Mister Impossible

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Ronan turned on the bathroom light and saw the mirror. He was in the mirror. The Ronan in the mirror said to him: Ronan!

  And he twitched awake again, this time for real.

  Ordinarily, when one woke, it was obvious the dream was a pretender. But this time, dreaming about dreaming … it had felt so real. The floorboards; the cold, chipped tiles of the bathroom; the sputter of the tap.

  This time, when he got up for that glass of water, the real glass, the waking glass, he was sure to marvel his fingertips over everything he passed, reminding himself of how specific waking reality was. The bumpy plaster walls. The rubbed-smooth curve of the chair-rail molding. The puff of air from behind Matthew’s door as he pushed it open to see his younger brother sleeping.

  You’re awake. You’re awake.

  This time, in the bathroom, he paid attention to the moon slatted through the blinds, the faded copper stain around the base of the old faucet. These were details, he thought, the sleeping brain couldn’t invent.

  Ronan turned on the bathroom light and saw the mirror. He was in the mirror. The Ronan in the mirror said to him: Ronan!

  And then he woke in his bed again.

  Again, again.

  Shit.

  He gasped for air like a dying thing.

  Ronan couldn’t tell if he was awake or if he was dreaming, and he no longer knew how to interrogate the difference. He examined every part of both dream and waking and felt no seam between them.

  He thought: I might be doing this forever. Trying to wake, never knowing if he had succeeded.

  Sometimes he wondered if he was still in that dream. Maybe he had never woken at all. Maybe every impossible thing that had happened since that Ronan! in the mirror, all the outrageous events of his high school years, good and bad, had been in his head. It was as plausible an explanation as any.

  The worst dream.

  Before, he thought he’d always know the difference between dream and waking. What was real and what he’d invented. But After—

  “Wake up, white boy, we’re here,” Hennessy said.

  Ronan woke as the car pulled to a stop, tires crunching gravel, brush scratching the exterior. He had been stretched in the backseat; now he sat up, pressing the heel of his hand to the crick in his neck. On the other side of the backseat, Chainsaw, his dreamt raven, scrabbled inside her box, sensing they were about to get out. Automatically, he reached for his phone to check for texts before remembering it was gone.

  Outside, the cold afternoon had turned to a warm, golden evening. Flat-roofed buildings huddled around a commercial parking lot, the gutters gilded fondly by the late-day light. It was the sort of complex that looked as if it ought to have school buses parked in front of it, and sure enough, Ronan spotted a faded sign: WEST VIRGINIA MUSEUM OF LIVING HISTORY. An unhindered tree-of-heaven grew around the sign, and tributaries of overgrown cracks ran through the parking lot. End-of-season leaves curled auburn and purple wherever the breeze couldn’t reach.

  The Museum of Living History looked like it had been dead for decades.

  Just the kind of place Bryde usually brought them. In the weeks since they’d fled from the Moderators on the bank of the Potomac, Bryde had directed them to collapsed houses, empty vacation rentals, shuttered antique stores, vacant airport hangars, disused hiking shelters. Ronan couldn’t tell if Bryde’s preference for the decrepit was grounded in secrecy or aesthetic. It felt like secret didn’t have to be synonymous with abandoned, but Bryde nevertheless brought them to places that few human hands had touched in recent memory. These lodgings always lacked creature comforts, but Ronan couldn’t complain. The three of them were alive, weren’t they? Three dreamers, wanted by the law, still standing, bristling with piss and vinegar as they climbed out of their dreamt car.

  Bryde said, “Listen. What do you hear?”

  He said this every time they got someplace new.

  Ronan heard the dry hiss of the wind through trapped leaves. The distant roar of trucks on the highway. The murmur of an unseen airplane. A dog barking. Some kind of buzzing generator far away. The soft whoosh of Chainsaw’s wings. Watching the black-feathered bird rise above the three of them in this strange warm place filled him with a feeling he couldn’t describe, one he’d been feeling more and more since they’d fled. It was like a fullness. A presence, a realness. Before, he had been hollow, drained. No, draining. Becoming empty. And now there was something inside him again.

