“Well—” started Ralph.
“Shut up a minute. Now, when you were recruited for Operation Dreamwatch, how did they explain it to you? Therapy program, right? A hundred hard-core recidivist juvenile delinquents, already been through every correctional program in the state, and they’ve got ’em all over there at the Thronsen Home now. And the therapists in charge of the program put the kids into a common, shared dream state every night and that creates this dreamfield, right? The therapists control the setting, control everything that happens to the kids when they’re dreaming—all the different sequences, which are designed to get to the kids’ psychological problems when their psychic defenses are lowest, catharsize their traumas and everything. And over here at the base, the watchers—us—are projected onto the field through the line shack, so we can observe and report on the kids’ reactions to the dream sequences. Isn’t that how it was explained to you?”
Ralph nodded. “Pretty much.”
“Okay, do you still believe it, then?” Stimmitz’s face darkened. “Do you really think these dreams are helping these kids? Putting them through the same kind of crap they’ve probably gone through all their lives while they were awake, only worse, because here it’s intensified, cut right down to the symbols—this is therapy? The real-life counterparts to these dreams messed them up before, what are these doing to them now?”
“How should I know?” Ralph shrugged, wilting under Stimmitz’s outburst. “I don’t know anything about psychology.”
“Psychology, fake-ology.” Stimmitz thrust his hands into the pockets of his jumpsuit and continued walking. “There’s a point where psychology has to meet with what you know about the world already. And if this is therapy, then the people in charge have missed that point.”
“Hey, maybe it’s not therapy—it’s anti-therapy.” Ralph laughed weakly. “They’re not changing delinquents into normal kids. They’re changing normals into delinquents.”
Stimmitz said nothing, leaving Ralph to his own thoughts for the next couple of hours.
“Look over there.” Ralph pointed ahead of them along the sidewalk. “It’s ol’ Slither.”
“Really?” Stimmitz snorted. “I thought maybe they’d finally gotten rid of that thing.”
“Wanna go see what it’s up to?”
“Yeah, why not?” said Stimmitz, yawning. “That oughta kill a little time.”
Ralph glanced at his watch. Two more hours until the end of the shift when the line would come down out of the sky for all the watchers. He and Stimmitz had gone through a couple of dozen of the field’s endless segments of small town, and observed half that many dream sequences.
Ralph used to jot them down in a little notebook, but all the patterns become too familiar for that to be necessary any longer. There were rarely any dreams to be seen in the last quarter of the shift. On most nights—it took an effort to remember it was still dark in the real world, crawling towards dawn—nothing broke the monotony of pacing the silent, empty streets and waiting for the line.
Except for the slithergadee, thought Ralph. He and Stimmitz hurried toward the corner where they had seen its tail disappear. The psychologist who thought up that thing must have some imagination.
They rounded the end of the block and saw the slithergadee squatting malevolently in the middle of the road. Its corroded-brass scales rattled as its flanks bellowed in and put with its breathing.
Repulsed, Ralph watched the creature. He remembered the poem, one of the classic Shel Silverstein children’s-rhyme parodies that one of the watchers had come up with when the thing was first spotted.
And it ended right there. The name had stuck to the dreamfield’s resident monstrosity.
It saw them coming toward it and opened its mouth in a gaping hiss.
Its retractable fangs slid out of their sockets, double rows of glistening-wet crescents. Of all the field’s illusions, it was the only one that seemed to be able to see the watchers. It was harmless, though, being as insubstantial as everything else.
“You know,” said Stimmitz as they halted a few yards from the slithergadee’s brooding face, “if they really wanted Operation Dreamwatch to be a therapy program, they’d take those kids over in Thronsen, give ’em our jobs, and let ’em come out here to take a few swipes at this thing.
“There’s really an enormous satisfaction in kicking this godawful thing and having your foot go right through it. It’s as if it were the embodiment of all the bogeymen that scared you when you were a child. And then you find out that it’s not even real; there never was really anything to be afraid of at all.”
Ralph nodded. Whenever it was sighted, about once a week, the slithergadee always afforded a few moments of pleasure to the watchers who had come across it. Ralph stepped forward and brought his foot down upon the thick tip of its tail lying in front of them. The thing hissed through its saucer-wide nostrils and jerked its immaterial tail away.
“Watch this.” A boyish excitement had brightened Stimmitz’s mood. Of all the watchers he seemed to most enjoy fooling around with the slithergadee. “I’m going to zip one right through its nose.” He walked up to its face, then arced his foot through a waist-high swinging kick. The slithergadee clattered its scales in seeming frustration at not being able to snatch the shoe going in and out of its face as though it were a cloud.
“Hey,” said Ralph. “With all your snooping around, you didn’t happen to find out what this thing is for, did you?”
“No.” Stimmitz stood back a few feet and gazed at its swollen bulk. “To be honest, I didn’t. I’m really beginning to think the therapists designed it into the field for some reason, and then forgot they had it here. It never does anything in any of the kids’ dreams—just lurks around the fringes every once in a while.”
Ralph yawned and scratched the side of his face. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s leave the poor thing alone. Even if it is just an illusion.”
“One more time.” Stimmitz pivoted on one foot and aimed another kick at its head. The slithergadee opened its mouth, its teeth sliding forward into place, and tore off Stimmitz’s leg.
“Good Lord!” Ralph fell backwards onto the sidewalk as the slithergadee reared up in the air, its roar mingling with Stimmitz’s agonized cry. There was an enormous gust of wind that smelled like blood and decayed meat, and the sky darkened. The slithergadee plunged back down and sank its fangs into the now silent body of Stimmitz.
Rolling onto his side, Ralph tried to pull his legs beneath him, but they refused to function. A glance over his shoulder revealed the slithergadee shredding the corpse pinned to the ground by its claws. His heart racing, Ralph pushed himself up against the building at the edge of the sidewalk.
It resisted for a moment, then yielded and he fell through the wall.
Suddenly, there were no sounds from out in the dream-field’s street.
Ralph crouched on the building’s floor and listened. The slithergadee’s roaring had stopped.
He waited a few seconds, then got to his knees. The building he had fallen into was one of the field’s restaurants. He crawled over to its front window and cautiously peered out.