David Townshend's big sister Marilyn died in a rock-climbing accident when she was eighteen, but he still dreamed about her often. In the dreams, Marilyn was always an adult, two years older than David, the age she would have been had she lived. They would meet at family functions or get together for lunch or coffee as if she'd just moved to another town and still came home for occasional visits. David always awoke from his Marilyn dreams with lingering feelings of peace and warmth.
       He didn't believe that he was literally communing with his dead sister's spirit. David's therapist-- back when his health insurance had supported such luxuries-- had suggested that the dream Marilyn represented David's own nurturing, feminine side and that the dreams were his way of getting in touch with that. Whatever the dreams meant, or wherever they came from, David was grateful for them. He missed his big sister. It was always nice to see her.
       The dream he had about her last night was a little different.
       It started out typically enough. David and Marilyn met at the little coffee shop down the street from where he worked. At first, they just caught up on each other's lives. Marilyn told David how she'd just been promoted. (David had never been able to determine exactly what Marilyn's dream profession might be. Something in academia, maybe. That would have suited her.) Then David filled Marilyn in on the latest developments in his long-simmering work crush on Amanda from purchasing.
       "I actually did it. I sucked up my courage and asked her out. She even said yes."
       "Awesome." Marilyn smiled. "Where did you guys go?"
       "Here, actually."
       Marilyn looked around doubtfully. "This coffee shop?"
       "I thought I'd start with something daytime casual, you know? A quiet place where we could talk."
       "Smart. How did it go?"
       "I don't know." David frowned. "I thought it was going great. I mean, I felt the sparks flying. But at the end of it, I asked her out to dinner. Logical next step, right? She said no. Shot me down cold. Gave me a hug and went back to work, leaving me crying into my latte."
       Marilyn laughed and shook her head. "Oh, Davey." When she was alive, she'd nursed him through failed crushes like this, going back to Helen Nickels in the seventh grade.
       "The thing is, with the company harassment policies and everything, I can't even ask her out a second time. I had one shot, and I blew it."
       "I'm sure the HR cops aren't monitoring every employee interaction. Give her a decent amount of time, and then try again."
       "I don't want to be that guy, though. The creep who can't take a hint. Obviously, she's not into me. I just... I really like this girl. I can't get her out of my head."
       Marilyn took a thoughtful sip of her dream coffee. "You could give her a present."
       "What kind of present?"
       "Candles are always nice. Here." She pulled a small object from her purse and set it on the table between them.
       It was a small white candle, molded in the shape of an old-school iPod, with an LCD screen and click-wheel controller. Lumpy and misshapen, though, like the device had been left in the sun on a hot dashboard, or it was the product of some Apple engineer who'd overindulged in the micro-dosing.
       "It looks like a music player," David said.
       "It is a music player."
       "You said it was a candle."
       "It's both. When you light the wick, the device draws power from the flame. No batteries to charge."
       "Oh." That made sense, in a dream logic kind of way.
       "I think she'll like it."
       "Okay, but how am I supposed to give this to her? I mean, this is just a dream."
       David's dreams of his sister usually included an element of lucidity. He was aware that he was dreaming and aware that their time together would only last as long as the dream. This one had already gone on longer than most.
       "Didn't you know that you can take things out of your dreams if you get them inside your body? If you swallow that, you can regurgitate it later when you're awake."
       "That's..." David laughed. "That's the craziest thing I've ever heard. You want me to swallow this thing?"
       "There is another way, but I don't think you'd like it."
       "What other way?"
       "You could always keister it."
       "Keister?"
       "You ever hear of a prison suitcase?" Marilyn made an inserting gesture.
       "Oh. Oh, God. No," David said. "Yeah, I think I'll stick with swallowing it."
       "Either way. Just as long as it's inside your body. Enveloped in living flesh."
       "Like in The Terminator?"
       Marilyn nodded. "Exactly. Same principle."
       Laughing, shaking his head, David popped the waxy device into his mouth. He gulped and swallowed while Marilyn looked on, smiling.
       Then he woke up with a painful lump in his throat.