  Listen, Bryde said, and Ronan listened. What did he hear? His pulse in his ears. The stir of his blood. The movement of his soul. The hum of the thing that was filling him.

  It couldn’t be happiness, he thought, because he was far from his brothers and from Adam. He worried about them, and surely he couldn’t be happy if he was worried.

  But it felt a lot like happiness.

  “When the last human dies, there will still manage to be a plane whining over the empty forest,” Bryde said.

  Although he was complaining, his voice remained measured. He was, in most ways, the polar opposite of his mercurial pupils. Nothing startled him nor sent him flying off the handle. He did not laugh hysterically or burst into rageful tears. He did not swagger or self-abase, indulge or self-abnegate. He simply was. Everything about his posture announced him not as an apex predator, but rather as something powerful enough that he could opt out of the predator-prey scenario entirely. All of this without a tousled lock of tawny hair out of place.

  He’s sort of a dandy, Hennessy had said to Ronan privately, on the first day. Like, a super-dandy. He beat all the other dandies and now he’s the boss-dandy, the one you have to defeat to get that button-down shirt of his.

  Ronan didn’t like the word dandy, but he understood what she was trying to say. There was something light and insubstantial about Bryde, something dissonant with the weight of his purpose. Ever since he’d met Bryde, in person, Ronan had thought there was something surprising about him, a mismatch, a weird join-up of the wires in Ronan’s brain, like he was thinking of one word but saying another. It meant that every time Ronan looked at Bryde for long, it felt as if a shapeless question formed in Ronan’s mouth.

  But what could the question be? The answer was always just Bryde.

  Bryde asked, “What do you feel?”

  Hennessy launched into a dynamite monologue. She was a tape that had always been playing fast, and since they’d gone on the run, she’d shifted into fast-forward. “Feel? Feel? What do I feel? I feel West Virginia. You might be forgiven for thinking you feel Virginia. It’s close, so close, but it’s got a bit more of a leather perfume to it. I’m tasting—what am I tasting?—I’m getting a bit of a banjo mouthfeel. Mm. No. Dulcimer. That’s the one. I knew there were strings involved. Something else is coming through. Is it kudzu? Hold on, let me let it breathe. Is that a note of sulfur?”

  Hennessy couldn’t be stopped mid-swing, so Bryde waited ruefully and Ronan got his bag and his sword with the words VEXED TO NIGHTMARE on the hilt. He slung both over his back, adjusting the scabbard so that the blade hung neatly between his shoulder blades. He wasn’t going to bother with this particular game of Bryde’s anyway; he already knew it was one he couldn’t win.

  When Bryde asked What do you feel? what he meant was How much ley power can you feel?

  And Ronan had never been able to feel the power of the invisible ley lines that fueled his dreams. At least not while he was awake. Adam could. If Ronan and Hennessy hadn’t ditched their phones on the first night to keep the Moderators from using them as tracking devices, Ronan could have texted him for some tips.

  Well, maybe.

  By the time they’d ditched their phones, Adam still hadn’t answered Ronan’s last text. Tamquam, Ronan had messaged, which was always supposed to be answered by alter idem. But Adam hadn’t replied at all.

  The silence sort of made this—the being away—easier.

  What do you feel?

  Confused.

  “If you’re finished,” Bryde said
drily. “The ley line. What do you feel?”

  “There’s some?” Hennessy guessed. “Bigger than a bread box, smaller than a lawn mower? Enough for Ronan Lynch to make a mess later.”

  Ronan flipped her a lazy bird.

  “Flip your senses, not your fingers, Ronan,” Bryde told him. “This division between your waking and sleeping selves is artificial, and I promise you, one day soon the space between them will not bring you joy. Get your things, Hennessy. We’re here for the night.”

  “Just what I was hoping you’d say.” Hennessy groped around like a zombie. “I’ve lost Burrito. Ronan Lynch, tell me if I’m getting warm—oof, never mind.”

