Dungeon Goddess Read online

  (Book One)

  By Gideon Caldwell

  Copyright © 2020 Boycott Books

  Edited by Adam Luopa

  All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. I’m pretty sure Gideon Caldwell is not Harmon Cooper. Pretty sure.

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Prologue: Shadow Dragon

  Chapter One: Sleeping Ugly

  Chapter Two: Skelesnakes and Real Life Drama

  Chapter Three: Mountain Dungeon

  Chapter Four: Needle Sleep

  Chapter Five: Back to the Dungeon

  Chapter Six: What Dreams are Made of

  Chapter Seven: Fina

  Chapter Eight: Marossa’s Tower Dungeon

  Chapter Nine: Pink and Yellow

  Chapter Ten: Sent Packing

  Chapter Eleven: Napping with the Hounds

  Chapter Twelve: Dream-Cheating

  Chapter Thirteen: Dungeon Knight

  Epilogue

  Back of the Book Content

  Prologue: Shadow Dragon

  It had been three days since Jake Goodman had been able to rest peacefully, five if he counted the weekend.

  Jake was on the verge of breaking down and doing something drastic when sleep hit him so much harder than it ever had before.

  Finally.

  A chance to rest.

  He was out cold, dead to the world, and within moments Jake found himself standing at the entrance of a cave, a sword in his left hand and a leather whip in his right.

  He had been here before.

  The last time he’d visited this world, Jake had explored the cave until he ran into a beautiful woman with the body of a spider, quickly discovering that along with a crippling case of insomnia, he also suffered from arachnophobia.

  Hoping to avoid the spider woman this time, at least until he got a better understanding of where he was and what he was capable of doing here, Jake turned away from the entrance of the cave, noticing that a mountain pass curved off to the left, the pathway large enough for a half-crumpled statue of a goddess to be erected on it, one of her breasts still intact, the woman standing above a pile of scrolls, the bottom of the statue covered in moss.

  Upon further examination of the mountain pass, Jake discovered steps carved into the rock.

  Perhaps this wasn’t just a random dream location, perhaps there was something else here.

  Jake took the steps as he glanced out over the side of the cliff, the valley shrouded in darkness.

  It was night, the moon a red orb in the distance. There was an occasional bolt of purple lightning in the sky, the scent of soil in the air as if it had recently rained.

  By the time he got to the top of the stone steps, Jake was past the point of wondering if this was some sort of lucid dream.

  He was beyond trying to understand how such a vivid hallucination played into his abnormal sleeping conditions, and he was done caring that he didn’t exist in this dream world, that this was all a figment of his imagination, perhaps stemming from the extra spicy Kung Pao Chicken he had in Chinatown for dinner and currently broiling in his gut.

  Perhaps...

  Jake’s eyes fell upon an abandoned fortress carved into the rockface, its turrets still intact, a strange flame glowing in its center and providing a silvery light to the setting.

  Movement caught Jake’s attention.

  An enormous shadow swelled out of one of the turrets, forming into the body of a colossal dragon, its teeth made of sharpened metal, a set of seven eyes moving up its snout.

  He barely managed to get his sword up in time.

  The shadow dragon gnashed its teeth as it tried to sweep him off his feet with a clawed hand, Jake cutting it away, suddenly taking to the air, moving in a way he’d never moved before.

  It all came naturally now, Jake flipping backward to avoid another swipe, sending his whip forward and cracking it against the dragon’s face as it spat a silver ball of fire at him, the beast hissing, flames trickling out of its terrible maw.

  He swerved right, avoiding another burst of flames as he swatted one of the dragon’s claws away with his sword.

  Narrowly avoiding another fireball, Jake dropped to the ground and leaped back into the air, taking complete control over gravity this time.

  And while he was suddenly all-powerful, able to fight in a way that he had never fought before, he was also too preoccupied with the shadow dragon’s claws and razor-sharp teeth to notice that it had a barbed tail.

  Jake was instantly swept through the air, the dragon’s barbed tail hurtling him into one of the turrets, huge bricks of stone falling onto him as everything settled, dust billowing into the air, accented by the silver light that continued to glow within the abandoned fortress.

  The tail lifted him again and yanked Jake out of the turret, driving him straight into the stony ground.

  The dragon landed before Jake and held him with its claws as it tore slivers of flesh from his back.

  And that should have ended the dream.

  Jake should have woken up at this point, his heart a drunken snare drum in his chest, beads of sweat drenching his sheets, that first sweet gasp of air immediately calming him, letting him know that it was a nightmare.

  That’s all it was, a nightmare.

  It wasn’t real.

  But Jake was forced to suffer.

  He was forced to feel his body torn apart limb from limb, everything but his neck and skull.

  And at the end of all of it, after his body had been devoured, he was nothing more than a severed head resting against a rock.

  He noticed the shadow start to shrink.

  As it did, Jake caught a glimpse of a nude woman with long dark hair, nacreous eyes and wide hips, a faint pink energy glowing about her.

  She morphed into the shadow dragon again, and finished him off.