       The crazy dream stuck with David all morning while he was getting ready for work, flashes recurring to him while he drank his coffee, showered and shaved, endured the morning commute. He had to laugh every time. It was so absurd. Once David made it into the office, though, he got wrapped up in the paradoxical blend of mind-numbing tedium and constant stress that constituted his workdays. He forgot all about the dream.
       A little after eleven, David was sitting at his desk, wrapped up in spreadsheets, when he began to feel unwell. A rising surge of nausea so acute that he bolted into the washroom. He bent over the sink, gagging and coughing, his throat on fire. Finally, it came up. David spat the lumpy device into the sink.
       It looked exactly as it had in the dream. Like a mutant i-Pod molded from white wax, covered now with a slimy coating of blood-streaked bile. He stared down at it for a long moment, head reeling with disbelief, throat aching from passing the thing.
       Holy shit.
       David rinsed the thing off and patted it dry with paper towels. He carried it out to Amanda's desk.
       Amanda had her headset on. David thought at first that she might be on a vendor call, but she was just sitting there, her bright blue eyes unfocused. Spacing out. She looked up at David curiously when he approached her desk, her face wan in her monitor's reflected light.
       "I got you something." David set the device on her desk.
       Amanda squinted down at the thing. "What is that?"
       "Candle."
       "It looks like a music player."
       "It's both," David said. "Light the wick, and the flame powers the device."
       "What?"
       David walked back to his desk with an indescribable feeling of lightness that sustained him through the rest of the day.

       Amanda caught him alone in the breakroom the next morning. She grabbed him by the collar and pushed him back against the refrigerator.
       "What the fuck was that thing?" she demanded. "Where did you get it?"
       "So, it worked?"
       "Yes, it worked." Amanda's eyes were wild. "There were songs on there. Hundreds of songs I've never heard before, by Nirvana and Jimi Hendrix. There was a Beatles reunion album with John Lennon. New Amy Winehouse songs. Tupac. Like those people never died. They just kept putting out music."
       "Were the songs any good?"
       "Are you kidding? They were great. How could you not know that? You gave that thing to me."
       "Yeah, well, somebody gave it to me."
       "Who?"
       Jeff and Kim from accounting came into the break room right then. Amanda quickly stepped back from David, but for all appearances, they'd been caught in an intimate moment. The office ran on gossip, and David was sure that he and Amanda would be a hot topic once word of this got out.
       "Coffee shop," Amanda said to him. "After work."
       David nodded, grinning. He had his second date.

       Amanda accepted that David had somehow smuggled an actual, physical candle/iPod out of his dream far more readily than he'd thought she would.
       "Wow," was all she said once he'd told her the whole story. "That's really wild, David."
       "I can hardly believe it myself."
       She bit her lip. "How often do you have these dreams?"
       "Dreams where I sneak things out by swallowing them? Never."
       "Dreams where you talk to your sister."
       "Oh. Uh, every few weeks, maybe."
       "Next time you have one, ask her to give you another candle."
       "I can ask." He didn't know what Marilyn would say to that.
       "Because, listen. I was trying to figure out a way to get the songs off the device. I couldn't download them onto my computer, but I thought maybe I could patch the headphone jack into the audio input and record them that way. I didn't have the right cords at my apartment, though. The candle burned all the way down before I could make it work."
       "It's gone?"
       "Melted into a puddle of wax," Amanda said. "When the wax cooled, it turned black and hardened into this."
       The misshapen black lump Amanda pulled from her purse caught the light with an uncanny shimmery rainbow color, like a chunk of iridescent obsidian. There was something off about the color, though David couldn't put his finger on what it was.
       "Pretty," he noted.
       "Pretty useless. It doesn't work now. Which is why we need another one."
       She said 'we,' David thought.
       "Those songs are worth a fortune," Amanda said. "They could make us rich."
       She said 'us.'

       Then David and Amanda were dating, officially. They went together to a party at her friend's house that Friday night and spent all day Sunday at the zoo. David was crazy for her, no other word for it. Amanda was easily the most beautiful woman he'd ever gone out with. She was cool and funny, too.
       Mostly, they just talked about the candle. Amanda wanted David to try something she called "dream incubation," which was a method for setting his mind. Lying in bed, David was supposed to visualize Marilyn's face and repeat, "I want to dream about Marilyn," as a mantra as he drifted off to sleep.
       He tried that for three nights in a row without success. His next Marilyn dream came to him quite organically, though, the first night Amanda slept over at his place.

