by Kit Alloway
“Then how do you explain what happened in the Hidden Kingdom?”
Mirren was referring to the way Josh had miraculously healed herself and several other people. A lot more than that had happened, but Josh hadn’t talked to anyone about it. She wondered if now was the time to tell Mirren and Feodor.
Feodor was fussing with a napkin, wiping up a drop of coffee that had spilled on the serving tray. Josh waited until he was finished to say to him, “In the Hidden Kingdom, you knew I was dying when you asked me for the activator.”
Suddenly she had all his interest. “Yes,” he admitted without hesitation.
The memory still frightened Josh, the sense of being slowly forced out of her body as if she were being shut down one nerve, one cell at a time.
“How did you know?”
He thought. “There is an expression on the face of someone dying, not so much in the eyes as … the tilt of the head, I suppose. As though they are already looking away toward another place, as though they can see things the living cannot. They are … distracted, by whatever comes next.”
Josh repressed a shiver. That is creepy as hell, she thought.
“After you left,” she said, “I passed out. I knew I was dying. But instead … I went somewhere else.”
Feodor tilted his own head.
“I went to a white place. It didn’t have walls really, everything was just white and misty. There was a black stone pillar with water pouring out of the top, like a fountain, but the water didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere. And on top of the pillar was, like, a white stone egg.”
Mirren sat up very straight then, her eyes wide. To Feodor, she said, “The Cradle?”
“Possibly,” he said, although he seemed less excited and more skeptical than Mirren did.
“The Cradle?” Josh repeated, and then Feodor’s memories came back. They had always been there in her mind—just like the recipes for makowiec and Turkish coffee and pierogies—waiting to be woken with a word or image, and now they blossomed like ink stains behind her eyes.
Many months before, Josh had drawn a Venn diagram for Will, to explain the three universes. “What about this place where all three universes overlap?” he had asked.
“That’s where the diagram breaks down,” Josh had said. “Because there’s no place where the three universes really overlap. Or, I guess I should say that dream theorists think there might be such a place, but no one has proven it.”
She hadn’t given the idea another thought. Until now, when everything Feodor had ever read or thought about such a space came splashing back through her mind.
The place where the three universes overlapped had no official name—just dozens of nicknames. The Cradle. Simtumu. The Dream Forge. No one knew for certain that it existed, but every dream-walking culture seemed to have a legend or a myth about it. The details differed—it was heaven, it was hell, it was where the True Dream Walker lived. The egg Josh had held had a name, too—the Omphalos. The Greeks had called it the Belly Button of the World.
Josh became aware that Feodor was watching her hungrily. “What?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I can almost see the memories coming back to you.”
Josh realized for the first time that he was jealous of her. He’d worked to educate himself for decades; to see such a wealth of knowledge simply handed to Josh must have made him envious.
“You think I went to the Cradle?”
“Did you touch the Omphalos?” Mirren asked.
“Yeah, I held it.” Josh fiddled with her napkin, uncertain how to go on.
“And?” Feodor asked finally.
“I saw all these souls, moving from the World to Death to the Dream, like they were part of a giant, choreographed dance. I could see the path each soul was taking, where they were supposed to go next, and it all fit together, everyone fit together in this sort of—it was like a moving constellation of souls.”
“You are describing the cycle of reincarnation,” Feodor observed dryly.
He was giving her a look he usually reserved for Whim. Mirren, on the other hand, wore a soft, amazed expression.
“That’s beautiful,” she said, and Feodor cast her a withering glance.
His disparagement bothered Josh very little. He had been too cynical for such things since long before she was born.
“You don’t have to believe me,” she told him. “But even you can’t deny the fact that I healed you.”
Feodor had been dying of a gunshot wound to the gut when Josh had her vision.
“I looked at your path, and it didn’t end with you dying at that moment. So I healed you. And I healed Katia’s leg, and I fixed the Hidden Kingdom when it was about to collapse.”
Feodor gave one of his acquiescing shrugs, as if her point meant nothing.
“But you didn’t heal your grandfather?” Mirren asked.
“I was too anxious to see his path. I started to panic, and that snapped me out of that place, or that mind-set, whatever it was. I couldn’t hold on to that feeling.”
Feodor was frowning then, not with irritation but with perplexity. “You entered what seems to have been the Cradle, but you did so without an archway.”
“Death can be entered without an archway,” Mirren pointed out.
“But it requires a ritual, which creates a temporary archway.” He thought. “The first time you accessed your powers as the True Dream Walker, were you not at Death’s doorstep also?”
Josh had been lying in the Dream with a broken skull and a shattered elbow, watching Will bleed out. She didn’t know if she had been dying, but she had certainly been desperate.
“I didn’t go anywhere that time. I felt like I merged with the Dream.”
“What are you thinking?” Mirren asked Feodor.
“I wonder if the two experiences are not different sides of the same coin. This egg you touched—was it the egg that allowed you to heal us?”
“Yes,” Josh said. “But—I felt like I could have done anything while I was holding it. Like I had…”
She didn’t want to say it in front of Feodor, but he finished her thought.
