The woman in the bathrobe put the gun to her own head.
The door opened (there was now a door). Hennessy stood in it. Not the Hennessy who was dreaming, but another Hennessy. She was standing a little differently than Hennessy did now. A little more softly, her shoulders a little more sloped. She wore a white T-shirt, nice jeans, flowers embroidered on the butt pockets.
“Mum?” Hennessy said.
“You won’t miss me,” Hennessy’s mother said.
“Wait,” Hennessy said.
The gun barrel flashed.
The dream dissipated with the reverberation of the shot, and Hennessy came to with a second Hennessy staring at her from the edge of the fairy ring, the mushrooms trampled.
Ronan looked at that new Hennessy for a split second and then said, “Lindenmere, take her.”
The forest dissolved the second Hennessy, incorporating her at once into the fine grass as if she had never been. The original Hennessy reeled, her hand pressed to her throat.
“That’s not the dream you described to me,” Ronan said.
Hennessy was breathing slow and hard, unfocused.
Ronan stalked over to her and pushed her shoulder with his boot. “That wasn’t the dream you told me. Was that a memory? Did that happen?”
“Give—me—a—tick,” Hennessy said.
“No,” Ronan said simply. “You don’t need a second. Lindenmere is dreaming for you. You aren’t doing any heavy lifting here. Did that happen?”
When Hennessy didn’t answer, Opal tenderly scrambled round into Hennessy’s lap. She pulled Hennessy’s hand away from her throat, kissed it, and hugged it.
“Did it?” Ronan asked.
Hennessy was as sullen as Opal when she didn’t get her way. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Control your thoughts or we’re getting the fuck out of here,” Ronan said. He stepped down to the edge of the clearing again. “We go again.”
Rinse.
Repeat.
The glen dimmed. The music played. The woman lifted the gun.
“Don’t let it open,” Ronan said. “Don’t let it play through.”
The door opened.
“Mum?” said Hennessy.
“You won’t miss me.”
“Wait—”
Another Hennessy appeared again, splitting immediately off the first, as if she were peeling the memory like a skin.
“Lindenmere, take it away,” Ronan said impatiently.
The dream fled; the extra Hennessy seeped into the soil.
Hennessy squeezed the heels of her hands against her eyes.
“Did that happen?” Ronan asked. “Or are we playing let’s pretend?”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” Hennessy said.
“What are we even here for today? Are you even going to try?” Ronan strode to the center of the glen and cupped his hands over one of the knocked-over mushrooms until he felt it grow tall and sturdy beneath his palms. “Again. The actual dream this time.”
Rinse.
Repeat.
The clearing went dark. Jazz filtered in. The gun, lifted. The doorknob, turning.
“Not you,” Ronan said. “Anyone else. Santa Claus. A dog. No one at all; an empty room. You’re not even trying to control it.”
The door opened.
“Mum?” said Hennessy.
“You’re not even fucking trying!” Ronan said, and shot the extra Hennessy.
The real Hennessy came to with a start, gasping, fingers clawing the grass. She stared at the gun in his hand.
“How did you get that?”
“Lindenmere is a dream,” he snarled. “I told you. All you have to do is try. It’s only doing what you ask it, and you’re asking it for that. I asked it for a gun. Now I’m going to ask it to take it away. Lindenmere, take this shit away.”
The gun and the dead copy melted away.
“Why are we doing this? Where’s the dream?”
“I’m trying.”
“I don’t think you are.”
Opal leaned against Hennessy, chewing on a watch Adam had given her long ago. She spoke around it. “She is trying.” But she couldn’t be trusted. She had a soft spot for the downtrodden, being one of them.
“Again,” said Ronan. “At least have the guts to get rid of the other copy. This is everything, do you get that? We have all this, we can do so much. It means we have to be ready to do what we need to do to make sure we don’t fuck everything up. No one else gets it. This is what we live with. Again.”
