's a dream was possible, of course, but what would that accomplish? Until he could be certain that dying in here meant waking unharmed in reality, he had no choice but to treat it with the same vigilance he'd bring to anything else.

— In other words, including the creature from before, and including the state of this hall — it's possible this is something that keeps repeating.

The thought crossed his mind, but without more information he was unwilling to commit to a conclusion.

He still didn't know what the danger he'd sensed from inside the hall actually was. He was here now, inside it, yet after the creature's disappearance the pressure and silence had simply restored themselves — oppressive, unlocatable, impossible to tell when or how it would emerge. He also clearly remembered: when the creature had attacked him outside, he'd had no warning at all.

He looked at the black umbrella. The sections corroded by the creature's pus hadn't restored themselves along with the door — the holes were still there, large and small, making this precision weapon fashioned from specialized materials look suddenly fragile.

Not that it mattered in a dream, presumably. If this were only a dream, the real umbrella back in reality would still be intact. Ma En had paid a great deal for this thing. And now that he'd left the postal service, left the homeland, having his military and research-institute friends commission something like this again was essentially impossible.

His only remaining option was his Party membership. If he could deliver results in Japan, re-enter the homeland's field of view, have his membership reinstated — then a commission through postal service channels might be feasible again. He'd worked there long enough to know just how remarkable the postal service's commission and delivery capabilities were. Almost anything was possible; what was acceptable and what wasn't was governed by the organization's own internal standards rather than the general public's standards. He'd once been part of it, and his departure had been processed cleanly — his memories weren't erased, which meant the possibility of reconnection remained.

At its core the postal service was just the postal service, offering different channels of access depending on who you were dealing with. Not every Party member could access the non-standard channels, but relatively speaking, if he lost his membership entirely, he'd be stuck with the everyday commercial channels like everyone else.

— Although, speaking of which, I wonder if this dream-space supports nuclear fission. If the materials and tools could be sourced through the dream, how long would it take to construct a workable device from scratch?

His most memorable assignment during his years at the postal service had been ferrying nuclear reactor theory, specifications, and engineering method documents to the Cuban region — though he'd only handled the domestic leg of it. And what ultimately happened with the materials on the other end, he'd never found out; personnel handling domestic segments rarely learned about the outcomes abroad.

He stared at the umbrella a moment longer, then shook himself. His thoughts had started to drift.

The priority right now wasn't weapons — it was finding whatever clues were findable without any. He told himself this and walked deeper into the hall.

The sense of danger rose from all directions, growing stronger with every step he took deeper. A person whose spirit wasn't sufficiently hardened might have cracked at this point — collapsing into tears, screaming, unraveling. He wasn't at that point, but the escalating dread was real enough and clearly felt. Out there, standing in front of the hall, he'd only felt that something dangerous was hiding inside it; in here, he felt as though he'd already walked into the belly of that dangerous thing. Every step forward was like offering himself up, delivering himself deeper into the creature's stomach. There was something both absurd and deeply foolish about it.

Even so, Ma En still wanted to understand what this building had been used for, whether anyone else was still inside.

As he moved forward, the lighting stayed the same, and the wreckage around him was much as it had been — extraordinary disorder, nothing standing out. Then he found the staircase: it appeared to branch left and right toward what had been the flanking halls visible from outside, while behind the staircase, space continued to extend in a direction he hadn't expected. He'd only seen the building's facade — its actual shape behind the front couldn't be guessed from where he'd stood at the door.

Left? Right? Or deeper, into the unknown space behind?

The absurdity and the stupidity of continuing surged up again, and Ma En briefly found himself not wanting to go any further. Left and right felt equally wrong.

He swung the black umbrella and snapped the blade out again, then walked to the base of the staircase.

The staircase swept up in a wide arch and gave out at the second floor; there was no continuation directly to a third. The steps were marble, like outside, with a wide strip of deep red inlaid down the center — Ma En had first assumed carpet, but it was harder underfoot, something closer to painted wood fitted into the marble. The railing was iron, partially flaking paint, partially rusted; the intact sections were silver-toned but rough to the touch, not smooth.

He put his hand on the railing.

Ice cold. The rust smell reached him here with complete clarity — faint from a distance, unmistakable this close.