“Unlimited power.”
She lowered her head. “Yeah.”
Feodor had been given unlimited power once, in his own pocket universe. He could have made that place anything he wanted it to be, peopled it with everyone he loved, created his own vision of paradise. Instead, he had recreated Warsaw during World War II. He hadn’t done it on purpose. No matter how many times he attempted to rebuild the city of his childhood, the war always returned to destroy it, because deep inside, Feodor believed the loss was inevitable.
If Josh had managed to keep on holding the egg, what would she have done with that power? What subconscious beliefs would have begun manifesting?
“You didn’t happen to look at your own soul’s path, did you?” Mirren asked.
“I did,” Josh admitted. “But it didn’t pass through the three universes like the others. It just showed up out of nowhere, and I couldn’t see where it led.”
Feodor murmured something under his breath that she didn’t catch, but she didn’t ask him to repeat himself. “Did you deliberately heal yourself?”
“No.”
“And yet you awoke healed.”
“Not just healed—healed completely. The elbow Gloves shattered hasn’t bothered me once since then. I haven’t had a headache, my eyesight is better, even my hair seems thicker.”
“That’s amazing,” Mirren said.
“Yeah, but I don’t know how to do it again. I don’t know how to do any of it.”
“Perhaps,” Feodor said, “you don’t need to. Perhaps this ability to enter the Cradle and return healed is part of your abilities as the True Dream Walker. You’ve expressed concern over losing yourself in a dreamer’s fear, but if you do so, and you are killed, it appears that this ability will heal you.”
“Wait a sec,” Josh said, and she felt relieved when she saw her uncertainty echoe
d on Mirren’s face. “That’s kind of a stretch, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Mirren admitted, “but it certainly isn’t a theory I’d want you to test.”
“I mean, I didn’t actually die either time. I was just in really rough shape. Maybe the key to entering the Cradle is desperation.”
Feodor smiled at her, the same way he would have laughed at her, like he knew something she didn’t. “Perhaps I am wrong.”
That’s the problem, Josh thought.
You never are.
Eighteen
Will spent several days debating what his next move should be. He was certain that Trembuline knew more than he was admitting, but Will didn’t have any way to force him to talk. He still had no clue where Peregrine was. And word around the house was that Josh and Feodor had invented a way to seal Veil tears that was faster and safer than any current method, so he doubted he needed to worry about what Feodor was up to.
I guess he and Josh are off saving the World without me, Will thought, sitting on the couch next to Whim in the guys’ apartment. The bitterness in his mental voice surprised him. Since when did he want to be included in such adventures? Hadn’t he broken up with Josh in order to avoid having to save the World?
He didn’t know anymore, but he liked this feeling that he was doing something proactive to prepare to meet Peregrine. Unfortunately, he only had one idea left to try. It was a long shot, but he’d convinced Deloise to go with him. “You want to go poke around in Mirren’s archives with me and Del?” he asked Whim.
“No. I’m working on an exposé of Amish puppy mills for my blog.”
Will clapped him on the back. “Well, at least you’re using your powers for good this time.”
Deloise drove them over to Mirren’s farmhouse, where they rang the bell.
Katia answered, her silvery-blond hair pulled up in a high ponytail. She didn’t look like she was in a very good mood: her brows were drawn together and the corners of her mouth angled down sharply. She softened a little when she saw her guests, though.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hey. Is Mirren home?” Will asked.
“No, she and Josh went to tea at Feodor’s place.”
Will and Deloise looked at each other, their faces mirror images of surprise.
“Feodor’s having a tea party?” Deloise asked.
“Josh is drinking tea?” Will asked.
“Who is it?” Collena called from deeper within the house.
“I’ve got it, Mom!” Katia hollered. “It’s just Will and Deloise.” She rolled her eyes. “Are you guys doing something?” she asked hopefully.
“Well, we were going to ask Mirren if she’d mind letting us look for some information in the archives in the Hidden Kingdom, but if she’s not here—”
“I’ll take you!” Katia grabbed a jacket off a coat stand and yelled, “I’m going out, Mom!”
“What?” Collena called back. “Where?”
“It doesn’t matter! I’m sixteen! I can go out with my friends! I’ll be home by ten!”
She slammed the door before her mother could respond.
* * *
Katia was so busy complaining about her overbearing mother that she got them lost on their way to the secret entrance to the Hidden Kingdom, which had been moved after Davita showed Peregrine the original entrance. Will finally had to look up directions on his phone.
“Um, I’ve never been to this part of town,” Deloise said as she turned in to the Unlock and Load storage facility. “And I really wish we’d come here before dark.”
“Isn’t it gross?” Katia said. “I mean, who would keep their stuff here?”
As they drove between two banks of shuttered storage units, Will said, “My mom and I lived in one of these for three months when I was nine.”
“Oh, Will, really?” Deloise said.
“Where did you pee?” Katia asked.
“Gas stations. We’d shower at Mom’s friends’ houses. It wasn’t that bad,” he added, although what he was remembering was how incredibly dark the storage unit had been once the door went down, and how there was no way to lock it from the inside.