Rinse. Repeat.
Darkness, jazz, a gun, a trigger.
“Do not let a copy survive this,” Ronan ordered. “If you won’t change anything else—”
“Mum?” Hennessy said.
“You won’t miss me.”
“Wait—”
Hennessy gasped and curled on herself. Ronan knelt beside her, put his gun in her hand, pointed it at the newly formed copy. “This is what you do in the dream. No one’s going to help you with this.”
Hennessy made a helpless sound as he squeezed her finger on the trigger. She began to cry without tears, just the ragged, hopeless sobs.
“Lindenmere,” Ronan said angrily, “take it away.”
The duplicate copy seeped into the ground.
“I can’t,” Hennessy said.
“Did this really happen?” Ronan asked.
“I can’t.”
Ronan sat back in the grass. “Fuck.”
Opal whispered, “Bryde.”
The name felt enormous spoken here in this place. It was the same word it always was, but here, in Lindenmere, it meant something different. Here in Lindenmere, he could say Bryde and possibly call the real Bryde, or he could say Bryde and invoke a copy, everything Ronan thought Bryde ought to be, like Hennessy and her copies.
He supposed Bryde would say that both versions were real.
Opal was still peering up at Ronan intently.
“Okay,” he said. “Yes.”
I had a dream last night,” Bryde said. “That’s what everyone says. I had a dream last night, and this is what it was about, it was crazy. It was about a hospital for zombies. It was about my fifth birthday party. It was about a space station but all the astronauts were actually you, isn’t that crazy?”
His voice came from somewhere very close in the trees. He had not said don’t look for me but the sense of it hung in the dark, shaggy mist that moved between the tree trunks of Lindenmere. Hennessy couldn’t tell what kind of a person he was from his voice. It could be any age. It was sure of itself, though, calm. Wry. It had seen things, the voice implied.
“Everyone thinks their dream is about something else,” Bryde said. “It’s just you. You’re not dreaming about your mother. You’re dreaming about how you feel about your mother. Your mother’s not there. You’re not that powerful. You aren’t pulling her from the afterlife to reenact her death scene for you. You’re just up your own ass.”
Hennessy didn’t feel up her own ass. She really had been trying to think about the Lace. She didn’t know why she had to keep looking at that shitty memory instead. “I’m not trying to do this. I’m trying to do my other dream.”
“Are you?” Bryde asked. “Do you think this forest lies? Or does it just give you what you ask?”
“I wasn’t asking for this,” she said.
“Your mind wasn’t,” Bryde said. “Your heart, though.”
She couldn’t argue. She had been ignoring what her heart felt about things for too long to pretend to be an expert in it.
“We fool ourselves better than anyone when we’re afraid,” Bryde said.
“Can you help her?” Ronan asked.
Bryde sounded a little amused. “Haven’t I been? Ah—” This was because Ronan tilted his head, as if to look around the trees in the direction of his voice. “That’s a good way to get me to leave.”
“I don’t understand why you’re still hiding,” Ronan said. “You’re here in my biggest se
cret. You know everything about me. I’m not asking for a birth certificate. Just a conversation with your face.”
Bryde said, “That’s because you don’t know what you ask.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice had changed a little. It was a little sad. “If you see me, it means everything’s changed for you. You can’t really go back from meeting me. I wouldn’t take you from your life. And so, this close, no closer. That is the closest you can get without things changing.”
“What happened to skip to the center?” But Ronan didn’t try to look around the trees again.
“I don’t know,” Bryde said. “I don’t know anymore. I don’t know if I want your life to change.”
It was clear from Ronan’s face that he did. He was master of this tremendous place, dreamer of dreams, and still he wanted more.
Hennessy could understand that. She wished Jordan could have been here to see this place. All of them. Maybe she should have brought them all here with her instead of always feeling like she had to carry this by herself. What good had it done in the long run? It was killing her as a secret, anyway.
