Smithery Hill (Patreon)

Let's do a little Halloween story. Usually I'm so late writing one that I decide it's not going to happen.

"OH MY GAWD!", Lucas shouted as he entered the house. "This is amazing!"

I felt a bit of relief that the interior matched the Airbnb photos and wasn't some generative AI scam. We would be too far from anything if that was the case. Maybe some of the people living in the village or the farms around the area would help, but if it was a scam we wouldn't have been the first. Or they would have been in on it. None of that matters though, since not only did the cabin's interior match the photos, but it surpassed it in every way.

"It used to be a forge," I said, maybe redundantly given the large brick hearth in the center of the large room. There were interior walls to the side for bathroom and closets, but otherwise it was just a huge room. Despite the old exterior they had done a good job with modern materials and furniture complementing all the original details they had saved.

"Says here it was in use until 1904," Lucas reported from reading some framed text on the wall over at the kitchen area. "The Smithery Hill Forge didn't only provide metal works for the local community but also taught numerous apprentices over more than a century," he read from the text.

I decided to skip all the usual Halloween parties and booked a surprise getaway for Lucas and me. Well, the trip wasn't a surprise, but the destination was. A large cabin smack in the middle of rural fall to sip pumpkin spice beverage and make indoor smores over open fire. "Let's get the rest of the bags. I'm starving and I'm exhausted after that drive. You owe me big time."
"Hey, I didn't know where we were going!"

Luckily we had prepared for a low-effort first evening with ready-made food in the cooler, so it didn't take many minutes to uncork the wine and open up the deli boxes we had brought. I carefully read the instructions for the big hearth and lit a fire that at least didn't fill the room with smoke. Hopefully not carbon monoxide either. Given how easy it was to get a fire going it felt like a missed opportunity to have all that cold food to eat, although it really didn't matter much because we were both so hungry and tired that we just ate, drank, and stared into the fire. We caught ourselves almost falling asleep in the armchairs and quickly moved the trash to the kitchen, corked the bottle, and went to bed with minimal preparations. Any quality time would have to wait until we were well rested.

I was in a haze for a while but it was the sharp sound of hammer against metal that brought everything into focus. A roaring fire was going in the fireplace, and the rythmic sound of pumping bellows filled the room. The small windows didn't allow for much light so the contrasts in the room were stark and it took some time to orient myself within the forge. Another strike of the hammer. I faced towards the sound and saw the smith working on a glowing red bar of metal on one of the several anvils in the room. Another strike. He was thinning out the metal rectangle, then stopped and looked straight at me. "Another apprentice? First nothing for so long and then suddenly two." There was something unsettling about the smith. A lean man in his 40s who gave off a sinister vibe. That's when I realized it was a dream. I had read about lucid dreaming enough to at least be able to acknowledge when I was dreaming, most of the time. "You take over for him!" the smith said and pointed towards the fireplace. There, fighting with the enormous bellows was a completely nude Lucas. He was covered in a sheen of sweat and used his whole body to move the lever of the bellows up and down. That's when I realized I too was standing on the forge dirt floor naked, suddenly anxious about tetanus. But whereas I was my normal, naked self, Lucas looked like a muscle beast. Instead of his normal lean self, he looked as if he had been bodybuilding for years.

"Don't just stand there gaping, boy," the smith said. "Hands!"

I had no interest in manual labor on my vacation, not even in a dream, so I opened my mouth to tell him off, but something inside of me was pushing for different words. I could feel that just before I said something a "Yes, sir!" was lined up. I tried several times, and all I got out was half the "Y", before stopping myself. Some pretty lousy lucidity for being lucid dreaming. The smith was suddenly right by me, staring intently at my mouth and smiling thinly. "I reckon you need some schooling how to earn a day's bread." He pressed a hammer into my hand, and we were suddenly next to an anvil. It definitely was a dream. The handle was worn smooth in a groove that fit my hand perfectly, as if I had worked with it for decades. "Strike where I tap, boy," he said, and laid the glowing bar across the anvil. I could feel the heat radiate on my naked body. "Not afore. Not after, mind".

Clang! I struck where he pointed. The jolt ran up my arm and into my teeth. Clang! Behind me the bellows kept up their wheeze, and Lucas kept breathing in time with his pulling, deep and steady, like a man who had been doing this for years.