       At the coffee shop, Marilyn insisted that David try the new cherry walnut scones. They tasted amazing.
       "So, how's the whole Amanda saga coming along?" Marilyn asked.
       "Great." David couldn't help smirking. "In fact, she's sleeping beside me right now."
       "Right on." Marilyn grinned. "Go, David. It's been a while for you, hasn't it?"
       "Yeah, well..." It was always awkward talking to his sister about his sex life.
       "Anyway." She laughed. "I guess that candle worked, big time."
       "About that. Do you think you could give me another one?"
       "One wasn't enough?"
       "Amanda has an idea about recording the music and releasing it on the internet. She thinks we could make real money."
       "Greedy."
       "No," David said. "Just, with something as amazing as new Beatles songs, it's almost wrong not to share it with the world."
       "She said that? Oh, please."
       "So, could you give me another candle?"
       "It was one of a kind, David. There isn't another one." Marilyn frowned, considering. "I guess I could give you this ring."
       She tugged it off her finger and rested it on the table between them. A gold band set with shards of black onyx in the shape of a turtle. The ring was much smaller than the candle, but it had some uncomfortable-looking sharp edges to it. David considered for a moment, then he popped it into his mouth and gulped it down.

       He woke up gagging and choking. Amanda came awake beside him and, seeing his distress, slipped her arms around his back. She pressed her fists into his diaphragm and thrust upwards in a kind of lying-down Heimlich maneuver.
       It worked. After a few thrusts, David coughed up onto his pillow. The turtle ring, along with a few chunks of cherry walnut scone.
       "Ugh." David coughed and spat. There was blood in his throat. The ring must have cut him at some point, going down or coming back up. "Marilyn said that she didn't have any more candles, but she gave me that ring."
       Amanda delicately picked the ring out of the acid puddle. She took it into the bathroom and came out a minute later, having washed it off. Hair disheveled. Wearing only David's ratty old Ramones t-shirt. Devastatingly sexy.
       She sat down on the bed beside David and slipped the ring onto her finger. The ring emitted an amber glow, backlighting the onyx turtle, and began making a gurgling noise. Like coffee percolating.
       "It's getting warm," Amanda said.
       Amanda tapped the black gem. There was a popping sound, and a shimmering soap bubble blew out of the side of the ring. The bubble was a perfectly articulated turtle the size of a quarter. Four legs, a head and a tail. The bubble turtle drifted to the floor and-- seemingly alive-- wriggled away, hustling across the room with a comical lurching motion for several seconds. Then it popped.
       Amanda tapped the ring again, and another turtle bubbled out. She tapped it three times in quick succession, producing three more turtles. Their soap-skins shimmered with the same eerie iridescence of the melted remnants of the candle. The colors weren't right, somehow. The spectrum was bent out of shape.
       "There's no tank for the soap," Amanda noted, studying the ring as it pumped out bubble turtles. "It's making bubbles out of thin air."
       Amanda found that she could make bigger turtles by holding the button down longer. The biggest one she made was the size of a dinner plate. Quick taps produced smaller turtles, pop pop pop, tiny as pinky fingernails. Amanda popped out furious Morse code, making turtles of every size, trying to fill the room. None of the turtles lived longer than a few seconds before disintegrating, though. She couldn't get more than a dozen going at the same time.
       "Why turtles?" she mused. "Why not kittens?"
       "I like turtles," David said.
       "I mean, this isn't as cool as the candle, but I can work with this. I bet every kid in America would want a turtle ring in their stocking for Christmas."
       "But there's only one ring." Even if David could persuade Marilyn to supply him with that many, coughing them up in mass production would be murder on his esophagus.
       "I told you about my friend Sam, from engineering."
       "You've mentioned him." Amanda talked about her friend Sam from engineering quite a lot, actually.
       "Maybe he can crack this thing open and figure out how it works. What do you call it, reverse engineering?"
       "I don't know if we should bring other people in on this," David said. "This is kind of our thing, isn't it?"
       She touched his cheek. "Honey, we're going to have to bring other people in if we want to capitalize on this incredible talent you have. But it's always going to be ours. Yours and mine. We're partners in every sense. Okay?"
       "Yeah. Of course."
       "I'll take the ring over to Sam's tonight. He's a legit mechanical genius. If anybody can figure out how to reproduce this thing, it's him. Hopefully, he'll get something we can patent."
       "You're seeing Sam tonight?"
       "Don't worry about it." Amanda took the ring off and rested it on David's nightstand. "Now, why don't you clean up that mess on your pillowcase and come back to bed?"

       They spent the rest of that morning in bed together, which went a long way towards easing David's anxieties about Sam from engineering.
       The ring melted before Amanda had the chance to show it to her friend, though. David and Amanda watched with dismay as it liquified into a bubbling puddle, emitting black smoke with an indescribable acrid smell. The puddle cooled and hardened into what looked like a lump of volcanic glass. Just like the candle.
       "That sucks." Amanda gritted her teeth.
       "I'm sorry."
       "It's not your fault." She shook her head. "I guess we'll just keep trying."