  Chapter One: Sleeping Ugly

  Jake Goodman was running late for work.

  His phone alarm sounding off, he rolled out of bed and nearly got caught in his sheets as his bare feet met the cold wooden floor, momentarily forgetting about the intense dream he had just lived through.

  The scent of deep-fried chicken met his nostrils as he turned off his alarm, the device strategically placed on his dresser to force him to get up.

  The chefs in the Chinese restaurant below his shoebox-sized apartment were going full throttle with their woks, making him regret the leftovers he’d eaten last night.

  No time for coffee or to grab a snack, Jake slipped into a pair of jeans and a loose-fitting Guggenheim T-shirt that he’d had for a year now. He stepped into the bathroom to run some water on his face and his beard.

  Once he was done brushing his teeth, he laced up a pair of work boots, and stuffed his phone and keys in his pocket.

  Jake reached the front door and returned to his nightstand to grab his wallet, jamming it into his back pocket.

  Upon taking one more look at his ultra-efficiency apartment in New York’s Chinatown, he noticed he still had a box of takeout sitting near his bed.

  Not wanting to attract rodents, he took the takeout box with him, disposing of it in the public trash can outside his building.

  It was night, and Jake needed to get to the museum.

  He hardly paid attention to his surroundings as he rushed to the Canal Street Station, where he hopped on the 6 train heading toward the Upper East Side.

  Lucky enough to find a seat on the train, Jake plopped down, finally able to catch his breath.

  The train picked up speed, and he took his phone out to check his sleep stats.

  Forced to be a penny pincher due
to the cost of living in New York City, Jake had sprung for one of the cheaper knock-off sleep tracking devices.

  Pressing the button to open the app, he quickly noticed that he’d actually gotten a pretty good amount of sleep in the four hours and thirty-five minutes he’d been out, which was probably why he felt well-rested.

  The blueish purple bar indicated his solid chunk of sleep, its beginning punctuated with turquoise chunks that were listed as ‘restless’ and red chunks listed as the dreaded ‘awake.’

  Awake.

  Jake had been awake for so long over the last five days that they had blurred together.

  He blamed it on a new art piece being installed at the Guggenheim Museum, Jake working the overnight shift.

  The installation piece was known as Dungeon Goddess, and the artist who had conceived it had all sorts of insane instructions for the museum preparators.

  But Jake was used to that sort of thing by now.

  He had been moving works of art, helping with the larger installations, and carefully taking down the pieces whenever it was time for them to go for several years now.

  Hailing from Austin, Texas, it was the first job that he had obtained when he moved to New York City.

  It sort of fit him in a way.

  The job as a museum preparator allowed him to be physically active, some of the pieces requiring some pretty strenuous lifting and climbing, as well as other athletic feats that reminded him of some of the MMA training and fitness regimen stuff that he had been into back in Texas.

  He didn’t really have time for training now, but he hadn’t lost much of his muscle mass. He was still pretty chiseled.

  An Asian woman with a cup of coffee in her hand sat down next to Jake, sipping from her coffee as she typed on her phone with one hand.

  The train started up again and stopped suddenly, the paper coffee cup leaving the woman’s hand and cracking against Jake’s knee.

  Most of the hot coffee landed on the floor, but some of it splashed onto his leg, Jake wincing at the pain.

  “Oh my God,” she said, dropping her phone too as the train picked up again. “I’m so sorry!”

  The woman reached towards Jake’s leg like she was going to pat it with her hand, realized he was a stranger, and stopped herself just in time, offering him a toothy grin.

  She had an accent, English clearly the second or third language she spoke. As Jake took her in, he noticed that she was wearing a pair of black contacts that made her eyes look larger.

  “Hello? Are you okay? Can you hear me?”

  Jake shook his head. “Sorry, yeah, I’m fine. I just spaced out there for a moment.”

  The woman started to laugh. “Even after someone spilled hot coffee on you?”

  Jake looked down at the brown liquid, noticing how it had already started to spread toward the exit door.

  “It wasn’t too much.”

  “I’m sorry. Please don’t sue me.”

  Now it was Jake’s turn to laugh. “It happens. Most of it landed on my boot anyway,” he said with a shrug, nodding toward his thick pair of leather Timberlands.

  The train came to a stop and the woman stood. “This is it for me.”

  “Just one stop?” he asked her with a smile.

  “Sorry about the coffee. I’ll tell someone out there.”

  “Yeah, tell someone,” Jake said as he watched the Asian woman leave.

  She was shapely and petite, wearing a pair of yoga leggings, a shirt that showed her midriff, and a jacket that barely reached the bottom of her buttocks.

  “Should have gotten her number,” Jake said under his breath as the door slid shut.

  “No, you should have tried to sue her,” a man sitting across from him said in a thick New York accent, cracking up. “Easiest way to get her number.”

  Jake hadn’t noticed the man before, the guy in a suit that looked like it had been worn all day, the collar loose, his tie hanging from his neck, bags under his eyes.

  “Next time.”

  The man snorted. “Yeah, right.”

