“Life is hard down in the candy corn mines.”

Blinking, I looked over at Haley. I’d been one of her advocates for over a year, working to get her transitioned back into independent living after a slow slide into schizophrenia at twenty-five had turned into a steep drop into an institution for six months. Now she was just a few weeks away from review at her group home placement, which depending on how that went, could lead to her being released back fully on her own. If she didn’t run into any setbacks, that was.

“Haley, what time did you take your meds today?” I tried to keep any tension or judgment out of my voice, and I’d carefully phrased my question as though I assumed she had taken them, though I was worried that might not be true.

She grinned at me. “Eleven o’clock. Same as always.”

We were driving to a nighttime Halloween parade—one of my last times to evaluate her out in the world before I gave my report for the review—and in the passing flickers of street light I tried to read her expression. Was she joking about the candy corn? Lying about her meds? I couldn’t tell. Smiling tentatively, I gave her a nod. “Cool. So what is this about candy corn mines?”

Looking back out at the road, she gave a small shrug. “It doesn’t matter. You won’t believe me.”

I forced a laugh I didn’t feel. “Hey, no fair. I’m curious now. What is it?”

She let out small sigh. “It’s just…none of this is real. Not for me.”

“Look, I think I know what you mean. Like you’re nervous about getting back out on your own, right? That’s totally n…”

Snorting, she shook her head. “No, I’m worried about the shrimp priests and the things that live under the cathedral.”

Heart starting to pound quicker, I slowed down until I spotted a good place to pull over and park. When she shot me a questioning glance, I nodded. “It’s okay. We’re still going to be in time for the parade, but I just wanted to be able to understand what you’re talking about, and it’s harder for me to give you my full attention when I’m driving.” Putting the car in park, I glanced around outside. I wasn’t that familiar with this part of the city, and while it did look old and run down, it didn’t look particularly unsafe. Just a few people driving by or on the sidewalks, and there were no unsavory characters lurking in the two alleyways I could see. Turning back to her, I tried to look excited. “So tell me all about this...did you say shrimp priests?”

Haley nodded. “I mean, yeah, that’s what I call them. Not because they’re short. They’re taller than me or you. But they have so many little legs and hands and their backs…you can see their backs in spots through the robes they wear because the robes are like old and kind of rotten I guess? And their backs are all hard and segmented like a lobster or a shrimp.”

I felt a chill pass over my back and I tried to ignore it. “Okay. So is this something you saw on t.v. or made up or…”

“No. I can dream them sometimes. No, that’s not right. I can see them sometimes when I dream.”

“Okay. Now you just distinguished between dreaming them and seeing them when you dream. What does that distinction mean to you?”

She looked at me for a moment, her expression almost sad. “You really do try to help me. I know that. A lot of them…they don’t really see you. You’re just a problem to them, whether they’re trying to solve you or just get past you so they can go home. But you really do listen, don’t you?”

I nodded. “I try, Haley. And I do care. I’m just…I’m confused by what you’re talking about, and not understanding…well, it has me a little worried. So I just want to get what you’re saying better. Does that make sense?”

Instead of answering directly, she turned and looked out the window as she began to speak. “I make that distinction because I’m not dreaming them up. It’s just sometimes when I dream I remember the truth, and when I do, I can see that place. The real place I am.”

“Okay. Um, tell me about that place please Haley.”

When she turned back to me, there were tears in her eyes.

“Okay. If you want me to.”

The sky is always angry there. During the day it churns green or orange, like an endless bank of clouds reading for a storm that is always there and yet never comes. At night, everything is still and clear and black, with every star standing out with a yellow glow so sharp it will cut you if you stare too long. It wasn’t until my second time remembering it that I noticed the constellations were different than here. Not until my third time that I realized I recognized them just like I do the ones “here”. One of the things that works us in the mines taught them to me when we were carrying our full wagons up the hill to the cathedral.

The road up to the cathedral is packed black dirt, and most things on either side of that path are either green clay or strange trees that twist up from it and then sag back down as though they’re exhausted from trying to escape that place. Not all of the land is like that. In the distance I can see a city of black stone, and beyond that, a shadowed sea.

The road we take is very dangerous. There are these things there…They look like giant snakes when they’re closed up and moving, but they like to get in the trees and stay very still until you pass close by. They look like branches mostly until they move, and when they do, they open themselves somehow. They glide down, and far away it looks like a huge bat coming for you, but when they get closer, you see that the bottom of them, the open, gliding part, is all just wet meat and teeth…rows and rows of hooked teeth, and when they land on someone, they wrap around them in a second. They hit them so hard I’ve seen a big man get knocked off his feet, and by the time he tried to scream, his face was already covered in their teeth and they were tightening around him as they started to roll away across the sick green earth. They keep holes burrowed in all over, so you’d never catch them even if you were dumb enough to try.

Light scares them…at least a little. Whenever we carry a load to the cathedral, We have two people sitting on the front and back of each wagon with a big jack-o-lantern in their lap. They get an hour off the day before to carve their pumpkin, and the candle inside is rendered by the mine’s reclaimers—hair and fat from the dead, you know. So much of what they do is strange to me, but they don’t let anything go to waste.