       David went back to his nightly exercises, focusing his intentions on summoning Marilyn into his dreams. Eventually, the method worked, though Marilyn seemed exasperated when David asked her once again for something to bring to Amanda.
       "Is that the only reason you wanted to see me?" she asked.
       "Of course not," David said. "But isn't there anything you can give me?"
       "Okay." Marilyn sighed heavily. "Here you go."
       This time, it was a tiny green glass bottle of liqueur. Once David coughed it up-- and that one hurt-- Amanda washed it off and uncorked the bottle. She poured some of the clear liquid into a shot glass. Close examination with a magnifying glass revealed countless tiny fish or tadpoles swimming inside, glittering like flecks of gold leaf.
       Amanda took a cautious sip and reported the flavor as being very sweet. "Kind of like Drambuie," she said. For several minutes after tasting the stuff, she was able to sing in an achingly beautiful, high and clear soprano voice. Like an angel.
       "That's great," she said. "That's perfect."
       Having learned their lesson about waiting, they set out immediately for Sam's house, thinking that he could analyze the fluid and perhaps reproduce it. The bottle dissolved in the car on the way over, though, melting into black glass right in David's hand, spilling the precious fluid and all the tiny wriggling fish. David licked some of the stuff off his fingers and was able to sing like Pavarotti for almost an hour.

       David retrieved a few more dream artifacts after that, but he no longer recalled the dreams that produced them. He was afraid that Marilyn was angry and didn't want to talk to him anymore. She still kept slipping him things, though.
       There was a tiny earpiece that looked like a hearing aid, which was at least relatively easy to regurgitate. When you put it in your ear, you could hear the thoughts of any person you pointed your finger at. David and Amanda tested it out on each other.
       I hope this one lasts long enough for us to finally make some bank, she was thinking.
       Him: God, you're beautiful.
       The earpiece barely lasted an hour before melting down to black glass, just like the rest of the dream objects.
       A week later, it was a felt skullcap that turned its wearer invisible. The cap marked an awkward turning point in that it was the first artifact that David retrieved using the alternative 'back door' method. He supposed this was for the best, as he probably would have choked to death on the cap. Still, pulling it from his body in this way was both uncomfortable and humiliating. He was actually grateful that Amanda wasn't sleeping over anymore. He would have died from embarrassment had she witnessed that.
       David cleaned the cap off as well as he could before he took it over to Amanda's apartment, but he was still hesitant to let her put it on her head. She insisted, though.
       "This is the one." She was looking into the mirror. Her reflection showed her clothes standing there with no one inside, the skullcap floating in the air on top of her invisible head. "It has to be."
       The cap was still intact when they got to Sam's house.
       In his head, David had pictured Sam as looking like the science nerd in an eighties teen comedy, but he was a good-looking Indian-American guy with lively, inquisitive eyes.
       Amanda modeled the cap for Sam to prove that it worked, the first time a third person had witnessed one of the artifacts in action.
       "Holy shit," he said.
       Sam led them down to his basement, where he had a home laboratory/workshop set up. He examined the skullcap under a magnifying lamp, then he snipped off a small piece of felt and looked at it under a microscope.
       "What the hell..."
       Sam was performing what almost looked like an autopsy-- delicately slicing the cap open with a scalpel under the magnifying lamp, peeling back layers of fabric with two pairs of tweezers-- when it suddenly melted like the other objects had. Sam cried out with surprise, leaping back from his worktable while the thing bubbled and smoked. The cap rendered down into yet another lump of the black glassy material.
       "The colors are so weird," Sam noted. "Reminds me of that Lovecraft story."
       "Do you think you can make another cap like that?" Amanda asked.
       "I wouldn't even know where to start." Sam shook his head, rubbing his mouth. "It's the strangest thing I've ever seen. It almost looked... organic. When I looked at it under the microscope, it had cells."
       "How does it make people invisible?" David asked.
       "No clue," Sam said. "If I hadn't seen that with my own eyes, I would have said it was impossible. Look, I'll do some more testing on the residue there, but this goes way beyond..."
       Sam shook his head and then looked David in the eye.
       "What alarms me most is that you're somehow producing these things inside your body. If you're going to keep doing this, I recommend that you talk to a doctor first. This could be dangerous. In fact, I think you should see a doctor anyway because this..." Sam indicated the shimmering lump on his worktable. "This is not normal."