You can't trust time in dreams. I have no idea of how long I stood by the anvil hitting red hot iron. When one arm got tired I switched to the other. The dim light streaming in through the little window never moved or changed, and the fire never needed feeding. But my arms stopped shaking at some point, and the hammer began to feel lighter, despite the tiredness turning into exhaustion. My forearms had thickened and the veins had turned into a phlebotomist's dream. I must have seen it happen, but couldn't remember it. When I wiped my face my shoulder rolled under the skin with unfamiliar heaviness.

"Good," said the smith, without looking up. "The craft takes to thee, I'll warrant."

I tried to stop. I told my arm to stop, quite clearly in my head. I tried to step away from the anvil. I remained in place, and the arm kept swinging. That was when the sweat on my back turned cold. Maybe you can't control a dream fully if you are not doing lucid dreaming, but you are in control of yourself. This wasn't a dream. This was something else.

"Lucas!" I shouted, or tried to. My mouth was busy breathing in rhythm. Nevertheless across the room he glanced up with eyes of empty content, the eyes of a man enjoying the work he was absorbed in. He gave me a smile.

"Wake up," I thought. "Wake up, wake up, wake up!"

Clang! I was tired and frightened and clumsy, and the hammer came down hard on my other hand. I screamed out at the top of my lungs as I reached to grab the searing pain in my left hand with my right, but instead tangled with the bed sheet. I let my tense body relax into the mattress and pillows. My heart was still racing and I felt sore, hot, and sweaty, but for a moment I was only grateful. The reading lamp in we apparently forgot on lit the room in a cold light. The ceiling beams were there, so were the glowing embers in the hearth and the neat bags by the door. A stupid dream after all. Something to tell Lucas over breakfast. I looked over at his side of the bed and only saw an empty tangle of sheets. "Lucas?"

My hand still hurt, I realized. "Lucas!" I held it up to the dim light and looked at it, and it was the wrong one. It wasn't the hand of a copywriter and occasional graphic designer. It was the hand of a manual laborer, a blacksmith. A hand with thick fingers and a large blooming bruise. I sat up and threw off the sheet. The hand sat on a forearm belonging to someone twice my size. My chest, my stomach, my thighs: all of it was the body from the dream, solid and dense, and the weight of it made the mattress sag.

"Lucas!" A feeling of dread instantly filled me. "Lucas, where are you?" The front door was closed, and no idea if it was locked, but the bathroom door stood ajar. Did I leave it like that? Lucas phone lay on the nightstand on his side, asleep, charging. His shoes were by the door, his jacket on the chair.

From below and behind, somehow through the mattress without any sound, two arms grabbed me. Long and sinewy arms almost hugged me, and pulled me backwards. I didn't have time to realize what happened, and as my head hit the pillow and then went through it I heard the smith's. "Too late," he said, talking directly into my left ear. "It's always the ones that think themselves clever that run, and run too late."

My back landed hard on the forge's dirt floor, knocking the air out of me. He kept his voice even, which was somehow worse. More sinister. More in control.

"Did thee think thee could quit my forge without my leave?" the smith asked, pacing in a slow circle around where I'd landed. The fire was roaring as ever, and Lucas stood at his bellows, as peaceful as an ox in a stall, pumping and pumping without ever so much as a glance in our direction. "Eleven apprentices tried to run in my day, and every one learned the same lesson. Guild rules demand naught leaves a forge without the mastersmith's approval. Mine!"

"We're guests," I said. "We paid for a weekend's worth of stay. We'll leave and we'll never come back to bother you, just let him go." I hoped some of that would land on some ancient rule of hospitality or fair business practice that like a spell would release us.

"Guests," he spat. "Those be no arms of guests, be they?" I desperately tried to get up, but my body wouldn't listen, again. He took something down from a peg on the wall. "Let us see how guests run with a bit of weight upon them." He grabbed my leg, my thick, muscular, veiny leg by the ankle and dragged me to an anvil without any effort, and placed it in a thick strip of iron plate that had been bent into a half circle with flared, punctured ends, and put another one on top. Together they formed a black, ugly, heavy iron cuff.