  Jake came to his stop, and as he exited the train, he admired some of the old-school tile work on the walls of the crowded subway station.

  He grabbed a hotdog outside the station, regretting his purchase as he paid for it, knowing that it usually gave him stomach troubles later on.

  To compensate for this, Jake dipped into a bodega and picked up a protein bar and a kombucha, figuring that the probiotics would help fight against any stomach issues caused by the hot dog.

  He made it to the back entrance of the Guggenheim and scanned himself in, walking past a series of pallets, the room dimly lit.

  As he did so, Jake noticed something move in the shadows of the room.

  He paused, suddenly recalling the dream he’d just had, the shadow dragon and the beautiful woman that he could have sworn he’d seen at the end of it.

  He shook his head.

  It seemed so real at the time, unlike any dream he’d had before.

  “My dude,” a voice came from his right, startling him.

  He turned to see Gerome in his Guggenheim shirt, the man’s thick dreads tied up into a topknot. His coworker wore a pair of clear work glasses that were strapped to the back of his head, Gerome giving Jake a funny look once he saw that he was holding a kombucha.

  “When did you start drinking that shit?” he asked.

  “Had a hot dog. Figured it would help,” Jake told him.

  “What would help would be not having that hot dog.” Gerome came forward and clapped hands with Jake. “Anyway, dude, we got to get working on this. It’s getting crazier.”

  “It is?”

  “This shit is going to be giving me nightmares.”

  Gerome led Jake through a back door that opened onto the second floor of the museum.

  Jake barely paid attention to the spiral architecture anymore, accustomed to it now.

  When he first started working here, he had always taken a moment to take in the views, most of the museum visible from each level, the art taking on different forms if he looked at it from a level up, or a level down, as it moved along the cathedral-like space.

  There were a couple other wings too, one that generally contained rotating pieces and another that had a bunch of postmodern works.

  But Jake rarely went into those.

  He sipped from his beverage as they took the spiral to the next floor up, coming to the start of the Dungeon Goddess exhibition.

  It wasn’t the first time Jake had seen an artist trying to do this, make two-dimensional artwork in three-dimensions, hoping to provoke some type of conversation.

  “Just take a look at this,” Gerome said, handing him a piece of paper.

  “Man,” Jake mumbled, noticing how the portrait was supposed to spread onto the floor, intricate directions as to how it was to be arranged laid out on the paper step-by-step. “This thing has to be twenty pages long.”

  “More like forty.”

  Jake mumbled as he sifted through more of the directions.

  At first, it didn’t make any sense, like most of the stuff that Jake helped set up, especially the installation pieces. But after flipping through to the finished concept, he noticed that when viewed from certain angles, it almost looked like…

  “Damn, that’s sick,” he said, laughing to himself.

  Gerome nodded. “I know, right? I mean, it’s crazy. But all this shit we set up is crazy. But this is like something else, man. I mean, look at this.”

  “We’re supposed to set all this up tonight?”

  “Yup, and a different one tomorrow night. They’re giving this lady the next two floors. I’ve never seen the museum do anything like this. I mean, some of these are permanent pieces. They had us box them up, if you remember.”

  “I remember,” said Jake, looking from the directions in his hand to the current state of the installation.

  “We just got to follow the directions perfectly,” Gerome said. “Shit is like IKEA
or something.”

  “Have you ever actually tried to put something together from IKEA?”

  Gerome snorted. “Too many times. My ex always had me putting things together.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Man, she worked at IKEA. She was always using her employee discount to buy stuff for friends, and her family members. And who’s the guy to set it up? Me. Motherfucking Gerome. The things we do to get some ass, am I right?”

  “You aren’t wrong,” Jake said as he turned back to the first page of the instructions. “Let’s do this.”

  Over the next three hours, Jake and Gerome carefully connected the strings to the nails on the floor, and set up the walls around the piece that allowed for the lighting to play with the shadows.

  It was starting to look more like the diagram, Jake still not able to believe how it would turn out in the end.

  What bothered him more was how much it was starting to match the vision from his dream.

  “You said you were having nightmares, right?” he asked Gerome, just as they were planning to take a lunch break.

  “Nah, not yet. I just said these pieces were going to give me nightmares. You?”

  “I don’t really sleep well,” Jake said, not mentioning the strange dream he’d had earlier.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Gerome said, his voice lowering. “You should do a sleep study or something. Easy money, man. I think you can go to Yale to take one, and like, stay there for a week or something. I had a buddy that did that. Said New Haven was all right, good pizza, bunch of Yalies you could get lucky with.”

  “You think?”

  Gerome shrugged. “Why the hell not?”

  “I’ll be fine. I’m going to eat something real quick and try to doze off for a minute or three. Do you mind?”

  “Have at it, Sleeping Ugly. I’ll come get you when it’s time to wake up,” Gerome said. “I got to make some calls anyway.”

  “Cool. Thanks.”

  Jake went to the warehouse attached to the back of the Guggenheim, where they kept some of the less valuable works of art.

  It was dark, the rows lit by ground lighting and an occasional light triggered by motion.