  Burrito, the car, wasn’t truly invisible, because Bryde had cautioned against dreaming true invisibility. He didn’t like them to dream anything that was permanent, infinite, repeating, impossible to undo. He didn’t like any creation that left an invulnerable carbon footprint after its maker was gone. So the car wasn’t invisible. It was simply ignorable. Ronan was pretty proud of it. Bryde had specifically asked him for a discreet vehicle, and clearly had no doubts Ronan could deliver. It had felt good to be needed. Trusted. He wished the process of dreaming it into being had gone a little bit more elegantly … but win some, lose some.

  As Hennessy shouldered on a sword that matched Ronan’s, apart from having a hilt that read from chaos, Ronan called up, “Chainsaw, we’re going in!”

  The raven tunneled down through the air to him. Ronan turned his head just in time to keep from getting a faceful of talons as she landed on his shoulder.

  Bryde pushed open the door to the museum.

  “Was it locked?” Hennessy asked.

  “Was it?” Bryde replied. “After you.”

  Inside, the West Virginia Museum of Living History was unkempt and unintentionally hilarious. Cluttered, dim hallways led them past room upon room of life-sized dioramas with vintage props and faded mannequins. Here, students in overalls and/or pigtails gave rapt attention to a mannequin teacher in an old-fashioned schoolroom. There, a sturdy doctor examined a less sturdy patient in a field hospital. Here, women’s rights activists lobbied for votes. There, miners descended into a concrete cave mouth. The mannequins’ faces were cartoonishly simple. It all smelled, even above and beyond what one would expect from a building abandoned since the 1970s.

  Ronan said, “This place is looking at me. What is that reek?”

  “ ‘The West Virginia Museum of Living History provides an immersive experience through sight, sound, and smell.’ ” Hennessy had found a brochure and she narrated it as she stepped around boxes and furniture pulled out into the hall. “ ‘Over five hundred unique scents are piped into diverse’—Diverse? Really?—‘scenarios. Students fall back through time in a one-of-a-kind outing they’re sure to remember!’ ”

  “Give me a hand,” said Bryde.

  He had already dragged two mannequins into the hall and was going back for a third. He stood them shoulder to shoulder in the hall. He didn’t have to explain what he was doing. In the dim light, the mannequins looked convincingly and confusingly vital, at least enough to give an intruder pause. A sham army.

  Ronan was beginning to understand that Bryde’s first instinct was always to play with his enemies’ heads. He would fight if he must, but he always preferred having his opponents defeat themselves.

  “You just gonna stand there?” Ronan asked Hennessy as he and Bryde dragged out a snazzy executive in a three-piece suit, a wartime housewife in a flowered dress, and three cadets in dusty uniforms.

  “I can’t touch bad art.” Hennessy gestured to a sailor with unevenly painted eyes. “It will rub off on me. What a way to lose my powers.”

  Without malice, Bryde observed, “If I had the same policy about dreamers, you wouldn’t be here.”

  Ronan made a sizzling sound as he touched a train conductor’s cheek. “That burned so hot this guy’s face melted. In fact—”

  “ ‘The West Virginia Museum of Living History is also’ ”—Hennessy raised her voice to drown Ronan out, the brochure held in front of her face—“ ‘available for overnight birthday parties and weekend home-school outings. Discounts available for groups over three.’ Shit. If only we had one more dreamer, the money we would save. We could put it toward Ronan Lynch’s college fund. Not for going to college; for when he burns one down and insurance doesn’t cover it. Bryde, love, any chance we can pick up a hitchhiker? Another dreamer who will fail you less than I? For a family fun pack?”

  Bryde stepped away from the mannequins, dusting off his hands. “Do you want another?”

  Ronan didn’t care to think about this. It gave him the same vibe he used to get back at the Barns some nights, when he got trapped in one particular train of thought, where he imagined he and Adam had been together a very long time and then Ronan died of old age or bad choices and Adam found someone else and later they all three were reunited in the afterlife, and rather than getting to spend the rest of eternity together, Adam had to split his time between Ronan and this stupid usurper he’d fallen in love with as a widower, which completely ruined the point of Heaven. And that was before Ronan even got to worrying if Adam made it to the afterlife at all, with his agnostic tendencies.

  “Three’s a good number,” Ronan growled, shooting Hennessy a dark look as they headed deeper into the museum. “Burrito’s built for three.”