The jack-o-lanterns keep some of the snake things back, and it works on the Lantern Eyes too. Oh yeah, the Eyes are…well, they look like cats except for their necks are all long and crooked, and their eyes are way too big. So big and glowing, it’s all you see when they wake up and look at you from off the road somewhere. Crushed salt is always scattered on the road because the Lantern Eyes don’t like it. I think it burns them some. So between that and the light, they tend to stay back, just watching with their terrible eyes, waiting to see if someone gets too close to the edge of the road or their pumpkin goes out. I’ve never seen it happen, but sometimes the Eyes take someone even if they’re on the road. We always know it was them because when they’re done eating the parts they like, they impale what’s left on one of the trees near the road. Maybe to tell us that our travels aren’t as safe as we’d like to think.

I’ve been talking about the road and the trips to the cathedral, and I do need to tell you about the cathedral itself, but I guess I should mention the mines, since that’s where we are most of the time. Vast mines that go miles underground—grey and green patches of earth and rock that can make you sick or crazy if you touch them for too long, all shot through with clusters of…well, candy corn. I know that sounds silly, but there are giant pieces of candy corn buried in the walls and floor of that place, and every day its our job to carefully dig them out so they can go up to the shrimp priests and the cathedral.

I think at one time I thought they were doing all this to rebuild the church—it’s made of candy corn you know, though you can’t tell it except up close. The cathedral is rotting, always rotting, and all of the millions and millions of candy corn that make up its walls and doors and statutes and symbols, they’re all specked white and grey as little red worms crawl in and out. It makes sense they’d want to replace some of that, right? It’s so gross and it smells so bad. But no. I figured out that they always carry the fresh candy down beneath the church. To what lives down there. The things they all worship and serve.

And even though it’s all rotting, it never goes away. I’ve heard that the things under the church think that place alive. And for us that are stuck there, they dream us back here when they’re asleep. To a life in this world for a little while. Part of us is always there, but their dreaming gives us times where our minds and souls can rest a little, if only for a time.

I waited until she fell silent to speak.

“Haley, that’s a very interesting story. But you do know that’s just a story, don’t you?”

Her gaze narrowed. “No it’s not. I’m telling the truth.”

I puffed out a long breath. “Okay. So you think that everyone in this world is actually trapped in some hell and that this is just a temporary dream something gives us to keep us sane?”

She shook her head slightly, that melancholy look passing back over her face. “No, not everybody. Not most people. But some of us? Yeah.”

“Do you know how…Look, think about what you’re describing. Mining candy corn. Things that look like bats and cats. Jack-o-lanterns. It’s like some kind of macabre Halloween art project. How does it make sense? Do they celebrate Halloween there?”

Haley looked out the window again, this time at the alley on her side of the car. “I don’t know. I don’t think they celebrate it. I think they are it, or at least an aspect of it. Or Halloween is in part a reflection of what they do in that place. It just get jumbled up and wrong and softened here, like things so often do in dreams.”

“Because this reality is just a dream.”

Another longer sigh. “You’re not listening. The world is the world. At least I think it is. But they insert us into the world…maybe we’re from here originally and they took us a long time ago, I don’t know…but they dream a part of us back into the world from time to time. We get to live our lives and worry about dumb shit and get locked up for threatening a security guard at the mall (or maybe that part is just me) and then eventually we start dreaming about that other place again. That happens when whichever one was dreaming us here starts waking up. Time is different there and it takes awhile, but eventually, this place starts to fade away for us, because we were never really here. For the rest of the world? Maybe we go missing, or they forget we ever existed until we pop in again down the line. I don’t have all the answers. I just know what’s real and…oh no.”

Her body had gone rigid as she gripped the door handle on her side hard enough to make it creak.

“What is it?” My chest was tight with fear, and while much of it was concern for her and what I should do next, I wasn’t sure that was the only thing I heard in my voice now. “What are you looking at?”

“It’s here! Oh God, I see its eyes in the alley. Green and glowing, they’ve sent it for me I…no…I’m just seeing it there…and everything here is fading away…”

“What do you see?” My words were shrill and loud and desperate as I reached out to grab her arm and found I couldn’t. I could still see her and hear her, but somehow she was beyond my grasp.

“Oh no! I see it all. The cathedral up the hill! It hurts my eyes but I can’t look away! Everything is rotting and burning and it never, ever ends!”

I could see the alley beyond the car now because I could see through Haley, if only a little. And it may have been my imagination, but was there a green glow coming from that outer dark? I screamed her name and tried to grab her again, but it was no good. Head throbbing, I called out the question burning in my chest now that my doubts had been eaten by my fear and anger. Anger that by telling me all this she had somehow infected me with it or caused it to notice me.

“Why? Why did you tell me about this terrible place?”

She faded away the next instant, but her words lingered in the air a moment longer. Long enough for me to hear her reply and start crying harder as I put the car into drive and drove on into the night.

“Because you’re here too.”