She spoke up. “I need mine to change.”
There was a very long pause. Opal reached her fist into the air above her and opened it. A little light of joyfulness escaped out of her grip and, instead of raining down, drifted slowly up. They all watched it until it dissolved into the gray.
“Prove it,” Bryde said. “Prove that you two can work together. And if you still want me, come for me together to tell me. But remember what I said. Oh—no. No. The world is going to shit.”
The forest was silent.
He had not said goodbye, and he was not visible for them to see him go, but Hennessy could tell that he was gone. It was a disquieting send-off. She could tell from Ronan’s face this wasn’t how Bryde ordinarily vanished.
“I’m going to do it,” Hennessy said. “Don’t let me fall too hard, Lynch.”
The clearing became dark.
This was how the dream began: in darkness.
There was no sound.
There was the vast movement of time and space, which had its own substance in the dream, but was not exactly sound. There was nothing in the dream you could really look at. There was nothing in the dream you could really put words to.
There was Hennessy, and in the dream, Hennessy knew she could manifest anything, if she really wanted to. It was limited only by her imagination—what an impossible, terrifying, brilliant truth. She’d been given this talent when born and not told how to use it. Given this talent and watched it kill her mother, or at least not save her.
She could do better with it.
If only she was dreamt of something besides …
It was there.
She felt it, and then she saw it. Dark and looming, the opposite of color and understanding.
Only its edges made any kind of sense. Slanted and hooked, checkered and geometric. Lacy, if they were anything at all.
Mostly it was bigger. It was bigger than anything she could understand. It was so enormous and old that age didn’t apply to it. It had been there for so long that humans were bacteria to it. Infinitesimal. Irrelevant. It was so much more powerful than they that the only saving grace was that it had never noticed—
Its awareness became a thing in the dream.
It saw Hennessy.
She could feel how awful that weight was. How it changed everything. Now that she had been noticed, she could never be unseen. There were two Hennessys, the one who had lived without knowing this thing existed, and more importantly, without it knowing she existed, and the one who was seen.
Now that it had seen her, it hated her.
It was going to kill her. It was going to kill her like this: It was going to get inside her, it promised, and it was going to kill her just by existing there, because she was so small and porous, and it was everything. She couldn’t hold it inside her.
Or she could let it out, and live.
She would never let it out. She was not strong enough to keep it from moving toward her now, but she was strong enough to never let it out. She wasn’t so weak that she would let anyone else have to live with it looking, seeing, touching, invading—
Declan didn’t ordinarily bring people home.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t gone on dates or hooked up, that unlovely euphemism for what was sometimes a perfectly nice time. It was that he didn’t get too close. Intimacy was allowed as long as it revealed nothing truthful.
Which wasn’t very intimate at all.
He’d had a few long-running relationships, three Ashleys in a row, much to his brothers’ mirth, but they were like hobbies that never paid off. He didn’t know why he was still going to film criticism club and he didn’t know why he was still dating Ashleys. It was such a lot of his schedule for something that eventually cried bitterly that she could tell she didn’t mean anything to him, or he’d have remembered fill in the blank. He got exhausted from carrying all their secrets and giving none of his away.
So he just didn’t normally bring people home. He didn’t really like people knowing where he lived anyway. Where his toothbrush was kept.
But he brought Jordan back home.
It wasn’t exactly like going home with someone else after a date anyway. It was just that it seemed strange to part ways after they’d been told to forget everything they’d ever heard about a mysterious syndicate by a man who was a copy of Declan’s young father.
So they went back to Declan’s place.
He unlocked the door. “After you.”
Jordan did as he asked, noting the town house as she stepped in. He saw it through her eyes: dull, predictable. Tastefully done, yes, expensively done, yes, but forgettably done. Gray sofa, white rugs, sleek contemporary paintings in dark frames. It wasn’t a home, it was a lookbook. Handsome, neutral Declan was simply another accessory in his own house.