  “You can fit two more people in the backseat,” Hennessy said.

  “Not if the person in the backseat’s lying down.”

  “Good point. If you’re spooning, you could probably stack four or five people back there. Two more in the trunk.”

  “Dreamers!” Bryde said, silencing them.

  He stood at the double doors at the end of the mannequin-filled hall, his hands upon the door handles. All that was truly visible of him in the darkness was that tawny tousle of hair, his pale neck, and the light stripe down each of his gray jacket’s sleeves. It made him look a bit like a stick figure or a skeleton, the bare minimum required to appear human.

  As he pushed open the doors, warm light poured into the hallway.

  The space on the other side was as large as a gymnasium. The roof had collapsed long ago. The golden evening found its way down through the jagged hole as a striving tree covered with creeper found its way up through it. The dust dazzled in the light. Everything smelled like real life, not one of five hundred scents piped in.

  “Yes,” Bryde said, as if answering a question.

  It was like a cathedral to ruination. Pigeons burst up from the shadows with a puff of sound. Ronan fell back in surprise; Hennessy threw a reflexive hand over her head. Bryde didn’t flinch, watching them vanish through the roof. Chainsaw threw herself after them with a joyful ark, ark, ark, sounding enormous and menacing.

  “Balls,” Ronan hissed, annoyed to have been startled.

  “Tits,” added Hennessy.

  As they stepped farther in, another batch of birds burst from a pollen-coated carriage, knocking a mannequin onto its face.

  “See how it’s become a museum to something entirely different,” Bryde said. “Look how honest it is now.”

  Because of all the leaf litter and undergrowth, it was difficult to say what the exhibit had originally been, although an ivy-covered vintage firetruck a few yards away from the carriage suggested a street scene. Bryde loved the memory of human effort.

  “How many years did it take for this to happen?” Bryde asked aloud. He laid his palm flat against the trunk of the big tree and gazed up through the split roof. “How many years did this have to be untouched before a tree could grow again? How many more years will it take before this place disappears entirely? Will it ever? Or will a post-museum forever be a museum to humans? When we dream something, how long will it last? This is why we do not dream something absolute, something infinite; we are not so egotistical as to assume it will always be wanted or needed. We have to think of what will become of our dreams after we are gone. Our legacy
.”

  Ronan’s legacy was a destroyed Harvard dorm room, an invisible car, and a sword with the words vexed to nightmare etched on the hilt.

  Everything else he’d dreamt would fall asleep the moment he died.

  Hennessy froze.

  She froze so thoroughly that Ronan also froze, looking at her, and because he had frozen, too, Bryde eventually turned and assessed.

  He simply said, “Ah.”

  Unhurried, he reached down into the underbrush by Hennessy’s feet. He straightened, holding a black snake just behind its head. The snake’s muscular body rippled subtly in his grip.

  Head cocked, Bryde studied it. It studied him.

  “It’s cold for you, friend,” he told it. “Is it not time for your sleep?” To Ronan and Hennessy, he said, “She is not the deadliest thing in this room. In the wild, this black snake will only live a decade or so, and the only thing she will hurt is just as many mice as she needs to stay alive. Elegant. Efficient. Wonderful, really. She is the in-out of a measured breath.”

  He offered the snake to Hennessy.

  If there was any part of Hennessy that was afraid of the snake, she didn’t show it. She simply took it, mimicking his hold behind its eyes.

  The snake twisted wildly, body undulating right by Hennessy’s arm, and Hennessy’s torso twisted, too, bowing out of the way of the grasping tail. Then girl and snake seemed to reach an agreement, and they stood quietly in the undergrowth.

  “She’s a fucking knockout. I would paint her,” Hennessy said.

  “Look at her,” Bryde said. “Really look. Memorize her. What are the rules of her? If you were to dream her, what would you need to know?”

  Ronan, high school dropout, had never been one for school, but he liked this. He liked all of it. He liked taking in the effortless, perfect way the hexagons of the snakeskin butted up against each other. He liked watching how the dry, cool skin seemed armored, inflexible, until she moved and it all contracted and expanded, the muscles moving beneath the surface like an entirely different creature lived beneath the skin.