He grabbed a chain from the floor and stuck it in a groove that had been hammered around the holes on one side of the cuff. While holding everything in place with his left hand he grabbed a red hot rivet from the fire with his tongs and skillfully drew it through both holes and the chain from the underside of the cuff. He moved everything to the side of the anvil, so the rivet rested on it, and began to hit the end of the rivet without a head with his hammer.

Clang! I could feel the heat radiating from the rivet on my skin that wasn't shielded by a 10 lbs shackle. Clang! Clang! Any other time I would be fascinated with how quickly you can hammer down a hot rivet, but now the feeling of dread had shifted to something else. Every swing of the hammer reverberated up my leg, just adding more and more despair to what this meant for me. He fished out another hot rivet, put it through the eye on the other side, and hammered it in place too.

Once the last blow had landed he grabbed the chain and pulled on it hard, yanking my foot off the anvil. He then rattled the chain in the other direction, and I saw it snaking across the dirt floor to a second cuff already riveted around Lucas' ankle.

"20 grown mens feet," the smith said. "That's how far apart thee may do thy business."

I did the only thing I could think of. Without even standing up I rolled over and grabbed a hammer and brought it down hard on my shin.

This time I was prepared. I leapt out of bed, ready to sprint to the door. I didn't feel the weight of 10 lbs of iron around my ankle, which I hadn't actually thought of one way or the other. A welcome surprise. Then things turned to shit. Despite probably being a lot stronger I was between 100 and 200 lbs heavier, with a very different weight distribution. Probably. I'd never stood up in the real world looking like this. Whatever the contributing factors I was unable to move properly, and was falling forward. I tried to change my footing and got a flash of pain from my leg, which I had made a pretty dedicated effort into banging the shit out of with a blacksmith hammer. I screamed out in pain, and felt like I was about to black out. My mind filled with fear and visions of hands reaching up through the floor. Somewhere back in my brain the tiny part that developed tens of millions of years ago to ignore pain and whatever damage your movements would make to your body, just so you could continue to run from hunting teeth decided to step in. This was not the moment for higher order though. This was the time of panicked flight.

I pushed myself up from the floor with the strength of a muscled up man overflowing with adrenaline and bolted straight in the direction of the door, with no thoughts of Lucas or clothes or anything. Approximately 20 feet from the bed what felt like a shackle collar yanked my already severely hurting leg and again I crashed into the glossy oak floorboards. In panic I reached to grab the chain, but only grasped air. Instead I grabbed one of the wooden columns that might still be load-bearing and pulled myself forward. In the bed I could see the sheets on Lucas side filling until his body was back in bed, as muscled as last time he'd seen him, pumping air. "Lucas! Lucas! Wake up! Run!" I screamed at the top of my lungs, while trying to pull him out of bed with the invisible, intangible chain attached to my leg by bracing against the post and doing like a cable glute kickback thing. There was a thud as he rolled out of the bed onto the floor.

His eyes opened and a look of confusion came over him as he looked at me, then at himself, then back at me. "What..." I cut him off with "Get up and run! Leave the house!"

To his credit he must have seen the urgency in my face and heard it in my voice that he just jumped to his feet and quickly moved towards me. Halfway there I turned and moved the last distance to the door, unlocked it and limped out and collapsed in the wet grass somewhere between the house and the rental car on the gravel road, now looking small and ordinary. Lucas knelt next to me. Both our bodies were visibly steaming in the cold October night. "What the fuck is going on?" and, once he saw my bruised leg "Are you hurt?" I love him so much that that's where his concerns were.

My heart rate was slowly calming down. "The forge," I said, still noticeably panting. "The forge in the dream. It changed us. You were working the bellows. You don't remember?"

He lifted his arm to scratch the back of his head, which I normally adored, but with his new body was absolutely boner-inducing, as he did when he was a bit confused. "I thought I was at the gym." He stopped as if he was trying to visualize it. "I had this whole dream like I was at the gym. There was a trainer there, a lean guy in his forties with a tight smile. He asked if I wanted to pump iron. It felt so good." His voice trailed off.

Then he suddenly snapped back "You're naked! I'm naked!" and he turned to run into the house to grab some clothes. "Lucas, wait!"

I was at least lying down, though the yank was in my bad leg. Lucas fell front forward into the grass. "Yeah, and also we can't be more than 20 feet away anymore."