He checked his watch as he closed the door behind them. Matthew, to his great relief, had felt better enough to go to his weekend soccer practice. “My brother Matthew’ll be here in about an hour.”
“How many brothers do you have?” But she had already found a photo of them on the entry table. She compared it to him, the gesture similar to when she’d been studying him to paint him.
“Both younger,” he said. “Matthew lives with me.”
“Cute kid,” she said. “Man. Boy. Whatever he is.”
Yes. That was the crux of Matthew, he thought.
“This one looks like the new Fenian,” Jordan said. “Crumbs, a lot like him.”
“Ronan,” Declan said. “Yes. He takes after my father.” He did not want to think about his father. He didn’t want to think about the new Fenian hugging him and telling him he was proud of him. It wasn’t real. How typical of his father that he’d give Declan a puzzle that just led to another dream. “Coffee? Espresso? Latte?”
Jordan let him get away with the subject change. “I could worship a latte right now. Not in a truly devoted way but at the very least in the weekend, casual, sometimes-put-money-in-the-donation-tin way.”
In the kitchen, he concocted a comely latte as she lifted herself up to sit on the counter. He hadn’t turned on the lights, so the only illumination was from the living area and the last of the gray, late-afternoon light outside. It made everything in the little kitchen black and white and gray, a chic sensory deprivation.
When he brought her the coffee, she spread her knees so that he could stand close to her where she sat on the counter, effortlessly sensual, grinning lazily at him. She gestured with the mug around his dining room, toward the visible living area. “Why’d you do this? What a walking tragedy.”
Declan said, “It’s stylish and contemporary.”
“It’s invisible,” she said. She put a hand under his sweater. “You can’t love this stuff.”
“It’s ideal for entertaining.”
“Entertaining robots.” She teased his shirttail out in order to touch skin instead.
“Where’s the real you?”
Safely hidden. “How do you know it’s not the real me?”
“Your shoes.”
He studied her for a long moment, hard enough that she stopped teasing round his skin and instead pretended to pose, her chin adjusted artfully, coffee cup drawn close to her face as if for an advertising shot or a portrait. Girl on Kitchen Counter. Still Life with a Past.
He relented. “Upstairs.”
She slid off the counter at once.
He led her upstairs. He saw it again as she must see it: more carpet. More forgettable framed prints and photographs. At the end of the carpeted hall was a modest master. This was slightly less anonymous; the prints on the wall were all black-and-white photographs of Ireland done in vaguely artistic and nostalgic ways. The bed was made as neatly as a hotel bed. Declan pulled a chair away from the corner of the room and stood on it. There was a door in the ceiling to an attic.
“Up there?” she said.
“You asked.”
As he pulled down the ladder, she looked at the photographs. She put a hand against her temple as if it troubled her.
“Still up for this?” Declan asked.
She dropped her hand. “Beam me up.”
“Hand up your coffee.”
Once they were both up, he pulled a string to illuminate the space with a single lightbulb.
It was an attic crawl space, only tall enough to stand at its very tallest point. He’d put a shabby antique rug down on the floor and covered the unfinished plywood on the slanted ceiling with prints.
Declan leaned back to plug in an enormous sculptural stainless steel lamp in the shape of a violent, art deco angel. She was as tall as Jordan.
“Is that a—” He could see her thinking hard. “Stubenrauch? Right?”
“Reinhard Stubenrauch.” He was absurdly pleased that she knew. He was absurdly pleased to be here with her. He was absurdly pleased. This entire day, this entire week, what a disaster … but he was absurdly pleased.
Jordan, her head ducked, examined one of the pieces carefully taped to the wall with hinges of tape to avoid damaging the front. Black bloomed at either end, and darker black stripes bisected it both violently and delicately, like bamboo leaves or handwriting or wounds. “Jesus, this is an original, Declan. I thought it was a print. Who is this?”
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