They pulled up at unit 115 and Katia keyed the code into a heavy-duty lock. “Hey,” she said, “Mom will kill me if she finds out I brought you here. So if she asks, just say we went to Waffle House.”
“Sure,” Will said, but he was starting to wish he’d gone to tea at Feodor’s.
The entrance to the Hidden Kingdom was through a Hula-Hoop that had been tossed into the unit, along with various pieces of secondhand furniture and a lot of garage sale candles. “This way it’s easy to move,” Katia explained, tossing the hoop onto a clear spot on the floor.
The other side of the archway dropped them into a windowless room. A light automatically came on when they arrived, illuminating concrete walls, a steel door, and a touch-screen panel.
“Is this a vault?” Will asked.
“Yeah,” Katia said. “Mom went completely crazy and had it put in right after the thing with Peregrine. This will take a minute. The security system is ridiculous.”
It took her a solid five minutes with the touch screen before the vault door opened. Finally, though, they stepped through a coat closet into the foyer of the castle where Mirren and Katia had grown up.
When Will thought of the castle in the Hidden Kingdom, he always thought of marble. There were more than a hundred varieties that made up floors, walls, end tables, statue stands, sinks, bathtubs, even toilets, and Will never got tired of looking at the different colors and patterns.
“Mom comes here once a week to dust and vacuum,” Katia said, as she started down the stairs toward the basement. “Can you believe it? That woman needs a hobby.”
Behind her, Will and Deloise laughed silently. Even Will, whose mother had abandoned him to the state when he was twelve, had never referred to his mom as “that woman.”
“Wait,” Will said as they reached the record room. “Do you know how to open the files?”
“Oh, yeah. Mirren taught me. She wasn’t supposed to, but she was worried that if something happened to her, no one would ever figure out the system. What did you guys want to look up, anyway?”
“We aren’t completely sure,” Will admitted. “But I was thinking that there might be something about Peregrine in the prophesies about the True Dream Walker. Maybe something about her having an archenemy.”
“Well, there are plenty of prophesied enemies for her to fight,” Katia agreed.
Katia and her parents also knew that Josh was the True Dream Walker. It had been kind of hard to hide after Josh magically destroyed the chains that bound Fel and Collena and healed the bullet wound in Katia’s leg.
Collena must have replaced the carpet in here, Will thought as he walked into the low, red record room. All the bloodstains are gone.
He wondered what she’d done with Peregrine’s hand.
“So do you want, like, stories about the True Dream Walker?” Katia asked. “Or art? Or theories about the first True Dream Walker? Or do you want to read the prophesies about the new True Dream Walker?”
“Definitely the prophesies,” Will said.
“I don’t know anything about the first one,” Deloise admitted. “Only that he had an assistant named Hazel, who Josh is named after.”
Josh’s second middle name—chosen after a role model—was Hazel.
“It’s actually pronounced Ha’azelle in Hilathic,” Katia said, already jamming keys from the three enormous key rings into a file cabinet. Each cabinet required three keys and a spin code to open. “The Hilaths were super into saying the same vowel twice in a row. Also, there’s a popular theory now that Ha’azelle was the True Dream Walker, but the story was recast for misogynistic reasons.”
She chattered on as she opened drawers and pulled out files, occasionally pausing to ask if something interested them. When she’d run out of things to show them, they carried the pile over to a library table.
“I think this says that Josh will be able to communicate telepathically with cows,” Deloise said after an hour. “But the story is really specific that it’s only this one kind of cow—im’meme cows?”
“They mean aurochs, which are extinct,” Katia said.
Despite being almost nothing like her cousin, Katia had one thing in common with Mirren: a very thorough education.
“I can read this,” Will said, “but I have no idea what I’m supposed to get from it. It’s a prophesy written by this German woman—Kyferin?”
“Oh, yeah. She was definitely smoking something. Is that the story about the pie?”
Will read the story aloud. It involved a vision Kyferin had had, that three witches dragged the moon from the sky and baked it into a cake. When they cut the cake, the True Dream Walker popped out.
“Only it doesn’t say True Dream Walker, it says Beguiling Dream Walker.”
“Beguiling?” Katia asked. “That’s wrong. Where’s the original German?”
While she got up to retrieve a pair of books, Will finished the story. “‘Then the True Dream Walker took a dancing stick and tore down the sky and put it in a cauldron. He tore down the sleeping sky and the waking sky and put them in the cauldron, and he cooked them for seven days and seven nights. He said to the Beguiling Dream Walker, “Help me stir the skies,” but the Beguiling Dream Walker tried to empty the cauldron, and the True Dream Walker pushed him in.’ Wait, what?”
“There are two different dream walkers?” Deloise asked.
“I’ve got it,” Katia said, slamming a giant dictionary down on the table. “So, ‘cake’ here should definitely mean ‘pie,’ ‘beguiling’ means ‘false,’ just like I thought, and ‘dancing stick’ should probably be ‘walking stick.’”