       The last dream artifact David produced was also the strangest. Made of gleaming chrome, it looked like the end of a spaghetti ladle crossed with some kind of crustacean. There was a little button on the top. When David pressed it, the device vibrated so powerfully that it skittered across Amanda's kitchen table. It also got very cold, developing a white patina of frost.
       "What the hell is that supposed to be?" Amanda asked.
       To David, it looked like a sex toy designed for stimulating some inconceivable alien genitalia. But he didn't dare say that out loud.
       Amanda sighed. "This isn't working, David."
       "It's working. It's just not exactly clear what it's doing."
       "We're not working."
       "What?" David whimpered.
       "Look, you're a great guy. You're the nicest person I've ever met, and you're fun to hang around with, but..."
       David's heart clenched. She said, 'but.'
       "... our relationship is totally based on these weird things you keep pulling out of your dreams. And that's not healthy. Especially for you. I think Sam might be right. It might be dangerous." She looked away. "You deserve to know, too. Sam and I have been seeing a lot of each other."
       David nodded. Sam was better looking than he was. Cooler, smarter. Definitely made more money. He couldn't really blame her. Still, that hurt.
       "I'm sorry, David." There were tears in Amanda's eyes, and she sounded like she really meant it.
       Still, that didn't make it hurt any less.

       David couldn't bring himself to go to work the next day. Seeing Amanda there would just be too painful. He was probably going to have to find another job.
       He spent the day in bed, sunk deep into a dark depression, slipping in and out of murky dreams. David walked through the shadowy valleys of his mind, searching for Marilyn, but he couldn't find her anywhere.
       That was the worst part. Losing Amanda had hurt, but Marilyn had always been a source of light and comfort in his life. He was desperately afraid that he'd lost her as well.
       David's dream wandering brought him to a lonely graveyard, a chill mist clinging to the ground between the tombstones. He knew that it was the cemetery where Marilyn was buried. After some searching, he found her grave. David knelt before the headstone. His fingers traced his sister's name engraved upon the granite.
       "Marilyn," he wept. "I'm so sorry."
       Then, in the transitory nature of dreams, the cold, hard stone transformed beneath his touch into her warm, soft face. Her eyes were wild with urgency.
       "I'm so sorry, David," she said.
       "No, it was my fault. I was so into Amanda that I--"
       "No!" she said, cutting him off. "Listen to me. You need to wake up right now. You need to destroy the remnants. Smash them with a hammer and burn what's left."
       "Why?"
       "There are things on this side. Beings. Entities. They're always looking for a way into the real world. When they found out what you can do..." Marilyn grabbed his shoulders. "I only gave you the candle. After that, it was something else pretending to be me."
       "What?"
       "I shouldn't have even given you that. I was just trying to help you get a girlfriend."
       "Oh my God, Marilyn."
       She slapped him hard across the face.
       "Wake up!"

       David came awake, gasping.
       The remnants of the dream artifacts were lined up on his nightstand, black lumps of varying sizes. David had placed them there so that he would be reminded of his failures every time he woke up. The candle, the turtle ring, the liqueur bottle, the earpiece, the weird sex toy thing. He realized with a start that the remnants of the skullcap-- the largest object-- were still with Sam in his basement laboratory.
       The remnants quivered, alive with rattling motion. The dark chunk that had once been the candle-- the very first dream artifact-- had developed a crack. There was something inside. He saw a tiny beak, pecking away from the inside, trying to break free.
       The candle remnant was an egg. And it was hatching.
       David watched with horrified fascination as a little creature penetrated the black glass eggshell and emerged wet and mewling onto his nightstand. The hatchling was pink and naked, like a baby octopus with grasping tentacles and a tiny, perfectly formed face. A human face, little toothless mouth open with hungry squalling.
       One by one, the other eggs hatched. Strange creatures emerged, each one unique. A black rainbow-hued turtle. A living origami frog, folded from glittering gold leaf. Something that resembled a hairless kangaroo's joey with long antennae on its head. A silver crab-thing. They all had human faces.
       Once they'd all hatched, the tiny creatures dropped from the nightstand onto David's bed. They gathered around his pillow while he lay there helpless, paralyzed as if by exhaustion. They were making a sound in unison. Chanting. Singing. A single word which David at first couldn't make out, until he closed his eyes and listened. When he finally understood, he had to smile.
       They were saying, "Daddy."